The Body I Was Given: Silent Encounter Community Gathering

​Sunday, October 18 — gather at 5:45 p.m., circle begins at sundown

​After forty days of fasting and thirty days of sitting, the silence ends the way it should: together. We will sit in a circle — no stage, no panel, no one at the front — and speak about what happened in that space. Come as you are. Stay as long as you want.

​I cannot fast my way into knowing what it means to live in a Black body in America.

​I cannot voluntarily experience what I have inherited the privilege of not experiencing.

​For forty days, I could only sit here, in this body, and refuse to look away.

​Come because you sat in that chair and have carried something out of it that has not yet found words. Come because you sat nearby, or stood in the doorway, or read about this and wondered what it would ask of you. Come because you want to know what other people found in the silence — and whether it was anything like what you found.

​I will share what these forty days required of me. You may share what your time required of you, or say nothing at all and let the silence keep doing its work.

​What you will get is not an answer. It is the rare experience of being in a room where a group of strangers has agreed to sit with this country's history without rushing to escape it.

​The fast ends here. The sitting ends here. The question does not.

​When this is over, I will still be able to stand. I will still be able to walk away. I am asking us to sit together one last time before any of us do.