The way words transmit memories.
Memories becoming stories in the air around us.
Because we are human, we are meaning-makers.
We tell stories to remember, to learn, to understand.
We tell stories because the act of sharing helps it rise from you.
A story is a story even if it is not said out loud but
I have learned that listening is an act of quiet revolution.
Bearing witness is not passive even if it is slow.
The truth is that random events happen.
The truth is that random events are born from a meeting of structural space and personal choice.
Pain, power over, random chance.
One of the ways we survive is to tell ourselves stories about the meaning of all this.
After an event is over, it becomes a memory, a story
and the more we remember it, the more it is changed.
In the act of remembering, we change the structure of the memory itself.
Perhaps in some way this too is an act of reclaiming.
Trauma affects memory, scatters it like wheat seeds in the wind, affecting not its validity but its recall. and it can be hard to remember things in a linear progression and some times the story falls out all at once or not at all or
it comes back unexpectedly,
and certain things,
a smell, a touch, a sound, the time of year
can call up the memory, and our beautiful resilient tandem of spirit and neurology rekindle certain hormones, synapses flooding the space between now and then. Our body says the story is now and then alive still in our nervous system.
As animals, we evolved this strategy to learn and stay safe, make brain maps of danger, to remember what to eat and when to run.
It is a very good one.
It works very well.
Wounding is not damage.
But random events occur in the meeting of structural space and personal choice
and not all things are meant to be learned from.
Smell and memory can be linked in beautiful and vicious ways.
My mother smells like a combination of men’s deodorant and cedar wood incense.
She has tall long strong arms that tied canoes to the rooftop of her minivan.
She taught me the names of wildflowers and how to distinguish a mint by the shape of its stem.
My mother is a cycle breaker. Everything that I am is contained in that sentence.
My mother is a cycle breaker.
What is time? With memory? What is end and beginning with trauma?
She made a series of choices over and over (and structural space and random chance), she focused her will, she worked very, very hard.
She was scared of what would work through her if she didn't.
My first word was mama.
My mother is a witch.
My mother has the eyes of a poet. She has hands like road maps.
Every day I wonder how she did it.
Cycle breaking is the start of healing generational trauma.
What is time? With memory and story? What is beginning and end with trauma?
In 2015, I am sitting at the bedside of a survivor.
In wholetime, I am sitting on my mom’s bed, as she talks, finally, in her gravel-edged teenage voice.
In 2004, we are driving to pick up my friend’s stuff, my mom is saying yes, move in.
In 2007, it feels like everyone I love has survived betrayal on some level. We pull tarot cards and make magic with our love. Our grandmothers are with us.
In 2015, I am a human trying to make meaning from the random events that occur in the meeting of structural space and personal choice.
In 2015, a quiet witness to the transformational power of random events and structural space and choice.
In 2015, I’m saying, I can’t guarantee what’s going to happen, but I can guarantee you won’t be alone.
In wholetime, I answer the crisis line and it is my grandmother and she says, I’m not sure what to do next.
In wholetime, I answer the crisis line and it is my great-grandmother and she says, I’m not sure what to do next and I say, it’s okay to be confused, but you have options and we will help you find them.
In wholetime, my mother calls the crisis line and I say, what do you want to see happen?
In wholetime, the smell of coffee brewing, the smell of my grandmother’s hands, we sit around a table quilting, my grandmother, mother, sister, brother, we sew with thread the same color as moonlight over green leaves, the same color as their eyes, we let every square be a memory we are happy to keep, our voices fill up the air between us and when we laugh, it sounds like waves cresting.
