#gatewayfellows

Dear Fellows,

Today was our first GO Gather Wednesday. We struggled with Zoom links, we texted reminders frantically, we shared project updates about how things were going in Lawrence with Elevated Thought and all the things. 

For me today was about so much more than that. It feels like our conversation is exponentially growing. It feels life giving. Thanks to our brilliant GO Guide, Aisha Densmore-Bey, we read James Baldwin’s beautiful words today.... I type them here with a full heart and a tumbling bumbling spirit on my insides moving with gratitude, hope, and love... 

“But the conquest of the physical world is not man’s only duty. He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself. The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.”    --James Baldwin 

Dear Fellows, I want to thank you. Thank you for seeking out this work. Thank you for giving your time, energies, comforts, talents, hopes, vulnerabilities. Thank you for joining us as we find our way to a future that is yet to exist in the world but needs all of us more than we know. And so, we GO.

We GO ON. We move slow. We try. We face our fears and do not let in to the lie that we aren’t good enough. We are enough. 

We are artists. We are stewards. We have a responsibility to society that we cannot ignore. And so we act. We GO.

Today, we go here (Roxbury, Boston), we go there (Lawrence, MA), and we go anywhere (online metaverse xspace). 

Most importantly though, we go together. We go together in all our difference. In all our unknowingness. Together we go. 

Back to Baldwin, “Society must accept some things as real; but he [the artist] must always know that visible reality hides a deeper one, and that all our action and achievement rest on things unseen. A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.” Amen.