share your spiritual biography in 10 words, or less:
I stopped looking for answers and started embracing life’s questions.
where are you turning for soul nourishment / joy / aliveness?
The world is particularly hard right now, and I find joy and nourishment in the company, embrace, and solidarity of my community. There is a lot of hate and violence everywhere, and there’s something so powerful and sustaining about choosing love and liberation in partnership with others. Building community takes work, accountability, and vulnerability. But it’s something so necessary for my long-term freedom and joy that I know no other way forward than with my people.
what is a text you hold sacred?
All about Love: New Visions by bell hooks saved my life. I read it right after I ended a very emotionally abusive relationship, and something in me started to mend.
what is a spiritual practice currently sustaining you?
Writing essays is a spiritual practice keeping me grounded. Writing essays and memoir invites a kind of radical honesty and transformative self-reflection. Any healing I’ve ever needed started with my ability to be honest with myself, especially about the ways I’m imperfect. Treating myself as a character on the page creates enough distance between my ego and my spirit for me to change the parts of myself that need changing and to love the parts of myself that need tending.
how would you describe the work you feel called to do in this world (even if it is not the work you get paid for)?
I’m called to tell the truth, even when it scares me. That starts with me being able to name hard truths to myself first. This is why I am called to be a writer. I am also called to create spaces where others can cultivate courage and integrate their values with their actions. That is why I facilitate spaces and practice and teach spiritual direction.
knowing that none of us “has it all together,” what is one question you are wrestling with, or bit of wisdom you are struggling to enflesh in your daily life?
The question most present for me right now is, “What do I desire for my life?” I am an emotional abuse survivor, and part of my healing work since that relationship ended has been tapping into my desires again. Emotional abuse teaches you to dissociate from reality, including from the realities of your hopes and dreams. I often feel guilty for having needs and desires, and that guilt comes from being told all my desires were selfish.
who is one elder / ancestor / mentor whose guidance you draw from? what is one piece of wisdom they have offered?
My grandma is the ancestor whose wisdom guided me when she was alive and whose presence still guides me today. She used to tell me to “be sweet.” I used to ignore her advice because I thought it had to be rooted in some kind of internalized misogynoir. Black women are often expected to hide their emotions, and I worried my grandma was suggesting I do that. But now that I’m older, I realize that being kind is often the harder, braver thing. And my grandma wasn’t saying not to feel, she was just teaching all of us how to be kind to each other in her own words, in her own way. We can all use a little sweetness sometimes.
what’s one oppressive untruth you are practicing unlearning / divesting from?
I’m unlearning social, emotional, and physical martyrdom. It is not righteous to lose yourself or betray your ongoing needs in order to sustain anything—a job, a relationship, a spiritual community.
what is one thing you wish were required listening / viewing? (please link to the song, poem, art piece, podcast, etc.)
I’ve been sharing Prentis Hemphill’s essay “Letting Go of Innocence” in the classes I teach for years. I’ve never read anything else that speaks so clearly to the spiritual and emotional power of transformative justice and abolition. So much pain, violence, and harm in this world is rooted in our inability to understand all humans as both capable of harm and worthy of repair. “Letting Go of Innocence” troubles the binary of guilty and innocent and invites the reader to consider how we can heal ourselves, relationships, and the world without rushing to punishment as the only solution for our pain. (Access it here: https://prentishemphill.com/selectwritings/2019/7/5/letting-go-of-innocence)
any of your website and/or social media handles you’d like us to include / highlight?
Marchaé.com | @MarchaeGrair (Instagram)