No mud,  no lotus

I don’t remember every distinct time I got grounded, but when I did, it was the same. The punishment was extreme, isolating, painful and incredibly long to endure. I remember one specific time when I was grounded. I snuck a book to help pass the time. As I mentioned in the offering Grounded, reading, just like listening to the radio or drawing, or playing cards, was strictly forbidden. I was instructed to just sit in my room with nothing to do.

I don’t cringe when I think about this time in my life anymore…not too much anyway. The memory will sneak up on me every once in a while and I’ll be able to process the memory and the accompanying feelings and keep it moving, and other times, like a few other memories I have, I’ll say, “oof,” to myself or out loud. It hurts. I cringe writing this, however. I cringe in the act of writing down such a horrible and painful thing to do to a kid, to me. I feel vulnerable writing this knowing people I do not know will read my experience. But, as I offered in the Introduction of You Talk About Race Too Much, I said, without baggage, as of late, I have felt I can and want to do more, and maybe you do, too. We get to decide for ourselves. I also said, I love a good journey. I love a good story. I love exploring and learning. And, well, my childhood is quite the journey that got me to where I am today, strong and powerful.

I do find myself in a well-worn habit of deflecting to this day when I reflect on my childhood and my journey out of being poor and working poor. Yes, it was horrible, but, other kids had it and have it way, way worse than I did. Yes, it was horrible, but at least any number of terrible things that could have happened to me, didn’t. Yes, my childhood was very difficult, but some people are actually in solitary confinement. Yes, it was a difficult childhood, but I also have very fond memories. When I habitually deflect, I don’t allow myself to acknowledge that when viewed alone, my situation was simply bad. That’s it, period. I don’t need to qualify. Do you ever find yourself deflecting a painful moment? If you do, is it to lessen the pain you felt, or to put the focus on something else, perhaps something more positive? If you do deflect a painful moment, when did you start deflecting?

More on the motivation

I have noted throughout this project, and will continue to mention, that I am very much a participant in this art project, just like everyone who is reading my words, viewing my photos, listening to my building soundtrack, and at a later time, reviewing resources that inspire me. For me, art is not linear and I anachronistically began the project almost in the middle. I didn’t know it at the time. The first several offerings I wrote, I realized, would need to come much later in the project for those pieces to fit the full concept taking form in my mind’s eye. I then began to play around with a notion: for you to understand my positionality for some of the things I want to tell you and ask you about, for you to understand how I came to think this way or present this way, you first need to know more about me, about my core. And if you come to see the stitchings and the weavings and braiding, palimpsest building, fermentation and the scarring of how I came to…be, that you will see I come in peace, I come in love with vulnerability, so when I ask you to participate with me, maybe you will. I am curious about your thoughts.

Invitation

Specifically, with my being grounded as a kid, and my memory of that grounding and the other groundings I received, they are a key, very, very important moment in my life. I don’t want to just share this with you, I am inviting you into this specific moment with me. The moment has so few details I remember, as I mentioned, but the essence of what was happening, I remember so distinctly. I remember and feel it as a very difficult time, but also it is undeniable to me that it was also a key moment in shaping who I am.

I wanted to share this particular piece directly on the tail of my offering, Grounded, as a way to deepen the feelings. To the degree you feel you would like to, please join me in this memory. It may be hard, so please make this decision for yourself with the love and compassion you deserve and need. I will remind myself to take deep breaths in, hold at the top, and a long breath out of equal or longer measure.

Kind of like a Ghost of Christmas Past, we can imagine and feel the moment, maybe even set a scene. You didn’t experience this with me, but I invite you to see and to feel with me. To be in this moment, as a kid, so angry, and bored, and frustrated. Grounded. Grounded with nothing but the passage of time to change the scene. Nothing but the passage of time. Nothing. But the passage of time. And listening to the sounds of my quiet house. For 10 hours.

For 9 hours.

For 8 hours.

Maybe I’ve asked my mom to use the bathroom at this point. Got the courage up to ask, parted the anger enough to talk and ask. And there was relief in walking out of my room, into the bathroom. The bathroom probably never seemed so interesting to me before. The window overlooking the backyard to the small purple and white lilac trees, the clothesline…the border of bramble in the backyard that gave way to some trees and then a field across the way that had one solitary horse in it for years; the bathroom tub faucet perpetually leaking, the hot water knob broken long prior and replaced with a small wrench so we could turn it on and off, but not all the way off. And then back into my room.

For 7 hours.

For six hours.

For five hours left until…bedtime. Maybe I’ve had a meal at this point.

For four hours.

For three more hours until it’s time to go to bed. Bedtime never seemed so exciting.

For two more hours.

One hour left until it’s time to go to bed. And I go to bed, and at some point, I go to sleep. 

The Earth rotates around the sun

Every once in a while, when I read the New York Times, there is an art prompt. Can you look at an image of a painting they’ve selected for 10 minutes? The idea being, many people, when we look at art at a museum, we spend about 33 seconds looking at it before we move onto the next piece, a kind of drive-by viewing. And when we do not give our focused attention to the piece of art, we miss perhaps a blob of paint here that may or may not have been intentional, or an expression on someone’s face here, or a dog in the corner over there., a seam in the canvas over there, scissor marks on cut out pieces of paper. We do not give our mind and our body a chance to relax, and just be with the piece of art. To just be and in the being, to look, to observe, calm in mind and body. I love that prompt and I recommend trying it yourself if you haven’t already.

And at some point, it’s the next day. And the countdown until freedom continues because the punishment is 24 hours, the clock starting at the command of, “go to your room.”

The god damn book

I wish I could remember the name of the contraband book I snuck. I was so starved for stimulation. I was understimulated and agitated. I remember there wasn’t a lot of activity in my house, my parents in their bedroom with the door closed, watching TV. I’m not sure where my sister was—maybe in the living room watching tv. I made the decision to read to help my mind, to speed up the drippingly slow passage of time. 

And I got caught.

I wasn’t fast enough to shove my book under my pillow so that as my mom walked by, out of her bedroom into the hallway, she had a clear view of me in my bedroom. It took my mom one step to cross out of her bedroom into the hallway, a second step to be already past my bedroom. Two steps. As she walked by, I almost simultaneously put my book under my pillow. Almost. I was too slow. How was she so fast? Where did she come from? How had I not heard the door open? Was the door not open, but then why would I have attempted to read with their bedroom door open?

I will never know the answers. But what I do know is that she saw me. She saw me putting my book away under my pillow. And what she said plunged me into a rigid, deeper despair. It was all one fluid motion: her walking by, one step, me putting my book under my pillow, and as she took her second step she said, “Another day,” and kept walking.

Despair, tight, rigid but with so much energy. Anger. Like the atoms inside a piece of wood: confined and solid, waiting for an opportunity to burst out.

Another day added onto my punishment, my grounding. Twenty-four more hours.

Twenty-four more hours. It was daylight, and then, after many, many hours, the sun would begin to set…

And, then, to protect myself, to help me in the moments of this grounding, I bring back my thoughts: This is survivable. I told myself that. One day, it wouldn’t be like this. It just wouldn’t be. I knew that to be true. But I had to get through this grounding first in order for it not to be this anymore. The passing of a day. This is survivable. Just get through it. It won’t always be like this. It won’t always be like this.
And the reason why this specific moment pearled an indelible part of who I am is because, in that moment, I settled into a depth much farther than my current despair at the situation, a deep, deeper still, depth of patience that I am not sure would have rooted inside of me. Patience. A gem. For me. Still water runs deep. I knew, because I knew I was going to survive this moment and other unknown moments. I would. I knew that. I just had to be patient. To look far into the future from where I am in this present moment, good or bad, but to know that the present moment, would at some point, become the past and that an unknown future moment would become my present. And that eventually, I would be making decisions for myself, for my life. But first, patience. I first had to get through childhood.