November 15, 2024 • 32 mins
We are all in need of some radical healing, and hopefully Stephon Bradberry can help provide that for you today.
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
Good morning, peeps, and welcome to OKAP Daily with the
Meet Your Girl Danielle Moody recording from the Home Bunker. Folks,
it has been an extraordinarily difficult week, and what scares
me is that we're actually existing in the in between place.
Donald Trump is not yet president for two months, but
(00:35):
the effects of this reality are really taking shape and
taking hold. And by taking hold, I mean taking a
stranglehold over half the country while the other half is
elated at their ability to cause pain and subject others
(00:56):
to levels of cruelty not experienced in modern times. The
rest of us are trying to figure out what a
path forward looks like. And I don't even mean a
path forward in terms of our politics. I mean a
path forward in terms of our day to day lives.
What does it mean to try and rebuild community, create
(01:22):
hopefulness when you are in the midst of despair, when
you find yourself breaking down into tears multiple times a day,
when you are experiencing a type of grief that takes
your breath away. And so today's conversation is with Stephen BlackBerry,
(01:43):
who I will tell you I needed this conversation so
very much, and the reason being is that we are
in the need, in need of radical healing and a
of where we think our lives are going. And Stephan
(02:04):
is the founder of the Clearing DC powered by Life
Well and it is a unique ecosystem around wellness and
community care, and he offers just so much depth and
perspective around how we need to see ourselves in this moment,
(02:27):
or I should say, an offering on how we should
see ourselves and our communities in this moment. And so
I hope as we close out the week here and
try and prepare ourselves for the weeks ahead, that this
offers a bit of solace, a safe space to sit
in for the duration of this interview. So coming up
(02:49):
next my conversation with Stefan BlackBerry. Folks, I am very
happy to welcome to Okay f Daily Stefan Bradberry, who
is the founder of the Clearing DC powered by Life
Well and Stephan. I want you to give us a
(03:13):
fifty thousand foot view, tell us a bit about the
Clearing DC powered by Life Well and the work it
is that you are doing.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Yeah, absolutely well. First, happy day. Thank you so much
for having me across the life while ecosystem. We're imagining
new possibilities of care, connection, community and justice. And one
of the ways that we do that is the Clearing
Community Center. I envisioned the Clearing Community Center after reading
Tony Morrison's Beloved, where Baby Soaks Holy brings together all
(03:45):
the black books. You know, it starts off when more
and more there came Baby Sokes Holy, followed by every
Black man, woman and child made their great heart to
the Clearing, which was this place that Baby Sokes told
them that they weren't the glory bound pure of the earth,
and they weren't the meek and mild of the earth,
but they were people who deserve to be loved in
all of their fullness. That she told them to love
(04:06):
this here flesh of theirs. And I thought about what
it meant for the enslaved to love their flesh, or
the formerly enslaver, for people who, by Hoko krok have
found ways to survive and in some cases thrive, and
so life well really came from this idea that all people,
in all places, at all times should be free, healed,
(04:28):
and whole. And at the Clearing. What we've done is
we have a built up an amazing yoga community. So
we're the home of Flowel Yoga, one of DC's only
black owned yoga studios. We're not the only, but we
are one of the only. Inside of here, we have
to create well art collective because the artists are the
ones who screamed the calls of revolution. Artists are the
(04:52):
ones that help us look inwards to do outwards. And
so inside of our center we have a community gallery
where we're constantly up lifting the works of particularly Galus
of Color, but people who believe that their art should
stir the soul and should shake us towards being free.
We also have Advocate Well, which is our politics and
(05:12):
policy group, because I understand as someone who used to
work inside the United States Congress that it's an arena
and battlefield that some people have to be in. And
so we lead a team that's constantly thinking about how
do we put our ideals into action and into practice
and into policy and into law. And then we have
work Well, which is our well being consultancy. So whether
(05:33):
you own a yoga studio or you are the CEO
of a fortune five hundred company, what we do is
we help you see the limits to your systems that
prevent people from being well and help you strategize toward
environments and toward communities and spaces where individual wellness can
be tended to and communal well being can be uplifted.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
I love every single piece of the collective and the
world that you're doing. And I must say that when
I lived in DC for many, many years, Flow Yoga
Studio was my favorite.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
Yes, and that's where I did my teacher chain on.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
Yeah. I lived up the street and attended classes often,
and so wonderful. You know, right now, as you are
well aware, and as everybody is listening to this, we
are living in really uncharted territory where people, namely people
(06:35):
from historically marginalized communities, are now recognizing that their government,
who has been elected to lead our government in twenty
twenty five, has no desire to see any type of difference,
(06:55):
to see or or create unity in this country, to
bring our divided states back together. There is a sense
right now of dread, of impending dread and doom and hopelessness,
particularly as many see the announcements day by day of
(07:15):
who is going to be leading some of our most
important agencies and departments in this country. And I want
to talk to you about a lot of folks are
saying they desperately need community, They desperately need to figure
out what it means to care for yourself in a
(07:38):
country that not only is saying that we don't care
about you, but that we're going to make targets of you.
Cruelty is going to be our new compass. Talk to
us about how we find stuff on grounding and healing
at a time when there is so much pain, and frankly,
(08:01):
we're not even really in the pain part. We're in
the between space right right.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
You know, there's a few things. The first you know,
we're in these yet to be United States and what
could be potentially because I've heard a lot of and
we kind of heard this during the insurrection, that this
is not who we are, right there was a lot
of there's a lot of people that were talking like that.
(08:29):
And those of us who have been relatively conscious, those
of us who so happened to live on the other
side of the color line, know that this is exactly
who America is. This is exactly what we do when
multiracial democracy begins to show its head. You know, before
I owned a yoga studio, you know, I was a
(08:50):
scholar I am a scholl It and you know, I
was writing my master's thesis a while ago, quite a
few years ago, and I was in the archive, and
I learned about these moments post Civil War when multi
racial city governments were coming up all across the East
Coast and down into the South, and for what they
(09:13):
could do, they were thriving and all people were benefiting.
But the white majority in these places refuse to seed
their space. They refused to allow the city or their town,
and let's say, the country to grow beyond this need
to be white. That there is a history of black
(09:35):
folks being at the forefront and other folks of color
being a part of these progressive movements and pushes forward,
but always with this violent, let's say, hand tapping of
white supremacy constantly coming through.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Right.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
And I have thought about when I was in the archive,
I was being I was very defeated because I was
trying to make this argument that if the United States
it was a democracy, we could only be that because
black people made it so, right, very similar to what
Nicole Hanna Jones was doing with the sixteen nineteen project Right.
And I was in the archive and I was seeing
that here are all these black people, these black folks
(10:14):
through time who, using this saying by Zoroloherson, by hook
a crook, found ways to survive and, like I said,
in some places thrive. And they did it because they
saw themselves in each other. And it kind of is
this thing of you could never believe in the veil
(10:36):
or the midst lies and illusions of what the country was,
because we bear the brunt of them. Yep. And that's
how we were able to forge community, not in response
to this visceral force of white supremacy, but in a
response in life affirming ways to say that, hey, actually,
whether or not the United States survived, we will. And
(10:58):
I've been thinking a lot lot about that over the
last week or so because in the immediate after, I mean,
I don't know about you, but Tuesday, you know, around
ten o'clock, my partner had gone to bed and I
started to see I said, oh my god, this is
not going to go the way that we wanted to. Yeah,
let me see a girl. I tried to go to bed.
I was tossing and turning. I couldn't figure it out.
(11:19):
And then I go to bed and spirit wakes me
up at three o'clock to see that Pennsylvania and Georgia
had gone to him, and I said, oh, it's over.
And I woke up on Wednesday and I was devastated.
I was devastated because for a moment I allowed myself
to maybe not forget, but to disremember what the country is.
(11:43):
But by the time that Thursday and Friday had come
around and I was here in the center, and I
was with people who had been nervous for weeks and
had constantly been asking me about what did I feel
and how did I think about things? And I said, well,
on this side or that side, we're going to have
to take care of each other. This is a long
way to say, like what is community. Community is more
(12:03):
than people of shared identity together. People would say that
pocs this tart, that we're community. Obviously, after last week,
we see that we are not right right that part.
And what community is is a vested interest in the success,
the health, the wellness and the well being of the
(12:24):
people that we are around. It is a commitment to
not abandon or disregard. It's a commitment to say that
I will step up when you have to step back.
It's a commitment to say that I don't have to
experience life for way that you do to see that
you deserve to live a just life, that you deserve
to live in the fullness of whoever it is that
(12:45):
you decide to be and in community is something that
requires a lot of us. And I think right now
in this moment, for people who are listening and for
people who are thinking a lot about what do we do,
I would say start with that small seat community, the
few people that you let intimately into your life, and
(13:07):
to start really really sitting there considering that when the
going gets tough, well the people that you around sell
you off, that they maybe have some hope and something better. Right,
because we're seeing a lot of people talk about, well,
I voted for the economy, or I did this, or
I did that, and now they're starting to see, wait
a minute, when they get done with y'all, they're coming
(13:29):
to us next.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
And so what community says is that we have a
vested interest in ensuring that there is nobody next. And
that is really at the core of what I'm thinking about,
because at the end of all of this, we want
to be able to say that we lived well, not
in response to visceral and violent forces, but in life
affirming ways and reminders that it is still worth living
(13:54):
so long as we keep, you know, getting up to
do it.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Everything that you just said, particularly about and defining community
and what you said about community makes so much sense.
And my question for you is what the election revealed
to your earlier point is that we are not in community? Right.
(14:24):
What you said about the veil being lifted, this veil
and I look at it as the veil between what
we had hoped for America and what America actually is. Yea,
that is what has been lifted. And when we recognize
(14:45):
now what America has been who America actually is, what
does it look like to forge community when half of
the country hates the other half of the country. Right,
Like you say, to invite those that you care that
have a vested interest in your thriving into your intimate space.
(15:11):
But we now recognize that people that we have had
in our intimate space, whether they be our colleagues, whether
they be our family members, whether they be our friends,
looked at us and put themselves first. Our grandparents voted
against their grandchildren. Yeah yeah, Husbands voted against their wives.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Mm hmmm hm. And it makes you sit and for
a while act, you know, and just being real. And
in my community, we've been saying, you know, out riding
the Metro or walking in the area and just you
find yourself just looking at people and you squint in
your eyes a little bit because it's like, girl who
sides you? Was it you?
Speaker 1 (15:58):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (15:59):
Yeah, you know. So there's a lot of that, and
you know what, I'm going to be honest, I don't
have a clear, cookie cut answer. I wrote this essay
a few years ago, entitled returning to the Village, and
it was after reading Tony morrison Soula and reading some
a New York Times review book review of the book,
right and this white lady of this white reviewer, she
(16:22):
essentially says that one day Tony Morrison will grow beyond
this provincial place.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
Yes, I actually I remember, okay, I remember that reveal.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Yeah, you know, and so one day Tony Morrison will
She's amazing, but one day she'll get beyond this. And
you know, Tony never really directly responded to that. And
I thought a lot about this idea of provincial as
if black people living in our fullness isn't the center
of our world. You know, so I'm like provincial, Like
(16:55):
that doesn't make sense to me. So I started thinking
about what it means to me to exist in my
black life, from my black livelihood, and I started thinking
about what Tony Morrison and word workers of her tradition
we're trying to do. Was essentially sit us all down
by a camp fire, and we sat around this fire
that is in let's say this village, and it's an
(17:19):
open door village. There are boundaries around it, but there's
one door coming through the front, and you could come
in and out of it as you please. But in
order to make sense of what's happening, you got to
release some stuff. You got to release this desire to
make them understand. You have to release this desire of
(17:39):
constantly responding. You know, they tell you that you don't
have a language. So you spend thirty years proving that
we have a language, the language. Yep, come on, they
tell us that we don't have you know, that our
communities aren't strong, and then you spend all this time
creating quote unquote traditional family you know what I'm saying,
ripping away the vestiges of who we are and who
we have been. And I started just thinking a lot
(18:01):
about this return to the village, and and and then
I started thinking about, well, this essay isn't about white people,
but but they they find themselves, and not just whites,
but let's just say non black people that they find
themselves with their hands cupped over their ears at the
village door. They want to study us, They want to
they want to see how do y'all how does the
(18:23):
fire stay lit? How do y'all stay so the worst
of humanity throwing your way, and yet you still create
the jazz and blues. It's like you still find a
way to dance and to celebrate. I mean, I think
one of the things about Kamala is that that was
at least inspiring to me is that you know that
she knows what half the country thought about her. Mm hmm.
(18:44):
I don't think that she, by any means was off
about what the nation thought about not just her but
the people like her. And yet she found ways to
get a nation to laugh and dance, or to people
in fiber Nation to laugh and dance for a sec
and to just for a moment see that, Hey, life
is still worth living, even though it doesn't book the
(19:06):
way that we fully wanted to. So going back to
this point of people who voted against us, people, I really,
let me tell you ding they are at the furthest
edge of my mind. They will have to be dealt with.
Let me be clear, but I know that the final
assignment of white supremacy is to destroy whiteness itself. And
what my God says is that the last will be
(19:27):
first and the first shall be last. I'm actually less
concerned about them being dealt with and more concerned about
have I created the conditions and being inside of the
spaces that I'm with people who aren't constantly trying to
respond to them. You know, in the commentary on my
I'm like or like the people on the news right now,
(19:49):
black folks going on the news, and I'm like, y'all
can just say that the nation is racist as hell.
Let's let's let's actually get to THEO.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
If we want to grow, get to the let's get
to the root of it.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
Yeah, let's let's name a thing a thing.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
Let's seek here and say that for certain populations of
non black people of color, they understand that in this nation,
if you want to succeed, you know that you have
to swim in the waters of anti blackness.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
You know that that is what you get in the
welcome packet when you immigrate here.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
Come on.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
And so I'm actually I'm not. I don't really they
are at such the corner of my mind because again,
I'm worried about those of us who are on the
side of life, living and justice. And on that side,
we got a lot to sort through, you know what
I'm saying. I think because at the end of the day,
(20:40):
let's say Kamala did get elected, we would still have
to deal with these horses.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
Yeah, And I was just going to say, and I
think that that is right, Like I want I will
say this. I want to be in the space where
I say that these people are at the furthest edges
of my mind, because right now they are occupying the center.
I am riding this wave of despair where I have
(21:06):
dedicated my entire career to public service and public offering
in public education, using various platforms, positions, and spaces in
order to advance the rights of other people. Yeah, and
to witness America's forceful return to its origin story is wild, right.
(21:36):
And then to think like, did we come this far
to only get this far to be pulled all the
way back. And I feel like that is where people
are struggling right now, which is where there are some
particularly you know, black women who you are seeing on
social media since the election, say I'm done. I've tapped out.
(22:01):
Y'all take it from here, because we've been on the
front lines doing the work, being the warriors for justice,
only to look behind us and recognize nobody has our.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
Right, nobody is there. Yeah. Yeah, And I think that
that's righteous. I think that that's holy. I think that
there is because I don't think that like because I've
been seeing you know again, social media is just a
hellscape right now, and and I've been seeing so much
of it, and I'm like, I don't hear that sisters
(22:33):
are turning away from us. I don't hear that. And
so when people are like, well, black, you know, they're
saying that they're done, they're done with y'all trying to
save you correct, but with me, And what I'm thinking
about as a black queer person is how how am
I getting in the ring? You know what I'm saying, like,
how how do how do okay? You know what y'all have,
(22:55):
It's time for all of us to step up and
how do I how do I confront where I can
the massage andoi of people in community who don't want
to see the space for black women to lead. Because
I started thinking about, you know, in my environments and
stuff that I've been in, you know, there have been
ample of moments where I have had to say, like
(23:18):
where we were in the room together and I wasn't
gonna let nobody play her. I didn't care right or wrong.
I got her in the same way that she has me.
And I think that there is something so holy to say,
you know what, nurse your own baby this time. Come on,
and I I, you don't have access to my flesh
(23:41):
no more. I think we should hold that for some
time now. I also think that it doesn't mean and
I'm telling no one how to feel about anything. I
don't think that what I'm hearing is that we're done forever.
I don't hear that as an y'all, I don't hear that.
(24:01):
What I hear is is time for y'all to get
your houses in order, because we're already here. Our house
is already in order. And when you you know, when
you get into it with us, you know, and I
think there's also something about like that Jewish women, Jewish
women and black women are the people who showed up
the most. Yep, I just I think that that's that's
(24:23):
saying something, and I don't know if we fully know
what it means. But all I know is all of
us who are not black or Jewish women, we got
some work to do.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
I appreciate you and the work that you were doing
to try and help people make sense of what it
actually means to be well and to live well, because
there is a and has been a desire to lie
to ourselves in order to convince ourselves that everything has
(25:01):
been okay, because the adversity hadn't been so stark in
our faces as it had been for our ancestors. But
now that truth has arrived on our door and we
actually don't really know what's on the other side. History
can only be your guide to a certain extent. But
like I said at the beginning, we're in uncharted territory.
(25:21):
And so my last question for you is in knowing
that we are in uncharted territory, in knowing that you
may practice ways to find grounding to build community, but
that there still may be a bulldozer yeah, that waits
for you. There may still be flames that wait for
(25:43):
what it is that you're building. What do you say
to people that are really in the spiral of hopelessness
right now, knowing that safety, knowing that their idea of
safety right and we know that people have said for
centuries say is an illusion, But now that illusion is
(26:05):
it's very clear that it was true. It wasn't just
as saying, So what do you say to people that
are grappling with that reality right now?
Speaker 2 (26:13):
Yeah? First, I would honor that it's really tough to
go through this type of identity crisis because during the
uprisings and all that was happening in COVID nineteen I,
before I had gotten there, I knew America was filled
(26:34):
with baltz. I knew the stories, I knew the history.
I come from a Vietnam War veteran who went and
signed up and served his country, not because he was
so patriotic, but because, as a black man in Niagara Falls,
New York in the middle of the twentieth century, there
were only a few options available to him. And I
(26:55):
know that when he came back, he went to bars
and he wasn't able to be served even in his
military uniform. I know that when Barack Obama ran from
president of the United States that my grandfather brimmed with pride.
I know that also because at the time I was
living in Texas, he refused to send me any of
(27:17):
the swag that he had made for the family. I
couldn't get a Barack Obama sweatshirt, a hat, a stick
that I can get nothing because he understood what the
country was, and he understood that even in the glimmers,
even in the glimmers, who we are. I think what
he says to me and what I would say to everybody,
it's time to be a witness. And to be a
(27:40):
witness means to stare it out into the world and
name exactly what you see, not what you want to see,
but what's there and what that allows us to do.
It allows us to become embodied, and only and embodied
people can be free. I think about those people who
stole themselves a way to freedom, people who maybe never
(28:01):
ever ever saw their reflection in a mirror, but knew
exactly what they looked like. They knew what they felt like,
they knew what they tasted like, they knew what it
would sound like for their feet to run on grass.
They knew what they smelled like and what the hounds
would smell, and yet they stole themselves away. And it
gets to this thing that it disembodied. People can never
(28:22):
be free, and we can't get free, healed or whole
disembodied or by ourselves. It means that we start seeing
that my wellness is my responsibility. At life all we
believed that wellness is the daily, moment by moment endeavor
of providing care to one's individual mental, physical, emotional, and
(28:42):
spiritual needs. Right, so it's tending to you that while
being is the responsibility and obligation of communities, institutions, and
more broadly, the state, we live in a time where
the nation doesn't believe it is their responsibility to provide
for our well being. So let's go to the next tier.
Our institututions, the places that we're working, that they have
(29:03):
vested interest in ensuring that we can provide for our
own individual wellness, and we should. We all ought to
gather and organize, you know, in whatever ways that we
can to push that forward, and then go the tier
under that community. You start to say, hey, actually we're
going to start putting together a bi weekly dinner and
(29:24):
you'll host it at your house this week. And we'll
also launch our book club together, and we'll go on
our walks here and we'll go and do this together,
or we'll just sit and be and become together, because
you start again to see that when we have each other.
And I'm not saying that this makes this is a
quick fix to everything, but I will say that every
(29:45):
day I come in here to this center, I see
what's happening in the world that I see what's happening
in people's lives, and I see the way that they
still laugh and they find hope and hopelessness. I see that,
like so long as life is choosing us, we choose it,
and there is for all the people who are listening
to this, it does. It does seem dreary, but let
(30:07):
me tell you. We may be an uncharted territory, but
this is not unfamiliar. Mm hmm. This is not unfamiliar.
And you think about it, Not all of us will survive,
but those of us that do, we demand witness. We
say that we're going to tell the truth. Because here's
the last thing. I know. I'm long winded. I'm sorry
(30:28):
The last thing I'll say is that we always think
about the New world, and we think about this world. Right,
we want to leave this one and we want to
go to the next one. What if we accepted that
those of us here probably won't make it to the
New world. But what can we leave for the rebble
that when this world is destroyed and they start cleaning
(30:50):
through the ashes, when they start lifting up the bricks
and the foundation, what did we leave them? Maybe not
all of it will be useful, but some of it
should be. And that's what I am living for. Because
when I was trying to live for the New World,
I was depressed all the time because I thought it
would never come. But I am. I am living for
the rubble, for the place in the in between, that
(31:13):
wilderness that people will have to map out. And my
hope is what we're doing here at the clearing, what
I am doing in my own individual life is something
that people can pick up hundreds of years from now
and find some use in it to talk about how
we relate to ourselves and to other people.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
Amazing, amazing, Stephan, Please tell people how they can connect
to you, to the center, to your work.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
Yeah, absolutely, so you can feel free to follow me
on social media across all platforms. It's stefan as te
Pho n Underscore JB. Same thing for the clearing at
the Clearing DC and you can find all the information.
You'll be able to find our website and I'm sure
we can maybe pass it along for the show notes.
(32:00):
But you know, understand that the digital is just one way.
You know, we understand that someday somebody can come and
erase all of that. Right. If you are in the
DC area, I invite you to the Union Market area.
I invite you to our clearing because from what I hear,
it is a place like none other. It's a place
where people feel sustained and fortified. Though the road may
(32:20):
be rough and weary, we know that we have each
other and we know that you know, so long as
life is choosing us, we'll keep choosing it.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
I appreciate you so very much. Thank you for making
the time for WOKF.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
Thank you, thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
That is it for me today, Dear friends on WOKF.
As always, power to the people and to all the people. Power,
get woke and stay woke as fuck.
Good morning, peeps, and welcome to OKAP Daily with the
Meet Your Girl Danielle Moody recording from the Home Bunker. Folks,
it has been an extraordinarily difficult week, and what scares
me is that we're actually existing in the in between place.
Donald Trump is not yet president for two months, but
(00:35):
the effects of this reality are really taking shape and
taking hold. And by taking hold, I mean taking a
stranglehold over half the country while the other half is
elated at their ability to cause pain and subject others
(00:56):
to levels of cruelty not experienced in modern times. The
rest of us are trying to figure out what a
path forward looks like. And I don't even mean a
path forward in terms of our politics. I mean a
path forward in terms of our day to day lives.
What does it mean to try and rebuild community, create
(01:22):
hopefulness when you are in the midst of despair, when
you find yourself breaking down into tears multiple times a day,
when you are experiencing a type of grief that takes
your breath away. And so today's conversation is with Stephen BlackBerry,
(01:43):
who I will tell you I needed this conversation so
very much, and the reason being is that we are
in the need, in need of radical healing and a
of where we think our lives are going. And Stephan
(02:04):
is the founder of the Clearing DC powered by Life
Well and it is a unique ecosystem around wellness and
community care, and he offers just so much depth and
perspective around how we need to see ourselves in this moment,
(02:27):
or I should say, an offering on how we should
see ourselves and our communities in this moment. And so
I hope as we close out the week here and
try and prepare ourselves for the weeks ahead, that this
offers a bit of solace, a safe space to sit
in for the duration of this interview. So coming up
(02:49):
next my conversation with Stefan BlackBerry. Folks, I am very
happy to welcome to Okay f Daily Stefan Bradberry, who
is the founder of the Clearing DC powered by Life
Well and Stephan. I want you to give us a
(03:13):
fifty thousand foot view, tell us a bit about the
Clearing DC powered by Life Well and the work it
is that you are doing.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Yeah, absolutely well. First, happy day. Thank you so much
for having me across the life while ecosystem. We're imagining
new possibilities of care, connection, community and justice. And one
of the ways that we do that is the Clearing
Community Center. I envisioned the Clearing Community Center after reading
Tony Morrison's Beloved, where Baby Soaks Holy brings together all
(03:45):
the black books. You know, it starts off when more
and more there came Baby Sokes Holy, followed by every
Black man, woman and child made their great heart to
the Clearing, which was this place that Baby Sokes told
them that they weren't the glory bound pure of the earth,
and they weren't the meek and mild of the earth,
but they were people who deserve to be loved in
all of their fullness. That she told them to love
(04:06):
this here flesh of theirs. And I thought about what
it meant for the enslaved to love their flesh, or
the formerly enslaver, for people who, by Hoko krok have
found ways to survive and in some cases thrive, and
so life well really came from this idea that all people,
in all places, at all times should be free, healed,
(04:28):
and whole. And at the Clearing. What we've done is
we have a built up an amazing yoga community. So
we're the home of Flowel Yoga, one of DC's only
black owned yoga studios. We're not the only, but we
are one of the only. Inside of here, we have
to create well art collective because the artists are the
ones who screamed the calls of revolution. Artists are the
(04:52):
ones that help us look inwards to do outwards. And
so inside of our center we have a community gallery
where we're constantly up lifting the works of particularly Galus
of Color, but people who believe that their art should
stir the soul and should shake us towards being free.
We also have Advocate Well, which is our politics and
(05:12):
policy group, because I understand as someone who used to
work inside the United States Congress that it's an arena
and battlefield that some people have to be in. And
so we lead a team that's constantly thinking about how
do we put our ideals into action and into practice
and into policy and into law. And then we have
work Well, which is our well being consultancy. So whether
(05:33):
you own a yoga studio or you are the CEO
of a fortune five hundred company, what we do is
we help you see the limits to your systems that
prevent people from being well and help you strategize toward
environments and toward communities and spaces where individual wellness can
be tended to and communal well being can be uplifted.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
I love every single piece of the collective and the
world that you're doing. And I must say that when
I lived in DC for many, many years, Flow Yoga
Studio was my favorite.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
Yes, and that's where I did my teacher chain on.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
Yeah. I lived up the street and attended classes often,
and so wonderful. You know, right now, as you are
well aware, and as everybody is listening to this, we
are living in really uncharted territory where people, namely people
(06:35):
from historically marginalized communities, are now recognizing that their government,
who has been elected to lead our government in twenty
twenty five, has no desire to see any type of difference,
(06:55):
to see or or create unity in this country, to
bring our divided states back together. There is a sense
right now of dread, of impending dread and doom and hopelessness,
particularly as many see the announcements day by day of
(07:15):
who is going to be leading some of our most
important agencies and departments in this country. And I want
to talk to you about a lot of folks are
saying they desperately need community, They desperately need to figure
out what it means to care for yourself in a
(07:38):
country that not only is saying that we don't care
about you, but that we're going to make targets of you.
Cruelty is going to be our new compass. Talk to
us about how we find stuff on grounding and healing
at a time when there is so much pain, and frankly,
(08:01):
we're not even really in the pain part. We're in
the between space right right.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
You know, there's a few things. The first you know,
we're in these yet to be United States and what
could be potentially because I've heard a lot of and
we kind of heard this during the insurrection, that this
is not who we are, right there was a lot
of there's a lot of people that were talking like that.
(08:29):
And those of us who have been relatively conscious, those
of us who so happened to live on the other
side of the color line, know that this is exactly
who America is. This is exactly what we do when
multiracial democracy begins to show its head. You know, before
I owned a yoga studio, you know, I was a
(08:50):
scholar I am a scholl It and you know, I
was writing my master's thesis a while ago, quite a
few years ago, and I was in the archive, and
I learned about these moments post Civil War when multi
racial city governments were coming up all across the East
Coast and down into the South, and for what they
(09:13):
could do, they were thriving and all people were benefiting.
But the white majority in these places refuse to seed
their space. They refused to allow the city or their town,
and let's say, the country to grow beyond this need
to be white. That there is a history of black
(09:35):
folks being at the forefront and other folks of color
being a part of these progressive movements and pushes forward,
but always with this violent, let's say, hand tapping of
white supremacy constantly coming through.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Right.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
And I have thought about when I was in the archive,
I was being I was very defeated because I was
trying to make this argument that if the United States
it was a democracy, we could only be that because
black people made it so, right, very similar to what
Nicole Hanna Jones was doing with the sixteen nineteen project Right.
And I was in the archive and I was seeing
that here are all these black people, these black folks
(10:14):
through time who, using this saying by Zoroloherson, by hook
a crook, found ways to survive and, like I said,
in some places thrive. And they did it because they
saw themselves in each other. And it kind of is
this thing of you could never believe in the veil
(10:36):
or the midst lies and illusions of what the country was,
because we bear the brunt of them. Yep. And that's
how we were able to forge community, not in response
to this visceral force of white supremacy, but in a
response in life affirming ways to say that, hey, actually,
whether or not the United States survived, we will. And
(10:58):
I've been thinking a lot lot about that over the
last week or so because in the immediate after, I mean,
I don't know about you, but Tuesday, you know, around
ten o'clock, my partner had gone to bed and I
started to see I said, oh my god, this is
not going to go the way that we wanted to. Yeah,
let me see a girl. I tried to go to bed.
I was tossing and turning. I couldn't figure it out.
(11:19):
And then I go to bed and spirit wakes me
up at three o'clock to see that Pennsylvania and Georgia
had gone to him, and I said, oh, it's over.
And I woke up on Wednesday and I was devastated.
I was devastated because for a moment I allowed myself
to maybe not forget, but to disremember what the country is.
(11:43):
But by the time that Thursday and Friday had come
around and I was here in the center, and I
was with people who had been nervous for weeks and
had constantly been asking me about what did I feel
and how did I think about things? And I said, well,
on this side or that side, we're going to have
to take care of each other. This is a long
way to say, like what is community. Community is more
(12:03):
than people of shared identity together. People would say that
pocs this tart, that we're community. Obviously, after last week,
we see that we are not right right that part.
And what community is is a vested interest in the success,
the health, the wellness and the well being of the
(12:24):
people that we are around. It is a commitment to
not abandon or disregard. It's a commitment to say that
I will step up when you have to step back.
It's a commitment to say that I don't have to
experience life for way that you do to see that
you deserve to live a just life, that you deserve
to live in the fullness of whoever it is that
(12:45):
you decide to be and in community is something that
requires a lot of us. And I think right now
in this moment, for people who are listening and for
people who are thinking a lot about what do we do,
I would say start with that small seat community, the
few people that you let intimately into your life, and
(13:07):
to start really really sitting there considering that when the
going gets tough, well the people that you around sell
you off, that they maybe have some hope and something better. Right,
because we're seeing a lot of people talk about, well,
I voted for the economy, or I did this, or
I did that, and now they're starting to see, wait
a minute, when they get done with y'all, they're coming
(13:29):
to us next.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
And so what community says is that we have a
vested interest in ensuring that there is nobody next. And
that is really at the core of what I'm thinking about,
because at the end of all of this, we want
to be able to say that we lived well, not
in response to visceral and violent forces, but in life
affirming ways and reminders that it is still worth living
(13:54):
so long as we keep, you know, getting up to
do it.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Everything that you just said, particularly about and defining community
and what you said about community makes so much sense.
And my question for you is what the election revealed
to your earlier point is that we are not in community? Right.
(14:24):
What you said about the veil being lifted, this veil
and I look at it as the veil between what
we had hoped for America and what America actually is. Yea,
that is what has been lifted. And when we recognize
(14:45):
now what America has been who America actually is, what
does it look like to forge community when half of
the country hates the other half of the country. Right,
Like you say, to invite those that you care that
have a vested interest in your thriving into your intimate space.
(15:11):
But we now recognize that people that we have had
in our intimate space, whether they be our colleagues, whether
they be our family members, whether they be our friends,
looked at us and put themselves first. Our grandparents voted
against their grandchildren. Yeah yeah, Husbands voted against their wives.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Mm hmmm hm. And it makes you sit and for
a while act, you know, and just being real. And
in my community, we've been saying, you know, out riding
the Metro or walking in the area and just you
find yourself just looking at people and you squint in
your eyes a little bit because it's like, girl who
sides you? Was it you?
Speaker 1 (15:58):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (15:59):
Yeah, you know. So there's a lot of that, and
you know what, I'm going to be honest, I don't
have a clear, cookie cut answer. I wrote this essay
a few years ago, entitled returning to the Village, and
it was after reading Tony morrison Soula and reading some
a New York Times review book review of the book,
right and this white lady of this white reviewer, she
(16:22):
essentially says that one day Tony Morrison will grow beyond
this provincial place.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
Yes, I actually I remember, okay, I remember that reveal.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Yeah, you know, and so one day Tony Morrison will
She's amazing, but one day she'll get beyond this. And
you know, Tony never really directly responded to that. And
I thought a lot about this idea of provincial as
if black people living in our fullness isn't the center
of our world. You know, so I'm like provincial, Like
(16:55):
that doesn't make sense to me. So I started thinking
about what it means to me to exist in my
black life, from my black livelihood, and I started thinking
about what Tony Morrison and word workers of her tradition
we're trying to do. Was essentially sit us all down
by a camp fire, and we sat around this fire
that is in let's say this village, and it's an
(17:19):
open door village. There are boundaries around it, but there's
one door coming through the front, and you could come
in and out of it as you please. But in
order to make sense of what's happening, you got to
release some stuff. You got to release this desire to
make them understand. You have to release this desire of
(17:39):
constantly responding. You know, they tell you that you don't
have a language. So you spend thirty years proving that
we have a language, the language. Yep, come on, they
tell us that we don't have you know, that our
communities aren't strong, and then you spend all this time
creating quote unquote traditional family you know what I'm saying,
ripping away the vestiges of who we are and who
we have been. And I started just thinking a lot
(18:01):
about this return to the village, and and and then
I started thinking about, well, this essay isn't about white people,
but but they they find themselves, and not just whites,
but let's just say non black people that they find
themselves with their hands cupped over their ears at the
village door. They want to study us, They want to
they want to see how do y'all how does the
(18:23):
fire stay lit? How do y'all stay so the worst
of humanity throwing your way, and yet you still create
the jazz and blues. It's like you still find a
way to dance and to celebrate. I mean, I think
one of the things about Kamala is that that was
at least inspiring to me is that you know that
she knows what half the country thought about her. Mm hmm.
(18:44):
I don't think that she, by any means was off
about what the nation thought about not just her but
the people like her. And yet she found ways to
get a nation to laugh and dance, or to people
in fiber Nation to laugh and dance for a sec
and to just for a moment see that, Hey, life
is still worth living, even though it doesn't book the
(19:06):
way that we fully wanted to. So going back to
this point of people who voted against us, people, I really,
let me tell you ding they are at the furthest
edge of my mind. They will have to be dealt with.
Let me be clear, but I know that the final
assignment of white supremacy is to destroy whiteness itself. And
what my God says is that the last will be
(19:27):
first and the first shall be last. I'm actually less
concerned about them being dealt with and more concerned about
have I created the conditions and being inside of the
spaces that I'm with people who aren't constantly trying to
respond to them. You know, in the commentary on my
I'm like or like the people on the news right now,
(19:49):
black folks going on the news, and I'm like, y'all
can just say that the nation is racist as hell.
Let's let's let's actually get to THEO.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
If we want to grow, get to the let's get
to the root of it.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
Yeah, let's let's name a thing a thing.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
Let's seek here and say that for certain populations of
non black people of color, they understand that in this nation,
if you want to succeed, you know that you have
to swim in the waters of anti blackness.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
You know that that is what you get in the
welcome packet when you immigrate here.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
Come on.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
And so I'm actually I'm not. I don't really they
are at such the corner of my mind because again,
I'm worried about those of us who are on the
side of life, living and justice. And on that side,
we got a lot to sort through, you know what
I'm saying. I think because at the end of the day,
(20:40):
let's say Kamala did get elected, we would still have
to deal with these horses.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
Yeah, And I was just going to say, and I
think that that is right, Like I want I will
say this. I want to be in the space where
I say that these people are at the furthest edges
of my mind, because right now they are occupying the center.
I am riding this wave of despair where I have
(21:06):
dedicated my entire career to public service and public offering
in public education, using various platforms, positions, and spaces in
order to advance the rights of other people. Yeah, and
to witness America's forceful return to its origin story is wild, right.
(21:36):
And then to think like, did we come this far
to only get this far to be pulled all the
way back. And I feel like that is where people
are struggling right now, which is where there are some
particularly you know, black women who you are seeing on
social media since the election, say I'm done. I've tapped out.
(22:01):
Y'all take it from here, because we've been on the
front lines doing the work, being the warriors for justice,
only to look behind us and recognize nobody has our.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
Right, nobody is there. Yeah. Yeah, And I think that
that's righteous. I think that that's holy. I think that
there is because I don't think that like because I've
been seeing you know again, social media is just a
hellscape right now, and and I've been seeing so much
of it, and I'm like, I don't hear that sisters
(22:33):
are turning away from us. I don't hear that. And
so when people are like, well, black, you know, they're
saying that they're done, they're done with y'all trying to
save you correct, but with me, And what I'm thinking
about as a black queer person is how how am
I getting in the ring? You know what I'm saying, like,
how how do how do okay? You know what y'all have,
(22:55):
It's time for all of us to step up and
how do I how do I confront where I can
the massage andoi of people in community who don't want
to see the space for black women to lead. Because
I started thinking about, you know, in my environments and
stuff that I've been in, you know, there have been
ample of moments where I have had to say, like
(23:18):
where we were in the room together and I wasn't
gonna let nobody play her. I didn't care right or wrong.
I got her in the same way that she has me.
And I think that there is something so holy to say,
you know what, nurse your own baby this time. Come on,
and I I, you don't have access to my flesh
(23:41):
no more. I think we should hold that for some
time now. I also think that it doesn't mean and
I'm telling no one how to feel about anything. I
don't think that what I'm hearing is that we're done forever.
I don't hear that as an y'all, I don't hear that.
(24:01):
What I hear is is time for y'all to get
your houses in order, because we're already here. Our house
is already in order. And when you you know, when
you get into it with us, you know, and I
think there's also something about like that Jewish women, Jewish
women and black women are the people who showed up
the most. Yep, I just I think that that's that's
(24:23):
saying something, and I don't know if we fully know
what it means. But all I know is all of
us who are not black or Jewish women, we got
some work to do.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
I appreciate you and the work that you were doing
to try and help people make sense of what it
actually means to be well and to live well, because
there is a and has been a desire to lie
to ourselves in order to convince ourselves that everything has
(25:01):
been okay, because the adversity hadn't been so stark in
our faces as it had been for our ancestors. But
now that truth has arrived on our door and we
actually don't really know what's on the other side. History
can only be your guide to a certain extent. But
like I said at the beginning, we're in uncharted territory.
(25:21):
And so my last question for you is in knowing
that we are in uncharted territory, in knowing that you
may practice ways to find grounding to build community, but
that there still may be a bulldozer yeah, that waits
for you. There may still be flames that wait for
(25:43):
what it is that you're building. What do you say
to people that are really in the spiral of hopelessness
right now, knowing that safety, knowing that their idea of
safety right and we know that people have said for
centuries say is an illusion, But now that illusion is
(26:05):
it's very clear that it was true. It wasn't just
as saying, So what do you say to people that
are grappling with that reality right now?
Speaker 2 (26:13):
Yeah? First, I would honor that it's really tough to
go through this type of identity crisis because during the
uprisings and all that was happening in COVID nineteen I,
before I had gotten there, I knew America was filled
(26:34):
with baltz. I knew the stories, I knew the history.
I come from a Vietnam War veteran who went and
signed up and served his country, not because he was
so patriotic, but because, as a black man in Niagara Falls,
New York in the middle of the twentieth century, there
were only a few options available to him. And I
(26:55):
know that when he came back, he went to bars
and he wasn't able to be served even in his
military uniform. I know that when Barack Obama ran from
president of the United States that my grandfather brimmed with pride.
I know that also because at the time I was
living in Texas, he refused to send me any of
(27:17):
the swag that he had made for the family. I
couldn't get a Barack Obama sweatshirt, a hat, a stick
that I can get nothing because he understood what the
country was, and he understood that even in the glimmers,
even in the glimmers, who we are. I think what
he says to me and what I would say to everybody,
it's time to be a witness. And to be a
(27:40):
witness means to stare it out into the world and
name exactly what you see, not what you want to see,
but what's there and what that allows us to do.
It allows us to become embodied, and only and embodied
people can be free. I think about those people who
stole themselves a way to freedom, people who maybe never
(28:01):
ever ever saw their reflection in a mirror, but knew
exactly what they looked like. They knew what they felt like,
they knew what they tasted like, they knew what it
would sound like for their feet to run on grass.
They knew what they smelled like and what the hounds
would smell, and yet they stole themselves away. And it
gets to this thing that it disembodied. People can never
(28:22):
be free, and we can't get free, healed or whole
disembodied or by ourselves. It means that we start seeing
that my wellness is my responsibility. At life all we
believed that wellness is the daily, moment by moment endeavor
of providing care to one's individual mental, physical, emotional, and
(28:42):
spiritual needs. Right, so it's tending to you that while
being is the responsibility and obligation of communities, institutions, and
more broadly, the state, we live in a time where
the nation doesn't believe it is their responsibility to provide
for our well being. So let's go to the next tier.
Our institututions, the places that we're working, that they have
(29:03):
vested interest in ensuring that we can provide for our
own individual wellness, and we should. We all ought to
gather and organize, you know, in whatever ways that we
can to push that forward, and then go the tier
under that community. You start to say, hey, actually we're
going to start putting together a bi weekly dinner and
(29:24):
you'll host it at your house this week. And we'll
also launch our book club together, and we'll go on
our walks here and we'll go and do this together,
or we'll just sit and be and become together, because
you start again to see that when we have each other.
And I'm not saying that this makes this is a
quick fix to everything, but I will say that every
(29:45):
day I come in here to this center, I see
what's happening in the world that I see what's happening
in people's lives, and I see the way that they
still laugh and they find hope and hopelessness. I see that,
like so long as life is choosing us, we choose it,
and there is for all the people who are listening
to this, it does. It does seem dreary, but let
(30:07):
me tell you. We may be an uncharted territory, but
this is not unfamiliar. Mm hmm. This is not unfamiliar.
And you think about it, Not all of us will survive,
but those of us that do, we demand witness. We
say that we're going to tell the truth. Because here's
the last thing. I know. I'm long winded. I'm sorry
(30:28):
The last thing I'll say is that we always think
about the New world, and we think about this world. Right,
we want to leave this one and we want to
go to the next one. What if we accepted that
those of us here probably won't make it to the
New world. But what can we leave for the rebble
that when this world is destroyed and they start cleaning
(30:50):
through the ashes, when they start lifting up the bricks
and the foundation, what did we leave them? Maybe not
all of it will be useful, but some of it
should be. And that's what I am living for. Because
when I was trying to live for the New World,
I was depressed all the time because I thought it
would never come. But I am. I am living for
the rubble, for the place in the in between, that
(31:13):
wilderness that people will have to map out. And my
hope is what we're doing here at the clearing, what
I am doing in my own individual life is something
that people can pick up hundreds of years from now
and find some use in it to talk about how
we relate to ourselves and to other people.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
Amazing, amazing, Stephan, Please tell people how they can connect
to you, to the center, to your work.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
Yeah, absolutely, so you can feel free to follow me
on social media across all platforms. It's stefan as te
Pho n Underscore JB. Same thing for the clearing at
the Clearing DC and you can find all the information.
You'll be able to find our website and I'm sure
we can maybe pass it along for the show notes.
(32:00):
But you know, understand that the digital is just one way.
You know, we understand that someday somebody can come and
erase all of that. Right. If you are in the
DC area, I invite you to the Union Market area.
I invite you to our clearing because from what I hear,
it is a place like none other. It's a place
where people feel sustained and fortified. Though the road may
(32:20):
be rough and weary, we know that we have each
other and we know that you know, so long as
life is choosing us, we'll keep choosing it.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
I appreciate you so very much. Thank you for making
the time for WOKF.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
Thank you, thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
That is it for me today, Dear friends on WOKF.
As always, power to the people and to all the people. Power,
get woke and stay woke as fuck.
Host
Danielle Moodie
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