Tag: tenderness

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Tender/Dangerous

I wish I could be in the Pacific Northwest to attend one of these screenings for Dark and Tender, a film exploring the work of Aaron Johnson and the Chronically UnderTouched (CUT) Project.

From their website:

The Chronically UnderTouched (CUT) Project is a movement supporting People of the Global Majority — people of color — to recover healthy, nourishing, platonic touch in a culture that, in the United States, denies it at every turn.

Born out of the development and tracking of the Chronically UnderTouched trauma story, the CUT Project develops accessible practices — deep listening, song, access to nature — as antidotes to the Black Brute archetype. […] Tender, thoughtful touch and holding, to the Black male body, is so dangerous to white supremacy that they use all matters of violence to erase this practice.

I’m watching my dad decline and trying to stay present for the version of him that remains and always, always thinking about grief in this country. How we drown it, gloss over it. We’re starved of the emotional technology that helps us process any of this. Our rituals fall so short. Aaron’s work illuminates the ways this deprivation disproportionately impacts people of color, making it all the more timely.

These days my ears perk up when someone speaks with the candor that comes from living through immeasurable loss. I find myself gravitating to places I never would’ve called home before: grief circles, mortality workshops, books and books and books about mourning, death, and ceremony.

Touch is a cornerstone of survival in this season. The older I get, the more deeply I know it. I know it because I want it. I want lingering hugs that last a full breath. I want leonine forehead to forehead greetings. I want a hand on the shoulder, a back scratch, the reassuring weight of leaning into someone side by side. I want to feel us shoring each other up, reminding one another that we are warm and breathing and alive, even as we hold everything that breaks us.

Brain Food, Reading

The Context Coin

Context creation can operate like the creative equivalent of Universal Basic Income. I want to make sure people’s obvious and immediate needs are met so they can tap into what they already know, but have been too stressed, distracted, and scared to access.

Started down this rabbit hole after getting hung up on the phrase “thought of everything,” which is one of those sneaky compliments that can point simultaneously to expressions of tenderness and anxiety. If I’m obsessed with preparing for every eventuality, where’s the room for surprise? For delight? For exchange?

(My word for 2022 is Return, and one of the meanings that I enjoy in it is the aspect of returning a serve, as in a game, as in conversation, as in play.)

It can be a strength. Someone who thinks of everything is likely good at logistics-heavy things like Kickstarter and self-publishing (hello), willing to go the extra mile to ensure that a project meets certain stringent standards (like accessibility), and concerned about the minutiae of how things feel. 

This crops up any time I unbox an Apple product. Something as small as how the cellophane unfolds from the device (smoothly, beckoningly) has a huge impact on my experience of receiving it. Someone went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that the box would be easy to open, that that textures would be pleasing, that the shapes would nest within each other just so.

This is a very capitalistic example, so it makes me uncomfortable to sing its praises, but the meta-experience is still there. What would it be like to have the resources to devote that much energy to how someone feels just upon opening the packaging of a book I’ve sent them?

It’s stuff like this that had me schlepping out to an industrial paper firm back in 2020, staggering away with armloads of samples, printing prototype decks in my living room, fondling card after card and wondering “woodgrain or linen? 200lb or 300lb? Ecru or Natural?” as if there’s a single right choice.

There isn’t.

There’s the trap. 

When Twyla Tharp asks workshop participants to come up with 60 uses for a stool, she notices a consistent pattern:

“[…] the first third of the ideas are obvious; the second third are more interesting; the final third show flair, insight, curiosity, even complexity, as later thinking builds on earlier thinking.”

There’s a version of context creation that suggests (maybe even only subconsciously) there is “a right way” to participate. I think it’s the version that relies too much on the anxious side of the “thinking of everything” coin. Tenderness in extremis is anxiety.  

I need to provide the context that keeps people on the stool after they’ve exhausted the obvious possibilities, because with that context comes freedom to explore.

At Wayward, we weren’t told what to make. In fact, we were encouraged to approach the week as a period of time during which we didn’t have to make anything. But we were fed, there was a loose schedule, there were comfortable things to nap on. We were held. And within that container—that tender context—things I didn’t even know I had in me emerged. Seemingly without effort.

I want that, and it shows up once I know when to stop trying to think of everything.