You Deserve to Be Sentient

A decomposition with brontë velez and amirio freeman

PHOTO BY AERAN SQUIRES

Our hearts are breaking today for our community in Los Angeles. For those of you on the frontlines, you can find resources for free food, shelter, and services here. And if you’re ready to get to work, organizer Kelly Hayes has curated a guide to next steps here. Please, everyone, take good care, and stay safe.

During this devastating time, we are grateful for the work of Weaving Earth, and in particular, their upcoming seminar on Remystifying Power.

Curated in collaboration with ATTUNE, this immersive virtual experience is an opportunity to gather together with facilitators—including longtime Loam contributors brontë velez and tayla shanaye—to study how we can “collaborate with place and spirit to instigate miraculous care in our respective bioregions for our human and more-than-human relatives.” Tickets for this gathering are sliding scale, and will support ATTUNE programming sharing skills for the climate emergency.

In honor of this upcoming immersive, we want to uplift a conversation between Weaving Earth Adult Program Director brontë velez and PLANTCRAFT creator amirio freeman on sentience. Although so much has changed since this conversation was first published in our 2018 (!) issue on resilience, there’s a lot that resonates to this day. One of the things we love most about this interview is just how citational it is, so take time to read through the notes, too.

We hope you can find something here to hold you, and pray you will join us for Remystifying Power as well. Spaces like this truly are medicine for the moment.

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brontë: I think that there’s an emotional intelligence that we have to reanimate and reawaken. That we’ve been told to close off because we’ve been told it weakens us. And I’m like, wait, no, my intuition and my discernment and my sensitivity—all of those things are actually the things that allow for my capacity to be stretched. Then I’m able to hold more. And right now, of all times, we need to be able to hold more. The problems are becoming so complex. They will require humility. And we’re gonna need to be like, where are we actually right now? Where are we actually right now? Where am I? Where am I in this moment? Where are we in this moment? Where do we really come from? Because we have so much trauma, there’s so much romanticization of the return.¹ There’s this idea that we need to go back to how we were living. But, where are we, and what’s really possible with the healing that needs to come in? Humility can really serve us. Because humility makes room for trust to happen.

I know sometimes I get frustrated that I don’t have enough tools for resilience. Because I’m around people who can shoot and make bows or a loved one who can make a damn kayak.² And I’m like, if shit really goes down, am I really prepared? And then I think about my humility and trust and listening and curiosity and all the ways we’ve learned to shape shift and be quiet and be invisible and visible. I’m like, oh that shit’s gonna help out. That shit is def going to help out. Somebody shared recently that apocalypse—that the etymology actually means to uncover, to reveal.³ And I was like, that makes so much sense. I wonder what was the point in time when that shift happened—when there was a loss of trust, probably a loss of humility, probably separation—that led to that word being the end rather than a reveal, a revelation.

amirio: I love this idea that before we can take a first step toward healing, there has to be this, like you said, moment of humility and humbleness and, almost like, a period of fallowness. Where we’re kind of stepping down for a minute. We’re brewing, we’re steeping, and we’re leaning deeply into our current moment and thinking about where are we: who’s with me, who’s not with me, what resources do I have right now, what resources do other people have, what are my current capacities, what are the capacities of other people. There really does have to be that deep reckoning with what is the current state right now. What is the current condition. And then once I have that assessment, I can be a lot more intentional and a lot more strategic about taking that first step. And so for you, what does that period of fallowness and brewing and steeping and just—period of rest and really taking into account what the current moment look like? What does that look like for you? And how do we resist the urge to always move forward and always take that immediate first step toward recovery and toward healing?⁴

brontë: If you’ve seen a video where an animal has just experienced a moment of trauma, a traumatic experience, of a gazelle escaping a lion and they make it out, their body is shaking and vibrating after, and their nervous system is allowing them to release it. They’re going through it. And then there’s this moment after, right after the shaking has finished, where they pause and they’re looking around. They’re receiving everything that’s around them. They’re noticing. It’s like they’re reacclimating themselves, and then they’re off. They’re back in their gazelle body, and they’re prancing beautifully through the savanna.

I feel like there’s something about that moment of noticing and pausing and allowing the grieving to happen, which we don’t allow. Just because we’ve been told it’s not righteous or worthy or healthy. But I let myself go, and when I need to feel something, I be like, alright, I need to make time and space—I make time and space to be on Instagram, I make time and space to do all this other random stuff—I’m gonna go make this time and space to feel this and grieve. And then it’s that shaking moment. I let it happen. That’s going back wild. Where we let it go. Cuz, really, the body is asking for attention, to be nurtured. The body is like, yo, I was just impacted, please support me. And what I’ll do, and what I’ve learned to do, because of all the conditioning, all this stuff, is to blockblockblockblockblock. And then there’s the day where you have the eruption, with an attack. And that attack, even, is a signal that your body’s like, please, let me feel this, and then after, the moment after, I promise there will be more clarity.⁵ It’s those natural cycles, those witnessing moments, when we have to rain or storm or flood or whatever it is the earth has to do to come back into balance. That’s what’s happening now. The earth is shaking shit up.

amirio: Literally.

brontë: I feel like this period is that shaking. And then the fulfillment of noticing and tracking how I feel after is that there’s so much more room and space to be imaginative. Because you’ve allowed that process to happen and integrate.

amirio: Now, thinking about your love for language, I’m wondering what the etymology of grieving is. Because we’ve been conditioned to think about productivity as being valuable and worthy, within our society we can see grieving as the antithesis of productivity. It’s like, oh, you’re grieving, then you’re not being productive. You’re in a place of stasis and not moving and not moving forward. But, we have to reconceptualize the usefulness of grieving, because, like you said, grieving allows for the rupture to take place. Allows for that unravelling to take place. And now I’m thinking about the writer June Jordan. Last summer, I randomly went to a bookstore and picked up this book, which was actually an opera that she had written, I think in the 90s.⁶ It was inspired by this huge earthquake that happened in California.⁷ And it’s called I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky. And in the opera, an earthquake happens. And after the earthquake, all the characters have these moments of reckoning and reveling in the truth and they have these moments of clarity. And I was reading this interview that she did, for some publication, further explaining the earthquake in the opera. And she was talking about how there’s a passage in the Koran that talks about earthquakes and how earthquakes provide a space for clearing and space and understanding.⁸ And they’re almost baptismal in a way. So, that’s all to say that I think we really have to re-understand grieving and re-understand rupture as being these things that can be so productive and so generative and, like you said, seeds for being so imaginative. And really rethinking how we return to a place of healing, or rethinking how we even start that healing process.

brontë: I really wonder what the root of the word is. And it feels like something with grace.⁹ Grieve, grace. We’ve been so distant from grieving being a place that regenerates us. And it not having to be something that possesses us.

I was dancing with a company—Glo—in Atlanta. I was moving with a company called Glo, and we’re learning what the director Lauri Stallings calls phrases—as opposed to choreography. And she’s telling us to stop doing it. She’s like, stop doing it, let it happen. Let the movement happen to you. Let the movement happen to you. And it was a totally different reorientation to allow the movement to happen to me. What does it mean for this movement to happen to me, and to be in that surrender? It feels like grief. It’s asking to do some work of erosion. And productivity comes from this toxic, white, heteropatriarchal shit, whereas grieving is trusting that the answer will come and that the answer’s already there.¹⁰ And then that the grieving is the part of the revelation. It’s pulling back everything that’s in the way. It’s moving through the stuff that’s been blocking you. There’s so much more. I always come to so much clarity when I cry. And that is something that I know has been taken away from us. And I did not grow up crying at all. Well, I did—tantrums. But, I was told don’t, to stop. We were not allowed to feel. And my mom actually said to me last year—and she would be okay with me sharing this—she shared with me that she had been jealous of me. I had to reflect on that. She was like, brontë, I am so sorry if I’ve ever blocked you, if you’ve ever felt like you couldn’t get past things. She was like, I realized that I’ve been jealous of you sometimes. And it was really frustrating for her when I was growing up, with me demanding that room be made for me to be impacted, and being like, I deserve to feel, I deserve to be sentient, you deserve to be sentient. But that didn’t come ‘til later.

amirio: “You deserve to be sentient”—wow! And, going deeper, and broader, historically, to be human is to be sentient, right, and for so long to be human meant to be white. And to be Black meant to be non-human, to be an object and something without feeling. Something that didn’t have this aesthetic, sensual relationship with the world. And that interiority wasn’t recognized by anyone else. And, so, I’m thinking about how—especially for people who’ve been historically oppressed, who have been historically objectified, who have been historically marginalized—we have to undo so much shit related to the idea of sentience. We have to do some work around sentience justice or something and really reclaim that right to cry, that right to grieve, that right to say, “I’m jealous of you” and “I’ve had to work through all these different traumas and oppressions and limitations that’ve been imposed on me.” And I think that makes the work of leaning into grieving and crying and being vulnerable in that way so hard because that involves, especially for people of color and women and different oppressed, marginalized people, that work of being in that place of healing and excavating and interrogating trauma. That work has to be done at some point, to some capacity.

brontë: I’ve been at a place of feeling like that work needed to happen alone. Because of all that conditioning, there’s so much isolation. And one of my teachers Joanna Macy said, Isolation and fear always reinforce each other. At a Bureau of Linguistical Reality workshop I was facilitating last year, a group came up with a word called courafy. The same way you have a murder of crows, or some group of beings coming together, they came up with a “courage of hearts,” as in a group of spirits. And the verb, courafy, was intended for use when information or suffering is too much to take in alone, into one body, and you want to call in others to redistribute that energy and hold it together.

I remember the day when I heard about Erica Garner—I woke up and I looked at my phone, and I saw that at that moment she was suffering. They were naming that she was— that her brain had totally gone dead (I don’t know the actual terminology). And I remember—I had a rose quartz next to the bed—my chest felt so heavy, and I needed to feel something heavier on me, just to calm down, and I placed the rose quartz on my chest. And I was just breathing. And then I had this feeling of like, I’m not gonna do anything today. The way I related to grieving was to isolate yourself in a room and you go and make yourself invisible and you lose it. And then I started thinking about the word courafy. I was like, I need to go fucking courafy right now, I need to go open up. I’m not the only one who feels like this. And I immediately went on Instagram and was like, yo, I feel impacted by this, does anyone else have time today to gather in the woods? If you are Black and you’re also feeling angry and you wanna scream and you wanna open up, we can go into the earth and make some holes and scream. I was like, I need to go prostrate my body and meet the soil.¹¹ And it was Erica Garner, and it was all of it—it’s all of it, it’s all of it. It’s all the ways everything worked against that beautiful being to kill her. ¹²And that stress on her body made me angry. And I was like, you’re not gonna feel it alone. That’s white. That’s what whiteness has made us think we gotta do. But we gotta be all in, we can do this together. And it was beautiful to be in ceremony with people who reached out. I was like, yeah, that’s what I need to do today.

And, similarly, we were in our soil collection ceremony during Lead to Life and we were collecting soil from a lynching site that Equal Justice Initiative sent to us for a man named Mack Brown who was lynched in 1936 in Georgia. We went to the place, and there was something about us coming together and grieving out loud and in public that felt like such a reclamation of what you’re talking about—sentience justice. We know people have done this work. People did this: people went and grieved after that man was killed, somebody grieved for that person. They did it. And it was maybe quiet and private—but they did it. And to feel all these Black people together in the woods, gathering water from the river where his body was thrown, and praying with the soil and being with the soil, and then singing out loud in the woods—I was like, we get to do this in public now. And still we don’t. There’s still shit. There’s always still shit with us doing anything public. There is a risk, especially with us wailing and screaming. You don’t see Black people doing that, and, yet, what a disruption. To be like, yeah, I’m gonna wail on the corner. I saw a picture of a brother after Mike Brown was killed, on the corner, and these mamas were holding him back. And the caption says that he had been yelling names of people who he had lost. He went out there on the street and was just in it. In that breath work. In that meditation. And one of my friends—my friend Niria—she goes, people wanna tell me to stop yelling and all this shit. And she goes, MY. RAGE. IS. MY. BREATH. I feel like screaming, crying—just all of it. And the ancestors are like, damn, we didn’t get to do all that. To be totally in it. Surrender. Feel it. When I’m willing to go to that level of grief, the sun of that, if that’s the moon or whatever—the other part is that I can feel my capacity for pleasure and joy and it totally deepens. Cuz I’m like, I have so much more capacity and the reservoir is deeper. I always come back to this thing about how “Black wellness is the antithesis of state violence.”¹³ May we be so well, may we just feel.

amirio: I’m thinking about how allowing ourselves to lean into these things more is not only good on a macro scale, as far as allowing us to have greater capacity to do justice work and healing work and wellness work and all these things, but also on a micro scale. These things are so important because if those things aren’t released—if we aren’t crying, if we aren’t grieving, if we aren’t being vulnerable, if we aren’t being open and being boldly emotional, especially in public—that does so much material, somatic damage.¹⁴ And I can share this with you, cuz I feel compelled to right now: my mom is actually preparing for surgery in June right after my one of my younger brothers’ graduation because she’s been experiencing the early symptoms of breast cancer. She caught it really early, so it’s looking fine. So, she’s preparing for surgery in June and then she’ll undergo a few rounds of not chemotherapy, but radiation therapy. And I’m really resonating with this conversation because I’m thinking about all the grieving I don’t think my mom was allowed to do. I don’t think she was ever really allowed to hold space for herself to really be angry and be sad and be emotional. Just because she grew up in the South in a time when you didn’t talk about certain things or you had to be really complacent and really palatable to whiteness and all of these things. So I’m thinking about how much that internalization must have wrecked her body to the point where it’s manifesting in such an egregious, violent way. And so, how do we get to a place where we all are just experiencing this, as you keeping saying, this right to be sentient and this right to be open? Because if we don’t get to that place collectively, we’re never gonna be well. And that’s just another win for state violence.

1. amirio: Constantly thinking about how this yearning for a Great Return feels so white. After all, Black folks are constantly caught up in a loop of egregious violence, undoing, and disaggregation; the “then” of slavery/lynching/Jim Crow/etc. is always now. Read: “Blackness, a Haunted History” (James Padilioni, Jr.) // brontë: can i make a footnote to your footnote? yes! i think a lot about the hauntological experience of blackness versus the ontological

2. brontë: wanna note that this person is one of my closest friends and teachers but we can live in the yes and! we live in complex times!

3. amirio: Listen: “How to Survive the End of the World” (Autumn Brown and adrienne maree brown)

4. amirio: Capitalism has scammed us into thinking that we always have to be doing. Repose is reparations! // brontë: Yes! Check out The Nap Ministry and Black Women Dreaming’s work!

5. amirio: “And the state of emergency is also always a state of emergence.” (Homi K. Bhabha)

6. amirio: She actually refers to the opera as an “earthquake-romance,” which is just beautiful! Imagine transforming something as unsettling as an earthquake into something that’s desirable, seductive, and romantic!

7. amirio: The 1994 Northridge earthquake

8. amirio: “And then I had huge problems figuring out how to get from Act One to Act Two; I was stumbling around. Peter [Sellars] came up from L.A. and we were brainstorming and on the counter, I had a very beautiful edition of the Koran that someone had sent to me. So Peter pulled it out and came to the section towards the end about the earthquake. It says that when an earthquake occurs, every atom of evil will be known and every atom of good will be known. And we thought, ‘That’s it!’ Now I knew what I was going to aim for; a kind of denudation would take place between and among people, that a natural catastrophe would coerce or make possible.” (“June Jordan by Josh Kush,” BOMB magazine)

9. brontë: when amirio was transcribing the interview, they heard me say grave, which is something i am still thinking about - the spectrum of grief moving somewhere between grave and grace - and how things we “mishear” invite profound revelations that we may have not otherwise contemplated

10. amirio: I’m *still* shook by this line!

11. brontë: Read: “A Small Needful Fact” (Ross Gay)

12. amirio: Read: “Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis” (Linda Villarosa)

13. brontë: Read: “Wellness and The Black Molecular Future” (Mark Anthony Johnson)

14. amirio: Read: “Allostasis” (Jessica Lynne)