Praying in Queer

is for All Bodies!

Because outrage, fury and sorrow are not just emotional but also physical experiences, I am finding especially in these times that my prayers need to be more and more and yes, more physical. As in touch, muscularity, rhythm, sound, sensuality and communal sweat. Not just to cleanse and release, but to strengthen and prepare. My social justice warrior friend Austin often says, “I want to make a prayer for . . .” and I absolutely appreciate his terminology. Try it out. First say, “I’ll say a prayer,” then say “I’ll make a prayer” Feel the difference? For me, this is one key quality of Praying in Queer. Because the Divine’s first language is not Words, especially not someone else’s. I believe Her first language for us is Body. Bodies seem to be the overlapping space where humanity and divinity do their thing. It’s where Making Prayers happens.

1.

His name is Ollie. After our own kitty died between my beloved and me in our bed 1-1/2 years ago, I’ve found healing help through kitties in our neighborhood tract. On my walks, I’ve learned which homes belong to which cats, and of those felines, which will allow for touching, petting, rubbing and delighting.

Kathryn and I have learned some names and have made others up. There’s Jakey (Cash), Honeydew, Grady, Mila, Juno, Butterball, Queenie, Patchy, Mr. Mestoffelees, CJ, Miles and Youngheart. The ferals in our own backyard who are in their own mysterious ways befriending us are Peaches, Bella, Bugsie, Apricot and Limpy/Meanie.

I’ve bonded most with Ollie, or as I have come to call him, Ollieluia. Ollie was a feral kitty brought from a nearby alley to live in the yard and on the porch of a family about three blocks away. Once they shared his name with me and said how it was ok to visit him, I’ve walk by almost every day and call out, “Olllie! Ollieluia! Are you home? Ollie, can you come out and play? Oll-llieeee!” And sure enough, he comes out from the bushes or their semi-partitioned porch and jumps up onto the hip-high wall bordering their entire yard. Sometimes he runs to me (nothing melts a heart like a cat running to you). Once on the wall, he allows me to rub under his chin, along his neck, over his ears and between his shoulders. He pushes his head into my hand for more. Often, he literally drools, forming little puddles on top of the brick-and-cement wall. He allows me to talk and sing to him. I improvise different words to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” Like this. Sing along!

I'm so happy to see you here today
as I walk and roam and find my way
Thank you for coming out to play, 'Luia.

Have you been happy and peaceful, safe and protected
Healthy and whole, loved and connected
Have you been cuddled and snuggled and huggled, 'Luia?

Ollieluia, Ollieluia
Thank you Goddess for Ollieluia . . .

The most special part is how, when I rub, talk and sing to Ollieluia, he leans the whole side of his body into my belly, stays there, purrs and sometimes drools on my hand and sleeve. It’s like my vocal vibrations and his purrs meet and create a new thing. Yes, we may be co-regulating, co-soothing, co-assuring. Co-something, because there is something more and defies words. Over the months, Ollieluia has become an altar for me, and I find myself pouring out my prayers to the Mama through him while we are in contact.

Praying with the altar of Ollielluia in touch, vibration, improvised song and cross-species (re)connection does something to me. I hope and sense something similar for him. There’s nothing like prayer that’s sensory, relational and sensual. I notice this: Every time I return home from these Ollieluia walks and open the front door, I feel possible. I feel closer to whole. I feel rebooted, restored and ready.

2.

Zumba?! Really? Why??

Yes, really!

I go to Zumba to commune with the Ancestors and make prayers to the Divine Mama.

Developed as a dance-fitness practice in 2001 by Colombian dancer Beto Pérez, it initially involved Latin-inspired music and moves. I think I came into Zumba in 2009, and since then, it has come to incorporate old and new school R&B, hip hop and a bit of poppy-rocky-something too. It’s literally moved me through really rough times like marital separation/moving out, identity loss/gain/transformation, depression, career and income loss, divorce, academic culture, cancer, the COVID pandemic quarantine/social distancing, relocations, deaths of loved ones and so much more.

Here in Torrance, it has deepened into a prayer practice. I didn’t go looking to pray at Zumba. But Zumba began to pray me. The rhythms—global majority heartbeats of the Great Mama—and movements/gestures open me up. Beginning in my body dropping into downbeats rather than my mind trying to form prayerful sentences, things like this organically happen:

My dancing body thanks the Ancestors, generations of survivors, and music/dance artists—Black and Brown—for the Life I know I’m receiving because of them.

My dancing body lifts and acknowledges especially the Ancestors who were stolen from their sacred homeland or had their homelands stolen from them. Ancestors of the gifts I’m receiving through this thing called Zumba. My body upholds those lost at sea, those enslaved as subhuman chattel, those hunted, detained and caged, and those policed in every direction. Those whose lives were taken. As I dance, I make vows to receive the life force they’re sharing with me through the music and the moves, to live and do right by them. I dance for them and ask if they will dance with me.

My body invokes my cousins who loved to dance and perform, and passed from this life before me. April, ballerina with the Oakland Ballet. Lisa, haumana hula with Ka Pa Hula O Wahineali’i. Kurt, musical theater performer with the Grateful Crane Ensemble. I feel their joy, our joy. I call my other cousins who loved to dance and those who never felt the freedom to. I invoke my maternal uncles—especially Melvin, Ronnie and Bob—who danced with their wives—Shizue, Mary and Faye—as if they were floating above the ground. Hawai’i style, my mom used to say.

When my body remembers my parents, my whole life smiles. I dance with my niece and feel her laughing. I dance with twelve generational circles of ancestors (thank you Masankho Banda) of blood, art and spirit. We commune. There is nothing dividing us from each other. We are prayers across the veil.

I give thanks to the Mama Goddess in each of Her names I’ve so far been given. I feel Her understanding my hands and feet, my easy attunement to rhythm. I feel a kind of swelling of Her spirit and mine.

My body—muscles, bloodstream, heart, bones, organs, brain, spine, cells, atoms—becomes restored as a site of Life. Although in “church” settings, I feel disconnected from the word Praise, here in the rhythm, groove, sweat and dancing community, Praise becomes me. The music is all the sacred text I need. My body is my offering. The offering plate is the dance floor, and how I will now live.

My only wish from entrance to exit is that the teachers and gym would at least acknowledge the human lineages of Zumba. Otherwise it feels like we’re consuming culture without entering its living river, which involves acknowledgement, giving thanks, reckoning and making offerings in the spirit of mutuality/reparations, and vows. I sometimes imagine offering my own R&B dance exercise classes in order to do just this.

But Zumba. Or its forms closer to its origins. Try it sometime, allowing yourself grace to learn, stretch and become familiar. Enter a space where you get to be immersed in the heartbeats of the Sacred Mama through the downbeats of the global majority. It can help to increase, bit by bit, a shift in your center of consciousness from white supremacy patriarchy (which we’ve all been formed in) to the heartbeat of the Black and Brown Mama (which we can remember, honor and restore). Receive the blessing with humility and joy. Leave your words at the door. Follow.

3.

Ok by now, y’all know I love Mama Ocean. When we relocated to Torrance, my body grieved the absence of redwoods, all trees, greens, shades of the East Bay. So much of greater LA is geographically a vast desert. And. Here in the somewhat creatively constrained suburb of Torrance, we live just over five miles from the sands and waters of Hermosa Beach. Seriously. If you drive four blocks south from our front door then make a right on Artesia Blvd and keep heading west, it will plunk you down at the beach.

The scent of ocean air, the sight of whatever shade of blue is there on a given day, the sound of perpetually powerful waves, the creatures that know this as their home . . . She is So Physical. As much as we have harmed Her oceanic bodywaters, she keeps healing the oofs, ouches and owies of my skin, muscle and mind. As I watch a grown couple standing on the sand playing paired hand-clapping games of youth. As I watch children, teenagers and adults scream in glee, running toward and away from the incoming waves. As I watch surfers try to harmonize with Her shapes and rhythms. As any of us who’ve come to Her on any given day get to enjoy being communally spellbound when dolphins swim by with their arcing fins. She is such powerful medicine.

There is a strategy I play with to enter Her waters. I have to get over humps of “Aaaah, it’s cold!” and “Whoa, the waves are big!” in order to go for it. You know where I said I get plunked down after the 15-20 minute drive to get here? It places me right between the Hermosa Pier to the left and the Manhattan Pier to the right. If I take a walk about shin-high in the water to and from either pier, my body builds up enough warmth internally and reacquaintance externally to create readiness. I think this too is a ritual, no?

The approach is a dance too. I liken it to knowing when to enter a jump rope that two people are turning at either end. This is where the body comes in, a fully kinesthetic listening. Over time, my body has learned when to go for it, between Mama Ocean’s push of wave and pull of foam. Do I always succeed in making a smooth entrance? No. But She is a strong and welcoming playmate.

It feels like prayer all along, listening, attuning, having to be 100% humble. There is the moment when I go all in, dive under my first wave and come out the other side. It’s like a remembrance, I don’t know how else to describe it. Then once I’m beyond the breakers, most often with my beloved beside me, play, humility and baptism are all there.

But what I really wanted to say was this. When I don’t time my dive right, into the oceanic jump rope dance, lots of pounds of watery pressure and foam take me. I know a common impulse is to panic and try to right oneself in that disorienting forcefield. But there is a wonderful alternative. I close my eyes, release my muscles, loosely notice how She takes me, and surrender. It’s not always smooth. Sometimes it lasts longer than others, but never longer than my breath can easily be held. Sometimes I get rocked, wildly undulated or turned. But She always brings me to shore. I could swear She laughs as She spits me back to safety, sand and salt up in everything and everywhere. All I know is I’ve been taken by a wild dance partner who is also my Divine Mama, and I am more than ok. She Is Here, and now, somehow more than before, So Am I.

Friends, let’s refuse the domestication not only of our loves and identities, but of our prayers. Let’s unearth and relearn the wisdom inherent in our ancient humanity and creatureliness. Our world needs us to share Life in these times from a deeply retrieved place.

With you in Her,

Coke