Moving from imagination to reality.

By Kiran Singh Sirah

Photo by Billy Howard

Over the years, I’ve appreciated learning ways people make sense of the world, chart pathways for healing and discovery, for our community. I often reflect on a conversation with an artist from Sierra Leone I met in a Brooklyn restaurant some years ago. Over dinner, he told me that the word for “medicine” in his village back home was “story.”

Just a couple of years ago, Tom Belt, an elder and citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, hosted us at a gathering on top of the Shaconage- “land of the blue smoke,” otherwise known as the Great Smoky Mountains. Mr. Belt talked about stories as the cosmology of his people in a place where his people have told stories for over 12,000 years. And how it took a 1000 miles and 150 years for him to return home.

During the pandemic, I also learned so much about the art of listening from my friend Daniel Kish. Blind from early childhood, Daniel is a world expert on echolocation and famous for developing a technique that uses tongue clicks to produce soundscapes as a way to “see” and understand an environment. He describes it as establishing the knowns within the unknowns, building points of reference, like navigating by the stars and making it into a story. We still talk regularly and share sound clip recordings via WhatsApp to one another when we’re in different places.

Last week, these interactions came to mind as I shared them in detail, with three days leading a series of narrative reflections, conversations, with a community of artists, veterans, healers, creative community storytellers from West Virginia, all gathered to envision the home they too wish to move from imagination to reality.

We walked by the lake, had conversations from morning to late at night, explored stories to preserve, uplift, disrupt, and reimagine to create a world that feels just and inclusive. We even got to play and drum and sing together one night by the firepit. That’s when I looked up at a night sky full of stars, and I thought of my friend and prepared a sound clip to send.

I am grateful to my friends from the Riff Raff Art Collective, its partners, and friends, for providing this space and for trusting me with their hearts and minds, allowing me to facilitate, and for being open also to the uncomfortable alongside the imagined possibilities for what a better, fairer community can look and feel like.

Most of all, I appreciate the chance to share this mutual aid ancient art and practice for our modern world. In the call and response tradition of our blessed ancestors, elders and teachers.

Thanks to the Riff Raff Art Collective, its partners and my West Virginia friends for providing this creative space. I’m also looking forward to returning soon and seeing what unfolds!


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