One quote response: Spill: Scenes of Feminist Fugitivity

So continues my practice of one quote responses.

In Spill:  Scenes of Feminist Fugitivity by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, there were so many quotations that are inspiring me.  In one of the interviews that I read, she talked about how some have used the text within ceremony as oracle, how each scene could instruct you about one aspect of your life, how she has used this as well.  I'm especially attracted to the integration of homage to Hortense Spillers, the use of careful citation of her work within the text, and Gumbs's own work at blending spirit work, ceremony, ancestral invocation, scene creation, feminist scholarly analysis, and poiesis of the soul in making a new knowledge and action through all of this weaving and layering.

The quote that I'm choosing for now is:

"there is always something to reach across always something to hold on to. even if it’s your own wilding body even if it is your own hand." p. 57

I am interested in this quote, because it speaks to hope even from a point of incredible desperation and tumult.  I'm interested in how the act of reaching creates a bridge from one material to another, a bridge that crosses space and time, and centers on the embodied knowing:  that of the wilding (what a fantastic and powerful word to describe the body!) body and the belonging within one's hand as in this hand belongs to me and I to it and all of the acts and senses that this hand has felt and sparked also belong to, with, and within me. 

I'm not sure I wrote about this here, but I did a workshop at Humboldt State University a while ago in which I asked everyone to name an item, one word, that brings them joy.  I asked many people to say what that thing was aloud and then I asked the participants the question of what does that change or do for you when you realize that you are always walking through someone's joy?  That leaf is someone's joy.  That jar of honey is someone's joy.  That trombone, that whisper, that wind, that caress, that raindrop, that dew, all someone's joy and in walking through the world you are sharing in that joy.  So when I think of Gumbs's quotation, that "there is always something to reach across..." I think that how in the reaching we must cross joy and in the crossing touch and belong to it.

#twt, #thisisthebeginningofanessay, #spill, #alexispaulinegumbs, #sabbatical, #sabbaticalreading