Two Artists Called to the Water, Guided by the Moon

MicroCosmos is an inquiry into our ability to affect meaningful change on a small scale through the inner dimensions of artistic practice. How are artists tapping into those inner dimensions to be in dialogue and right relation with the outer context in which we live? When things feel out of control on a macro scale, how do our artistic gifts meet the needs of the world?

In response to these questions, MicroCosmos co-curators Javiera Benavente, Matthew Glassman, and Nick Slie created a framework of creative prompts and then convened artists who are knee deep in this inquiry to reflect, study, and then encounter a fellow practitioner they’ve never met. In this conversation, Sharon Day and Sharon Bridgforth come together to discuss their responses to the MicroCosmos framework in a conversation facilitated by Nick Slie. Sharon Bridgforth collaborates with interdisciplinary artists and audiences to install moving soundscapes of her ritual/jazz texts in celebration of African-American Southern migration histories/queerly. Sharon Day is enrolled in the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe and makes her home in Minnesota. She is an artist, playwright, water walker, grandmother, and activist, as well as a founder and executive director of the Indigenous Peoples Task Force.

This encounter represents the culmination of a three-part process of individual work. The process began by convening pairs of artists who are knee deep in this inquiry. We invited each to reflect, study, and then encounter a fellow practitioner they’ve never met. Each participant in the MicroCosmos project undertook a three-part process of individual work. They were asked to meditate on five questions:

What questions and callings are you living?

What are the places, spaces, and relationships that are undergirding you and your work?

What seeds are you planting and tending?

What are the practices that would help you?

What are the experiments you yearn to conduct?

Then, participants engaged in shared study of excerpts from Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution by Lynn Margulis, “When You Meet the Monster, Anoint its Feet” by Bayo Akomolafe, and "Communication is Sacred” by Nora Bateson. Finally, participants created a short expressive response in any creative medium as a way of sharing what the prompts and shared study activated in them. Those creative responses appear interspersed throughout the following conversation.

It sent me into this space that is where I live where the angels swim at the bottom of the ocean, and the mermaids fly, where there's all kinds of monstrous mammals, and beauty emerging, where there's crashing, and wealth, and where the ancestors are.

Sharon Day: In terms of what is calling me, and what has been calling me, of course, that is the water. That's what concerns a lot of my work.

When I read the articles, I remembered listening on the radio to Camille Seaman, who is an Indigenous woman from Long Island. She was telling a story about when she was a child. Her and her cousins were playing outside in the yard, and her grandfather was home. They were picking these leaves off this tree, and the grandfather came out, and he said, "Stop." So, they stopped and knew they had done something wrong, and he said to them, "Do you think that you're separate from that tree?" He said, "I want you to lay down on the grass. Lay down until I tell you."

So, they all laid down on the lawn, looking up at the sky, and the sky was blue, just not a cloud in the sky. It began to get warmer and warmer, and after a bit the grandfather came back out. He said, "Look at the sky," and they looked and there was this little whimsy of a cloud, and he said, "You made that. You made that. Your perspiration went up to the sky and made that cloud."

To me, all that writing that we read, like, that's what it was. It resonated with all of the teachings that I've had: we come from the stars, the earth. We spend our lives interacting with everything, the plants, the animals, the water, and then we go back to the earth. The earth has fed us, and now we feed the earth.

The water that we're drinking today is the same water that our great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents drank, right? It's the same water. In that way, our body feeds the earth. We are the ancestors, and we're those that yet to come.

So, first, I made a little song, and I read the directions again, and I said, "Oh, we're supposed to make something."

So, I made this zine.

Sharon Bridgforth: Oh, wow. Beautiful.

Nick Slie: We will pass to you, Sharon, for whatever you feel like sharing.

Sharon Bridgforth: Thank you. That opened my heart so big, and it helped me see how to enter what I want to share.

So, I grew up in South Central Los Angeles raised by my mom, who was from Memphis, and I spent a lot of time as a kid in Memphis. In both places, my memory is that I did a lot of running outside. I was just wild, just running and feeling a sense of wonder, feeling like I was a part of nature.

I remember distinctly the first time I really saw and felt the moon, and that was my first year of college in Moraga, California. A bunch of us from my high school went there for our first year of college. None of us graduated from there, but we went there. We just stood out there—and there were cows and these fields, and it was so beautiful—and we looked up and saw the moon and stars.

Ever since then, I look for the moon, and the moon has guided me exactly where I need to be for healing. Even when I didn't have language to utter, or a prayer, or a request for it, I would just look for the moon. It opened me, and I was always able to find a way.

I've been writing since I was fifteen. My great-aunts were teachers, so education was really highly valued, and they started me in school early. I learned to really, really love reading, so writing was a natural response for me because I loved words so much, and I was so in awe of my elders. I got to grow up with my great-grandparents, and my great-aunts and uncles, and all these people. And I was just so in love with them and in wonder of them. From just watching them, I learned a lot. I was fully loved.

When I started trying to figure out my life as this urban, always in love with women, queer, many gendered person... Like, I had no language for it all, but writing was my first impulse.

I wanted to tell stories like how I saw my family tell stories. So, that meant people were talking at the same time. They were singing. Somebody was always praying. There was cooking. And dancing.

I always aspired to that, and also to find a way in that to understand who I was and how to heal lots of broken places inside of me. So, it's been my way to heal, and the moon, and this desire to be inside of our stories and open and heal and understand and honor led me to the ocean.

No one had to tell me I was a child of the ocean. I already knew that, but it did get affirmed more officially. And so, when I looked at the Bayo reading, the piece is titled “When You Meet the Monster, Anoint Its Feet.”

It sent me into a meditative state that is the state that I write from. I feel like I'm always looking, receiving, and listening, and it sent me into this space that is where I live where the angels swim at the bottom of the ocean, and the mermaids fly, where there's all kinds of monstrous mammals, and beauty emerging, where there's crashing, and wealth, and where the ancestors are. And the moon carried me there, and that's, like, where I am, and what I have found as I try to heal is sometimes I am the monster. Sometimes it wasn't them, it was me. Damn it. Fuck.

So, the thing that I've written and healed my way into is the knowing that the greatest thing I can do is heal myself.

Nick: Thank you. I was feeling the ancestral energies between these conversations.

Sharon Bridgforth: Thank you.

Sharon Day, I just have to say, I have so much respect for you. I honor you. Thank you for all you've done.

Sharon Day: Thank you.

Sharon Day: But, truly, when you're talking about the moon... We say the moon is the grandmother of us all. We have a full moon ceremony where we make a fire, and we talk to her just like we would talk to our grandmother. It's a time for what you're saying about the healing. Whatever has happened during that month, we put it in the fire.

When you talk about sitting and listening to the aunties and the grandparents—I was that kid too. When my mom and her sisters would get together, mostly they would talk in Ojibwe, but I would still just sit and listen. They would tease each other, and then they'd laugh, and they'd think I didn't understand anything, but you don't have to understand every word to know what they were talking about.

I am yearning to hear the Black language that I hear as music, which is how my mom and them talked.

Sharon Bridgforth: That's right. That's right. What a gift. Does your mom's language live in your body, or inside of you?

Sharon Day: Yeah. Every time I try to learn Spanish, somehow the words get translated to Ojibwe first in my brain. Right? Even though I'm not a fluent speaker, it comes to me in Ojibwe first.

My parents always spoke Ojibwe to each other. In ceremonies, it's all in Ojibwe, although it's a different Ojibwe than the kind of conversational Ojibwe people speak today. It's so much more, I don't know, beautiful.

Nick: What are the experiments that you yearn to conduct?

Sharon Day: Well, I don't know if there's anything, or any experiments that I'm getting to do.

This summer I started including some more physical exercises as well, but my big experiment was water walks. I don't know if there's any more experiments that I wish to do that I haven't done, but I enjoy this.

For my birthday this year, we created this turtle mosaic with rocks in my front yard. Two years ago, we made this sixty-foot mound in the shape of the Big Dipper with solar lights pointing up to the sky and boulders.

I'm not trained in anything. Everything's an experiment. So, I look forward to experiments with art, with trying something that I haven't done before.

Sharon Bridgforth: Nice. I have this big heart's desire that I've had for a long time, and I've done bits of it, but I've never done the full thing that I yearn for: I would love to take one of my texts and compose it live in the spirit of what Lawrence “Butch” Morris used to do with musicians and poets where he'd teach them his signals. He called it Conduction. They didn't get sheet music or anything. They would learn his signals, and then based on the signals, they would do things.

So, inspired by that, I would love this choir of voices where my signal invites lots and lots of people speaking and singing pieces of text that I give them in lots of different languages—in concert with a core African-American performer who offers the script in it's entirety from beginning to end. I am yearning to hear the Black language that I hear as music, which is how my mom and them talked.

I think that, in addition to spoken language, I think it would include a physical language as well. I've done some bits of this, but not ever to the full extent that I yearn for it. So that's a heart's desire.

What called you to walk the Mississippi with people?

Sharon Day: In 2011, Josephine Mandamin had organized this four directions water walk where women would carry the water from the four oceans to Lake Superior, the heart of Turtle Island. Nobody wanted the South, so I did it.

I learned so much on that walk about myself. It was just usually me and one other person.

So, you're walking and there's no one. You're carrying this water and the eagle feather staff, and you have so many thoughts come and go, and the horses come and greet you.

There was a little red-winged blackbird that was with me every day. It would “beep, beep, beep.” I was hot, and I was tired, and I looked at that little red-winged blackbird and I said, "It's a good thing the Creator gave you such beautiful wings, because your song has a little to be desired."

I started on 24 April—the day of the oil spill in the Gulf was the day I chose to start. So, when I get to Missouri, it's mid-May, but the wind coming from the north. It's cold, and blustery that day. I think, and I'm looking around, "Where's that dang blackbird? What happened? Where is he?"

And some young woman who had come to help came and took the water and the pail from me. I got in the van with the women, and I said, "I'm wondering, where's that red-winged blackbird?" And they burst out laughing, and they said, "You're walking all hunched over facing the wind, and that little red-winged blackbird was hovering above your head."

Sharon Bridgforth: Oh, my God. Wow.

Sharon Day: I learned so much on that walk, and what we were doing is speaking to the spirit of the water: "We love you. We thank you. We respect you."

After we all met in Lake Superior, we had a big ceremony. When Josephine poured that water into the lake, I cried. And this was not a gentle little tear streaming down. It was a big, big sobbing cry.

When we had been walking for four days, Josephine came and started all of us off. She said, “I had this realization that when we gathered this water, we orphaned it, and now it's our responsibility to get it to its destination, Lake Superior. Who knows how long it will take for these waters to get back home, but when they do, they will confer with the other waters, and they will know that there are still human beings who love and care for the water.”

So, that water became my baby, that orphaned baby, and I had to take care of it and get it to its destination. The same way, when I raised my grandson Kirby, raised him the best that I could, and when he went to college, he said to me “Gram, don't cry. Don't cry.”

I didn't cry. I got in the car. I'm a block down the road, and his mother calls me—“Mom,”—and I cried.

And I said, "I know this is the way it's supposed to be. You raise them the best way you know how, so they can go, and live their lives.”

If you know in your bones, in your heart, in your spirit that water is life, then you're destined to do something about it. Right?

Sharon Bridgforth: Yeah.

Sharon Day: I just miss him so much.

Sharon Bridgforth: Yeah.

Sharon Day: But this is the way that it's supposed to be, I know that, and that's exactly the way I felt when I poured that water back into Lake Superior.

So, I see Josephine there, and we're getting ready to leave, and I said, "Josephine, I'm going to walk the Mississippi River," and she said, "I know that, Sharon." I said, "How do you know that? I just came to that decision myself." She said, "Look at your staff. You have carved the Mississippi River on your staff."

Sharon Bridgforth: Whoa.

Sharon Day: So, then I did that, and other rivers. If you know in your bones, in your heart, in your spirit that water is life, then you're destined to do something about it. Right? To do something to love and protect that water. The same way we do our children. And they don't have to be our children. It can be any child that we are trying to nurture. So, that's why we do it.

Sharon Bridgforth: Oh, thank you so much, and thank you for doing that work. That's everything that we need right now, everything that if we could learn it, and hold it, and offer it—it's all there. That's it.