Alice Walker described her first encounter with unapologetic, queer delight, as “a revelation.” “The sight of two grown men locked together in a thorough and obviously toe-curling kiss,” she witnessed, was “a bit like my seeing a bearded iris for the first time.” Stunning beauty–glorious and strange and alive. “How sad,” she concluded, “now never to see men holding hands, while everywhere one looks they are holding guns.”
I’ve been meditating on her testimony of revelation throughout this Pride season. So much is in crisis, collapse. The world, falling apart in so many ways, and so fast.
WhiteXnHeteroMasculinistRage is trading out gays for guns every chance they get, protecting weapons of war while waging war on trans youth. From sanctuaries and state houses, pulpits and public school boards, Supreme Court decisions and the scared silence of those who claim to be our friends. Seeding death while claiming to protect life, unleashing hate and calling it love, declaring illegal and immoral our very aliveness, our care for each other, the care we need to survive, and thrive. All while this gorgeous, queer planet–our only home–heaves and melts and chokes and burns.
What do you do when your world falls apart?
Queer and trans elders and ancestors fought back and loved hard. They threw bricks at cops coming for them, declared sacred what the church deemed damned, cherished beauty where others saw freakishness, and refused to let shame, fear, and silence deaden the aliveness that pulsed so courageously through them, that pulses so courageously through us. They danced, together, when others wanted them dead. They held each other, fiercely and tenderly. Fed each other, feasts from crumbs. Made home together, in the ruins of rejection. Creating, together, new words and new worlds. Finding, together, forms of kinship and belonging at once ancient and new.
What do you do when your world falls apart?
Find and share a good thing, Alice Walker suggests. Love, of course, the source and root of it all. Love for ourselves, for each other, for the falling apart world, for life itself. For lifeforms and loveforms denigrated or demeaned. Love for and manifesting in dance. Music. Soil. The moon. The Spirit. The color purple. Our pleasure, shared, and the world’s beauty, savored–this is our call to worship, to life, how we survive in and through.
What do you do when your world falls apart?
Mary Oliver turned her attention toward grasshoppers. One particular grasshopper, in fact. Alive, embodied, and in movement. Pray by paying attention, strolling through fields, falling down in grass, being idle. It will bless you, she insists. And it doesn’t have to be grasshoppers we turn our attention toward. It can be blue iris, too, Oliver suggests. Or weeds in a vacant lot, or even a few small stones. Find something for which you might mumble “thanks,” even when sorrow and loss bear down. Move toward the grief that seems unbearable. Linger in beauty, and admire kindness emerging, yet. How else can we honor this “one wild and precious life,” in which “everything die[s] at last, and too soon?”
What do you do when your world falls apart?
Anna Tsing takes a walk, and looks for mushrooms. Matsutake, more specifically. An edible delicacy, a valuable commodity. Matsutake grow in forests that have been ravaged by human disturbance and destruction; indeed, matsutake help the ravaged forests regrow. Transforming heavy metals and dumped toxins, composting what is deadly into new life. This precious fungus bears forth wisdom for living in the ruins, Tsing finds. When the world is falling apart, where wreckage proliferates, look closely for life emerging, yet.
What do you do when your world falls apart?
My grandmother plucked herbs from her garden, aromatic and bursting with life. She also wore red shoes–Reebok hightops, well into her 80s–because she noticed how an old lady in red tennis shoes made people smile and laugh, and if she could so easily bring joyful aliveness to others, to the world, no matter how fleeting, well, how dare she not?
What do you do when your world falls apart?
“All of us,” wrote Howard Thurman, “want the assurance of not being deserted by life nor deserted in life.” He insisted that in order to know who we are, we must ask to whom and to what we belong.
What do you do when your world falls apart?
We bloom like bearded iris yet, huddled in the toxicity-laced soil that hasn’t yet been swept away or paved over. We reach up to the sun, and bask in her lifeforce. We reach down into darkness, and root down into what nourishment is possible. We bloom together, more beautiful because we’re holding each other, hand in hand. We belong, here, together, to each other, to the world. Neither deserted by life, not deserted in life. Happy Pride, beloveds. Still and yet and always.
Anna Blaedel (they/them) is cofounder and theologian-in-residence at enfleshed, where they tend to the theopoetic intersections of spiritual, academic, and activist engagement. Anna chaplains University of Iowa students, and is a doctoral candidate in Theological and Philosophical Studies at Drew University’s Graduate Division on Religion. Waking before dawn, lingering in poetry, being an aunt, retreating to the woods or their basement woodshop, tending the garden, sharing silence, and feeding people delicious food are some of Anna’s favorite things.