I scrambled to cope with an incident on the street. This is the tool I used at home.
Things I tried to do and things I used to cope with a racist, xenophobic nonna
Dear Black, Indigenous, Person of Color and Queer and Trans Person of Color,
An hour ago as I was walking my dog, and old italian lady spat at me from her third story balcony. I’m leaving out the details of this incident to take up no more space with this person and her actions.
I felt angry. I thought, ‘What am I doing here in italy?’, ‘I hate it here,’ and other more colorful pissed off, enraged thoughts. As I continued to walk my dog, Fiona, I avoided eye contact with people to dodge the usual blank stares and comments from random aunts and grandmas about how I’m walking my dog wrong. I normally do this in italy. This time, I turned a corner and started to tear up. I kept looking up above the sidewalk at the balconies ahead, and I started to feel afraid of walking under them.
Once I got home, I sat at my desk with my computer and my phone trying to figure out what to do. Who should I text about this? A few friends came to mind and I started to type out messages only to delete them. In the end I messaged my husband who’s out of town. I went on facebook and thought to write something there but deleted what I started to write there, too. I was having trouble finding an outlet.
I was scrambling to figure out what I should say and to who because it was a lot to digest at once and I was avoiding feeling how it felt to be in that situation. So I closed my eyes and tried to smudge it away with Palo Santo smoke. I swirled the stick slowly around my head about ten times as I took deep breaths of it in. Then I sat down on my bed, poked around on my computer some more, then started crying. I felt more settled. I cried for about thirty seconds, but my apathetic dog, Fiona, side-eyed me and walked away. So, I didn’t have my dog for support but I thought maybe YouTube can help. I pulled up a new tab and searched for Björk’s Anchor Song. Some of the lyrics say, “I live by the ocean and during the night I dive into it. Down to the bottom underneath all currents and drop my anchor as this is where I’m staying. This is my home.” I thought of my self, my body as home. I’m in it and it’s home. As I write this, it occurred to me that I should check her history on Black, Indigenous, People of Color issues and found this damning piece of information written by poet and artist, Melannie Monoceros. Needless to say, I closed out of Anchor Song and am now playing A Seat At The Table.
After drowning in smudge smoke, breathing, sitting in my feelings, and meditating on a song, I was settled enough to remember that this is what my work is about. It somehow didn’t completely click for me that I’m doing this project, Our Everyday Forms, because I go through stuff, too. I reminded myself it’s not only for or about my friends, family, and community.
I’m using this live publication on Medium.com to process my thoughts and to reflect on how I used the stuff where I live to help me cope.
So, of the many things that I did to try to wrangle my feelings and work through processing them, I happened to use one physical object; a stick of Palo Santo. To cope with other incidents, I have used/may use objects or not use one at all.
I’ll use this space here to make some sense of this particular object, what I used it for, and why.
What it looks like:
After burning it every morning, it’s now an inch long and sits on a windowsill with plants, skincare stuff, books and jewelry. It’s a piece of wood from a tree native to South America that I burn.
What I used it for:
I used it to shrink and kill the thoughts and image about this person that, knowing myself, could easily turn into a sleepless night stewing in anger and bleeding into other parts of my life. I took it, burned it, and wrapped my head with smoke. That swirling does the same work as a hug, but for my thoughts. The smell fills the vacant space of the thoughts and image that I just cancelled out.
How I picked it:
As I was trying to process in my mind, I felt like I needed something to be engulfed in. I needed a shower of some kind. A sprinkle wouldn’t pacify it and I was trying to prevent my thoughts and the negativity from spreading into my sleep and onto the next day.
While I was juggling thoughts in my head while this happened, a flash hit me with anxiety of being out alone. I stopped those thoughts and in this case, the smoke from burning the stick of Palo Santo functioned as a way to clear grossness and replace it with love for myself and who I am.
