“I am who I am, doing what I came to do”
Me on ancestral land/water (Wampanoag Land) circa 1992
in a poem
i am a beautiful being / awakening from the ground up / i offer my turquoise smile / as i skip through the rain / holding the world in my belly / i dance to the sound of butterflies fluttering their wings / flying squirrels soaring across treetops / & worms transforming compost into soft, dark, warm earth.
my ancestors hum into my shells / like velvet soup / tender tendrils reaching toward the earth / i hold all my energy and love / in the palms of my belly / as offering.
i belong to the universal dance of abundance / which spirals in and out of my body / with each and every breath / she welcomes me / and i land softly.
“Never does one open the discussion by coming right to the heart of the matter. For the heart of the matter is always somewhere else than where it is supposed to be. To allow it to emerge, people approach it indirectly by postponing until it matures, by letting it come when it is ready to come. There is no catching, no pushing, no directing, no breaking through, no need for a linear progression which gives the comforting illusion that one knows where one goes. Time and space are not something entirely exterior to oneself, something that one has, keeps, saves, wastes, or loses...the story never stops beginning or ending...the story circulates like a gift; an empty gift which anybody can lay claim to by filling it to taste, yet can never truly possess. A gift built on multiplicity. One that stays inexhaustible within its own limits. Its departures and arrivals. Its quietness.” ”
in a short film
Photo by Kristen Murakoshi, 2022.
In a short bio...
miyuki baker (they/them) is a Zainichi American polyglot artist, scholar, and cultural organizer rooted in Ohlone Land (aka Oakland, CA) passionate about using common or discarded objects, stories, zines, and social practice in service of our collective liberation.
They are a co-conspirator of the Church of Black feminist Thought, an embodied spiritual-political education project alongside Ra Malika Imhotep. After finishing their PhD in performance studies, they launched their own consulting practice to support scholars to activate the beauty of their offerings through visual theory maps and embodied study sessions.