We Flow RMX featuring Brian Fresco
Music as apology & Forgiveness
Dramatic photoshoot on a pitstop in Holbrook, AZ. November 4, 2016 on our way to LA.
Music sometimes communicates what the heart wants to say. Words and conversations can be more challenging for people to communicate rather than through art. I have to be honest in that I make mistakes, I cause harm, and that this music is my medicine, too, as much as I hope for it to serve as medicine for others. Like anyone, I carry my own set of traumas, triggers, tools, and tactics for responding to situations.
When Fresco asked to be on this track, I was really honored to have my little brother and fellow Gemini representing this message. Around the time we recorded this song in 2015/2016, I was just coming back from Colorado living with relatives who come from the immigrant experience. In my time living with them, I was immersed in their Broncos fandom mixed with deep anti-Blackness despite their love for Black NFL players. They somehow could separate their racism with the game though they would still say criminalizing things about cannabis and players using this medicine despite using this medicine for their body pains at the same time.
I share in the link below about being harsh to DC and this song coming to me in apology. We left my aunt’s house after I had to call her out for saying some anti-Black shit and telling her if she wanted me to stay with them that she’d have to work on that and be mindful. Just like an aunt in Florida she said something that was othering Black people and making them “foreign” to her ironically immigrant self. I would learn later on how racist their white neighbors, co-workers, and communities were and how they judged their accents and how that deeply engrained in them the desire to appease their oppressors. Having to deal with and navigate this while being with someone who is white caused me to project my energy towards DC.
After this incident we took a walk and I blew up at him for trying to have me see her perspective. We walked to a creek nearby and the water trickling through these beautiful rocks brought us back to a state of peace. Sometimes it’s hard for an air sign like me to feel before speaking, so nature is necessary for my flow
Songs to Mend & Bridge
To do a deeper dive into the words, check out this genius link or host your own karaoke party with this lyric video.
Parallels Gentrification & Climate Change
When I returned to Chicago I was able to attend an Assata’s Daughters rally/march in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago’s south side where I learned about how most streets named “King Dr.” are often named that way in irony of how the city removes Black people and gentrifies those neighborhoods under the guise of “progress” destroying powerful networks of Black American communities that were forcibly and by circumstance placed into projects in the first place.
I shared the vision with Fresco of wanting to do a video to this song back in the Marshall Islands where I grew up because much of the land is sinking into the ocean as sea levels rise due to climate change. When he recorded his verse tying the demolition and destruction of his neighborhood and community for the sake of high rises, I balled listening to him in the booth. I hope that through our co-creations we can bring peace, justice, and respect to ourselves and our communities - to be an example of Black & Brown solidarity and all that is in between & beyond.
Sky, mountain, and crescent moon in Colorado Springs Area. November 3, 2016 on our way to move to LA the first time.
Nature As our healer
Often when people are unable to forgive each other and themselves, the land and the nature around them still does. The air still offers breath, the earth still offers land to stand/sit/lay on, the water still offers us drink/rain/nourishment, and the fire/sun still offer heat for us to live in our current states.
I read an excerpt from the Herbal Medicine Maker’s Handbook’s Harvesting Chapter through my Herbal Medicine for the Soul Mentorship Program with iWillaRemedy and when James Green writes about looking for male elders and finding them in their gardens, I think about how much harm masculine divine energies and people assigned male at birth have caused for centuries in our world now and how it wasn’t always this way. But as it is now, that the earth and plant are one of the main and only allies that can forgive them for their wrongs when all is said and done in a world riddled with war and violence because of the imbalance centuries of jealousy, mis/non-communication/connection, and punishment have caused.
The words and works nature is able to evoke from us is so profound. I pray and I trust we will continue to collaborate more closely and creatively with these natural spirits to heal the deep wounds we have inflicted on one another’s souls. Each and every one of us, one by one, by emulating the healing energy of nature. Nature also possesses the capacity to harm and destroy, but with our consciousness we can work with that energy to benefit and connect each of us rather than separating us further.