After I pressed publish to my last blog, I read a dear friend’s message on facebook, “My stomach hurts so badly because I ate institutionalized racism, police brutality and cold-blooded murder before bed.” That is when I learnt of two more black men killed in the States, murdered by the Police. I am knocked down. For the next days I am grounded. Present. Deeply mindful of all Maya and I are learning, unlearning while on our ancestral journey. And I am also feet planted in the distress and unimaginable pain black people in North America must be feeling. Sorrow. Rage. Fear. Sorrow. Rage. Fear.
Yesterday we walked the streets of Dublin. We walked alongside the famine sculptures by the river; figures of people marching, no not marching, walking, no not walking, slow dragging, tumbling inch by inch towards the famine boat. Withered, wasted Irish people murdered slowly by the State. Slow starvation. A father carrying his child on his back, women blank eyed, empty. And with the deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling heavy on my mind I think of the suffering, the suffering than and now. I think how some countries have risen to some extent above their vicious violent pasts and how some countries rise too but also continue to struggle mercilessly. And how many of us refuse to take time to understand the deep embedded layers of colonialism and institutionalized racism and how it plays out in lives today.
I raise my fist today, in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. May we always seek to listen, to understand and to see we are all One but we are all coming from vastly different stories.