Keening

These are unique times. And yet, according to astrologers (whom, I now consult with some frequency because why not?) the stars were only aligned quite this way at two other very important times in history.

The start of the American civil war. And the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Given that everything seems sped up now, like the whole of humanity is on a cocaine binge, perhaps this moment in history will move through us like a wind, revving up into conflict and somewhat quickly concluding with a mass insistence that we take down the hand of duplicity and greed that is locked around our throats. I wish it weren’t so, but I do see how this time of conflict is necessary to wake up the masses - addicted to their streaming platforms and free next day shipping - but I hope it happens very quickly, rather than seeing us slog forward at the pace of the typical war.

It would be safe to compare what is happening already to a war. There are innocent people seized and dying. There are political prisoners. Children sick and suffering, away from their parents, in concentration camps. There are injustices and surprises and pain. So much pain.

There has always been so much pain. Human beings have been doing some dastardly deeds to each other for a long time. And I am going to go out on a limb and say that what has been done in this country by white settlers in the name of “progress” is stone cold chilling. Seizing of lands, tricking native communities, kidnapping their kids and torturing them out of their belief systems, kidnapping and using enslaved Africans to build the biggest economy on the planet. And I’m just getting started. But why keep going? That’s enough for us both to face that the ancestors are good and ready for us to face what we’ve been up to.

The older I get, the more I can see that sins must be atoned for. And I’m not even religious. But that idea transcends religion. It is in our bones. You know it. I know it. And we have been running from it for so long. It’s time to stop and pony up. It’s time to face the music and grieve what has been done in our names.

So when white people around me are bemoaning our fate I find myself talking to them about grief. For years now, as I’ve been reading the incredible work of Black Americans like Ibram X. Kendi, Austin Channing Brown, Layla Saad, Sonya Renee Taylor, Heather McGhee, Isabel Wilkerson - and those are just the recent heroes trying to guide us - I have been struck by how deep is white America’s addiction to avoidance. Anyone who is aghast right now - anyone who can’t believe it could get this bad - has not been squarely looking at the reality of things. They are living in a fantasy and calling it reality because they want it to be something other than what it is.

And now we are being called to see. Those generations of pain are here, calling for us to atone.

Grief is what happens in the body when we lose something. And what we are losing, is the illusion of whiteness. Because anyone who has thought of themselves as white, got a little cookie of safety along with that affiliation. And that cookie was full of poison. But we like cookies! And while we were eating our cookies, we were distracted from the pain being suffered by those who didn’t get the whiteness cookies. Since the beginning of this American experiment, we have looked away from the babies harmed. The mamas crying. The men gunned down in the streets. We avoided the obvious. We told ourselves that the color of their skin made them really different from us. It was too scary to look at the alternative possibilities. So we fantasized that maybe, just maybe, we would be able to run out the clock and the piper wouldn’t catch up with us.

The part that really makes me sick to my stomach, is that the same culture that told me my whiteness would protect me, told me to let that culture give the cookies to my kids too. It made it look really obvious that I should raise my kids to also run from the piper. Because when I set the cookie down, as I’m doing now, it is really obvious to me that there is no future in this greed and duplicity, power hoarders’ cookie pact. The earth is going to take us out before we can outrun that piper. The people who have been writing the rules are morally bankrupt and they’re all too happy to take us down with them.

So, I’m past being scared of what the big bad morally bankrupt dudes are going to do. I’m not going out like that, friends. There is DNA in me that goes back many generations to a little place in the center of that island called Ireland. That DNA remembers that we had land and someone from another land came and took it. It remembers that we were mocked and belittled and impoverished by people who thought they were better than we were. My DNA remembers that my Great, Great, Great Grandmother, Mary Reilly, sent her only daughter Rose, alone to a land called America to suffer on the ship, in the city and through the 12 short remaining years, when she bore three daughters and lived stunned and far from the trees and rivers of home. My DNA remembers that the women of the next three generations went on to marry for safety - in the clutches of a culture bent on striving and cruelty. They lived as traumatized people do, suppressing their feelings, their grief balled up in their throats.

I became a therapist because I cannot hold my grief. And I know others shouldn’t either. Lately I keep thinking the thoughts, “I need to go down to the banks of a river and keen.” In Ireland, keening was an ancestral practice of sounding out pain, so that others could feel their grief too. It has existed everywhere that people have known how to heal themselves.

We will grieve. We will grieve if it kills us.

And if we don’t, it will.

May we have faith in goodness.

May we know our inherent oneness.

And may we remember that transformation starts small and is always beginning.