I applied for a grant from an organization whose members needed to have lives with meaning and fulfillingness while they (I can only image) held charity balls.
I may have overestimated my talent and abilities, or the final decision came down to something else. I wrote them the following letter:
Perhaps you gave $25,00 to someone whose work you found more inspiring. However, right now, I’m writing this as if this is not the case as I’m thinking of people with privilege that I know. I don’t know you. I concede that.
When I look at homeless people lying down on the street by where I live I wouldn’t want to think that they did something terribly wrong in order to end up there. Since I had experienced homelessness, not on the street but in shelters or in a car, I have come to question everything about fairness and about a God that loves.
When I look at homeless people lying down on the street by where I live I wouldn’t want to think that they did something terribly wrong in order to end up there…. I have come to question everything about fairness and about a God that loves.
a. m. davis
I’m trying to comprehend how a God would place babies in the Gaza Strip to have their legs blown up and that god still be made out of love. That is what I have been told by the spiritual teachers who insist that this “God is love thing” is true. I also think that if I had the opportunity to go to Gaza and help people that were in pain I would be constantly saying I’m sorry that this is happening I’m sorry that this is awful I’m sorry that the world is so unfair that you are in this position going through this pain, this incomprehensible pain that makes no sense… you must feel as if god fell asleep with the stove on and let the pilot light go off with the gas to escape all over the house then wake up suddenly and say, “fuck.”
And I also think that the worst thing that I could tell them is, “you poor thing, you poor, poor thing because I would bypass all of the acknowledgement that this world is outrageous to a lot of us, and just voice a sentiment that I am blessed and you are so fucked.
the worst thing that I could tell them is, “you poor thing, you poor, poor thing because I would bypass all of the acknowledgement that this world is outrageous to a lot of us, and just voice a sentiment that I am blessed and you are so fucked.
a. m. davis
I have concluded that God and that spark inside of us which has us come here to experience this human experiment wants something beyond what our human senses can think of as right and wrong. I think in the vast eternity, this experiment is brief, and in my mind I just imagined this journey of learning is worth the trip here.
Why this digression here and now? I have come to another conclusion that you who are sitting there listening to me want to believe that everything that you have is because of a blessing over whatever my blessing is instead of this stint of time being leg on a trip where you are to learn the nature of who you yourselves are. So at this point, you believe that you were blessed with a birth that allows you to have your placement and privilege, and not born a migrant mother that will never see you again because you were taken at the border and put in a cage so that you could be a deterrent to other would be immigrants through Mexico.
I tend toward anger. That was the near starting point of my human existence. I have been told that anger is a placeholder for deep caring and grief in a situation that is unbearable. Lately, I have gone back around to the question of, why did I get a parent that hated and rejected me at my birth moment? I think that this is the question that the privileged members of the dominant culture answer with, you poor, poor thing.
The answer says that you were born blessed, and you are lucky. And I was born a failed (or unfortunate) version of you. Because the human mind needs fairness and what would seem fair is that my journey in life contains looking up to look to you with you having traits that I must aspire to. So, it is your job to verse me on how to lay down my anger and be grateful instead.
And how can I do that if, from where I stand, I want a lot? And by a lot I mean $25,000 to rent a studio and buy all the supplies that I need to do all of the art that I want to do. For me to ask for $25,000 is for me to need to sit for a while and learn humility and gratitude for the things that I have where I am. I must ponder my ungratefulness and look up to you for answers instead of across from you for the recipient of funds that you I have gathered. I am sure that the possibility exists that I could be wrong. I could just be a figure in an equation where you all are trying to disperse funds to the most worthy people in a pragmatic way.
I will write a list of things that I am grateful for. I will also let you know that I have audacity.
Grateful for my warm comfortable bed
Thank you peaceful sleep
Thank you peaceful mind
Grateful for this quiet place where I can hear my mind
Grateful for the calm blue sky
Grateful for fresh air
Grateful for what is still left of our democracy
Grateful for bravery in the face of tyranny, the people, Democrats and Republicans alike standing up to authoritarianism
Grateful for relationships
Grateful for my working mind and my still mind
Grateful for my strong body
Grateful for better understanding of the nature of myself and my surroundings
Grateful for my willingness
Grateful for courage to ask for and wait for answers
Grateful for bravery in the face of tyranny, the people, Democrats and Republicans alike standing up to authoritarianism
Grateful for relationships
Grateful for my working mind and my still mind
Grateful for courage to ask for and wait for answers
I think that some call what I have audacity because these desires are coming out of me, this one here today. Not someone with more wealth and privilege than I have. Not some national treasure of inspiration and courage brimming with external rewards and gratification. I have the audacity to envision a nice place to live and a nice place to do my art and I believe that I deserve to live with all the canvases I need to paint on and all the paint that I need to paint with and all the light that I need to work under and all of the time of my own.
Can I get these things if I say these things to you, and can you not condemn me for wanting? Does me believing that I deserve give your mind cognitive dissonance in a human mind that I am told seeks fairness?
So, what happens to the wealth-privileged living in a world that their senses will call unfair? What happens to the minds of the favored if they live in a world where the thoughtful person with unearned disadvantage asks for everything that she wants? I believe they will look for reasons for her unfavorable condition in order to find fairness.
So, what happens to the wealth-privileged living in a world that their senses will call unfair?
a. m. davis
An obvious source of my unworthiness could be that I am not humble. I don’t ask for a crust of bread. I asked for all that I could get. That ask could have the whole paradigm of worthiness and luck that gave you your position crumble. Now I notice that I say a lot and I leave open a lot of room for argument and discourse and defensiveness and the protection of your ideals. I get that. The reason that I am actually saying this is for you to hear new words and sit with them without being in the process of formulating a retort. I believe that playing the devil’s advocate and arguing back and forth is a good way to never ever truly engage with your own perceptions and risk change.
I don’t ask for a crust of bread. I asked for all that I could get. That ask could have the whole paradigm of worthiness and luck that gave you your position crumble.
a. m. davis
This is what I say a lot. There are facts and there are truths. The fact is that I was born into the arms of the man who looked at me and hated me because he said not only was I not his child, but I was fathered by someone from the dominant culture. People from that culture that he witnessed murdering and lynching and raping women. My father was born in the Jim Crow South and indeed he witnessed these things. And he did not want to know that his ancestors were these rapists. He eventually knew the things he did not want to know.
The fact is that I am in a culture that wants to keep women making less money so that the men can go home and take care of their families and where women cannot quite do that.
a. m. davis
The fact is that I am in a culture that wants to keep women making less money so that the men can go home and take care of their families and where women cannot quite do that. And I was born in a culture where people go by their guts. And when they look at me or someone who is nonwhite their gut clenches up and they ask themselves, ‘why should I work with this when I can hire a white person?’ And I was born into a family that was pretty crazy and I recognized that early on. And I did not fall into the family culture of crazy that I was born into. And I was born into a family that hated my intelligence, as did my teacher in the wider culture, as I did not have the ability to conform and to hide my intelligence. I was also born into a family where I agreed with my father’s aspirations for who I was, and I did it in order to survive my family no matter the cost to myself.
The truth is that I am a spiritual being having a human existence and I was given a path to walk on before my birth in order to learn the things that I need to learn in order to feel satisfaction at understanding who I am and what kind of beings humans truly are. That is the truth and those other things about culture, society, my dad my family are facts.
The truth is that I am a spiritual being having a human existence and I was given a path to walk on before my birth in order to learn the things that I need to learn in order to feel satisfaction at understanding who I am and what kind of beings humans truly are.
a. m. davis
I digressed into this tangent so that you can understand why I am recovering from homeless and why, if I am so smart, am I in a position of asking a homeless organization for a $25,000 grant. And why I did not ask for $5000 as I am supposing (rightly or wrongly) the winners did. The expectations that I have of you are not necessarily fair.
I am on this path where I agree to an experiment… to believe in the existence of a universal mind which I am told seeks love, justice and fairness. And still I feel this anger welling up inside because the people that I deem to have power, which is not actually true, decided to teach me a lesson about asking for a lot.
I am on this path where I agree to an experiment… to believe in the existence of a universal mind which I am told seeks love, justice and fairness.
a. m. davis
I have a mantra. God is real. So, on the one hand I am looking at all of the things that I could have done with that $25,000. On the other hand, I understand that in truth I will get everything that I need when I need it in a way that is for good reasons beyond what I can imagine. Period. Which is scary and requires an act of faith because I am watching, among other things, people born in Gaza getting their limbs blown off by people who have never met them.
I am watching, among other things, people born in Gaza getting their limbs blown off by people who have never met them.
a. m. davis
I’m pretending that you all are sitting across the table in front of me and that I’m trying to have a discourse with you so that I don’t dehumanize you and rant at you while I imagine you only giving to people who ask for very little. So that you can teach them that it’s good to look up to you, and perhaps I will learn that it’s bad for me to look across from you.
I am going by what I have known personally, and you can be a lot of things and not necessarily these things.
a. m. davis
Like I said, I am going by what I have known personally, and you can be a lot of things and not necessarily these things. And I don’t necessarily need to hear back from you because you imagine I have gotten you all wrong. Or, that I have gotten it right, and you want to tell me that I am misguided.
In a real sense, all life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.