Let us pray,

May we quiet ourselves before the Great Mystery who still speaks through burning bushes, through trembling ground, through the breath of creation.

May the Holy Spirit’s presence in the earth encourage us to become truthful witnesses to God’s revelation.

Amen and Asé.

Today, we’re gonna wander the wilderness with the prophet Amos, the shepherd and dresser of sycamore trees who Creator “took from following his flock” and said to him “Go prophesy to my people Israel” (7:15).

Before Amos ever opens his mouth to prophesy, the ground is already speaking. The book of Amos begins in Chapter 1, verse 1 at the fault line of empire. Amos comes to rebuke the empire of Israel two years before an earthquake. Empire is always built upon a fault line, and it is only a matter of time before the earth reflects back the rupture upon which it was built.

In Chapter 2, verse 6 Israel has sold the righteous for silver and traded those in need for a pair of sandals. In Chapter 2, verse 7 they have trampled the heads of the poor into the dust. In Chapter 5, verse 11 they have built houses of stone while exploiting laborers. In Ch 5: verses 21-24, they keep worshiping, singing, sacrificing, and holding festivals, while their neighbors suffer at the hands of oppression.

Israel wants worship without right relationship, as though right relationship isn’t worship. As if liberation is not where God delights in us and where we delight in God and the God in all things.

So God offers rebuke through the earth. Throughout Amos, the earthquake becomes ecological theophany— theophany church means a way God reveals God’s own presence. We know about God revealing God’s self in the burning bush or in the Prince of Egypt of Exodus 3. Amen. We know our God descends in fire upon Mount Sinai in Exodus Ch 19. In Amos, we encounter God as trembling ground.

In Chapter 2, versus 13, and Chapter 8 versus, 8 the earth strains beneath this covenantal rupture. In Chapter 9 , verse 1 the temple itself begins to shake. By the time we reach chapter 9, verse 5 the whole earth melts at the touch of God.

The ground is trembling because Israel has neglected their covenant.

Church, when a people stop trembling before injustice, creation will remember how to shiver. As Jesus reminds us in Luke 19:40, “if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.”

And when the earth cries out, God appoints someone who has been paying attention to the earth’s patterns, who has learned to witness God’s presence in creation, to translate God’s rebuke.

God sends a shepherd. A dresser of sycamore trees. Amos cries out with the stones, affirming that God will send their prophets from below, from the earth, to confront the “powers who think they are” (Tiokasin Ghosthorse).

As Amos walks through Israel rebuking the harm of economic exploitation (2:6–7; 5:11), religious hypocrisy (2:8; 5:21–24), and violence against the most vulnerable (2:7–8), his words have become so disruptive that Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, sends word to King Jeroboam in chapter 7 versus 10:

“Amos has conspired against you in the very center of the house of Israel; the land is not able to bear all his words.”

Did you catch that? The land is not able to bear all his words. But it’s not actually that the land can’t bear Amos’s words. Amos’s words have become unbearable because they carry the weight of the earth’s own testimony.

Amos is conspiring with God’s trembling.

God had to call someone whose feet and attention knew the ground so they could give voice to the grief the land had been carrying in the afterlives of this broken covenant.

Someone who had spent day after day attending to the rhythms of creation and would recognize God’s call in that trembling earth.

In chapter 7 versus 12 -13, Amaziah then turns directly to Amos:

“O seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah, earn your bread there, and prophesy there; but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom.”

Now it’s important to remember that in Amos’s day, prophecy wasn’t just spiritual gift. There were prophetic guilds, royal prophets. There were temple prophets. Many prophets served kings, served the kingdom. Prophetic authority was often bound up with political power and economic livelihood.

So when Amaziah tells Amos to leave, he is saying go earn your living as a prophet somewhere else because here we have already decided who does that translation from God on behalf of the kingdom.

And Amos’s response to this in Chapter 7, verse 14-15 is,

“I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son; but I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees, and the Lord took me from following the flock.”

Amos could have left out his previous vocation and continued on with what God called him to rebuke. But Amos emphasizes where he was called from and what he is not, I’m not a prophet, nor a prophets son but I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees, and the Lord took me from the following the flock.

Amos here is redefining and inverting prophetic authority. He is saying, You know prophets as people appointed by kings. I know prophecy as the work of someone who has learned to attend to God through the land, through the sheep, through the goats and tracks and milk and trees.

I want us to stay with this phrase dresser of sycamore trees.

Various translations render the phrase “dresser of sycamores” differently. Some say that Amos “I looked for the fruits of the sycamore trees….or I scraped the wild fig trees…or I made incisions on the fruits of the sycamores.”[1] NASB translations uses “grower of sycamore figs”. NET translation uses “took care of sycamore fig trees” but then notes that the Hebrew means “gashed” or “pierced” rather than “took care of”. Piercing or gashing the sycamore figs is key here and is distinct from growing or harvesting fruit. Ancient sycamore-fig tree dressers in Palestine were known to pierce the thin stalks of the trees to quicken the ripening of the fruit. This action becomes a powerful metaphor for the nature of prophecy. Sometimes prophetic accountability is piercing in order to quicken the maturation of God’s people to align with God’s will and God’s earth.

Prophecy is a disruptive act of tenderness. The prophetic prepares us for God’s inevitable pursuit of right relationship, with one another, and creation, and with God.

Amos invites us into the grammar of prophetic ministry.

In a time when truth is censored, when the earth groans beneath extraction, the proliferation of data centers, of genocide, of mass surveillance, when we are being called to be silent under fascism, where are you called to be a dresser of sycamore trees?

Before Amos learned to speak God’s truth, he learned to attend to God’s world. In a time of ecological collapse, censorship, and empire, how do we become quieter? How do we become more attentive as a way into the prophetic? To learn the language of rivers. To learn the grief of forests. To hear the trembling of the ground beneath our feet. So that as we learn to attend to creation, we become people through whom God can entrust the truth.

What fruit has God entrusted to your care? What truth, offered in love, might become the incision that opens the way for that fruit to mature?

May we learn where love must be piercing so that justice can ripen.
May our grief and prayer pierce the atmosphere of apathy and evil.
May it quicken the ripening.
May the fruit of our care be a prophecy.
May it invoke God’s will where all beings are liberated from suffering.

Asé.

delroy lindo has to be charlie’s grandpa. charlie is a cute non-binary black child and this is their debut role. after wonka, or maybe it’s called billy blonka, folks just start writing whole new movies for the baby because their tender eyes make people remember stories they were told to forget.

in billy blonka, the story takes place on a reclaimed plantation where mr. blonka and his cooperative rebuke slave labor. they pay reparations to the oompa loompa community through the funds for the global golden ticket search — reparations for the oompa loompas who, in the original roald dahl book, were bastardized as African indigenous pygmies who wonka paid in cacao beans in exchange for slave labor.

mr. blonka’s head is exu and he fucks with these golden ticket winners to call children socialized by white supremacy into a rite of passage of accountability to their consumption, desire and ancestry. mr. blonka works with the cacao medicine to open their hearts, illuminating the shadows of the children’s lineages they are invited to transgress.

i need mr. blonka to open my heart today on this mosey. i need to drink from mr. blonka’s cacao river. my heart wants so badly to know in this season. or maybe my mind does? my mind with their grasping, with their suffering and attachment. maybe my heart abides by a different cosmology than the mind who is so good at being “a perpetrator of the fraud of certainty” (Alta Starr). maybe my heart has the capacity to be enraptured by mystery, intuition and the circulation of this walk.

i wander reading the sand along the bank looking for MaKshya’s heart-shaped leaves, grateful MaKshya is keeping their witness available to the tenderness of love beaming from the earth: how “the ground is full of hearts” (MaKshya Tolbert).

North Cackylacky is the epitome of Hildegard’s viriditas — what she calls God’s greening power. maybe my heart is a rumen and wants me to feast my eyes on the verdant angels of all that surrounds me so that i may trust there is a holy electric green sanctum inside me where no hurt, harm or danger can enter.

my heart cries out, “i need turtle medicine.” i watch their mouth water for turtle soup. something tells me a Taino ancestor ate turtle meat to slow down the racing. i let them lead the way to the turtle’s siren call. we, meaning me and my heart, get to the end of the trail. the arrow tells me to turn left but my heart disobeys and says “uh-uh, the turtles are right on past that sign. keep going.”

six years ago in a 24-hour fast i was told to repair my intuition by following every instinct from those familiar inside whispers, without doubt, for the entire day. that ceremony has supported me to trust what miracles lie in wait when i trust the pull.

we keep going. now i’m in mosquito nation. my eyes become at least seven gnats resting place. what did they witness flying into the event horizon of my eyelids? is there enormous love in my eyes that the world could fall into? will there be enough left for me?

i see a tall bright red torch out of the corner of my eye along the bank. the cardinal flower. i assumed the flower was named after the birds. but looks like the cardinals, both the birds and the flowers, were named after the Roman Catholic Cardinals’s red vestments. the red represents the blood of Christ and the martyrs of all who have died on behalf of the faith. the bright red they stole from Mexico and Peru to make carmine, spilling blood for red. to defend the appearance of the faith even unto murder, kidnapping, rape and pillage.

i hear the mindfulness bell of a plop to my east. turtles! there’s one…two…three…oh…four! there’s four! four turtles! four red-bellied cooters. enough turtles for each chamber of my heart. more than enough cooters my heart can handle. ;) i approach the four doors, the four cardinals. cardinals whose etymology means door hinge ~

the first chamber door of my heart is easy to swing open. they look heavy so you use a lot of force but then you almost swing the door right off the hinge: “i was able to pray in public as if i were alone in the quiet of my own room....the door between their questing spirits and my own became a swinging door” (Howard Thurman, With Head & Heart).

the second door acts like a second child. they live in the shadow of the unhinged door. they are what my elder Anne Symens-Bucher might call “the tragic expression of an unmet need.” as soon as i am ready to open the door, they like to slam the door shut in my face. they slide down the door in rom-com fashion and wait, hoping the me on the other side will try opening it again. i always do.

the third door holds the curious places of my interior, where my soul goes down into “my inward sea” (Thurman, Meditations of the Heart). the trivium, the place where three roads meet, where my altar lives. before the door stands “the angel with the flaming sword” (Thurman, Meditations of the Heart) protecting my wayward as the path to the most high, most low, and all the God that is in between those hemispheres.

the fourth chamber is the door my hand has been resting on this past year. i keep wanting to turn the handle but i’m so afraid about what is beyond the door. i thought my partner was supposed to turn it with me. i thought marriage was the crowbar to pry it open. the wood is chipped from all the effort. i keep thinking the only way i can enter is with another but the knob is formed from a track of my soul. i’m the only one who can turn it.

a couple of times i’ve got on the ground and peered underneath the crack to see what the light is like underneath. if i see our feet dancing together on the other side. there’s just darkness. sometimes i’ve pressed my body up against the door to hear the music on the otherside. it’s the music of the stories i’ve neglected. it’s the music my body has been praying to dance to. it’s the music of my spinning wheel. it’s the music of being a beneficiary of the love i pour out into everything i do and everyone i care for. in a couple of weeks, i have an appointment with God to open the fourth door. my soul is touching the brass. it’s warm now. will i turn it? will i enter the fourth chamber that’s the rest of my life? that’s the rest of my life?

i sing for the turtles, or they sing a song out of me, about patience. as i mosey back, i keep longing to find a turtle shell. i have this image of a turtle tambourine in my mind i want to craft. i need to bring back evidence that i asked for God’s love and God gave it to me. beholding them wasn’t enough. the change of praise in my eyes and heart after the affirmation of a miracle is not enough. the story wants bones.

i try searching the banks for a shell. i want something to hide my heart into. i don’t know if my little body is sturdy enough to hold this big heart. i need another. i need another. i hunt for the shell at the small moments where pools eddy among covened rocks till the time of water wears them apart.

this fever reminds me how sick i have been in this season. i asked for the turtle, God let me witness the turtle, the turtles consented, but still it’s not enough. i am desperate for the shell. what about the tambourine? what about when i can’t remember my intuition and i don’t have the instrument that can mediate me back to firm faith?

mama cherie in my dream telling me, “marriage is courageous but theatre is ornamental.” hasn’t our love always already been a tambourine? i can only hear the music coming out of the fourth chamber because you pressed my ear against the door.

this is a devotional in a series called mosey. i am in a 52 day practice of moseying as a way to care for my wander and my wonder and my writing. i go mosey wherever i am and then mosey with my writing about the moseying. mosey is such a cute word and also hinting at the whimsy i want with my prophetic awareness, maybe what rev. pauli murray meant when they wrote about being “pixie-prophetic.” mosey is so moses-coded too. like verbing the activity of Moses’s prophetic attention where Moses knew presence was the prophetic task.

it is when God saw that Moses turned aside to look again (Exod 3:4 NRSV) that God then addressed Moses and called Moses into his prophetic commission. God recognized that Moses carried the attention of a prophet. Moses’ attention was present to the miraculous and stayed with a miracle long enough for God to address him through the burning. hence, since everything is burning, i know it’s time to mosey.

feeling inspired to share my writing in more low-stakes ways inspired from writing retreat with alexis pauline gumbs called necessary as water about our writing practices, and our devotion to them, being as necessary as water~

sticky thick huffing molasses air. syrupy cicadas slither their shimmer down my spine. the mowed grass in this neighborhood smells like a thousand sheep grazed a small lawn at once. i want to take refuge by this creek. but there are more sprite bottles and fireball whisky shot leftovers littering the banks than water. i want to clean the creek but then think, “this is not my neighborhood. i’m just visiting” as though to imply being a guest doesn’t require the responsibility of being a relative.

i gasp when i see deer scat along the grass. there is life here among these cookie-cutter homes designed to signal this used to be a black neighborhood till we changed that. then, i love that this creek is a lil ghetto. it tells me black folks were here. not to say they didn’t love the earth but that they marked it with the tracks of their pastimes. i forgive the trash.

now my forgiveness puts a little strut in my walk. i feel sexy belonging to everything. i love being black and curious. i stop at a flower because i want to stop at a flower and i want everyone to wonder why i’m stopping and stop their cars and get out with me to behold the flower. i want people to wonder about me wondering and wonder about their wonder and where it’s gone.

here goes another creek wishing for more turtles than trash. forgiveness, forgiveness. try to look for something i can love. the kudzu. i want these thorny vines to choke me into their secrets.

i bring my gaze back to the ground so the woods and i don’t lock eyes. a trail of lotto tickets. 652. 42972. 71356. 473. 81465. i wonder where folks divined their numbers. are they addresses of homes they lived in before these lily white houses broke in? did they ask grandbaby for a number that morning? did they see them in a dream and rush to the gas station ready with a knowing that after today all my worries are no more?

i keep following the trail of cigarillo butts and arizona tea cans. yea i know people who could read the sign of an armadillo tail pressed into the sand long after they are gone. but they couldn’t mosey through this neighborhood and read through the ground that black folks laid to rest a dream here.

a mockingbird whistles at me like an old school niqqa craning his neck to see if the front looks as good as the back from his no-rim having gold suburban. and here comes the car and that familiar turn of the head that black men passed down to owls.

“it’s too hot out here for you to be walking little lady! my name’s Dre.” all front of his teeth missing. i bet he whistles good.

“are you the Dre that taught the mockingbird to sing?”

Hildegard’s Cosmic Egg

“There is in every person an inward sea,

and in that sea there is an island and

on that island there is an altar and

standing guard before that altar is the ‘angel with the flaming sword.’

Nothing can get by that angel

to be placed upon that altar

unless it has the mark of your inner authority.

Nothing passes ‘the angel with the flaming sword’

to be placed upon your altar

unless it be a part of ‘the fluid area of your consent.’

This is your crucial link with the Eternal.”

- Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart

dear being,

my prayer for you and our world is that we are each accompanied. that as we cross the significant thresholds of our life we are witnessed. sometimes “we forget things if we have no one to tell them to” (The Lunchbox). sometimes those things can be trivial, but sometimes, those precious things we need to hold onto are matters of the soul. sometimes we need “commemorative justice” (Free Egunfemi) for your soul matter: a safe space to let the soul yawn, rattle and glitter in their kaleidoscopic singularity. my prayer is to offer that refuge through this practice. my prayer is to support the protection and affirmation of your crucial link with the Eternal.

Eternal life is a covenant with the heavenly temporalities that have the power to “dismantle the master’s clock” (Rasheeda Phillip). in the midst of fascism, genocide, white supremacy attempting to strip dignity, cultural memory, families, freedom, peace, how do we care for your crucial link with the Eternal as the intergenerational heirloom no one can take away from you? the heirloom of prayer that warps and wefts across time seven generations before you and seven generations after you?

i serve a God of companionship — meaning to break bread with. i serve a God who knows that when we come before each other and the Holy Spirit honest in our brokenness, which is to say our vulnerability, we have the opportunity to offer and receive the hospitality and nourishment of life. i serve a God of fellowship. a God of witness. a God of life-affirming presence. a God who knows that “sometimes people need a story more than food to stay alive” (Barry Lopez). this is the God of bread i serve. the God of bread standing before the altar of your life with a four-day old hard af baguette, engulfed by an eternal flame, letting no hurt, harm, or danger that seeks to desecrate the altar of your soul get past them. and i serve “a God of consent” (Donna Battle) who entrusts us with the agency, humility and empowerment to be active co-conspirators with the angels and ancestors who protect our spirits — that we are called to the holy responsibility of participating in our liberation.

i serve a God who teaches us more about who they are, that their presence is near, and that we are never alone through their revelation in the land. i am called to offer this ecological accompaniment as a way to support people to encounter the companionship of God’s presence in the earth. i serve a God who shows up in our suffering at the river. who knows how to “resanctify our anger” (Sparlha Swaby) through learning how to make a firebreak. a God who can heal our heartache with bird song. a God who prophesies to people when their head is bowed to the earth following the trail of a deer. i want to support the firming up of your crucial link with the Eternal through listening to the eternal love of the land who longs for us. a love and God older than capitalism.

in the midst of uncertainty, we need spiritual fortification to trust in the Great Mystery at work, and at rest, in our lives. in seasons of uncertainty, it can be impossible to imagine salvation. my prayer here is that we might dare to explore being delivered from salvation through the liberation of presence. how does presence deliver us from the need to be saved? my prayer is to notice the “salvation” that Christ offers is not taking suffering away from us. Christ gifts us eternal life through interrupting a cycle where we suffer our suffering. Christ, as a bodhisattva, takes that suffering on through Christ’s body so we are given the gift to receive equanimity in our living, to be present to our suffering, but not to suffer it. to sing awake our grief with radical acceptance, amusement and tenderness.

beloved, i don’t know if we will make it out of climate collapse, or any of its coterminous violences, but i’m curious what we do, how we be, what we make and how we are made on the path of presence together. what i pray to offer as a companion is meeting you on the dirt road of presence to see what wonders await us there. to let our senses become a soft substrate where God’s trace can impress upon us ~

on my radical spiritual companionship practice:

• 1:1 spiritual companionship for an 8-week devotional container together. meaning, you and i will meet for a 1:1 weekly 60 minute call over the 8 week container that will include collective prayer, sharing from the heart, spiritual counsel, and land-based contemplative practice.

• in the prayer of Barry Lopez’s “sometimes a person needs a story more than food”, our time together will draw from parables and stories as teachings that guide our sessions. i may also recommend contemplative reading, ritual arts, writing etc. for you to play with as they feel aligned for you to explore.

• we will meet once a week for our 1:1 session from the week of July 20th, 2026 - the week of September 14th, 2026 (excluding the week of August 24th, 2026). the offering is time-bound so you are cultivating an unmediated practice with your relationship to your spiritual life. in the future, there will be other sessions, but i may open it up to a new group of people to work with me.

• throughout the eight weeks, you will be invited into daily spiritual hygiene and “earth intimacy” (Weaving Earth) practices that we discern together. depending on what is emerging in our work, i will offer you solo practices between sessions that support your prayer life, spiritual hygiene, and relationship with the more-than-human world. many of these practices will invite you onto the land as a site of encounter.

• this is a devotional container, which means i am inviting you to set apart this season of time as sacred. the depth of what emerges will be shaped, in part, by your willingness to enter into a focused relationship with the prayer of your life as it is unfolding right now. our time together can be as rigorous or as soft as you want it to be and i will meet you there. we can go immersive (which my Scorpio moon loves!) or we can be in light touches together. we will co-determine the pace. i am serving as a sacred witness and offering pastoral care and practices. you are committing to the devotional practice of integration beyond our calls.

• together, we will cultivate practices of attention, listening, and devotion. the prayer of our time together seeks to resanctify devotion — to recover our capacity to remain faithful to what is sacred under a capitalist culture that abuses the holiness of stamina.

• ecologizing discernment will be our pillar practice, as you navigate the questions of your soul. this means bringing the curiosities after your heart to daily practice with the land, and listening for the patterns that emerge. we will receive those patterns as information that helps guide how we interpret the invitations unfolding along your path. we will also pay attention to the ways dreams and synchronicities reveal, echo, and reflect what is asking for your attention.

application process:

• apply here! applications will be open until Sunday, July 12th. i will take mutual discernment calls week of Monday, July 13th. we will begin week of July 20th.

• once i have had time to sit with your intake form, if it feels like this practice may serve what you are seeking, i will invite you to schedule a 20-minute mutual discernment call. our discernment call is an opportunity for both of us to listen for whether this practice feels like the right fit.

• after our conversation, we will discuss if it feels aligned to move forward. in some cases, after reading your intake form or after our call, i may recommend another practitioner or a different kind of support if i sense it would better serve what is moving in your life! you will also have space to discern whether this practice feels like the right fit for you. if we both feel called to continue, we’ll get you set up in the system and begin!

• for this first cohort, i will be accompanying eight people individually. applications will remain open until those eight spaces have been filled, at which point i will close the application. in the future, i will open up another 8-week container for another group.

• please email at bronte@bakine.studio if you have any questions, would like to contribute to the spiritual reparations fund, or want to learn more!

reciprocity + financial transparency:

• each weekly session over the 8-week container is $250/session.

• as someone healing from the prosperity gospel preached in a megachurch culture, it’s hard for me to mix spirit and exchange, but it is the world we live in, and by not receiving resource, i am not able to offer my medicine!

• i am grateful for Dr. King naming in his “But If Not” sermon that “religion is not a bargaining matter”. i do not serve a transactional God, and i do not want to be in a transactional faith practice. i want to give my gift freely and this is the prayer i am working towards. my prayer for this offering is not to be in a capitalist exchange, but in a practice of shared circulation of resource that supports me to continue living into right livelihood.

• i do not come from inherited wealth. through my life and work — caring for land, animals, and community — i receive a modest income.

• the resource i want to share right now emerges from the well of my spiritual practice, and this resource will support me to work on my writing to offer gifts to a wider public, continue my spiritual formation and research in divinity school and give back to my community as my community invests in my learning and formation!

• if this is not something you can afford right now but are interested in working with me, i will also be offering a monthly group container for your crucial link is the eternal for folks to practice with me in a wider group as a gift. be on the lookout!

• following Weaving Earth’s lifeways back fund , and the spirit of reparations as an ecological and social balm to our planet, you might also consider supporting me to raise $8,000 to take on 4 black clients without financial exchange as a practice in spiritual reparations. you can note if you’re interested in supporting the spiritual reparations fund in your application, send me a venmo @bronte-velez and note “spiritual reparations fund”, or email me at bronte@bakine.studio for other options!

who is this for?

this practice is for people who are curious about what their soul has to say on the matter.

it is for those who sense that there is a deeper wisdom running beneath all things, and crave to be able to attune to it beneath the overstimulation of capitalism. it is for those who want the seat of their soul to have the final say in how they live their life. for those seeking to embody and renew their covenant with this life rather than postponing the work of the soul for some distant afterlife.

this practice may be supportive for those who are asking:

• what is being asked of my life right now, and where am i being called?

• how do i deepen my relationship with spirit, land, prayer, or the divine as guiding forces in my life?

• what spiritual practices can support a posture of equanimity?

• how do i navigate grief, uncertainty, transition, and rupture as spiritual formation?

• how do i allow longing, unfulfillment, and mystery to become places where God might enter?

• how do i design a life, vocation, or body of work that is rooted in the health of my soul?

potential pathways of accompaniment:

• you are discerning your vocation. you sense your life and desires are changing and want spiritual companionship as you listen for what is being asked of you

• you want to deepen your relationship with God, the unseen, ancestors. whether you’re beginning again, wrestling with faith, or longing for a more alive devotional practice, you want a spirituality rooted in integrity and authentic connection

• you are healing from church hurt or spiritual betrayal. you want to repair your relationship with the Holy on your own terms, without abandoning yourself.

• you are one of God’s queer beloveds. you long for spiritual formation that celebrates, rather than questions, the holiness of who you are.

• you are an artist seeking a devotional practice. you want your creative work and your relationship with Creator to nourish one another through ritual, prayer, and disciplined attention.

• you are building work that wants to become prayer. whether you’re designing a business, nonprofit, collective, ministry, or creative project, you want faith, ethics, and spiritual practice woven into its foundation or you want to renew how you have been doing your work.

• you long for your work with the land to be a place of prayer. farmers, shepherds, herders, gardeners, ecological workers, and climate organizers seeking land-based ritual, ecological spirituality, and practices that resanctify labor and intimacy with the earth.

• your relationships want spiritual accompaniment. couples, chosen family, partners, lovers, and everything in between wanting shared spiritual formation, conflict transformation, devotional rhythms, vow-making or discernment together.

• your community wants to practice spiritual formation together. congregations, organizations, collectives, and leadership teams seeking spiritual formation, ritual design, retreats, or prayerful organizational culture.

• you need help tending a threshold. marking grief, transition, reconciliation, vocation, endings, beginnings, or creating rituals that honor what is unfolding.

• you are longing for spiritual hygiene. sweeping the heart, cultivating everyday prayer, renewing wonder, and learning to recognize the sacred woven through ordinary life.

• you want prayerful accompaniment for a project. consulting on rituals, ceremonies, land projects, organizational discernment, or spiritually grounded strategy and curation.

MY SPIRITUAL ORIENTATION

• my spiritual practice is rooted in a four-fold witness: interfaith traditions, ancestral wisdom and veneration, ecological relationship, and artistic practice. as an interfaith climate chaplain, i draw from “The Church of Black Feminist Thought” (ra malika imhotep), Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, the Orishas, Mexica traditions, and traditional Taíno medicine ways, while also understanding the natural world, creative practice, and dreams as sacred sites of revelation. i once dreamed a friend shouting underneath an abundant oak tree, “my religion is the liturgy of the universe!” i woke up repeating the phrase as the dream confirmed what i give my life to. my cosmology is a kaleidoscope: with each turn, the Divine reveals a different facet of their self. at different angles (and angels), i encounter different expressions of the sacred.

• i welcome people of all faith traditions, as well as those who claim no tradition at all. my hope is that together we can work with the grammar of the soul: a language that exceeds any single religion, doctrine, or denomination. i also believe it is important to be transparent about the waters i drink from. while i draw wisdom from many streams, my deepest well is Christianity, or, as the early followers of Jesus once called it, the Way. i am guided by the teachings, practices, and cloud of witnesses to whom i am apprenticing my life in that tradition. i am oriented towards what my professor Dr. Eric Williams noted that “enslaved black folks were converted to Chrisitanity and then they converted Chrisitanity.” it is this trans-conversion and the syncretic way black folks know who Jesus is that my prayer and worship life is rooted in

NOW WHAT YOU MEAN BY SPIRITUAL

• whenever i use the word “spiritual”, my loving and discerning mother says, “now what do you mean by spiritual? spiritual can also mean demons!” if you have a black Christian mama, you know exactly what i’m talkin about! by spiritual accompaniment, i mean attending to the language of your soul. i mean the things in between things: the unseen, the Great Mystery, dreams, symbols, wonder, grief, longing, pattern recognition, intuition, shadows, synchronicities, and the subtle movements of a life seeking meaning. i am interested in accompanying those parts of you. i also take seriously the vulnerability of allowing those parts to be witnessed in a world that often teaches us it is unsafe to speak of them.
  

WHAT THIS IS NOT

• this is not therapy.

• i am not a therapist, and this space is not designed to replace clinical or psychiatric care.

• if something arises that is outside the scope of my care, i will support you in finding additional resources. i believe in a quilt of care, where multiple forms of support can hold you.

• when you apply, i will spend time with what you share and prayerfully discern whether this space is well-suited to accompany the questions, longings, and work that are calling for your attention right now.

• this is not a space for quick answers, optimization, or productivity coaching. this work may be slow. it may be nonlinear. it may leave you with more questions than answers. and together i pray to be amused by the God of curiosity at our doorstep!

my bio:
brontë velez (they/elle) is a black-boricua transdisciplinary ritual artist, shepherd, minister and cultural worker. brontë’s ministry is committed to re-ecologizing the roots of pastoral care — as shepherds who paid attention to the earth, followed the wisdom of their rhythms and patterns and through that devotional awareness received prophetic instructions for liberation.

the prayer of brontë’s life is to support safe and hilarious bedside care through climate collapse. they don’t know if we will get to the “other side” but are interested in the quality of tenderness, attention, awe-fullness, and miracles we can receive and offer to each other, and the earth, on the path of presence.

they practice pastoral care (in an ecological and ministerial sense) as a co-director of The School for Inclement Weather in Kashia Pomo territory in northern California and through serving as adult programs director and climate chaplain for climate preparedness program ATTUNE at Weaving Earth. brontë is currently an MDiv candidate at Duke Divinity and co-conjuring an absurdist opera with esperanza spalding about a frequency that can disarm.

on the covenant of my accompaniment:

PASTORAL CONSENT & CURIOSITY

• my practice first and foremost prioritizes consent and my pastoral care prioritizes curiosity rather than certainty. i offer trauma-informed care and am attentive to spiritual consent as a counter-remedy to the residue of church hurt, spiritual harm, and religious abuse. i do not presume to be the authority on your life. our work will be on honoring the unmediated sovereignty of your inner authority with your guides. instead, my prayer is to offer companionship as you deepen your relationship with the questions, longings, mysteries, and wisdom already present within you.

TENDING THE SOURCE, WITNESSING THE RIVER

• my prayer is that we might sit together at the riverbank of your life and bear witness to the water. we will pay attention to the currents, tributaries, droughts, and floodwaters, asking how the river of your living is feeding the ocean of your soul, and whether those waters are carrying what is life-affirming, life-giving, and most authentic to the prayer for your life. sometimes our work will call us to wander upstream together, returning to the headwaters of the Great Source, tending the altar of your relationship with the spring from which all living waters flow.

PRACTICE + ACCOUNTABILITY

• i am part of a wide and deep community of elders, advisors, teachers, peers, and students to whom i am accountable and from whom i learn regularly from. i do not understand this work as a solitary endeavor. when needed, i will seek guidance, supervision, and counsel from trusted members of my community so that our work together remains rooted in humility, discernment, and care.

• if we have the privilege to work together, i will be practicing the eight-week devotional container alongside you as a sangha member. while our journeys will not be identical, we will be in mutual practice together.

i think a big part of the unfulfillment is the immense confusion and challenge of purpose at this moment on the clock of the world. what does individuated, enlightenment-derivative purpose mean in late-stage capitalism, genocide, fascism, climate collapse? what do i do with the dreams i had for my life? how do i grieve them? how do i dream new dreams for myself in apocalypse? or rather how am i re-dreamed? how do i trust harriet tubman’s hypersomnia was a part of the gifts of her survival? was a way she surrendered to spirit re-dreaming her?

i am concerned that what i have set up for my life and worked so hard to create is not what is really after my heart. or that it even matters at this point. i dance between prepper mentality: we best have some food we can eat when they shut down everything! and barry lopez’s sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. it’s all true. the question that feels most prescient now is: how do i shift my purpose to presence? and isn’t presence the grammar of the prophetic anyway?

i feel like i spent my 20’s asking the earnest question, what’s the best thing i can do for the world with the gifts i have been given? how can i make the most beautiful impact? how do my gifts meet what the world needs? and i am grateful for the heart of service that was animating that question. but that question left my longing behind in it. now when i look around my life, i am moved by the things that i have made and offered but i feel so deeply unfulfilled. i have always felt i needed to be of use as a part of my ministry: how can i be more helpful, better, live more in integrity, show up to my community more. i am grateful for that moral compass and i am so exhausted by a world that could give two shits about integrity, and yet the evil prospers! and here i am with my integrity intact but my account broke as hell!

i feel so confused. and when i feel a thing in english i like to ask, is that the word i really mean to describe these sensations? how can i get as accurate and close with language and poetry to this sensation? as an etymology slut, i love that the word confusion comes from meaning to mingle together, but at one point it meant to overthrow or to ruin. this is helpful for me. it helps me think about reclaiming confusion as a synesthetic process. of my senses blending together and overthrowing the straight, narrow and boring path of having my shit together in late-stage capitalism. my confusion wants to betray what i thought my purpose was. i desperately want to approach the altar of my life again and ask, what is really for me Creator? what is the honest gift that gives to me which gives to others? which worships you? how do i trust the river of my life is a gift that can become an estuary?

i had a dream recently where i laid the cross down on the ground and was supporting it to rot. as the cross was rotting, it began to offer breast milk i fed people with. this dream affirmed the importance of confusing back the inheritance of a martyred purpose. that there is a possibility of fellowship, nourishment and hospitality in the rot. the supine cross spilling with milk.1 shortly after the dream, a classmate in seminary shared that growing up, her father and grandfather always prayed, i plead the blood of Jesus, and the milk of his mother, over you. then, i would read julian of norwich, my medieval anchorite crush, write about Jesus as our mother, who labored for us.2

how was i being asked to let the shape and physics of the cross change for me?

in my black american spirituality class last summer, led by Dr. Eric Williams at Duke, we were invited to write a letter to a black theologian who was now an ancestor. i of course wrote to Dr. King because i am always, in all ways, in conversation with Dr. King ~

at one point in the letter, i wanted to ask him about his conviction to “carry the cross.” when Coretta Scott King was six months pregnant with their third child Dexter, Dr. King wrote her a letter from the Reidsville state prison in Georgia. he acknowledges the difficulty of her pregnancy coinciding with his incarceration but then he emphasizes “…this is the cross that we must bear for the freedom of our people”.3

i wondered about the weight of that responsibility on his spirit and psyche. what it means to bear the weight of what King called an “obedience to the unenforceable”.4 i was curious about the conviction of his responsibility and also the fruit of that conviction. i asked him: can the shape of the cross change and can the way we carry it evolve? can i follow your invitation towards a “transphysics”5 to consider other postures of freedom?

black queer weaver Diedrick Brackens reimagined the cross as a basket and boat in a piece called ark (cross) as a part of a larger exhibition called ark of bulrushes following Exodus 2:3. Brackens’ ark (cross) is constructed from reeds in a houndstooth pattern in the shape of a cross. there’s an image of Brackens lying in the ark cross as it floats down the river from a piece called “bring watergrass (carefully prepared)”. the houndstooth pattern was traditionally used as outerwear by Scottish shepherds as camouflage. here the cross, typically seen as an object of Christ’s public humiliation and lynching, becomes for Brackens a ritual object of fugitivity. the floating cross becomes a womb and a shepherd carrying Brackens upon the water. it is this blending in the land, bending into the land, that feels like the transphysics i’m after. the importance of Jesus, laid out, resting in the boat during the storm (Mark 4:38; Matt 8:24; Luke 8:23).

the famous images of Dr. King are in cop cars, jail cells, at the front of the march, at a pulpit, behind a podium. Tricia Hersey, bishop of The Nap Ministry, alerted the pattern that we don’t see images of Dr. King resting. like the image of him lying in the Lorraine Motel in 1966 while he was in Memphis for the March Against Fear. his arm lifted up softly against the headboard, the newspaper on the bed next to him, where he was featured on the cover. two years before he would be taken from this earth at this same site. forced supine.

or the picture of him napping on the plane on the way to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. his hands woven together in prayer and resting against his cheek. such remarkable tenderness.

Dr. King in the hospital bed in his silk pajamas receiving the call that he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

the Ebony article that featured Dr. King and Coretta on vacation in Jamaica. what they called his “tropic interlude”: lying out on chairs on the beach resting, Dr. King in the pool, Dr. King on a bicycle. Jamaica, the place he named he felt like a human being.

i told Dr. King about the Museum of African American History and Culture in DC. how the current administration is trying to get rid of it. how his work and ministry is found throughout the museum. how there were so many artifacts in the museum that moved me deeply, but none more than an unassuming metal tub — so much like the one i use to carry grain to my sheep — where Dr. King, staying at a friend’s home, once soaked his feet after the five-day march from Selma to Montgomery. Lord knows he was in those little church shoes on that pilgrimage and those boots were not made for walking! that tub was so tender to witness. i imagined his friend drawing him the water, maybe even taking off his shoes, and saying, “you can rest now brother.” i of course thought of the woman washing Jesus’s feet (Luke 7:36–50; John 12:1–8). of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet (John 13:1–17).

not too far from the tub where Dr. King soaked his feet, is a wall listing bills of sale of kidnapped, enslaved black folks. i fell to my knees at the liturgy between the ledger: Fatima, 40, does nothing.

Fatima, 40, does nothing. an ancestor who was useless to capitalism in ways that most likely endangered her. unfulfillment, or rather to unfulfill capitalism’s use of us, is a criminalized act. it’s dangerous to be unfulfilled. and our unfulfillment is useful to capitalism. when we are unfulfilled, we are at risk of exploitation and confusion. we can be taken advantage of. and i am curious about reclaiming the empowerment of unfulfillment. how do we confuse back? how do we unfulfill the limits of what capitalism has set out for us?

last september, i’m on a flight and i can’t afford the damn $8 wifi to do my homework. in my humiliation at being this broke, i decide to try and let the Holy Spirit still work on me. i go to my iPad (yes broke with an ipad on a plane, american sob story) to read Mother Elizabeth Juanita Dabney’s book What It Means To Pray Through where she shares the story of her three year devotion of offering herself to sunrise to sundown prayer at her church home. this hospitality of prayer recalled to mind some friends of mine’s elder, Sister Jean. for a year she had a practice called the ministry of availability to which a friend Alan Webb expanded upon calling it the ministry of availability and presence. Sister Jean allowed herself to be available to wherever she was needed and called to be present as her ministry. i was seeking some of that surrender to a ministry of availability and presence that exceeded the logics of capitalism and let my brokenness rest in something on other terms.

but of course, just as i’m willing to be available and present, the book isn’t downloaded. now i remember i’m broke again. and hope in the obama font starts bleeding and blurring in my mind, the red, white and blue cacophony. now i’m not hopeful. now i remember…SLAVERY! institutional racism! wealth inequity! this white bitch next to me is the real issue! those fuckers in first class! second arrow, third arrow, fourth arrow, more and more suffering…

now i’m not feeling hopeful. now i wish i had something downloaded about how to get money, how to change my circumstances. where is the quick fix God?! money would help me tolerate this jacked up nervous system!!

now i’m hurrying tryna see if i have anything that will fix my feelings but besides academic texts, the only other book i have downloaded is Meditations of the Heart by Howard Thurman.

i very reluctantly open it. frankly, i didn’t want to be inspired. i was angry. i didn’t want to meditate on my heart. i wanted white folks and billionaires to meditate on their greed! it was only in trying to distract myself from my suffering that i finally opened the book and of course, this is what i opened to (it feels important to share the full meditation with you):

“32. The Patience of Unanswered Prayer

“TEACH me the patience of unanswered prayer” is a line of the familiar hymn. It opens up before the mind the wide intensity of unfulfilled hopes, broken dreams and anguished denials. Who is there that has not carried at a central place in his concerns the persistent hunger, sometimes dull and quiet, sometimes feverish and angry, for something that has not come to pass. The hunger moves in the background of all the days like the rumble of distant thunder or the far-off roar of the sea. Sometimes it is so close that all of life seems summarized in its urgency and its denial, the denial of life itself. The general overtones of anguish created by the unfulfilled need often send the soul searching for some clue, some key to unlock the door of the treasure house.

All sorts of things are tried. Often there is the searching of one’s own way of life to see if in the intricacies of the personal behavior pattern may not stand revealed the reason for the unmet need. Often there is the subtle intimation of some weakness in the character that takes no overt form but turns up as limitations in understanding or blind spots in perception. Often there is the sure knowledge that one has been hurt, crippled by the actions of others and no care was exercised in the healing process, with the result that growth was out of line and twisted. But despite all of the meaning of all of the possible clues, the persistent hunger works away deep within. It remains unfulfilled and unmet.

Slowly it may dawn upon the spirit that there is a special ministry of unfulfillment. It may be that the persistent hunger is an Angel of Light, carrying out a particular assignment in life. With the coming of this possibility into consideration, slowly, tensions are relaxed and the center of emphasis is shifted from the hunger itself to what it has meant to deal with it through all the years. Slowly at first, the words are shaped and the pattern of them shows itself. At last, a man may say, “I know now that there is present in my life a quality that is only mine because the hunger is mine.

Thus, at last, I come to the door and seek entrance where is gathered the great community. I know the password: ‘Teach me the patience of unanswered prayer.’ ”6

now i’m gagged on the plane. Mr. Ancestor Elder Baba Rev. Dr. Thurman! how dare you be up here with me in this sky as a cloud of witness! how dare God minister to me in my wifi blues!

i was dumbfounded by that language of the ministry of unfulfillment and asked God to continue working that out in me. i want to share with you some questions and things i’d love to pray about with you on this piece around the ministry of unfulfillment.

how do we be patient with unanswered prayer? how do we cultivate not only the patience to be in our unfulfillment but even to risk recognizing God, spirit, life-force still at work in that unfulfillment? and how in our practice of patience, which i would say like purpose, is really presence here — how through that presence are we able to transform inherited capitalist temporalities that distort our ability to perceive God at work, and at rest, in our lives?

why would we want to worship a God who is only at work in our lives? what does that do to how we understand God’s nature and our own nature? how might that patience, that presence, even become erotic, even become yearning as a way we recognize God is present? how do we recognize the presence of God because we are present to our desire?

my unfulfillment has been marked by trying to do the opposite of one of Howard Thurman’s other poignant admonitions: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” but inheriting the christian conviction of service, which is a beautiful conviction, is not immune to capitalism’s distortions. my conviction over this past decade of my work meant looking to create healthy conditions for unfulfilling work. and the pain of that unfulfillment was difficult to care for.

now, i want a transphysics in the shape of my yearning. if my yearning has been limited by the physics of capitalism it wants to abide by another physics. my yearning wants to abide by another eschatology that exceeds fulfillment as the theology of my reunion with God. how are we disobedient in our unfulfillment to capitalist temporality? to narratives of arrival and completion? what happens if we live in a transphysics where unfulfillment is how we encounter God? what happens if we live in a transphysics where unfulfillment is where the miraculous takes place?

kenosis is the theological term for what King calls Jesus’s “obedience to the unenforceable”. kenosis meaning emptying, in Jesus’s emptying to make himself available for God’s will, he is able to fulfill his purpose. what a generosity that we can be obedient to the unenforceable! an obedience no empire can force out of you. that a holy purpose requires our consent.

what happens when we lean into our unfulfillment? when we consent to it and let ourselves be emptied? what if in that transphysics God can enter and accompany us into our purpose?

in the black christian tradition, this kenosis, looks like tarrying. historically, black american churches hold tarrying services to invite in, welcome and await the hospitality of the Holy Spirit’s visitation. where i used to see our new year’s watchnight services as a time to wait for someone else to announce our freedom, i understand now that it’s bigger than that. tarrying and waiting is how we court the Holy Spirit to enter. tarrying is the ministry of availability and presence.

sometimes in my unfulfillment, i can feel like God is not with me. i am unable to recognize God in the unfulfillment. i am searching and searching for God and they are nowhere to be found because i have associated only recognizing God as the affirmation of synchronicity. God as only being present when i feel secure. i realize i’m working through an insecure attachment with God because i was trained to relate to God with anxious attachment.

i’ll never forget one of my professors from undergrad Greg Childs sharing a story about realizing that researching black fugitivity and rebellion requires resisting traditional modes of western historiography’s impulse to capture across the archive. he noticed while attempting to trace the movements of an enslaved person central to an eighteenth-century rebellion in Brazil, that he was reenacting the work of a slave catcher in his role as historian.7 where finding the insurgent would have been good for his book, he knew this person intentionally did not want to be found. even across time. sometimes not being found is how someone survives. the fugitivity is the freedom. i want to serve a fugitive God.

in Exodus 33, Moshe/Moses tries to capture God. after the golden calf betrayal (32), Moses intercedes on behalf of the people again and begs for God’s presence to stay with them. when God promises, “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest” (33:14 NRSV), Moses presses further at that promise and asks, “Please show me your glory.” (33:18 NRSV).

so God names that God will permit Moses to witness God (33:19). then God gives a boundary to the revelation: “But,” God said, “you cannot see my face, for no one shall see me and live.” And the LORD continued, “See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock, and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen” (33:20-23 NRSV).

Gregory of Nyssa, an early church father, uses this moment to articulate his theology of epektasy, challenging christian eschatology’s impulse to seek a completeness where we finally fully rest into God. for Gregory, human relationship with God actually rests on the eternality of longing for God’s infinite nature, the eternal stretching toward God. because God is infinite, we will never reach God. God is in the ongoing renewal of desire and yearning rather than a static arrival of fulfillment. the promise God offers lives beyond our fulfillment coming to a close. the promise God offers is in our desire being continually renewed.8 it is an ever-deepening communion. this is an unfulfillment i can get with! unfulfillment is the cleft in the rock. unfulfillment is the place where we are protected from the demand to seize.

Gregory goes on to name that “the divine voice granted what was requested in what was denied…the one who looks up to God never ceases in that desire…Thus, what Moses yearned for is satisfied by the very things which leave his desire unsatisfied.”9

where is God gifting us our longing through our unfulfillment? how do we let the unfulfillment feel like the loving hand anointing us? how do we feel our depression as the cleave in the rock holding us up on all sides as we are being transformed in the glory of darkness? what company can amuse us in the erotic humor of God just showing their back? how do we trust God is not abandoning us but calling us back to resanctify that original meaning of the word abandon as a holy surrender to forces beyond our comprehension?

how is God present in the liminality of our longing? how might unfulfillment be merciful? what if God covers us so we can live?

Sojourner Truth, born Isabella Van Wagenen, was a black woman, itinerant preacher, knitter, spinner, mother, and black feminist abolitionist. Over the span of her public theology, she shared the gospel of liberation for over thirty years.[1] Truth has been popularized in the American imagination through the bastardized version of her speech “Ain’t I A Woman”, where Truth challenged the exclusion of black women’s distinct needs and rights in white feminist-led movements.[2] Truth famously sued for the return of her son when his enslaver sold him across state lines, violating New York’s emancipation law. Through that case, Truth became the first black woman in America to win a lawsuit.[3] Her impact on the American consciousness is significant but like other prominent black historical figures, Truth has been heroized in a mythology that obscures the courageous intimacy of devotion required to make herself vulnerable to the ongoing ritual labor of abolition — even after liberating herself from enslavement.

As Painter notes, Truth “freed herself…in three dimensions”: “She left slavery with the Dumonts when she thought the time was right; she freed herself from fear through a discovery of Jesus’ love; and, empowered by her new religious faith, she broke out of the passivity of slavery by using the law toward her own ends.”[4] Truth’s freedom in the third dimension with Jesus is essential to understanding her liberation technologies: Truth’s work required an active co-creation with God toward justice. How did Truth’s daily communion with the Holy Spirit shape the moral clarity of her public witness? Though Spirit led her efforts for abolition (“The Spirit calls me there, and I must go”[5]), what of the ways Truth was being spiritually formed in her interiority — formation that exceeded what could be perceived through her efforts in the material realm? How did her relationship with God offer her the hospitality of fugitivity within the terror of slavery? How was the merit of her own freedom through Christ its own mercy and offering toward collective liberation?

Isabella was raised and enslaved in Ulster County, New York, in land indigenous to the Waroneck. Perhaps Isabella sometimes received relief in her land labor through embodying a sigh reflected in the gentle heave of the hills, of thinking about freedom through that land’s spirited streams and rivers, of noticing everything is subject to cycles through the fall dance of shimmering red, yellow and orange from the yellow birch, oak, and hickory trees.[6] Though Isabella was enslaved in this place, how did the land imprint her spirit with God’s convictions? What epicletic relationship did Isabella cultivate between her attention, her encounter with the land, and the Holy Spirit? Painter notes that “Early on, Isabella had conceived of a mode and a setting for godly communication, which, in retrospect, seemed to her naive and magical… On an island in a stream, she built herself a brush arbor, much like the outdoor shrines of Black southerners, and worshipped God as though she were in a West African river cult.”[7]

This brush arbor protected by the companionship of willow, was Isabella’s hush arbor, a place for her to commune with God in private. She selected this place because of its seclusion, serenity, beauty and because the sound of the river could protect others from overhearing her intimate gratitude, grief and intercessions with God.[8] She took refuge in her hush arbor daily. She would confide in Creator and ask the vulnerable, tender question, “'Do you think that's right, God?” [9] along with a plea to be delivered from the evil of slavery.[10] Isabella noted that she would commune with God “as familiarly as if he had been a creature like herself; and a thousand times more so, than if she had been in the presence of some earthly potentate.”[11] Her hush arbor was also where the sheep took refuge.[12] Their trails signaling a path that led her to be beside still waters and restore her soul (Psalms 23). Could Isabella, who recalled being sold for $100 in the company of sheep at 9 years old, know her liberation was bound up with the more-than-human world?[13] That the familiarity of God’s creatureliness was accessible through her companionship with creatures and being made creature? From an early age, Isabella understood that when rendered less-than-human, seeking liberation through the more-than-human allows one to more fully encounter God. It is no wonder she trailed the sheep to draw the spirit down to petition for deliverance from evil.

After the state of New York declared emancipation, Isabella’s kidnapper, Dumont, assured her he would grant her freedom a year earlier than the law required. But in ableist fashion, he walked back on his promise, weaponizing her injured hand — and the decline in her forced productivity — as justification for his betrayal.[14] Isabella decided she would complete the labor he figured was owed and then leave on her own terms. The cost of that freedom was spinning hundreds of pounds of wool, despite her disability, which would have taken about four to six months of dedicated spinning.[15] Perhaps the sound of the spinning wheel was its own psalm: the melodic trance of the zhoom, zhoom, zhoom; her feet pumping left and right like the stomp that emerges when a good word touches us deep down low and we need to let the ground know we felt it. That underground praise — that wisdom that knows God is not just above us but also beneath us: a God of soil, of earth, of blackness. Four to six months of that rhythm, that spinning, that preparation, that contact with the matter of the creatures she had been sold alongside — creatures who brought her to her hush arbor to rehearse the promise of refuge.

Perhaps we might read against the archive and imagine that Isabella was not just trying to do right by Dumont but instead took the time she needed to resanctify her stamina and listen for the calling God had for her life — preparing for the freedom she would take for herself. As a mystic, she knew she could more intimately encounter God through liturgical presence. Isabella, holding the thread with a fist, deformed by forced labor, across her womb, imbued a new life and covenant into Psalms 139:13-14, “For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb”. Through reflecting the creative labor God was in when spinning the earth into motion, Isabella enacted a defiant and holy rebellion against dehumanization — reclaiming the higher agreement of God’s authority and love for God’s children from the assumed authority of white supremacy as deity.

When she was complete with her spinning, she meditated on the query, “How can I get away?”[16] How could she steal away, steal a way? She sought counsel with God for kairos — when would the heavens, the earth, and her peace and safety align to be in concert with her freedom? A thought arose to her to leave just before dawn: those liminal hours where the veil is thin and the company between darkness and light breaks toward something softer than harsh exposure or total consumption. God affirmed to leave in the hours of the “thin place”[17] and she exclaimed, “Thank you, God, for that thought!”[18] When Isabella’s kidnapper encountered her and accused her of running away, she responded, “No, I did not run away; I walked away by day-light, and all because you had promised me a year of my time.”[19] Without directly reading the Bible, Isabella experienced that, “Those who walk during the day do not stumble, because they see the light of this world.” (John 11:10 NRSV).

Shortly after walking away from slavery, Isabella heard news that her five-year old son Peter was sold across state lines illegally. Her resolve to sue Peter’s enslaver on behalf of her son’s freedom, was nourished by the same unwavering communion with God that shaped her path of liberation. She prayed, “O Lord, give my son into my hands, and that speedily! Let not the spoilers have him any longer.”[20] Assured that God was her provider and deliverer, she trusted in a divine order even when legal structures and worldly conditions betrayed that faith. “Why, I felt so tall within,” she recalled, “I felt as if the power of a nation was with me!”[21] This inner vastness allowed for a synesthetic covenant with God — through the antennas of her divine sensibility she was encouraged to imagine freedom even though the senses constituted by her environment would have suggested that freedom was not on the table.

But this level of trust, faith and surrender in God’s divine providence was not always available to Isabella. She actively developed her spiritual maturity over time through cultivating an unmediated relationship with God that transcended the logics of “slaveholding Christianity.”[22] Isabella recalled that in her early prayer life, she “looked upon her master as a God.”[23] God’s nature was distorted under the strongholds and cosmology of slavery — predicated on abuse, surveillance and punishment. God was tallying her moves in a “great book”[24], tracking her behavior and missteps rather than accompanying her as a loving and abiding presence. God was an overseer. In her spiritual formation journey, Isabella named that her faithfulness and honesty to her enslaver made her true to God.[25] That because of the conditions of enslavement, she cultivated a knowing that honesty protected her from harm. She took pride in the character of honesty she had developed through that suffering. It is a challenging testimony — one shaped within the logics available to her at the time, in which suffering was often interpreted as a pathway to sanctification. Though the cruciform nature of enslavement — its humiliation and dehumanization —cultivated character, her reflection raises difficult theological questions: If Isabella were alive now, would she note this thread between character and suffering? What does the development of Christian ethics look like without the conditions of abuse?

The logics of being formed in “slaveholding Christianity” also meant that Isabella was shaped by what Dr. King calls an “if faith”[26] — a transactional relationship with Creator, rooted in a Deuteronomistic theology that believes if one follows the law, one will inherently be rewarded. Isabella recalled that she would “bargain with her God” and that, “by midcentury, the memory of such ‘blasphemous conversations’ shocked [her].”[27] She would find herself promising God good behavior in exchange for her needs — the barter system she had inherited through negotiating daily for her safety under enslavement. Her transformation from an “if faith” to what Dr. King calls a “though faith”[28] is a testament to her sustained commitment to be transformed by her fellowship with God.

When her former enslaver, Dumont, came to kidnap her again — just as Isabella had intuitively sensed he would that day — she began walking toward his vehicle, ready to leave. But before she could reach him, she was drawn into an ecstatic revelation where God revealed their self to her, and she realized, “God was all over… and… there was no place where God was not.” She repeatedly described this incredible presence as looking at her. In their presence, she was not invisible. God’s attention anointed her, and she was beloved in the eyes of God. She was no longer under the scrutiny of a master’s optics but the loving attention that exists through being encountered by the Holy Spirit. By the time her ecstatic revelation drew her back down to the earth, her former kidnapper had left and Isabella called out, “Oh, God, I did not know you were so big!”[29]

This experience crafted a new holy demarcation between God and Isabella as she recognized God’s unfathomable mystery as incredibly distinct from her creatureliness. She desired an intercessor to bridge the distance. Suddenly, she was met with the presence of a beaming form “radiant with love.”[30] She addressed the visitor exclaiming, “I know you, and I don’t know you”. Which meant for her “'You seem perfectly familiar; I feel that you not only love me, but that you always have loved me — yet I know you not — I cannot call you by name.”[31] When she would repeat I know you, the presence shimmered, steadfast. When she would repeat I don’t know you, the presence stirred, unsettled. She repeated, I know you, again and again — her soul reaching out for resonance with the companion who had come to intercede. After relentlessly repeating I know you as a mantra to reveal the presence’s name, they answered in her spirit: “It is Jesus. Yes, it is Jesus.”[32]

Her reunion and delight with Jesus — and the spiritual transformation it initiated — required a shift in identity so profound that her name, too, needed to reflect the path she was walking with God. In a theophoric lineage akin to Simon becoming Peter (Matt. 16:18), Abram to Abraham (Gen. 17:5), and Jacob to Israel (Gen. 32:28), Isabella chose to be known by the name that reflected who she knew herself to be in the company of God: Sojourner Truth. Truth was a woman who experienced the indwelling of the Holy Spirit directly, without mediation. Her truth-seeking preceded and extended beyond formal church life. While Truth would go on to support the founding of the Kingston Methodist Church[33], and later align with radical reformers like the Progressive Friends and Spiritualists[34], her deepest intimacy with the divine was never dependent on institutional formation. She was, as Painter describes, what we could call today a Pentecostal in spirit, because Pentecostalism has “proved so hospitable to Black women’s spiritual gifts.”[35]

Her religious life stretched across denominations and movements, but it was always anchored in direct revelation and a Spirit literacy that transcended the written word. She knew about the talking book. Truth, who could not read, would ask children to read scripture to her because they would not add commentary or interpretation to the scriptures like adult readers would. Through children’s recitation of scripture, she was empowered to arrive at her own exegesis, to “compare the teachings of the Bible with the witness within her.”[36] This intimate perichoresis between the written word and her inner revelation shaped her into a living gospel: attuned to God and poised to enact God’s creative and liberatory activity in the world.

[1] Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol, Kindle edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), loc. 4.

[2] It’s worth noting Truth was born in New York and her first language was Dutch. It’s unlikely she would have spoke in the caricatured dialect assigned to her as part of a mythologized black voice of the era.

[3] Historical Society of the New York Courts, “Sojourner Truth: First African American Woman to Win a Lawsuit,” History of the New York Courts, October 4, 2022 (last accessed July 4, 2025), [link].

[4] Painter, Sojourner Truth, loc. 25.

[5] Sojourner Truth, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, as dictated to Olive Gilbert, Kindle edition (New York: Project Gutenberg, 2005), loc. 123.

[6] Painter, Sojourner Truth, loc. 6

[7] Painter, Sojourner Truth, loc. 28

[8] Truth, Narrative, loc. 45

[9] Truth, Narrative, loc. 17

[10] Truth, Narrative, loc. 45

[11] Truth, Narrative, loc. 45

[12] Truth, Narrative, loc. 44

[13] Truth, Narrative, loc. 17

[14] Truth, Narrative, loc. 29

[15] Truth, Narrative, loc. 29

[16] Truth, Narrative, loc. 17

[17] “Experiencing God in the Thin Places with Barbara Holmes,” YouTube video, 1:00:15, posted by Center for Action and Contemplation, November 18, 2022,

[18] Truth, Narrative, loc. 32

[19] Truth, Narrative, loc. 32

[20] Truth, Narrative, loc. 37

[21] Truth, Narrative, loc. 33

[22] Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Kindle edition (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845), appendix

[23] Truth, Narrative, loc. 23

[24] Painter, Sojourner Truth, loc. 28

[25] Truth, Narrative, loc. 24

[26] Martin Luther King Jr., “But If Not,” sermon delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, GA, November 5, 1967, transcript, The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, https://okra.stanford.edu/link/document671105-000.

[27] Painter, Sojourner Truth, loc. 28

[28] King, “But If Not,” 1967.

[29] Truth, Narrative, loc. 48

[30] Truth, Narrative, loc. 40

[31] Truth, Narrative, loc. 49

[32] Truth, Narrative, loc. 49

[33] Painter, Sojourner Truth, loc. 31

[34] Painter, Sojourner Truth, loc. 170

[35] Painter, Sojourner Truth, loc. 36

[36] Truth, Narrative, loc. 82

note: this was originally a sermon i gave the day before Dr. King holiday and inauguration this year in collaboration with Weaving Earth’s Remystifying Power gathering. the sermon held the same title. If you would like to witness the sermon you can head to Weaving Earth’s site!

tomorrow, on Inauguration Day/King holiday, we are gonna sadly and inevitably witness the annual tried and true reduction of Dr. King’s theology, work, assassination, and most importantly his life. and i hope you will be right there with me offering loving correction to the theft and misappropriation of his intellectual, spiritual and cultural labor. it will take the form of vague platitudes on I Have A Dream, there will be black and white folks holding hands singing Kumbaya, all of it will lose the political memory and breadth of King’s scholarship, sermons and liberation efforts. and especially, the rigor of his prophetic discipleship to nonviolence. that what Dr. King was up to was not naive courage, or “hope” in that Obama campaign font (you know what I’m talkin bout). Dr. King was studying the spiritual stamina required to live at the mercy of entanglement. his knowing that, “in a real sense all life is inter-related. all [beings] are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. i can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be...this is the inter-related structure of reality.” through that agreement he positioned himself at the mercy of entanglement.

my prayer this morning is to care for his political and spiritual memory as an act of ancestral veneration. and to dance and wrestle with Dr. King’s prophecy that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.”

i am curious about the flexibility, posture, agency and limits of that bent, that bending. i don’t know that the telos, the ultimate completion, of the universe bends toward justice. maybe even i distrust that it bends toward justice. maybe i am wary of what the betrayal of faith can do to a spirit. maybe you know something about that in your own life. but i am also an apprentice to the risks and vulnerability Dr. King takes to trust in that eschatology — eschatology as in theology of endings, of the outcome of humanity, of our destiny. i am interested in the power of that level of faithfulness. and, i bend a little bit more towards Werner Herzog in Burden of Dreams where he is in complete and utter awe-full disgust about the shrieking chaos of the jungles in Iquitos and he says:

“we have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth, and overwhelming lack of order. even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess. there is no harmony in the universe.”

i trust more in being amused and surprised in how we become humble before the overwhelm, how we craft harmony despite, how we take notice of and prostrate at the crooked places where praise becomes disarmament, where forbidden acts of tenderness transgress inherited forms of relating to one another, where we’re taken aback by unexpected care. i love these breaks that change time: as Bayo Akomolafe calls them cracks, as Rasheeda Phillips calls it dismantling the master’s clock. how do we bend time? how does bending time transmogrify our despair? how does it miraculously change the shape and conditions of our despair? how does the earth bend time? how do we learn from the earth’s bending?

it’s of course not lost on me, cuz i know you’re thinking about it too, maybe you’re thinking about Toph, the earth bender/metal bender, maybe you’re thinking about how the Avatar bends the elements to care for harmony and liberation among the four nations. i’m right there with you. it’s this intimacy with the elements, it is this bending, that changes the conditions of oppression, it’s this harmony of bending that has the Fire Nation shook and wanting to take the Avatar out. and i am present with this tomorrow as the Fire Nation takes office again - how will we bend the elements in service to our safety? to our liberation? to our joy?

i am curious about what happens to the “master’s clock” (Rasheeda Phillips) when we bend our bodies toward the heavens in worship and abandon? what happens to the master’s clock when we bend our bodies toward the ground in prayer and curiosity? what happens to the master’s clock when we bend our bodies to lay down? when we bend our bodies in Eros? Janet Jackson’s goofy homophobic lament “oh so you doing the bending?” how does that bending take care of one another and the earth?

and when is our bending not our own? when is it contortion? when is it disempowering? when does bending disfigure and disable us? when does bending hurt? i use the word “bent” knowing that many of our bodies are bent, are not straight or upright, are chronically ill, are mad, are disabled, are immunocompromised, don’t fit in the ways a white world wants and forces our bodies and minds to fit.

i’ll never forget a time where i met a woman at a get-together of a mutual friend’s lunch. during the lunch, we discussed my elementary understandings of non-monogamy at that time, which Lord Jesus, poor baby, was a completely misguided understanding that was really just a tolerance for chaos to say the least. i told her excitedly, “i’m down for the relationship however he wants it!” she began to configure her body into smaller and smaller shapes in front of me, “so when he wants you like this, you’ll do it? and then when he says, ‘like this’, you’ll take that?” i was like “aite i get it! we just met! how i’m catching strays?!” she then released the postures of contortion and positioned herself into a posture of dignity, and named, “you need to know what this feels like for you and move from there.” that unwavering posture has never left me: her wide wingspan, her feet planted on the ground, her neck lifted, her gaze fierce and focused.

how had i inherited and been socialized toward the art of compromise? where had i convinced myself i was flexible enough to perform whiteness? where was i actually over-stretched? where had i come to believe that power was inherently evil? why did i shrink? what illuminations might refracting power draw me toward? what ways does the earth refract power and how might we collaborate with those refractions? what beauty is only possible from bending power?

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almost two weeks ago now, i couldn’t sleep witnessing the images in LA of the fires. so many loved ones and beloved creatures in Tongva lands who were affected, so many unknown beings affected. and i imagine so many of us here either were affected directly or indirectly. and my deepest prayers are with all of those who were closely affected by these fires.

i keep thinking about the aftermath of these fires. particularly, about my dear friend and poet MaKshya Tolbert sharing that the original meaning of “aftermath” was connected to grass, to a second-growth crop that emerges after harvest that you can harvest again. rather than how we understand aftermath now, as the wake left after trauma. i was thinking about that other quality of aftermath in the fires, that second-growth harvest. not in a naïve way that rushes toward a “resurrective impulse” as theologian Karen Bray calls it. but aftermath as a dismantling [of] the master’s clock (back to Rasheeda Phillips language). to feel the ways the plantationocene has abbreviated the length of geologic time. the plantationocene as described by Donna Haraway and other scholars as a reframe of the anthropocene. challenging the narrative that humans at large contributed to the current state of our climate emergency, and instead noticing how, the transatlantic slave trade, indigenous displacement and genocide, and colonialism, were so horrific that they changed the weather. that they changed geologic time by millennia in the span of 500 years. that colonialism was a time bender. and now, we witness the way the earth revolts through breaking and bending that time back through the madness of their weather. there’s something there for me about the dignity of the earth’s aftermath.

the week of the fires we were reading the Psalms in seminary. i became aware that my anxiety with the fires sounded like the desperate music of the Psalms. my Old Testament interpretation professor Anathea Portier-Young (who we affectionately call APY) had us pray the Psalms as an assignment and notice what emerged for us as we “dislocated” them from reading and re-encountered them through prayer, movement, song, art, etc. i felt angry praying the Psalms. i was like ?! what are these bitter ass prayers asking God to strike people down cuz they struck you down? i do not relate to this. i do not want to pray to a war deity. i want something i heard Bayo Akomolafe describe as a “a worship that has not been invented yet”. but then i got read in class when APY invited us to notice how the Psalms demonstrate that it is safe to come before God broken. and to let God hold the vulnerability of our brokenness. and when i say God, i mean any presence for you that feels like the miracle that bridges the distance between things.

i have always understood i need to come to God correct. APY and other fellow peers’ interpretation invited me to notice where i have conflated correctness and perfection. the ways i have hid my despair from God’s witness. i’m grateful to learn through the Psalms that despair can become the frequency of worship. that in praying there’s that familiar choreography of bending the knees, of bending the neck, a posture of folding, of breaking, of coming before God crooked. and that prayer sometimes hurts. prayer is risky. and yet, i felt the power of that bending, to prostrate before inclement weather.

when i think of climate collapse and its accumulating anxieties, i feel the weather pressing down on us. asking us not to act out of fear but to be brought supine by the weather of our times. to become Jesus asleep on the boat in the storm in the Gospels. i’m invited to follow ra malika imhotep from The Church of Black Feminist Thought’s question: “What happens if instead of facing each crisis ‘head on,’ we bear witness to it belly up?” in The Church of Black Feminist Thought’s Experiments in Supine Possibilities, they followed the Combahee River Collective’s question, “How we might use our position at the bottom to make a clear leap into revolutionary action?”

when The Church of Black Feminist Thought hosted an “embodied citation lab” with a week of this “supine experimentation.” ra malika imhotep wrote in their invitation:

the body supine is a vulnerable thing, an open thing, an invitation for rest and the risk of invasion. we see Black bodies supine in death and in spectacle performances of protest like die-ins, but what of our most intimate acts of laying down? informed by the intersection of Black feminism and Disability Justice, [this] is an attempt to think and create from the Black disabled bodymind experience of the world in crisis. how many of us have been laid out by depression, fatigue, apathy, chronic pain in the face of these converging crises? how many of us are scared to lay down for fear we might not get back up?

this is an experiment in embodying the rhetorical position of the bottom. asking: what if instead of fighting for center, we force a reorientation towards the bottom? or what if we don’t force anything, we build from here -- allowing our backs something to rest on, training our eyes beyond the ceiling, roof, clouds, cosmos. laying on the back refuses to offer it up as bridge. supine possibilities is an attempt at weaving together harriet tubman’s hyper-somnia and breonna taylor’s stolen sleep. the supine possibilities lab invites us to unthink surrender and pushes past the carceral limits of popular imagination…

can i get an amen for that?! what a word and what a gift! (you can follow dr. imhotep’s substack here!)

i experience ra’s invitation toward a supine, somatic political posture and cosmology as an act of what Dr. King calls a “transphysics”. when we incorporate sabbath, enchantment, mystery, curiosity, worship into our bodies, we abandon the physics of capitalism, white supremacy and extraction for black planets who love us and belong to a different covenant of matter.

------------------------------------

the night before Dr. King was murdered, he offered his final speech and sermon, I Have Been To The Mountaintop in Memphis, Tennessee, that he delivered before the sanitation workers participating in the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike. he opens addressing the crowd of sanitation workers and their allies saying, “I'm delighted to see each of you here tonight in spite of a storm warning. You reveal that you are determined to go on anyhow.” he invites folks gathered into practical methods to economically divest from state and corporate violence, companies to boycott, where to redistribute resources to nurture a black economic base, and how to support solidarity efforts for the Memphis Sanitation Strike.

he speaks to testimonies of civil disobedience, the expertise, wisdom and effect of black nonviolent organizing practices, and the gravity of their impact to interrupt and transform violence. King begins to describe Bull Connor’s demonic tactics for attacking nonviolent black protestors and children through dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham during demonstrations held by black folks after the violent, racist bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church and the murder of 4 little black girls: Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley. King, in agreement with a different covenant to matter, declares:

I remember in Birmingham, Alabama, when we were in that majestic struggle there, we would move out of the 16th Street Baptist Church day after day; by the hundreds we would move out. And Bull Connor would tell them to send the dogs forth, and they did come; but we just went before the dogs singing, "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around."

Bull Connor next would say, "Turn the fire hoses on." And as I said to you the other night, Bull Connor didn't know history. He knew a kind of physics that somehow didn't relate to the transphysics that we knew about. And that was the fact that there was a certain kind of fire that no water could put out. And we went before the fire hoses; we had known water. If we were Baptist or some other denominations, we had been immersed. If we were Methodist, and some others, we had been sprinkled, but we knew water. That couldn't stop us. And we just went on before the dogs and we would look at them; and we'd go on before the water hoses and we would look at it, and we'd just go on singing "Over my head I see freedom in the air.”

he closes the speech declaring, resolute in his soul’s work, voice trembling in humility at his capacity to channel the divine, the tectonic, his impending death, his seismographic cadence — the measure of prophecy quaking through the earth of him:

“Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! And so I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”

————————

i don’t know if there’s a promised land, but i believe in the promise of time we can make for each other. the time the earth makes for us.

—————-

it’s our first night sailing through Glacier Bay and i keep receiving the instruction to crack an egg into the water as an offering. i ignore the signal.

i take a deep, luscious nap in our small cabin in the boat. i imagine this must have been similar to what it felt like to be carried in my mother’s womb. i try not to think of the hold. but that rocking back and forth against the belly of water can’t help but hum ancestral multitudes.

we are awakened and told we have 45 minutes before the tide comes back in. we need to hurry and get dressed. the two boats anchor. the sun is setting.

we get into skiffs to get to the shore of Lamplugh Glacier. i long to know and call them by their childrens’ names. their Tlingit children who were forced out of this bay. it’s my first time this close to the presence of ancient ice. though the project is called Can I Get A Witness, we do not gather in a circle to pray, to set our intention, to make an offering, to ask permission to be here. we do not take time to sit and behold our elder. we quickly discuss some shots and angles and begin to get in positions as the glacier calves behind us. huge chunks of their body break and spill into the glacier river beneath us. dissociation must feel safer to the upwelling of grief beginning to surface. we can’t break at the sound of their fractures. we need to be sturdy and upright. we are at the mercy of the tide. we are here to make a difference.

we have been called in to sit bedside with them as death doulas, to be in the ministry of hospicing extinction. all the glacier wants is witness — whatever prayers, songs, cries emerge from that level of attention. but we need to hurry and make something meaningful to save them! we dance furiously on their burial plot in a naïve attempt to resuscitate them. their deathbed our epic backdrop. and here we go with the….leg! and now a leap! bop! ok….now a turn! shimmer the hands! 5, 6, 7, 8 and contract! here, comes, the, cello, go! cue the sad music so people will cry and feel something! and here’s a roll on the ground! boom! some sort of earnest, futile prayer that our abstract ritual film can encourage people to protect our beloved and dying earth.

i can’t help but think about Susan Sontag’s reflection of the camera as weapon, as extraction. to capture, point, shoot, take. the way glaciers calving sound like gunshots, explosions. the speed we are moving at feels antithetical to the rhythm of their deep time.

since i barely stretched after hopping off the sailboat, i get tired from all the jumping around. i imagine myself behind the camera and think it will look good if i decide to dramatically bend down, crawling, to lay underneath an iceberg. i really hope they get this shot! it’s getting dark! as soon as i lay underneath the iceberg to catch my breath in my durational performance, a single drop from the iceberg drips onto my forehead.

their anointing, the earth’s tears, immediately breaks me into a wail. a wail beyond consciousness. the wailing cries out from a very old place in me — one before me and beneath me. of what Dr. Koko Selassie calles a place lower than where you cry from. my bones flute the grief. we all begin to weep. the weeping stimulates the wolf tone of Jiordi’s cello. their music breaks.

in some recess of my mind that’s still the director, i think, “ok, this is the film. this is the entire film.” we close and do not dance again. we begin to rush back to the skiffs to make sure the tide doesn’t consume us. i ask the videographers if they got that last shot. but when I began to wail they decided to stop filming.

———————————————

i think about this experience a lot. the fugitivity and agency of the glacier’s wisdom to suspend our speed and to ask us to feel them. to again feel the ways the plantationocene has abbreviated the length of geologic time. to really be impacted by that break in time. and to even, be anointed by that break. to be blessed by it. to be anointed through bending my body, not keeping it upright. through becoming supine, through witnessing the glacier from the bottom.

when i shared this story with a dear friend, irma, she noted how much memory must be stored up in that ancient ice. i can return to that moment like a plant medicine journey and feel the psychedelic surge through my body of that tiny, but powerful, melting commandment to move humbly here, to follow their pace, to refuse salvation, to practice glacial retreat. something about describing deglaciation as glacial retreat reminds me of Dr. King’s observations and experience of embodying this radical, spiritual black tradition he called a transphysics.

it is this transphysics, this black presence, i feel the climate emergency, demanding we shapeshift into at a molecular level. that we let mass extinction lay their hands on us. that we fall out in grief and praise from that quality of black awareness. and i say black to call upon black epistemologies of being that to have to reconcile, or beware of the distance between, a world that does not love you and an earth that does. an awareness that is not just rooted in data and responding from fear but an indigenous cosmology of being the earth and so responding accordingly with reverence. a cosmology that calls us to surrender the methodologies of our actions and our politics to being transformed by worship.

it is this willingness to let worship lead us astray, to bend us, that i feel calls upon Karen Bray’s wisdom around what she calls a counter-salvific politic and what she calls a theology of the unredeemed. what is lost and who is left behind in our attempts at salvation? what and who is lost in what Bray calls again, resurrective impulse? if we were not trying to save the irreconcilable, what wisdom and what power might emerge from covering our bodies in the moraine’s ashes, of drinking the glacial water as eucharist, of dancing as an act of worship facing the creator?

———————————————

days after the glacier’s anointing, the image of cracking the egg in the water won’t leave me. i keep seeing the image in my heartmind. i am recalling my fast from that summer where i committed to follow my intuition and not ignore spiritual cues — to trust what miracles they were attempting to lead me to, to defy the strongholds of white logics. for “sense” to come from growing my capacity to feel.

i ask our sailor Frances if i can have an egg. she has been generously cooking for us throughout our time sailing around Glacier Bay and the Tongass — bringing us to old-growth hemlock, yellow cedars, wild bog cranberry-dotted muskeg to pray and bear witness. she asks how i would like the egg prepared. i giggle and awkwardly name, “i actually was told to crack it in the water.” she’s an elder, British white woman and i’m nervous how I will be perceived in this dignified, black witchcraft and veneration. she responds, “oh! well i have to come with you to see!”

we are docked in a bay at night. the circle of collaborators joins on the deck and we gather in a circle to bless the egg. i crack it on the boat’s surface and drop the yolk and egg whites into the water. when the egg meets the water, a radiant, holographic halo reverberates in several rings from the yolk’s center. we gasp and offer praise in awe. we happen to be docked in a bioluminescent bay. i look down and notice, already, gills growing on my breasts (Gloria Anzaldúa, Letting Go).

this whole post is really cuz i need to fangirl about Wicked before i read a bunch of critiques that make me feel otherwise. i know the girlies got the read for the late-stage capitalism of it all: Starbucks brewing Glinda’s pink potion and Elphaba’s cold brew with a side of genocide; i know there’s some piece in there connected to Zack Fox’s joke about how the AKA’s are the types that don’t want to abolish the police but just want the lights to be pink and green; i know, i know, i know, why was Elphaba’s mama light-skinneded and her daddy was Jeff Goldblum…i mean Unc do kinda look like he could have a little something something in him…pero why they have to pull the Moesha Cinderella type casting on us…and lest we forget these promo interviews that make it seem like folks were traumatized after the making of this…but…the micros!!! Cynthia Erivo’s performance!! Doing her own stunts and belting!! The production!!! Paul Tazewell’s costumes!!! Shea Osei’s claw work! The “sovereignty of quiet” dance in the Ozdust ballroom scene. Bowen Yang! They used tf outta their budget, left no crumbs and performed the shit out of Wicked!

witnessing Wicked as a black shepherd theologian theatre bruja, i felt complete and utter ecstasy down in my soul, in the sweetest and most familiar parts of me: witnessing a black witch speak in her own chorus of tongues, go fugitive on behalf of animals being silenced, and find her levity through a limpieza instrument?!?! all in head-to-toe black pleats?! i felt so hype about the importance of these oracular images being situated in our popular ;) (ariana and the production designers killed that song!!) imagination. i live for revisionist histories in commercial iconography because that iconography makes culture. it changes our collective sociality and psyches in subtle and spectacular ways. i deeply enjoy the mysteries possible when we throw in a generous seasoning of shadow work to zeitgeist consciousness, even if that wasn’t the plot behind this multi-million dollar shenanigan. it does something to us. i feel the revival of my creativity. i feel the call to draw the most beautiful parts of me to the fore. and to express in the holy maximalism that musicals beg from us. why would i inhibit my inner dialogue to a journal when i could sing, dance, and backflip it tf out?! i am ready to sashay to therapy this Wednesday.

i felt energized by the way the quintessential witch’s broom took on a new, and ancient, black life for me in Cynthia’s care. to take refuge in sweeping the yard – how technologies of presence and spiritual hygiene may appear mundane but provide everyday sites of freedom. i think of my beloved’s lowkey read of an invitation:

“here are the days of tedium, of sweeping, preparing beds, cleaning up after the monster comes to town. did you think your work would be more glamorous than fixing the roof after the storm? of replanting the garden post-flood, or fitting sheets to the couch for the neighbor whose house burnt down? the monster wants janitors, not heroes.” - jiordi rosales, Becoming Janitor

and underneath the absolute drama of it all, i was struck in my spirit by witnessing Elphaba’s custodianship to the earth change the quality of heroics. i was moved by her spiritual integrity to protect the sanctity of her magic. through Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba, i was reminded of the ways black women are demonized for their sacred refusal to be complicit in perpetuating state violence. i felt a particular kinship for a black Elphaba’s tenderness and co-liberation with animals —— what that invites us to reflect on in relationship to interspecies histories of violence between black people and animals, as chattel and other. i am thinking a lot these days about how Sojourner Truth was purchased with a flock of sheep for $100 when she was 9 years old. Elphaba rebuked violence against the more-than-human because she knew what it was to be read as more-than-human. she also knew there was magic to be protected in the more-than-human.

Elphaba’s solidarity with Dr. Dillamond, a goat played by the goat (Peter Dinklage), so satisfied the black pastoral-punk cottage-core agenda after my heart. black people in wild abandon in meadows is the stuff of my dreams! though the memetics of it make me giggle, the goofiness attends to the trust that black laughter and play in the earth is a ritual technology for ancestral veneration. i’m grateful to be living on a ranch that mostly fulfills that fantasy. but the most side of that mostly, is that working with animals is difficult, foul, irritating as shit and unromantic. and the ancestors are definitely laughing.

i began divinity school this year to deepen a theological literacy for questions i have regarding prophetic traditions and shepherding peoples, to re-ecologize the pastor. particularly wanting to follow the trail of Amos 7:14 when the prophet Amos says, “i am not a prophet, nor the son of a prophet, i am a shepherd and dresser of sycamores.” before working with animals, i had this idyllic projection of where the pastoral and the prophetic meet: i imagined folks sitting in a gentle sea of sheep for hours as the sheep contemplatively eat grass. suddenly, as a result of the sheer tranquility, the shepherd can make out the voice of God. but i have learned the theophanic, when God makes their self present, typically comes in the scatological. the prophetic emerges from the caca pendejo. like Werner Herzog belts in awe-full disgust in Burden of Dreams about the shrieking chaos of the jungles in Iquitos:

“we have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth, and overwhelming lack of order. even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess. there is no harmony in the universe.”

like Elphaba’s magic being accessed through her rage, this counterpoint of prophecy billowing from the bowels of agitation is what i seek to attend to. something about how John the Theologian wrote the book of Revelation while incarcerated in persecution on the island of Patmos, not from a gorgeous field of flowers. something about how revolting is disgust that incites you to rebellion. and there’s nothing that can make you mad like going to be with the sheep for respite only to encounter them escaping electric fence, getting caught in fence, finding out the sheep you thought was a wether still has cojones. it’s giving more antics than mantics. and where are you God?! i am making myself available! where’s the big downloads and God-quotes and instructions i come down from the mountain with?! i’m doing the formula ain’t i?!

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on the way back from watering my saffron-colored cotton, i pick up a guest resident sef at the ranch from the pond. when sef gets in the car they have an excited look on their face. they tell me, "i just saw a mountain lion." i can feel my heart begin to pound with excitement and awe — electricity courses through my body feeling their presence so close. it's rare to hear of a mountain lion sighting. i ask sef a barrage of questions to learn more about what they noticed.

our livestock guardian dog hector is still a puppy. i am not sure his diminutive but feisty nature will be up for protecting my new colored flock of sheep. i decide to sleep with them that evening to support protecting them. jiordi helps me inflate the sleeping pad. i get my gear ready to go, and we carry my things out to the paddock. i decide i will sleep with them for the next three nights and practice the sleeping dragon meditation from the daoist meditation lineages. during sleeping dragon practice, you visualize the big dipper revolving in your chest and then at your center, counterclockwise and clockwise 49 times. i will lie underneath the stars and give my attention up to the big dipper and be surrounded by the sheep. i will wait for a prophecy.

i get my bed situated and jiordi turns the electric fence back on. i am sleeping completely out underneath the stars, no tent —— waiting/wading. jiordi shared an inuit word with me to describe my process, qarrtsiluni, meaning "sitting together in the darkness waiting for something to burst forth". i qarrtsiluni and begin to rub my lower dantian imagining the big dipper above me is also inside of me.

quite abruptly, my attempts and projections of a romantic, pastoral, contemplative scene are thwarted. amused i am on the ground, the dog nips at me every five seconds trying to play. the sheep surrounding me in protection, and caring for me as one of their own, chew their cud asynchronously the entire night. the moment i finally find myself falling asleep only to wake up to three black sheep looking down at me and chewing their cud loudly right above my face. i fall asleep again for a moment and wake up to the roaring sound of a river of piss heading straight for me through a northwest wind. i fall asleep again only to wake up to the gentle plop-plop-plop-plop-plop of several doo-doo balls dropped right onto my mattress inches away from my head.

now, where the hell is the prophecy?!??! where are the seven dragons at the seven gates with the seven lampstands and the seven trumpets?! where the hell are the four horsemen?! and the 144,000 first fruits these lambs sposed to give me?! where is the messiah?!

i resume rubbing my dantian — let the drinking gourd have their way with me. in the darkness i begin to see images of a felted vest made of the california red sheep’s wool embroidered with shipibo neon embroidery of the ruminant digestive system. then heirloom candle holders on an altar passed down from my ancestors, all of the candles lit, as my mother shares a story about our family’s traditions in forgiveness. i wake up to the sound of cud being chewed above me again. this time it is the matriarch Lettie, or Leticia, a black Shetland, above my head chewing. i reluctantly meditate on the wisdom of digestion, of adopting and mutating toward a ruminant digestive tract, of vomiting the indigestible and then chewing on it throughout the night.

i’m ready to get the fuck out of this paddock. i can’t sleep. this is not deep. this is not black cottage core cute. i’m fucking cold and exhausted. hector is awake again trying to bite me. get me the fuck out of here! i get up to leave these bastards. fuck! the electric fence is still on! i can’t get out!!! i head back into my bag to endure the sisyphean patterns of the night.

in the morning, i write to my daoist meditation teacher about the sleeping dragon practice with the sheep underneath the drinking gourd. she shares that her teacher Li Shi Fu names that “the dao is in the shit.” the next day, i go with sef to try tracking the mountain lion. ruler and binoculars in hand, we follow in their footsteps looking for signs of their imprints, scat, caches of a kill they will come back to feed on over several days. we wander and wander hoping to see a sign of them. we come across no sign of them. in the evening, we sit for an hour across from the pond quietly hoping they will come across the trail again. sef shares about an indigenous hunter who names tracking animals requires undoing time. we don’t see the lion. that night i do not sleep with the sheep.

on the third night, i go into the sheep’s paddock to sit with them. i observe them quietly and let them observe me. i feel our bond. i feel their respect. i feel the initiation they carried me through via their bowels, fluids, and leftovers. they each come to greet me and sit quietly with me. strangely, there is a desperate longing to sleep there again. and again. and again. my breathing feels different. my mind feels quiet. my heart feels slow. i chew my cud.

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citations:

• “sovereignty of quiet” is from Kevin Quashie’s book “The Sovereignty of Quiet: On Blackness and Being”

• if you want more on the scatological, see Sarah Nahar’s work on “defecatory justice”

• I do not recommend practicing the Daoist meditations i spoke to without training and direct transmissions from teachers who are initiated in the tradition and practices. if interested in learning more, you can check out Lindsey Wei’s work at Wudang White Horse Academy <3