portal | unlearning fracture - a new mythology of wholeness

PORTAL | winter 2025
Type: Essay & Artwork

✧This piece is a node in an ever-expanding map of memory and meaning. I invite you to sit with me in the unknown and see what surfaces for you.

It is hard to imagine our lives without fracture. The fracture of family wounds, the fractures created and deepened by oppression, the fracture of our inner lives and the realities we tightrope to survive. And the earth-wide fracture of capitalism, ripping us daily from our tenderness and planting us in the rawness of commodification. It is in this dead place where we struggle most to feel whole.

This is not an anti-capitalist post. I will not use my energy to remind you of what has been lost. It is an exploration of a new mythology, written to those who understand that the old mythology has run its course. How can we see our wholeness when we are taught to define our worth through productivity—our time, our energy, our life force cut into dollars and cents?

In Salvation, bell hooks speaks of a 'pervasive lovelessness' that is a crisis of our culture. She tells of finding both an unmet need for love and a general weariness and distrust among both the old and young for love as a redeeming cultural value. Yet in All About Love, she speaks of women as love's 'primary practitioners.' This duality illuminates our current crisis: women, particularly Black women, are simultaneously tasked with being love's keepers and subjected to its systematic destruction. We hold the stories of love lost at the hands of trauma and cruelty. The cultural project of racist capitalism depends on violence against and the exploitation of women. This violence intensifies along a calculated social hierarchy where trans women, disabled people, and queer folks - those systematically coded as 'less than women' - face compounded layers of exploitation and erasure. The system is designed to extract maximum labor while inflicting maximum harm on those furthest from its centers of power.

For most of us, love is expressed through labor—caregiving in the classroom, the birthing room, the boardroom. Our capacity to love becomes measured by our capacity to produce, to serve, to labor endlessly. So perhaps by radically transforming our relationship to labor, we can reclaim love's true nature.

I wonder if, for the modern Black wom(x)n, the new mythology is Ease. If our path to remembering our wholeness is built in a slower procession forward, in direct opposition to capitalism's demand for constant production. I have been growing intimate with ease for some years now—most intensely in the last 6 months. On my 41st birthday this past summer, I committed to a Year Of Ease in which I agreed to no further extensions of my labor. This would be a profound commitment considering I typically lived knee-deep in multiple projects and, like many Black women, tended to express my commitment to service through innovation and creativity that often had an invisible cost on my health and well-being.

I had already spent years reshaping and decolonizing my career but hadn't really addressed the pacing and volume that kept me in a state of busyness. In my Year of Ease, I would take intentional steps to lean into slowness, to say yes to help and support, to try and find myself anew outside of the construct of capitalism that keeps me and my Black body tethered to a whipping post of harm and disregard. I wanted to know what it would feel and look like to reframe my labor from an endless, unyielding fracture to a love ethic.

I have had mixed success. Yet perhaps what I avoided is most significant. I managed to avoid starting a Ph.D. this year—narrowly, yes, but a true win considering I've been on that particular linear path since I was six years old. As I leaned more fully into ease, my ego bubbled up with the need to prove itself. It would not go quietly. I noticed it, acknowledged how internalized systemic issues show up as drive and ambition, and allowed myself to dream up a new framework for validating my energy, my time, and my labor. I chose to pull back the curtain on my ego and see the spirit beneath.

To give this new framework a home, I built a digital whiteboard honoring the learning I am already engaging in—the djembe drum, rock climbing, the ongoing practice of painting, writing, and dancing, learning to parent an adult child, noticing how nature seems to call me to be her lover. I am capturing something that has always been true for Black communities, queer communities, and other communities of color—we must affirm our own brilliance, our own knowledge, our own wisdom. We must affirm that we are whole and that anything else is a bonus. Not surprising to my ancestors (it was their patient guidance that kept me from applying to a graduate program in Portugal), I am channeling more, seeing more, loving more, and learning more than I ever have in a classroom. Life is truly my curriculum.

These new labors feel like an effort to further tumble into my wholeness, not a distraction from it. I've built a new studio in my daughter's old bedroom—moving my art supplies from their old home in a corner of my office to a bright sunlit shelf. I'm airing out old pieces and remembering that I really do be out here painting and shit. I surfaced old poetry and flash fiction and read them joyfully, swinging in the full-sized hammock I dragged into the space. And as I read, I cried big bold tears at my own brilliance. At the brilliance that I am often afraid of because it does not feel like "me". It is a light that runs through me, shines around and below me, it is cast by generations of ancestors who could not let their light shine too bright for fear of ridicule, injury, and death.

As I cry and swing, their tears mix with my own and I remember. With Alice Coltrane's A Monastic Trio as the studio soundtrack, I remember and listen.

Capitalism is a balm to trauma. It is a construction of bliss. Humans are naturally bliss, we experience and perceive light and beauty in its many forms. Capitalism severs us from our natural state and constructs a false sense of bliss through productivity and consumerism. It was created by the imagination of folks who have been traumatically, ancestrally severed from their own bliss and began rituals of theft to correct their deficit. They went out and stole the bliss of others-their songs, their dances, their imagination, their dreams, their natural kin and folk, their land and seeds of hope to generate more bliss. And they consumed and consumed-others, themselves, the stars, and the moon that orbits around them and still they are not full, never full. They will devour all the bliss in this realm if there are not measures to stop them. You are the measure. You, the collective you, the ALL you-the you that sits on the shoulders of your ancestors, the you that opens portals, minds, and hearts. The light. Accept the light. We are the light.

More tears. More Alice Coltrane. More lavender chamomile tea and now I am here. Dreaming new dreams in a new reality where I arrive in my studio every day whole. In meditation, I call back parts of myself that were lending energy in places where it was not safe or welcome. I call back parts of me that were holding onto people who could not see me and could not love me. I call myself back from fracture.

In the new mythology, I am whole.

Aṣẹ