Episode 5: BATHE

Framed as a ritual in decolonizing epistemology, this session was a turning point for us in the lab. We have up until this point been doing ancestral research, uncovering and recovering our people’s ways of knowing and ardently tracking body wisdom through fine-tuned observation of our sounds and gestures: vocal inflections, shift of the gaze, what (or who) animates our hands and how. One this episode, Corrina Keeling and I wade back into the waters of this bathing session to retell the journey of our co-created grief ritual. Our water bodies, like all bodies of water, get funky when they’re stagnant, and the ritual came at a moment where we as a Lab body needed the wisdom of the water cycle to allow the sticky, griefy knowings of cultural loss that have arisen so far in us to distribute out into our wider web of relations and resources. Corrina shares about her process of reaching backwards into ancestral unknowns for cultural artifacts to pull forward and make sense of in the now context, and our discussion wanders through topics of regenerating tissue in places that have been scarred over, holding multi-racial ritual space over zoom, how to grieve big things a little bit at a time, and distinguishing cleansing and renewal as different from feeding desires for purity. We don’t end the conversation with offerings as we have in other podcast episodes, but I’ll invite you here to lend your attention, perhaps in a meditation or journal reflection, to the medicinal qualities of water: the capacity to change state, to weather hard things, to navigate around obstacles, to hold memory. You could ask the water that makes up your body- how do you also carry these medicines? You can learn more about upcoming workshops and all things Somatic Scribing on my website asthecrowfliesdesign.com or by following me on Instagram @crowcamino. Music for this podcast is from the album Black Shamxn by our labmate, multidisciplinary artist and healing practitioner, Neith Sankofa.