Beyond Good and Bad: The Medicine of Conscious Collaboration⁠⁠​

In 2024, I took step back from taking on new collaborations. I turned down some seemingly dope opportunities to work with new people, because how I was showing up was feeling off. It had been for quite some years; but I kept overriding it and pushing on so that I could be a good person. Then, I stopped using good and bad logic and really listened to Spirit. At the time, all I had was the sense in my body to take a pause/not now approach to new collaborations, and I’m so glad I listened. I knew that everything I knew about who I was, how I worked, who I worked with, how I worked with them was shifting, and I also knew enough by then to know that every time I said yes to a new thing, a new group, a new collaboration, I was saying yes to new Ancestors, and to more, mostly unconscious, shadowwork.

I had enough darkness on my plate for a good little while, so I pressed pause even though my mind was always finding ways to make space for yet another collaboration, another project, another way to be “helpful.”

I knew I needed to develop a clear sense of practice and find a way to center myself in myself, to understand my own ethics and bring them into the light at the outset of new relationships. That would take time, that would take practice. Here’s some of what I’ve learned so far:

1. We agree to unconscious and conscious collaborations,

2. Our Ancestors also agree, to working on things between and amongst us. We are often attracted to or repelled by one another for reasons that need acknowledgement and examination in the lineage.

3. We are sometimes the last to know that that's actually what's going on, and make all kinds of assumptions and draw conclusions about what things mean and don't mean before we have all the information. (I raise my hand high on that. I have paid for my assumptions so many times.)

4. I've learned that a lot of my assuming and concluding is because I was attached to timelines and experiences that had little consequence in spiritual logic. We often have to go on the journey of finding out what medicine that brings to our respective lives and our collecting healing.

5. All of it is medicine. Medicine is not “right” or “wrong.”  Medicine is medicine.

6. We can be in resistance to medicine, we can be waffly, doubtful, about the medicine, we can practice taking radical responsibility, again and again, for what the medicine of collaboration is teaching us.

7. We always have the choice for it to make us more aware of ourselves, more open and compassionate. More whole.

But we cannot do that if we are not expanding and healing our vision.

The pain + joy of collaboration on my last stage production, The Whitney Album, in New York City, 2023 (w/ stage crew, ABOVE + Abigail Jean-Baptiste, Nia Witherspoon, and Stephanie Weeks, BELOW).

It’s hard to see where the medicine is in collaboration, most often because we are not viewing each other through a medicinal lens. We tend to default to the carcereal mechanisms of imperialism as a way of evaluating who “deserves us,” we tend to default to plantation logic to determine who has “earned” and who has not, the gift of our presence. We default to evaluating collaborations on the whole, in cycles of comparison, attack and defense that are so commonly accepted as normal.

These tend to be seen as healthy in our culture when we consider who to “cut ties” with, and who is worthy and who is not, which strips the humanity of the soul from the soul, so that it cannot fully fly.

In my practice, I now work daily on addressing people’s Ancestors before I address them, to ask about what it is they have brought us together to do.

I bring myself humbly back to divining as a way of acknowledging that there are so many timelines the Ancestors can see and access and communicate with us about, if we come correctly and ask.

Collaborating with the Spirit World, with Kelly Kessen in Bali, 2023.

Still from our film, BLK GRK w/ Eric Berryman (dir. by Rachel Chavkin), 2022.

Because I am water, I have to be even more clear about where I flow, what the landscape is, what I might pick up. It’s going to get cleaned. I’m going to be changed.

Working on the level of shared values is a good start, but values can be matched in disastrous collaborations when there isn’t shared acknowledgment of what dances around in the shadows. Shared culture and shared values are not synonymous. The default culture is carceral, colonized and codified.

What I know is, We exist to make magic, and I do my best to follow that. I do not know it all. Each of us holds a piece of knowing that the other needs. Each of us is medicine and mystery.

True collaboration exists in acknowledging this and I pray to move accordingly.

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