Category: Spirituality

  • Salt

    Salt

    The ice is sweating. Moisture gathering at the surface, at the precise line where the ice meets the water it’s in the process of becoming. I’m watching it from the bench on the pier, the same bench, the same eastward orientation I keep returning to without quite deciding to. Gulls have settled at that line and they don’t move. They know something about thresholds. They sit exactly where the transformation is occurring and they stay.

    The St. Lawrence in late March. The ice still holds toward the middle, grey-white and flat. At the edges it’s releasing, the surface doing its slow work, and the water that was held all winter is beginning to find its way back into current. I’ve been sitting here long enough to watch it happen. I haven’t moved either.

    There’s a specific quality of attention this place produces in me. I come here when the body has been holding too much and needs to set it down somewhere that can receive it without asking what it is. The body keeps returning to this exact spot, this exact orientation, facing east, the city at its back, and at some point the repetition itself becomes information.

    I put the city at my back when I sat down. I know what’s there. I know this city the way you know something you’ve loved through several versions of itself and several versions of yourself — its pace, its particular generosity, the specific texture of its contradictions, the way care gets built here inside difficulty. I’ve walked these streets through enough seasons to have accumulated a real knowledge of this place. That’s most of what I know about how to survive.

    The most enslaved people in what is now called Canada lived here. In these streets. In these buildings’ predecessors. They moved through this geography, were bought and sold in it, built what became the city now sitting behind my left shoulder. Montréal, Québec City, the towns along this river — the institution put down roots here, made its records here, established itself in French and in English and in the silences between the two. The history is documented and specific and present. It’s in the soil the city was built on. It’s in the financial foundations of institutions that are still standing. The place holds this whether I acknowledge it or not. What I try to do is be someone who doesn’t pretend otherwise while I’m standing here — who doesn’t let the beauty of the water or the particular way the light falls on the ice in March do the work of making the ground feel neutral.

    Follow the St. Lawrence east and you reach the Atlantic. The Atlantic is the route of the trade. The trade is the origin of my lineage. The river in front of me, moving in the direction it has always moved, is carrying water toward the ocean that carried my ancestors. The body standing at the edge of this pier and the current visible at the edge of this ice are not separate things. There’s a line from here to there that is literal — longitude, current, the specific direction water moves when the land finally releases it into the sea. I keep facing east. I keep coming back to this exact orientation. The body keeps choosing it. The eastward pull runs deeper than this lifetime’s accumulation of difficult days and necessary walks. The ancestors are in the direction the water goes. Facing east, here, at this river, is a form of relation.

    Ancestral presence feels like a quality of attention, a pressure in the chest that arrives when you’re standing somewhere that holds more than it shows, a recognition that moves through the body before the mind has assembled the full sentence. I’ve felt it here before. I feel it today. Something in the body responds to this geography in a way it doesn’t respond to other geographies, and I’ve learned to follow that response without demanding it become more legible than it is. I’m not the first Black person to stand at this water. I’m not the first to face east from a shore on this river and feel the weight of what the water knows. There’s an accumulation in a place like this — of the people who came before, of what they survived and didn’t survive, of the specific grief of those who were brought here and those who were born here into conditions not of their making. That accumulation sits in the body alongside everything else, indistinguishable sometimes from ordinary grief, sometimes from the particular tiredness of carrying one’s own history through a world that keeps asking you to set it down. I stay with it. I’ve stopped asking it to become more coherent than it is. Some knowledge arrives in sensation and lives there, and the staying is the practice.

    The gulls haven’t moved from the line where the ice sweats. I keep returning to what they seem to understand about that specific location — the threshold between states, the place where one thing is becoming another and the process is incomplete and you can see both at once if you look closely enough. The grief of knowing what the water knows is structural. It predates you and will outlast you. It lives in the body as inheritance rather than as event. The grief of standing at a river that runs toward the place your people were taken from, in a city built in part by their labour and their captivity, in a body that carries the record of all of it — that grief has no clean edges. It doesn’t arrive in a single moment and it doesn’t resolve in one either. It moves the way the ice moves. A slow release at the surface, the held thing finding its way back to motion, not all at once but gradually, at the line between what was solid and what is becoming current again. The holding is structural, which means the release is too: slow, incremental, happening at the edge where the conditions finally allow it. This is one of the few places where the grief the body carries and the geography underfoot are in direct relation. Where the river is already doing the work of holding the history, because it runs through the same history on its way to the sea.

    There’s a practice in returning. Each time the body is slightly different — more tired, or more clear, or carrying a different weight — and the place receives that version without distinction. What accumulates is a relational knowledge, built through repeated presence, through being changed by a place over time and being willing to notice the change. I know this stretch of the St. Lawrence in winter. I know what the ice looks like at different stages of forming and releasing. I know the quality of the cold here and how the wind comes off the water and where the light lands in the late afternoon. That knowledge was built through return, and it means something that it was built at this geography. The body knew to come here today. It knew the turn toward the water before the thought to turn had fully articulated itself. This is what happens when a practice has been sustained long enough that the body has internalized its logic. The walks have their own intelligence. The route has its own memory. And underneath that memory, older routes: the ancestors returning to water, finding their way to shorelines for their own reasons, carrying their own knowledge of what the water holds. Some of those routes were interrupted. Some were destroyed deliberately, the paths erased along with the people who made them, the knowledge scattered in the violence of what was done. The practice of return is partly an attempt to hold what was held, to keep a thread from breaking entirely, to maintain a relation to geography that was never supposed to be maintained. I have this river. This body. This bench facing east. I’ve stopped waiting for more before taking it seriously.

    The ice is still sweating when I finally stand up. The gulls have shifted slightly but they haven’t left the line. The water at the edge is darker now than when I arrived, more current visible, the release progressing through the afternoon. I stand there for a moment before turning back toward the city, facing east with the cold on my face, feeling the specific quality of attention this place produces and letting it finish what it was doing before I interrupt it with movement. The river will keep doing this after I’m gone from the pier. The ice will keep its slow release toward the edges, the sweating at the line, the water finding its way back into current. The St. Lawrence will keep running east the way it has always run, carrying whatever the city gives it, moving toward the Atlantic with the patience of something that has been doing this longer than anyone alive can remember. The ocean it runs into will keep holding the history it holds. The salt will stay salt.

    At the end of everything, it all returns to that. The ocean that carried my ancestors. The river that runs into it. The body standing here, made of water and what water holds, at the edge of a geography that is mine and not mine, claimed and unclaimed, loved and not yet finished being grieved. The ice sweating slowly back into motion. The gulls at the threshold. The city at my back, built on what it was built on, holding what it holds.

    The water already knows all of it. I come here to remember that I do too.

  • Keeping Each Other Alive

    Keeping Each Other Alive

    Good morning.

    When I first heard the theme What’s at stake, I thought about crisis — the headlines, the smoke, that feeling that the world keeps ending. But when I let the question settle lower, into the ribs, it changed. It stopped shouting and began breathing.

    What’s at stake lives in how we breathe through the losing. How we keep each other alive — in body, in memory, in breath.

    We gather here in Tiohtià:ke, this island city colonially called Montréal, where the river holds its conversation with the sea. The Kanien’kehá:ka have called and cared for this place since before the measure of time, and still the river moves with their keeping.

    If you stand at its edge in the early morning, when mist lifts off the St. Lawrence like smoke from a slow fire, you can smell the ocean far away. The same current that laps these docks once brushed the shores of Ghana, of Trinidad, of Nova Scotia. This water has carried so much — salt, sorrow, survival. It remembers even when we do not.

    To live here is to live where rivers hold court with memory. And I’ve learned that the river always has something to say if you stand still long enough to listen.

    When I walk by that water, I feel it remembering me. The wind catches in my chest the way it must have caught in theirs — those who crossed, those who tended, those who waited on a different shore. The ocean and the river are not symbols to me; they are witnesses. They hold what language tries to bury — the tremor in a hand, the grit of a long-dried tear, the weight of a glance over a shoulder — everything we thought was gone, still moving.

    When I ask the river what’s at stake, it answers in layers: memory, sediment, and breath. Everything carried forward because someone refused to let it sink. The river teaches that what’s at stake is never abstract — it’s the remembering itself, the persistence of movement through loss.

    Christina Sharpe tells us that we live in the wake. I feel that every time I pass the port. The air itself carries residue — of ships, of chains, of prayers that were never written down. The wake is not simply history; it’s weather. And I’m still learning how to live inside that weather without drowning in it.

    The water keeps teaching: remember, and still move. Forgetting feels like stillness but pulls us under.

    Cole Arthur Riley writes that there are truths the body remembers even when the mind forgets. I know that truth. My shoulders tighten when I hear sirens. My breath catches at the sound of a crowd shifting tone. Our bodies are archives of every crossing, every warning, every survival.

    So when I ask what’s at stake here, in this body that remembers, I hear the pulse answer: the stakes are in the breath we keep taking, even when the air feels heavy. They’re in the trembling that refuses to disappear. Our bodies keep insisting that life itself is unfinished work.

    So take a breath. Feel the cold of this river air in your lungs. That chill has moved through centuries of breath — through Indigenous keepers of this land, through enslaved ancestors who built the port, through migrants who came seeking rest. Their breath mingles with ours. The body is the shoreline where past and present meet. Justice begins in the diaphragm before it ever reaches the law.

    Audre Lorde reminds us that caring for ourselves is a form of political warfare. I think of that every time I cook for someone grieving, every time I sit in silence with a friend who can’t find words. Care gathers what’s been shattered. It steadies the trembling hand. It chooses patience when anger wants to speak first.

    And I think — what’s at stake when we care for each other this way? It’s more than comfort. It’s the memory of our own worth. It’s the refusal to abandon tenderness in a world that keeps demanding hardness. Every gesture of care interrupts despair. Every act of care is a way back into the current.

    Our Jewish kin say in Pirkei Avot: it is not your duty to finish the work, neither are you free to desist from it. The river teaches the same thing. It keeps carving, returning, remaking. To care is to join that motion, to step into the current that refuses to stop.

    Philippe Néméh-Nombré reminds us that to be Black in Montréal is to live in the shadow of the ocean. Even this far inland, salt lingers in the snow. The Atlantic hums through the pipes and the bones of the city. I feel that hum when I ride the metro at night, when the doors open and cold air rushes in — the memory of tides still breathing through concrete.

    Every community that survives lives by a promise: to keep showing up, to tell the truth even when it trembles, to hold one another through the long dark. We break that promise sometimes, but we return to it, the way the tide returns to the shore.

    The Qur’an says, whoever saves one life, it is as if they have saved all of humankind. The Talmud says, whoever sustains a single life, it is as if they have sustained an entire world. Different tongues, one breath — both carrying the same rhythm of mercy.

    And the Qur’an also says, weigh with justice and do not fall short in the measure. The river whispers this, too. Justice is balance — the quiet work of holding one another steady in the current.

    Sometimes holiness is nothing more than breath shared between weary people. When the news is too loud, when grief hardens in the throat, the most radical act might be to exhale and know someone else is inhaling.

    I think of February on the St. Lawrence — ice shifting, breath visible, water moving anyway. That is prayer.

    The Qur’an tells of a moment when the Divine breath entered clay, and the clay remembered how to live. I think that breath has never stopped moving — through us, between us, through every mouth that still calls another name in love. Every breath, then, is borrowed holiness — an echo of that first divine exhale. Even when words fall away, breath keeps the prayer going.

    Cole Arthur Riley writes, it is holy to weep, holy to rest, holy to be held. Holiness gathers in warmth built between bodies, in hands extended across the ache.

    And when holiness feels far, I remember what’s at stake: not belief, but belonging. Not certainty, but the fragile thread that keeps us reaching for one another even when we can’t see the shore.

    There are days when my own body is scraped thin from carrying too much, for too long. When another name appears on the news. When the apology comes before the grief has cooled. When the word solidarity tastes hollow, when every meeting feels like a funeral with snacks. There are days when I want to disappear — not out of fear, but because the grief has nowhere left to go.

    And then there are days when grief turns to fire. When I want to shout until the sky opens. When I want the ground beneath boardrooms to tremble with the weight of what’s been silenced. When I am tired of sounding calm in a world that keeps burning. When exhaustion becomes anger, and anger becomes proof that something alive still refuses to die.

    Because forgetting is the luxury of the unaffected.

    And if you know what it is to be Black, to be queer, to be Indigenous, to be trans, to be displaced, to be criminalized, to be border-crossed or borderless, then you already know this truth: the world is not neutral.

    That’s when I feel what’s truly at stake — the world’s capacity for feeling itself. The part of us that still flinches at injustice instead of adjusting to it. That flinch is holy. That fury keeps faith with what should have been protected all along.

    And when the fire quiets, when the lungs remember how to fill again, there is the small miracle of return — the reaching for another hand, the weight shared, the breathing that steadies across two chests. Keeping each other alive means carrying the rage and the tenderness in turns, passing them back and forth until the tide shifts again.

    So what’s at stake moves through all of this — the fragile, luminous us. The breath between bodies. The hands that build the table. The memory that refuses to fade.

    We are descendants of those who crossed and those who tended. We are what the river carried and what the land still holds.

    The Torah says, I have set before you life and death… therefore choose life. To choose life, in our time, is to keep choosing each other — to cook, to listen, to repair, to rest, to stay. That might mean checking on someone who’s gone quiet. It might mean making food, or sitting still, or saying, I’ve got you. Or I’m sorry.

    When I ask one last time what’s at stake, I know now: it’s this. The persistence of care. The endurance of tenderness. The choice to live as if the river’s work is also ours.

    So when you leave this space — when the air outside stings your skin and the city feels heavy — remember the river. Remember its persistence. When you hear sirens, when you see a neighbour fading from view, when exhaustion tempts you toward indifference — stop. Take a breath. Keep each other alive.

    Our faiths, however we name them, meet in this place: in the river’s return, in the body’s remembering, in the breath that refuses to end with us. May we live like the river — carrying what has been lost without surrendering to it, meeting obstacle with movement, finding our way again and again toward one another. That is how we keep each other alive.

    So take this breath with me. One deep inhale. One long exhale.

    Let it carry the ache. Let it keep us soft. And let it be a way back to each other.