Rests as a Pit

Let’s make time stand still together

The first note I learned to play, while learning my first instrument, was silence. Silence is a note too. I learned to play the notes in between the ones we hear first. Which resonated in my body because I’ve always leaned towards silence. In music, the notation we come to know as silence is called a rest.

Pictured above is a whole rest which equals 4 beats of silence

I am a rest filling the space until we meet to flood The Clearing together. The awkward silences become swampland for us to wade through. All the while knowing that if we get still—the water will clear. Or at the minimum, the path before us will emerge clearer. Sometimes, the swampland is the refuge we needed all along but ran past because it didn’t seem like a viable option. However, it’s in that pit that imaginative solutions & ideas emerge such as saxophonist Harry Carney playing with Duke Ellington & his orchestra.

We applaud Harry’s ability to hold out the long final note on “Sophisticated Lady,” but fail to acknowledge the beat of rest that made the note we do hear possible. The rest is a quick release & inhale to gather enough breath to fill the space with awe.

We love how Bill Withers held on to the word day for 40 days & 40 nights in “Lovely Day.” Just like how we equally admire his insistence on repetitively proclaiming what he knew in “Ain’t No Sunshine.” And still, yet again, we fail to be enamored with the silent beat he fell into before the sung notes that hold our minds captive in amazement.

We give Mariah Carey, the iconic diva that she is, her flowers for holding the last note in “We Belong Together” but can not comprehend the deliberate choice to take the rest needed to sing that note out loud.

The point I’m making is before we as listeners arrive at those beautiful drawn-out notes we adore—the artist made an intentional choice to rest in their process first. It is quite impossible to arrive at the lauded over moments without first falling into rest.

I realize it feels somewhat futile to talk about rest when bombs are still detonating over Palestine. I realize it may feel futile to discuss the musical notation of rest when hurricane survivors have no place to rest their heads. It feels futile to talk about rest when the mines are still up & running in the Congo. Be that as it may without walking on what I presumed to be solid ground, & falling into the pit of the whole rest I would not have had the space to process the atrocities of these acts. If I had never fallen into the pit of rest I never would have been able to dream of how to align my life with my beliefs & be spurred into action centering my body’s capacity.

I more than likely would have continued walking my path feeling that the ground was faulty but not having the space to imagine how to make it feel solid again. I would’ve adopted a false sense of security in the very systems that harm me so that I may continue presenting as if the world’s spinning still felt the same in my body. Because suppressing emotions & desires is what the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (bell hooks) asks of us. We accept breadcrumbs of sustenance when we in fact crave community to share the whole loaf with. I’m talking about the rest that empowers us to make intentional choices so when it’s time to sing out loud our stories carry far beyond where our feet are planted. This type of rest is in regards to what gives us the space to truly feel. Instead of carrying on out of survival, we trust that the pit of rest only prepares us to share in the whole note-shaped clearing when we are ready.

Here’s a video I made of what I imagine this ongoing process of walking, maybe even racing through life, on solid ground until you fall into the pit of the whole rest. This pit lets you breathe for 4 days, weeks, months, years & other possible time experiences. When you emerge the whole note clearing will be there as a space for you to share & be held.

A major source of inspiration for The Clearing was inviting fellow unruly folks who feel called to still time to feel. In a world that tells us to carry on The Clearing is a place to meet to collectively still time. This is why 6 of the 9 notes in the Assemblage Framework scale are musical rests. In our 1:1 rest sessions, we will explore, laugh, gather, grieve, get still & honor the knowledge our sites of memories (including our bodies) are telling us.

A still from the film entitled The Wiz that I rewatched recently while resting & re-discovered so many gems to hold on to. This quote from the song “Believe in Yourself” performed by Diana Ross is one of them 💙.

This is an intentional choice in the process of The Clearing to fall into rests together leading us to our community clearing sessions represented by the whole notes (pictured on the right of our framework). The whole note equals 4 beats of sound—Harry/Bill/Mariah’s lasting notes that we adore—we will create together & share in collective clearing ceremony with your cohort.

In this Clearing, through the Assemblage framework, we acknowledge the shift occurring & feel through the rest to share what emerged. In The Clearing, this emergence takes the form of 3 archival art pieces. These 3 pieces will preserve the sites of memory we gather & honor through the Assemblage framework. You can incorporate archival material into your work but you can also use purely your site of memory as the source you draw from to create. Ultimately, this process welcomes us back home to the sites of memory in our communities & that exist within us. So that when we fall into a pit, we know it is a place to rest (for however long) knowing that when we emerge we can honor what we found by sharing out loud with others.

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🌀 Enrollment for The Clearing is open now & closes on Thursday, October 17th, 2024.

If this piece resonated with you then I invite you to enroll in The Clearing! The Assemblage Conservatory Clearing is a 9-week griot in training program where you will go from feeling disconnected to the land you walk on, feeling ungrounded, & difficulties navigating the tides of life to feeling rooted walking with the stories of the land you gather through archival art making & the Assemblage framework

The Clearing Fall 2024 Cohort will be capped at 10 unruly folks. So be sure to gather the information you need & enroll today to meet us in The Clearing by clicking the button below. Still, have lingering questions? You can still book a discovery call from now until the end of enrollment by clicking the same button below.

Share the flyer below with someone you think has been searching for a Clearing in their life! I hope we will get to practice gathering & honoring together inside The Clearing of our dreams knowing that reality is a dream’s worst nightmare & a dreamer’s worst nightmare is reality ✨. Meet you in the clearing?

Inspired by bell hooks’ writing within Art On My Mind, “In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life.” On page 57 bell writes that “the walls of images in Southern Black homes were sites of resistance. They constituted private, black-owned and -operated gallery spaces where images could be displayed, shown to friends and strangers. These walls were a space where, in the midst of segregation, the hardship of apartheid, dehumanization could be countered. Images could be critically considered, subjects positioned according to individual desire.”

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