Where are we? Where are we headed?
Get oriented to our place and time with Prentis Hemphill's guests
The intention behind Prentis Hemphill's podcast Finding Our Way is to offer listeners some level of “orientation” — a guiding light for where we are and a light for where we might go. Every time I listen, I’m grounded back in my body and in what matters most. And I find myself discovering ways for living in healing, wholesome relationship that are being worked out among queer communities and in Black and Brown communities committed to liberation. It’s a place I go to listen as a shivering, grateful outsider who is allowed to sit around a warm fire, listen, and try to work out both what it all means and what it could mean for me.
Prentis is a therapist and somatic coach who served as the Healing Justice Director for the Black Live Matter Global Network, among many more, before going on to found The Embodiment Institute. They are guided by questions and the conversations kicked up on this podcast are the most meditative, wise, healing, integrating, wholesome, impassioned, liberatory things I’m experiencing right now. The purpose of their podcast interviews is not to settle on answers with experts, but to hold and wrestle with questions, contradictions, and longings with those who are leading the way into new ways of being.
Each episode opens with the same question: Where are we right now? That question holds together my fascination with place with my fascination with theories of change. Grappling with what is happening is crucial to identifying what should happen—and how we might get there. Framing that question as a “where,” as a matter of space and place, shows just how brilliant Hemphill’s prophetic imagination is. And asking that question of these particular people opens up worlds.
I’ve transcribed, with some editing for succinctness and clarity, the responses of nine of their guests below. My hope is simply to allow these striking reflections to be held together in a single place, to expose more people to this incredible podcast, and to hold us tight as we squarely face what’s happening today in a way that builds our courage to love and fight.
Read them meditatively. Don’t blow through. Sit with their words, with the acrobatic angles they challenge us to peer at the world through, with the meaning of these perspectives for our own healing, becoming, and responsibilities as people alive today, in this place.
Sonya Renee Taylor - July 2020
"We are at the merger of a few very specific things. Metaphorically being in a global pandemic, energetically things spread incredibly fast, a time of rapid movement—not on the 3d, but the 4d and 5d, the things we cannot see moving very quickly—we’re in a time of infection, so the question is: what do we want to spread?”
adrienne maree brown - August 2020
“Utopias live on top of dystopias. In most times, they’re concurrent and it’s just a matter of your perspective, your privileges, as to which experience you’re having….There are people totally out to lunch, people trying to figure out how to pay the rent, people locked in prison right now—all at the same time….How do we be with the suffering that is actually happening right now? And with all the possibility that is actually opening and unfolding?”
Patrisse Cullors — September 2020
“We are in so many different moments at once. This moment feels both like fertile ground, and it feels like destruction, and it feels like big big vision, and a deep reckoning and healing…This moment is handing every single one of us a paint brush and a palette and a canvas and is like, ok, here you go, are you ready for this, are you ready for the responsibility of creating the vision for all of us? And it’s also very exciting—I haven’t been in a moment like this in my lifetime where I feel a tremendous amount of hope and excitement and also deep fear about what’s going to happen, what’s next?”
Lama Rod Owens — October 2020
“This time feels like being in labor. Our country, our culture, our world, our communities, our lives—we’re in labor, we’re in the process of trying to give birth to something. And we know when we give life to something there’s the quality this experience of pain of hardship that we have to experience, that we have to move through. And we also know not everyone survives the birth, not everyone survives the labor, not everyone will be alive to see what will be birthed….We’re also experience that this is the apocalypse, or at least an apocalypse. And apocalypse means unveiling. It means truth. It means that the veils are being drawn back, the curtains are being drawn back, the light of the truth is flooding into our lives, our consciousness, and our communities — and a lot of us aren’t interested in the truth. And those of us who run back into the dark are those who don’t make it. I’m not saying they’re going to die: I’m saying they are the ones who won’t make the transition.”
Alexis Pauline Gumbs — October 2020
“Where we are physically, how we can and cannot be physically [in the midst of the pandemic]—it’s actually offering everyone some rigor in terms of where we are.
We are learning how to love, as usual, but we are learning in such a profound way right now.
What is it to actually be at home on this planet? What is it really? Because whatever we thought it was, we are really being called to learn it differently and to let go of the definitions and assumptions that we had. So I think that’s where we are. I know that we are in the unfolding of love. And for me, I’m grateful for that. I’m grateful that while everything else is showing it’s impermanence, flaunting it’s impermanence. Love is constant. So if I can learn how to be in love, that’s the hopefulness. And it’s not hopefulness unless it’s all of us.”
Tarana Burke - April 2021
“I want to answer from where I want us to be. We talk so much about healing and trauma. People right now need to be in a place of healing. This last year was so traumatic. We get by making jokes, but it’s been one thing after another after another in a pandemic. We’re out of it enough to maybe breathe a little better, maybe get a bit of a roadmap. Not just how we’re going to travel and all that—which I’m into—but acknowledging what we went through, how it hurt, what it left them with. Because the remnants are going to last longer even longer if we don’t do that. That’s where I’m hoping people are. I do hear a little more about healing or dealing with what we went through than in the past.”
Bayo Akomolafe - May 2021
“My elders say if you want to find your way, you must be willing to become lost. You must be willing to lose your way in order to find it. That sounds like poetic nonsense and yet there’s something rich about that description and it’s appropriateness for white-modernity and the dynamics of our present globalizing civilization. I think we are experiencing the toxicity of being found. Fully found, fully owned, fully categorized, fully in-place, if you will. There’s something ironic about modernity and how it frames place: it frames place by naming it forcefully, sometimes in violence, by insisting on the agency of the human, the individual. The irony there is when you name something so forcefully, something slips away, something eases away. What eases away, what steals away? Our relationships with each other, with the earth, a sense of humility, the whiff of an idea that we are entangled with the planet is lost in the city….I think we need cracks and openings. Now we need to get lost in order to find a new way. Where we are: we are living in the incarceration of a single way. The monolithic enterprise of the highway, and we are being invited to fall off like fugitives.”
Phil Agnew - June 2021
“I feel confused about it often. I feel confused about my place in it…
It feels to me that we’re in a time of very rapid transitions. And new normals are happening every single day. It’s hard to keep up with. Every day there’s a new word, a new identity, a new way of being that’s being explored and being popularized. And we’re in late-stage capitalism as people living in the United States within an empire in decay, rapidly—seeking, with these little death lurches, to find ways to survive. If you look at America’s story, the capitalist story as a tapestry, it is ripping. Every day a new rip is happening. And the United States is trying to sew it up super quick, ‘Hey, no no no, you can still buy things! You can still go to nice restaurants! The world is not over.’ …Movement people have to hold the tears open.”
ALOK - July 2022
“I see fear. Fear that has become so calcified people think it’s their identity. I see people who mistake dissociation as personality and armor as a body. I see how that fear leads to so much distrust and division and separation. I see a lot of torment and anguish and loneliness that’s not allowed to surface because people pretend as if it’s not there. I see people playing pretend.
The history of this fear is the history of the individual. Which for me is always a ghost story: how we came to see ourselves as separate from one another, from an ecology, from an interconnect sense of being.”
Alicia Garza - August 2022
“I think where we are now is both a very dangerous moment and a moment of incredible opportunity. I know that can sound a little contradictory, but. On the dangerous side of things, we’re in a pretty intense period of backlash. That backlash is driven by some of the ways in which we’ve been successful: inserting new conversations, intervening in old conversations, and bringing new conversations to the table. And not just talking, but also changing rules, changing who’s in power, and changing the way power operates. So we should expect that the people who benefit from the way things are right now, they want their shit back. They want it to go back the way it was. So what’s dangerous about that is that, one, some of us don’t see it that way, so we’re responding in ways that aren’t meeting the moment. Two, it’s scary. And it’s not just that people are mad, but people are being targeted and lives are at stake. So much of this backlash is driven by white nationalists who have come above ground and even serve in the government, they’re elected officials…But then, inside of that, there is incredible opportunity. We wouldn’t be experiencing this pushback if we weren’t changing things. We have to keep going. And we have to be deliberate about how we move and we have to apply extra pressure. Now is not the time to reign it back. Now is the time to go full force—but a thing to consider about this moment is that full force is not rigidity, full force is actually bringing more people into the process and into the fold, having many more access points for people to find each other and to work together, collaborate together, and dream together. And that is actually what creates the collective force we need.”
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We’re in a daunting place, friends. Do not be afraid. The Spirit is among us, dancing.