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September: A Podcast For Loveships
September is a weekly podcast for Loveships. It explores the tools and technologies that build and sustain life-changing love relationships. Hosted by writer and facilitator Alexis Pauline Gumbs and artist and entrepreneur Sangodare Wallace, this intimate show draws on their 17-year partnership built on the premise of Loveship as a spiritual practice and Loveship as a resource in community.
From conflict and contrast, responsibility and repair, to emotional intimacy and navigating the ever-changing seasons of life, Alexis and Sangodare share insights that nurture not only couples but also families, friends, and communities.
Tune in each week for heartfelt conversations that honor relationships as sacred ground—an offering to ourselves, our people, our ancestors, and spirit.
September: A Podcast For Loveships
47. Love the Creative Power of Difference
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This episode’s core teaching is valuing the creative power of difference, with hosts Sangodare and Alexis drawing on Audre Lorde’s “Difference and Survival” to frame differences as polarities that spark possibility, expanded choice, collective flourishing, and a living Earth. They discuss how differences in gender expression and money stories can create dissonance but also curiosity, intimacy, and growth, and they offer three “North Stars” to help reframe difference as a sensuous experience to get curious about rather than a pain to overcome.
- Difference in Loveship
- Dissonance and Growth
- Getting Curious about the Gap
If you want to support this podcast and have access to monthly live sessions with us and other goodies, join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/did-i-mention-we-159287534
You can also send us a tax-deductible donation via “text to give." Send a text to this number: 53-555. All you have to put in your message is “September.” Then press send. You will get a text back from Black Feminist Film School which is helping us make this and all our production more sustainable for us and consistent for you.
For more on our coaching and community building offerings, Click Here
https://www.mobilehomecoming.org/loveship
Because love is living with purpose, join us for our second Chrysalis Cohort this September! More info here:https://www.blackfeministfilmschool.com/offers/oKhBLdfo
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Hi, I'm Alexis Pauline Gums. And I'm Shango Dari Wallace. And this is September, a podcast for love ships.
SPEAKER_01We're two lovebirds who decided to intentionally create a love ship and share the insights we gather with the world.
SPEAKER_00For the past 17 years, we've been relating to our love ship as a sacred space for spiritual practice.
SPEAKER_01This podcast is our space to reflect on the insights we've found and been given with you.
SPEAKER_00Whether romantic, platonic, or somewhere in between, okay, situationships, every bond has the potential to become an offering to a higher vibration for the world. One choice, one act of care, one repair at a time.
SPEAKER_01So, if you're ready to think expansively about love, community, and spirit, you're in the right place. So glad you're here. Hello, Shango Dare, you dashing visionary who loves to think out loud while writing on the wall. Or a whiteboard. Or a wall painted to become a whiteboard.
SPEAKER_00Hello, Alexis, cute hermit who likes to go into your nook of books and play a gong and go where your imagination takes you. With no disturbance from anybody.
SPEAKER_01Anybody. And to keep it in balance, I'm also the one who glitches a little bit in the gap between your thoughts while you are writing on the wall.
SPEAKER_00And I'm the one who needs a body double or might wander off all the way off task, out the room, out the house, who knows?
SPEAKER_01So once again, we are two imaginative people who work differently and work together, and we are exactly as lovable as you. Today, we dedicate this episode to the late Stephanie Stokes-Oliver and her husband Reginald Oliver. We are sending so much love to the Stokes and Oliver families at this time.
SPEAKER_00We met Stephanie and Reggie in Anguilla. As I recall, Alexis was asking Stephanie one million questions, as she does, about her time as fashion and special projects editor at Essence Magazine. And Reggie was freestyle dancing and running on the beach for like four hours straight.
SPEAKER_01I remember noticing immediately that even in their chosen second home of Anguilla, in a vacation vibe, these were two very different people who loved doing their own thing and also loved being together. Stephanie was always writing something, always organizing something, and Reggie was another version of retirement, deeply free spirit, basking in ultimate freedom.
SPEAKER_00Elite Black Seattle meets working class queens, daughter of educators, son of airline workers, the woman in the corner, having a literary conversation, the guy in the middle of the dance floor. They really taught us something, which is that underneath all the ways of living and personality features and favorite things, there is something deeper, which is the vibration between a couple that creates a harmony and longevity and a generative relationship. All the resonances that exist may not be visible to everyone else on the surface, or sometimes even to the couple themselves, but they are infinite, infinite, energetic resonance.
SPEAKER_01Stephanie joined the Ancestors very recently, and I'm so grateful that I got to meet her at the Calabash Literary Festival in Jamaica and find out that she had moved to my ancestral home of Anguilla. What are the chances? It was destiny. I loved hearing stories about the 1988 Essence Black Women's Writers Retreat in the Bahamas, which she helped organize along with my mentor Cheryl Wygreen with the legendary black women writers like Barbara Smith, Tony K. Bombara, and Tzaki Shange, Octavia Butler, Sonia Sanchez, Lucille Clifton. The list goes on and on. And then I got to benefit from that organizational brilliance that she has myself when she invited me to be a featured speaker for a salon sponsored by the Anguilla Literary Festival, which she co-founded. I didn't actually know at the time that I was the only speaker at the salon. Yeah, and that's where they named you the Pride of Anguilla. Yeah, Anguilla Literary Festival. It meant everything as an emerging writer, and it still does. Reggie and Stephanie, we love you. We love you. Always. So, listeners, this is another opportunity to dedicate your listening to someone who inspires you, someone who you're grateful for, someone who's made a difference for your life. And yeah, with gratitude. Okay.
SPEAKER_02Dedication launched.
SPEAKER_01Ready to get into the heart of it?
SPEAKER_00Let's grow.
SPEAKER_01And guess what?
SPEAKER_00It's still September. Every week, we have a technology for you from our journey and our teachers with North Stars that can guide you as you navigate your own Sunday beach calypso dance of relationship as spiritual practice. And on today, we just drop by to remind you, difference is the fun part. Difference is the fun part. So today's technology is about valuing the creative power of difference. Difference is your friend, y'all. And when we relate to difference with curiosity and possibility of growth, that possibility of growth, we learn, we get to learn, we get to learn a lot more than we do when we relate to difference with fear or with judgment or with attachment.
SPEAKER_01Yes. And so our sacred text this week is Audrey Lorde's Difference and Survival, where she explains the concept we know as the creative power of difference. It feels so clear to me that she is talking about love. She says, the house of your difference is the longing for your greatest power and your deepest vulnerability.
SPEAKER_00Longing. Vulnerability. Power. This is what we are talking about. Love ship. Exactly. When we're talking about love ship, this is what we're talking about.
SPEAKER_01This is what we are talking about. And then, Audrey Lloyd says, our differences are polarities between which can spark possibilities for a future we cannot even now imagine. When we acknowledge that we share a unifying vision, no matter how differently expressed, a vision which supposes a future where we may all flourish, as well as a living earth upon which to support our choices.
SPEAKER_00Yes, the spark. And choice is a function of expanded awareness. So if differences spark possibilities, keeping that generative door open, that expanded awareness, we have more support for our choices.
SPEAKER_01What you're gonna do for me, this is what it feels like to be in love with you. The ways that you are different from me are exciting. And one of the most obvious ways is how we express gender. Yeah, back in the day, they called it the butch film dynamic.
SPEAKER_00Today I just call it freedom, balance.
SPEAKER_01And it transcends binaries. In relationship, there is difference and reflection at the same time. Same time. And also a different vantage point on myself that I get from being in practice with you.
SPEAKER_00And it can be challenging because when I'm talking to myself, most of what I'm thinking and doing seems obvious and self-evident. But when we are in relationship with other people, talking to somebody else, we can sometimes realize that they have a whole different logic, a whole different way of understanding the world, themselves, me. In relationship, we are never fully self-evident, even with people who know us well, even with people whose understanding we long for, that we long for most. And this can be frustrating, even triggering sometimes. I'm a witness.
SPEAKER_01You witness, I'm a witness to your witness. And there is an opportunity there in that space of difference, witnessing our own difference through how someone else responds to us. Especially when we suddenly or gradually or repeatedly realize that something we think, do, or say doesn't compute to someone close to us who has the benefit of a lot of context clues to work with. That's right. There's an opportunity there to wonder about ourselves. Why do I think about it that way? Why does that make sense to me? And nobody else. I'm just playing. Shade. But for real, there might even be a revelation there that can liberate me. Something I notice about myself that I can share with you that allows us to get to know each other even better and create intimacy. But all of that was invisible when I was just out here being self-evident to myself.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. For example, we have different relationships to and stories around money. And at the same time, we collaborate on money and create household together constantly. I remember one anniversary, our gift to each other, or maybe I should say practice, because was it a gift? Anyway, was a day-long, a day-long workshop where we dove deep into how our families of origin related to money, and we wrote letters to the versions of ourselves that will exist after capitalism, or whatever you call this current economic system, to the versions of ourselves that existed then.
SPEAKER_01It was so generative. Actually, my letter from myself after capitalism became part of my short story, Evidence in Octavia's Brood. And today we have a weekly prompt practice where I write prompts and we take turns answering questions about how we think about things like savings, debt, household expenses versus project expenses. And even after almost 18 years together, we still learn things we did not know about our different relationships to all of it.
SPEAKER_00That's right. And at the same time, we are not always comparing and contrasting in love ship and in our relationships, we are meeting each other's longing to be seen and held, affirmed and known. We actively build the type of familiarity and patterns, you know, certain forms of predictability to feel safe enough to let down our walls and grow together. But the idea of complete synergy or even complete harmony all the time is an illusion. Like, think about it. What happens when you play both of the notes that are right next to each other on the piano at the same time? What do you get? Dissonance. Dissonance.
SPEAKER_01Kind of like that tone you give me sometimes when I ask you a clarifying question about something that is totally crystal clear to you and in your mind totally self-evident. But in that minor moment, see what I did there. There's also so much space for growth if we keep listening and stay curious.
SPEAKER_00And the learning that happens in this process and these processes in real time. Yeah, and these processes is what it takes to do what Audrey Lourdes is talking about: a future where we may all flourish, as well as a living earth upon which to support our choices.
SPEAKER_01Emphasis on that living earth part for all those folks who forgot Audrey Lord was an environmentalist. Anyway, exactly this. We are people who are different from each other, who need to collaborate for our collective survival and the possibility of a living earth. That's right. That's one scale. And in another way, we are also seeking to create a world that is significantly different from what we are experiencing now. So, like when we received the letters from our future selves, we were learning from what was different about us in a different context.
SPEAKER_00Context being the future, right? Mm-hmm. There are some aspects of who we are and how we view the world that we may need to double down on to hold true to our legacy, values, mission in this life. Now, looking at you dissonantly is not something I need to double down on. You know, we could be in growth and generosity around that. I love it. Yeah. So, you know, but but some things are important to hold to and like they we grow in that dissonant space. But how be ever, most of the aspects of who we are, and even those core through lines are in relationship with change. And it's not easy, but it's important. It's valuable, it's meaningful, we can get through it.
SPEAKER_01And it feels less scary and more empowering if we can intentionally practice difference.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and create space in our relationship, space that is safe enough to hold us as we change. Like I can listen to Alexis' critique and feel playful about it, even as she may be giving me side eye. Like we're excited about that growth. And like the snark is just sweetness. And I love that. I love that. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01It happens sometimes even while we're recording this podcast. So our first- Then I get to too you after. Oh. Hooray. Our first North Star, speaking of which, is that difference is sexy. It activates possibility. Listeners, make a list of examples of how some of the ways that a loved one is different from you feel exciting.
SPEAKER_00Let's try it out. Our second North Star is stay curious and keep listening. Especially when someone you love does or says something that is totally different than what your approach would have been, or vice versa.
SPEAKER_01Our third North Star is take on difference as a personal practice. How are you different now than you were last year, 10 years ago? What is there to learn in that difference? Loved ones who have been long-term witnesses might have clues to share with you about what's different. That's right. Well, listeners, we love being in this conversation with you. If you want to support the work and the exciting growth of the podcast next year, videos, conversations, interviews, game nights, join the Patreon. You can see how to do it in the show notes. All right. Well, until next time. Farewell. Thank you so much for listening to the September podcast. If this conversation spoke to you, we'd love for you to share it with someone who might need it. And don't forget to leave us a question to cover on an episode and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It really helps more people find the show. Until next week, stay in the ship as an offering for yourself, your community, and our collective spirit.