The Art Show Served Pallid
making meaning with the older, white, and rather wealthy - written on 🌑 New Moon
Where have the sparrows gone?
Where have the sparrows gone?
Where have the sparrows gone?
Where have the sparrows gone?
Where have the sparrows gone?“Where Have The sparrows Gone?” sung by Emily Barker
🕸️ marginalia*
During the first weekend of June, I went to a local artist's show in my town, which is older, white, and rather wealthy. I went through the catalog and selected a list of artists working in similar mediums as me or looking at similar things, TREES & plants (hehehehehe). I found most of their work was uninteresting and unalive—emptying to me. It is what I imagine “It” from A Wrinkle in Time worked if the corruption started the energetic heart space rather than thoughts. My heart felt lonely standing in those studios. My skin wanted me to get away from those studios as soon as possible.
They were not signs of imposter syndrome; my soul was letting me know that we (me, myself, and all the ancestors/caring relations) are allergic to this pallid-ass flavor of the American Dream.
My nervous system needed a few days to recover and the experience is still churning me. The churning has prompted some important rememberings of other moments I’ve experienced that emptying feeling, the incongruity. What did those feelings teach me?
The first memory is of me at eighteen years old, studying at a Predominantly White Institution and tagging along with a friend to a party hosted by a sports club. Walking to the house, I opened myself to the possibility of partaking in drunkenness and sexual adventures with fellow classmates. We opened the door to a waft of beer, an unfamiliar preying heaviness, and an introduction to apathy that I would learn to transform as medicine to my hypervigilance.
I have, of course, experienced this sensation during other occasions, such as my commencement ceremony, sitting quietly in my cubicle of a very prominent conservation organization, attempting to relate to my white colleagues after listening to their brainstorm on how to make their classes culturally relevant to the black/brown students entrusted in their intellectual care, purchasing my first car with the grip of the loan payment plan suffocating me, etc. It is not lost on me; many of those occurrences are aspects of a successful adulting journey in the so-called United States. They were not signs of imposter syndrome; my soul was letting me know that we (me, myself, and all the ancestors/caring relations) are allergic to this pallid-ass flavor of the American Dream.
How does one repay freakin extraction? How does one repay for the killing of a river?
I sit here, in love with my life—a life that I am not sure if I am dreaming or being dreamed through me. My heart aches for my younger immigrant self, who was led to believe my neighbors' material gains and social status were the highest aspirations we could have while living on this beautiful Land. I am indebted and grateful for the ways they could not bear the sensation of being empty, a husk of life.
🌾 florilegia - unintentionally very funny
Creating a system of valuation of more-than-human kins is one of the many leaps my brain could not and will not make in the American environmentalist framework. It would often show up in conversations on how to respond to climate collapse and masquerade as a legitimate pathway for reciprocity between the Earth and corporate conglomerates. How does one repay freakin extraction? How does one repay for the killing of a river? (Ha! Kille, Kille-ing. I promise that pun was unintended)
🌱 gratitude & grounding
Thank you for the sun and their intensity. Learning how to tend to sunburned skin is a humbling learning curve. Blessing to all the kind-hearted, old white herbalists sharing recommendations freely at the apothecary.
Have you ever said no to a life-sucking, emptying dynamic? How did you know it was time to exit?
*the text is, as always, our entanglement