Not in my name.
SUMMER CHRONICLES
I have often thought I was not from this world - from the place I was born, from the community, rituals, culture, mindsets and patterns. I have often cursed to be born where I am, to feel the pain of wars deep in the land itself, to hear the songs that carry the history of separation, to see the landmarks and statues of what I see as humiliation, not victory and to smell the lust for revenge deep in our collective national and trans-national unconsciousness.
I have often cried because of my people and even more often I have cried with them and for them. And I have found myself over and over again to keep on trying to find the connection to this nation that resembles the one I have to incredible living earth, the land and nature within these borders.With years I have learned where to look, how to walk, when to speak up&down to walk without being bothered. With years I have also given up on that, knowing that (our) discomfort is growing pain.
I have also learned to know the layers of my community, to find the people like me, to be the people like them, to erase us and them as often as I could, to say hello, to meet, to be curious, to get in connection, appreciate even when I don’t understand, to ask instead of judge and to offer my trust in our humanity, equality, love or at least respect as an offering of other possibilities. I have found a way to be where I am connected, open in mind and heart with boundaries, aware of the ‘us’ instead of ‘me and them’ in the ‘good’ and ‘bad’.
And yet… and yet I find myself once again in pain feeling the looks of the people around us, feeling my own fear of walking the night streets of the seaside with my dark skin and the skin darker than mine next to me. I feel ashamed for understanding those looks, knowing their words and fearing their acts. I feel angry for needing to call that my home.
For all of us who have been blessed to travel, the time of closed borders was hard in many ways - from the world expansion to nation contraction in a second. For all of us who have been blessed to travel we all know the humility of walking into somebody else’s home. We know the blessing of ‘difference’ of our ways, the beauty of that bridge of exchange between us and the fruits of the trust instead of the fear of Unknown. We know we are not the same in our appearance, but in our heart’s longing. We know the fear of being controlled by fear and are choosing to move anyway. We offer our home in a way it has been offered to us many many times knowing that we always give what we receive and don’t expect anything less from the world. And we also trust in the power of collective growth, the hippie idea of love and peace, of what we call conscious communities - the ‘We’ and the ‘I’, in balance, together. And we believe the world can be different.
I am a child of this world, a woman of this sky and earth, a friend of many regardless of the beautiful colours of our eyes and skin, of who and how we love, of what languages we speak, where we were born and how we move and think. And I choose not to call ‘mine’ that which undermines instead of helps to grow, what brings hatred instead of love and tears down instead of builds up, what thrives on someone’s or something’s suffering. I choose to be in connection with it, but not becoming it in any way. And I choose to be as loud and clear as I can until it’s time for that to change.
For all of my friends who have been looked at in the way that it is anything less than mirroring their magnificence and dignity, the ones who have been insulted, bullied, hurt, cheated, scammed, physically assaulted for being different in the country that I call my home, for the love of Life in this world, let us not look the other way and let us all feel at home wherever we go.