Freedom Beyond Our Lifetimes with K. Melchor Quick Hall

K. Melchor Quick Hall is a popular educator, writer, and researcher. In this final episode of Season 3, she and Dwight explore the importance of nurturing practices of creative play, what it means to honor legacies of liberation and care, and what freedom and hope look like in our lifetimes and beyond.

Read the transcript of this episode.

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K. Melchor Quick Hall, PhD is a popular educator, writer, and researcher. She is the author of Naming a Transnational Black Feminist Framework: Writing in Darkness, and co-editor, with Gwyn Kirk, of Mapping Gendered Ecologies: Engaging with and Beyond Ecowomanism and Ecofeminism. Advancing racial equity in education and research, she is Executive Co-Director, alongside Cheryl Jefferson Page, of the African American Education & Research Organization (AAERO) @ Melchor-Quick Meeting House (MQMH), an organization founded by her mother and first teacher, Paula Quick Hall. As part of the food sovereignty movement, Hall is also the Director of Education for Global Village Farms.

Watch Melchor's June 2023 First Monday Lecture, "Reparations is to Justice as Art is to Freedom: Linking Healing and Creativity," on Pendle Hill's YouTube channel. 

The transcript for this episode is available on https://pendlehillseed.buzzsprout.com/

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The Seed is a project of Pendle Hill, a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people.

Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org/podcast.

This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

Transcript

Dwight Dunston  0:00 
You're listening to The Seed: Conversations for Radical Hope, a Pendle Hill podcast where Quakers and other seekers come together to explore visions of the world that is growing up through the cracks of our broken systems.I'm your host, Dwight Dunston. This season, we're exploring the practices that enrich our connections to ourselves and to each other. How do we cultivate relationships and spiritual community? How do these relationships and practices support our work for liberation and justice and transform our sense of what is possible?

K. Melchor Quick Hall  0:45  
I experience time in a way that is not focused on my lifetime as the primary unit.

Dwight Dunston  0:54 
Our guest today is K. Melchor Quick Hall,  a popular educator, writer, and researcher. She is the author of Naming a Transnational Black Feminist Framework: Writing in Darkness, and co-editor, with Gwyn Kirk, of Mapping Gendered Ecologies: Engaging with and Beyond Ecowomanism and Ecofeminism. Advancing racial equity in education and research, she is Executive Co-Director of the African American Education & Research Organization (AAERO) @ Melchor-Quick Meeting House (MQMH), an organization founded by her mother and first teacher, Paula Quick Hall. Hall is also the Director of Education for Global Village Farms.

Dwight Dunston  1:37 
You may notice some audio hiccups during this episode of our show. We thank you in advance for your grace as we were navigating some technical difficulties, we hope that you stay and listen until the end of this final episode of season three as Melchor shares some incredible learnings from her experience caring for her now 101 year old grandmother.

Dwight Dunston  2:07 
Melchor, thank you so much for being on our third season of "The Seed: Conversations for Radical Hope." I am very excited to share space with you, be in conversation with you, be learning from you and alongside you in this time together today. I want to begin our time together in a way that we start our time with all of our guests, by just asking you Melchor, what it's like being you today.

K. Melchor Quick Hall  2:45 
I am anticipating, wondering, curious about this conversation. And also I am listening and looking at a gardening space and thinking about plants in part because of the pre recording question that was in the soundcheck that made its way into this moment as well.

Dwight Dunston  3:17 
Yeah, I've been in a few spaces now that have spoken to or use the metaphor of a garden in describing another concept, another theory another idea. And specifically, we just finished up Continuing Revolution here at Pendle Hill, which is a program for folks 18 to 35. The theme was on abolition, the metaphor of a garden of planting these new seeds or new ways of thinking about injustice in relation to the prison system and prison industrial complex and, right? the need to actually plant new seeds and new visions, to nurture and to water as we as we think about transforming the system that has been extractive and destructive and dehumanizing. And I'm curious if in your life in your sphere of either learning spaces or other spaces that you're connected to, if the metaphor of a garden has showed up for you in any ways or gives you some insight into other parts of your life or other thoughts and ideas that you've interacted with.

K. Melchor Quick Hall  4:30  
I am appreciative of the metaphor and the reality of farming and gardening. And in particular, appreciate thinking about things that are--I think about composting, I think about the decay of things I think about what kind of things as they die become nutrients for the soil and I in particular think about that, in relation to questions of abolition, one of the things that is a serious question for me, instead of a surprise and the question I was thinking about the other day, how difficult it is, a carceral state and a democratic state, how those two things ultimately can't go together in any kind of harmony. When I think about abolition, I think about the necessity of the ending of a carceral state in order for democracy to flourish. It's one of the things about which I think I am most and I think that this is the right word most ashamed that I live in a place that devotes so much of its resources to militarized violence in punitive punishment. And I know that a democracy can't thrive under those circumstances. And it's quite a surprise to me that there isn't more of a of a groundswell to end the carceral state. It's impossible to imagine it as anything, as a system that with some regularity kills and detains people who have done nothing, nothing punishable by any law. When you imagine that, and when you believe that, because of the Innocence Project, or the Central Park Five, anything, any number of things, you have to understand that that kind of system can't thrive alongside a democratic one.

Dwight Dunston  6:58 
Something you said made me reflect on the power of imagination, this idea of the carceral state and the democratic state, those two things can't coexist. So much of what I believe is required to really move people you know, halt our self extinction, is a robust, vibrant, enlivening imagination and creativity. And you as an an artist and someone who cultivates the artists selves in many other folks. And I would love to hear you just share some of your reflections on the relationship between art and imagination, and creativity and freedom and liberation in any pieces of just your journey. Yourself as an artist, as a creative that led you to understanding its importance in supporting humans to thrive supporting humans to live in right relationship with one another and the land.

K. Melchor Quick Hall  7:59 
Oh, my goodness, there's so much to say there. But I'll start off with a quick shout out

Dwight Dunston  8:04 
Listen, go rock, we rollin' Melchor, you know!

K. Melchor Quick Hall  8:07  
to a lovely pair who recently posted what they called a Love and Liberation Camp (shout out to Ashni and Akua) in a space in Massachusetts, part of which included a farm at Mumbet's Freedom Farm and, you know, the, whenever we're talking about, when Seers talking about freedom, somewhere nearby there's a farm. The camp was about playing. Then we had the list games that we enjoyed when we were younger. We put them on note cards and we went through this process of figuring out what we were gonna play. And I assure you know what your game of choice was, whether it involved a ball or a bat or a stick or not. But we had jump ropes and hula hoops. There were cards involved. It was such a beautiful, playful conversation. I feel like the place that I see it really shine is with children, children who you might give some materials to and think that you have shown them something or given them some particular game. And if you walk away and come back, they are often playing some game that you didn't realize you had given them. They have repurposed things, they have added the materials, you know, all kinds of things have happened if they feel free to do so. And when I think about freedom, broadly speaking, it requires a willingness to be creative, a willingness to imagine worlds not given. One of the saddest reality of adulthood for many people is the sort of taming or sometimes I refer to it as disciplining of that part of oneself. And it is the thing we need most to get to everything that we can create uniquely with others who we love and with whom we are creating community. And I have been surprised at how often if I give adults some crayons or some markers, often they're resistant to an activity that involves coloring, but then if I can somehow convince people to participate, that things are unlocked, that they remember that they tap into what they need in order to be safe in the future that is created, but that they would have never just said or written, it had some things have to be colored with marker. Some things have to be drawn out with streamers, some things have to be sung to the, to the beat of a double dutch rope.

Dwight Dunston  11:11  
Come on now,

K. Melchor Quick Hall  11:12  
there's an evocative component to sort of being willing to join people there.

Dwight Dunston  11:33 
As you yourself, think about spirituality, if there's pieces of your spiritual self, or whatever word you would use there about that part of you that has hope that has faith. I'm curious about the things that inspire you or your motor behind moving that way in the world. And anything about your spirituality of spiritual practices that really support you in, in being grounded.

K. Melchor Quick Hall  11:57  
I want to say that I have had something that's probably close to a five year meditation on on the question of hope. You know, I've been reading and listening to things listening to songs about hope. And just wondering because there are some people who say hope, and what they mean, is the kind of wait and see kind of hope that hope that works out for you. Where they, when you can tell they're not getting involved. And so, sometimes when people refer to hope in in ways that don't require much work, we have to think about how the term is being invoked. And one of the people who I've been thinking about that a lot is somebody who writes about a Latin-x politic, political ethics for the for helplessness. But it's Miguel de la Torre, who talks about what it means to give up certain kinds of hope, the kind that is not going to get you to move your feet, or move your mouth or act. I experience time in a way that is not focused on my lifetime as the primary unit. And what that means is that I can see myself in the context of a particular kind of freedom struggle, and understand that I need to move the needle to a particular place with the resources that I have. And so it means that I think a lot about death, which also means I think a lot about birth. And just to circle back to a question you asked about the Love and Liberation Camp, it was women of color. And so for me, it is a it's a question of sort of my birth into this location. My understanding of a sort of a particular thing is quite small, you know, but small things, I mean, this this podcast is called The Seed; small things can be significant. My understanding of myself and I and I feel the connection to the people whose legacy I'm continuing. Absolutely feel it coming through me and passing it on. And I'm very clear about purpose in a way that allows me not to become so distracted by what can be done in my lifetime. And that shapes how I think about hope, and it shapes how I think about spiritual practice. I think I wrote this in an essay once: one of my primary spiritual practices is listening. To ancestors to plants, to beings listening, especially in places where people are unaccustomed to, to paying close attention to the messages that are being conveyed. We can learn so much. I mean, I just planted some chestnut trees to see things getting out of

Dwight Dunston  15:21 
it's everywhere. It's everywhere!

K. Melchor Quick Hall  15:23  
But I say all of that to say that I am, and again, often I stopped there: I am because that that is enough.

Dwight Dunston  15:34 
Yes.

K. Melchor Quick Hall  15:36 
Okay, I just want to be you know, we're having a conversation here. But sometimes there's a focus on doing that undervalues the being. So I just want to say I am, and I am connected in ways that allow me to focus on freedom work, and it is such a gift to to have come into that legacy. Such a gift. I mean, can you imagine your job is to free? I mean like, what a beautiful I mean, I think about all the jobs you could have. I feel so lifted by that. I don't need much else.

Dwight Dunston  16:40 
There's a way you spoke about legacy and life beyond yours. I felt this question, even before we landed together, and it resurfaced here in this time. And Melchor, it would be remiss for me as someone who's witnessed this part of your life on this planet, how I see you moving in purpose and intention is in connection to this relationship with your your grandmother, the role you have played in having this direct lineage of yours have the highest quality of life on this planet as she can have. Being the person responsible for ensuring that, the question that's forming or it's more of just an opening, as you spoke about life beyond yourself or thinking beyond this moment, just if there's any reflections you want to share on how you think about caring for your grandmother, who's now 99, I believe?

K. Melchor Quick Hall  17:39 
Oh, no, she's 101 Turning 102 In July.

Dwight Dunston  17:44 
Excuse me, excuse me, my apologies. 101!

K. Melchor Quick Hall  17:47 
What a beautiful invitation. What a beautiful ending and beginning. Oh my goodness, there are so many things to say about that relationship with Mrs. Beulah Melchor Quick, whose first name I often write is Mrs. for those who were not raised in a culture that would advise them not to be calling someone of her generation by their first name. I am so honored to have her as my teacher at this point in my life, and she is a teacher who provides lessons about presence. So she has Alzheimer's there are parts of her that have been fading away and at first I thought to be somehow worried or scared about death and then through a kind of accompaniment I began to believe, I do believe that she actually is not going to die. And I don't mean the body, that is really the least of us, but that what I was having the opportunity to do with her during this period was actually kind of transference. But this this was a one last intensive lesson that would allow for so, so many different things one attention to patients and presents. Often you hear people talking about being present in ways that are very selective. They are they are attending to their favorite things in the moment. And not with some of the more difficult reality. For example, someone waking up at three in the morning and thinking that it is nine and even if you say it is three in the morning, she will sit down, and think that she is getting up and repeat. So you can either flow with the 3am start, or you can have a, you know, repeat yourself for the next hour. It has completely shifted my relationship to time, which is exhausting, by the way, completely exhausting. Even that has forced me to think differently about our being, our willingness and openness to napping, shout out to the people who do see us. Shout out to the Europeans go on holiday and put up signs and close down business. Part of what makes this such a hard place to care for her. And I'm thinking in the larger society because I am so very thankful for the smaller communities of people who, who want to be in communities of care. The reality is that I exist in a in a country that has relatively little support for elder care as an infrastructure. I mean, I could, you know, and that's not the worst thing alone, but it's that paired with with an individualistic culture, that assumes that our elders shouldn't be cared for by everyone. I mean, we have the same kind of thinking often when it when it comes to children, but that's sort of, again, the part of the culture that owns much of the media that, you know, the the whiter patriarchal, supremacist part of the culture that that acts in those ways, is a deathly blow a deathly combination of no infrastructure, and an individualist sentiment that, that we should be able to do it on our own, that people crumble under. I mean, it could kill me, and because my life is not really about my life, but it's about some other kind of legacy, I am so committed, that I know that if I am going to die doing something, I want it to be this. Freeing my grandmother. Being free with her. Participating in what it means to the care in this way, unapologetically, radically, for and with her. And I wanted to say that it's often that opposites run close together that this is both a huge joy and also quite difficult. I think it's important that we allow the contrast to exist together.

Dwight Dunston  17:59 
Thank you for thank you for sharing, I mean, I'm just my heart is just bursting at the expression of love and love, it's love as I would define it.

Dwight Dunston  23:18 
As we near the end of our our time, in this format, you know, in this way together, I want to hold space for any last reflections you want to share. And or, you know, we've been offering practices or offerings to our listeners. So it could it could be a combination of one of those two things, either last words or an offering?

K. Melchor Quick Hall  23:43  
Sure. I'm gonna I'm gonna pick a mixture. I'm thinking about mycelium and the connections between roots.

K. Melchor Quick Hall  23:51 
It makes me inclined to just shout out Lina, who we both know, and I think is part of how we are connected. Also, I know that the three of us have something in common about our thinking about father legacies. And I'll just say that there without, you know, going into a lot about our histories, but I just, I just was thinking about Lina, that I also I want to encourage people to listen and plant, that can mean a whole lot of things. And people can do a whole lot of things I'm happy with all of those things. To listen and to plant are the two words that come to mind. And then also just to say again, how, how deeply grateful I am to have been able to have this conversation with you in particular. It is such a joy, you know, to be able to think through some of these things that I've been meditating on about hope and faith and planting and roots and interbeings. I often think about it with community. So thank you.

Dwight Dunston  25:19 
It's been an honor to be in the space with you. And to just, yeah, be blessed, be blessed and showered with your thoughts and your brilliance and your thinking and your vision. You know, I'm thinking of the Ubuntu phrase, Zulu phrase, you know, I am because you are.

K. Melchor Quick Hall  25:39  
Yes! I am you I was! Yes!

Dwight Dunston  25:42 
I feel more of me because of you and all of you that you brought here. So I thank you I thank you, I thank you, and so much love to you.

K. Melchor Quick Hall  25:56  
Ashay

Dwight Dunston  26:58
Ashay 

Dwight Dunston  26:26 
The Seed is a project of Pendle Hill, a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat and community. We're located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni Lenape people. 

Many of our guests are teachers, leaders, and speakers at Pendle Hill, and we host workshops, retreats and lectures all year round. For full list of these upcoming education opportunities, visit pendlehill.org/learn. 

This episode was produced and edited by Anna Hill, with production support and advising from Peterson Toscano. Our theme music is the I Rise Project by Reverend Rhetta Morgan and Bennet Kuhn, produced by Astronautical Records. 

This project was made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. and Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund. 

Feel free to get in touch with us by emailing podcast@pendlehill.org. You can follow us @pendlehillseed on all social media platforms. 

If you're finding these conversations meaningful, you can support our work financially by heading over to pendlehill.org/donate. And we would love it if you can subscribe, rate, and review us wherever you get your podcasts. It helps us to continue planting these seeds.