something ordinary

a couple of weeks ago, i was preparing to give a paper at a conference. i was working on chicana feminist writer, Gloria Anzaldúa, exploring the potential for her work to offer a queer symbolic language. it was getting down to the wire, and i was feeling that core-tingling anxiety begin to get denser, like a balloon full of gravel and lava in my chest, bumping into my bones, threatening to burst at any moment. and desperation was the weight tethering it to the inside of my secret part. just begin, whispers the little girl who sits with me sometimes and keeps my loneliness company. just begin.

i opened the library book that has been on my shelf for nine months, an index card fell out, presumably a page marker. rather than look at the page it was holding (opening the book is a beginning; let's not get ahead of ourselves), i was drawn to what was written on the card - a shopping list. i read the list.

can a grocery list be a poem, a prayer even? it seemed so beautiful to me. as i read i tasted and smelled and imagined the labor, the tools, discerning what these ingredients would come together to be - lemon pound cake, tortellini salad, guacamole. yes, a prayer i think, preparations. but what for? a dinner party i think. i tried to think of when i had made lemon pound cake. and i remembered who it was for, the evening shared with friends, opening our home, the moist, soft heat of pound cake on my tongue, mingled with the cold wetness of ice cream and the throbbing sensations of joy and love and energy in sugar and conversation. two things spring to mind when i remember this meal and this moment when i needed to be reminded - eucharist and, well, perhaps you can decipher the other.

Gloria Anzaldúa describes dormancy and emergence as an important process for the human being, the writer, the queer woman, la mestiza. she describes this as the Coatlicue [Coat-li-qwe] state. this is an internal, psychic struggle to reconcile (but not resolve) contradictions. for Anzaldúa, this is characterized by a visit from Coatlicue, the Aztec goddess of birth and death. 'serpent skirt' represents for Anzaldúa the fusion of opposites that plague the psyche. she appears at the crossroads of life and plunges the soul into darkness and stasis, the space of germination, where death and new life meet, the threshold of transformation. interestingly, Anzaldúa describes the emergence from this state or the crossing as a claiming of her sexual agency. It is orgasmic. she writes, “And someone in me takes matters into our own hands, and eventually, takes dominion over serpents – over my own body, my sexual activity, my soul, my mind, my weaknesses and strengths. Mine. Ours. Not the heterosexual white man’s or the colored man’s or the state’s or the culture’s or the religion’s or the parents’ – just ours, mine.”

doing and writing theology are erotic acts, just as making a pound cake or preparing and receiving communion can be. all of these acts also require a claiming of self and desires to give and receive love. they require imagination and creativity, which requires action. this shopping list was a love note from God, a reminder of my hybrid identity as committed to both theory and practice. i am not just an academic. i am a partner, a friend, a sister, a daughter. i was able to see the other commitments in my life, the other things i do. and i was able to move beyond the thinking and the worrying and the fear that academics and writers, really all human beings struggle with constantly, and see the task before me as another labor of love, another instantiation of eucharist. i was, once again, as i always am, able to embrace my insatiable lust for language and ideas. i popped the balloon in my chest and let the grit and heat drip down to the tips of my toes, and i feasted on the entrails of the serpent.