Monthly Howl: organized together!

This month's Howl is a visualization of the collective experiences of ants. In this session, we imagine both carrying and being carried, seeing if we can embody these experiences simultaneously.

In The Light of the World, Elizabeth Alexander writes, “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand,” which to me feels like a call to embrace simultaneity, an idea echoed in a Maya Angelou quote I keep near my desk: “And you find out what it costs us to love and to lose, to dare and to fail. And maybe even more, to succeed. What it costs, in truth. Not superficial costs—anybody can have that—I mean in truth.”

To grow, to move, to change, you put something on the line. Those who never grow up, who stay static, often remain in that superficial experience of life.

This month, the Howl is embracing the nature of both holding and being held, and comes at a perfect moment as I am rereading Ross Gay’s Be Holding with my students this week. Later today, we are going to practice looking at our looking at The International Center of Photography. As I went through the text again, I had the meta-experience of him writing about being on the Metro-North as I took the line home.

I had the experience this weekend of being at a protest with my friends, and noticing, as we already knew, that we were being watched high up from the top of the buildings around us by the police. The way most radical gathering is surveilled.

But there was also the beauty of the mass pod of umbrellas, the way we kept each other shielded and dry.