Why, yes, those are 2 separate audio links – 1 below, 1 above. || My reading of this essay is right before the opening Hi friends. 👇🏾 || A guided meditation is at the top of this email. 👆🏾 || An archive of meditations lives here.
Lin Wang Gordon and I will be leading a daylong meditative hike for BIPOC on Saturday, September 7th. More info and registration is here. Space is limited.
Listen to me read this essay:
Hi friends
What’s your August like so far? I realize we’re only a few days in, but who knows what might happen this next minute let alone this next month. How are you feeling?
I’m just back from visiting our northern neighbors. So lovely. Is Canada truly kinder? Vraiment plus gentil? I know they have their issues, and it also seems like everyone’s not barely hanging on by their fingertips to any semblance of security? That they’re not in a multi-year anticipation of absolutely everything finally crumbling, of it all crashing down? The social safety net (and legal weed gummies) make it feel gentler. Plus doux. Though we did spend lots of time at the cottage talking about the coming apocalypse and I did see my first MAGA hat out in the wild – on someone at Lake Huron. Le sigh…
I intended to write a post about my time away. I assumed I would jot some notes and start an essay at the lake. Nope. Mostly I slept in late and did my morning pages and ate and chatted and swam and napped and chatted some more and read stories & poems & New Yorker magazines. And laughed so hard I peed my pants. Twice.
I’m taking my own advice and sharing something from les archives (slightly edited) that only a fraction of you will have read and feels appropriate for this moment and for this month. These are powerful times, requiring all of us be rested & ready, practicing & imagining for whatever may come. Let it be…
“Be... The entire essence of language is concentrated in that singular word.”
— Michel Foucault
During graduate school in my late-twenties, I wrote an entire (long-ass) paper about the use of the verb to be in a De La Soul song because 1) I loved hip hop 2) I was immersed in a lot of academic blather (I also wrote a paper on Baudrillard and Zen) and 3) because to be epitomizes language as power. [Side note: If you’ve read You Belong, this is the paper I delivered at the conference where, engulfed by public speaking anxiety, I spilled water all over my notes.]
In this too-long essay, I explored how to be shows up in Black English (aka African American English or AAE). Contrary to the arrogant (and clueless) assumptions of the dominant culture which insists that Black English is simply grammatically incorrect Standard (read: white) English, Black English has its own rules, syntax and structure. Many aspects of AAE are in fact carried over from West African languages, including a very profound use of to be. I will spare you the details of my thesis because that’s an endless postmodern rabbit hole (the paper was titled: I Am, Therefore, I Be - a jab at Descartes), but basically I argued as the quote above states that the entire essence of language is concentrated in this teensy word: be.
In meditation practice, we are often told to let go… When I first heard this instruction, I interpreted it as an invitation to loosen my (futile) grip on control. By then, I’d realized that my suffering is directly linked to my contention with reality – the tightness I create by constantly needing things to be different than they are. A tightness in my mind that I also find in my body. Whether I’m anxious or avoidant, disgruntled or dejected, I can usually locate physical contraction within me. It’s often in my heart area or in my lower back and hips, but I can feel tension in my face or jaw, in my shoulders or belly too.
Embodied practices, including meditation, have helped loosen some of that tension but I’ve also found subtler ways to inflict my obsession with control onto life. Even the simple phrase let go can become an attempt to manipulate reality – to turn this moment into something I deem better or necessary (go implies somewhere else… to be). If I just let go of this (pain, grief, anger, person, place, thing…), then I won’t suffer. My spiritual practice becomes a bargaining space: I will be with this back-pain/heartache/ anxiety-around-political-uncertainty so that it will go away.
Sometimes, you may have heard a slightly different instruction: let it be. This distinction is subtle but crucial. Let it be invites me into a more nuanced understanding that ultimately practice (and everything!) is paradoxical. The transformation I seek comes not from control and manipulation but from the subtle play of aspiration and allowing. Transformation always involves understanding how things are in this moment. I aspire for love, joy, beauty, freedom. And I allow things to be – right here, right now, in the midst of back pain, heartache, injustice... suffering. I am not the boss of reality and I must be careful not to make practice simply another way to (attempt) control. If I make space simply to be with my experience, I can meet moments of liberation.
Let it be offers two meanings. The first is closer to the “let it go” of a meditation practice – allowing things to be just as they are. But that does not mean abandoning any aspirations for personal and collective well-being. The taste of freedom I experience through acceptance can support my aspirations for healing and wholeness for all. BOTH/AND. This second meaning invites me into power – it is an opening to imagine, to create. Or, if you want to be witchy about it (I always want to be witchy about it): to cast a spell. Let it be is a powerful incantation that releases me from the suffering of control but not from my responsibility to act. Aspirations become incantations that move me into alignment with freedom. Comprehending that ultimately, I am not in control IS a vital step towards liberation. Lack of control does NOT mean lack of power.
Everything that exists now was imagined. Everything we long to bring forth must be too.
Ultimately, to be encompasses the limitless capacity of the imagination to create from love and liberation. Through imagination, I align with the reality that our interconnection is inherent and inextricable (Let it be!), that the Earth and all their beings can live in balance and reciprocity (Let it be!), that love and joy will abound for all (Let it be!), that we will move toward our collective liberation (Let it be!).
The invitation and incantation let it be is an opening – a simple imperative pointing to the paradoxes of aspiration without expectation, of incantation without anticipation, of power without controlling. None of us can know what the coming week, month, year, decade will bring. And, with practice, we can meet whatever comes with clarity and care, with wisdom and compassion.
May we imagine and create our future in beauty and joy.
Let it be!
Love,
Sebene
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