By Rev. Lynice Pinkard
“I will call them beloved, who were not beloved.”
–Romans 9:25b, quoted in the epigraph to Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved
If there is a hierarchy of belovedness in the United States–and there is–then Black queer and trans people and Black women are surely near the bottom of it.
We now invite both groups to The Clearing. Named for a scene in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, The Clearing is a site of soul retrieval that involves a rejection of the nothingness the world places on us and ours and a reclamation of our gifts and blessings, our belovedness. In The Clearing, our potential is freed from the domination that would submerge our stories. It is not only I who have returned to myself but also all the faces, all the damned, the remembered faces of all my kin who have lost their being because of the force of a history and a now. We will be(come) a cultural mooring place, a moment for reclamation and for naming: “I will call them beloved, who were not beloved.” I will call them. I will name them who were not named.
We will begin with retreats–three and a half days of song, ritual, ceremony, art, ring shouts and every kind of dance, and most importantly, the deepest love, care, empathy for and celebration of one another. We will call the names of our ancestors whose breath is our breath. We will lament. We will voice our silence into stories. We will sing and dance our collective cadence, write our souls retrieved and re-membered. We will conjure our roots and spread our seeds and gather artifacts to trace the contours of who we are. We will hold one another and cook for one another from ancestral recipes. We will forage through our lives to identify what we will reclaim and what we will release. And with our own feet and hands, we will heal the land and love that vast more-than-human world that, as Leah Penniman has said, our ancestors have loved and revered for more than 12,000 years, a time that far exceeds the few hundred years of enslavement. We will leave with pockets overflowing with acorns, pine needles, love notes, and phone numbers.
Over time, we will build a network of soul friends who are, together, becoming more and more alive and attuned to our own intuitive wisdom. The practices of The Clearing are not individual but communal; Morrison’s Baby Suggs, Holy, was not urging “self-care” for atomized selves but transformative communal care practices that restore our collective humanity and enable us to live differently, to become love itself, even amidst systems that literally take our living breath away. So emboldened, we will gather in larger and larger numbers, and we will begin to build alternative systems and structures so compelling, so life-giving, that more and more will be drawn to The Clearing.
We begin–we must begin–with those of us who have been most reviled, Black women, queer and trans folks, sex workers, women living in poverty, those who might never otherwise be able to afford to rest.
And…The Clearing is ultimately, over time, for everyone. All can be grafted in. Black queer and gay men and transgender people, Indigenous two-spirit people and other queer people of color, all BIPOC people, and white people, too, who have been doing their work. (Kirkridge is committed, alongside The Clearing, to doing deep, transformative, soul-restoring work with white people who are unlearning internalized supremacy culture.) Ultimately, this project is about the healing of everyone, but there can be no large-scale healing until those on the bottom of the hierarchy find themselves beloved. From there, the healing spirals outward. As Toni Morrison said, “The function of freedom is to free somebody else.” Freedom starts here, in The Clearing.
To sign up for more information on The Clearing as it is released, email Program Coordinator Lynice Pinkard at TheClearing [at] Kirkridge [dot] org.
