Belief Has a Body: When Love Becomes Flesh

Belief enters the body. The body decides what continues.

The drum does not speak alone. It listens through water, roots, study and the body before rhythm returns as relation.

Siir’s Talking Drum is where music, theology, Blackness, queerness, transness, neurodivergence and education coalesce inside the BespokeCurry Cosmos.

In this opening transmission, three songs meet Siir inside the remains of inherited religion. Belief leaves the mind and enters the body. Water exceeds the building that tried to contain it. The self becomes the first altar. What remains is not a return to church authority, but a practice of deciding what deserves to continue—and changing what moves through the next body.

Blaxkcurry Productions

A mark for knowledge made material—read, sounded, embodied and built in relation.

blaxkcurry productions is the Black queer and trans world-building production company built by married artists Kiing Curry and Siir Cole. Across performance, sound, visual and material culture, education, research, design and embodied practice, their distinct neurodivergent minds create work neither would make alone.

Kiing & Siir

 Two bodies. Two tempos. One shared architecture built without requiring either mind to move like the other.

Siir and I built Black Beauty School together. We were not playing. We were two Black queer and trans artists, educators and world-builders asking what Black beauty could teach us about embodiment, access, spirit, memory and liberation. We are educators, but neither of us is interested in reproducing the traditional classroom or training people into compliance. We teach through bodies, sound, space, relationship, repetition, design and the worlds we make possible around us.

Portland, OR 2021. Kiing and Siir with a Black Beauty School cohort after turning the salon into a classroom for technique, embodiment, color and collective study.

Black Beauty School became so serious that it sent us back to the lab. The questions outgrew the container. Much of what has since coalesced as the BespokeCurry Cosmos—and the pedagogy moving through it—carries material from what Siir and I built, questioned and survived together.

The portrait holds the tenderness. The work holds the architecture beneath it.

Siir is my hom(e)ie, lover and friend. On October 1, the day this transmission enters the Cosmos, we celebrate six years of marriage. What we have built exceeds the colonial instructions we inherited about love, romance, labor and who each person is supposed to become inside a partnership. It has taken time. It has required us to stop measuring care by sameness and begin understanding the actual conditions each of our minds needs.

We describe those minds through conveyor belts.

Knowing does not travel one straight route. It gathers through overlap, interruption, sensory memory, crossed signals and multiple rhythms moving at once.

Mine rarely stops. Several belts may be moving at once. Some move so quickly that I cannot control what they carry or where they carry me. That is part of how my autistic, OCD and hyperactive brain moves through the world.

Siir’s factory operates differently. Sometimes their belts are not running at all, and getting one to start requires enormous effort. Once movement begins, material may arrive faster than the belt can process it. A backlog forms. Routes cross. One piece gets placed on another belt. This is part of how autism and ADHD moves through Siir’s mind.

Neither factory is broken. Neither one needs to become the other. But loving each other has required us to learn the machinery—to recognize when speed, stillness, confusion, exhaustion or backlog is speaking before we assign a moral meaning to it.

That learning also lives inside our work as neurodivergent educators. Siir is doing the quiet, rigorous labor of working with students—including neurodivergent students—inside a world that still misunderstands neurodivergence, overlooks its complexity and too often treats access as an individual problem. They are helping people locate themselves without requiring them to become more legible to the institution first. That is real pedagogical work.

Our relationship has given us somewhere to practice making room for minds that were not given enough room. That practice is now helping us place the first building blocks of community—not a return to what was, but the slow construction of what might actually be able to hold us.

Siir’s Talking Drum

Siir’s Talking Drum takes shape as a living architecture of sound, study, relation and Mycelial Sankofa.

Siir’s Talking Drum is Siir’s space within the Cosmos. I am opening the door, but I am not speaking for them. I am also placing my full protection around what they choose to place here.

Siir Cole is a Black queer and trans artist, musician, theologian and neurodivergent educator whose work listens for what belief becomes once it enters a body.

Their foundation in music began with the trumpet and expanded through an undergraduate study of music, a Master of Divinity and years spent working with people inside—and beyond—institutions that rarely know how to recognize the full intelligence of a neurodivergent life. Their teaching does not begin with the assumption that the institution is correct and the person must be adjusted to fit it. Siir works from the person outward: listening for how someone thinks, where their conveyor belts stall or become crossed, what has been misread as failure and what becomes possible when difference is met with context rather than correction.

Siir’s work lives where music, education, divinity, Blackness, queerness and transness coalesce. They know the Black church from within its music, its language, its family lineages, its institutions and its theological training. They also know that inheritance is not an obligation to preserve a structure unchanged. The building can be examined. The belief can be tested in the body. The material can be pulled apart, composted and made to carry something else.

Music is Siir’s Flowing Water. It is how thought finds movement, how spirit becomes vibration and how an idea travels between bodies without requiring every body to arrive through the same door. Siir creates the original music moving through BespokeCurry. “MuMos” and “The Black Beauty School Theme Song” are the first two tracks, carrying the sound of our shared work into the evolving architecture of the Cosmos.

Siir’s Talking Drum makes room for that architecture to speak in Siir’s own register. Some transmissions will arrive as drops: concentrated titrations of sound, thought, image, theology, astrology and practice that can move through the body without demanding the weight of a long reading experience. Others will become essays when the work asks for that form. Lightness here does not mean lesser depth. It means Siir is building the vessel according to how their own mind moves.

The talking drum is not a decorative symbol and this is not a return to the authority of the church. It is a technology of relation: an instrument whose meaning changes through pressure, movement, rhythm and response. It does not only announce. It converses.

This is where Siir pulls apart what they inherited, listens for what remains alive and decides what they are willing to carry forward.

Love Within.

Live Beyond.

The transmission opens with the body applying pressure—and the drum answering in a changed voice.

Belief Has a Body:

When

Love

Becomes Flesh

Three songs enter Siir’s listening field, carrying inherited belief into the body to be questioned, sounded and remade.

Three

song

song

songs met me in a season

of questioning what I had inherited…

and what I was actually willing to carry

forward.

The body is not an illustration of belief. It is where belief becomes consequence.

Message: I came to these songs while pulling apart the

religion I inherited: my family’s lineage, my church experiences, my seminary education, and the questions that remained after all of it.

What I heard instead was something much older and much more expansive: what lives in the mind does not stay there.

Belief

becomes

movement.

Movement becomes behavior.

Behavior leaves a mark on the material world.

We are not only shaped by the worlds we inherit.

We are always making the next one.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/23e724_de15b535f62b443a8407968400acb548/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

Faith does not remain in the mouth. It enters the feet, the hands and the choices that build what comes after.

FAITH WITHOUT WORKS IS DEAD (BEFORE YOU DO WHAT YOU DO)

FAITH WITHOUT WORKS IS DEAD (I'VE GOT RESPONSIBILITY)

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/23e724_2f841cc3d38c4dc886cb627dd0ff3846/480p/mp4/file.mp4

The refrain becomes instruction: move before inheritance settles into another body.

FAITH WITHOUT WORKS IS DEAD (TO PUT ACTION)

FAITH WITHOUT WORKS IS DEAD ('CAUSE FAITH WITHOUT WORKS IS DEAD)

FAITH WITHOUT WORKS IS DEAD (IF I WANNA SEE IT)

W A D E

I

N

THE

WATA

The self becomes the Wata(ring) W(hole): enter the current deeply enough to choose what will—and will not—leave through you.

What happened to you can

s h

a p

e

carry

what you

but it does not have to determine what

you

p a s s on.

From 0 Came 2: Cultivating The Third. Two whole selves remain rooted in themselves while tending the living relational ecology that neither owns—and neither could create alone.

The self is a Creator, and therefore tending to the self is a communal and spiritual responsibility. Living for yourself isn’t the opposite of loving your neighbor—it can

be the condition that makes a healthier form of love possible.

Because belonging isn’t something you can

purchase and install.

They Were Comfortable Summoning Blackness: culture can be merchandised, but belonging still requires relation, responsibility and reciprocity.

A failing structure does not become sacred because we inherited it. When the building leaks, the soul is allowed to move.

Change the current.

Release what you refuse to pass on,

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/23e724_31ee066b0c094a938999b60a0fd044e6/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

Black Palm Trees returns as an ecosphere: the Black body is not separate from the current, but a rooted life within it—receiving, transforming and choosing what flows onward.

before it finds another body to

flow

through.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/23e724_5320117312e94536be2826b87a6752f9/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

LaShun Pace makes the leak audible: inherited structures can fail, and leaving them is how the soul keeps living.

Practice: An

Altar'd (You)

Call 

The altar call turns inward: tend the body where belief took root, then choose what your living will make flesh.

Before you pass something on or keep keepin’ on,

pause.

Altar’d U / Astro Me opens the practice: pause, name the inheritance moving through your body, then discern what must be carried, composted or released.

Name

it: What did you inherit that is still moving through you?

Pluto makes discernment structural: inherited agreements must either transform with the world we are becoming or end here.

Discern

it: What deserves to continue, and what ends with you?

With Pluto in Aquarius pressing against Mercury in Libra, our society is being asked to examine the beliefs, stories, and agreements beneath how we relate to one another. 

Don’t just identify

the pattern. Change

what you pass on.

Move it: Choose one way to embody the change instead of simply believing in it.

Flowing Water carries belief into motion: change becomes real when the body takes a different route.

Maybe it’s a boundary, stopping a behavior or simply a different response.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/23e724_30a3739ea42746e591b41656fda3267d/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

Thee Sacred Souls turns self-devotion into embodied practice: love becomes material through the boundaries, behaviors and responses that protect a life.

The song returns love from abstraction to practice: the self becomes someone whose life must be tended, defended and fully lived.

Love

Within.

Living beyond is what inward love makes possible: a self grounded enough to move, choose and build differently.

Live

Beyond.

Cosmos Watershed

This transmission enters through Deep Water, where family lineage, Black church experience, seminary education and inherited belief continue moving beneath the present body. Turbulent Water arrives when the old building leaks and inheritance can no longer be mistaken for obligation. Flowing Water carries belief into movement, behavior, music and material consequence. Still Water creates the pause before an inherited pattern is passed forward. Tidal Water holds repetition, rhythm, marriage, neurodivergent conveyor belts and the work of learning one another across time. Sacred Water returns the altar to the self: love becomes practice, self-tending becomes communal responsibility and the body decides what continues.

Watershed	Tributaries
Watershed	Deep Water moving through Turbulent and Flowing Water; Still Water creates the pause, Tidal Water carries the repeated practice and Sacred Water returns the first altar to the self
Relationship	Belief and embodiment; inheritance and discernment; self-love and communal care; music and movement; neurodivergence and access; marriage and relational practice
Hom(e)ie	The African talking drum—an instrument whose meaning changes through pressure, movement, rhythm and response
Origin	Three songs meeting Siir during a season of questioning family lineage, Black church experience, seminary education and what they were willing to carry forward
Expansion	blaxkcurry; Black Beauty School; neurodivergent conveyor-belt minds; Black queer and trans pedagogy; inherited religion; Reverse Osmo(cis); Altar’d U; the body as material evidence
Application	Pausing before transmission; naming what remains active; discerning what deserves to continue; embodying change through a boundary, stopped behavior or different response
Lineage	Black musical tradition; Black Beauty School; Black queer and trans world-building; embodied theology; neurodivergent education; Mycelial Sankofa
Counter Currents	Church authority mistaken for spiritual truth; colonial romance; compulsory self-sacrifice; ableist institutional legibility; faith without material practice; belonging treated as something that can be purchased and installed

The Six Waters

Water	Movement through the transmission
Still Water	The pause before the body repeats, responds or passes an inherited pattern forward
Flowing Water	Music carrying thought into movement, vibration, behavior and material consequence
Deep Water	Family lineage, Black church memory, seminary education and belief moving beneath conscious thought
Turbulent Water	The leaking building, ruptured religious authority and the conflict between inheritance and discernment
Tidal Water	Songs, rhythms, repeated responses, six years of marriage and the ongoing practice of learning differently moving minds
Sacred Water	The body as first altar; self-tending as spiritual and communal responsibility; love made material through practice

Cosmos Coordinates

Coordinate	Placement
Primary Portal	Siir’s Talking Drum
Connected Waters	Deep Water, Turbulent Water, Flowing Water, Still Water, Tidal Water and Sacred Water
Tings Connections	I Hear Tings; Trans Learn Tings; I Know Tings; I Move Tings; Altar’d U; Astro Me
Primary Methodology	Mycelial Sankofa
Methodological Practice	Inheritance is tested through the body: what remains alive, what becomes harmful through repetition, what must be composted and what can be carried forward differently
Cosmos Concepts	Belief has a body; the word becomes flesh; music as Flowing Water; Reverse Osmo(cis); the Wata(ring) W(hole); Altar’d U; the self as Creator; conveyor-belt minds
Geographic Coordinate	Black Beauty School’s shared laboratory and touring life moving into the BespokeCurry Cosmos from Elyria, Ohio
Relational Coordinate	Kiing and Siir as hom(e)ies, lovers, friends, artists, educators and world-builders learning to distinguish care from sameness
Temporal Coordinate	Before the Cosmos → Black Beauty School → October 1, 2026; six years of marriage and the opening of Siir’s own Cosmos portal
Astrological Coordinate	Pluto in Aquarius pressing against Mercury in Libra: examining the beliefs, stories and agreements beneath collective relationship
Orientation	Inward through the self, downward through inheritance and outward through changed practice
Core Inquiry	What did you inherit that is still moving through you—and what will you change before it enters another body?
Core Refrain	Love Within. Live Beyond.
Expansion Principle	Recognition is incomplete until the body changes what it practices, permits or passes forward

Cosmos Constellations

Constellation	How it enters this transmission	What it makes visible
Siir’s Talking Drum	Sound, theology, education and embodied practice speak in Siir’s register.	The drum does not only announce. It converses through pressure, rhythm and response.
Black Beauty School	The shared work between Kiing and Siir forms part of the laboratory from which the Cosmos emerged.	The pedagogy was relational and embodied before the Cosmos had its current name.
Mycelial Sankofa	Inherited material is examined, decomposed and permitted to return in a changed form.	Carrying lineage does not require preserving every inherited structure.
The Wata(ring) W(hole)	Water moves through the body, the riverside and the building that tried to contain it.	The current exceeds institutional containment and changes through contact with the self.
Reverse Osmo(cis)	The body becomes its own discerning membrane.	The self—not an external authority—decides what enters, remains and passes through.
Altar’d U	The body answers the altar call by tending itself as the first sacred site.	Sacredness begins through attention, arrangement, discernment and embodied practice.
Astro Me	Pluto in Aquarius and Mercury in Libra situate personal discernment inside collective beliefs and relational agreements.	A private pattern may be carrying a larger social structure through the body.
The Six Waters	Inheritance holds, music moves, conflict ruptures, rhythm returns and the self becomes sacred practice.	Belief changes state as it travels through memory, body, relationship and action.

edited and graphics by kiing curry

Belief Has a Body: When Love Becomes Flesh