It was a morning with a soft wetness slowly lifting away. We were staying in a bed and breakfast in central New Jersey, a community full of horse farms, when the phone call came. The proprietors, a husband and wife, were more than gracious, the wife explaining when we arrived the night before that her husband loved poetry. He loved it and he loved writing it. They even had a signed copy of a book by a poet I knew, and they asked about my work. As the phone call came, I was signing a copy of Spirit Boxing as a donation to their collection. The voice was shrill and barely distinguishable, that of one of my sisters delivering the news of our son, Kala’s death. 
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      The Yoruba prayer I included in "The Ten Lights of God," hoping Kala would be the one to pray over my body in its stillness, became a prayer God chose not to answer, for reasons I may never know:

                                                “May I know the blessing of being buried by my son.”

     After talking with my sister, I walked out to our car, and saw several of my neighbors' horses grazing quietly in the pasture. They were so serene. The sky was full, but not threatening. The grayness was too quiet, though. Kristen and I were immediately devastated, and I was in no shape to drive. Kristen got us back to our little farmhouse in the Hudson Valley, shrouded with trees and marked with stone gardens in a Zen motif. The morning birdsong mesmerized. We were on the return leg of a trip we took to Cambridge, Maryland, to the annual conference of the Maryland Library Association, where I gave a talk on the importance of libraries to me as a child growing up in Baltimore, after receiving the Maryland Author Award.

     Like me, Kala was a native son of Baltimore. In his forty nine years, he made good use of books as he found them necessary. They were not always what he was supposed to read, and one need not go far to guess where he got that trait. He read the Tolkien books when he was nine years old, and had a broad and independent mind, traits that I am sure he gave to his two children. My son was a big man, standing 6' 6" tall. He was a strong, young man, full of love. He worried about me, though, as he saw me pursuing my own happiness. He even moved to Boston in 2000, hoping both our lives would improve.

​     In 2016, Kristen and I began our relationship. Kala called one day that spring to congratulate me. He told me: “You are whole now, Daddy. This is so much better.”

     In February 2018, we moved into this farmhouse, just thirty-five minutes across the state line from where we lived in West Cornwall, Connecticut. Kala helped us, using the expertise he gained from years of working as a mover. He loved riding on the trucks that sometimes took him across the country, and I think of him now as traveling, and I think of him as an old, treasured friend. Kala was born in my first marriage, where his mother, Ms. Eleanora Dent, and I lost his older brother, Michael Jr., to Down Syndrome.  
       
    Kala was a father, a son, a stepson, a step brother, an uncle, a cousin, a nephew a trusted friend, and loved one too many people. His funeral took place in Miller’s Metropolitan Chapel in Baltimore, owned by my cousin Geff Miller. It was a private service for family and old friends. There was not an empty chair in the room. His memorial service was full of people, some of whom I have known since they were born. Kala’s maternal cousins, loved him dearly. Two of them, Kevin and Ray, gave moving remarks as they cried. 
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    My son had several health issues, but slipped away quietly in his sleep on the morning of May 6th, three days before the anniversary of my father’s passing in 2003, nineteen years earlier. His grandfather’s passing prompted him to return to Baltimore. Kala was with his son, and his son’s Mom in their home in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, when Kristen and I last saw him in September, 2021.

     We move slowly through the days now, doing things more intuitively. Several times a day I look up at places in the house where he stood when he helped us move, or when he brought his family to visit us on Thanksgiving in 2019, after our honeymoon in Taiwan. I look up and see him, or I think of how much I love him, how deeply. The love is the fullness that keeps the hollow feeling of loneliness from spinning me out into space, disentangled from all that keeps us from entering into that emptiness and fullness that is the other side of things. My faith is such that God is love. 

     Kala slept away just around sunrise on that morning of May 6th, to fly back into that divine essence, and the news of his transition was caught in that mystical moment of stepping out onto the porch and seeing the horses grazing in the misty air of divine grace.
        
     The magic of horses continues to fill our lives.

    🌸🌿🌹🌸🌿🌷🌸🌿🌷🌸🌿🌷

Donations in remembrance of Kala O. Weaver may be made to:
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Mother Seton Academy
Sister Margaret A. Juskelis, SSND
President
2215 Greenmount Avenue
Baltimore, MD 21218
410-563-2833, ext 228
Email mjuskelis@mothersetonacademy.org

Cave Canem Poets
cavecanempoets.org

Obsidian Literary Magazine
​https://obsidianlit.org

​

      As we walked through Taoyuan airport, it seemed as if nothing had changed in the nine years since the last time I lived on the island. In 2009, I spent the summer there studying Mandarin at Taipei Language Institute (TLI). At that time, I lived alone in a small faculty apartment near National Taiwan University. 

     I was here now with Kristen, and as we walked she saw news bulletins in English about the approaching typhoon, and she was excited to know we arrived with such a grand natural fanfare. I was surprised that she was not afraid. In fact, I had hoped we would miss it, which we mostly did. As we rode toward our hotel, it was late in the evening, and the rain began to ease. That night the storm turned and headed north toward Japan, granting a pass to Taiwan. The following day was the first day of October, and the weather was that perfect Taiwanese autumn, a warm but gentle sun with a soft breeze. I was home again, and Kristen was there for the first time. It was our honeymoon, an announcement my godfather Dr. Chinghsi Perng declared in our email exchange.

     Our Taiwan honeymoon is a year behind us, or if you are thinking as Chinese language indicates, our honeymoon is one year above now. The past is above, and the future is below, a verticality of time in Chinese language. As we landed in Taiwan, we could not know the gifts we would receive, even as each day was a gift. We made a decision to create a treasure chest of memories that we could draw on in the future, and the future is now. So I hope all of you, in your own lives, can use the beautiful moments of the past, among other strategies, to help sustain you in this present that engages us all in this global pandemic. Although some blame the pandemic on globalism, our connectedness as human beings is a fact of life now, most of which I think is good.

     In the evening that we landed and took our room in the Sherwood Hotel in the Songshan District of Taipei, we took a taxi to the GongGuan area of the city, its Harvard Square, the campus neighborhood of National Taiwan University (NTU) , where I first landed in Taiwan in January, 2002. We walked along the edge of the main gate, me feeling the rush of memories, the feeling of being home, and Kristen marveling at all she was seeing for the first time. We stood on Roosevelt Road and watched the stream of motorcycles before taking a taxi back to our hotel with a driver who sang Italian opera for us. It’s a place with one of the highest levels of education in the world, a gateway to the rest of East Asia. 

     A few days later we had our Taiwanese wedding, something of a surprise my godfather and godmother, the Perngs, put together for us. Dr. Perng is professor emeritus at NTU, and he gave me my Chinese name when I was teaching in the theater department as a Fulbright. He was chair of the department, and he gave me the name Wei Yafeng 尉雅風。At the banquet table with friends from my first time in the country surrounding us, Kristen was given her Chinese name Shi Keting 史可亭。That first weekend in the city, we were guests of Dr. and Mrs. Perng and friends in the National Theater, who took us to see the premiere of the play Hold On, Love!,  by Dr. Perng and Fang Chen, with the English translation by my godfather, a Shakespearean scholar whose translations are well known. The play was inspired by As You Like It, and written in Hakka, one of China’s ethnic cultures. We were in the spell of enchantment that comes when couples such as ourselves meet later in life, and can share across time and cultures the special parts of our lives. Kristen is Jewish, daughter of a matrilineal line tracing back to southern Russian immigrants who landed in New York in the early twentieth century. Our home has the rich air of worlds inside worlds.

​     We met with old friends and had lunches and dinners. Ze Yang, a poet and editor, took us for tea at the Wisteria Tea House. The playwright and actress, Hsing Penning, hosted us for tea and snacks at her home and on another evening had dinner with us. Scott Prairie, the musician and songwriter, met us for dinner and walked with us through GongGuan. 

     Taking the train to the eastern coast city of Taiwan, Hualien, we spent the night at Hen Nan Temple and Monastery, where I spent a little over a month during my longest period in Taiwan, the greater part of my yearlong sabbatical in 2004 to 2005. While in the monastery, I often sat and watched the southern stream of the Pacific looking toward the Philippines, wondering if I should retire to the monastery. It was enticing, but I decided to come back to the day swirl of Taipei before returning to the States. It was in the monastery that I was persuaded to begin writing poetry again, after a hiatus of several years.

     Back in Taipei on the Monday before we flew back to Los Angeles, Kristen went to the national museum with Joyce Tsai, another friend of many years. On that evening, Mr. Lu Di presented me with the 69th national medal from Taiwan’s Writers and Artists Association, in recognition of my achievements in poetry and the honor and distinction it brings to Taiwan. Afterwards LuDi and his wife Jen took us out to a generous lunch. 

     I am at work on a memoir that focuses on how Chinese culture, specifically Daoism and the soft or internal arts of Taiji, Xingyi, and Bagua, have helped me achieve wholeness, making it possible for me to become the poet I intuitively sensed in myself when I was a teenager, to endure that journey and realize the joy of it as well as the hardship, to make my own sense of my own life. In my poetry this journey is solidified in my later works, especially The Plum Flower Trilogy (The Plum Flower Dance, The Government of Nature, and City of Eternal Spring) and my most recent book, Spirit Boxing.   

     Living in Taiwan and China over the period from 2002 to 2009, afforded me the space of self-reflection that was key to that stage of the integration of my life experience that began in my late forties, and our honeymoon in Taiwan was my way of sharing that key with Kristen. As newlyweds in our 60’s, we were able to see how the whole world of human beings has a half most westerners never get to see. We were able to experience the blessing of the gift of insight.     

      In some future, maybe the work of extending ourselves to worlds we do not know will help us understand we really do need each other, as our Earth groans under the weight of 7.5 billion human beings. It is said that Atlas shrugged. But, our grandchildren may well have to write the 21st century myth of how Earth shrugged, forcing us to reach through languages and beyond xenophobia to realize the human reality, which is that we are all connected. That is our natural condition, and we fight so hard to deny it.

See more of what I'm up to, now:
My video presentation for the new anthology African American Poetry/ 250 Years of Struggle and Song just published by the Library of America

Copyright © 2021, Afaa M. Weaver
All references, including hyperlinks and videos, are for educational purposes only​.



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In the distance between here and there, the unknown lives. The unknown lives here, there, everywhere. It lives inside us, and it lives outside of us. The unknown calls to us at different times for different reasons. We can be driven to it by fear, by hunger for new experiences, and often by faith. As we grow and grow older, the hope is that we will find love and sustenance as we explore the unknown, and when we are children, our instinct is that we will be guided through the unknown by the protective love of our parents. This often fails, needless to say, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Xenophobia, nativism, racism, sexism, greed, hatred…these are energies and forces that work against the good.

The world’s wealthiest nation can do better than what it is doing now. The U.S. can do better than what it is now doing to children and families at our southern border. The seeds of future heartache and dysfunction are being planted in the souls of children. It need not be this way. Trauma begets trauma, and it takes conscious healing to untangle this transmission. 

In “Who Is Singing To The Children At The Border,” which aired on WBUR, Ellen Spero visits the issues of the traumatizing of children at our southern border with Mexico, and in doing so she rediscovers the trauma in her own family. During the WWII era, her Jewish mother was separated from her parents. Trauma and tragedy were woven together into an emotional inheritance. Read/hear her article here: https://wbur.fm/2LmHqDp

Going to visit my friends Harold Anderson and Sandy Rodgers when homemade blueberry pies were available, I would always have to struggle for a slice of pie. Harold handed them out stingily, and always only after he had his portions. He would laugh heartily, from way deep in some place as cavernous as all the possible music held in his upright bass. Harold loved his family and friends, his art, the world of art, life. I learned so much from him. When we talked about art, about music, poetry, visual art, all forms of language, it was as if we were having a sumptuous meal.

We performed together several times over the years, beginning with a Valentines Day performance at Simmons College, which is now Simmons University. It was over fifteen years ago. Bill Lowe and Stan Strickland made it a foursome, and we had such a wonderful time. The students loved the performance. We called the show “Old Men in Love.”

I performed the wedding ceremony for Harold and Sandy, my only such service. We stood in the backyard of Sandy’s daughter and I was succinct. This morning I was thinking back to that day and wishing I had said much more. It’s a way of bringing a person back to my space once they have made the journey we all must make.

When Kristen and I last visited Harold and Sandy at their home in Greenbelt, Maryland, he was sharing his progress on his last composition, a grand piece of music inspired by a painting by Ewin McDougall entitled “The Way to Paradise.” We talked, and he explained what he was doing in the composition, playing sections of it as his computer displayed the music sheet. He talked about his upcoming journey, of what he had do to and how he was feeling. I was there with him, and I was traveling all the times we shared together. Once outside walking along with Kristen to our car, I let the tears roll down my face. Harold and Sandy later traveled to New Zealand, a place he loved and where he made his transition.

We come to appreciate the gift of art more deeply when we share it in the intimate spaces we share with the people we love, and art teaches us how to love more widely and more deeply, if we are willing, if we are brave.
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“The Way to Paradise” and more of Harold’s work with the painting are in this article from the Otago Daily Times in New Zealand. 

When I watch reruns of westerns from my childhood, "Gunsmoke," "Wagon Train," "Big Valley," and the others, I see myself as I am now and when I was ten years old. My child-self is puzzled when I turn to him and ask, “Do you ever wonder what it would be like if some or all of them were like you?” 

This is not an exercise I would recommend unless you’re willing to take apart your own personal history. After all, you will need a sense of humor around something that is pretty serious in many ways. My child self looks at me and says, “You’re pretty funny looking. I mean you are really old. Is that what’s going to happen to me? Ah man.”

Really. How do we take apart history? What questions can we reasonably ask? I love the fact that historians believe one out of four cowboys in the Old West were actually black, but when I begin to wonder what it was like for them, I almost always insert myself. It’s me riding a big bay Quarter horse along a trail at the edge of a large field, looking for a place to pitch camp for the night, no mind to the probable saddle fatigue, including the back pain from riding all day. I would most likely want to dismount and lead the horse for awhile and give it a break. 

What would it really have been like? Would I have been safe in this place or that place, depending on who lives there? How would I know?

After all, much of my childhood love of horses came from television, and the tube is no oracle of truthfulness. Marshall Dillon always had the nicest, pressed shirts, neat as a pin in a world where slavery had hardly been ended. Still I love seeing the photos of black men and women who made their livelihood when horses were very necessary in day to day being. Black cowboys in the Smithsonian. 

Read More!

• East Baltimore Muse: http://eastbaltimoremuse.blogspot.com
• ​Obsidian Magazine

Copyright © 2019 Afaa M. Weaver
All references, including hyperlinks and videos, are for educational purposes only

It was the cat’s decision, not ours. While doing my morning meditation downstairs, I heard Kristen let out a moan of despair. Right away, I thought someone had died, and my mind went to those relatives and friends who are sick and suffering. My mind went to those I thought would be hardest to lose. The felt the fear of it. Then, I settled back into meditation focus, looking to quiet myself, my mind, and all of what makes me.

The cat had killed the partner of a yellow finch. That gasp of beauty was gone to satisfy the whims of a cat who does not lack for food, but cannot turn off an instinctual urge. For that she is now in the house, left to suffer the consequences of taking a life.

I have been luckier and more blessed than the bird who lost her life this morning. Twenty-three years ago I was given a death sentence in the way of a diagnosis of congestive heart failure. I was living alone in an apartment in West Philly that I called The Treehouse. My third marriage had failed, but I had received tenure with distinction at Rutgers Camden, a trek I made on teaching days by taking the Patco train over the Ben Franklin bridge. In the summer after getting tenure, I could barely walk.

In the months that followed, I made a decision to do everything I could to live, in essence, to take care of myself. My heart has recovered. I still have to be careful, but in the twenty-three years since my diagnosis, I have learned that health has many aspects, and one has to take care of all of them. One must pay attention. It’s mindfulness.

In my previous post I shared the information about black women’s health. I want to share that podcast again. Click here to listen to “A Life or Death Crisis for Black Mothers.  ” The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has a collection of articles on this topic. Click here to read “Race, Racism, and Health/ Examining the connections between race, racism, and health in the United States.”

In taking care of myself, I decided to extend my experience in theater by studying acting.In studying the art with Dossy Peabody beginning in 2013, I came to spend a lot of time on August Wilson’s "Fences." Acting is not easy. It is hard, hard, hard. If you want to earn some real understanding of and respect for actors, just make yourself a serious student. As Dossy made clear to me, acting is not therapy, but the fact of it as a demanding art will require you to go at the business of taking care of yourself in newer ways.

"Passing the Torch: Denzel Washington and Michael B. Jordan:"  I was especially heartened to see this article about these two wonderful actors, one an established veteran with many accolades, including his film version of "Fences," and the other a youngster. It’s the sharing between two generations of black men that is heartening. There is a strength in the Denzel’s humility and generosity that inspires me. We have a hundred years of film in American culture now, and television is ubiquitous. It behooves anyone, I think, to understand acting. It can give you insights into how and why we all behave or, as my mama would say, how folk act.

I am at it again. It’s my third attempt at a memoir, and I think I have the thread this time. It’s a thread with several threads, each of them complex in their own ways. I am having fun researching history and culture, especially the impact of Asian content, however stereotyped and commodified, into American culture via television, Asian content that eventually led me to Daoism and Taijiquan.

The TV series Kung Fu had its problems for sure, but I immediately wanted to be one of the wise monks. Just skip life’s pain, thank you, and go straight to wisdom. 
Needless to say, it did not work that way. We come to our endings in many ways, but it’s how I travel along the way that makes all the difference to me. 

Kristen and I took that picture of the Hudson river from a hill on the Vanderbilt park, where that family had its mansions. There are goats behind it now. People walk with their dogs across the silent driveways where the cars of the rarified rich and privileged were driven by chauffeurs. Behind the building there is a herd of goats, protected by a fence.
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And the Hudson, the river Henry Hudson thought led to China or “Cathay.” Well, it takes me to China in my memories of having gotten there by airplane. Oh Henry, if only you could have seen what I have seen and can still see, standing here on the banks of the river that took you away. ​

In Closing, Sam Cornish
Sam Cornish, Boston’s first poet laureate and a friend, passed away. Please travel over to East Baltimore Muse and read my remembrance. Click here to read “The Poet in the Mirror.”

Be well….

Afaa

Tags: #KungFu, #Racism, #Health, #HudsonValley, #Acting, #DenzelWashington, #MichaelB. Jordan, #Well-being, #PlumFlowerTrilogy, #SamCornish, #EastBaltimore 

Copyright © 2018 Afaa M. Weaver (pertaining only to original text).
All links and referenced materials are for educational purposes only.

My mother endured many things and died at fifty-two of health issues related to the “lived experience” of being a black woman in this country. She was a courageous woman, and this segment on “life and death” issues for black mothers and their children struck deeply for me, as I thought of my mother, my matrilineal line, my father and his matrilineal line, of the black women who have endure the crushing weight of history.
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A quote rom the New York Times Daily Podcast: “Black women in the United States are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes as white women, and black infants are more than twice as likely to die as white babies. A growing body of research links this disparity to "the toxic psychological stress experienced as a result of systemic racism." 

Linda Villarosa goes into this huge topic in depth in this article: https://nyti.ms/2GOKeCf  There is so much to say about this. I’ve been aware of the issue generally but the podcast emphasized it powerfully for me. In terms of poetry, I have written about my mother in Talisman, but there is so much more I want to lovingly write about the woman who gave me life. May I be blessed with time and the portal to that space in my writing. 

Matters of Black Lives
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In 1997, I took over as editor of Obsidian Magazine. Based at North Carolina State University, it was, as I saw it, one of the three sisters of black journals. The other two were Callaloo and African American Literature Forum. I made my decision in the way of cultural duty and saw it as a chance to contribute something to the tradition of African American letters, and I am so happy to see the journal continuing under the steady leadership of Duriel Harris. Visit Obsidian here:  https://obsidianlit.org

I was asked by Honoree Jeffers to write something for the Poetic Research column she was editing for Common-Core. My thoughts immediately went to some kind of continuation of the arc of history in  A Hard Summation , inspired by the story of Phoebe, the eight year old girl who endured the Middle Passage. While visiting North Carolina back in the 90’s, my Aunt Janet told me Phoebe’s story. While growing up, I was a listener. Few things held my attention more than sitting around listening to stories of the past. I suppose that’s why she chose to tell me. Click here to read my poem and essay for Common-Core, a website maintained by the American Antiquarian Society.

As I get older, I often wonder who to give certain stories to, so that the stories will be remembered properly. Of that there is no guarantee, so I come back to a simpler truth. I should just enjoy telling the stories and hope for an attentive audience other than our pets. I can hope to be as interesting as the man from Baltimore who became the world’s greatest harmonica player. Listen here to his story, “A Polite Word for Liar."
Meanwhile, I am outdone by the spew of illusory smoke from the White House in this, our Land of Oz.

On Black Panther: Mostly loved it, but I would not have the C.I.A. agent character be a friend of  Wakanda. In the end, I would have had some rather enterprising and scientifically inclined kids approach the fantastic space ship with their own ideas for investing in African American uplift, as opposed to cutting it up and selling it. A closing scene with the royalty of Wakanda walking with the U.S. president into the U.N. to discuss the Atlantic slave trade, reparations, official ceremonies of atonement, and proclamation of a Day of Silence. What would that take? Hmm.

The Magic of Horses

Hidden Hollow is a farm near our home here in the Hudson Valley. Hidden Hollow is open to those who need horses. I walk in the soft mush of the pasture, or stand on the fence and just watch them as they watch me. 
When I meet a horse, I stand near it, and try to empty myself. Standing on the ground and imagining any worries or stresses falling out of me and into the earth’s core, I sink. Usually, the horse will relax, too. Often enough they poke their nose around at my pockets, looking for the treat. There has to be a treat. Why else would a human take the time to be with me? But I had no treats for this old-timer. For that he tried to push me over. His owner told him to cut the crap. 

That’s the how of how I love being with horses. When I left that day, I felt saved. At other times someone has to tell me to “cut the crap.” Once in a while it’s the voice of the summer breeze.

My papers are among the permanent holdings of the Howard Gotleib Archival Research Center at Boston University.

Copyright © 2018 by Afaa Michael Weaver
All embedded and referenced materials are for educational purposes only.


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