Story-sharing
Originally published at Examorata. Please leave any comments there.
Last night my friend Laura and I hosted our second “Sharing Our Stories” event at UUCC, on the theme of “Love in Action.” We host these evenings to discuss and raise awareness of issues surrounding reproductive justice.
But just lately I’ve had so much more than that on my mind. After I got back from General Assembly (see my last post), I had a bit of down-time and then I headed to War, West Virginia for a week chaperoning our high school youth group on a service trip. War, in extreme southwest West Virginia, is a part of McDowell County, one of the most impoverished counties in the country. It was like a whole other world.
And I haven’t written about it, because I’ve had no idea how. What I mean is, I haven’t written anything for “public consumption” - I’ve written a lot, but I’ve gone in circles. There is too much to say. About poverty. About hope, and its lack. About work. About perspective. About community. About loneliness. Some of this stuff I’ve been thinking about is outward-facing (“How on earth do we even begin fixing this?!”) and some is inward-facing (“How on earth do I come home and take up my old life of privilege and hope and desire when I have faced this other extreme?”). And mostly I’ve felt split in two.
For the theme of “Love in action,” I wanted to write something about the trip. Okay, strictly speaking, I felt almost entirely unprepared to write about anything NOT involving the trip.
I looked at my notes. I looked at pages and pages of contemplation and questioning and agonizing and frustration. What on earth to focus on? And how could I keep it SHORT?
I wrote the following, and shared it. It’s not poetry, exactly, because heavens above, I am so many things, but I am not a poet. But it’s not exactly prose because it’s the only way I could begin to approach the topic: by cutting it down to one, specific, emotional truth.
Before I read this, so help me, I also shared this song by my friend Caleb. He and I have talked about what it means to write songs from points of view that are very different from your own. I love this song and am so thrilled he wrote it…yet every time I sing it, I think, this song needs to be sung by a woman. I am not forwarding myself as the best woman for the job; still I was the best woman to do it last night since I was the one sharing it, who knew the words. It is worth a listen to his lovely recording above.
Then I shared this. I will have more to say later I’m sure. But it was important for me to start this process, to stop sitting in silence and gazing at my own navel which - I think we can mostly agree - has a true but quite limited applicability.
It doesn’t seem possible that this woman’s heart can actually be contained within the human-sized cage of her chest. When she speaks, the love pours out like the cavern within her is bottomless, spanless, neverending.
Here is where I am from, she points.
These mountains. These rivers. These trees.
Welcome in, though it is broken.
Welcome in, though it is tired.
Welcome in, though it is weathered.
Welcome in. It looks asleep. It looks exhausted. It is alive. Alive and boundless and spanless and neverending.
This woman takes it up. Another woman started it, the lifting. They come together, the women who have lost more than we understand. Their husbands, brothers, fathers, sons. Their homes, lands, dignity, opportunity. They have lifted back up their spirits in song again and again, to heal what is broken, to breathe hope in where it has collapsed away, to fill the earth rent so deeply.
And as that love pours out, she says, “The men have lost so much.”
The men here have lost everything.
Everything that they are. Everything they were ever told they were to become. Every chance they had to do the only thing they were ever expected to do.
It is gone. They are hollow. They need to be lifted, filled, healed. The earth will care for itself in time. Who will care for them?
The women here sing the answers. They lift their voices their spirits their hands their boundless spanless neverending hearts.