Last week, I had the privilege of attending the Healing Race Portal in Montgomery, Alabama, as part of the team of Rooted Global Village.
We were guided by Rev. angel Kyodo williams (author of Radical Dharma and Being Black) and Dr. Resmaa Menakem (author of My Grandmother’s Hands and The Quaking of America) for four days of an incredibly rich, intense, hopeful, and connective exploration of racialization and its impact on our bodies, psyches, and cultures. The space was held by a mixed and diverse group of 50 participants from all over the country, each committed to showing up as fully as possible—with humility, curiosity, and deep care for each other.
I’m still digesting the experience and how it continues to ripple through and around me. I can say with clarity that it wasn’t so much the information that affected me—though some of the content was new—but rather the communal aspect. Being with the content, being seen and seeing each other as we shared our truths, our grief and rage, our insights and brilliance— I still feel it very viscerally. It continues to move through me in tangible and in unexpected ways. I’m feeling especially grateful for Rev angel’s practical and compassionate facilitation that brought us back to what was true in real time again and again.
My dear friend Cliff Berrien, also part of Rooted’s team, wrote down this quote from one of the sessions:
“We need to attend to the tending and tenderness that were lost in white body supremacy*.”
Tending and tenderness. Attending. This feels like my deepest intention for SE+AM. That by allowing ourselves to be seen—in all of our flaws and imperfections, and in our power and magnificence—we become more alive to ourselves and to each other. And that aliveness, in its creation; strange and full of errors and brilliance, reveals life itself. When we attend to that aliveness, it becomes more living, more alive.
In choosing to reckon with the ways we’ve been conditioned not to see that aliveness, in ourselves and in each other, we begin to return to being more attentive and tender witnesses. There’s so much more to say about this experience, but I feel like I need more time to see what words emerge from it, rather than trying to contain and understand it too quickly. Stay tuned…
Another gem from last week’s Healing Race Portal,
So I ask, what are the ways that you come in contact with your very core truths? And do your moves in life reflect them? One of my core truths is that there are infinite ways to remember, connect to and create from our innate aliveness. My deepest desire is to belong to a culture that gives permission for all the ways we connect to what uniquely animates us, and allows the awe of aliveness to unfold and take shape in all its forms.
Sending you grace and skill as we navigate this ruckus reality.