Zero Gravity Dreams
As a little kid I dreamed of one day going into space. I wanted to be launched over vast expanses of cratered lunar rock, powered by Styrofoam ice cream and the novelty of floating hairbrushes. While I read many books about astronauts, I think I was most enthralled by the things that humans didn’t know yet, the things I couldn’t fully know until I was there. A Sagittarian eighth-house bitch since (before) birth, I wanted to journey through a spacetime where the persistence of deep strangeness and mystery was a matter of course.
I’m starting this newsletter with a similar desire, and some new ones too. There are other expanses seducing me these days: mycorrhizal networks and underground rivers, trees communicating with each other across miles of land. The other day an architect asked me to consider everything that’s lost when we routinely look at maps from an aerial view. It’s easy to forget that there are entire universes happening beneath the surface of the earth. Swampland obscured by centuries of colonial development. Ancestors laid to rest beneath the commerce-laden streets they were forced to build. I’m interested in the ways Black folks steward the earth under these haunted conditions. How we make sense of the lost and the unseen. I’m interested in learning how to be in better discipleship to the unknown.
I hope Groundwater can be a space for some of these things: conversations with those in the habit of speaking to the soil, coastline sounds, surrendering to the wisdom of birth and decay. Thanks for joining me. I’m excited for what we’ll find.