I Stopped Walking
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| Kadir Nelson's "Say Their Names" New Yorker Magazine Cover, June 2020 |
I was distracted. I could no longer convince myself “Mountain Tea” mattered in light of George Floyd and the urgent need to address systemic racial and gender inequity in the US. Yes I felt defeated after my last walk. Yes the mosquitoes, yes the isolation and yes the clear-cuts, but it was George Floyd that stopped me.
My return to rural, white Vermont from Greensboro, NC in March had already felt like an escape, a retirement, from the work that needed doing. I was forced, in Greensboro, to face my whiteness and to face the facts of systemic racism and white privilege. I spent my month in Greensboro repeating a 20-mile walk across town, across race lines, spelling out the word L-O-V-E with my feet, requesting and delivering messages of love. During that month, I was engaged in the community as an earpiece, attending meetings and working with organizations in which I was a minority—The Beloved Community Center, IRC, Soul Society.
After Greensboro, I planned to bring “Love Line” to NYC and other cities struggling with racism and violence, but my return to Vermont coincided with Covid-19 and I found myself in a new town with no job, no doctor, no bank account, no community and everything closed. So I invented “Mountain Tea,” a solo walking artwork, to keep myself going and to keep myself and others safe, while the men and women in blue wreaked havoc and raged against a public who were rightfully outing them for excessive force and murder.
Fear in America
This is what I feared, coming home from Europe last November, this culture and my part in it. I had wanted to walk across America, on foot, for L-O-V-E. I had wanted to face my own fears of corporate America and of violent white men and conservative Karens and the brutal police. I could not have made the art I made this last decade if I were black. I know this. My art is permissible because of the color of my skin and the privilege that brings. It is time for me to use my art to challenge and change the system and uplift those the system has oppressed.
Silence
In June, I attended a vigil for George Floyd in Vermont. I knelt on the town green for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. I listened to the resistance and incompetence of the Police Chief when he met with the mostly white citizens of Brattleboro who invited him to disarm and he refused. I made protest banners with the names of the men killed by police in Vermont. I attended Juneteenth in Keene, NH where I saw a white homeowner throwing knives into a tree. And I watched every Youtube video and police dash cam of every killing and of every mother and father and sister and brother speaking out against the brutality.
In bed, at night, I replay the videos in my mind and imagine being restrained, choked with my hands behind my back. I dream of gunfire. I dream of driving through restless crowds, evading bodies in streets. And I am white. What are Black Americans dreaming? It is safe to say too many are dreaming and living the American nightmare.
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| Mural at 38th St & Chicago Ave S in Minneapolis, MN by artists Xena Goldman, Cadex Herrera, and Greta McLain |
No More Names
The video that broke me was not the one with the knee to the neck or the shot to the back or the taser to the chest, but the one where an officer shoots a man’s dog, which as a white woman looking on, feels pathetic! The dog jumps out of the car window to protect its owner as two white officers handcuff a Black man for videotaping them from a block away. And he does not resist. And he does not crumple when they shoot and kill his dog in front of him. I did not speak for 3 days. On the 4th day I spoke in Spanish, a language I never studied. I called this private action “No Soy American.” But I am American, and white, and am being called to face that responsibility.
Mountain Tea
I have performed 13 marathons between Mount Wantastiquet and Mount Monadnock. 51 hexagrams (marathons) remain. After 6 weeks of rest, on 30 July, I will begin again with Ya Tu, ䷍ Great Possessing, Hexagram #14. This time I will follow the ridge of the Green Mountains from Massachusetts to Canada on The Long Trail, the oldest long-distance trail in the US and the inspiration for the Appalachian Trail. I have been both resisting and trying to understand why I stopped walking. My long walks typically have a destination. They are not circles or repetitions. How much of my struggle has been this repetition, how much the mosquitoes, how much the double pandemics?
When I imagine The Marathon Monks of Mt Hiei in Kyoto, Japan, after whom my action is modeled—the monks who walk a marathon everyday around the same mountain for 7 years—I imagine fatigued men battling with desire and fear, settling into the routine of a walking meditation. Mount Hiei is close in elevation to Kyoto and has a monsoon season with summer temps in the 90s. Now I imagine boredom, heat, humidity and mosquitoes.
Within a week of starting “Mountain Tea,” I was on a course of antibiotics for cellulitis and lost two toenails. It was April and 30F my first night out. Two weeks later, it was 90F. This Sunday it was 105F with very high humidity. Either nothing I have done compares to this barrage of heat, humidity and mosquitoes, or something else is going on.
Hell You Talmbout
George Floyd was murdered on 25 May. I arrived home from my last walk on 27 May. I heard nothing about George until I got home. New England is rural and white. I followed the protests and CHOP/CHAZ online. I found reliable coverage on Converge Media and with Tessa Hulls on Instagram. I turned to Heather Cox Richardson, Al Jazeera, Democracy Now and the BBC. I learned as much as I could about the black men and women killed by police. Janelle Monáe calls out their names in her powerful protest song "Hell You Talmbout.”
George Floyd. Eric Garner. Treyvon Martin. Michael Brown. Sean Bell. Freddie Gray. Aiyana Jones. Sandra Bland. Tamir Rice. Ahmaud Aubery. Breonna Taylor. Elijah McClain. Atatiana Jefferson. Botham Jean. John Crawford. Philando Castile. Walter Scott. Sean Reed. Phillip White. Kimani Gray. Miriam Carey. Sharonda Singleton. Amadou Diallo. Tommy Yancy. Jordan Baker. Rayshard Brooks. Cornelius Fredericks. David McAtee.
With militarized police forces rioting against peaceful protestors and police affiliates driving into crowds and federal agents in unmarked cars kidnapping protestors in Portland and nooses in trees and thousands of protestors mobilizing despite Covid-19 our democracy, if it ever was one, feels threatened everyday. My thirst for news is once again insatiable, as when Trump first came into office and everyday brought a new crisis to fill my waiting expectation.
Actively Anti-Racist
A homeowner in my town, brilliantly turned their Little Free Library into a lending library for books about racism in America by black and brown authors. I am currently reading Black Liberation by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Everything I do not know about my own history and the history of my countrymen is a mountain that has not been climbed. I am now committed to understanding and practicing what it means to be anti-racist. And now I am also committed to finishing my walk, not only because it is what I do, but because our connectedness to nature and to one another is being disputed and I need to understand how my actions relate to the Black Lives Matter movement and how my whiteness requires blackness and how my blindness prolongs anger and pain in my community.
Mountain Tea is a durational walk. It is not the circumference of the Earth. It is not a barefoot or cross-country challenge. It is a question about aligning with time and flowing with space to learn how to heal. It is taking place during and because of two pandemics.
I am a transplant in a rural town. I arrived in December. I have no substantial community. I last worked in June 2019. I have not received a stimulus check. I feel isolated, unmotivated and disposable. Nothing gives rise to new discovery. My art is on life support. I am looking for a cliff and the motivation to jump it.
Quantum Entanglement
Thanks to Zen friends in Seattle, an idea arrives—quantum entanglement—the ability for separated objects to share the same condition. “If you observe a particle in one place, another particle, even one light-years away, will instantly change its properties, as if the two are connected by a mysterious communication channel," Physicist Jenann Ismael. Physicists question whether particles and galaxies on the farthest reaches of known space are acting strangely because they're really just projections, or secondary creations of objects existing in different realms. Perhaps you can see how the idea of mysterious communication relates to America and the pandemic or to our health and the health of our planet or to the American Dream and police brutality. When two thing are entangled and not individuals, they are part of an inseparable whole and one constituent cannot be fully described without considering the other. This feels right.
Yin and Yang
Yin and Yang mean literally the dark and the light side of a hill. The idea of Yin and Yang to represent the two complementary forces that define all aspects of life was introduced in the 4th Century BC. Eventually 64 groups of six yin and yang lines found their way from the Book of Changes into Western thought.
Time, the basis of the motion in hexagram #1—Ch’ien, The Creative—has 6 yang lines and represents masculine energy. Spatial reality, the basis of motion in hexagram #2—K’un, The Receptive—has 6 yin lines and represents feminine energy. When every line in hexagram #1 is 9, old yang, the whole hexagram is in motion and changes to hexagram #2, whose character is devotion. When the strength of the Creative and the mildness of the Receptive unite, we have mildness in action and strength of decision, one force giving rise to the other.
So, if physical locality is not the deepest level of reality, what other connections can we uncover between let's say our health and the health of our environment? What connections can we uncover between Covid-19 and racial inequality? When we let go of the idea of locality and agree to the faster than light transfer of information in spacetime, what secondary projections can we see, what nonlocal phenomena leap out of space?
The Long Trail
The Long Trail runs the length of Vermont. At 273 miles, it is 59 miles longer than the John Muir Trail in Yosemite National Park and has a of total elevation gain of 59,400’, that's 13’000’ more than the JMT! While much less remote with lower high points, The Long Trail is admitted rugged.
Ya Tu | Great Possessing
Ya Tu is the image of possession on a grand scale. Fire moves over Heaven. You have arrived. Your life is full of abundance. You can stop focusing on what is missing. HExagram #14 tells us we need only activate our hidden powers of expansion to arrive. By simply being, we set off a chain reaction of abundance.
As I continue my meditation on The Long Trail, I take on the added goal of projecting equality along with personal and environmental health.
