All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [198]
On Saturday, we took a rare race-weekend hike after Dario’s practice. There was a beautiful state park nearby, and we enjoyed each other’s company and the many waterfalls that dampened sharp rocky outcroppings, carefully picking our way along the terracing of creeks. Occasionally, there were deep pools into which the creeks rushed in and out. I cannot resist a good creek, and I paused, looking both ways on the trail. My husband knew what was coming, and made his usual and always futile protestations. I sneaked off my clothes and plunged into a cold mountain pool, exhilarated, needing this, thinking of my Uncle Mark who baptizes in the creek, feeling how water cleans, refreshes, promises, transfigures. I heard, and duly ignored, Dario’s insistent pleas of “Babe! BABE! You’re a nutter!” because I knew he wouldn’t be mad for long. Submerging my head again and again, opening my eyes to see the world under the oxygenated bubbles of moving water, I recognized that something deep inside me had settled, had sorted itself out. It’s like an internal click, and it comes when it comes, and it cannot be hurried, the moment when I know I am okay, that deep inside I have always been okay, and when I don’t feel okay in the future, I will somehow have a process I can trust, that promises I will be okay again. The click. I stepped naked from the creek, smiled at my husband, began to put clothes on my damp body. I was ready to face the world again.
Chapter 23
CRIMSON DREAMS
My dad and me on my first day of graduate school—making up for lost time.
may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it’s sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young
—E.E. CUMMINGS. “may my heart always be open to little …”
n June 2, 2008, trembling just a bit with healthy fear, I used my voice to bring the sacred narratives of the vulnerable and mute to the world’s most expansive stage: the United Nations General Assembly. As a board member of PSI, I had been invited to speak about the scourge of human trafficking and to promote the solutions that I had seen at work in the field. I used this opportunity to describe the insidious enmeshment between poverty, illness, and gender inequality and how that triad sets up the exquisite pain and degradation that is sex and labor slavery. And, as always, I did it by sharing the stories of the poor and the vulnerable, the disempowered, and the exploited people I had met in my travels, those to whom I had made my one keening vow: I will never forget you, and I will tell your stories. So the representatives of 196 nations were introduced to the transgendered sex slave in Cambodia whose face had been mauled by her rapist’s dog; to Natasha, the literate, high-priced “call girl” in Mumbai who could see no way out of the netherworld of sex trafficking; and the children born in a squalid Indian brothel, collateral damage of sex trafficking, who wrote their names for me on dirty scraps of paper: Aadarshini, Yamuna, Nabhendu … And I reiterated the basis of my faith: that every human life is of inestimable worth and that when we save one, we save the whole world.
I quoted the effervescent light that is Marianne Williamson, who said, “We are, all of us, not just some of us, children of God, and our playing small does not serve the world.”
I was standing before the United Nations because when it comes to human dignity and rights, I refuse to play small. Knowing I was surrogate for the real experts, the survivors whose stories I told, I remembered Elie Wiesel’s quote, “Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.” And in my head, a plan was already forming that would expand my game beyond anything I had ever thought possible.
I had always wanted to go to graduate school, but I never pictured myself at Harvard. I had briefly considered divinity school and had thought I might go for a master’s in public health at Berkeley. I also considered Vanderbilt University, an outstanding school that