Transcript

Hey, it's Slowdown producer Myka Kielbon. We all need to take a moment to pause. Here at the show, we realized we know some pretty amazing poetry lovers who have their own Slowdown moments to share with you. Chefs, musicians, journalists, and more. These late summer Wednesdays, we're bringing you their selections. We hope you enjoy.

I'm adrienne maree brown, and this is The Slowdown.

I think there's something around balance that I have figured out. It's like, Oh, this is what life, this is one of the things that life is all about. One of the things that life is all about is home versus journey. One of the things that life is all about is the energy that you pour out versus the energy that you pour in.

When I'm on the road, especially when I'm on the road to talk about things I love, to talk about work that I've done, there's this sweet expansion feeling. So it's like each stop my body gets to be in the room with all these other bodies. I think the best way I can describe it is it feels like, oh, we're all the ones who try. We haven't given up and we care.

I'm also a homebody, so I have this sense of tether. I can feel tether pulling me home at all times, and it's something that I'm in a constant balance with, like, how can I take care of myself on the road so that my body still feels a “home” feeling? And also, how do I continuously go be with all the people that I love who are trying and also keep rooting as deeply as I can?

I think a lot about the freedom I have in my life now and how fresh of an experience that is in my ancestral lineage, and especially driving around the South with the book that I'm touring, which is Loving Corrections. The book is a set of essays that are each meant to course correct us in some way to help us get ourselves back on a right path towards each other and towards Earth.

I think that people misunderstand the South a lot and people think that the South is like the furthest off course in the U. S. or something. I see it a different way, which is that most of what I have learned about freedom, I have learned from people organizing in the South. You know, there's this saying, as goes the South, so goes the nation.

I see such bravery here. You know, I see people are very straightforward and honest here. All my ancestral lineages on both sides are from the Carolinas, and I never thought I would live in the South. And to have been in this reverse migration process in my life, it feels like coming full circle in a way. It feels like a “loving correction for me.” Like, what is the dirt to which I most belong on this earth, and how do I go be accountable to it?

I think that Palestine has been holding up this, it's like, what does it mean to actually value the land that you come from, and the land that you love, and the land that you are willing to steward, willing to care for, and be stewarded by, and be cared for by. Palestine always opens my mind to the fact that we have multiple worlds that exist at once, at all times.

There's a throughline, there's a way of being on earth that's like, I'm listening to something beyond this moment, and I'm listening to something beyond this conflict, and there are things that are true. I love the idea that there are things that we can all acknowledge are true, so that we don't have to start from there each time we're building relationship.

For me, poetry is how I get to be my whole human self in a given moment and really connect to that river. I always talk about there's this river of love and justice that's flowing from the beginning of time to the end, and it flows through us to different degrees.

We're supposed to do that kind of work, but it has to be able to hold the whole complexity of a given moment. It has to be able to hold life and death, really life and death, over and over again in a variety of ways.

Today's poem confronts what it means to live in community on the land with one another. It shows us that persevering against the powers that encourage violence takes the physical and metaphysical task of rising above the experience of the individual and into a shared space.

In Jerusalem
by Mahmoud Darwish, translated Fady Joudah

In Jerusalem, and I mean within the ancient walls,
I walk from one epoch to another without a memory
to guide me. The prophets over there are sharing
the history of the holy … ascending to heaven
and returning less discouraged and melancholy, because love
and peace are holy and are coming to town.
I was walking down a slope and thinking to myself: How
do the narrators disagree over what light said about a stone?
Is it from a dimly lit stone that wars flare up?
I walk in my sleep. I stare in my sleep. I see
no one behind me. I see no one ahead of me.
All this light is for me. I walk. I become lighter. I fly
then I become another. Transfigured. Words
sprout like grass from Isaiah’s messenger
mouth: “If you don’t believe you won’t be safe.”
I walk as if I were another. And my wound a white 
biblical rose. And my hands like two doves
on the cross hovering and carrying the earth.
I don’t walk, I fly, I become another,
transfigured. No place and no time. So who am I? 
I am no I in ascension’s presence. But I 
think to myself: Alone, the prophet Muhammad
spoke classical Arabic. “And then what?”
Then what? A woman soldier shouted:
Is that you again? Didn’t I kill you?
I said: You killed me … and I forgot, like you, to die. 

“In Jerusalem” by Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Fady Joudah from THE BUTTERFLY'S BURDEN © 2007 Fady Joudah. Used by permission of the Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Copper Canyon Press.

Through her writing, which includes short- and long-form fiction, nonfiction, spells, tarot decks and poetry; her music, which includes songwriting, singing and immersive musical rituals; and her podcasts, including How to Survive the End of the World, Octavia’s Parables and The Emergent Strategy Podcast, adrienne maree brown has nurtured Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, Radical Imagination and Transformative Justice as ideas, frameworks, networks and practices for transformation. Her work is informed by 25 years of social and environmental justice facilitation primarily supporting Black liberation, her path of teaching somatics, her love of Octavia E Butler and visionary fiction, and her work as a doula.