They Tried to Bury Us-THEY DIDN’T KNOW WE WERE SEEDS!
First of all,
Know this. You. Are. Not. Alone.
You, with your equal measures of grace and grit that drive you to wake and face the day, even when it is hard to leave your bed, your home. You, who are learning and claiming self honoring boundaries. You, unlearning hyper-vigilance and abiding in your worth and value as a whole human.
I see you.
I hear you.
Look around.
Let us behold the presence of one another in awe of our individual and collective resilience.
Growing up, I would try to shrink my long, lanky body into the corners of our house, this house in the Eighth Ward of Johnstown, with narrow hallways, low ceilings and not enough room for all the volatile interactions that took place here. In shrinking, I sought to avoid comments about my body, gropes, attempts at tickles and other violations from my stepfather. Sometimes I succeeded, other times I did not.
As a young adult, I didn’t know I could set boundaries. So boundaries were violated several times, once by a longtime friend after I had too much to drink at a B.B. King Concert. Intoxication apparently is an invitation to have sex even if the intoxicated person cannot give consent.
I hated myself.
20 some years later.
I called this by name.
Rape.
They tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds.
For many of us, the experience of trauma may no longer be present, but what remains is hyper-vigilence, despair, shame, guilt, and fear that never quite seems to leave.
However Dear Ones, there is Hope.
These feelings may reappear, but don’t need to stay.
We can learn to work with these. Face fear and the residuals of trauma one breath at a time. Fear can keep us alive and can also swallow us whole. Naming and facing our fears with the help of a skilled therapist is a game changer.
And Anger!
Anger can turn into motivation which sparks courage to speak up and say ENOUGH!!!
Enough violence. Enough manipulation. Enough coercion. Enough gaslighting. Enough silence. Enough isolation. Enough business as usual.
Anger channeled appropriately supports us in poking holes at the crumbling rot of excessive greed, power, domination, and the objectification of bodies.
And Hope. Hope rises from anger and despair. It cannot exist without them. Hope and faith are the beliefs that love is both this emergent strategy for change and the essence of who we are. Love is what feeds and supports healing and is what we uncover in us, peeling back the layers we thought would protect us. These layers served their purpose and how wise were we that we used whatever means available to us to survive.
And now we are done with “making it through” this day, this time, this life.
They tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds.
Intentaron enterrarnos, no sabían que éramos semillas.
This quote appeared on several signs we witnessed during the Women’s March in Washington DC January 2017. The quote has been used by Latin Folx in both fights for liberation and to be fully seen as immigrants seeking safety, stability and peace. The quote is attributed to Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulo whose deep confessional poetry and his homosexuality saw him cancelled by society.
We are not invisible, our seeds may be small but we will not be buried, we will rise, rooted in justice.
We are here to thrive.
We are here to peel off the layers that may have protected us for a time, but also served to bury deep within, our wholeness.
As a young person, I struggled with the pain of existing in my body. Drugs, alcohol and promiscuity provided short term relief and allowed me brief check outs from suffering. I no longer blame myself for these coping mechanisms that allowed me to survive until by grace, other avenues opened up to me.
Yoga. This idea of being present to my body, my breathe, my own life scared the fuck out of me and yet, also fascinated me. In the beginning, I practiced off and on mostly hard core power yoga where I could be present to outer physicality without pausing to tend to inner churnings. One day, my body, a wreck after significant trauma from the birth of my daughter, a different type of trauma that retriggered prior memories in my body, found me tentatively moving slowly, finding breath and body together. Standing on my feet, hands at my heart, I breathed in, extended my arms and my gaze up towards my hands, exhaling, inviting my spine back down. Moving, stretching into lunges, lying on my belly, curling into a ball and making my way back into standing became a slow, rhythmic meditation. At some point I remember an integration of sorts happening, where I heard from deep within, “Well, there you are! Welcome Home!”
I cried. I slept well that night. It wasn’t the finish line. There is none, but this turning point changed the trajectory of my life and where I am headed.
The healing journey is the path of remembering who we are, returning to that awareness and living more and more from that space. This journey is not only one of personal healing, but finding each other, rooting out causes of harm, protecting the most vulnerable among us and speaking truth to power that normalizes sexual violence.
They tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds.
Hope is this seed that contains the whole of the plant. The roots. The stem. The trunk. The branches. The blossom. The fruit.
The path of healing is literally composting our shit into fertilizer to grow that seed of hope.
This fertilizer emerges from despair, from rage, from the dark nights of the soul. Hope that shapes direction and purpose.
So Dear Ones, Know this. The ugliness of the abuse of Power has always been here, it is now being revealed in epic proportions. The veil has been lifted and the silence that preserved the old order is now deafening. Let it crumble. Speak truth to Power.
And Dear Ones, Know this. Love, this all consuming agape love, the primary force of bonding and attraction in the universe, that which drives all Creation has always been here and will never, ever leave. This is the strongest of all and this is what wins if we can move through the pain, instead of numbing it, running from it or denying it. Love awaits you. You don’t need to earn it, but you do need to claim it.
This is what bonds us as we liberate our nervous systems together, settling, calming and grounding as well as igniting passion, motivation and inspiration. This is how we heal in the collective. In supportive, healthy relationships where we work together so all can thrive.
Let’s do this.
Together.
