Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [97]
I am mindful that my many gifts, talents, and skills are of huge value and are greatly needed, and it doesn’t serve anyone or anything for me to play small. I am an experienced elder in successfully bringing together personal and institutional change; in holding light through dark times; in physical and emotional healing; in providing leadership and in mentoring leaders; in asking probing questions and listening with openness and attention to answers wherever they come from. It is my work to pass on the wisdom, skills, and insights that my years on the front lines have sharpened, and to allow the forms that it takes to organically evolve.
I am mindful of an intelligence that permeates everything, that is in the core of every cell that has existed since the birth of the universe. It is also in the fires and the floodwaters and the dying coral reefs and the carbon that is suffocating us, and it is in me as powerfully as it is everywhere else. I can tap into that for good. And so can we all.
Vivienne Simon, JD, CPCC, has devoted her life to fostering a just and sustainable world. She has worked on Amazonian rainforest protection, international anti-nuclear campaigns, famine relief in Africa, women’s empowerment programs, consciousness research at Harvard, and the development of the University of the Wild. Her coaching, trainings, and writings help evolving leaders to respond to the unique challenges and opportunities of the twenty-first century with an engaged co-creativity. Vivienne’s work draws on Eastern and Western practices and teachings and promotes the sacredness of all life. Her Web site is www.vivsimon.com.
From Mourning into Daybreak
NINA SIMONS
We’ve forgotten how to mourn. Lost the art of grieving.
No one keens anymore.
Women in Greek tragedies knew how, but these days, we medicate.
We veer away from the depths,
and so we rarely even see the peaks.
Now, we have become an unfinished circle—
a culture caught recycling our wounds
because we don’t ever acknowledge the pain, grieve our losses,
complete the cycle of mourning.
How will we ever see daybreak without mourning?
If we don’t feel what hurts, surrender to its demands,
speak the wound, how can we really begin to heal?
I understand young people’s prolific piercings now,
black rings and claw-like ornaments jutting through their skin.
Wanting to wear some mark of realness, courage,
a willingness to feel pain.
It’s a modern-day sun-dance, dancing to awaken the world.
Proof that you’re not to be counted among the anesthetized,
those among us who are lulled into false security,
who’ve chosen this way of shutting down,
this course of least resistance, this blithe consumer life.
Those who are lured by promises of “safety”
and seek more stuff to distract themselves from feeling.
I was pierced recently, feeling the sudden loss of a friend’s best friend,
knowing I had no words to offer her comfort.
I encouraged her to dive down deep, to immerse herself
as far down into her grief as she felt drawn.
To sing for her beloved friend, to wail, paint, dream, carve, dance the sadness.
To let the loss impregnate her belly, fully, without hurrying the passage.
When my father died, I felt the rock I stood on suddenly gone,
my self in free fall.
I was warned that it might take a year for me to heal.
It was at least that, and it was longer.
I was grateful for the crystalline expanse of time I permitted myself,
mindful of the warning.
I entered expanded elastic months of feeling transparent,
of squinting at the striking brightness of colors, line, and light.
I oscillated between emptiness and attunement—
the tenderness of my tears for him always only a breath away.
I was appalled to discover our illiteracy toward death,
envying the Japanese tradition of wearing a black armband
for a