Our Salvation

Containers.

 

The first time I heard this word used on a daily basis, I was volunteering in a refugee camp. The pre-fabricated boxes that pairs of families were crammed into were aptly called “containers”.

 

The second time I heard this word on a frequent basis has been recently, in my art therapy course. Art therapy sessions are supposed to function like containers for the clients’ emotions and art: nothing is supposed to leak out before the start time, and nothing is supposed to seep past the stop time. Not tears. Not paint. Not the anguish we enter therapy rooms to try to transform into something that will heal us instead of destroy us.

 

When the session ends, we close the lid and close the door. We put on a brave face, and keep going, and going, and going, and going. To prove our strength? To prove our sanity? To prove that we are bigger than what befalls us? I don’t even know anymore.

 

What if we do something different? What if we contain nothing? What if we let out all our rage, pain, fear, and grief in one primal scream?

What if we stop trying to explain our wounds and our scars, our identities and our pasts? What if words are just the same masks as our smiles? The same borders as our countries? Nothing more than outstretched arms ending in stop-sign hands that say: don’t come too close? What if what we most need to communicate can’t be said with words? What if all this talking is part of the problem?

 

What if we fill the boardrooms and classrooms and dining rooms and streets with wails?

What if we let our bodies ROAR their unbearable grief instead of forcing them to keep carrying it?

What if instead of drowning from within, we let ALL the tears out?

What if we spill buckets of water,

all the water that the starving are forbidden to drink,

all the mud they have tried to distill into streams of life, in a holy and hungry attempt to LIVE,

all the tears we have already wept,

all the tears we no longer shed, because pain has turned numb as a survival strategy?

 

What if we stop trying to survive and believe we are capable of truly living? Believe we deserve so much more than we’ve been taught?

 

What if we flood everything?

No more dry hands or faces.

No more clean palettes or rooms.

No more containers.

 

What if we just stop and…

 

AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

One haunting howl after another.

After another.

After another.

After another.

After another.

After another.

After another.

 

Until those who are not screaming stop in their tracks, their cores quivering, terrified by this total rewrite of the script.

 

Maybe first, they’ll look at us like we’re crazy.

Then maybe they’ll start screaming for us to shut up.

And then maybe, out of frustration, they’ll give up their words, give up on words, and just be raw and real and cry.

 

And then, in this collective howl of pain,

in this shared wail of grief,

in the sea of sorrow that will finally carry all our masks away, wake the sleepwalkers, and embrace the broken WE with the reality of unity,

maybe we will feel the healing power of oneness in our bones,

that both the “I” and “you” in “I need you” apply to every single soul.

Maybe in that raucous, unstoppable squall,

in that ocean of private anguish that we finally make public,

in that storm of suffering that we fear will kill us,

we will do so much more than hear the life stories that we’ve long refused to hear.

Maybe our pain will mix so thoroughly, that we will no longer know whose wounds belong to whom,

whose scars ripped open whose heart.

 

Maybe in the drowning,

every wall will crumble,

every gun will rust,

every bomb will become waterlogged and unable to detonate,

every identity that is not our sacred sibling will get washed away,

every life will remember that death is coming, no matter what you do,

and we are wasting our time on anything that is not love.

 

Maybe in that collective collapse

we will at last feel

the power of feeling everything

instead of fragments,

of STOPPING.

instead of going on.

 

Maybe, forsaking words,

we will again hear and understand the language of the mountains,

the breath of the butterflies,

the magic and mystery of the grains of sand,

the wisdom of the ants,

the petition of our sacred Mother Earth

hemorrhaging from our trespasses

and yet

denying no one and nothing a place here.

On the contrary.

To every single soul she still sings:

“You are welcome here.”

 

Maybe this is our salvation:

AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Originally published on Women Rising Radio: https://www.womenrisingradio.com/gallery/