She who has travelled far. A map for getting lost. The door is implicit in your escape. The stairs co-conspirators in your ascent. The coffee cup your portal. Resistance is your roadmap. Disruption is the key. The glitch, the silence, the pause, the discontinuity, surrender, going off script, the mystery, the sacred space, creation, the crack. SELAH. Musical direction. Can you hear it in the silence of the pause, rebounding off of the walls of the crack? The more jagged the edges, the easier it is to climb. (In or out? On or in? With or of? As above so below, as within / without). Shapeshifting. From a boat to a bird. The boat, as a tree, remembers how the birds used to fly. The boat longs to be a bird. To take flight away from the sea, away from the land, away from the pain and the grief it was forced to hold, in a hold created for just that. Holding pain, in hands chained in the shape of a container. But what if the hands become wings and no longer have to hold onto anything. To be trapped no more. The cage door opens, the hold spills its guts. The birds feast. Is this the way out? You thought you could bury me here, but I turned out to be a seed. SELAH. The crow picked me up. And now I take flight. Carried away. Thank you my ancestor for setting me free. I cannot be tracked. It is an act of deepest love to be stirred by the wildness of the world. I am a boat. Again. I shapeshift. Back into a tree. I let my roots dive deep into the earth. Longing to be rooted. Longing to be grounded. Longing to know where I belong. When you are lost just go to the first tree. SELAH. I am a chair. So stiff. So high. Now I am sitting on the ground. I am contained. How do I keep becoming part of the structure of oppression? The silkworms. The weavers. The dyes. The carpenter. The plans. The tools. All become part of who I am. I hold their stories in me. They have all left traces of their DNA. A dream here, a longing there, desires and fear and anger and joy. They all become part of the politics of belonging. Must I perform the human to be understood? Does the world need to be converted into language? SELAH. It is a silence that makes everything music. We are all undone in the moments of subjugation. The slave, the oppressor, the tree, the metal, the bird, the sea. All. Everything is everything and nothing that is cannot be. I shapeshift again, out of the performative. I am ocean this time. And the words are gone. This time just movement, tethered to the celestial beings. I feel full. I feel empty. I am waning, I am waxing. Am I the moon? What does this becoming taste like? We are entangled. We are emerging. We are sanctuary. We are fugitive. Keep on dodging the algorithms of capture, go sideways, lean in, look over, listen. And stay certifiably lost.
