Rebirth & Renewal Novena ~ Day 38
The Sorrowful ~ March 4, 2023
“How would it feel if in your entire lifetime it had never mattered what you thought?” *
I sat in the darkened theatre in a row with women on either side of me that I didn’t know. And yet, there we were, sisters. A family. A community of ancestorial connection. I knew the words were coming because I’d just finished reading the book. * And when the words came out of the actor’s mouth I could only sob; fore in that moment was reflected my entire childhood and upbringing as well as the decades of processing and the undoing of this lie. This lie that said, your voice doesn’t count. What you think and feel doesn’t matter. I felt it in my bones; the way my father and brothers looked at me, treated me, spoke to me. And the continued felt sense and often, the unconscious, experience of this encoded “you don’t matter” low-hum underneath my living.
And with this felt experience, hearing that question be reflected back to me from a screen in a cinema, arose an immediate feeling of, a release. “OH!”, this story I’ve been fed and repeating to myself is a lie and it is time to set it free.
(It’s so, I don’t know the word (s), murky? Multi-valent. To describe a layered experience and place words upon it.)
And with the next tear-filled sob came another truth for me; not only was it time for me to release this story, but I could release it for anyone in that moment who also was ready to let it go; anyone/anywhere, through all space and time. It was a communal release happening in a movie theatre on a Saturday afternoon with only the other women sitting in my row.
A gift.
All the sorrows; not only our own daily small and/or unbearable, but collective sorrows brought upon by the violence broadcast every minute of the day via social media and news outlets.
Lamentations in search of sanctuary. Woven.
Flow of waters. Threshold of the in-between.
The in-between has its own fluidity.
Not even the space from one something into another lies stagnant.
Everything alive, always alive, even within its death, the movement into the next-ness of its existence is arriving.
Movement of dying into birth into dying into birth.
This liminal bardo space is an environment, a never-ending becoming.
In the underneath lies the recognition of our wholeness.
She has been waiting for Our return. Bubbling up….
She is patient as the turning folds in on itself.
Surfacing now….
We are acknowledged, respected, and known as equals for our individual uniqueness since and before we arrived in our mother’s womb; before there was “time”.
*Women Talking (the movie, adapted for the screen and directed by Sara Polley)
“Women Talking”, the novel by Miriam Toews
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