But my pain!…
Okay Universe, I understand – I get it.
But since the world has been thus blessed, return my children to me! From the north south east and west, return them to me.
Ah, but life never tarries or returns. It always goes forward. Besides which, it is difficult and traumatic to return to the birth canal. Although to return would no longer be by slave ship, to return requires a psychic re-encountering of the first journey. Alas, the Chi of many has not empowered many to re-confront the birth canal. For those who never left – but were colonised, to return means to confront a shame born of knowledge. The shame of knowing that coerced or persuaded, the Other almost always eventually got our permission…
Whether or not our respective Chis have granted us the courage to turn or re-turn; to physically return or continue to live the contradiction of grafted beings, today we collectively reclaim the ability to “re-turn” and look with our own eyes at our own past, and with what we see create and build a self-chosen future.
Today we express a celebratory pain – of our past. We continue to dance. Not for healing or redemption or closure – there is no need for these. We dance into our future. We dance because we are instantiations of the universe. We dance because we carry the ancestors. We dance to express our pain, joy, shame, pride, courage, complicity, greed and generosity. But most of all, we dance into a future that we can finally see. Today we hear our bodies. We dance to “re-member” our collective memories.
We sing to recognize the celebration of life which my pain heralded – the joy of children returned to their mothers.
Therefore, I celebrate life that grows as it will; I celebrate today, an ancestry that cannot die.
Today we celebrate a victorious remembering because in our remembering they die; but in our remembering we live.
