be/longing

“Your god loves me more than you.”

*

I was sitting with a patient recently, at the foot of his bed in his room. He was in one of the nicer rooms in the warren that is the hospital: spacious, sleek, with a wall of windows and furnishings in whites, grays, and brushed steel. I was grateful to have found a chair. I prefer to sit in patient visits, especially if there’s a chance that I’ll be there for a time and we’ll be able to have a meaningful conversation. What we talk about is almost always up to the patient: family, treatment, anxieties, frustrations, or even if we talk at all. Today this man was sharing with me his faith journey. Like many patients I see here, he started out in the Catholic tradition, and through a circuitous route, has wound up worshipping in a large, mainline Protestant denomination. This winding road isn’t a problem for him, experientially or theologically. When recounting a near-death experience, he shared, “No one asked me for my papers, no one said, wait which one are you—or, you know, you have to pick one—there was none of that. You know this, all these different traditions, that’s us, you know, that’s a construct.”

I nodded silently. I think along similar lines often, and seldom do I hear people say this. Often when I enter a room, I get a look and someone says, I asked for a priest, or I hear what religion are you? as if religion is a precursor for our capacity to be present and vulnerable people together present to one another’s experience of illness, struggle, transformation, or death.

It is not.

But not today. Today, I could be with another person who does not need me to wear a collar or be a different gender or race or sexuality in order to shed tears with me about his anxiety of how his daughters will cope if he dies as a result of his surgery this afternoon. True, after we have prayed together, he does ask me for a priest to come and offer him Sacrament of the Sick and the Eucharist: evidently his Protestantism is not flexible enough for him to allow me to share with him the Body of Christ, or anoint him and offer him to the safe touch of God. I’m not bothered by it. (Incidentally, I have questions about why I’ve chosen a profession that invites so much rejection of me, but that is an exploration for another day. I suppose the TL;DR answer is that I haven’t chosen it, I’ve been called to it.) I make a note to put in a consult for the priest who will be in later in the day, and I take my leave. Some days, like today, it’s so busy that it’s easy for me to confuse one patient with another, but all day this gentleman lingers like fragrance on my clothes. What he shared about the meaning of faith communities, about his family, about his theology: they turn over and over in my mind.

There are communities he has been in, and I have been in too, where the badge of belonging is significant. What do you believe is a way of determining who is in and who is out, who is “safe” and who is “threat”. There is simply no room for the radical notion that there is no such thing as binary, dichotomy, duality. To consider that this is possible is to give yourself away to something or someone that will almost certainly hurt you. I have clear memories of growing up a Black woman in a white Midwestern suburb, and learning the hard way that my brand of Black did not belong with the accepted brand of Black in my communities, sometimes—and quite painfully—not even in my own family. Having come out as bisexual not too long ago, I wonder if I will come to experience the biphobia and erasure that I read about from others in the bi community. Will gay and lesbian friends I haven’t yet made whisper about me, or condescend to my face, saying that I’m lying to myself, that being in a relationship with a straight man makes me straight and not queer, or that my relationship is destined to degrade while I’m on my way from straight to gay, as if bi is no more than a junction on a train line? The nature of belonging feels incredibly divisive in faith communities. My faith tradition of origin has in its history a legacy of determining whose faith is real and true enough, who is a heretic, who is a witch, who is other in some “dangerous” and “threatening” way that must be destroyed. As someone traversing the path toward ordained ministry in the Christian tradition, I acknowledge this openly, and doing so allows me to recognize it in other places, spaces, and moments. It doesn’t give me more power, nor authority; it gives me a kind of experience that comes from previous and repeated injury, injury my faith ancestors have inflicted, injury my faith ancestors have repented, injury my faith ancestors have denied.

If my patient is correct, if these assemblies of theology, polity, ideology, and practice that we have gathered ourselves around and called religion is a construct that allows us to understand That which is Greater, what do we claim to be true about our particular construct? What can I distill mine down to, and does it look the same as yours? If not, or if so, so what?

*

In Spanish, word translates to palabra, which has in its etymology parable or parabola, or I set side by side.

*

your god loves me better than you.

At my altar this morning, weaving in and out of my head among my mantra was this utterance. your god loves me better than you. On the heels of its echo I considered my Jewish and Muslim siblings, and the union where our Venn diagrams of religion intersect: That whose Name shall not be spoken, the Lord of Hosts, the Great and Merciful; Abraham the father of your faith, and mine; the seeds from which Semitic religions grow, and depending on who you ask, whence they mutate. I think of how often it seems these faith traditions have looked at one another and uttered this sentence to each other. I have the real way, we have said. I am chosen from among us, we say. I am the most blessed and beloved, we say. What is the takeaway of speaking to one another this way? It allows us to make those among us who are not chosen, who are not special, who are not on our same way, to be counted as less-than. It allows us to make a comparison that puts us in a one-up and them in a one-down. And if there is a they that is not we, and if they are one down, what can’t we do to them?

*

Words matter.

I say this because people around us are worked up about the words we use to name, claim, deny, rebuke the actions of our people, our governments, our allies, our enemies. Words matter. They are imperfect and narrow and ill-fitting approximations of the feeling or the experience or the reality we know and are trying to share. And they matter.

I recently reread some passages from My Grandmother’s Hands that have come into bright and sharp relief for me in the past months. Among them are the idea of clean pain and dirty pain. I don’t want to spend too much time on it here, but I’d encourage you to read it if you haven’t: it’s easy to follow, it has incredible, helpful strategies for being a person, and if you let it, it will change how you see yourself and the world from which you come. I think almost daily about the investment it asks us to take in our own trauma: not in allowing this trauma to define us, but to consider the ways in which trauma unmetabolized is running us.

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will run your life, and you will call it fate.”
— Carl Jung

I look around the world and see war, murder, extermination, destruction, dehumanization, fear, and profoundly destructive duality. I see a determination and a clinging to the idea that there is us and there is they, and they are bad and we are justified, and we will see who has the final word. All I hear in this rhetoric—regardless of where it comes from and regardless of who it's demonizing and dehumanizing—all I hear is unmetabolized trauma. I think of patients and family members saying to me, bad stuff happens but I don’t want to think about it, what good does it do to talk about it, and I imagine pointing at a newspaper and say, you don’t have to talk about it, but the bad stuff has a way of finding its way to the surface whether or not you ignore it. I paraphrase a line that one of my favorite writers wrote into a story: when your pain is this great, of course the hair you tear out is your own, of course the house you burn down is your own home. The thing about unmetabolized trauma is that it doesn’t just harm those we visit it on, it harms us, too.

“Unhealed trauma acts like a rock thrown into a pond; it causes ripples that move outward, affecting many other bodies over time. After months or years, unhealed trauma can appear to become part of someone’s personality. Over even longer periods of time, as it is passed on and gets compounded through other bodies in a household, it can become a family norm. And if it gets transmitted and compounded through multiple families and generations, it can start to look like culture.”
— Resmaa Menakem

That patient I recently sat with talked about dropping a rock into a cesspool and the “ripples of shit” that make its way out and effect everyone. I think about how the world has behaved since 2020, and since October 7, and about our unhealed trauma rippling out, and what consequence it will have, what will people two, five, ten generations from now be doing to each other (in the name of faith!) because they think it will keep them safe, because they need to feel like they belong. You will not hear me advocate for an us/them binary. You will not hear me advocate for any kind of militaristic conquering in my understanding of faith, of “good versus” anything else. You will only hear me advocating for a love so radical that it changes us. It doesn’t erase our traditions, it doesn’t dilute our identity; and it recognizes the threshold where these become obstacles to connection with one another, and the harm done by our mis- and dis-connection. This love invites us to reach and move beyond that threshold into a circle where none of us is on the outside. Because this love makes us vulnerable and invites risk, it has to be sourced by the Divine. We have shown time and again that we are simply incapable of anything else.

Energy Spent Wisely

I was recently bullied online by someone I considered a friend because I hadn’t shared my views about the war in Israel/Palestine on a social media platform. I and others have a moral obligation to speak out online she posited, presumably voicing an opinion she shares, but I think her anger was just that I hadn’t spoken out at all. It hurt me really deeply that this person that I respect and admire would choose to manipulate me this way into doing something that I clearly wasn’t going to do. Additionally, it felt not at all relational: if she wanted to know what I thought, why didn’t she ask me? If she wanted me to understand how my reticence to share impacted her, why didn’t she share that with me? Anyone who knows me well knows that trying to manipulate me into doing something will only antagonize me, and thrust us both into conflict, and I might not like conflict, but baby, I ain’t afraid of it. Finally, it dawned on me that this person is also a woman of color, which made me really angry: for a Black woman to be publicly angry is a risk to her life in our world, and this person’s behavior seemed to ignore that completely.

Generally, when I get this hurt and upset, I have one move: emotional cutoff. I flip a double bird and bounce. (Well, let’s be honest, I rail and shout at the person and judge them, and then I flip a double bird and bounce.) One of my life lessons is to befriend the question of why: so for the rest of the day, this painful interaction worked in the back of my mind and in the space between my shoulders. Why did this bother me so much? Why had I been so hurt by this action? It’s never outside of yourself, I heard one of my teachers say to me. What is this touching in you, I heard another teacher say. Who do you want to be in this? I heard my higher self ask.

Let’s find out.

black-and-white photo of hedge labyrinth with person walking in it.

black-and-white photo of hedge labyrinth with person walking through it. photo by Maksym Kaharlytsktyi

*

The other morning, I was making my bed before work. It was dark out, my partner was away, and I was trying to move toward another day of meaningful (and taxing) work with equanimity, unwisely ignoring the fatigue and anxiety that I felt. I was listening to a recording of “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” by Audre Lorde, read by Teneshia Samuel. (As I write this, I rise from my desk, looking for my copy of Sister Outsider, so that I can run my fingers over the words, and I realize that, having just relocated to Boston from North Carolina, I have no idea where in my house that text is. The book hunt makes me smile.) Those prophetic and convicting words from Sister Audre were spoken:

“I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength.
I was going to die, if not sooner, then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.
”
— Audre Lorde

At the time, I shook my head while tugging on the sheet, as if being admonished by the ancestral auntie who was, in fact, chiding me. What was I not saying, and why? What was I saving by holding my tongue, and would it be good for me in the long run? I look at my book today, and in the margin of this essay, I wrote in blue pencil, “permission to GRIEVE.” I am sure I was thinking about the way in which Black women must hold our grief apart from our presentational and subjective experience, because grief makes us human and vulnerable, and existing in a culture in which we weren’t meant to has taught us that to grieve and to be vulnerable is not safe. Anger is, at least, a shield by which we can defend and fight back; grief just makes us penetrable, pierce-able.

And so, if I will be pierced regardless of my consent, if I will die, if not under the gears of the machine, then by the Hand that transforms all things, then what must I say before I die? Who is served by my silence? Who is harmed by it?

*

I am in the process of working toward ordination in a mainline protestant denomination in the United States. One of the questions those in process with me are asking ourselves and one another is, is jess someone who will steward the access, privilege, and microphone of the Church with integrity, safety, and justice? Will she share the gospel thoughtfully and in accordance with the head of our Church, Christ? One of the ways in which folx discern this about me is by witnessing my preaching.

Now.

My husband will tell you that I love to preach, but that’s just because he’s closest and he often gets the earful. Truly, my day-to-day doesn’t offer me much opportunity to interpret scripture with and for others the way that my pastors and mentors do when they step into the pulpit. Not only that, but I feel the weight of that space whenever I preach: it isn’t (just) that I feel I have to say something that makes folx uncomfortable, but not so uncomfortable that they stop listening, and also interested enough to reflect on their own way in the world and that if they don’t like it, I don’t want to hear about it, and I will. Something happens when a person steps into that space. Suddenly, for some who are listening to them, that person becomes a vessel onto which we project all of our fears, or insecurities, or demands, or expectations, or needs related to our relationship with Divinity. Not only do I carry my own burdens into the pulpit that I have to deal with, but I receive those from others, without my consent. This is an occupational hazard, and it’s a rough one. Can I deal with it? I’m not sure—and for the record, don’t trust anyone who says yes unequivocally, they haven’t really sat with it if they’re super sure. With the help of God, yes, but this is what discernment is, right?

One of the questions I’ve been asking myself is, where exactly is my pulpit? If I were working as a pastor—assistant, lead, solo, resident, fellow, whatever—I’d know, it would be architecturally, energetically, and consistently clear. But I’m not; I’m working as a chaplain, and I’m doing so because Spirit has called me it. The Venn diagram of chaplaincy and pastorship is an intersection, but it’s not a union. For me to use the death of a loved one in my work as an opportunity for conversion to a faith tradition is religious abuse. (I happen to believe it is this when pastors do it at funerals, too, but that’s a different essay.) I do not preach at or to people in my hospital; I abide with them. I listen to them. I bear witness to them. I reflect them to themselves, and to others who may not see them as clearly. I invite them to feel, and I feel with them. My ministry has a different ask and a different shape.

Do I preach? Where do I preach?

I used to preach on social media; hm, well, if preaching is being vocal about my politics and the way they intersect my faith, then I used to preach on social media. I no longer think preaching is this simple. I haven’t preached lately, nor for a while. I’ve thrown all my energy into holding others’ trauma, into celebrating and grieving and lamenting and petitioning with others in real time, in real life, and the apps just don’t often feel like a space where that lives. I listen a lot on the apps, but I speak less, and if I’m honest, I think it’s really good for me. I also follow folks I consider faith leaders on the apps: my executive conference minister, Rev. Darrell Goodwin; Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis of Middle Church in New York; Candice Benbow; Gail Song Bantum; Jessica Chapman Lape; @TheHospitalChaplain; @DivergentChaplain, and many others who model for me what it is to engage social media (read the wild west) as a spiritual leader. Some of them preach with memes, some of them preach with videos or threads, and some of them preach with photos of themselves, in joy, in movement, in humanity. Their models cause me to wonder, am I doing this correctly? Do I need a “professional” account in places, and a place where I just wanna post selfies of me in my Black queer joy, or me with my Honey, or what I’m witnessing, or me face-deep in vegan food somewhere else? Is this a boundary worth holding, even? I tend to like erasing these lines, to like being my full self in one place, and it’s generally better for my mental health. To have an account that is “appropriate” touches a bunch of injury seeded in my family of origin that I am working to heal.

But until this person antagonized me for not saying what she wanted me to say, I never even wondered if anyone was listening to me on social media. No one else has asked me to speak on anything, not like they have asked Jamyle Cannon or Sunn M’cheaux. Our culture is such that if you step away from the mic for even a minute, your loyals will forget the sound of your voice, and so I have not been amplifying my voice because it’s already so facking loud out here, and no one is listening for me.

I was heated, literally, by this interaction I had online—I felt bullied, manipulated, and hurt that someone I thought was my friend sacrificed our friendship in favor of vitriol, antagonism, and frankly, cruelty. Fortunately for me, I have no chill, so I said to my colleagues, I need help, and I told them what had happened and how I was feeling. One of them wisely asked me, what’s this relationship like, maybe this person sees you as a spiritual leader. I couldn’t believe it. We don’t share a faith tradition; we haven’t been in conversation for years; we don’t worship or ritual together. It’s inconceivable that she actually cares what I think.

My higher self asked, but what if she does think of you as a spiritual leader, despite all that other stuff? I mean sure, in your embedded theology, a spiritual leader was a straight dude, Black or white, head of the family, and he told you what to do and you did it? You weren’t even present as a spiritual leader. Are you still erasing yourself?

Nah, that’s just ego, I said to myself. It doesn’t look like that out here.

Yeah, but they told you when you went to HDS, that after they came out, that reality was going to land for others heavy on the table. Maybe that MDiv is a microphone that is in front of you and others are waiting for you to speak into it. You made an impression while you were there, you made an impression in residency. You are out here hustling for reproductive spiritual needs. You aren’t invisible.

Ugh, but this isn’t the place. Nothing about this is real, it’s all curated and performative. If I really thought a well-timed post or story or TikTok was going to sway foreign policy, I’d do it. It’s just cacophony out here, full of sound and fury. I’m not Barak Obama for fuck’s sake, no one is waiting for me to sound off.

You’re right. You aren’t. And your silence will not protect you. Someone may not be asking you to speak, but they notice that you’re silent. You are going to die. So how do you want to live?

*

illustration of hand reaching down to take two hands in waves

illustration of hand reaching down to take two hands in waves. illustration by Sue Carroll

I remember being angry for most of my thirties. I was unafraid of my anger; I understood it, and it felt like a resource, like a weapon, like a tool of clarity and meaning making. Man, did it cost me a lot to be so angry. I remember sitting at my dining table with a dear and wise friend, railing about how freely and indiscriminately Black folx were being killed, and how angry I was with the yogis in my life (still at sea in the white supremacy that undergirds the wellness industrial complex) who were either ignorant of the fact and who were advising me to spiritually bypass. Why weren’t they more angry? Why weren’t they doing or saying anything?

“It’s okay to be angry with people for not being angry enough,” she said to me. “I’ve felt that way. And if you are angry with others for not being angry, you’re going to be angry all the time.”

It stunned me. It was a lesson that keeps on giving. What a waste of my prana. My anger could continue to clarify my work, could invite me to speak on what mattered to me, but to rage at others for their way of moving through the world was just going to burn me alive. It was immolation that would not resurrect anyone’s daughter, would not bring her back from whatever field or alley or cell she’d been left in. My self-righteous anger would not make abortion access easier for a teen who lived in the bible belt, nor would it ease the aching heart of a mother who’d miscarried three times. It wouldn’t help the trans person discern their relationship to their changing body and how it related to their vision of parenthood. It wouldn’t transform the history of the American police force, it wouldn’t rewrite state and local policy. It wouldn’t even teach breathing techniques to police officers, which is something I could actually do.

I think about this person who attempted to manipulate me into action, and I remember a younger version of myself, who also needed other people to be publicly as angry as I am, to draw a line in the sand and say no, not anymore.

If this person is anything like I was, underneath the layers and layers, and layers, of rage, are bone-deep fatigue and grief. And fear. That version of myself is tired of living in a world that does not love me, does not see me, and will not keep me safe. That version of me wants to live, she wants to feel sunlight on her face and worship in joy and laugh with her loved ones. She wants to believe there is enough for all of us, and nothing about life has confirmed that. She is almost struck dumb with how difficult it is to live. She wants to live. She wants to feel safe, to know who she can trust, to know who will hold her during this existentially terrifying moment that we blithely call life. Who can she look to, will they recognize the grief and fear in her eyes? Who will protect her? It is intolerable to feel this frightened and angry and sad.

It is intolerable. It is part of the human experience, and it is intolerable. So when I felt feelings that were so big that I couldn’t hold them by myself, I absolutely slung them on other people and called it justice. The feelings were too big, I couldn’t hold them on my own, and so I slopped them onto others like mud and I made them deal with it. I discharged onto others. Did it make me feel better? Maybe for five minutes. But it didn’t change anything about the reality I was living in that is so painful, and it torched my relationships, which is not what I wanted.

We do this all the time. We make other people responsible for our feelings every time we yell at our kids or our spouse, the barista who messed up the order, the person on the other end of the phone who doesn’t understand us, whoever isn’t meeting our expectations. We do it every time any one of us picks up a weapon, whether we have a flag on our arm, a cause in our heart, or a manifesto on our computer. We do this because we don’t know how to feel our feelings, because our nervous systems are overloaded, because this is not how we were meant to live, and our bodies know it, and we can’t handle it.

I try so hard to love that version of myself. I see her reflected in every soldier, every civilian, every lone gunman, every disappeared girl. I try to love radically, and loving radically upsets our paradigms. It defies duality, it rejects the notion of arrows and straight lines. I pull that version of myself into  my lap, and I encircle her in my arms, and I breathe with her until our bellies are soft. I smooth her hair and we cry together, and then I whisper, I am here. This world is a prison, and this life is a penance, and the only remedy I have to offer you is that I am here and that I love you. I see you and I love you and nothing about this is fair or okay. Here we are, we have our breath, and we have ourselves, and we have each other, and we have a love that is more powerful than each of us. That can make something healed. That can make something new.

let’s hang out

When even a little of your life’s work or heart’s desire gets clearer, you suddenly want to move toward it fast, right? The thing you’ve been wanting to feel, the electricity, the flow, the zzZZZZZZZzzzzzz, you finally feel it, and if you’re anything like me, you want to move toward it at top speed. And then, something pops up in the road that slows you down; it grinds you to a halt, and forces you to be still, to wait, to do nothing.

For me, that thing is bronchitis. I know, it doesn’t sound so bad if you’ve had it or you know what it is, but just because it has a common name doesn’t mean it won’t take you out like a first-string middle linebacker.

This might make a better story if I told you that I’d been working myself to the bone, that I’d been spending shift after shift in the hospital praying with families who were losing loved ones, that I’d baptized five babies and laid to rest five more, that I’d presented three verbatims, and that I’d provided staff care for nursing staff on six different units, all in the span of a week! (And really, if you’re not a hospital chaplain, by now you’re rolling your eyes.) But none of that is true. My first week of work in May was pretty average: I did help facilitate some staff care on a couple of ICUs, and I co-facilitated a community health center spirituality group in which no one showed up. By the end of the week, though, I could feel that telltale sweat/chills/ache that said something bad was coming, and I spent most of the weekend in bed. I missed three days of work this past week to this infection. I came in on a Tuesday when I should have stayed home, and I came in on a Wednesday because I didn’t want to miss more education. My colleagues and supervisors all wore an expression of concern and incredulity when we talked: they looked at me like, woman, what are you doing here? You sound terrible and you look worse. It’s not that deep, go home.

I’m often a worker who believes in boundaries. My phone doesn’t ring after 9 pm because that’s how I set it up, and that’s how I like it. If I can at all help it, I do all my CPE writing at work, so that when I’m home, I can enjoy being there, and spend my time the way I choose to. When my colleagues are in need of time to tend to their lives—they’re sick, or injured, or a loved one has died—I’m big into them placing their attention where it belongs and picking up their slack. But somehow, when I was sick, I couldn’t show up this way for myself. I was stunned, honestly. I was embarrassed. It took several folks worrying over me to help me understand that this wasn’t something I could power through. What was at work in me that made me keep trying to pretend I wasn’t as bad off as I was? When I finally got home and was still, the rip tide of illness took me. My throat was on fire. My chest and belly were ceaselessly heaving and sore with coughs that buckled my entire body. My skin was clammy and greasy. My voice was hoarse, if it was there at all. I got tired getting up to change my pjs or just make tea. It was bad. Few times in life have I slept so much and still felt so tired.

I went to urgent care, and while I was there, I flashed back to the last time I was a child and was this sick. As a girl, I was desperately afraid of the throat culture: a nurse, armed with a Q-tip the length of a pencil and the circumference of a marble stuck a wooden popsicle on your tongue and went on the hunt for your tonsils. She would wipe over and over and over with her swab, and it was all I could do not to puke all over her shoes. I sat there and saw that nurse come in with the swab, and I was instantly ten years old, and started apologizing for whatever would come next. The, nurse, bless her heart, believed me when I told her I’d try not to boot, and she wheeled the laptop out of the room and out of the splash zone. Fortunately, the process has changed over the last 30 years. No more tongue depressors, and the touch is evidently a lot less precise. I managed to do a strep test and a throat culture without redecorating her scrubs, myself, or the room.

Parts of me have asked, in the haze of fever dreams, when did I get sick? How was I exposed? What caused this to happen: did my acupuncture loose something? Is this a healing crisis? I did a lot of energy work, do I need a cleansing? But I’m not sure how much any of the answers to these questions matter; what feels important is the stillness I must practice in getting well.

Stillness is not my favorite. I am a big woman with a big personality and a big reservoir of energy. So being still feels like I don’t care. It’s also worth saying, and it only occurs to me now, that there have been moments in my life when other people, white people or older people, people with more power than me, have perceived my stillness as a kind of flaw, some indicator that I don’t want it bad enough or I’m not serious, that in order to prove my worth and my capacity I must always be doing. Now, I’m able to look back and feel compassion for that poor younger version of myself who was always trying to prove, and to tell those folks who felt I didn’t jump fast enough to go kick rocks. But is that anxiety of proving myself still at work?

A friend and colleague in my cohort helped me surface an idea that I hold: if I’m not hustling or working or doing something, then I am sure (read, afraid) that something bad is going to happen. If I take my hands off the wheel, if I don’t work, if I am still and surrendered, Spirit is not going to bless me, but instead only ruin and desolation are mine. Can you imagine? What room is there for grace in this as a worldview? It sounds so Protestant and hard working: God helps those who help themselves, so get out there and do it, because you only get a blessing by earning it. Another colleague and friend reminded me of a member of the Major Arcana in the Tarot, a tool of reflection, insight, and/or divination: The Hanged Man.

The Hanged Man from Black Tarot by Nyasha Williams and Kimishka Naidoo.

This is my favorite rendering of the Hanged Man that I’ve seen so far. According to the Rider-Waite-Smith version, the card reflects a masculine-presenting person, caught by the leg in some kind of noose or trap, hanging upside down from something, and looks pretty chill about it. This is not a domestic terror act-cum-neighborhood picnic, and it’s not state-sanctioned murder; this is just a somebody who’s gotten scooped up, who can’t get untangled, and who’s just gonna relax and wait a while. This hanged man is female-presenting, has gorgeous locs (#hairgoals), and seems expressive in her suspension: she’s taking this time and making it creative, because what else would you do when suspended by silks, except see what kinds of cool shapes you can make with your body?

So I finally, finally feel like I’m in my zone, and I start to move forward, and I get grounded by a bronchial infection that makes me too tired to do much of anything. For days. I am forced, not just into energetic stillness, but into bodily stillness. I haven’t been back to work yet, so we’ll see what happens on Monday. But it would seem that there’s a new era, a new level, of stillness I need to practice. What will happen if I’m still? What will I miss out on? Will ruin and desolation come for me the way I fear they will? (I mean, eventually, because that’s part of the human experience right, but not like, tomorrow.) I don’t know what lessons stillness has to offer me. But I’m getting the signal loud and clear that it’s time to stop moving and just practice being still.