A couple days ago I went to the Poetry Project here in NYC to see Neti-Neti, a group whose thoughtful exploration of grief and ritual was something I wanted to hear ever since Amirtha Kidambi’s excellent interview on Critical Listening. The performance of percussion and effected vocals opened up all sorts of sonic and spiritual pathways and I felt a little physiologically different after, maybe lighter.

Even though in Buddhism and in most therapies, one is supposed to sit with difficult feelings before trying to “fix” them, I hadn’t thought about how those same dynamics may play out as a group in a room or even a nation. It is such a heavy, erratic time and opening up space to sit with it before talking about ways forward felt radical in our escapist era.