Happy Friday, dear ones! It has been a week over here. Not in a bad way, but in an exploded-out-of-a-cannon sort of way. I finished my final report for my spring freelance gig at 11 PM last Saturday and then woke up the next morning raring to reclaim my life out of the jaws of overwork.
Sunday I moved all my plants out to my catio for the season (Yes, my porch is primarily for my cats, but they share, luckily.). Monday I cleaned my house from top to bottom and did multiple loads of laundry. Tuesday I started waking up (on purpose!) at 5 AM so I could sit on the catio, drink my coffee, and watch the light creep in.
Wednesday and Thursday I walked both to and from work through the Cascadilla Gorge, enjoying both the excess of stairs and the waterfalls. Thursday night we had our annual Ithaca Festival parade, when the townies take back our fair city from all the students who’ve either graduated or moved out for the summer. And I listened (multiple times) to a revelatory conversation that lit me on fire on the How To Survive The End of the World podcast between adrienne marie brown and Abigail Bengson.
Abigail Bengson is one half of the performing powerhouse The Bengsons, who are, as adrienne aptly calls them, “holy magic in a bottle.” Maybe it’s hard for folks who didn’t grow up like me, in a mystical religion and in love with singing, to appreciate what Abigail does, but I will try to language it so you can.
Abigail experiences herself as a vehicle for spirit, an ecstatic instrument for funneling something vast and powerful into the world. In her conversation with adrienne, she puts it this way:
I have always felt an ecstatic relationship to the world as it is and felt a need beyond my control to sing a song of praise to all that I see. And I tried to pretend that that made me a rockstar for a minute, or that maybe a this or a that, but this thing, this other, I always, over and over again, became a flute.
Whether she is singing in jubilation or heartbreak, for Abigail it’s all praise. She is celebrating the world as it is, in all of it’s glory and horror and mess and multiplicity, because that is how you call on the world, as she says it, to “jump up and live.”
Have you ever had that experience of listening to someone sing the saddest song, a song that breaks your heart into tiny, little pieces, only to realize that having heard it you just want to take the world in your arms and love it for all your worth? That you feel connected and seen and glad to be here right now? Here’s how Abigail explains it:
I wanna say something about what you just said, about singing, about the suffering of the world and singing the world as it is… I think we feel that all times are happening at once. I think we can feel that, though we are story animals that like a linear line, that we know in our bodies…We know if we look at the planet that all seasons are happening at the same time all the time. So we can sit with the knowing that, even as we are faced with extraordinary pain and destruction, that the intact nature of the world remains at every moment. And so, so does the intact nature of ourselves. It’s always there… it cannot be shattered. And there is a great shattering taking place at all times. And to me, when I see that, I feel a Hallelujah in me. I feel, “My God, all things are breaking and can never be broken”, and somehow in the body, we know this to be true. So, I wanna say that when I feel like we sing the song in praise of what is, we call into being the intact world, the intact nature of the world, the intact nature of each other that’s always there waiting to be sung to. And that doesn’t mean a denial of grief. It’s the opposite. It means singing the song of grief, singing the song of the heartbreak that makes things wanna jump up and live.
One of the things I love about Abigail most is that she extends that same hallelujah, that same grace and spiritual rigor and tender vulnerability, to herself. She’s working— steadily, imperfectly, honestly— to embody that knowing of the concurrent shattering and perfection of the world in her own messy, exceedingly human life.
What do I mean by “messy, exceedingly human life”? I mean, that she is able to name her mistakes and resistance and shame. Just like you and me, she sometimes screws up and feels exposed, and determined to never screw up again because it’s all so damned uncomfortable. But she’s also paying attention to life, and having been around long enough paying attention she realizes that if you can stay present through that discomfort, resistance, and shame then the world doesn’t break you irredeemably. Instead, it breaks you open like a seed, and new life emerges. What is this, but the practice of integrity? To live in constructive relationship to our own wholeness so that we can be a constructive part of the wholeness of the world:
I feel like that moment where you’ve gone headlong in love towards life, and then you get hit, you know, you get hit with your old—whatever it is, the thing you repeat, you know, the thing you thought you had outgrown, here it is again talking to you.
I think about Henri Nouwen, the Jesuit, who I love, [who] writes about pruning, being pruned by the world. He uses language of being pruned by God. And I resisted that language. I hated that language because it felt so artificial, like, I want a wild garden, and he was coming in with shears and making me a hedgerow or something. So I was like, “No, I don’t—No thank you, I would like—I prefer to be the jungle”, but [then] I thought, “Oh, even wild things prune each other.” Not to kill each other, but to help each other find enough light. So everyone gets light, everyone gets water, everyone gets earth.
So, when I am taken down I do not like it, adrienne. I do not enjoy it. I do not want it. And I guarantee you it’s never gonna happen again. “I’m done. I’ve been pruned. It’s over. No more mistakes from me.” But when I think of it as a natural pruning of me, that helps other things to live well around me, because I am in an ecosystem with other humans and the world, and sometimes might need to be a little smaller, and sometimes might need to be bigger, and that’s alright, to have that rhythm and that flow. And also I think of, you know, seed pods that need forest fires to be split open, right? To release! That sometimes I’ve been in a fire of my own shame for ways I’ve caused harm. And if I—if you—can survive it through good company, you know, that there’s a chance to get split open, and in the splitting open, there’s a chance to live new. And that, that’s the resurrection story I’m interested in, you know? Is the seed bursting open, through any kind of hardship, a natural hardship, to become itself, its full self as it’s meant to.
Abigail also insists, and I agree with her, that our imperfections are not simply aspects of ourselves to be survived in order to grow, but aspects to be embraced. It’s our imperfections which make us human, which make us alive, which give us access to compassion and connection. Perfection, as Abigail describes it, “belongs to the dead.”
Feel into that for a moment. Do you get it? You are not required to be perfect. To be without flaw or error or imbalance. To be alive in this messy, glorious world, to be of this messy, glorious world is to be wildly imperfect. To be wild and imperfect. That’s what we’re here for. That’s our gift and our offering. Our wild, imperfect, glorious, striving selves.
Abigail, being a singer, talks about it as your song. She describes the process of editing ourselves to be acceptable and appropriate, to fit in and do things properly as domesticating our voices. But you don’t have to be a singer to have a song. Your life is your song. Let it be a song of praise to what you truly love:
We domesticate our voices, you know, on purpose. We rid them of their wildness in the name of perfection, which we also recognize as something that only belongs to the dead. So we court death with our voices when we court perfection, and we remove ourselves, we put ourselves in the hierarchy, and remove ourselves from the collective, which is the real voice, right? So, this is why, when we began, I said, “I’m a singer, but what I mean is just that I’m a human.” And I think that all humans, every creature that breathes has a song and as sure as it has a fingerprint, it has a song, and your song is needed in the chorus of the world. And when we train ourselves, in the name of something that would own us, to sound other than what we are, we do a disservice, a deep disservice, to that which we truly love and truly loves us.
At this point you might rightly ask, But, how do you do that? How do you find the song which is your life and then sing it well and truly? How, speaking in the language we use more often here, do you practice your integrity?
Stepping away from practicalities for a moment, the mystic in me would say this: there is nothing between you and that which animates the world. And what you must do— through meditating, praying, singing, walking, dancing, creating, or loving with as much force and open-heartedness as you can possibly hold, and then maybe just a little more than you think you can manage— is realize that that which animates the world animates you, too. Feel how Life (or God, or the Light, or Spirit, or whatever you call it because it doesn’t care) is living Itself through every aspect of your life, including the messy, mucky, painful bits.
I’ll leave you with Abigail’s response when adrienne asked her what she would want everyone, whether or not they’re a singer, to learn to do for the good of the world:
You know, that ache in your gut or your chest, that feels like an empty place? Or can feel like something’s pulling on it? Like a seat of longing? I would ask [you] to, rather than trying to fill that empty throne with anything, sit with the ache of that empty space and recognize that all flutes are hollow. And breathe into that empty part, that seat of longing, and just let your breath come from there and see what it goes towards, see what that longing takes your voice towards. It might be your mother. It might be a tree. It might be your dead. It might be your unborn. But it will take you somewhere… hold that with respect. ‘Cause it’s an umbilicus connecting you to all living things. It’s not meant to feel whole, it’s meant to pull you into life.
Have a good week, my friends. May the sun shine upon you wherever you may be.
XO, Asha
“perfection belongs to the 💀 “
🙏🏻 🙏🏻
Thank you for introducing Abigail. I was not aware of her. But the image of the hollow flute is a piece of poetry to remember long. I too love Henri Nouwen’s powerful thought about the necessity of loneliness and ache. We’re not supposed to satisfy the ache or make it go away; we’re to see where it points. The flute conveys this succinctly and memorably. Thank you for this life affirmation! May another week follow like the last one. ❤️