To The PSR Graduating Class of 2020

Breathing | Being | Praying exercise 21
To PSR’s graduating class of 2020:

Dear Comrades,
I write to you during a time that is full of complexities, losses, mourning, sadness, and impossibility. I stand in solidarity with you: I, too, was also unable to “walk” and be “present” for my graduation ceremony this spring. .

We are surviving a global pandemic.
No other graduating class at PSR has lived through anything quite like this. We don’t know what will be the toll of these months on our bodies, spirit, communities, the environments and all our relations. .

We are living between the shadow of the now and the possibilities of our dreams for tomorrow. As Anzaldua put it, we are living in a moment mientras la sombra y el sueño. The exercise of re-membering important aspects of our trajectories helps us bear this moment and conjure up a future that is not yet here. .

Let’s face it, you have navigated cishet patriarchy & sexism, colonialism, racism, extractivist capitalism, white supremacy, phobias, violence, trauma, and so much more. re-membering these shadows is also an exercise in naming how far you have come. These memories testify to how you’ve resisted, how you have desired, dreamt another future for yourselves. What were the communities, the bodies, the relationships, the shared meals, the movements, the cries, and pleasures, ancestral wisdom, familial bonds, acts of kindness, places, generosities that were extended to you? Which authors, artists, art forms, theories, field work, communities, classes, hallway conversation, educators kept your heart pulsating all these years? Your curiosity and wonder alive? These people and places and beings and moments and memories have inscribed within y/our skin invaluable body-knowledge of how to reinvent existence in the face of impossibility. They are witnesses and blueprints of how you have been able to imagine, build, and create worlds where none seemed possible. .

May you re-member them. Always. Know that you are sacred, ferocious. .

You are Holy. .

You are love. .

May God bless and protect you as you move into the four directions of your future. .

With love and affection, Dr. Yô