Solo Performance

It had been a hellish week. On Monday my lonely and tired AfricanAmerican husband told me, as gently as possible, that what I had hoped was a temporary separation is to be extended into perpetuity. This separation had been scheduled to terminate when my Fetal Alcohol daughter turns eighteen and can move into a new, more therapeutically endowed, home not our non-group home which could not feel like a private home to him and to a more peacefully vulnerable me. He told me his autonomy of residential sight and sound and smell, temperature and feel, thought and absence of forced transparent thought, has grown ever more compelling for him, Like a new life system organically emerging from calcified minerals mixed with melted wet. This permanent separation, less about not wanting to share a roof and walls and multicultural floors and more about wanting a more private monotheistic habitat. I had been working on my adopted daughter's emergency group home application; Her eighteenth, and first qualifying, birthday was Friday of this same hellish week filled with demands, as usual, but more so, more self-prophetically entitled now; A "big [supremely self-disempowering] girl" as multiply messaged from school and therapists and family, jonesing to live with submissive peers who will best be lesser care receivers as she intends to appropriate all care giving staff, Demanding preferred foods, and music and stories and dance, and diaper change and bed and bath times ignoring needs of lesser beings; Like living with a constantly ticked off Gaia showing us who's our jealous Boss in response to our climate endangering ways of patriarchal colonization disrespecting matriarchal communion, ecological creolization. Demanding routines she and I have evolved since she was five, unable to see up, only downstream, unable to hear well, unable to speak in consonants articulate enough to defy caregiver ignorance, lack of subservient cooperation, submission to her aggressively iron will, triggering every slaveholder property owner violated nerve in my husband's long-term matriarchal-limned unnerved memory. Our more cooperative and trust-building relationship soon took care of Gaia's communication problems but we created, thereby, a princess entitled 'I win so you lose' monster of immediate and really loud NEED! Yet, now that she is maturing to leave this nest, how much do I need her to keep me safely home at night and off the larger terrifying climate stage of degenerating ecopolitical performance? On the following Sunday morning, I was to sing "Let Your Little Light Shine" a less popular spiritual, and at least not unnatural, gospel message; A sung prayer from enslaved history, humiliating origins surviving valleys of vulnerable despair by holding up and out dim fading lights of hope, sometimes accessible from other enslaved properties with more resilient hope in green and brown and black communion. On Saturday night my heart spoke of grief lost in deep dark valleys isolated abandoned down-sized empty-nested shallow-chested ancient old person despair, And my lungs sagged pushing against narrow edges of freezing panic Terror about forgetting left-brain words and reminders of past sung and danced solo performances not nearly as fun enriching fulfilling health wealthy as past group participation in full-nested harmony synergy resonance regenerativity sacred communions spiritual while naturally co-present Green and brown and black, ultra-nonviolet and transparently clear. On Sunday morning, after earning a strategically planned full night's rest, I felt much worse Unable to imagine leaving my sanctuary much less singing much less performing a song longing for the Lord to shine even the faintest ray of hope down into this valley of well-earned despair, A grey climate of hopelessness, nihilistic thoughts, narcissistic preoccupations trapped in a shrinking fragile egocentrism. I took an anti-depressant which got me to the church on time but now feeling anxiously disembodied within my own Beloved Sanctuary too universally white straight and too removed from outside green and family brown and EarthTribe Native black resonant voices, fragrances, touch, tasting and seeing. I could not remember words, or think of alternative reasonable sounds, could not find my opening pitch, felt deserted by a cappella absence of accompaniment, by a choir relegated to background support services rather than foreground cooperative resonance of care giving co-passioning care receiving. But, there was something else bad, REALLY bad, a repugnance that stayed with me through rehearsal, through first and then final performance and on through the return home after a technical tepid success lacking the resonance of producing music transcending rhythm and pitch and lyrics demanding better held and managed light systems for my self-isolating despair Afraid of drowning in this internal river valley. Although not sure what happened Sunday night, I awoke next morning to emotional fragility, again to fears of too much aloneness, loneliness, worries about ageing in a place not quiet enough from road rage and too demanding of soil and water and energy stewardship, warm accompaniment, propriety of grace, cooperative well-being. What was different, on this reawakening, was recognizing my, and our, monocultural misappropriation, supremacist ideation of "Let your little light shine" as if we are, and I am, the Lord's great solo hope for all the autonomous disconnected apartheid indigenous nature/spirit EarthTribe life-systems of healthy care giving/receiving singing and dancing in revolving circles of gospel fire, Choired resonantly together in active shared home harmonies, extending families back through enslaved ancestors reminding an AfroCentric Lord this light begins from hope sung dance together with multiculturally resonant intelligence Leaving no one behind trying to soulfully enlighten my darkest valley of despair.