Many of us are trying to metaphorically find our way home. To a new home with more open space and better emotional energy. We want to gain a deeper understanding of the pain so many are feeling. We are seeing and feeling the results of unresolved trauma on a global stage. The raw, unfiltered process feels painful while moving through healing of epic proportions.
While we struggle to find words to define how our own lives, our thoughts, and our actions have influenced the people around us, we must remember how the greatest change begins, evolves, and is re-birthed into a different and better way.
We will only find meaningful progress by moving through it, all of it. By acknowledging and addressing the realization that people ARE treated differently because of the color of their skin. That our black sisters and brothers want and deserve to be seen and heard. They want wrongs to be made right. While we cannot change history, we can change our future.
There are many ways to accomplish what we all collectively desire-which is to have peace and safety, dignity and respect.
- I don’t have all the answers.
- I don’t know the “right” things to say.
- Most of the time, I simply have more questions.
- Being curious about the feelings people have had and are having, being honest about my own responses, and being open to new possibilities, seem like good tenets to start with. They are a right place to begin.
How can we initiate change when we are so divided?
First, by acknowledging our own roles in full consciousness, by genuinely honoring the anguish and outrage people are feeling, by offering unbiased listening, by investigating, by doing better ourselves, by asking for direct, meaningful dialogue with the people we know. “I see you, but I may not know you, and how can I help you,” are good places to begin.
I myself want a better, healthier path to living together where each of us, and all of us, will embody a true sense of belonging and peacefulness. Will that happen in our lifetime? I don’t know, but I pray we will find our way toward that right now.
By becoming the lamp for each other and for the new gens-our children who are watching us, witnessing the process, consciously and unconsciously absorbing our responses and our emotional energy, as we deal with all that’s happening in our world. What messages are we iterating and energetically passing to our children? Are we to express overt or underlying tones of racial animosity? Or, are we showing compassion, understanding, and love?
I suspect that many of us would like to walk away from all the arguments about these difficult topics. But that, my friends, is simply not a good idea. We must engage with honesty. If we truly care about building quality relationships with our black communities, we will actively find a way to communicate and reach resolution, together.
#antiracism #community #lovethyneighbor
In the spirit of empowerment,
