further darkness

in collaboration with Taraneh Sarrafzadeh

Joaquin Miller Park, Huchiun, December 2024

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further darkness is a winter solstice performance ritual gestated from over a year of creative and spiritual research into the question: what wisdom lurks in the dark?

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Emerging from a call to alchemize our grief from the cellular to the collective, further darkness brings us into immersive witness of darkness’s mystery and transformative power. Sensing its way through the dark as a portal into ancestral remembrance and diasporic communication beyond sight, further darkness refuses our cultural equation of vision with truth. We instead insist on being with those truths we cannot see clearly, but whose murmurs we hear, whose tremors we feel, whose sweat we smell, whose breath we taste on the tip of our tongues. We honor the dark for beckoning us into sensitivity of these rich potentialities, feeling for new worlds in the cracks, in the shadows, in the soft soil.

 

further darkness began from a moment of parallel grief in our friendship. In unfolding its medicine together, dancing with the rhythmic comings and goings of the dark through the seasons, we have been humbled to darkness’s profound vastness. Grief was just a doorway: the dark is surprising, tricky, awkward, soft, intense, ugly, subtle, still, familiar. In these deep and wide possibilities we come home to each other.