Day Two
30 days/30 minutes
Trust your mind, trust your truth, trust the momentum of your beautiful mind, the rhythm of your body and what she is leaning into, trust the power of your heart flexing and flowing onto the page.
Home. Surprised and not surprised how easy it is to find my footing after eight months away, find my footing in a place where I’ve lived in, out and through, half my life. Over and over recognizing the privilege of movement, the bouncing back and forth from one home to the next and how easy, easy, easy that is for someone like me. May I not take this privilege for granted, may I continue to sink deeper and deeper into Fannie Lou Hamer’s, “Nobody is free until everybody is free.”
Theo and I watching Grenada’s ‘Beyond the Headlines’ last night. Conversation discussing mental health and mental illness using recent video clips of a school child physically retaliating against police; and then two youth men beating a mentally ill elder. The conversation opening to what is mental health, what is mental illness? Broadening our limited definition and understanding of mental health and mental illness; acknowledging all of us have the capacity to lose our selves to mental instability, illness, rage, extreme violence. And this too I believe ruled by privilege and what kinda cards we were dealt the moment we were born into this world inhabited by other human beings, a species I believe that is deeply traumatized. How else to explain the state of the world that continues to wage war on other human beings, wage war against the very earth that breathes us to live? How else to explain the existence of nuclear weapons as a means of keeping the peace. A traumatized species in a traumatized world is the only way I can make sense of the violence we humans continue to explode through and into one another. Violence our historical legacy. How can anyone of us be free in hearts, mnds and bodies when there is such monumental division within man-made systems and structures? Some of us get to move freely, majority of us, not.
While Theo and I watch the conversation on tv we both hush each other so we can stay present to the sharing between guest speakers. We want to share our own opinions, our own understandings which quite often differs with the exception of how we as a family modal in many aspects how we live and show up in the world, within our relationship and how this spills over into other ways of being that does not mimic the dominant ways of being and doing passed on from one generation to the next but continues to find its own freedom of breaking free from a not so free dominant story we have all been born into; a story that differs for all of us depending on the complex personal and collective stories we carry.
Not in this life time, Theo says when he hears me talk about co- imagining, creating, building cultures of peace in whatever form that takes. I agree and don’t agree. No and yes in this lifetime, depending on how we broaden our understanding of trauma, mental illness, mental health, and freedom. Can we hold multiple truths about ourselves and each other; a traumatized and exquisitely beautiful species capable of nudging freedom onward and inward, collectively, personally…….