New Moon, New Day, New Way

Pete and I left the campground yesterday to be in the audience, a packed house, at Hugo House in Seattle, to listen and watch this woman read her art. This woman is thirty year old Morgan Parker, poet and author of her newest book Magical Negro.

" Los Angeles–based poet Morgan Parker titling her new potent book of poetry Magical Negro is hilarious, because this book doesn't cater to white selfhood or knowledge at all. Instead what we get is a portrait of 21st-century Black womanhood: our complexities, our sadness, our everydayness, our shared ancestral trauma and the violence done against us, our splendor, our humor. My body is an argument I did not start. That's the pitch of Parker's language."  - Jasmyne Keimig

Leaving our usual world of routines is an investment in our well-being (it's good to add something different to the mundane, tho' there is very little about our life that feels mundane). Timing-wise going into the city to listen to a young Black woman read her art? That was a gift for the Moon-in-us for the Dark Moon was coming in the early hours of Friday. Pete drove the light-Thursday-traffic to give us power to our New Moon in Aries Intentions.

Third House New Moon (me):  Mean what you say. Don’t back down.  
Eighth House New Moon (Pete): You’re responsible for and in control of your own psyche.  Don’t be pushed around or misled.

I am reaching a peak of awakening to the life-long ancestral trauma that every non-white woman and man experiences. The problem with that long time trauma is it's difficult to articulate; or more truthfully it's difficult for whites (who are the majority of my friends, associations, and sources of daily contact) to hear (entitlement creates a stout wall) let alone comprehend and apply.

 "My body is an argument I did not start."There. That. As I sat in the darkened theater and listened to Morgan Parker read that line, I felt the answer. Her answer. My answer. Ya, my language has been trying to give my body a better, bitter answer to all the condescension and white entitlement that has and still does keep that argument going.

The oxygen flowed through the purse-carrier sized tank, through the stainless tubing and out of the ceramic mask. At a constant flow poised on "4" I held the life-giving element -- 02 -- up to my seventy-one year old Filipino, Hawaiian, Chinese face. The young Black woman was funny, tired from a book tour that was not even near finished. She read from her newest collection of poetry as well as poems from earlier books. She 'clarified' the title of her book There are More Beautiful Things than Beyonce because the title stirred people (her own) to name the poet blasphemous.  After sips of something clear and icy with a slice of lemon with Tequila in it, Morgan Parker scented the oxygen I sucked up that night with deep truth and reinforcements for this old woman. This old woman who could have used that "My body is an argument I did not start" line decades earlier as an antidote for sucking up to white power, or sucking on white cock.

I'm not sure where this peaking awakening will take me. I know it was no accident this past year of episodes with the white folk of this liberal and sustainably self-identified community. I know the challenges Pete and I face as a couple duking out racial and cultural differences counts for something. What exactly?

I'm not sure. But then the way is not over yet, and this edge-dwelling version of life for us has a message that fuels us to remain curious and wise in our everyday. So many ways to make a different choice. Not so many choices when you are not white, and even fewer choices when the margins of definitions tag you 'Chronically Homeless'; 'Homeless'; 'Temporarily Homeless' ... or the honest but cold shit description we heard as the New Year of the Pig was birthed?

"In the way."

I am planting new seed, digging up new ground, and making connections with the Bunnies and the Children here at the campground in Langley. The way forward is clear, but the how and who are still having that age old argument in my body. "It's an argument I didn't start," the young Black poet sez. She is right, but what an old Brown and Asian writer can do is to pen the bravery of my life and say:

"No. I won't start out-of-the-way." In as many ways as I can, that may make that argument (I didn't start) weigh more on the side of the Colors than in times past.

Read here for more of what's happening for New Moon, New Day, New Way. I mean what I say, and won't back down. Wow, the poet made the perfect argument for why it makes no sense to back down now.