Happy Tuesday! This post picks up where the previous one – “doing the thing” – left off.
The following Thursday – February 15th, 2024 – Daniel (Sitaram Das) Shankin messaged me on Signal. “Hi,” he said. “Are you around to talk about something that happened at the retreat?”
“Yeah,” I responded.
I called him on Signal video about fifteen minutes later. Daniel picked up and immediately announced that he couldn’t do a video call, but continued with the call while moving around in and out of the camera’s line of sight.
[Note: I’ll call the woman with whom I shared my poem Jess.]
“What happened with Jess?” Daniel said, his tone indicating his belief that something very bad indeed had happened with Jess.
I said that I’d shared a poem with her.
“Can I hear the poem?!” Daniel said.
I recited it.
“You have to be careful what you say to people,” Daniel said.
I may not be relating the events of the call in order. I did not take notes. Perhaps before I shared the poem, perhaps after, Daniel told me that this situation had been taking up all his time for the past several days. He told me that Jess had found my interaction with her to be misogynistic. And he informed me that I had “unintentionally harmed” her.
He advised me not to contact Jess. He asked if I was available to meet Jess, himself, and his friend Erica Siegal – founder of the harm-reduction organization Shine Collective – the following Tuesday. I said I was.
“This is the gig,” he said. “You’ll understand when you have ‘children’ of your own.”
I said that it would probably be a while before I was organizing weekend retreats with changa journeys for twenty people.
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” Daniel said.
He asked me to share the poem with him in written form, and I did, both from the writing app in which I’d composed the poem, and from my instagram, where it had been posted since June 2nd, 2023. “Thank you,” he said, “I’m glad you have it posted.”
He may have asked how I was feeling and I said something like “simultaneously horribly guilty and totally innocent.”
“I’m not shaming and blaming you,” he said.
Well I feel shamed and blamed, I responded.
That’s all I remember from the call.
I went outside, sat with hapé, and wept.
Afterwards I messaged Daniel, “Just wanted to add that I’m delighted to be part of the process and grateful for the help.”
“Thanks man,” he wrote. “I know a lot is going on right now.”