Pa que vivimos

Dear Friends: About my workshop, YOUR VOICE AS CATALYST - I'm sharing a condensed version that is "Donate what you can." Starts April 27, online, 4 Saturdays, 10 am Eastern Time US.

I felt inspired to act on this today because of an encounter yesterday evening. I was getting groceries from the store next to my studio, and got to talking to Fon who runs it. He asked how I was doing. Something made me tell the truth.

I said. Well, things are challenging, livelihood is challenging, como ganar...

He said, I work and I work, and there is no break, and for every single thing I think I may need, I have to question, can I afford it, it may even be the smallest thing.

He said, I sometimes ask myself, pa que vivimos? for what are we living?

It was so tender, I have to say, early morning in Sevilla, to see someone I hardly know speak straight from the heart. 

I said, thank you, Fon and felt something in me shift. I said, in such moments, I want to be grateful. Yes, he nodded. I said we have our feet on the earth and the sky above and the sun is out. Yes, he said. I said, shie shie which is Thank you in Chinese and left feeling the gratitude that I hadn't been feeling till I called it into me, till someone shared something tender and true.

But that question, pa que vivimos, took me deep into myself, how I've been living the dance with money, how for me, it's a different dance and I haven't been honoring what has felt true to my way of being and seeing.

From the start, I wanted this workshop to be offered asi, like this.

Come as you are, donate what you can.

It mattered, given what I have come to understand, about the impacts of colonization and trans-generational trauma, to have this workshop be shared in this way.

But I didn’t listen to myself. Something in me, the part that still follows the ways of a particular kind of world - there are many worlds! - felt I needed to do it otherwise.

Someone once said to me, Shebana, you're at once trying to dismantle the way one world works and also be a part of that same world.

I ask myself: How will the power I have given to money, what it allows me/us to do and what it doesn't, how will that change unless I act on what I value first and let money follow. Instead of following it.

In that mixed up syntax of that sentence is some true feeling I want to embody, that I don't have clarity on right now. But it led me to this moment, to the realization that this particular offering wants to be “come as you are, donate what you can.”

Yes, of course, I want to learn how to dance in this world, with this world, to survive and be sustainable.

But the dance I really want to learn is supplication to the song, to the trees, to the stones, to the sea.

​So this is my way of simplifying one dance so I can lean fully into another. And surrender to "pa que vivimos," wherefore I am here.

​At the beginning, subsé pehle, en la oscuridad, the animal left the sea, found the shore, loved the cave, and became song, tree, stone dance...

- in mystery

Shebana

ABOUT YOUR VOICE AS CATALYST

This workshop grew directly out of my The Good Manners of Colonized Subjects play and its core poem about inviting fear in for tea. There is a palpable impact I have seen - in myself and others - when you excavate what has kept you silent and find the words and and body movements to express what wants to speak - not just in performance, but in your own sense of what is possible for you when you engage with fear to empower your passion, your "pa que vivimos" "what you are living for."