Turn your lights down low.
One reflective practice I’ve been doing is keeping a Hip hop journal. In it, I reflect on my personhood and feelings through Hip hop and Black music.
One of the songs I’ve journaled about recently is ‘Turn Your Lights Down Low’ — the version with Bob Marley and Lauryn Hill. The actual aesthetic feel of the song is lovely, but it’s the extramusical thoughts related to this song that I want to explore here. I’m really impacted by the imagery and sensory elements evoked by the idea of turning your lights low and what that means for us connecting with our inner selves.
Now imagine that when our experience is rooted in our minds and the intellectual evaluation of our emotions, the lights are bright. There is nothing inherently wrong with this bright light, but there is something problematic about it as the dominant or only light.
When we reflect and explore our feelings, we are turning the lights down low. I imagine it as a rounded, soft, focused, glow. If ‘aha’ moments had an image, I’d actually image it in this way. And further, it would be a certain type of reflection- one of deep feeling. While reflection could be very thoughtful and cognitive, this leans more towards a feeling space.
“I Feel, therefore, I Can be Free.”
I’m talking about something very much connected to what Audre Lorde states in ‘Poetry is Not a Luxury’, when she says “The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt.”
Audre Lorde was a self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” In this writing, she is talking about the experience of women and how poetry is a necessity and not a luxury. The poetry that comes from experience as being distinct from that of nice words or rhetorical device. That the white fathers said, “I think, therefore I am”, but the Black mothers says, “I feel, therefore, I can be free.”
I, of course, am not a Black woman, but firstly, I stand in solidarity with Black women and examine the ways I perpetuate the patriarchy as a cisgender heterosexual man that was socialized in ways that objectify and place value judgements on women. Secondly, like the feminine that birthed and nurtured me, I create, I sensate, and I relate. I lead, but I also follow, I fight, but I also surrender. I’m solid and grounded and I can ground for others, but I’m also soft. And I feel. I feel very deeply.
“I Wanna Give You Some Love.”
I turn the light down low and I tell myself, “I wanna give you some love.” I hope it’s a welcome thing for me as a Black man to love himself and feel deeply. That we might care for ourselves and you more, my dear Black loves. I hope we might see ourselves in relationship to this light, and…..
With this light, I’m thinking about how emotions are related, but also very different from feelings. Emotions are more cognitive, based in understanding. Emotions include appraisal. A determination. An evaluation. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s different than feelings for me.
Feelings are not at first to be understood. They are to be felt. Acknowledged. Noticed. Then, many feelings are to be Stayed With. Experienced. Explored.
Feelings are not rooted in cognition and intellect, but in sensation and intuition. I learn to trust my feelings. As a student in my class recently wrote, “one can think and be wrong, but one can never feel and be wrong. Feelings are our own, there is no right and wrong.”
So, I’m turning the lights down low and I’m observing my feelings. If I decide to stay with a certain feeling, I’m saying, “I wanna give you some love.” When we sit in reflection in this way, I believe it’s an intuitive practice, like poetry as Audre Lorde talks about. “It is a vital necessity of our existence.” Yes- for women, but not only women. I need poetry as a generational blessing of vulnerability from the Black mothers and Black Queer folx. From all those who have had to learn what it means to belong to themselves. I need it because “it forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into an idea, then into more tangible action.”
The Idea of You
We can get to ideas and action from feelings, but we are not succumbing to the domination of rationality and productivity as ways of being. I find that a strictly emotional space, because it’s often connected to that cognitive experience, makes it hard for you to disconnect from experiencing yourself as ‘the idea of you’. You often appraise your situation and evaluate it. You appraise and evaluate yourself. And the idea of you is not always a negative evaluation of yourself.
The idea of you can be a meditation of the things you’ve done well in a way that inflates the ego. For example, many of us experience social media as an ego echo chamber at times. That’s why we consider taking breaks from it. It can reinforce the idea of you instead of the actual you. Which is……… How do we get out of the idea and evaluation of ourselves and into acceptance, affirmation, discovery, and exploring ourselves more fully?
I hope that you will choose to practice turning the lights down low and holding yourself dear. We need more people whose thoughts and actions are connected deeply to themselves and to community.