This Will Be Long, So Sing!

I woke in the middle of the night because of the thunderstorm - ran downstairs to check if water was coming in the basement (it wasn’t then - though it did since - heading down to wet vac after this). Back in bed, the lightening shuddering across the ceiling, and I remembered. Remembered the news of the previous day. I was overcome with that sickly feeling when something ends — a life, a relationship — and you’re in the throes of the first hours and days and have to keep meeting the reality again and again, like an amnesiac: yes, this is real. Tomorrow you’ll awake and what had been is no longer. You will need to get up. And deal. And be with the new reality. Wet vac-ing will only distract us for so long.

This morning, I’m met by my sign from last night’s rally: I Pray to End Patriarchy. I’m not big on rallies or marches, but I go when the moment calls. Last night, as I rode my bike downtown with the sign sticking visibly from my backpack, a woman drove by in her car and waved: “See you down there!” I whooped with the sense of communality. So so needed as I’d tried to digest the news on my own throughout the day, the isolation wearing me thing. Arriving to the enormous crowd in the bright green of summer, I again felt buoyed. Hundreds were there. Neighbors. Shop owners. Old classmates. So many faces, new and not.

As the speeches rolled on, deflation set in. My body literally moved closer to the ground until I was sitting on the grass at the back of the crowd instead of standing, my sign aloft, in the thick. We need something else, I thought. Some kind of mourning. A space that takes care of the very visceral shock and sadness and oozing anger of this moment.

Admittedly, the introvert in me has never found protests super appealing; they tend to overwhelm my system. But as we clapped for statistics and facts about medical realities — often seemingly applauding horrors — it just struck me in waves that there must be alternatives or co-existing forms of public belonging and communal gathering around our current systemic hemorrhaging.

Last night, finding the posts from adrienne maree brown singing the original song of @thebengsons with the lyrics: We will not / We will not / We will not be controlled / I am sovereign in my body / I am sovereign in my soul … I knew this is what I need. There were ripples in it of Civil Rights era songs - of the way that the voice heals the individual while joining us to the collective. I need song. I need being together in sacred silence. I need meeting eyes and holding space for bodies I’ve never seeing until today: saying to them, “I am here for you. Can you be here for me, too?”

This is not a call against protest. Loud and angry and insistent - it’s needed, and I’ll be there. And we need more. This will be long. The two older women in front of me sighed at the protest as the speaker after speaker heeded the call to hot give up hope and stay engaged. I could tell they’d been doing this for decades and weren’t sure how much fight they had left.

We must care for our bodies. Our nervous systems are undone by all of this hate that is pointed so righteously at so many of us just for existing. We cannot supersede our need for gentle, loving belonging at the belief that loud is The Way. We need spaces for song and poetry. For reflection and the sweet coming together of differences in a shared, intimate space. There are so many spaces, so many ways.

There are many ways to protest. This morning, mine begins with a phone call to an old friend who is a scholar of the reproductive rights movement. Help me to figure out the next step, I’ll ask her. What action — whether loud or quiet, seen or invisible — is the next right one for my body? I trust this beloved, wise soul. I know she’ll have ideas and sparks. In the meantime, I wet vac and I sing.

p.s. I’ve been writing, Abigail Bengson came on live IG as though she heard me typing: https://www.instagram.com/thebengsons/live/17949775756871759

Image: Fannie Lou Hamer singing during the 1966 “March Against Fear.”