Burn, girls

On rhythm and disruption

Each season has its own rhythms.

When I was preparing to leave my marriage, Dilla’s beats guided the way. There is no structure too strong, no count too set— there is only rupture, possibility, freedom. Donuts informed me of this each time I listened to it. Nothing was where you expected it, and it felt so good. I ruined my life on the strength of Dilla’s thesis— the beat need not contain us. Ruined it into something less perfect, more ungainly, wider.

Winter in Chicago has its rhythms, its stillness, its scrolling, its daily battle with depression, its gray mornings and early sunsets, its coziness and its captivity. Its inside-ness, its coiled nature that precedes the spring into the mania of summer.

We are recovering, also, and preparing. This summer and fall, ICE terrorized the city I love, ruined it into something more confined, frightened, repressed, violated. They are still here, though less, and likely to return. We watch our neighbors in Minneapolis and learn resolutely.

Here, people are organizing in pockets, people are chanting and hitting drums, people are peeling the saran wrap off of the histories that most schools fail to teach. Here, people are marching in the snow, people are making and sharing fire cider and books and resources, people are bagging groceries for their neighbors, people are making playlists and friends and fighting off paralysis with all their muscle. There are new songs, it feels like, sometimes.

I am touching things in my house, turning the volume dial of my speaker up and down, scrubbing out my tub then laying in it, lush with salts and herbs. I am rushing out of the house in my winter coat and scarf, spraying my curls and hoping they don’t freeze. I am eating when lesbians cook for me. I am reading vampire romances and treatises on resistance.

It is winter, deep winter, and I am heartbroken. The freeze does nothing to help with that, encouraging me deeper and deeper into the cave of my heart and home. The organizing does something, though. To be so close with other people in rooms, arm to arm, dancing and laughing and flirting and distributing packs of chicken into waiting boxes.

We crave the rhythms of each other’s heartbeats. I tried to cancel my class last Friday for the general strike and my students were on the phone with me within hours, protesting. Let’s meet, they said. Let’s organize, they said. We need to be together with our bodies to organize, they said.

I saw some of them at an event later that weekend. The room filled with clapping, drumming, call and response, sound and bodies. The rhythms regulated and provoked. A dance floor, a chant, a speech where we are responding in real time. Yes, we might say. Shame, we might say. All power to the people, we might say. In the same way we are dancing, each weekend, eyes tracing each other’s moving bodies.

Now it is February, finally, and yesterday we burned. On Imbolc, the Gaelic holiday, feast day of the Goddess Brigid, the beginning of Spring (at least in our hearts.) Here, in Chicago, it is icy and snowy and dark early, but you can feel the light returning. The moon was huge in the sky.

And as the legend demands, the lesbians gathered on the Leo Full Moon, and we burned. We burned into each other’s eyes, bright and on fire and sparkly and sparking. We wrote things down, wove herbs into bundles, dipped them in beeswax, consulted the tarot, performed ritual. We ate beautiful food, teased each other, stood in silence, and tried not to bring everything that has haunted us into the present, and certainly not into the future. Burn, the full moon demands. Burn. Brighter, gentler, hotter, more beautifully. Burn, girls, burn.

A full moon in Leo amidst unravelling crisis. We need our rhythms and to disrupt them.

What are you burning?