i write you today to celebrate the birthday of my grandma, margot allison, and because today it’s because it’s on turns two years old! he can walk and yell.
i am grateful for the enthusiasm that shows itself the more i look for it. i am grateful for all the ways that the people who read this newsletter and so many others make my life and this practice possible.
earlier this week a friend pointed me to a commencement address by Howard Thurman called The Sound of the Genuine. i was so moved by the excerpt that i listened to the whole thing. at one point he says, “if you cannot hear the sound of the genuine in you, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.” reading this, i thought of my grandma because she was a puppeteer.
Thurman also says, rather ominously, “There is something in every one of you that waits, listen for the sound of the genuine in yourself. And if you cannot hear it, you will never find whatever it is for which you're searching. And if you hear it, and then do not follow it, it were better that you had never been born.” when we resist who we are, we suffer and we punish other people, especially other people who express who they are. we withhold our particular splendor from a world in dire straits.
i think my grandma heard her genuine sound, expressed it in many ways including puppets, music, water colors, adventure, mothering, grandmothering, friendship. i like to think she identified what actually pulled her and yielded to it.
and speaking of sound, Alta Starr taught me that Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist, played the violin. she writes,
one anecdote from his travels in the British Isles between 1845 and 1847. Douglass spent almost two years there giving speeches, raising funds for the abolition movement and to buy his freedom so that he would not be returned to slavery, which was possible at any moment when he was in the United States…At one point, in Scotland, the travel and controversies got to him, and perhaps too, I like to imagine, a bit of homesickness. He bought a violin and locked himself away to play for three days, until, as one biographer puts it, “he was in tune with himself and went out into the world—a cheerful man.” This might be one of the most important lessons we can take from this freedom fighter: that we can strengthen our connection to our life- force, our innate well-being, and in fact, that it is our responsibility to do so. Douglass’s example reminds us that aliveness itself, if we choose the hard and sometimes scary work of coming home with awareness to our bodies, will nourish our visions of wholeness as well as our work to create the world we want.
to live through the madness, to imagine and work towards a future/world/society in which life is precious, we need to hear our sound. i suspect our sound also guides us towards that world.
call it the sound, call it the life-force, call it what is innate about you, call it aliveness, call it love. call it your freaky little life. you were somehow summoned here, you’re already in it. we, the collective, need you—need your version. i celebrate you, too.
if you love this newsletter, considering sharing it with someone to celebrate :)