Once upon a poetry event, just before Saul Williams covered a Rakim song, he said, I’m not going to talk about Hip Hop, although I’d like to, instead, I’m going to toy around with evolving ideas.

That practice informs my bloggery today.

I don’t want to write anything lengthy. Days 1-14 of BFM show I can write long. I want simply to say that I am interested in the way black women, the world ’round, relate to water. I have ideas about the way singing about and talking about water reinforce old rituals and create new ones. I hypothesize that our traumas relating to water last long and cut deep — and are counterbalanced only by the ways we celebrate God at the water, too. And by the ways we’re beginning to re-imagine our future based on our positions to rain, cloud, ocean, river and (well) –well.

I’m attempting to discuss influence, tradition, trajectory and possibility, without speaking a sound. Instead, imagining myself as part of this continuum: violated, discontented, purged, reflective, and moving forward — as the women in these videos, and the water near us all.