After exiting teaching tonight, and bearing witness to some of the most gut wrenching stories of survival and the cycle of victimization and perpetration, I can only hold the deepest hope in my heart that even a segment of the greater population can become as reflective and willing to enter the difficult spaces of one’s own psyche as these women. To witness is a position of deep honor, to hold without judgement, but a deep clarity in the heart of love and open spirit. I find myself rocked to the core. Stories of bone shaking abuse, violence, mistakes, addiction, death, loss and identity. Stories of love, compassion, lessons and family. As I sink into my own body, giving thanks for all I have that allows me to walk into these moments with presence and vulnerability, I am feeling the depths of this thing called humanity. It hurts. It aches. It uplifts. It dances around the being and stirs up a cauldron of feeling. Breathing in tonight’s celebration of words - the joyful ones alongside the profoundly painful ones, I have never felt more sure of story as the tool for transformation. The ability to write one’s own story is what helps us stay alive, spiritually, through the deepest caverns of this tricky world. It is why society once deemed poets so dangerous. When we own our own narratives, our internal power emerges and is an uncrushable foundation. Friends, let us keep telling stories - aloud, on paper, through movement and image. Let us listen to other’s stories and allow them to transform us as witnesses. Let us witness each other, in all of our beauty and dismay.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Nov 2014 03:37:24 +0000