Moving Through Black Geographies: A Train Methodology
- Kiing Curry
- Jul 30
- 9 min read
The deeper delusion is forgetting that we are living beings now.
Not future relics.
Moving Through Black Geographies: A Train Methodology
Editorial Note
While revisiting this essay, I realized there is an important origin story that sits beneath these reflections. Much of what became this “train methodology” did not begin during my 2026 Amtrak journey. It was first practiced years earlier while my partner and I were experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles.
Without a car, public transit became more than transportation. Buses, trains, stations, and repeated routes became places where I unknowingly studied my own autistic body—how I regulated, how I rested, how I observed, and how movement itself could become a form of care amid profound instability.
I did not have language for this practice then. I only knew I was paying attention. Looking back, I can see that many of the sustainable practices I now carry into a more stable life were first learned under conditions I would never wish to repeat. This essay documents one journey by train, but it is also part of a much longer methodology of learning to move through Black geographies with curiosity, relationship, and care.
I Move Tings
Movement, Rhythm & Embodiment
I Move Tings explores movement as a language of the body—how rhythm, slowness, and repetition become medicine.
This practice centers moving in ways that sustain rather than extract, listening for the body’s own tempo.
Movement here is not performance; it is relationship.
When I lived in Washington, DC, from 2010 to 2013, people still called it Chocolate City.
But even then, I could feel the cocoa beginning to run dry.
Learning the city by rail. Washington, D.C., 2010–2013. Wonder belongs in the methodology. Movement was always a teacher. An archive of gathering. Field notes before I called them field notes. The archive remembers. On the way. Community moves through the streets.
Not because Black people had disappeared. We hadn’t. But because something was shifting beneath the surface. The conditions that had allowed Black life to shape the city were being rearranged.
You could feel it in the neighborhoods.
In who could stay.
In who was expected to leave.
In which stories became marketable and which bodies remained disposable.
Years later, I returned by train.
Union Station has always been more than a transportation hub.
It is an ecosystem of movement.
People arriving.
People leaving.
People waiting.
People carrying entire worlds inside backpacks, duffel bags, shoebox lunches, fast food lunches, and tired bodies.
I sat in the station watching people move.
I watched Black elders trying to catch a nap before the next leg of their journey. Families sharing food. Workers stretching tired backs. Students beginning new chapters. Children watching trains with wonder.
Living culture was already passing through the station.
Later, I wandered into two Black-owned shops.
I took pictures.
Union Station. 
Listening archives. 
Many lineages. Listening archives. Carried stories. Stacks worth lingering in. Found in the bins.
That was all my body wanted to do.
It wasn’t because the spaces weren’t beautiful. They were.
My body simply wasn’t asking to possess anything.
It was observing.
The photographs were enough because what I was seeing wasn’t inviting me into relationship.
It was inviting me into a performance of Black culture.
Beautiful displays.
Strategically placed Black books.
Objects that signaled Blackness before they invited me into deeper conversation with it.
I realized I didn’t want another place to purchase Black culture.
I wanted somewhere to encounter it.
Imagine walking into a shop where the first invitation isn’t to browse.
Maybe there’s already tea brewing.
Maybe someone says, “Sit down for a while.”
Maybe conversation begins before commerce.
Maybe you leave having learned something, having remembered something, having been changed in some small way.
And maybe, because you have been cared for, you naturally want to sustain the people who created that experience.
The coins still flow.
But they flow differently.
Not because someone extracted them from you.
Because relationship invited them forward.
None of us escape capitalism.
We all have to sustain ourselves.
This isn’t an argument against selling.
It’s a question about the terms of relationship.
Because I am no longer interested in participating as a commodity.
I am interested in participating as a living body within a living culture.
That question followed me across town to the Takoma Wellness Center.
Waiting to transfer. 
The next stop. 
Arriving with intention.
I always know I’m going to have an experience in a dispensary. Cannabis has become one of my deepest teachers.
But this felt different.
They leaned into my curiosity.
Into my questions.
Into my nerdiness.
No one rushed me toward the register.
My purchase was finished, but the conversation wasn’t.
I stood talking with my budtender for another ten minutes about Oregon, about cannabis, about where the industry could go, about the kinds of ecosystems we both hoped to see.
My transaction had already ended.
The relationship hadn’t.
I left with one overwhelming feeling.
I wanted to pack those people into my backpack and take them with me.
Not because they sold me cannabis.
Because they had met me with intention and care.
I’m on a tight budget.
My OCD also means I have to stay aware of the ways excitement can influence my spending.
Balance matters.
But I noticed something important.
When my system is genuinely met with intention and care, it wants to circulate.
It wants to support.
It wants to invest.
It wants the people who created that experience to continue creating it for someone else.
I’ve seen this current before.
Early in the pandemic, long before my autism diagnosis, I found myself moving through the world with that same instinct. Everything in me wanted to support people, invest in community, and keep resources flowing. If someone was creating something beautiful, I wanted to sustain it. If someone invited me into relationship, I wanted to respond in kind.
Looking back, I can see that I often mistook my own orientation for the orientation of the people around me.
I believed we were participating in reciprocity.
Many times, we weren’t.
What I experienced as circulation was, in some relationships, simply extraction.
I didn’t yet understand that my body naturally moves toward intention, care, and flow. I also didn’t understand that not every space, not every collaboration, and not every community was moving toward me with that same intention.
My body wasn’t wrong.
It was responding exactly as it had been designed to respond.
What was missing was discernment.
Now I know the difference.
My body still wants to circulate.
It still wants to invest.
It still wants my coins, my labor, my attention, and my care to move.
But now I ask a different question first.
Has relationship already begun?
If the answer is yes, then the circulation feels like nourishment.
If the answer is no, then I no longer mistake extraction for reciprocity.
Then the train carried me farther south.
By the time I arrived in Charlotte, I had crossed the Mason–Dixon Line.
The next station held another image that refused to leave me.
Buffalo Soldier memorabilia sat behind locked glass.
I kept staring.
History sat behind glass. Some histories are preserved. Others are still waiting to be met. 
I couldn’t stop looking.
There was something about encountering those display cases here, in the South, that felt impossible to ignore.
The South is not simply where so much of Black history unfolded. It is where systems of containment turned Black bodies into property, where lives were cataloged, bought, sold, disciplined, displayed, and made legible through ownership. Standing there, I couldn’t help but notice how easily a living history could become a curated one.
So I found myself asking a different question.
What happens to a thing that was meant to be living embodiment when it is frozen in time in order to freeze the harm, interrupt repair, and preserve an imagined history for a very few?
The display case wasn’t simply preserving history.
It was performing it.
As I watched countless non-Black bodies perform care as they read through the glass with misplaced concern.
History became something to admire instead of something to inhabit.
Something finished instead of something still asking something of us.
I wonder how often we do this with ourselves.
How often we inherit Blackness as artifact instead of relationship.
How often we perform our history instead of embodying it.
This is part of the delusion that Blackness has been wrapped in.
Not simply that our labor, our music, our food, our language, and our creativity can become commodities.
We know that.
The deeper delusion is forgetting that we are living beings now.
Not future relics.
Not museum pieces waiting for someone else to tell our story.
Living beings.
Our ancestors are not asking us to become artifacts in their honor.
They are asking us to continue what they could not finish.
To keep life moving.
To keep repair moving.
To refuse every system that teaches us to relate to ourselves primarily through performance, display, archive, or market.
The thing that stayed with me most wasn’t inside the shops.
It wasn’t behind the glass.
It was inside the stations themselves.
Black elders asleep with bags wrapped around their arms.
Families sharing meals between trains.
People searching for the least expensive food they could find.
Workers finishing long shifts.
Children watching trains.
Bodies carrying generations of movement without ever calling it embodiment.
I’m not separating those Black bodies from the ones with excess coins.
They are all my people.
But I am asking what happens when some of us begin to believe we have earned a separation from the exhaustion that still travels through our lineages.
The violence is not only that Black life was made into a commodity.
It is that we begin imagining ourselves outside the conditions that continue shaping so many Black lives.
My body would not let me participate in that fantasy.
It would let me witness.
It would let me take photographs.
It would let me notice.
But it would not let me confuse beautifully curated Blackness with living Black culture.
Because the culture wasn’t waiting behind the register.
It wasn’t waiting behind museum glass.
It wasn’t arranged on a bookshelf.
It was already moving through the stations.
Carrying backpacks.
Holding babies.
Sharing lunches.
Closing tired eyes.
Waiting for the next train.
Living.
I left the journey with one question still moving through me.
How do we create spaces where culture is so deeply embodied that anything exchanged is simply a continuation of relationship rather than the reason we gathered in the first place?
The route was already changing me. Every route carries more than one destination. 
Movement leaves evidence. 
I belonged to the route before I knew it. Still looking up. 
Board. Observe. Return. 
Some places teach motion. 
The window remembered me too. 
The night kept carrying us forward. The view kept widening. I kept following the tracks.
The Cosmos Watershed
The Cosmos Watershed is not a bibliography. It is a relational map. Rather than documenting only where ideas originated, it traces how they entered into relationship, what they nourish, what nourishes them, where they continue flowing, and which currents they resist. Knowledge does not move through the Cosmos as isolated facts. It behaves like water—branching, converging, disappearing underground, resurfacing elsewhere, and continually reshaping the terrain through which it moves. The Watershed invites you to follow those currents rather than simply cite their source.
Watershed | Tributaries |
Companion | Reverse Osmo(cis): Restoring Circulation, Moving Through Black Geographies: The Infrastructure of Slowness A Train Methodology, Part II (Soon Come) |
Origin | A train journey from Cleveland through Washington, DC, Charlotte, and Durham became an embodied methodology for observing Black geographies. Observations from Union Station, Takoma Wellness, Charlotte Station, and the movement between them revealed that travel itself could function as a way of knowing. |
Expansion | Extends the concepts of circulation, reciprocity, embodiment, and relationship beyond water into movement, transportation, museums, commerce, cannabis, and Black geography. Introduces the train as an epistemological methodology rather than simply a mode of transportation. |
Application | Invites readers to reconsider travel as a practice of embodied observation. Offers a framework for evaluating spaces through relationship rather than transaction, and for recognizing when culture remains alive through circulation instead of becoming performance, commodity, or archive. |
Lineage | Reverse Osmo(cis): Restoring Circulation • On Support • I Hear Tings: Buying Groceries Should Not Require a Strategy • Symbols, Signals and Ways of Paying Attention • I See Tings |
Counter Currents | Culture as commodity • Performance replacing embodiment • Museums mistaken for repair • Extraction mistaken for reciprocity • Consumption replacing relationship • Blackness reduced to representation rather than living practice |
Cosmos Coordinates
Field | Content |
Planetary Body | ◉⌁ I See Tings |
Planet of Origin | The Wata(ring) W(hole) |
Primary Water | Flowing Water |
Secondary Water | Sacred Water |
Movement | Observation → Circulation → Relationship |
Portal | Train Travel |
Primary Technology | Embodied Observation |
Cosmological Function | Uses slow rail travel as an embodied methodology for observing Black geographies, revealing how movement, infrastructure, commerce, disability, museums, cannabis, and everyday encounters expose the difference between culture as commodity and culture as living relationship. |
Core Inquiry | What becomes visible when movement itself becomes a methodology for understanding Black geographies instead of simply a means of getting somewhere? |
Threshold | Travel shifts from transportation to relational practice, allowing geography to become an ecology of observation rather than a backdrop to movement. |
Black Ecological Orientation | Reads Black geographies through circulation, relationship, accessibility, commerce, food, museums, public infrastructure, and everyday life, recognizing culture as something lived rather than displayed. |
Calabash Relationship | Holds trains, disability, cannabis, Black commerce, museums, public space, food, and community in conversation without collapsing them into a single explanation, allowing each encounter to deepen the ecology of the journey. |
Wata(ring) W(hole) Relationship | The Six Waters provide the relational methodology through which movement becomes observation, observation becomes relationship, and relationship becomes a deeper understanding of Black geographies as living ecosystems rather than fixed destinations. |
Return Practice | Slow your arrival. Before asking what a place offers you, notice how people move through it, what circulates freely, what has been commodified, and where relationship exists before transaction. |
Moving Through Black Geographies: A Train Methodology
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