SPEAKER_00 0:00

BBHC, the frequency. This episode is brought to you by INSTAR. Calling all science and nature lovers, Steve Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, also known as INSTAR, is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year. In honor of this milestone, the Institute will host a science-day celebration for all ages at its mountain research station, just north of Netherlands off the Peak to Peak Highway. For more than a century, the station has fostered mountain field science and education. On Wednesday, August 19th, get a peek into its inner workings through guided hikes and tours, hands-on activities, dinner with a scientist, and an evening seminar from ecologist Katherine Sooning. Sign up now at tinyurl.com slash MRS Open, or find more info in the events section of InStar's website. We'll put both links in our show notes. Happy Friday, frequency listeners. I'm Trey Castle, and today I'm bringing you a conversation with Pedro Silva. Pedro is a longtime local minister. He's currently an interim associate minister at Unity Columbine Spiritual Center in Boulder. We first connected probably a decade ago and have worked together on stories about racism and homelessness. Today we're talking about so much. Joy, grief, masculinity, racism, safety, control, spirituality, accountability. A conversation was all over the place in the best way. It's funny, touching, and includes more profanity than you might expect from a conversation with a spiritual leader. Don't worry, we've bleaked it all out to make it safer for the kids. Pedro is hosting an event Thursday, August 20th, called Good Grief: Pain, Pleasure, and Possibilities. It's a combination of poetry, storytelling, music, and comedy to explore grief and joy and their many intersections. The event is hard to describe because it encompasses so much. Pedro does a better job than me. So without further ado, here he is.

SPEAKER_01 2:14

The bolder world has changed so much since like I first met you.

SPEAKER_00 2:17

A lot of things have changed, and then some things that I would like to change haven't.

SPEAKER_01 2:22

Yeah, yeah, there's that too.

SPEAKER_00 2:24

So tell me about the event you have planned. When is it? Where is it? What is it?

SPEAKER_01 2:30

Okay, so the event is called Good Grief, Pain, Pleasure, Impossibility. And it's happening on August 20th at 6:30 p.m. at the Boulder Library Canyon Theater. And I'll be performing slash communicating with Solassie Atiase, who is the front person for Solassie and the Fafa family, which is a reggae band in the local area. And then also Ramon Gabriel Parrish, who works at Naropa and is also a part of an organization called Once in Future Green. And we're all three black fathers raising biracial or black kids in a predominantly white community. And we started this event initially, it was because in December 23rd of last year, my younger brother was murdered. And I, you know, went into grief. And it was a grief like I've never experienced before and couldn't really understand how to navigate that collapse of a world and the collapse of a reality and the collapse of identities that were just all kind of happening. And I felt like I was like, maybe I got thrown in the ocean and there was like no life preserver, and I was just waiting for myself to drown, but it was just taking a while. That's what it felt like. And I was like, what do I do in this place? And who am I in this space? And my instincts when I'm feeling that level of vulnerability is to isolate. And I decided that rather than isolate, I would lean into asking for hugs and telling people, hey, I'm about to cry. It just like leaning into the things that were happening. Just like instead of trying to be like, I'm gonna gotta go to a meeting, I don't want to cry this meeting, I'll just be like, hey, I'm about to start crying, or hold on real quick, I gotta walk out. Oh man, I think I need a hug right now. I just kind of like leaned into all of it and just said, This is where I am. There's no way for me to escape this. I might drown, you know, and that's maybe part of the process, but I'm gonna keep trying to stay up, but I'm also gonna ask for help and stuff like that. So I just decided to put my body into those communal spaces, even though my mind wanted to be somewhere else. And then I watched what happened, and then I started thinking about the grief that people live with every day of their lives that we don't really talk about in our society, we don't make spaces for. And so I decided the best way that I could do something with this was to channel it into something. And so that's when the idea of good grief, pain, pleasure, and possibility came up. Because grief and joy are connected to one another. Because if you ever enjoy something, when it's over, you're gonna grieve. But it's inescapable, but the depth of your joy is the depth of your grief. And so trying to help people understand that, and then also understanding that when we go to the depths of our grief, it actually builds our capacity for greater joy if we don't separate them from one another. And so the whole idea behind this event is to hold an alchemical space of energy where artists who are intimate with grief can both be present with the griefs that they've experienced over life, but then see how they can transform it into art and all sorts of things. And it's not just like about my brother dying, but different things like how the nation's been going, or how do we create a future for our children and all those things? Do we turn them into stories and poems and comedy and music and conversation? And we're just kind of weaving it all together.

SPEAKER_00 6:34

So you first mentioned, like, hey, we are all three black fathers raising our children in a predominantly white town. What's the intersection of grief and parenting?

SPEAKER_01 6:45

Speaking for myself, when I became a parent, it tethered me to the world in a way that I had never been tethered before, because I had to always think about this being that is dependent upon me for their survival. The vulnerability of being a parent is very present because you know that if anything happens to your child, it's like something happening to you times 10, because there's this sense of I should be able to create a world of safety and provision. And especially just talking as a guy, there's also social pressures of feeling like you're responsible. And even if you don't buy into the toxic masculinity stuff, and even if you don't buy into what they used to call typical gender norms, or you don't buy into any of that, which I don't, the still system still projects that onto me. So that's still an energy I have to deal with, whether I subscribe to it or not. And then it's also an energy that my children are exposed to, so they will also generate expectations of me from societal norms. And so I had to hold that and hold that while simultaneously trying to care for them and provide for them and to be a listening ear or a corrective person in their life, all sorts of things, you know. So it's just a very vulnerable situation to put yourself in. The thought of anything happening to your child is devastating, even if they were in the safest environment. I remember the first time my oldest got stung by a bee. It was like something went through me. I had never experienced it before. It was my first time in that situation, and she was like, She was holding her finger, and it felt this energy was moving through me like, like, no, my child should never get stung by a bee, which is like completely unreasonable. But but the feeling was there, and I was watching it, like, what in the world am I thinking? Like, why is this energy moving through me as if I should have been able to stop her from getting a bee sting? And so that's like resonant all the time. But then when you couple that with at least speaking for myself, but I know these my friends feel the same way, when you're a black person and you're raising children and you know, regardless of how progressive or whatever people think they are, we're all subject to the kind of collective conscious and unconscious about all of these things. And even if you have really close friends from different races who love your children like as close as they possibly can, we all are inside of a society that does not hold certain children in the same regard. And so you know that. And so when your children are like, can I do this and can I do that? You're also mindful that you're sending them out into a world where they might not be safe, not just because they're just kids playing and being in the forest or whatever, but they might not be safe because there may be someone who takes it upon themselves to say something to them. Think about it, you want them to live in their power as I want my children to live in their power, want them to live into their deepest compassion and passion and all the things that make them human. So yeah, it's an interesting tension to hold.

SPEAKER_00 10:02

So, what can people expect from this event?

SPEAKER_01 10:05

They can expect engagement. We're going to be weaving in conversation with our comedy, music, poetry, and storytelling. So it'll be on some level, it will be as if they're witnessing these three guys talking about grief and their different ways of approaching it and then transforming it into art. But then at the same time, there's gonna be a point where people can share and talk and things like that. But I want people to bring their raw selves to the space because when we get down to it, being human is very simple. We kind of all do it the same way. We might do it in different degrees, but it's the same stuff going on, same ingredients. I one time lost a dog, but and when my dog died, I had no earthly idea how much that would make me fall apart. I was completely shocked because I didn't even want the dog. So it was kind of like, what? So if somebody could have something like that, like something like losing a dog, losing a job, or losing a relationship, and then, or whatever the case may be, because what ends up happening is humans, I think in order to move through our lives, we project futures and then we try to move toward that future. And that's just kind of what keeps us going on a lower level, right? And whenever something doesn't match, that future collapses. And it could be a little thing or a big thing. Like I grieved losing a coupon last night for a $5 movie because I didn't know it would expired on the East Coast time. I thought it expired in the time zone I was in. And I didn't grieve a long time, but I was like, damn it, now I'm gonna pay $23. And then I felt that for a second and I witnessed it. And I said, Oh, look at this, you know, and we do that on a lot of different things. So it's nothing too small, nothing too large. Just be present with what's real for you and hold that energy in the community that we're creating. Because I'm looking at it as a almost like a pop-up community space where we are able to just be as we are. I personally believe that art turns chaos into culture and that whenever we see these chaotic seasons like we're in now, or the little micro chaotic seasons that we experience in our own lives, there's a way to transmute it, alchemize it, transform it through creativity. And so this is like an opportunity to just be alive, like fully alive with everything that's there, all the mess, all the chaos, and knowing that through the creative principle that we'll show through poetry and art and storytelling and stuff like that, that anybody can do that. And we might even try to create a piece through all of us in community, whether it's a song or whether it's a poem or something like that, we'll try to create something in real time to show that we're all doing this together. And we always are, it's just whether we're doing it consciously or not.

SPEAKER_00 13:10

I'm gonna ask a question that I think I know the answer to, but I will ask anyway. It's like, who is this event for? Is it for people exploring grief? Is it for people exploring parenting? Is it for white people? Is it for people of color?

SPEAKER_01 13:25

Like, what's the what's it's for everybody, it's for humans. It's for humans, you know? Because we're all going through stuff. It so happens that the three of us are black dudes, and it was born out of a specific grief on my part with my brother, but then I invited friends to be a part of it as a community thing. And it's just for us to be present with the realities that are emerging for all of us in different ways, and it's informed by our being black men and multi-diasporic black men too, because Selassie's from Ghana, Ramon's American, and then I'm my dad's from Africa and my mom's from America. So we kind of have like a spread of the diaspora experience. So obviously, it's informed by that. But like I said, all of us live in a context that's informed by everything. And from a spiritual and philosophical standpoint, I don't really believe in separation. I believe in denial of unity, but I don't believe in separation as a reality. I think that we can put effort into denying our oneness because we're creative. So we can create an illusion of what if we weren't all connected? What if we all weren't one? And we can make a art piece, which is what our world seems to look like right now, a bad interpretation of reality, but we can also create better interpretations of reality that more mirror the fundamental truth that we're all connected, you know? There's nothing that isn't, and that is our reality. I read somewhere that it says free will is what you do with what happens to you. So this is what we're doing.

SPEAKER_00 15:09

Yeah, Jean-Paul Sartier. What's been some of the most impactful part of putting this together and working with these other men?

SPEAKER_01 15:17

Recently I wrote or actually made a video called Deconstructing the Good Man Myth. And it was kind of born out of this idea that what people call a good man in our society is a moving target, and that a lot of men look outside of themselves for signs of whether they're doing man right. And when they do that, they one, they're vacating the premises of their own being, and then by looking outside themselves all the time, and then they're largely performing what they think manhood is in the world to the detriment of everyone. Because also they're vacating themselves, so they're functionally empty, and then they look outside themselves, so they need validation and approval and all sorts of stuff that make them feel like they're doing man right, and then that means other people have to perform and be a certain way for them to feel validated, so it's like a very toxic, harmful situation, and these guys are not like that. These guys are just present with their children, they're gentle and creative, but also fierce and bold in their different ways, and they all know that the real thing is just being the person that you need to be for the moment that you're in with the people that you're with, and that that means that you're constantly being reshaped and recreated while holding on to an idea of consciousness and intention and things like that rips up that illusion of autonomy too, because it's reshaped itself. And even from the beginning, when I first decided I wanted to do it, there were some other people that were involved at first, and it kind of just moved around and evolved where it became the three of us guys. And the whole time I had to be with it because I was committed to doing it, even if I was the only person, and I eventually was like, oh, guess it's just me. But I was committed to it, but it was also life was creating it too. It is cool to watch, and I I'm really looking forward to it being birthed into the world that day. And I'm kind of treating it like a child, I guess. That's why I said birth. It's like it's three three guy mothers.

SPEAKER_00 17:47

Three men and a baby, the redo, the sequel.

SPEAKER_01 17:50

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:52

I love it. And I mean, it's just such a reminder of like when things are chaotic, a lot of people have a tendency to lock down, to control as much as possible, because that's one way to deal with chaos. Doesn't work, and it in my opinion, and it's a lot of energy that's wasted. But this is the other thing to do. It's like, all right, we're gonna stay flowy, we're gonna relax, we're gonna see what happens and adapt.

SPEAKER_01 18:14

I feel grateful too, like extremely grateful to be able to put out a request to friends and have them respond and be in wonder and be in curiosity and let things evolve amidst all the things that are happening in the world and all the like grief and things that are happening. We get to also create some meaning out of it. Like, even things like what's happening in Mississippi with Nolan Wells and that whole thing, that's been in my heart like so much for some of the similar reasons, like the circumstances he was in, and then mirror some of the situations that our children might find themselves in. And I grew up 20 minutes from there in Mississippi. So I used to go to his town to get donuts, and I just told people yesterday that his town is the boulder of Mississippi. It's a place where you think, like, oh, well, people are more open-minded here and less like segregated and things like that. So it's hard to watch that thing unfolding in that place.

SPEAKER_00 19:18

What else should I be asking you about the event or anything else? Obviously, this is about the event, but what else should we be talking about that we haven't?

SPEAKER_01 19:25

It's at 6:30 on August 20th at the Boulder Library Canyon Theater. Good grief, pain, pleasure, and possibilities. And think about it. I said pain, I said pleasure, I said possibilities. So all of that's in there. We need to bring more questions to spaces without thinking that the answers that emerge are the final answer. And that's the vibe that I wanted to bring to the space. I don't want people to come to the thing and go, hey, we figured out grief and joy, and now we're gonna all be walking out of here as gurus or something. We figured out that we can't figure it out, but that we can create. And that through community and creativity, we can build better worlds. And sometimes those worlds don't last a long time. We create these kind of false static ideas for safety. And those things end up robbing us of real life. Like you have a meal, the person prepares it, brings it before you, you're like, oh my God, it's beautiful. I love it, it looks so amazing. But the fulfillment of it is its end of you eating it and swallowing it and turning it into that's the fulfillment of the meal. Like if it doesn't go through that process, what's the point? And if you don't do anything, if you just stare at it forever, being like, I never want you to change. Life itself will just let it shrink up, mold, turn into mush, and then it'll still be mush in the end. Whether you enjoy it and eat it, or you just sit there and stare at it, the same thing's gonna happen, it's just quicker or slower. You know what I mean? But it's just like that's part of being in this human experience. It's like, how do you enjoy all of it? This denial has gotten us butt so far.