The past week has been a transitional time at the nursery, as I plan for summer workshops and begin to turn my attention to the seed crops I’m growing in the field this year. I’m preparing for the last few plant sales and giving a lot of starts to local community gardens. Gemini season has felt like an unfurling, mirrored by the shapes my body is making while I work. For the last few months I’ve been hunched over at tables in the greenhouse, patting soil into the small individual cells of seed-starting trays, consulting lists on my phone, and writing plant names and dates on pieces of tape. The seedlings are bigger now, so I stand as I pinch off early flowers from tomato plants and tiptoe to reach the top shelves of the metal racks. I spent yesterday morning and afternoon laying down landscape fabric, walking slowly down the length of the high tunnel and squatting to hammer down metal staples. As we barrel towards the solstice I’m spending more time outside the humid greenhouse, reaching and lifting, stretching and growing.
This week I started biking on the street for the first time since my accident. For a while I thought I wouldn’t return to commuting by bike and would only bike on trails. Now that I’ve had 2/3 of my eye and face surgeries and can see without double vision, though, biking around Philly feels inevitable and familiar, like a return to myself. It’s been weird to do something that’s so deeply meditative and natural to me while dealing with PTSD symptoms at the same time. When I’m approaching an intersection, I’ll feel my brain calm itself down while also thinking distantly about how every moment like this could be the last time I’m alive. It feels like biking is a kind of mindfulness that helps me (literally) move through horrifying thoughts, because if I panic or dwell on them I will become more unsafe. I’ve missed my bike so much. Lately, all I want is to go on evening rides in the two hours before the sun sets. All I dream of is biking to the creek, to the river, to the ocean. I’ve been yearning to move my body in new and remembered ways. I’ve been wanting to kiss and be kissed, to pedal fast and hard, to explore the desires that are blooming shyly and insistently in my chest.
Things that have been inspiring me:
The Market Woman Story by Jacqueline Bishop
In artist Jacqueline Bishop’s work The Market Woman Story, a set of fifteen ceramic plates is adorned with paintings of Jamaican women surrounded by the plants and animals of their island. Dressed in shades of blue, pink, and ivory, carrying produce and babies, staring out at the viewer or engrossed in their work, Bishop’s market women reference a long history of labor and Black self-making that emerged throughout the era of plantation slavery. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many Jamaicans grew and sold food that they cultivated on provision grounds: small plots of plantation land that were deemed undesirable for cash crops and used as subsistence gardens by enslaved people. When thinking about the importance of gardening to the lives of colonized people, I often return to the provision ground as a site of resistive relationship to the land.
“12 Little Spells” by Esperanza Spalding
This dreamy, sensual album from bassist Esperanza Spalding features twelve songs that each pertain to a body part. My favorite tracks are “Thang (hips)” and “Touch in mine (fingers).”
Love Is a Dangerous Word by Essex Hemphill
I’ve been consistently floored by Essex Hemphill’s ability to move fluidly between registers of love, protest and grief. The poems in this collection chronicle his experiences as a Black gay man living in Washington, DC during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. I keep returning to “So Many Dreams,” a luscious poem about yearning and desire (“take whatever suits you,/my love, for now”).
Daily Tarot Pulls and Red Tarot by Christopher Marmolejo
I’ve been doing almost-daily tarot pulls and reading the corresponding chapters from the book Red Tarot: A Decolonial Guide to Divinatory Literacy by Christopher Marmolejo. Marmolejo’s text draws on Black and Indigenous literature and critical theory to chart an alternative practice of divination. I’ve pulled the Magician card twice in the past month, most recently while camping in Western Massachusetts with friends.
Till next time,
B
My forthcoming essay collection Mounted: On Horses, Blackness, and Liberation is now available for preorder wherever fine books are sold! If you enjoy reading my words here, please consider supporting the largest collection of words I have created thus far.
