Spacious Solidarity Blog: Day 100
In the early evening we head out for our daily walk. We decide on the loop through Springfield Park, along the canal, to the Walthamstow Marches, and back home via Clapton.
My partner is taking there time getting ready to leave the house and I’m feeling impatient so I go outside and sit on the front doorstep. My neighbour a couple of doors down in the house on the corner is playing music out of a big speaker in her front garden.
I keep holding on
I keep holding on
I keep holding on, so tight
She looks up and says hello and I say hello back and that I’m really enjoying her music. My partner appears and we head down the street.
As we round the corner we see my neighbour’s adult daughter and her friend sat on their front doorstep, enjoying a yellowy-orange drink in big wine glasses, sipping it through long, plastic straws.
We met soon after we moved in. She was sat in her car playing really smooth R&B and I went outside to introduce myself and ask her what she was listening to. We had a really nice chat about music and she explained that she was on her way to see her mom.
I’ve been wanting to go deeper, get to know her better, but haven’t yet had the opportunity. I feel like a kid in the school yard, wanting to ask her to be my friend.
We say hello and ask what they’re drinking and my neighbour’s friend explains that they are having passionfruit margaritas. I say that we had a passionfruit and white chocolate cake for our wedding.
“Oh, that sounds delicious. What a delicious combination! How long have you two been married?” they ask.
“Four years this August.” we reply.
I explain what a big deal it was for us, getting married. That neither of us grew up thinking that marriage would ever be an option. That when gay marriage was finally passed in the US, through the Supreme Court reversal of the Defense of Marriage Act, something in me relaxed deeply.
Somewhere, deep inside I had been holding a ball of tension that I was finally able to let go of. There was something about the government finally recognizing that I was just as deserving of something that “normal” people are deserving of. I didn’t even realise I was carrying that around until the burden was lifted through the changing of the law.
Anyone who tells you the personal is not political does not know what discrimination feels like. What it feels like under the skin and deep in your bones and like a weight in your belly and a fire in your heart.
Today I met with a friend who I’m working with to plan and facilitate a meeting later this year. We agree on some things but not on others. We were talking about debates and how as a spiritual community we could do better at debating with one another about highly polarized issues in a more civilized manner.
I brought in this thread I’ve been tugging on for a while around somatics. That I would like us to have debates, or dialogues rather, where we are speaking as much from sensations and the emotional landscape they paint within our hearts, as we do from our heads, all the thoughts, ideas, concepts, theories.
I want our discourse to privilege the body as much as the mind, and the deep, intimate connection between the two. How what we think is intimately conditioned by our sensations and the emotions that proliferate from them.
But he didn’t seem to understand what I meant. He kept saying that it wasn’t valid because it was personal and subjective. Ugh.
Back to the conversation on the doorstep. After talking about gay marriage we start talking about coronavirus and how the government is using it as an opportunity to take away our rights, one by one, little by little.
My neighbour’s friend says that it’s all about moving us to a cashless society and implanting chips in us that will control everything from our ability to buy food to the jobs we’re allowed to have.
She says that if they try and put a chip in her she’ll resist.
Then she starts telling us about her daughter who works in a hospital and how hard she is finding it. It’s not so much coronavirus as the politics in the hospital and how some of the staff treat some of the patients.
From the work I used to do in higher education I know that it’s really hard to be a young woman of colour in a work environment like that. If you try and speak up you risk alienation, not being listened to or taken seriously, and possibly even losing your job.
If you stay quiet you risk dying a little more inside each time you step through the door.
Then we’re asking for one another’s names. Even though I know my neighbour’s name she can’t remember mine which is understandable because it’s weird. When I remind her of it both her and her friend get really interested, asking about what it means and getting excited when I tell them.
The same exchange happens with my partner. We’re all smiling hard at each other and my heart is full.
We end with an agreement that we’ll try and have a chat again soon. I make a mental note to invite her for a drink on our doorstep the next time I see her.
As we walk away my partner hears them say, “What a lovely couple.”
June is Pride month. And what I loved the most about that exchange with my neighbour was how she and her friend didn’t even flinch when we mentioned our wedding cake. Instead, they took an interest and celebrated us.
This has not always been my experience. In fact, in my life I’ve experienced outright hostility from members of my very own family for being gay.
I’ve been harassed and spat on and physical assaulted at various times in my life while walking down the street with another woman.
I’ve had people tell me that the only reason I’m attracted to women is because of losing my mom at a young age, or because I simply haven’t met the right man, or because I’ve got a chemical imbalance in my brain.
June is Pride month and in the world I imagine we are all walking around our neighbourhoods proudly holding our lover’s hand while chatting to our neighbours and deep down inside we all just want to connect and that’s what we do and it’s all really quite straightforward.
Because that’s all we want really. We all just want to connect.