Wednesday, June 12, 2024

To make all these things that wound and hurt us a thing of the past

I wrote this reflection as part of an online conversation. It is lightly edited. 

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P*, you shared that “the woke movement is dividing people everywhere - this is an embarrassing movement, but at the same time how can we fight it?  How do we take action against it?”

 

I don’t know your experience, but I can say that this is certainly not the case in my own experience. Especially for those of us who belong to multiple marginalized communities, there has never been a time when these deep, painful, cruel divisions did not exist. We have inherited and then lived with these divisions our whole lives, born the crushing terror, despair, and cruelty of them in our bodies, hearts, and minds. Maybe you have known this experience, too? 

 

Whatever the case, the divisions we are seeing now are not the first fractures; they are not cracks along the surface. These fissures are manifesting from deep below, erupting from ancient wounds that have long gone unhealed. It is our collective failure to tend to this woundedness, and not the woundedness itself, that is the root of the problem.