To Repair Our Lives - End of February 2021

February 28, 2021

Acts of Repair

We are hitting anniversaries and moments of too many woundings.

Rodney King beating 30 years ago, March 3, 1991

Breonna Taylor's shooting one year ago, March 13, 2021

The start of the trial of former Officer Chauvin next week, (George Floyd's killing, May 25, 2020),

March 8, 2021

The unbelievable 500,000 mark of our nation's COVID-19 death toll, last week

The disproportionate number of Indigenous American, African Heritage, and Latinx losses in that death count, the past year

My soul is tired, and dug-out by excavations I haven't always acknowledged or been able to recognize.

How to repair a soul, or a million souls, or a hundred million souls... how to repair a society...? So much hurt (and anger at folks daring to acknowledge hurt) walking our streets, packing our food, tending our patients, creating our policies, teaching our children.

In "To Repair Our Lives" I am delving into practices and awareness tonurse body-soul, to name and clean the wounds in a family, to breathe towards tender places in our communities. (Thank you for accompanying me on this journey.)

In the midst of this I was invited to create a musical teaching about the Black National Anthem:

"Lift Every Voice and Sing." This was for the UMOJA Family Camp. This event is dedicated to offering resources and inspiration to parents and children in families in which the fostering/adoptive parents are white and the children are of African Heritage.

Frontline Repair Work:

Humans loving one another.

Adults loving children and each other across racial lines.

These same adults caring, aware, and humble enough to seek circles of empowerment and healing for the precious at-risk lives of their dark-skinned children.

UMOJA organizers and teachers shaping and sharing roots, heritage, and understanding with which to ground and wrap our children, that the young ones might remember their own names, identity, voice, and strength.

All are acts of repair. Even if the child is an infant, this is already repair work - they slip and push into this world's hands which wait to mold them with centuries of historical harm. Acts of repair: laying on of hands, singing over with songs, drumming heartbeats, opening minds and spirits, dancing prayers -- of love, promise, and prophetic power.

So I share with you my bit of participation in this work of repair -- work that repairs me at the same time; work that points to amazing reparative leadership and creativity of 120 years ago; work which I hope invites reparative action within and from us all.

Peace & repair...

~regina