A Companion
for Liberatory
Practice
II. Inhabiting Complexity
I. Openings
III. Breath, Friction
VI. Reservoirs
VII. Living Space
VIII. Seeds
V. Iceberg
IV. Hesitation, Iridescence
IV.
As I step down from the plinth I realize I’m joining a procession. People I know and people I don’t know fill the rotunda. They’re filing through the door and I follow them back into the corridor. But the corridor has changed—it takes me a minute to recognize what’s different, and then I realize that the ground is covered in shoots of grass and dandelions and brilliant red poppies. I step carefully through the flowers, following the rhythm of the procession through another door.
Past the door, the walls and ceiling disappear and the sound of rustling footsteps draws me outward to the edgeless blue sky.
I feel myself open.
[flower for Pina Bausch, Nelken]
Reservoirs
May 2022
I’ve been listening to an audiobook of The Places that Scare You by Buddhist nun Pema Chodron, gifted to me by my friend Liangyeh Tai, as I drive down the winding Page Mill Road from where I’m staying in the hills west of Stanford. I keep rewinding it to re-listen to segments: it’s making me feel like the question I’ve been asking myself in relation to my musical and artistic practices, about how I can hold and move with the complex interweavings of tenderness and violence that make up the world in which I participate, have been asked in the wrong language, or maybe rather in the wrong ways. I have a nagging feeling, or maybe an expanding feeling, that the liberatory practices I’ve been trying to shape for myself already exist in the forms of spirituality, an absence (an opening?) among my inherited and learned experiences.
There’s a section on the Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice of Tonglen, which Chodron translates as “sending and receiving.” The first step as Chodron describes it is to “flash on openness,” on shunyataa, an experience of boundless, borderless emptiness that she describes through a story. One day, while she was trying to contact this feeling, the loud fan in her meditation hall suddenly switched off. In that opening, she experienced shunyataa.
Into the openness of shunyataa, a space without corners where anything could catch, the practice of Tonglen invites you to breathe in the dense feeling of suffering, and to breathe out the brilliant openness of relief. Chodron advises you to begin with the textures: the in-breath draws in dense claustrophobia like coal-dust, and the out-breath sends clear blue shining relief. She says to take care to keep the in-breath and out-breath balanced, to avoid skewing to one or the other even if it feels harder to contact the ease of relief or perhaps to stay with the density of the in-breath. Gradually, as this becomes easier, the focus can move to more concrete experiences of suffering and relief.
I listened to her entire book at least six times before I felt like this was something I could try. The part that shifted for me and made the practice feel possible was her description of shunyataa, this brief moment of openness that formed the edgeless container for the practice. [add sentence about shoulders] Chodron writes that if you feel depleted and unable to send relief, to remember that the relief you are sending comes from the boundless expanse you have opened to. Likewise, Tonglen is not a practice of holding, but of opening to difficult feelings: it is constantly moving, always in motion. I think of Harumi’s bow-arm turning a corner in the Janacek, of the fluctuating breath in Oliveros’s compositional invitations.
. . .
Recently I was talking with a Stanford-based documentary filmmaker, Susana Canales Barrón, who had reached out to ask if she could use a recording of an improvised performance I’d done with Fernando Lopez-Lezcano for a documentary she was creating on the near-extinct Mexican gray wolf. She was interested in the wolf as an embodied archive, a way of attending to ongoing histories of European colonial genocide and indigenous displacement. We met at CoHo and I felt instantly connected with her, drawn to her warmth and openness and the fact that she ordered a drip coffee and filled her cup just halfway.
She asked me about my recent installation at a public library in Boulder, Colorado, which I’d forgotten I’d told her about. In the exhibit, Reservoirs, I had used surface transducers—little vibrating pucks—to turn empty, community-sourced containers into speakers playing sounds I’d recorded from the local creek. I invited the contributors to share stories about their containers, and arranged the resonating boxes in the library’s gallery to create an invisible river that I hoped would create a little opening of wonder for anyone wandering through.
Pema Chodron, narrated by Joanna Rotte, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times (Random House Audio, 2017).
I told Susana how amazing it had felt to put the installation together, even though I was terrified the whole time leading up to it because I’d never done anything like it. She was curious where I got my inspiration for my art, and I didn’t immediately have an answer, but then I shared a story that felt linked with this particular installation for me. I had spent a week in Sequoia National Forest with a friend, no internet or cell service, and there had been a creek there that we’d spent the days sitting by, recording, sketching, skinny-dipping in its frigid pounding currents and then lying on the sun-warmed and smooth rocks. Time felt so full, so different from either the slow density of pandemic isolation or the hectic pressure of pre-pandemic stress. I felt so present. I had wanted to share this feeling with others.
What about you, I asked Susana. Where do you find your inspiration?
She sat back and then said, smiling apologetically, From my pain.
She talked about how her project had taken her into archives that talked about the dark histories of conservation movements, about direct links with eugenics in the choices of which animals and plants and people were worthy of conservation, which ones were not. She talked about the violence of settler-colonial displacement, the cultural erasure that comes from being pushed out of one’s home land (a wolf’s; a person’s.). Because of the logistics of the program’s requirements, she had done all her fieldwork and videography before this quarter, and was now immersed in the archives and feeling heavy with what she was reading. She wished that she had been able to do the archival work first so she could have ended with the more complex, unflattened experiences she’d already had working face-to-face with actual people working in the complex lineages she was now reading about: the conservationists, the person she’d stayed with and whom she considers her friend even though she was staunchly anti-wolf.
I felt something lift from me as she was talking, a reticence that maybe shared something with the smile through which Susana had begun to speak. Beneath, beside, within the source of inspiration I had initially shared with her, I remembered another strand that felt connected with the installation. It was fall and I was back in Colorado after the Sequoias trip, in the midst of volunteering at a Denver-based organization for social justice through the arts, and participating in an intensive weekend workshop they’d organized on the topic of facilitation.
Over the course of the workshop, two experiences lodged themselves in my body. The first was how I felt looking at a worksheet with a version of an image I’d seen before: a drawing that was labeled “the cultural iceberg,” its subsurface masses far outweighing the above-surface peaks. In the past, I’d thought of this image primarily in terms of its ability to make visible the hidden weight of white supremacy culture, the invisible structures that underlie and influence every part of the societies in which I participate. But in this moment, I was drawn to the labels on the worksheet, which described the small, above-surface part of the iceberg as correlating with surface-level elements of culture, such as language, clothing, cuisine, and festivals, and the enormous below-surface mass as the invisible but much more powerful embodied parts of the culture: gestures, habitual ways of seeing oneself and relating with others, and other non-verbal assumptions and worldviews.
Because of the accidents of genetics and the complexities of my grandparents’ assimilatory response to the anti-Japanese racism they experienced in Canada before, during, and after their incarceration during World War II, I’ve discounted my sense that there was some part of myself that only made sense through the lens of my biracial heritage. I sometimes feel like an imposter in my Japanese name. Looking at the iceberg drawing, I felt relief, because I realized that it was only and exactly these surface-level cultural elements that had been erased from my heritage. The huge mass of subsurface culture, on the other hand, was actively and deeply present in my body and my ways of moving in the world.
The other experience that stayed with me from this workshop was in relation to the racial identity-based caucuses that were built into its structure. One of the moderators had told us that we’d be splitting up into subgroups the next day so that we could discuss and support one another in community around topics that related to our racial identities, and that there would be two groups, one for white folks and one for BIPOC folks. They asked us to think about which group would be most supportive for us, in case there was any uncertainty about which one to join. My heart rate went up as I thought about joining the BIPOC group – would my face, my presence, my enculturation as a white-passing woman limit the scope of what they could explore and process and heal together? Then as I thought of joining the white caucus something inside me collapsed and sank, felt like there was no room or support for its presence in that space.
Here’s a gap of time:
an iceberg slips in.
Above the surface I feel the smoothness of melted ice. It rolls across my face and on my forearms (years of frozen Dixie cups tracing circles on my arms between practice sessions), any sharpnesses melting into a luxurious curve.
Below the surface, I feel my arms coming back to sensation in pins and needles as I drive on 36 from Denver to Boulder clutching the steering wheel and hearing my therapist ask what those tears are trying to say. (I hear my grandmother’s voice whenever she took sleeping pills and shouted her nightmares harsh and raw in the language she didn’t teach my mother.) I realize as I breathe into my curled shoulders and drive into the space opening up under my car’s headlights that I didn’t know my arms had been asleep.
That evening, back in Boulder, I wrote an email to the moderators of the workshop, asking if there was any chance that there could be a third group for in-between folks. I’d bonded with another participant who shared her experience as a sometimes white-passing and straight-presenting queer Latina, and I wondered if this might be helpful for both of us and anyone else who might relate.
When I arrived the next morning, one of the moderators said that they were thinking about it and would let the group know.
They did end up making a third group that they labeled “multi-racial,” and I went into the office-space they’d designated for this group and waited for twenty minutes to see if anyone would join.
I’ve put in my car’s CD player the album Verso, by Maria Pia de Vito and two other musicians whose names I always forget (I look them up: John Taylor and Ralph Towner. My anti-male bias hits again.). The music sounds like the drive into the San Luis Valley with my partner Phil, the stretch of road as the mountains part and a huge expanse between them opens up, like the hot air balloon picture on the machine that they use at the eye doctor: huge sunny expanse, endless road. It sounds like home. Inside its warmth, the tightness in my shoulders and the pod of my car reminds me of the loneliness of the pandemic. I’m absurdly conscious of trying not to cry in a way that obstructs my vision of the road that’s actually unfolding in front of me, highway 36 in the dark as I travel back to our shared apartment in Boulder.
My friend ended up joining the BIPOC group (I wondered if the third group, the in-between group, had not been labeled multi-racial whether she’d have felt more welcomed there), and I had a one-on-one chat with the biracial Black woman who generously left the BIPOC group to moderate my in-between group. The conversation was light-hearted and warm, and I left it feeling intensely alone. When I got back into the shared space, my friend held me and I choked on my gratitude.
That night, when I got home to my apartment in Boulder, I imagined what it would be like if the two parts of myself supported one another rather than pushing one another down: if my white-enculturated confidence validated the parts of myself that curled up and stepped back when invited into a BIPOC group despite their longing, and if the deep iceberg of my body stood by and complexified the habits of dominance I’ve internalized in the white-culturally-dominated spaces in which I spent most of my time. My memory drifted to how it had felt to immerse myself in the warm ocean off the coast of North Carolina where I grew up, and where I returned at the start of the pandemic, how it felt during that July in 2020 to let my body be held and tossed by the swells, swimming much deeper and farther out than I would have before entering the isolating refuge of my childhood home. Water felt like closeness.
In Boulder that post-caucus evening, I imagined standing in a crowd with the other participants in the workshop, and swaying like the ocean water, letting sound well up and ripple through the group in a sonic mediation whose aim was shared presence.
I realize writing this that the experience I was remembering in relation to Susana’s candor about pain has split into two as I’ve gone back into its source. When I was sitting with Susana and feeling deeper into the layers that hadn’t come up immediately when she asked about my inspiration, what I remembered was another project-seed involving water, involving creative doubt and curiosity around my experience of erasure, and a desire to connect with others for whom erasure resonated as an embodied experience. My first thought in this vein—creating an installation to externalize my feelings around erasure, inviting others to share theirs— felt somehow wrong to me. Thinking back to the Sequoias, to the ocean, I wondered about presence, about the sensations and sounds that helped me into feelings of expansive presence. Was it actually presence I was interested in? I imagined creating a mail-based art project, a series of handmade gift boxes filled with sound. Each box would be sent to someone I knew and loved and who I felt might connect with an experience of erasure in some way. The boxes would contain an embedded transducer and perhaps a story that would unfold on translucent paper like a roll of film or a scroll as you opened it, a story about an experience of expansive presence. When the lid of the box opened, the sound of water would pour out, resonating through the transducer and out of the material of the box.
