00:00:00.000it's not holding a hand out anymore it's not it's not a place of begging right it's a place
00:00:09.260of turning to each other and becoming it's not asking to be let in but demanding to be let out
00:00:15.380right for the wild is honored to present the edges in the middle a series of conversations
00:00:22.120between bio komalafe and thought companions like john a powell v naomi klein and more
00:00:29.080These limited episodes have been adapted from Bayo's work as the Global Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute.
00:00:38.340In this role, Bayo has been holding a series of public conversations on issues of justice and belonging for the Institute's Democracy and Belonging Forum,
00:00:47.420which connects and resources civic leaders in Europe and the U.S.
00:00:52.080who are committed to bridging across differences to strengthen democracy
00:00:55.660and advance belonging in both regions and around the world.
00:00:59.920Bio's conversations encourage us to rethink justice, hope, and belonging
00:01:04.360by sitting amidst the noise, not trying to cover it up with pleasant rhythms.
00:01:09.420To learn more about the Democracy and Belonging Forum,
00:01:17.420This recording features Bios' conversations with V, the artist formerly known as Eve Ensler.
00:01:25.380V is the Tony Award-winning playwright, activist, performer, and author of the theatrical phenomenon, The Vagina Monologues.
00:01:34.000Her new book, Reckoning, explores how we can love and survive love, hold people and states accountable, reckon with demons, and honor the dead, and see ourselves connected to a greater purpose.
00:01:47.420Bio and V dance with restitution, repair, trauma, and safety.
00:01:56.400I want to welcome everyone here to this experimental playground at the edges of things as we dance
00:02:07.380with possibility and impossibility. I'm so excited about the team at DBF and OBI making
00:02:15.020this possible. I'm so grateful, and I'm doubly excited to be having this conversation with
00:02:20.100Mama V today. I'll just say a few words to make welcome everyone here. Welcoming is a place-making
00:02:30.860ritual. So I offer these words as a libation. This is the edges in the middle, and it's
00:02:39.580convened around the concept of an umbari and i just i have a story one of my favorites
00:02:47.420that i like to tell i want to share with you um as a as a ritual of making you welcome
00:02:54.560and making you feel expanded if you will to explore what we're doing here um i'll tell you
00:03:01.640this story you probably know it already it's from 1803 it's the legend of the flying africans
00:03:09.220There are Igbo men, women, and children, I think 75 or 76 black bodies stolen from Africa, the Bight of Benin from present-day Nigeria, which is where I come from, and taken across the Atlantic to the state of Georgia, where at Dunbar Creek, some kind of mutiny took place.
00:03:34.280and the slaves were able to take control of the ship, the vessel, I think it was called a York
00:03:42.160or something, and chase their slavers inland. They came back with reinforcements to capture
00:03:49.960or recapture the slaves. And those Igbo men, women, and children refused labor. They refused
00:04:00.500to be captured. They would rather die than to see themselves as organs of a plantation. So what they
00:04:07.100did was to form a single file and march into the waters, singing an ancestral song to Chuku, who is
00:04:15.140the great spirit in Igbo cosmology, right? Why the story is very important to what we're doing here
00:04:22.120is what happened later, because the official account of that event, the formal account of
00:04:30.960that event, the written one, was penned in a journal by one Roswell King, right, who was a
00:04:39.800manager of several plantations. And he wrote a very sterile, single, stoic line in his journal.
00:04:47.080It was, they took to the swamp, right? They took to the swamp. It was facts, just the facts,
00:04:57.460ma'am, right? Is that the Americanism? Just the facts. But you see, alongside that stoic
00:05:04.180recitation or representation of what supposedly happened was an ecosystem of embellishments,
00:05:14.360of woundings, of rumors, of whispers that developed and emerged like a ferment alongside
00:05:21.980that stoic narrative. And that story was, well, those Africans actually sprouted black wings0.92
00:05:31.640and flew back to Africa. That is what an Umbari is. The Umbari is an aesthetic of storytelling,1.00
00:05:40.400of speculative experimentation. Our work here is not to, in a very trickstery way, tell the truth
00:05:48.860or speak truth to power. Our work here is not to arrive at consensus. Our work here is to play
00:05:55.900with possibility and to offer our dance away from the convergence, the colonial convergence of safety
00:06:04.280into new ways of thinking about the world, is to upset the established order, the normative
00:06:12.720ways of speaking and thinking about ourselves just long enough for other intelligences to be
00:06:19.020noticed. I hope that makes you feel welcome to what we're doing here today and to this
00:06:24.760beautiful, playful assemblage that is centered on the heuristic, the metaphysical basket or
00:06:33.860metaphorical basket that is called Congo. And this is where Mama V, as I like to call her,
00:06:41.320comes in. I met Mama V not too long ago, and we connected deeply on this story of the Congo. I mean,
00:06:53.620i was born in nigeria right i i grew up in nigeria and migrated to what was then called
00:07:03.580the democratic i mean zaya right in central africa now called the democratic republic
00:07:09.100of congo i lived there i enjoyed it the food sukos the dance the people you tell you more
00:07:16.160about that. It was a place of joy and play, and I have great and fond memories about living there.
00:07:26.520Eventually, a war broke out, and we had to return to Nigeria. Ultimately, my father died there.
00:07:35.900So the country of Congo holds this place for me of loss. It has become a figure of loss0.97
00:07:44.560and strife and a quest for my father, this ongoing quest to reconnect with
00:07:50.320ancestrality. When I met V, she told the story of joy and celebration and dance
00:08:00.220in spite of abuse and deep loss. And we will get into that together.
00:08:07.320What we're doing here is we're holding this duplicity, this notion of Congo as
00:08:13.900celebration and loss at the same time. This invitation to enter into places that we're not
00:08:21.060used to. And maybe a good place to begin, as I make you feel welcome, I hope, Mama V, is to
00:08:27.960stay with that provocation from our dear sister Sarah about what it means to you, what it means0.77
00:08:37.380for you to sit with Congo, if you will.
00:08:40.700Well, first of all, thank you so much.
00:09:34.020And and I think finding out that you were your early years were spent there and the loss of your father there was very profound to me because the Congo occupies my heart like no other place in the world.
00:09:48.220I have been changed by it. I have been educated by it. I have been transformed and taken to other places. And the women there particularly live in my dreams, in my pores, in my system for the many years that I've spent there and what people would call working there.
00:10:07.940But it isn't work. It's loving there. It's connecting there. It's being in solidarity there.
00:10:13.740And I think in many ways, you know, that story you told of people refusing, the slaves refusing their bodies be of slave labor and rather walk into the waters is so telling in terms of the Congo.
00:10:30.380because I think many people in the Congo, particularly in the East, are now living outside any structures that really exist in the world.
00:10:41.800You know, when people have been so systemically suffering in such a malignant and internally ignored way by the world for so long, right?
00:10:53.520And even when supposed agents of help and change make nothing but kind of shambolic offerings, further insulting and humiliating. And when that suffering and deprivation has gone on for so long, it's become calcified, right? When there's no reliable outside force to turn to, people have created their own nirvanas, their own realities outside those structures of oppression, right?
00:11:19.280And I think it is so gorgeous to see what people have created in all kinds of ways, but City of Joy is a particular, because I would say it is a palace of possibility.
00:11:36.080It's a portal. It's an opening that has grown out of people's non-reliability on those structures, but turning inward to themselves and to each other to create a new paradise, a new world in the midst of what has collapsed.
00:11:54.880you know um so congo for me represents that and and um and the beauty of that and and the struggle
00:12:04.220of that and um and actually it's taught me in so many ways that um you know i i love the image of
00:12:11.700the lotus so much because it's the only flower that blossoms and seeds simultaneous and it's
00:12:17.820the flower that blooms from the mud and joy is this lotus that has risen out of um you know i
00:12:25.240can't tell you how many people said to us at the beginning this will never work this can't happen
00:12:29.800this will never happen and it's holy it's holy because it's not holding a hand out anymore it's
00:12:39.220not it's not a place of begging right it's a place of turning to each other and becoming it's not
00:12:45.760asking to be let in but demanding to be let out right um not waiting for that day to come but
00:12:52.660seizing that moment now right and believing that moment is enough and essential in spite of
00:12:59.060everything that is being told or um or even what's around it right and so um that's to me what
00:13:07.160miracle means right a collective decision and energy and a field of possibility that has been
00:13:13.660imagine. It really is a planetary tale, isn't it? It's the story of we've been pressed down.
00:13:25.240There seems to be no place to go. We are living in the Baldwinian, the fire next time moment,0.99
00:13:32.600right? It's the fire this time, right? There's no more water. Water has been extinguished a long1.00
00:13:38.540time. We're in the fire now. But even in that place of being burnt and pressed down, there
00:13:46.680remains this persistent, almost fugitive glimmer of, there I call it hope. I think hope is too
00:13:54.880impoverished a term. That something so ravishing, celebratory, maybe even festive, lives in the
00:14:02.140deep places of what have you, trauma or repression or oppression. You know, Mama V, I think I told
00:14:09.820when we had our conversation that my son's name is Abayomi, which also happens to be the name of
00:14:15.480my father. Abayomi is the Yoruba word for, well, we don't have words per se. We have stories,
00:14:26.060orikis. We tell legends in the names we give ourselves. We kind of shorten it because it's
00:14:31.920not practical to sing stories when you're calling out someone uh calling someone rather um but the
00:14:38.280full name of my father who is also my son in a sense is otah or buy on me or lorun oje
00:14:44.840short into abayomi it means the devil or the enemy would have won but god did not allow it
00:14:55.420It also means they buried me in the soil, but they did not realize that I'm a seed, right?
00:15:03.120It's this idea of what psychologists are struggling with when they say post-traumatic growth.
00:15:11.840I mean, and you have never been shy. I mean, your book, The Apology, is this struggle with forgiveness, with restitution, with restoration, I dare say.
00:15:26.980And it's really an invitation to do something else with forgiveness. Do you want to say something about that?
00:15:33.300You know, to think Congo through this dynamic of coming back to the so-called flattened destitution.
00:15:42.620I love what you're saying. And I love the name of your son.
00:15:46.080I love that whole idea because I think I mean, just going back to City of Joy for a minute and wounds and wounds.
00:15:52.340You know, wounds, wounds are portals. Wounds are portals.
00:15:57.260And I think it's all degrees to which we are traumatized on this planet.
00:16:15.740I think one of the things I've had, and it's a weird thing to say, but I've had a life of intense trauma, intense violence, intense invasion, intense disruption of the path that I might have been on had someone not come into my body and splintered and fragmented that.
00:16:38.740And I think that what I learned at an early age is that if you keep going with that trauma, you keep going with it, there is something on the other side that is quite astonishing.
00:16:53.440And I see this so often at City of Joy, which is women who come, you know, girls who come are between 14 and 24, and all of them have been seriously, seriously sexually abused.
00:17:07.740I mean, in ways that I don't even talk about publicly because it's re-traumatizing to people.
00:17:13.300And it feels like it's some grotesque, I don't know, punishment just to keep repeating it.
00:17:19.540But what I do know is that if we look at it, if we don't avert our eyes, if we don't deny it, if we don't push it away, if we let ourselves and ask ourselves to see that trauma, there is pain.
00:17:35.280There is, ah, there is a, there is, there is a, but there is a doorway. There is doorway. And, and writing the apology, which was me essentially writing my father's apology to me for his sexual abuse and his physical abuse of me was excruciating to climb into my perpetrator, to climb into this person who I, I did not want to have compassion for.
00:18:01.300I did not want to understand what made him do what he did.
00:18:04.220For some years, it was just so much easier to create a narrative of him as monster, me as victim, me as, you know, and to be honest with you, I was living fully in his story because he was the architect of that story.
00:18:30.780I was in my notion and my understanding, not justification, but understanding of who he was, was that made that story. And I was able to actually break that narrative and leave that narrative and not be a consequence, not be in reaction to, not be always in response to that traumatic event and that traumatizing person.
00:18:54.780Right. And I think I think what it's taught me is that for me, at any rate, my attachment to that narrative, it was a home.
00:19:06.300In fact, I knew it. It was familiar. I rested there. I I built I moved in couches.
00:19:13.180You know what I mean? I made a life of it, but it kept me in one single room and I wasn't exploring all of the reality around me.
00:19:24.860And I think that one of the things I see that happens at City of Joy is that these young, beautiful, astonishing women come and they're broken and they don't believe they have a right to be on the earth and they can't imagine why anyone in the world would care for them because they've been so exiled and so humiliated and so shamed and so damaged.
00:19:48.360But within six months after being cared for and loved and seen and actually pushed to confront and walk through that portal, my God, what happens is so glorious and magnificent.
00:20:04.400And we, in this country, I think, particularly in America, we are so terrified to look at, to look back at, to touch, to know all of what that has brought us here.
00:20:19.340And so we just keep repeating it and repeating it and living in that narrative I was talking about, because we've, you know, we've now built fortresses around it.
00:20:28.280We have four million guns to defend that narrative, right?
00:20:31.880We are constantly, you know, and I think the work is how do we really be brave enough to go inside it, to feel it, to know it, to understand it so we can break out of it.
00:21:57.660there is there is a sense of um dare i say when i listen to you mama v i hear you say that
00:22:09.320forgiveness needs a different cosmology right there is a sense in which we've gotten used to
00:22:15.580saying sorry and this is maybe what i might mean by the limits of restitution
00:22:21.360that still preserves the roles and still has with it an implicit ideological commitment to our
00:22:29.720separation right it's it's it's like you are there and i'm here you speaking about climbing
00:22:37.160into the body there's something very fleshy and creaturely and maybe even viral speaking about
00:22:45.280pandemics about climbing into the role of the perpetrator eating up the body and finding
00:22:52.560yourself in this strange expansiveness that breaks down those almost neoliberal dissociative
00:23:03.120you know separations that you inhabited both of you and there's something that feels ancestral
00:23:10.380absolutely right right it feels like slushy time like you're dismantling the notion that you're
00:23:18.600dealing with a past that is already done with and most of our notions of trauma emerge from a very
00:23:24.540colonial cartography right the past is done with there's nothing to do there but you climbing into
00:23:31.860the body of your father is like no he's here right now we are all in this together there's nothing
00:23:38.340more radical than saying even birth is trauma. You've unraveled it in a beautiful way. Maybe
00:23:45.520something for us to eat together, just a meal. The United Kingdom recently announced that they
00:23:51.460were going to restore to, especially Nigeria, stolen artifacts, meaning bronzes. You probably
00:23:59.380right about that and this idea of restitution it feels recolonizing right totally
00:24:07.820here it is as if an original could be reclaimed right we just get back to the way things were
00:24:16.760but you know there is a beautiful story about forgiveness that is told you know in in 1897
00:24:24.020one of the British soldiers took one of those that killed Benin people from the Kingdom of Benin
00:24:32.620and took those Benin bronzes, took one of them, took it to his home and used it as a door stopper, right?
00:24:39.700Just these are the memories, the sacred, just used it to, and then when the movement picked up
00:24:46.220of restore these things to us, like bring it back to us from Nigerian activists and African activists,
00:24:53.080this gentleman who was now old who was the grandson of that soldier said I think I should
00:24:59.200return this and so he came back with that tiny but incredibly weighty and ontological object
00:25:08.160and came back with it and he expected to be mobbed and to be to be beaten you know in the villages
00:25:15.940in nigeria instead mama v we gave him more the people came out and said hey take more back with
00:25:23.140you think about that it's like what you did with your father it's like turning the scripts totally
00:25:29.660totally and i want to speak to i want to speak to forgiveness because i'm highly suspect of
00:25:37.460forgiveness okay um i i feel like it's one of those notions that kind of got pushed on us
00:25:44.160through those colonial Christocentric Christocentric exactly and I think what I would
00:25:51.100rather talk about is the alchemy of apology the biological psychological I thought you were
00:25:59.660calling me of physical alchemy of apology because one of the things I think that happened for me in
00:26:10.600this book is that um and writing it wasn't even a book it was it was only making a decision
00:26:17.820it was a ritual it was calling in my father who came who was here who was present through the
00:26:24.860whole writing of this book who would wake me up at four in the morning and say come i'm going to
00:26:29.540tell you a story stories i had never known and he would just tell me things but one of the things i
00:26:34.580realized is when you go into that bodily place where you actually experience and feel and know
00:26:45.180and understand your perpetrator and what they were doing and when that person is willing to
00:26:51.660climb inside you and understand the impact of what they did it's like when the pope made
00:26:59.980restitution to the indigenous people for the horrible cruelty did he climb into their beings
00:27:08.480did he try to know in his body in his in his in his spiritual makeup and in what that experience
00:27:18.440felt like what what what were the all of the short-term long-term impacts of that violation
00:27:25.800that was led and orchestrated by the church did he take months knowing and feeling and going there
00:27:33.940because that that alchemy frees frees resentment frees rancor frees frees frees anger frees
00:27:46.000that's the alchemy that is what we call forgiveness right but it's not something you can
00:27:53.760do. Because it's not up to us to forgive. Do you know what I mean? That's a hierarchical notion
00:28:02.440that I forgive you. It's not something we are engaged in together. It's not a process we are
00:28:10.600doing that relieves the suffering of the person who has been violated, but also relieves the
00:28:18.020horror that lives in the perpetrator which is is is is vast and multiplying if it is not believed
00:28:25.680right it reminds me of indulgences right the the old catholic yes of of just just ask for
00:28:35.380forgiveness and with the sound of the coin hitting the bottom of the box our soul is released from
00:28:41.320hell it this hierarchical notion of forgiveness is is undone with this near animist you know this
00:28:52.020invitation to stay with the body and to disappoint the roles that we're committed to right the the
00:28:59.800roles that we've been incarcerated in i just love that let's let's talk about let's dance with the
00:29:06.960notion of trauma a bit and maybe connect it in our playful experiment and alchemy with
00:29:12.020thought and speculation and fiction let's let's connect it with politics we've had a conversation
00:29:19.700about the largest stockness of politics today and it feels like trauma as politics not trauma as
00:29:29.760a thing in politics but trauma as a politics today um just to quickly remind those of us
00:29:36.240listening, the word trauma seems to be the most popular term of the decade. I think some
00:29:43.940publications have named it the word of the decade. Why do you think that is, Mamavi?
00:29:49.660It's funny, because I was just reading yesterday that the most popular word
00:29:52.560this year in America is gaslight, which I thought, well, first of all, I think
00:30:01.940trauma is so vast. There are so many ways in which people feel traumatized. But I also think
00:30:09.060it's a framework that allows us in some ways to be thinking about the past and the present
00:30:18.200simultaneously, right? That one of the astonishing things about trauma is as a person who
00:30:26.540experiences a lot of what people refer to as PTSD, right? Where I can be in the situation
00:30:33.360and something triggers, you know, because I was physically beaten a lot, you know, where
00:30:40.120it was constant and for years. When it happens, you are actually in the present, but you're not
00:30:48.500in the present. You're in the past, but you're not in the past. It's a timeless continuum of
00:30:53.680happening. And I think we are in a period of global reckoning. I think it's happening. And I
00:31:01.580think trauma has been the kind of pathway that has pushed us to this reckoning, right? And I think
00:31:08.040there is a great pushback against that reckoning, of course, because people are terrified of what
00:31:13.060that reckoning could lead to in the way of actually transforming consciousness in, I think,
00:31:18.500a very significant way. But I think people are beginning to wake up from this kind of
00:31:25.260deep sleep that trauma induced in so many places and beginning to articulate the impacts of that
00:31:32.800trauma, the history of that trauma, the time confusion of that trauma. And I think it's also
00:31:40.680a call for, I don't, for me at any rate, it's a call for a new form of compassion, a new form
00:31:49.040of solidarity, a new form of stepping inside each other and understanding each other in ways
00:31:55.800that we have never been able to do before. And I think traumas open those potential doorways to
00:32:03.680that yeah you know it might seem very politically incorrect to speak about trauma as a portal but
00:32:11.420but that is what indigenous elders African cosmologies and ways of knowing have been
00:32:17.480saying for so long that the trickster abides at the crossroads that's the trickster's you know
00:32:24.480home you know and trauma is that home you know you just spoke about trauma as time travel this
00:32:32.000is what i was hearing it's like a reconvening of time and the past isn't done with the future is
00:32:37.120yet to come or the past is yet to come as well it's it's almost like we're being invited to lose
00:32:43.700form and there's a crisis of form um so that trauma is not just this external thing that
00:32:52.060happens to us um trauma is also our ideological commitment to reproducing the forms we're used to
00:32:59.600it's a politics it's a way of stamping our authority and our mastery of where we are and
00:33:07.580maybe this is why politics is so stuck i mean united states being an exemplar of that it's
00:33:13.620the left will never meet the right because they're right and the right will never meet the left
00:33:18.740because they're correct and when we are both correct we are we're going to be eternal others
00:33:24.580to each other. There is no belonging in being correct, because being correct is also another
00:33:30.580form of colonial entrapment. Exactly. I want to tell you the story that's related to that. I don't
00:33:37.240know why. I'm just negotiating, so I'm just going to grab it. You know, for many years, I spent time
00:33:43.100in a correctional facility in upstate New York working. I ran a beautiful, beautiful group with,
00:33:50.440you know, people who have been in prison for long times for violent crimes.
00:33:55.260And it was a writing workshop where they really went deep, deep inside their crimes,
00:34:00.800what led them to their crimes, what they felt about their crimes.
00:34:04.620Just the most, the holiest examination, the bravest examination.
00:34:10.600But when I first started, I ran this group where every week everyone would go around
00:34:16.480and they would talk about one central experience from the age of one to nine and then nine to 18
00:34:21.780like thing and all the women in the group I just had such a deep connection and but there was one0.98
00:34:26.840woman who I really didn't like and she gave me the creeps and I wanted her to go away and I didn't
00:34:33.760like her and I I was judging her and I just and um and it was and I and I had so much this was
00:34:39.920years ago I had so much judgment for her and and the second group she sat down next to me and I
00:34:44.020was like oh I don't like this woman she scares me and and then she started to tell her story0.97
00:34:49.120and her story was that when she was a child her parents had um basically used her as a sex toy0.94
00:34:57.020and they sold her out to people and people had chained her to beds and put things inside her
00:35:03.820and had sex with her from the time she was like five years old and when her mother died her father0.99
00:35:10.060then married her and made her his person who would go and find other kids to bring into their0.98
00:35:16.740lives. And they would then sexually abuse them and sell them out. And eventually somebody died.0.91
00:35:23.780And when she came to prison, she didn't know why she was there. She had no idea what she had done
00:35:31.920wrong because the moral reality that she had grown up in was one reality that had never shown her
00:35:39.400another thing that could be different than that. She told the story in the midst of 20 women who
00:35:45.720had all been radically self-abused and many had been sexually abused as children. And I sat there
00:35:53.420just weeping, weeping because I had made a determination about her based on, based on
00:36:02.920my feelings my judging my whatever but not climbing into her story to understand what
00:36:11.040had bought her to where she had been to understand that i have no right to do that any place i ever
00:36:17.980am in this planet until i know the seeds or where things begin to get to where we're going right
00:36:23.840and i think in a way that's what you're talking about it's like if we don't understand what brings
00:36:31.460people to who they are how they think how they behave how do we begin to even think of changing
00:36:39.320or rearranging or transforming our consciousness because people are stuck in time people are stuck
00:36:47.860in history people are stuck in pain people are stuck in in in story in story and to puncture
00:36:56.160story to unravel story to disentangle story requires time and attention and care and love
00:37:03.940and this world is moving so fast it's moving so fast we don't have time for that right this is
00:37:11.840then an invitation to slow down speaking of going fast and slowing down is not as i like to say
00:37:17.400reducing speed it's about meeting the others the radical others without which we are not possible
00:37:25.580right it's about touching and being touched by the others and you the story of the apology
00:37:32.920it just feels um it just feels like a shamanic encounter i mean what you did there the alchemy
00:37:42.240of apology i just love that and it dislodges again the hierarchical framing of forgiveness as
00:37:50.220establishing some kind of holiness and i think we're too holy or we're our quest for holiness
00:37:59.060or arrival or completeness or wholeness you with some specificity here is is what's getting in the
00:38:07.660way and maybe this is what slow down is how do we fall apart together each other how do we stay
00:38:15.820in the middle the edges in the middle that feels like a good question to hold with some tension
00:38:21.880that i love that so much and maybe there's maybe there's pagan holiness which is a different kind
00:38:28.820of oh i love that already right maybe pagan holiness is is is fragmented holiness messy
00:38:37.680holiness that that's the word that comes to me whenever i'm at city of joy is holy and i think
00:38:44.360But it's holes. It's holes. It's full of holes. It's absences, right? It's full of possibility. It's full of what can be. And it's also full of the intention, the intention to live with care, to live with care.
00:39:03.520so that, for example, a lot of the women who work at City of Joy as social workers or as the mamas
00:39:10.940who cook and take care of the girls, all of them are traumatized. All of them have been through
00:39:18.000many similar experiences to what the girls have been through. So they are constantly,
00:39:24.920as the girls are going through it, they're going through it. So it's a community of holes inside0.68
00:39:32.300holes inside holes which are all emerging as the community is emerging and there's not anyone at
00:39:39.780top saying I forgive you we're all in this story I just have a little more skill or maybe a little
00:39:47.960more distance or a little more time under my belt experience to help you move through what you're
00:39:54.560moving through at this moment right have we have we have we ever been not broken then I don't think
00:42:16.860It's one of the few cracks, or maybe even multiple cracks in the Bible, that I like to dwell in, because there's a strange pagan-ness over there.0.68
00:42:29.820And so Paul is speaking about something that haunts and disturbs him.0.97
00:42:35.120And he's crying out to God to take away this pain.
00:42:39.400He calls it a thorn in the flesh, right?
00:43:41.700I think what it evokes for me is the notion that that Rilke quote, we are guardians of each other's solitude, that we are not meant to go inside and take away people's pain.
00:44:01.680But we are meant to sit by people while they do that process so they know they're not alone.
00:44:09.920and it's taken me a long time to learn how to do that because i think my instinct when i was
00:44:16.400younger was like i want to get in there and i want to be able to help people not be in pain and and
00:44:22.020why my pain has been my greatest teacher my pain has been that doorway which i am constantly it's
00:44:29.700it's that thing that tennessee williams says without my demons i won't have my angels right
00:44:34.900Like without your demons, you can't call for your angels and your angels won't come. Right.
00:44:40.800And I think I think part of what I see sometimes going back to City of Joy as an example of that is what what is what is the role of dance?
00:44:52.280Right. Dance is grace. Dance is grace around our wounds.
00:44:57.180Dance is like the practice of dance and the movement of dance is what moves through City of Joy.
00:45:19.040It is a way of lifting the spirit so the spirit can enter the wound.
00:45:23.020And I think our grace is really our willingness to be with each other in the global wound and our individual wounds and have the patience and the time and the love to keep being with people so they can get through to the other side.
00:45:47.800So they can find their way through to the other side and not say, get it done faster, get there quicker. People have their own story process ways to climb through that maze. And it's a maze. It's a maze. Once that fragmentation occurs, it's like, oh, I thought I was here. Oh, no, you have to go.
00:46:06.740You know, but are we willing to have the grace, that patience, that love, that soothing to be with each other as we walk through that?
00:52:52.880May we decorate and find the spirits, the freeing emancipatory spirits to guide our hands to decorate and adorn the thorns of flesh around us and in us and within us as spaces of perverse freedom, dancing emancipation.
00:53:22.880May we see that which has been hurt inside us,
00:53:31.580those hurt portals as openings to worlds we need to travel to
00:53:41.900in new forms, whether they be animal forms or spirit forms,
00:53:49.080so that we can touch into parts of ourselves