Some thoughts on freedom before I begin writing this book
“Rosa Parks had an interest in Buddhism. In her senior years she took yoga classes and added Buddhist meditation to her prayers. She also became a vegetarian and consulted a naturopathic doctor to improve her health.”
The Rosa Parks Papers, Library of Congress.
Earlier this month, I thought I would be sitting down at my desk to write about Michael Brown. This happens every August since I moved to St. Louis, a year after his murder. No matter where I am in the world, I think of him. Who he might have become. What was taken from him, his family, his people. When I moved to St. Louis, I used to orient the changes that I saw in myself around his death. Like that was the moment that everything shifted for me. August 9, 2014. And I think that maybe it was. Or maybe it happened a year later. Or maybe it was years earlier. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly, but I do know that the me of today is very different from the person I was in 2014: freshly graduated from LMU, aimlessly floating about the Inland Empire trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. Or, maybe more accurately, what I could do that would make my parents proud. Because I just wanted to write, really.
I still do.
So I was sitting down to write some thoughts about embodiment and freedom fighters and liberation movements, for reasons I’ll get into shortly, and in the process of trying to remember an experience of my early St. Louis days, I stumbled upon some old writing: wherein the me-of-2016 tries to make sense of rage and Black death and about the Catholic Church’s silence in it all, which was something I cared deeply about at the time. Silence about Michael Brown and Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. It kind of embarrassed me to return to that moment – in my writing and in this journey toward something that feels like liberation. I actually couldn’t even read all of the words, because I feel so far removed, while simultaneously feeling deeply close to that version of me.
What I was interested in marking as I began writing, though, are these moments of perceptible shifts in what I believe about freedom and activism and embodiment. How that journey has changed for me. And what has remained the same. I mark those reflections in a few scenes:
I am sitting on a couch in Rancho Cucamonga, where my parents live. It is November of 2014 and the police officer who murdered Michael Brown will not be indicted. As I learned in my horrifying time serving on a grand jury in St. Louis a few years after that night, in our justice system, this means that a group of people decided that there wasn’t even enough to consider if Michael Brown had been unjustly taken from this world. There would not even be a trial of that police officer. So I sat on my parents’ couch and watched as St. Louis and its surrounding areas seemed to go up in flames. As Black rage and despair shrouded its streets. I didn’t know what to make of that moment, but the image of it has remained with me. Even still.
Less than a year later, I moved to St. Louis. It still feels like a deeply spiritual point in my life that I ended up in that place, where so much of my family has been raised, and where I feel like I was raised in equally profound ways. And it began at a film screening about the movement that I attended with my then-new-friend-turned-boyfriend (hello, Decatur) and still, I just remember the rage: these two Black activists who I knew to be Ferguson frontliners stood up and seared the audience with their pain and anger and desperation. Again, I did not know what to make of that moment. But it has remained with me.
In the months and years that followed, I struggled through what it meant to be a Black person with predominantly non-Black family and friends. With what it said about me that these were the people I surrounded myself with. I was desperately concerned with being accepted by the Black community in St. Louis. And, in my mind at the time, that meant something like self-segregation.
In 2018, I went through a breakup and subsequently ended up in Al-Anon, a 12 Step Program for people who are impacted by another person’s relationship to alcohol. The details of those circumstances are not important here. But I ended up in the rooms of Al-Anon, and I ended up in a Yoga studio. Serendipitously. Maybe it was the universe or some god that I’m not yet acquainted with. But those practices combined catalyzed the process of thinking differently about freedom. That maybe I did not have it all figured out. That maybe race-based self-segregation just was not my jam.
In 2020, lord. Sometime after the murder of George Floyd, I was fascinated (and quite troubled) by much of what I saw on social media. A lot of which looked like virtue signaling or empty rage by a lot of white people that I knew. I have a difficult relationship with social media, but I don’t think I’ll ever feel settled about the ways that some people treat it like the beginning and the end of activism: like, I’ll just post this thing on my story, and that means I’ve done my work. The frustration I was feeling inspired me to write a 30-day journaling series called The River Daily – which was essentially an opportunity for me to reflect on activism and history and race and embodiment and social media, and to offer others the opportunity to reflect on those things as well. It was very well received. And it reminded me how deeply powerful writing can be. And how much I love this practice.
At some point in all of this, a couple years into my Yoga practice, with one teacher training under my belt – which really just served as an opportunity to deepen my relationship to these postures – I stumbled upon a photo of Rosa Parks practicing Yoga. And I was moved to wonder about her relationship to her body. What it was to tend to her body, to nurture her body, to be deeply careful about her body, while being deeply involved in freedom movements.
I’m still wondering about that.
Which is how I ended up at Brown University. Next week, I begin a six year journey toward a PhD; which, I’ve been told by my advisor, is really just a six year journey toward writing a book. It’s a six year deep dive into the things that have always made my head spin, but especially over the last decade: race, identity, history, freedom movements, the body.
What remains important to me, though, with this impossibly big undertaking ahead of me, is that I keep writing. That I don’t remain siloed in the University. That I remain connected to and in conversation with the people who have always been thinking alongside of me, and hopefully some new folks too.
So, I’m writing today as a vow to myself that I will write again tomorrow and the next and the next. And that hopefully some of that will find its way into public spaces. Because, really, what good is this thinking and meditating on ideas of freedom if it remains inside of my head?
