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9 June 2020 Dear Friends & Students, In the week since I last wrote, we have collectively witnessed and participated in extraordinary actions of civil discourse. Stories, sources and resources have been shared ~ thank you to all who have reached out to me personally. I want to believe that from mourning we can find morning, a new arrival, but from experience I know, that a week is merely a beginning. A week is not practice. True embodied recovery begins with (re)considering the stories in which we are entangled. How is memory interwoven with forgetting? Whose voice is received, inscribed and believed, and what is the price to those whose stories are silenced? It is from this place that I return to Lorna Simpson’s Water Bearer and accompanying text: she saw him disappear by the river, they asked her to tell what happened, only to discount her memory When I first experienced this work it spoke to me through my “eye” as an artist, and as a feminist art historian. I saw the photograph only within the context of a canon that for so long had silenced the artwork of women. What my eye did not recognize was the anonymous woman as black; my “I” did not recognize that my story as a woman was already predetermined by difference and privilege because of the color of my white skin. My focus was one of gendered connection and commonality (one that I did understand as constructed and performative), but there was so much more to the story that I didn’t have the eyes to see..until now. Embodied Recovery as with everything is a balance, and balance is rarely equal ~ but I do my best to listen and to become more attuned with the other. It can be hard, uncomfortable work, but we can do hard things, and in the words of Resmaa Menakem, “there is no failure; there is only practice.” From the artist to the yoga studio, my life has been my practice, has been my challenge. It has consistently been one of deliberation and discovery, and so it is from this place I invite you to join me and participate in a weekly virtual writing circle
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