At the start of every writing practice session with our Sovereign* Writers’ Knot Community, I invite the writers to participate in the act of “invocation.” I ask them to write a particular prayer or blessing.
On May 25, we held our closing retreat. Writers from around the world gathered for three hours to review the work, the tangles, and the wonder of the last season we’ve shared together. We gathered to imagine the next three months of creative becoming.
This was a time of celebration, and yet…
We entered this particular call, hearts heavy with the news of nineteen third and fourth graders and two teachers killed in their classroom in Uvalde, Texas. I knew I needed to give us space to grieve, contemplate, and pray.
It is terribly, wildly, horribly true that we need to advocate for policy and change. Thoughts and prayers are empty without action. But, those actions begin with stillness and the stirrings of new language.
The stillness that breeds a prayer can breed a great outer revolution if we remember that prayer is meant to be a catalyst, not a pacifier. (Plus, in this community, we are writers, our change always begins on the page.)
This is the prompt I offered our writing community:
Write a prayer or a blessing for this moment.
Remember the dandelion that pushes through the concrete, the single house that withstands the storm, those who walk through hell and then heal enough to tell the tale.
And remember those who do not.
I always write along with the group. I wouldn’t send anyone into territory I myself wouldn’t dare to tread.
And so, I began here…
A blessing on a day when we all grapple with the killing of nineteen elementary school students. I think of Yeats and his poem, “Amongst School Children”...
Then, I put down the pen and reached for my battered grad school copy of W.B. Yeats’s Collected Poems. I was about to ask an Irishman who lived and died a century ago about his opinion on violence. While Yeats writes of death and war in Ireland and Europe (observed from an aristocratic distance), I stopped myself when I realized he didn’t have the medicine I needed to navigate this moment.
There is a time to turn to art for solace. And, there is a time when we turn to certain art because it feels easier and safer to escape into well crafted lines, rather than weep and respond to the mess of modern life.
This was not a time to escape into the yellowed pages of poetry or numb myself with well-crafted verse. Instead, I needed to do the harder work of opening my eyes to the full sorrow and anger of the present moment.
I returned to my own, in-this-moment story and to the first line I wrote: “A blessing on a day when we all grapple…”
That word, grapple. It’s rather a strange one. It speaks of struggle and challenge. For me, it calls to mind the life or death quest of the mountain climber trying to find a way up the cliff face.
Resisting poetry, I went to the dictionary, seeking something other than my vague impressions of the word. Further down in grapple’s definitions, there it is: “engage in a close fight or struggle without weapons.”
A. Fight. Without. Weapons.
Yes, it seems that the magic of language is alive and well, and we cast our words like a spell even when we do not know it.
We Have Words, Not Weapons
Poetry has its place, everywhere and always. There is always a place for stories and mythology and flights into the mythic imagination as well. Prayer, too.
As filmmaker Kerra Bolton said in a Facebook post about the sorrow she feels about this event, but also the grief she feels about the comparative silence she witnessed in the wake of the murder of the Black elders in Buffalo, “We don’t pray to change God. Prayer changes us.”
As we are forced to grapple with gun violence in America, and with the perpetual list of human crimes and failings, betrayals and sins of omission, we must engage in a fight without weapons.
For that, we have poetry, stories, mythology, the mythic imagination, and prayer. And protest, too.
We have our lips to speak the unscripted truth, our arms to embrace, our legs to march. We have our phones to call senators and reach friends who are afraid to send their kids to school. We have front stoops to sit on to talk to neighbors who are brokenhearted by their own numbness and helplessness as we all face another day of death in America.
I haven’t got a single answer beyond all these wordy ideas
Except this…
Words are not enough, until they are enough. Words make stories, shape minds, and gather across hundreds of pages to make laws.
And one person isn’t enough to change our reading of our Constitution, the chasms in our culture, the generations of unhealed trauma, or the layers of toxic masculinity that makes all this keep happening again, and again, and again. Until that one person is enough when they become one with others.
When the individual ceases to be an island of fear, grief, and anger and becomes part of a collective that’s finally (finally!) driven to transformation…
When enough of us form an US that realizes that there can be new bridges and boundaries, new ways of interpreting the law and enacting “community,” then maybe (just maybe), we’ll have something - each other, a nation, a dream - worth fighting for.
*A note on “Sovereign,” which I use to describe our writing community and which I explore extensively in my book, The Sovereignty Knot: A Woman’s Way to Freedom, Power, Love, and Magic: sovereignty is not about obsessive individualism or “I alone” consciousness.
It took me a couple hundred pages to describe just what I mean by “sovereignty,” but love how Seán Páidraig O’Donoghue, a KnotWork Storytelling guest and a brother who walks a similar path as an American who sources his soul in Ireland and the Celtic world, says it on his blog:
I see a lot of people using the word "sovereignty" to reinforce and justify their ideas of individuality.
I have said before and I will say again: to understand the concept of sovereignty, we need to go back to its oldest iteration. The first Kings were sovereign because they wedded the land and took responsibility for the well being of the land and the people.
Over time, this marriage became more and more abstracted, especially in cultures where kingship was hereditary. In time, people rose up and put an end to kingship, and rightly sought to reinvest authority in the people.
But because they were separated from the concept of what sovereignty first meant, in seeking to make the people collectively sovereign and the individual self sovereign, they missed something fundamental: true sovereignty means taking responsibility not just for yourself, but for the land and the people (human and other-than-human) and the impact your decisions and actions have on all with in your web of relation.
May we all abandon the myth of individualism and reanimate true sovereignty.
If you resonate with this belief in the power of words and are seeking a writing community where you can explore the ideas that are hardest to speak aloud, consider the Sovereign Writers’ Knot. We’re enrolling for our Summer Mini-Session, which begins July 6.