As a child, I was a rule follower. Rules helped me feel order and predictability in a childhood that often felt uncertain and overwhelming. In the span of 6 years, our family experienced my mother’s death, my maternal grandmother’s return to India, my paternal grandmother’s moving in, my father’s short courtship with and marriage to my second mother, and my family taking in a 15 year old foster child after her own mother’s tragic death. In this period, my family morphed from an Indian immigrant family of four to an intergenerational, blended, multi-racial, and foster family of seven. Additionally, we moved two times, gradually shifting from a low-wage worker family to a middle class family on a budget. These moves initiated ending and beginning grades in new school districts and peer circles.

In this midst of what felt like a whirlwind of change, rules offered some constancy and grounding.

One of the rules I quickly embraced was asking permission before taking or doing something.

“May I have a fork please.”

“Can i play kickball with you?”

“Is this seat taken?”

“Can I ask you a question?”

I hear an ethic of consent building and an awareness of shared resources in these questions, which I value. I appreciate the ways my father and paternal grandmother modeled and imprinted this ethic in my being. My father embodied this by regularly hosting large gatherings of family and friends in our 2-bedroom apartment. Guests squished like sardines on our 3-person couch, sat on the floor, balancing plates of food on their criss-crossed legs, and spilled out onto the 2nd floor landing of our apartment unit. My father also practiced this by volunteering time as a youth leader within our church while working 2, and sometimes 3, part time jobs while going to graduate school.

My grandmother modeled an awareness of shared resources by purchasing yarn with her small monthly social security payments and making scarves and doilies for grandchildren, elder friends, and younger women who found refuge in her presence and counsel. In our shared bedroom, she would sit on the edge of her twin bed with her back hunched, her right leg folded over the left, pressing and releasing her lips as she crocheted late into the night.

These actions made lasting impressions which have shaped my practices of love, healing, and justice. And I also see how some of my father’s and grandmother’s practices skewed my sense of giving and narrowed my view of my own sovereignty and choice.

One example of this was the way my father always seemed to say yes to requests. In the first years after my mother died, my father’s overextension made time with him hard to come by and his.inaccessibility felt like absence.Through my adult eyes, I can look back at my father during his first years as an immigrant and widower and sense into his anxiety about making enough money to pay the rent, tuition, and the costs of clothing and feeding his family. I also imagine his utter heartbreak over losing his young wife at the start of a new and risk-filled chapter of their lives. The adult in me can understand my father’s busyness as a grief and anxiety coping mechanism.

At the same time, my younger selves bore significant costs as a result of my father’s inability to center his children’s needs in the wake of our mother’s devastating death. By giving, even when he had very little energy, time and limited resources, my father unconsciously left my brother and me believing that we were not as important as others. There was also the cost of my father’s impatience and reactivity due to his exhaustion and not knowing how to resource himself. My father’s volatile temper messaged to me that love was conditional on behavior that he and other adults deemed “good”.

Through my work with ancestral coach and family constellator, Ana Polanco, I know that my father’s patterns are echoes of patterns in our lineage. From his mother, my father inherited a sense that very little was his to claim.

My father recounts that for a portion of his childhood, he and his five siblings resided at the home owned by one of his mother’s cousins while his parents lived in a small one bedroom rented flat in the same city. In addition to housing, my grandmother’s cousin, who had no bio or adopted children of her own, also offered financial support so that my father and his siblings could attend schools my paternal grandparents could not afford on their government teacher salaries. Recently, my father sheepishly remembered how his mother would cook food for her children after a full day of teaching and drop it off at her cousin’s house where she was not invited in to eat with them.

“I still feel bad about this.” my nearly nonagenarian father said, his eyes drifting off.

I see myself in my grandmother, who my cousins and I affectionately called Gama. I see myself in Gama’s sense of indebtedness to wealthier family members. I see myself in her centering her children’s needs at the cost of her own. I see myself in Gama’s thinking it too much to claim a seat at the table. I see myself in her accepting unacceptable terms.

I want to transmute this pattern for both of us.

One way to do this is to get clear on when asking permission is an act of submission and when it is an act of respect.

I’m learning that asking permission feels like an act of submission when I ask for something that is inherently mine or when I ask to be something that is intrinsically my nature.

A place at the table. My father’s love and attention. Rest and joy. Pleasure and sexual freedom. An expression of dissent. A queer life and worldview. The choice to spend as much of my life in connection and alignment with who and what is important and joyful to me. All are inherently mine and intrinsically me. I will no longer submit and ask permission for these experiences.

And I am also learning that in some cases asking permission is vital - as in essential AND full of energy.

In preparation for the Remember and Reawaken ceremony, Ana Polanco and i visited Socrates Sculpture Park, the site of the ceremony. After talking through and visualizing elements of the ritual, Ana and I both felt compelled to ask the Land for permission to hold ceremony there.

Near the elevated stage, there stood a tree whose thick trunk branched into four solid boughs which offered the canopy of leaves hanging over us. Ana intuited that we could ask permission of this tree on behalf of the Land. We stepped down from the stage and each found a spot between the trees' large exposed roots. I unscrewed a small jar filled with tobacco and dipped my fingers in to gather a handful.

Closing my eyes, I searched for the words to speak.

“Dear tree, we seek to hold ceremony here tomorrow.” I said within myself in an awkward formality.

I continued in the same vein, ““May we do so.”

I bent down and placed tobacco at the tree’s base and listened. At first, I heard nothing. After a few moments, I could feel an energy of ease rising through my legs and torso. Initially unsure of where this feeling came from, I then sensed that the tree’s root system was sending soothing energy to my own. I received this energy as a yes.

I looked over at Ana who was recapping a small water bottle and grinning as she stepped back from the tree.

“That’s a funny tree.” she said.

When I asked her what was funny, she shared that she asked the tree their name and they seemed to tell her and then deny it coyly. On the third ask, the tree answered that their name was ‘Joanna”, a combination of their first two answers.

I was moved by how Joanna answered me with a transfer of soothing energy and responded to Ana with playful banter, somehow knowing what language would be specific and clear to each of us.

Asking permission of trees on behalf of the Land is vital for me as an immigrant settler on Turtle Island. It facilitates my practice of reciprocity, which interrupts a one-sided extractive practice of taking and consuming the gifts of the land. Asking permission from the Land allows me to remember and reawaken a mutually beneficial way of being.

I am committing to asking permission of the Land before engaging in actions that impact Her and therefore require her consent and blessing. In this context, asking permission feels like an act of respect.

In a joy-filled episode of the podcast, Insights from the Edge, psychologist and Buddhist teacher, Dr. Kamilah Majeid spoke of the origins of the word “respect”, noting that respect comes from the Latin word “spectare,” which means “to look,”. She added that the “re” in this word means to “do again”. From this, Dr. Kalimah concluded that to respect another is “to look again” or in other words to act towards another with an awareness of their uniqueness and true value.

May we ask permission in ways that nurture our awareness of the uniqueness and true value of other living beings. And may we claim what is inherently ours in ways that eradicate unacceptable terms. In our discernment in and practice of these ways of being, may we heal and enliven ourselves and all those who came before.

What is enchanting me

Practice

I learned of the In It Together Toolkit: A Framework for Conflict Transformation in Movement-Building Groups through the Movement Memos Podcast. Based on decades of work, this resource is a generous free offering of members of Interrupting Criminalization, Dragonfly Partners and organizers and activists from around Turtle Island.

Music

I am ecstatic that Beautiful Chorus dropped a new album called High Frequency Love Music! I love how the group is innovating on their gorgeously textured vocals by adding electronic and RnB instrumentation.

Readings

I’m finding solace, resonance and inspiration in therapist and guide Frances Weller’s stories and poetic reflections on grief in The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief.