hey Ray,
it is the time of year when i can spiral down lost in cracks. i am disciplined at the moment to respect the cracks while not falling. today is a bit hard i admit. the body tends to vanish.
with this awareness, i consider your sacred acknowledgment of our start of a new human relationship. simple. present. there. cracks or not. respect. i pause and i listen. i hear you and i do not. i feel i trust you for a fraction of a second (intellectually, i trust you. period. but emotionally, trusting others paradoxically feels like betraying still others).
sadness.
still, in my core, i feel i have received something. thank you.
and then, i will share something about smudging.
smudging is also in my life and it has been part of my reverence/sacred/safety practice for years now. ironically, since i had to move in august, smudging can trigger the centralized fire alarm and bring fire trucks in the next 5 minutes… and it does so with very little….
as a 1st generation white settler though, i feel very shy to share this practice of mine. i have had conversations with Indigenous artists and been invited by one specifically to smudge a space instead of her doing it, and so, there is a sense that the practice has come to me too, but still, i know i am appropriating.
please tell me more about smudging for you.
claude