untitled.

Ruth Nicole Brown

Quiet (Shaw), kind of comprehension (Ogunfemi)

transformed into a gesture (Valencia)

the divine 

tender heart (Montgomery)

flipping places 

impetus for acts (Shipley)

are revealed (Van Wieren)

Humility, I learned first from the adults who meant so much to me in my community. Family, friends’ parents, and teachers were audacious with the lessons even as the teachings were subtle, understated, and not at all concerned with what anyone else thought of the act, word, and gestures of our world making. These first lessons in humility rooted me to home and how to be. 

Admittedly, the relationship between humility and generosity is as entangled in my chapter as it is in practice. I really can’t tell with enough specificity to satisfy a formulaic expectation where and how one begins and the other ends. For all parts of it, humility was undoubtedly present and is what I know and remember about Aunt Dottie and Uncle Jack’s love and We Levitate’s music making practices. It is whole. We make so much with these first lessons learned from those who remain with and in us. To call the names of Catherine Stokes Speller and Grandma Candy is the point and the dot that shapes our wings. 

The 567,892 meanings of humility I came to know later in life, out in the world. And if I pretended not to know the difference between the firsts and the later lessons, my cousin Michael’s laugh, loud and long, could be heard through all of Chicago Heights. I’m also pretty sure Tojo would appear from nowhere, dressed in his maximalist style, walking down the middle of an empty street to signal the delight in the difference that difference makes. 

Humility, when practiced as a Kentucky born and raised legacy, a spectacular rendering of the daily, gendered Black femme and made at home, is a way of living. Communication across locales, spaces, places, hearts, hometowns, and timelines, regenerate like lichen. There are also fragrant blooms. The recognition and response to such beauty is a worthwhile “yes” to an unlikely unknown. A kind of necessary revival of hope. 

I am grateful for those who know humility as an echo of laughter that defies reductionary capitalist logics, binary thought, and celebrity worship. I am full of gratitude for the generous writers who made time to put pen to paper, finger to keyboard, mind to heart to hand, and/or voice to recording in celebration of Radical Humility. In the affirmative, we must have commonly come-up-under demonstrated gestures of extension and reach that we wonder everyday if we want to translate or not. Humility’s impact is also in sharing how generations migrated and kept with them particular rituals of nurture and being to defy what you think you saw. Black is all around; diasporic; fluid; boundless. 

More butterflies to unclassify the classifications so that the feeling of grounding inspires memories and unnamable motivation. 

Scientific name || Also to be called

Charaxes cithaeron: Stokes Speller no airs

Boloria bellona: Interdependence

Vanessa cardui: Ma Candy’s grand mashugana

Limenitis Archippus: All we make

Lethe anthedon: Cold snaps in warm autumns

Holding space: A Rebekah & Jamie collabo

Zabeulah’s lessons in flight; deep, critically aware, curious, and held by heart.