Lineages & Ancestors
I'm preparing for an interview with someone I deeply admire. (Details coming soon!) One of the questions is "who are your (witch/magic) ancestors, is there a formal lineage to the way you work?" Today's my 43rd birthday. I sat in the sun with one of my dearest friends, Meg Della, reflecting on this question... There are sooooo many lineages I have immersed myself in, so many teachers who have deeply moved me. So much support at my back in the living and ancestral realm. I wanted to take a moment to share this image honoring 9 of them. Thank you Meg for your incredible friendship.
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1. thank you Joe Goode for inspiring me as a queer choreographer, as a creator of dance family with company members who have stayed together for so many years, as a gentle human generously sharing with us the art of aging and dying, softening and accepting with an open heart. you have supported me through my brain injury and near death experience. you have brought me a sweet courage in my own relationship with disability and facing death. you have inspired me to know myself more intimately as a human, a dancer, and a dance maker.
2. thank you Barbara Carrellas for introducing me to s3x magic in a communal ritual in my 20s. thank you for being an elder in my life who loves ecstasy, kink, and the performing arts. thank you for sharing stories from the AIDS epidemic of the 80s and carrying forth the courage, resilience and creativity of our queer & trans cestors who explored breath & energy orgasms at a time when fluid bonding could be fatal. thank you for contextualizing tantra within a caste revolution. thank you for your dedication to diversity in the field of s3xuality. thank you for seeing parts of me before I could.
3. thank you Baba Chuck Davis for being a welcomer, for the ways your joy and passion lit up a whole theatre at Dance Africa. thank you for locating us inside a larger culture and lineage of power, majesty, and joy. thank you for helping us remember the strength and beauty of who has come before us. thank you for giving me a chance to be a white minority in a black space, for your trust and your encouragement in my early 20s... for being part of opening my eyes to de-center whiteness.
4. thank you Dunya McPherson for inviting me into the temple of my body. thank you for being on the path from dancing at Juilliard to dancing as a spiritual community practice. thank you for giving me permission to walk that path too. thank you 10+ years of accumulating harmony together in my body, in community, in somatic prayer, in deep listening space that came forth to support me so readily when I was laying in the dark with a brain injury. while I could not walk or speak very much, inside I was dancing, in my dreams I was dancing, I heard us chanting and I felt us all together in another dimension, dancing love.
5. thank you grandma Dotty, wow... there's so much here. I love you so much. I'm taking a pause to be with how much I miss you. (the next day I continue here...) anyone who was in the presence of us laughing together could feel it. people hear me laugh down the street, and I learned that kind of joy from you. thank you for being a matriarch, calling us together as a family to celebrate life with feasts, lively conversations about the world, and rituals. thank you for caring out loud about justice, for a lifetime of protesting, educating, and world travel to truly be in connection with the human experience beyond this country. thank you for loving people so fiercely. thank you for showing me a way to be angry about harm, to be vocal about justice, and to be generous and joyous in celebrating life together. thank you for driving 5+ hours every year to see my dance performance as I grew up. thank you for being my home when I got out of college. thank you for raising my dad with love. thank you for your chutzpah, and for nourishing mine.
6. thank you Katherine Dunham for bringing dignity and respect to the culture and dances of Haiti. thank you for revolutionizing American dance in the 1930's by going to the roots of black dance and spiritual ritual. thank you for pioneering a new field of anthropology and dance (only "new" relative to a white academic lens.) thank you for calling me forth when I was only 21, to learn these dances, to perform with you, to embody an intergenerational transmission of the beauty and power of African people and the African diaspora. as someone who has danced my entire life, you supported me to notice how culture defines what dance is, what spirit is, and that if dance could perpetuate oppression dance could also be part of liberation.
7. thank you Maria Nemeth for teaching me how to partner with my brain. in a lifetime of learning the art of being a body, you helped me dance with my brain. you gave me a way to see the larger journey of my life contribution, to vision more clearly and precisely. you taught me how to see from my heart and how to stay focused on what's most important to me. from age 35 to 40 I trained to be a coach and then trainer with your academy for coaching excellence. your tools have brought so much more meaning, compassion, gratitude and ease to my life. the coaches I met through you are still some of my closest friends. thank you for giving me a framework for my spiritual life to be rooted in the details of my daily physical life. thank you for teaching me how to choreograph the 6 forms of energy: time, money, relationship, vitality, creativity, and savoring.
8. thank you Sobonfu Somé for being my village teacher, for showing me what it feels like to be a village of open hearts, not alone in our grieving. at 35 I met you in the tenderness of breaking up with my fiancé. your grief rituals transformed my life. you deepened my connection with the ancestral and elemental support that is so much bigger than all that we grieve. you touched and healed a sense of loneliness in my being I never had words for. you became an ancestor when I was 36, one of the biggest questions in my heart has been how to carry forth the exquisite love and village you gave us... how to honor you and the Dagara people of Burkina Faso as we carry forth this gift you so courageously brought here to the west. you visit my dreams frequently, you are such a presence in my life. now at 43, I have guided 15 grief rituals inspired by you and I'm in the middle of making a film so your magic may continue to grow here.
9. thank you Teeni Dakini for being my energy teacher from age 28 to 43 and still going! thank you for being a grounded integrated presence in the tantra world. thank you for teaching me the basics, to shift from pattern to presence... practices I still do every day and share with most of my students and clients. thank you for supporting my closest relationships, for being the one I turn to whenever I need support repairing with my parents, partners, friends. thank you for seeing me in the most vulnerable and reactive moments of my life and still loving the f*ck out of me. thank you for teaching me how to create energy containers to support the groups I facilitate. thank you for collaborating with me to create ritual space around anti-racism and s3xual empowerment.
There are even more ancestors & lineages. Thank you to all those named and unnamed for inspiring me to be who I am and love how I love.