As a person raised with all the privileges of whiteness, what does it mean to use so many tools and cultural practices of Black Indigenous People Of Color for my thinking and reference? Indeed I was raised as a liberal Jewish queer in New York City, so this was actually my approach already from a young age, - dynamic integrative thinking - the atmosphere of the City, and of contemporary secular Jewish intellectual life. In the revelatory racialized phenomena of these times, I feel all the more strongly the necessity to call where culture is bereft and thin, and to give deep respect and honor to the fact that there has been something invisible even to myself how the potency and wisdoms I have been attending to are inextricably linked to humans with rich cultural lives, yes, and also I ask myself how to experience, to receive the depths of the grief that these treasure of ideas and practices are also inextricably linked to histories of genocide, slavery, inequiity and displacement, and that from my position I am in fact accountable. This is not new, but this is necessary to feel and act on over and over again and again today and now. This need be named, understood, and amplified.

Over the past decade I have been in earnest evolving my relationship with my ancestral, cultural, and constructed lineages. I do not feel a need to identify with whiteness as an identity, nor as crutch, but yet, but yet, my benefit from this very whiteness on all levels of existence - economic, access, comfort, confidence, and on and on - exists in all the cells of my daily experience. So, when I use, or to be more specific, am inspired by - understandings and wisdom traditions of BIPOC people, without addressing the complexities of this dynamic, receiving it, and naming it, I am perpetuating appropriative, implicit ideological, unconscious and harmful operations which is not only violent, it is also is doing a disservice to my own growing as well. This is something to be reckoned with. How to pay honor and continue to grow as a larger transcultural community from a position of care and honor, and to never abandon the weight of it, and continue to ask what could reparations and a radical reimagining be from every angle?

There is something important here to be practiced not only through the potency of writing and conversation, but perhaps even more foundationally from the the subtle and sensing approaches such as working through movement, with “empty axis/empty space” “receiving the atmosphere,” “living measurement” and “tuning” (from Amerta Movement and other places) that could support this as a process. This is one of the many ways I am working in New Landings and I acknowledge it as one very small step, but a valuable angle.

After decades of practices, the practices I have been studying, so many of them either drawn from cultural practices not-my-own, or even fully of other cultural contexts and hxstories, they are integrated into my own speaking-being; this makes these questions all the more felt, and all the more necessary to address.