Uptown Notes: A Softer Gaze | No. 51

Before getting into No. 51 below, here's a short outtake of the media captured at the soak circle two weeks back.

Some thank yous:

- big thank you to Mama Nia for leading us in a rich & needed stretch flow, and for being an advising lead on the circles

- big thank you to Mama Glenda, Mama Deveor, Mama Shtira, Mama V, & Mama Nef for supporting with photos & cleanup

- big thank you to Gia for supporting with the vending display

- big  thank you to Makeba "KEEBS" Rainey for the select postcards and journals

- big thank you to Samantha Thornhill for the truly amazing & grounding oracle meditation

- big thank you to John for cultivating this process alongside me, tech setup & partnership

With a new, freshly lined journal opened before me, a selection of mechanical pens, pencils, and colored markers lying like red pickup sticks on my writing desk—a desk also home to my cream and oil-making supplies—I promptly logged on to YouTube and Google to execute a few searches on the differences between a diary and a journal.

I knew that in this new journal, white no less, my markings in grey black, the occasional pink—I would not fill its pages like the logs of the 12th-century accountants of Florence, recording every transaction of the day. Besides, I’d done that before, in my 20s. I’m not quite sure how I managed it, but the reams of journals and spiral notebooks exist. If the “e” in email was for evidence, then the “r” in diary was for record—of which I wanted no part.

Unsurprisingly, this thought process landed me back in Greece, back at the guest house in Thasos, back at a table with other participants in a food and travel writing workshop with the writer Christopher Bakken. Bakken had begun the session with a provoking idea. Was it a fact? I doubt it. Was it a notion? Perhaps. He said, with somewhat of a smirk or smile, that very few people in the 18th or 19th century ever traveled very far from home. The ones that did were considered “insane.”

From what wound up being an auspicious statement—specifically given that I completely unraveled during this trip, of which I won’t go into detail at present, only to say the journal of the trip lies mostly blank. What I came to say was that Bakken went to some length to share the distinction a journal brings. A good journal, with details, notes of a particular focus, could be a collection—a curated selective. Something someone else's eyes might potentially review. So, take heed: the rambling pen. Shorten at your will, lengthen with delight.

With this all in mind, my pen chisels away upon the page today. A tool made live by the crutch of my hand, my thumb and middle finger daring to kiss but for the utensil between them. I write: I let my thoughts come down in question, and in grace—I sculpt.

It is from this frame—of journaling as narrative, selection, and curation—that I take up the work of philosopher and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist. McGilchrist begins his tome, The Master and His Emissary with birds, raptors, and the separate movements of their eyes. He describes the competing needs of the two hemispheres: the left’s narrow focus and the right’s broad vigilance—or "open attention." Through this, he draws us to a central question: the matter of attention itself.

The facility with which a bird can spot a kernel of corn and simultaneously remain alert to predators supports survival. Asymmetry pays as McGilchrist points out. In a flourish, the author brings us to his thesis: the kind of attention placed on something can and does change how we perceive it—or don’t—how it becomes itself, or won’t. 

Another way to accustombrate this idea is to consider the phrase: ‘pay attention to what you pay attention to.’ This Simon Say-ic instruction invites you to make what you will with what makes you. Attracted to texture? To shades of green? To vestiges of Blackness in whisks of white smoke? In a small exercise like this, you may find the nature of your consciousness. At least, you may be able to offer it a “howdy do, you?”

As I listened to a lecture McGilchrist gave in Scotland last August, I thought of three Black women—really four—who taught me ways to be aware of our natural environment, this being the streets of 90s Harlem. In  reminding me to slow down, to pause, ultimately to encounter the world with a softer gaze, they shaped my early understanding of what it was to be gentle.

While few would describe a bus ride as gentle, the making of tenderness did, for me, begin on a city bus. For on these buses, beginning at some point in ‘92, there was poetry, and there was Akua.  Akua, a childhood friend, would sit just close enough to the “Poetry in Motion” signs to copy them down. Sometimes she had to stand, capturing the piece as one might catch fireflies before the coming of our stop. 

On these bus trips, we were almost certainly being chaperoned by Mama Quassia, Akua’s mother. Us children—she would invite us classmates on a myriad of excursions. Mama Quassia also taught us how to garden. How? Well, at one time, a community garden sat just outside the maroon church building on 129th Street and 8th Avenue, where our Montessori school led and founded by Mama Orundun was housed. 

I believe Thursday was our gardening day. We'd come down the suite of stairs in the brick building and cross the street to the garden, which was paved not very long after we began to work our hands in its soil, into a parking lot.

We learned and viewed the work of Mama Quassia and the other community gardeners to keep the garden fresh, healthy, alive. There were tons of beds made of wooden planks, two-by-fours, where rows of string beans, peppers, tomatoes, and other vegetables grew.

Mama Quassia may very well have been the first to teach us to engage with a plant on a metaphysical level—to ask if it was okay to snip a stalk of chive or a leaf of peppermint, turnip. We learned from her that the world was alive.

Truthfully, my connection with the word “consciousness” began with my mother, Mama Nonkululeko. To her, to be conscious was wrapped up like a gele upon her head with an integral awareness of herself as an African in America. She hoped we would embrace that pride of Blackness which has been so derided in the larger culture.

In a similar vein, in a rites of passage program led by Mama Latrella and others, including the celebrated Mama Camille Yarbrough, we learned that even inanimate objects like a mask or stool had persona and spirit.  I was initially unsure of how to understand this claim—the spiritedness of all objects, all things—but nonetheless, I've grown to appreciate what the thought offered to me, what it taught: interact with the world with an open-sighted, strong degree of care, of notice.

I pause here to return to these texts on attention—on the world and our making of it, our choices on what has been included, what has been left out, what we might want more of, what we'll do without. This is my journey. This is my song. Blessed assurance all day long. May we receive its granting.

The butters are deeply moisturizing and restorative, the skin tea is healing and reparative, and our floral bath teas bring bath-time back to life!

A few of you asked about the body creams that ran out at Kwanzaa — they’re back in small quantities.

Shared with love,

N