Dear pdw family,
For the last few days, I’ve been sitting with a swirl of feelings that cycle through frustration, anger, sadness, fear, and uncertainty. I wonder if you can relate. For those who know the work of pateldanceworks, we have been invested in sustaining ourselves and our communities long before this election year and will continue to do so into the unknown of the next 4+ years. But that doesn’t mean that many of the election outcomes this past week weren’t devastating.
On Tuesday, November 5th, I sat on a zoom call with friends watching the tide of results roll in. As the electoral counter grew redder and redder, I offered to do a tarot pull. The card that arrived for us that evening is one that reminds us to stay true to our values, to fight for what we believe in, to stay in touch with our integrity, to emit our light from within as a way forward. I think that this card arrived at the perfect moment, as many messages from the universe do.
Photo credit: Rachel Keane, Dancers: Elizabeth Sugawara and Bhumi Patel
As news continues to unfold and come in, I am thinking deeply about the improvisational practices that I rely on in dancemaking, and in life. Many of my movement practices begin with the idea of homeplace, a concept which feels important to remember and reorient to in this time. Our dear ancestor, bell hooks, writes that “it is no accident that this homeplace, as fragile and as transitional as it may be, a makeshift shed, a small bit of earth where one rests, is always subject to violation and destruction. For when a people no longer have the space to construct homeplace, we cannot build a meaningful community of resistance.”
She reminds us that “dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity.” But we can work against this culture of domination by building our own communities of resistance and cultivating a homeplace where we know that we are not alone. It is in homeplace that we “can regain lost perspective” and “give life new meaning.” We can create a homeplace “where we return for renewal and self-recovery, where we can heal our wounds and become whole.” We can heal our wounds.
Our liberation lies not in the results of elections, nor in the choices of politicians. It lies in our own capacity to hold, be with, and pray for one another. It lies in our community organizing, our individual resistance, and our beliefs and dreams that another world is possible.
As we continue to resist over these days, weeks, months, and years, I hope that you will remember this prayer that I hold in my heart for all of us.
May we care for, protect, and love one another more fiercely, more expansively, more deeply, than the oppression we live under.
May we carry our values beyond elections and the systems that oppress us, and into meaningful community building.
May we adapt to the challenges we face so that we can continue to survive and thrive.
May we look to the past for knowledge and inspiration on how to face the future. May we be aware that we are tomorrow’s ancestors and that future generations will look to us for guidance.
May we continue to show the young people in our lives the fullness with which we express our queerness, our race, our values, our commitments, our bravery so that they may know that they can lead full, brave lives.
with love, and always in solidarity,
Bhumi
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