Sunday, August 10, 2008

Introduction: A person inside my head.

Somewhere inside of me, there's a little black girl of about 8 or 9 years of age. Her hair is caught up in ties, little balls of fluff on all sides of her head. She knows that she's not meant for anything fine the way she knows how to breathe. And she draws with a stick in the dirt whenever she gets the chance, draws her family such as it is, draws the sycamores around her, and sometimes, with her mind, she draws shapes in the clouds. She is barely aware that she does this. She does this because creation is as much her birthright as the wind is.

I don't know how many more years this girl lives, what children she bears or whether her life ends as it began – in slavery. I just know these bare facts, know her unconscious acceptance of the circumstances of her short life, the art she makes in the simplest of forms, the wind on her black skin, the hard work she endures and the losses she suffers as a matter of course.

We have these birthrights, these few things: The capacity and impulse to create, skin that feels the wind, the opportunity to love, if only to love ourselves. We have inner workings that accept the gifts of the world – the calories and the oxygen. The workings by themselves tell this truth: We belong. We utterly belong no matter what; we were longed into existence by a force greater and truer than ourselves and then, regardless of appearance or contribution, we are loved every single day of our short silly lives.

2 comments:

  1. Well this is a very fine piece of writing! I do appreciate the way you could take the images inside you and put them into writing this way. I also resonate deeply with this bit especially, as it relates so much to what I do in my work and what I think about while I'm working (if I think!):
    "We have inner workings that accept the gifts of the world – the calories and the oxygen. The workings by themselves tell this truth: We belong. We utterly belong no matter what; we were longed into existence by a force greater and truer than ourselves and then, regardless of appearance or contribution, we are loved every single day of our short silly lives".
    That we are come into/out of the world as an expression of the Whole, and are "breathed" by it; and this Breath of Life catalyzes all the workings and movements of our mind and body, and that this is Health, and that it is always in the background (we marinating in this love and intelligence this breath of life is characterized by, and this breath playing our form like a flute), no matter who we are or what we do, "every single day of our short silly lives".
    - will

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  2. Hi Will,

    Thanks for the comment - sometimes I forget what I've written. It was nice to be reminded. I like the idea of marinating in divine love. MMM. It's what's for dinner.

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