this uncapturable us

Through my willingness to practice vulnerability in public, I’ve learned that the things I think are a me thing rarely are. Yes, everything has its own texture and flavour as a question moves through an individual body, shaped by culture, context and quirks. But the challenges that feel most isolatingly mine, most annoyingly Scorpio, the knots I’ve been quietly trying to fathom for decades, the truths that feel most trembly to voice… they’re the ones that I receive most gratitude for, for having said out loud. They’re the words that feel like a collective exhale.

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I have withheld my spirit from being visible because I was afraid of being captured.

Fellow Black, Brown, global majority and diasporic kin, I wonder if this rumbles around something deep in you, too. We who hold ancestral memories of when the colonisers came. We who had to make choices of whether to run, whether to fight. Whether to hide or fight in plain sight through assimilation or alchemy. We who are still embodying this in real time, audacious and private, shaky and steady. Finding each other elsewhere.

My spirit is here to practice fugitivity. Being un-capturable. A wisdom that understands patience and stealth, that recognises metamorphosis as art, as unresolved storytelling across a lifetime, as a pan on the stove, a palm on a shoulder. Living in terrain that’s always extended beyond the horizon, snaked through sand, dipped beneath waves, danced in clay soil. Unspoken-understood, felt beyond five senses, known without knowing how we know. Faith before proof.

This uncapturable us is untouchable. There’s an infiniteness, a divinity that operates in a separate realm to the systems that insist on capture, so that the sides of those orbits cannot touch, not ever, not really.

This uncapturable us can’t help but make changes to our lives. There are agreements and compromises that no longer fit this shape, shape-shifting as it is. This uncapturable us is its own atmosphere. There are spores and stories that no longer thrive here. The laboured effort and turmoil of navigating relational boundaries and saying no quietly resolves itself. In the face of commitment, in placing ourselves within a longer arc, there is clarity, determination, less holding on for dear life, more dancing.

This uncapturable us can meet each other within the realities of oppression AND not be only in relationship to that oppression. We can breathe in beauty outside. We can allow the truth without flinching and we can imagine and tend to and live inside something different altogether. We can savour the sweetness, notice wonder, be where we are. We can keep moving, keep evading, keep orienting towards possibility as the terms of play change. We can honour the ways our shorelines of lineage overlap, and sense where our terrains are not yet recognisable to each other. We can meet each other without colliding.

When I’m not afraid of being captured, I trust my relationships more; the scrappy desperate urgency dissolves into something more spacious. I explain less. Trust silence. My writing is shorter.

When I’m not afraid of being captured, I can be in expansive relationship to my heritage in ways I never thought would be accessible. I’m with my great-grandfather, leaving his father after a disagreement and never returning, imagining the train he caught from Syria through Palestine and Egypt to Sudan. I imagine him stopping to eat watermelon in the roadside stall that his future daughter would build. I’m with that daughter, my Haboba, as she heals from the lip tattoo and lines scarred into her face as tradition and protection. I’m in my work room, صوفية on the wall, in a practice guided by Nazbah Tom, holding the weight of my cheeks and feeling the musculature of a lifetime of smiling. I’m with my grandad, building components for warships and nuclear submarines and going home to sing peace to his family around the piano that now lives in my mother’s home. I’m with the stickers my kid has stuck on our keyboard, the tender nurturing of a generational gift that skipped a beat through me. I’m with my Nanna before the houses were built where we used to play tag, on her daily walk with grief through the reeds to the sea. I’m with جبل بركل and the way my bones know this rock without a plane ride.

When I’m not afraid of being captured, I am in deep connection and slow spiral time, letting things unfold and loop and close and escape. We meet at the altar, in voice-notes, in living rooms, in applause, in dreamlands, in Zoom calls, in songs shared.

We’re with Bastet, offering protection and perfume and balm, rattling their sistrum, making music as they move.

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The words above are in call and response, always, to the Black & BIPOC & diasporic & queer kin who offer their generosity and warmth and magic to the collective. Then kneaded, swirled and tended into slow coherence through the brilliance of the people I get to love in friendship. Here are five podcast conversations that inspired me this month.

This little playlist feels especially sweet because some of the beautiful humans included here are people I’ve been taught by and practiced with in somatic community.

The Erotic, Audre Lorde and The Voice of the Genuine with Nya S. Abernathy, on Black Coffee and Theology Podcast

The Marrow of Somatic Healing w/ Nazbah Tom and Fayza Bundalli, on From Root to Bone with Dr. Jenn Mullan

Witch School Chapter 10: Aesha Rasheed, on How to Survive the End of the World

Hallelujah with Sendolo Diaminah, on Becoming the People with Prentis Hemphill

The Marrow of Radical Queerness w/ Robert Downes, on From Root to Bone with Dr. Jenn Mullan

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These words emerge from reflection, craft & relationship, written within and between being a practitioner, community-tender and caregiver.

If when they reach you, they feel like nourishment or inspiration, or make something feel more possible, I welcome your support.

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Thank you for being here.

Wishing sweetness for your day. Til next time,

dia