The Clearing: Black Queer and Trans Healing Retreat

Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and transgender people face the triple threat of white supremacy, misogynoir, and homophobia. Even the Church–long a refuge for Black people in the United States–is too often a site of trauma for us.

That is why we now invite Black queer and trans people to The Clearing. Named for a scene in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, The Clearing is a site of soul retrieval that involves a rejection of the nothingness the world places on us and ours and a reclamation of our gifts and blessings, our belovedness. In The Clearing, our potential is freed from the domination that would submerge our stories. It is not only I who have returned to myself but also all the faces, all the damned, the remembered faces of all my kin who have lost their being because of the force of a history and a now. We will be(come) a cultural mooring place, a moment for reclamation and for naming: “I will call them beloved, who were not beloved.” I will call them. I will name them who were not named.

Join us for two and a half days of song, ritual, ceremony, art, ring shouts and every kind of dance, and most importantly, the deepest love, care, empathy for and celebration of one another. We will call the names of our ancestors whose breath is our breath. We will lament. We will voice our silence into stories. We will sing and dance our collective cadence, write our souls retrieved and re-membered. We will conjure our roots and spread our seeds and gather artifacts to trace the contours of who we are. We will hold one another and cook for one another from ancestral recipes. We will forage through our lives to identify what we will reclaim and what we will release. And with our own feet and hands, we will heal the land and love that vast more-than-human world that, as Leah Penniman has said, our ancestors have loved and revered for more than 12,000 years, a time that far exceeds the few hundred years of enslavement. We will leave with pockets overflowing with acorns, pine needles, love notes, and phone numbers.