Soul Folks
The slow work of growing creative community
Friends,
Last Friday I was feeling anxious, a bit distracted, and struggling to feel motivated to work. I was teary, wandering from laptop to kitchen to living room and back again. It took me a few hours, but I finally realized what it was: grief. Grief at the news that Image, a journal exploring art faith and mystery for 35 years, was closing later this year.
Almost two decades ago, I spent a semester in Florence, drinking in the city, its art, and its faith. A center of the Renaissance, I felt inspired by a history where art and religious traditions not only co-existed but spoke in one voice about our shared life. There was a deep humanism there, one I struggled to find in my small college town. That next semester, I talked to my spiritual director about this tangle of passion, frustation, and loneliness I felt. She turned around, shuffled through her bookshelf, and handed me a few copies of Image to take back to my dorm.
A journal covering art, faith, and mystery? I felt relief opening the pages. Relief that oh yes, I'm not alone, there are others who see their faith and art practices as two sides of the same commitment. I subscribed, and soon decided to go to seminary to study theology and the arts, opting to move west months early to stop over at the Glen Workshop along the way. Reading those pages wasn't just an education, it was an invitation into a generous and open-hearted community: iconographers and songwriters, professors and painters, poets and spiritual writers. These people don't go away when a publication ends, but it can feel harder to sense that larger voice when we lose a historic means for it to speak.
So yeah, grief. And trying to process all that means my plans for this letter took a pivot. It's Black History Month, and I've started a series on R.A.P. Ferreira’s album Purple Moonlight Pages and all its historical references. My approach started in the head, but this week I needed to address the heart. After the news about Image, I kept drifting back to one track in particular that helped me process what I’m feeling: “Doldrums.”
“Doldrums” is an old nautical word, one that describes that moment a ship waits motionless for wind. If you've ever been confronted with unexpected loss, you know the feeling: the wind taken right out of your sails. You have everything you need to move forward, and yet...nothing happens. You're drifting, aimless. After R.A.P. Ferreira was kicked out of a grocery store for rapping, he was confronted with that same loss. It's not just that he gets kicked out of a public space, which would be frustrating enough. It's also what it symbolizes: he's on a shoestring budget making lo-fi music videos, and here's yet another set-back in his work. His creative pursuits meet the blunt realities of a world that doesn't seem to care. That's the doldrums. What do you do about that? What does he do?
The poet's at a decision point: he might be tempted to take the easier, more successful route of making “visually zany” raps like other bombastic rappers. Or he might be tempted to waste time grasping for answers like some of his friends with “superstitious metaphysics, stained with humdrum.” Instead, he makes a different choice: this rapper takes a nap, he cooks a meal, and he relaxes at home with his son.
In the face of setbacks, he reorients his creative life back to the relationships and rhythms that give his life meaning in the first place. He makes space for recognizing “the signs of cycle” and “slow-farming humility.” You can almost picture him chopping onions in the kitchen repeating it like a mantra: “I accept the mystery, I accept the mystery, I accept the mystery.” For this poet, the best way to respond to setbacks is to recognize that success isn't linear and that creative work takes time. In the ebbs and flows of any effort worth its salt, sometimes the best thing to do is to “kick back and inherit the world.”
But don't be mistaken: this isn't solipsistic self-care. Inheriting the world—that's beatitude work. That’s work that happens in community, both in the present and through a lineage of people who come before us. That’s what an inheritance is, right? The receiving of a gift. The poet continues: “And the goal is to retain, the goal is to retain the most whole / It’s the soul folks, it's the soul folks.” Soul folks. Such a great phrase, and R.A.P. Ferreira layers it with meaning: he’s referring to W.E.B. Du Bois’ landmark book The Souls of Black Folk, the name of his rap-only vinyl store and venue in Nashville, and any spiritually-inflected community (his wordplay is so good).
Trying to live through a heart-dulling low tide? Find your soul folks. And for me, diving into this album and learning more about Black culture through this D.I.Y. artist-run space has put some wind in my sails. There are “signs of cycle” here, and even as I grieve losing one creative space, I'm also inspired by others that are growing all around us.
Just yesterday, I went to “a chance encounter,” a small experimental gathering in Minneapolis for communal meaning-making, climate activism, and the arts. Lillie (the facilitator, “relationship-weaver,” and all around inspiring human) guided us through a reflection on a changing world and where we find ourselves in it. We walked around the room, reflected on quotes hanging on the walls, and used collage and conversation to reflect our way toward new ideas. At one station, a fellow attendee Sara and I were talking about this one from Marian Wright Edelman: “Learn to be quiet enough to hear the genuine in yourself so that you can hear it in others.” Learning to slow down like that reminded them of San Francisco's privately-owned public spaces, green gardens hidden throughout the city’s glassy surface. What a perfect image.
Soul Folks feels like one of those green spaces, and I can’t wait to visit the space next time I’m in Nashville. The “chance encounter” gathering happened in a small venue in the shadow of a freeway—another green space. I'm sure you can think of a green space in your own neighborhood too. These are soulful places, unassuming rooms, the patient work of local communities and D.I.Y. spaces. They won't make national news, but they're all over this country. And while we might be losing an important one, they’re also growing too, even if we don't see it (I'm not just saying this—I know this is true. Check out the working list later in this letter).
Another quote I resonated with at the gathering yesterday was this one by J. Drew Lanham: “We have to recognize the joy that the world didn't give us and that the world can't take away, in the midst of the world taking away what it can.” There is joy and community and creativity to be found, but it must be found—one meal, one conversation, one page, one song at a time.
So I'm still in the doldrums, even as I write to you. Maybe you are too. Spaces like Image are rare, and we need them more now that ever. Just this past week I talked with a writer facing down yet another rejection letter, a queer theologian pushed out of a college, and a songwriter looking for work. The doldrums aren’t easy, and there aren’t any shortcuts. So it's a relief to me that R.A.P. Ferreira doesn't end the song with answers to the malaise. Instead, he throws out a litany of questions. Questions we can live into, even now, wherever our creative work may take us:
Can you find the level of difficulty in this?
Can you find the level of jubilee in this?
Can you find the level of revelry in this?
Can you find the level of freedom in this?
Can you find the level of spirit in this?
Take care,
Michael
After I saw the news that Image is closing, I reached out to some friends and colleagues to crowd-source a list of similar organizations. It's a working list, and it's a diverse one to boot. Buddhists, Christian, queer, Jewish, liberal, atheist, conservative—they’re all there. And they’re—we’re—all united in a shared commitment to cultivate the common good through the arts. Click the link, take a look, and get in touch with a local group that interests you:
Art and Spirit Organizations 🌱
This working list was first built with the support of Bridge Projects. Thanks so much to the following artists, scholars, and advocates who added to it this week: Dr. Jonathan Anderson, Lillie Benowitz, Dr. Maria Fee, Dr. Jennifer Awes Freeman, Dea Jenkins, Victoria Emily Jones, Mason Mennenga, Dr. Ben Quash, Meaghan Ritchey, Julie Tai, Lanecia Rouse Tansley, Dr. Tamisha Tyler, and Dr. Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt.
“cutting greens” by Lucille Clifton
curling them around
i hold their bodies in obscene embrace
thinking of everything but kinship.
collards and kale
strain against each strange other
away from my kissmaking hand and
the iron bedpot.
the pot is black,
the cutting board is black,
my hand,
and just for a minute
the greens roll black under the knife,
and the kitchen twists dark on its spine
and I taste in my natural appetite
the bond of live things everywhere.The art and wisdom of Jack Whitten
Gordon Parks’ The Invisible Man photograph series for Life Magazine
Explore Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series
Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron on changing our hearts toward pain