Dear Community, I'm grieving equity. I'm attending a funeral for equity, for diversity, for inclusion. I'm grieving an idealistic ideal that says all are created equal. Last season, we cut back the fig tree so far, as if to erase it. It was going to be invasive next to the other plants, they said. I complained to the gardeners, I eat figs from that tree. I'm grieving that I live in a place here in the United States that has little to no care whatsoever for how this country was built, for whose backs it was built upon, that have not been acknowledged. I'm grieving the plaques that never happened, the plaques that say whose land this is, who the original stewards are. I remember crying in Australia, with the acknowledgement of the Indigenous people of that place. Crying because the museums cared enough to post what was what, and it was a beginning. I wanted that kind of reparation here. I wanted that for us. I wanted that for our museum. We acknowledge land here at MUSEA. (Our 501 (c)3, The Intentional Creativity Foundation acknowledges the original stewards) That fig tree, as the year went on, it started to come back. It started to grow up strong and compete a bit with the calla lilies. It started to compete even with the small maple nearby. I'm a woman in America with so many privileges. Yet there was a cycle in my life where our family was mostly Queer. As a kid I got criticized. When you wake up to how people are, sometimes you feel guilt or shame or wonder why you're weird. And then you learn about what's really going on, that people should be able to love whoever they want to love. And the rainbow flag in my soul started to fly as I defended, with pride having Queer people in my life. Marching as a child at the first Gay Pride parades with my family. Learning to be proud of the things other people criticized. And that fig tree started to push through, making friends with the plum instead of competing, slightly adjusting just to one side so the plum could have her blooms and the fig tree could find her way through the shadows of the other trees toward the sky, reaching from where she was cut back. Making friends with everything around her, narrowing herself, stretching her little body upward, her tender brown body reaching for light. I remember that time when my mother married a Black man. Not just any Black man, a man who was in a different class than us economically. a beautiful man, but a Republican and a capitalist and a chauvinist. There were issues, but we rallied around the equity of being a multiracial family. We did something weird, though. We moved from a place where black and white people live side by side and we moved to a town in California called Tiburon, named after sharks. Nothing against Tiburon, but we became the only multiracial family in Tiburon. I was eight years old and I was in on it. I'll never forget the day where we made a plot to go to the pool. And his worry the entire time ,as he was sweating the bullets of racism, bringing a girl child to a pool. The looks, y'all. And how he spoke to my mother that night of how terrified he was and how surprised he was that nothing happened. But he was a different class than us, you know? He spoke seven languages. He loved Swedish women who were beautiful. He wanted them to wear high heels, he told my mother, look at this other Swedish woman and her heels. My mother tried to fit in to his idea. It didn't work in the end. In that time with him, I learned so much because he taught me how my love of Black people since early, early in my life, when I went to almost all Black schools, how good that was. He told me I wasn't white and not to accept the white man's agenda on my cultural identity. He told me to celebrate where I came from and not go for their agenda. He taught me to play Hambone. Hambone, Hambone, where you been? Round the world and back again. An African story of passing the bone when all the meat is gone and given to them from the messah's table. And how much goodness they got out of that bone. We are in a time where we need to get some goodness from the bones. Not just because we're working with what we got. Because we got to sing through this time. I'm grieving equity, spending so much of my life working toward a common value system that people could actually understand how in art, 50% of the artists of the world are women, and how for many, many years, until very recently, that percentage was 2% to 3% of women were exhibited museums and galleries when 50% of us were artists. The inequity was so extreme that I've dedicated an enormous part of my life to getting us to 5%, but actually at MUSEA we're 95% female art based. And that 5% we share with men is by invitation and men who care that there's 50% artists and only two to 3%-5%, if we're lucky, of women. And of black and brown people, that percentage barely makes a register. I'm grieving some of the things that have happened over the past five years since the brutal murder of George Floyd, when there seemed to be a kind of a wake-up call and a care for diversity, equity, and inclusion. When it started to become popular to see that it was so much better to have companies and communities and sanctuaries and decisions with people of other orientations than white people, like how that was so much better for us, not just to genuflect from a perspective of doing it, not just because of performativism, but actually because you actually want that in your life, and in the places you gather. Because not only is it such a better place to live, when you have actual inclusive diversity by choice, it's just so much better. Everything, the culture, the connection, the conversation is so much better when there is diversity. You choose equity because you care and because you want to be with people who are different than you. I'm grieving that those DEIA departments are disappearing. I am greiving that short-lived cycle of speaking freely about what it means to take an all-white space and begin to include others, has suddenly dropped off the agenda as important. I'm grieving equity. I'm grieving museums even before the current undoing of certain museums, where the archaeologists began to change the names of findings that original archaeologists named. Artifacts that were named in the feminine, named for the goddess, named for the matriarchy. They began to change that language so that we wouldn't be able to find the artifacts of the feminine. I'm remembering about the trees that have been cut down, the groves dedicated to the mother's. the ancestors, the matriarchs, the goddesses. I'm grieving that those trees are being cut down again en masse in sacred land. I do lots of grieving about equity, and as I look at the fig tree, I see the green shoots reminding me to stretch for the sky. I grieve things like how Mount Diablo is called Mount Diablo, Because the indigenous people of that mountain were able to evade the conquest through hiding in the mountain for a time. Thery were thought to be so crafty to find a place in the mountain to hide so they called it Devil Mountain. And this mountain is the sacred mountain of many indigenous tribes of this area in Northern California. And they called it Devil Mountain. Yesterday, as a truck drove by with an uprooted tree, I saw the sign on the door and it said Devil Mountain, I grieve that the sacred mountain is called Devil Mountain. I grieve that probably over a hundred trees across the street from my home were cut down to make a roundabout to make less accidents. And then all the birds left. And then the water stopped flowing across the street. And then all the lights came on. Now there's street lights and now it's louder than ever.Now i live by a highway and I grieve the stumps of trees ground down. And the birds and the bees that left. Don't they know what trees are and who they are and what they do? Couldn't they have kept those trees in the middle, made a median with trees for birds, for water, for shelter for creatures and butterflies? Why wouldn't they think of planting milkweed so the monarchs would have a place to grow themselves? Don't they understand if there's no monarchs and there's no bees, there will be no food? Don't they care about the water? The water where I live has been tested again. There are toxic levels. Acceptable, they say, acceptable levels of toxicity. Of course, we filter our water. But right now, that groundwater has remnants of things that kill humans in small doses and animals and trees. I run around looking at the trees and saying to them, I hope you can handle this. Will you be able to titrate the toxicity? Will I? Will you help me? Will you breathe with me? Trees. Fig tree. Breathe with me. Reach for the sky. I grieve inclusion. I grieve the idea that we could be an inclusive people because we care, because our lives are better when we're inclusive. But I know better now that right now we're in a cycle where the things that I idealized, the small changes in percentages, the acknowledgements of indigenous people, the inclusion of women in leadership, the chance of a Black woman president in my lifetime, regardless of what you think about her policy, just the fact that that was possible made me break down in tears. Oh my gosh. Have we changed? But no. not as a collective. There are individual pockets, villages, where we still call on the sacred names and dance around the wheel of the year with respect and care for the harvest and the sun and the moon and the great romance of creation that we all experience. When we look and say to the rising fig that was cut down at the root: I see your brave green shoots reaching and making friends with the trees around you, becoming lengthy, reaching for the sky. Today it is raining. And the rain is pouring on your new green buds. I salute you, fig tree. And I look forward to what we shared before. All the ways to eat figs. Every fig I eat, I sing the praise of diversity. of equity, of inclusion, of justice, of right-mindedness in a time where wrong-mindedness is promoted as an ideal. I refuse their structures and their systems, and I turn instead to the teaching of the fig. The blossoms from the plum tree are falling to the ground in the rain, But I know soon enough there will be figs and there will be plums. And I pray that the bees who left here this year one day will find their way back and fertilize this aching heart. I'm remembering my Black father now. I remember holding his hand. I hold your hand. I reach for your hand. I grieve with you for the things that matter to you. As today I've shared some of the things that are on my heart and mind. This is Curate Shiloh Sophia for the Cura Council You can listen to this in my voice on my Subtack, The Cura Council.
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