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THE LAST TUESDAY IN JULY ...
is always our last newsletter until September. We take a break in the month of August, a month of silence, a space for quiet, a pause between breaths. A time for allowing other noise to fill the room.
There is an art to breathing as well as to listening. These spaces exist in meditation and movement practices - the space between inhale and exhale, between one movement and the next. It requires effort to pay attention to the parts that we take for granted, that are less celebrated and spotlighted. There is power in these spaces, just as there is power in silent forms of communication.
I spend a lot of time thinking about truth, and the need to share stories and express our truths, in whatever form that takes for each of us. Somewhere in the last five years, it also occurred to me that my truth cannot be dependent on the denial of someone else's. In a time of intense disagreements, of boundaries that easily become walls between us, I think a lot about what it means when someone can't tolerate the truth.
Sometimes I've expressed my truth and been told I tie threads between experiences or insights that don't make sense. I'm supposed to feel chastened by this, to reconsider the logic or intelligence of my methods, but I'm learning to see it as a compliment. I survived childhood by learning to recognize patterns. First, the patterns that signaled danger from my abusive mother. Later, the patterns that woke me up to understanding how I had been manipulated and controlled by one person's version of the truth. Seeing patterns helped me find my way out of survival and into healing.
This is the work of weaving that I do as a writer. Imagine telling a spider that her web doesn't make sense, simply because it came from inside her?
Creativity is also a process of making connections that did not exist before, and building them into something you can see, taste, touch, or feel. Who decided pistachio and chocolate might work? Corn and lime? Raisins and cinnamon? There is always danger in creating and spreading something that might turn out to be harmful, yet we have to believe in our own ideas in order to try. In the kitchen, there is the fear of making something that won't taste good, that could even make someone else sick. Yet we keep making things to feed ourselves and others. If we were too afraid to believe in ourselves, we might starve to death. Yet it is common, even socially acceptable, to starve our creativity.
The fear of making a mistake in creativity is connected to the fear of making a social error, of saying the wrong thing, of being wrong. This plays into those who would abuse their power in an effort to silence us. It's one thing to be tired of a topic of conversation, to need a break from speaking about something, a chance to reflect...it's another to be afraid to speak about it, afraid of the questions that arise.
We live in a world where the degree to which we can conceal our pain or illness is a source of merit. The habits we carry out of shame cause us to behave in denial of our truths even as we are experiencing them to their fullest. And the desire for control is so great that we make ourselves or other people into gods, in order to surveil, to cast judgment, and to silence others. How do we go from a place of self-righteousness to peaceful coexistence, when silencing and abuse exist in the relationships between us? How can we maintain boundaries that are clear but flexible, moving with us as we change and grow, rather than building walls that separate us from our humanness?
Being silenced has helped me understand my freedom well enough to not be silenced again. Waking up to the systems that are at play in all of our lives has helped me understand my entrapment too well to be silenced again.
We are in the business, here at GFJ, of shifting perspectives, transforming relationships, questioning systems, and liberating our truest selves. Here's to the questions that we grapple with in the silence between breaths.
Until September,
Dor + Tay
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