[Image description: Blue sky filled with billowy white clouds, behind a line of trees, with a field of grass and wildflowers in the foreground.]
In what some consider heretical musings, dangerous thinking, playing with fire on slippery slopes, asking for censure,
I find space for questions unwelcome within either/or constructs of other people’s god.
I find insights previously obscured by certainty that stifled doubts along with creativity.
I find explorations and longings formerly restricted to a certain collection of words.
I find companions willing to clasp hands, jump, free fall, enjoy the vastness, the beauty, the tenderness, the wild wilderness that beckons within, that knows without seeing, that new life is what we’ll find.
[Image Description: Shadowed canyon walls on either side of a river, blue sky, rock formations, and light from the rising sun in the background.]
Well, thank goodness we’re getting back to normal as evidenced everywhere we go.
Regulations disregarded even before they’re even lifted it all feels so normal now, doesn’t it?
As if three and a half million people have not died of a pandemic made worse by refusal to act for mutual protection.
As if entire communities didn’t get sucked into a cesspool of conspiracy or refuse to give a damn about their neighbors while fawning over unethical politicians.
As if children are not being killed in their own homes by bombs and guns funded by world governments.
As if people are not dying, starving, fleeing devastation caused by destructive policy, only to be caged on the borders of the countries that caused the most harm.
As if our tax dollars are not being used to kill and imprison and oppress while the instruments of oppression are heralded as heroes.
As if rights of protest, votes, and safety aren’t being gleefully stripped from the vulnerable at the manipulation of the rich and powerful.
As if people aren’t losing people, losing homes, losing peace, while being called lazy and selfish for not sacrificing all on the altar of the economy for others’ convenience.
As if water and trees and the earth herself are not being ravaged and her protectors are not cheated, brutalized for corporate gain.
As if Christians don’t worship corrupt, abusive men and follow them blindly down a path that is nothing like the love of Christ.
As if there is nothing to grieve, nothing to morn, nothing to learn from, no reason for pause or grace.
As if everything is fine, so totally fine, nothing to see here, everything is so, so normal as long as you spend your money, demand service and subservience to your whims.
As if normal has not always been this tragic, trauma-filled ruin that only those with privilege can pretend not to see.
As if those whose eyes are open don’t have the power to imagine and co-create and bring about a better way than normal.
[image description: two dark curtains closed except for a gap near the top where sunlight streams in.]
Knob turned and door pushed open, asleep until newly spoken to and unable now to stop my own annihilation, transformation, re-creation into what is not entirely yet clear.
Unable not to shake the hand-me-down scapegoat god, the one we’re supposed to wait on to make things better or end it all
that absolves of collective work for change, keeps distracted, focused on individual charity that stokes self-righteousness, keeps tight control, as if parceling out crumbs to “worthy” individuals will set things right.
Sliver of sunlight piercing curtain gap, tired of being confined in this dark room, this dark tomb, reusing words that belong to other people, when what my soul longs for is the voice that speaks within, “There is another way, walk in it.”
[Image Description: close-up of bright yellow clusters of flowers growing in a patch of Ragwort plants]
Eye catches steam unfurling from my coffee mug in morning light, iridescent, driving kids to school no time to transfer to a travel mug as would be sensible to trap coffee and vapor inside, which would have prevented delicate tendrils capturing daybreak’s glow and that millisecond of my attention.
How much mundane exquisiteness we stifle with modern, sensible things.
Flights of fancy tethered to practicality and function.
Cities once tried to outdo each other with buildings more grandly architectured, more beautifully adorned, now they order mass-produced block building plans and bulldoze wild spaces to construct squat monstrosities with no thought to grandeur or beauty, human potential boxed in dull cubicles inside.
Functionality, efficiency, productivity, choking off time for leisurely enjoying the beauty of coffee mist on a Wednesday morning.
We aren’t supposed to let the pretty “weeds” grow where they sprout in the vegetable garden just because it’s nice to be greeted by their loveliness among the broccoli and turnips.
We aren’t supposed to take the long way home past fallow fields brimming with sunny yellow ragwort when the more direct route will get us to the next thing faster.
Yet I long to crucify utility, resurrecting beauty for its own sake.
[Image Description: Close-up of woven fabric, in loose, square weave]
Harms are more ignorable in isolation. Blame a single culprit, a bad apple, a place or person gone astray.
Yet, entire congregations assembled in old movie theaters, and pole barns with steeples, and old-worldly cathedrals can be convinced to harm our own children and call it loving discipline.
Convinced to welcome high-profile abusers with open arms and sold-out conferences and chance after chance to start over and call it forgiveness.
Convince victims they they must suffer silently, not to harm another’s reputation for what (they are told), if they’re honest, they brought on themselves, allowed to happen, and call it God’s will.
State violence, laws unequally enforced, harm disproportionate, wielded against those with certain tone of skin and this is called justice.
Powerful people are encouraged to rig the system, exploit and cheat for their own gain, and this is called success.
Those impacted by generations of exploitation, are deprived of access to meet even basic needs and blamed for not utilizing non-existent bootstraps, and this is called their own laziness.
We convince ourselves these are individual cases, misfortunes, or failures. One-offs, special circumstances, not all [fill in the blank].
And ignore our own refusal to call the horrifying tapestry woven from a thread of domination, what it is.
[Image description: close-up of garden soil turned over in the foreground, with a wire and wooden garden fence and some grass in the background] _________________________
[Image description: sunlight and shadows making patterns on a wall and part of an interior door.]
Content Warning: Child abuse, religious trauma
Sometimes you think of that day when you heard a friend’s mom was telling all the parents she read they should use dowel rods to spank their children for the really bad sins and your stomach lurched and tightened because you already knew how it felt to have a wooden spoon broken over the back of your bare thigh and you thought of the bookends you made with your grandpa using some wood he helped you cut into triangles and two lengths of dowel and you imagined the weight of those rods and tried to calculate how much more it would hurt.
And you’d heard some say it takes a village but you don’t know what to do when the village parents agree to hit their kids with items they bought casually at the hardware store and tell them it’s God’s loving discipline and you know some kids don’t even get I love yous and at least you do and you try not to think of it and also try to be as good as possible or at least hide anything you think might be a really bad sin so that maybe, maybe, you won’t have to find out.
And then the day you see what the marks of a dowel rod spanking look like on someone else’s skin and you lose your shit and can’t stop sobbing, can barely breathe because you know in your gut those bruises look nothing like love and you swear to yourself you will never hit your own child with a wooden spoon or a wooden rod, no, you’ll only use your hand and only not-too-hard swats to the bum because that is how the indoctrination works to keep you from imagining there could be another way entirely and you think a gentler, less-bruising punishment is the only alternative because to be part of the village is to perpetuate its violence to maintain control.
And your heart breaks still knowing that your children were touched by even your toned-down version of the violence and you hate that you ever bought into thinking your responsibility was to control every aspect of your child’s behavior with swats or isolation or yelling or retaliation because these things were supposed to be God’s tough love and keep them from evil.
But you also think of the day that you realized that “Love is patient, Love is kind” were not just words for wedding days but words for every day and every part of life together and especially your kids and you and that guiding with patience and kindness instead of controlling with harm and punishment could be that other way entirely that you couldn’t even imagine when you were just a kid in a village gathering up pieces of a broken spoon from the living room floor.
Artist: Thomas, Hank Willis. Title: Stars and Bars. Date: 2015. Medium: decommissioned prison uniforms. Photographed on display at the Cincinnati Art Museum in October 2020 [Image Description: Artwork by Hank Willis Thomas created from the blue field/stars of a U.S. flag, surrounded on three sides by black and white stiped fabric sourced from prison uniforms, creating a visual like a double United States flag.]
—
I will no longer pledge allegiance as I was taught, to a nation, religion, or book,
If pledging to the nation requires I pretend liberty and justice applies to all, in light of clear evidence contradicting.
If pledging to a book canonized by men insists I make-believe its words prevent sin, when those words are all too often used for hate instead of love.
If pledging to a Christian flag demands I swear an oath to so-called brotherhood, united to exclude, traumatize, and injure those it views as other.
If my allegiance to a flag and nation means I endorse its government killing citizens in the streets,
killing innocents in the middle east, killing refugees in camps,
then I withdraw the allegiance I spoke every time I said the words.
If my allegiance to a book means I must blame the abused for their abuse,
blame victims for their suffering, blame the struggling for their struggle,
then I withdraw my hand from the cover of that leather-bound volume and turn away.
If my allegiance to Christianity means I must advocate harm of the marginalized,
harm of the poor, harm of our earth,
then I will not be a Christian, will keep my allegiance to myself,
refusing to make any pledge to idols that desecrates the still, small voice of the Divine within.
[Image description: sunlight projected onto a blank wall through windowpanes, making the outline of the window, with the corners where two walls and ceiling meet visible.]
Disorienting, waking up to find I’d relegated wild, creative parts of myself to the corners of my own existence.
Wasting energy fashioning masks and filters from the more-acceptable parts and my perception of other’s needs, drowning in exhaustion keeping them in place.
Ill-suited, perpetually reconfiguring in attempt to fit my soul into soulless, man-made structures, never drawing a full breath, never fully seen.
Painfully slow, reclaiming space to be unwieldy, to forgive my younger self, befriend my contradictions,
and sit with my own words long enough to let them change me, breathing all the way in, all the way out.
The Forest and the Trees 