I have a clear image of my dad's hands. Open wounds, taking the wear and tear of our world. My dad was usually driving truck when I was growing up. Lifting boxes. Hauling them from the truck into the warehouse. Opening that giant steel trap back gate. Bumping against the crates. Bits of flesh being ripped off. Open, exposed wounds covering his calloused and hard hands. I would see him each weekend and he would be wearing fresh battle scars from doing the labor needed to sustain an economy of stuff. An economy that wounds people as it goes.
Even now, sitting a thousand miles away, I can picture my dad's hands and my stomach tightens, flips and aches. My dad's wounds, his many scars pain me. Even though and maybe because he never shared them. The pain stays in his body, swallowed long ago and more today, with no outlet, never given voice. Depression is what we can see. Pain swallowed and held so tight, blows received from his father, and the world since, held inside with nowhere to go but down to the depths of despair.
The weight of silence.
My words.
My struggle.
The brokenness I see.
My dreams.
They get trapped in my body. Rising. Giving heat and color.
Turning me red, but without release.
My neck turns bright red any time the spotlight is on me.
As a small kid I would hide behind or between my mom’s legs when others would try talking to me. Don’t put the spotlight on me.
Yet I know I have so much to contribute and when I keep my thoughts and dreams and struggles to myself it makes me feel alone. Removed. Small. Especially in the face of all the hurt and destruction I see.
I have been reflecting on how our current power structures are kept in place at least in part because white people are disconnected from our bodies. We see so much devastation around us. We know our bodies are to blame. The color of our skin has been used as a weapon to enslave, murder, rape, jail, destroy black, brown, indigenous bodies. Our skin color has zapped the life, literally killing, people of color. It is used as a wedge to divide and conquer. We must be distant from our bodies or else we could no longer live with the way things are.
I believe part of the healing journey is getting back in touch with our bodies. For me it is to give voice to the words that get trapped in my throat. It is to feel the anguish of the blood spilled.
Deep. Raw. Exposure.
There are emotions hidden inside our bodies.
Penetrated and brought out.
As I write I feel scared. There is an opening deep within. There is a wound I rarely see or tend to. The wound is not mine alone. It has traveled through generations. Passed from people I know and don’t yet know. There is raw, muddy, muck and I am swimming in it.
What does it feel like?
Sandy, gritty, grimmy sludge that is hard to move through. Forces me to slow down. This muck is life. Sometimes we try to sail ahead as if we aren’t in the depths of a broken, damaged and damaging world. But then we are left raw.
I reflect on the life altering moments that got me to see the muck? That allow me to slow down and tend to myself. To the people I love. To the people my day brings into my orbit?
I was 10.
Carmen and Tito lived in the apartment directly below my dad. Their baby was 2. We connected instantly. I loved on that little girl the way pre-teen girls long to do.
One day I bathed her. She had sat in a dirty diaper all day and I so desperately wanted to get her clean. As I stripped her I felt a deep sadness. As I washed her soft skin in the worn, old tub she laughed, but the weight of her life was not lost on me.
A flash into their apartment window. Jagged edges of glass barely holding on in one pain. Tito with a pipe in his mouth and fire in his hand.
Carmen had many children, all but this young one were taken by the state. Soon Carmen would give birth to another child who we would visit in the ICU. Born crack addicted, never to know her parents. Tito also taken away by the state. Thrown in jail, leaving Carmen alone with her heartache.
The day Carmen brought me into her apartment. Speaking words I could not understand, but the message was clear. She held my hand so tenderly and placed in it a little silver necklace. She closed my fingers around the necklace. The cold metal resting in my palm. Her warm hands wrapped around mine. Holding me with such tenderness. Her words a lullaby. Her eyes filled with love and pain. Gratitude and sadness. She blessed me in that moment.
She turned something in me. Opened my eyes to see all the love and tenderness that is suffocated in all the pain and destruction.
Pain and destruction caused by an economy that uses people. Caused by the creation of race, so effectively used to divide and conquer. Pain and destruction that lives in my body, that lives in all of our bodies. Suffocating love and tenderness.
In this world I cannot remain silent. We must give voice to what we see.
~ my reflections were inspired by Audre Lorde’s work Transformation of Silence.