Due to a variety of orthopedic issues and past trauma challenges I won’t bore you with, there have been many things in this run-up to election day that I have chosen not to do. Big gatherings. Knocking on doors. Making phone calls…
Instead, I have done what I CAN do! Signs in the yard. Intentional wardrobe choices, meant to start conversations. Pockets full of GOOD TROUBLE buttons to give away. Social media. And conversations with real, actual humans struggling with the way we’ve always done it and I’m not sure I can.
On Saturday morning, I had a dream… the kind that comes complete with images! Present-day chucks & pearls candidate, VP Kamala Harris, and 6-year old Ruby Bridges walking, hand-in-hand, into the White House.
And the flood of memories began! Ruby Bridges is four years older than I am. And I have my own school integration story from Florida, in 1968, complete with parents throwing rocks at the school buses their children were riding in!
Now, gravestones on the news. Young women dying without abortion healthcare they desperately needed. Victims of rape and incest being forced to carry the children of their abusers. And more memories…
I have assisted in abortion health care. I have helped to deliver infants by cesarean section for young teen moms… one of them a 13 year old with developmental challenges, forced to carry the child of her mother’s partner, “because they were good Christians.” When I told that child that her baby was a girl, she sobbed, “How will I keep her safe?”
There were tanks in my dream, too. Huge Russian tanks in Hungary, in 1989, before the wall came down. And a young man who told me that, when he was growing up, he woke up every morning and checked the news to find out where he lived and who was now in charge.
And a wild card glimpse of the PBS show, Finding Your Roots. Angela Davis, former member of the Black Panthers, was one of the guests. Angela Davis! Turns out she and I share a family of Mayflower ancestors! Also turns out that The Presbyterian Disaster Fund, busy these days in hurricane relief work, was founded by activists, in what we used to refer to as the Northern Presbyterian Church, working to get Angela released from prison.
Then, a scene from The West Wing. Season 7, episode 6. Presidential candidate, Matt Santos, just before the Al Smith Dinner, explaining his position, as a Roman Catholic, on the issue of abortion:
Abortion should be safe. It should be legal. It should be a whole lot rarer than it is.
Then, he went on to advocate for access to social resources like education, housing, food, daycare, health care, and contraception, as ways to make other choices possible, too.
All of that dreaming went on with the help of the paintings whispering from the walls. Mostly, Grandmother Moon, whose job it is to carry the visual codex of my deepest convictions. And to call me back to me, as often as I need her to!
There were other voices as well… Dr. Walter Brueggemann, thundering Just tell the story! in a room of fledgling preachers.
And, Cousin Angela Davis! I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.
None of us can do it all, but the world will be better when we do what we can! I’m on team “How can I help?”
ps… turns out that “my” story to tell is getting bigger! Like speaking all these things we don’t talk about! And A Creation Poem… telling the oldest story of all in a way that more and more of us – and our Littles – might hear room for themselves within it, as we were meant to hear! Just click here to get a copy… or several! (Also mugs and posters and puzzles!)
pps… the painting inviting you in, at the beginning of this dream wandering adventure, is from an Intentional Creativity® journey known as Temple. And the one below is my reminder that I said yes to being one of those 5 people for as many folks as I can. They insisted on joining team “How can I help?” too!!!
