WINTER ONE/ "There is another world but it is inside this one”-Paul Éluard

19 December 2025, Central Valley, NY

Toward An Earthbound Transcendence

Starting a new project can feel like building a world. In my entrepreneurial art practices, it’s often a dizzy one—creating not just an offering, but the field where it lives, or drawing together of multiple “fields.” Sometimes there is particular pressure in the arts (& it’s starving mythologies); to make not-sinking look like grace; to perform not just pivots, but pirouettes on shifting sand:

How to outrun what can be an extractive, losing game— often played on a field other than one’s choosing. How to shift the rules then, widen the field, bridge the terrain? How to build a door wide enough for more than oneself to walk through; gather water or at least heat (something of sustenance)? How to make a case for the arts without reducing it to a benefit held in everyone’s hands but art workers themselves? How to hold to that wider project—the work of art, her necessary joy—beyond the decorative, entertaining, distracting or seductively complicit?

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Our current world can feel exponentially complex & increasingly compressed. I’m a dancer, an architect, a sweaty beast moving between the lines of work/rent/dream. World building & her promised newness (if not transcendence) is tempting: A resting place between pirouettes—something solid like a self or a shelter; a secret magic, an ethos, an exit strategy; a system—a gluten free course in forgetting, a perennial promise of community, fragrance & friction free. Nobel writer Wole Soyinka (whose visa was revoked in October) reminds: “It is not a universal principle that gets stabbed, shot and even mutilated, it is a very specific voice.”

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For weeks all I’ve been doing is staring, trying to name what I’m building—write it down, cross it out, move from private notes into shareable form—a container (for clarity), a system (to preserve energies I have left), a strategy (not just to prepare the banquet but also to eat), & a way of welcoming you in.

Recently, a generous friend smirked at me over coffee: What if you just stop? (She literally wrote the book on it). Such moments are a lovely blend of shock & relief—not reverie, cold water. It reminded me of the sparrow stuck in my studio last spring—crashing, flailing, breaking things. It was only after it wore itself out that it noticed the door was open. My naming & explaining & case-making were a swirl of hot air & wings—barriers, not gates (no flight in them). Self-protective at best, stingy, if not habitually defensive. Also (wonderfully): I’d worn myself out.

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If there’s a form to be had here, I’m beginning with the one I’m in. Winter is an apt season— not just because the soil is readying itself for an imperceptible, living heat; not because seeds in the dazzling dark eventually surface through ice, surprising even themselves, but maybe because a vast portion of them don’t. Heroics are dangerous: No victory lap can justify the price of the ticket. If there’s a seed of wisdom here, its to stay close to the ground. One of the first lessons in Aikido is how to fall. Backwards, forwards— brute surrender to the ground again & again teaches every clenched hip & elbow an imperceptible softness. Gravity becomes round until the only way to stand is to fall.

If there’s transcendence to be had here (& that’s a big if), it’s earth bound.

Báyò Akómoláfé offers a similar counterintuitive invitation: “To relinquish the tyranny of Happily-Ever-After, if only to listen to elsewhere’s between the lines.” Things fall apart & don’t always get put back together again. Nor should they. There are thresholds we cross but don’t always return from, often fragmenting along the way but it’s just another way of dancing. “It would seem,” says Akómoláfé, “that the universe is more prolific at generating loss than it is at keeping things together.” Bracing against it can feel intuitive, but the advice is probably my friend’s over coffee: Just stop. “The undulating waves of becoming do not carry guarantees with them. And ‘healing’ is not the final end of all things or rights we are entitled to,” continues Akómoláfé. “‘Failing forward’ has come to concretize corporate commitments to certitude in times of chaos,” but “the expectation that we are entitled to confident futures and convenient closures diminishes our capacity to welcome the strange. The world is too rich, too promiscuous, too generative to host hope and stability alone.” The surrender here is also an active one, not of imposing one’s will—insisting on the efficacy of a rigid (sometimes brutal) illusion— but giving it up.

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It’s the private notes, dear reader, that you’ll find in these writings.

Shareable form can carry a hidden arrogance; it overreaches into the part that’s always been yours.