(Written after his visit with me on Wednesday February 23)
Revisiting Karina’s blog, Karina’s films, Karinaland and Karina herself, I’m reminded that people can be medicine.
I’m lifted by Karina’s presence, by all the ways she takes in and pours out.
As a person born and raised in the U.S. who identifies as a cis-straight white guy, I’ve long felt that some vital part of me has been cut away. The missing piece aches and sears with phantom pain. The wound only throbs harder when I try to pretend that everything is fine and ignore the violence and harm flowing through me. At times death has felt like the best escape. That’s the ejection trigger my uncle pulled. I feel for him.
Watching these cycles of violence and trauma tear through my family, through our community and world, through me, sometimes it feels like, what’s the point?
Karina and her community show that healing is possible. A person born in the rubble of human atrocity, Karina found healing through movement, dance, drama, film making, music, gardening, ritual, spirit, community... These energies flow through her work and into strangers like me who happen to bike down her street and stop to take in her BLM Memorial Mural.
On Wednesday I bike up to Karina’s house again, almost a year to the day after our first chance meeting. I see Charleena Lyles’ name on the BLM mural. Charleena is a young black woman, mother, student at my college, who was murdered by police in front of her children for having a mental health crisis. The police also shot and killed the baby growing in Charleena’s womb. We shouted Charleena’s name in the streets of Seattle. Charleena’s name echoes in the police accountability legislation recently passed in Washington State. A piece of Charleena’s humanity proclaims itself from Karina’s garage door, memorialized alongside many other human beings tragically killed by racist violence in the United States. Killed but not forgotten.
In Karina’s living room, on the screen on her lap, I meet Nicky, one of Karina’s collaborators who helped paint the BLM Memorial Mural. Karina has already connected us via email, where I learned of Nicky's work on the We Rise podcast. The episode “The People Are the River” introduced me to the Stop Line 3 movement. I've since played this episode for my students to help them learn about indigenous history, sovereignty, and activism. Now Nicky and Karina will visit my class, and I have no doubt that their energy will help students access their voice and creativity, the sense that they do have something to say and a story to tell about what's happening in their communities.
I’m reminded of a scene in Karina’s film, Phoenix Dance. The camera follows Homer as he warms up on the mat. He has one leg, the other amputated. At first I fixate on the phantom limb, but then I’m drawn into his movement. He lies on his side, curls into a ball, then straightens. He rolls, rises, stretches. He sways like a tree, then spins like a leaf riding the wind. He is alone in the scene, but I can feel Karina behind the camera. She moves with him. She holds Homer in her gaze, feeding and amplifying his spirit. As a viewer I am brought into their exchange. An exquisite fullness emerges. Something beautiful and sacred opens within me.
This is the experience of visiting Karinaland, becoming Karina’s friend. I feel opened by her art, lifted by her stories. In her garden, the limbs of her trees hold me. Shoots sprout from my feet and sink into the ground, entwining with a root system that holds the earth. Cut open, cut down, carved out, and poisoned, yet thrumming with light and wholeness and healing.
––Jamie Wilson, writer, college teacher, union activist in Seattle, adventurer on his bike... (see entries with his writing from July 25 & 26, and October 11, 2021)
(Jamie gave me the name and story of Charleena that is now memorialized on the garage doors)
See entries of Oct 21 and July 25 & 26 in 2021
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