Throwing Rocks

Throwing Rocks

            As a child, I loved walking the streets of my hometown. The sun was too bright for me to look up, so I followed the trail of dandelions and violets that grew wild in the dirt along the side of the road. I walked everywhere – to school, to town, to the little chapel down the street, to the willows by the lake. The entire town was my playground where I could get lost in my own thoughts and imagination. It was a welcoming place, safe and warm. I could not imagine anything else.

            I was a blond, blue-eyed, curly haired little girl that fit so well in my hometown. One day in the third grade, I saw something that pulled me in and would change my life forever. As I was walking to school on a spring morning; I saw a small circle of my friends on the playground. They had surrounded a new boy at school. He was different than us. He was tall and scrawny and stood crunched over with his shoulders sagging. His clothes were tattered and outdated. I could hear my friends taunting him as I approached. As I got closer, I could see my friends had surrounded him and were throwing rocks. I stood there for a moment watching the rocks hit this boy. He did not move or look up.

            I cannot explain what happened next because I don’t remember feeling any great decision making process within my own mind, but I stepped into the center of the circle and stood next to him. The other children stopped for a moment and just looked at both of us. I found myself saying

            “If you throw rocks at him, you will have to throw rocks at me too.”

            One young boy picked up a rock, throwing it hard at both of us. It hit my forehead and blood began to pour down over my curly hair. Funny, I don’t remember much about being hit or even hurt. What I remember is everyone stopped throwing rocks. They simply stopped.

            I didn’t become friends with this new boy. In fact I remember thinking he was kind of weird. It wasn’t the cut on my head, or the memory of my wounded soul that I remember, but that the rocks simply stopped. I couldn’t figure out why this small town had been so safe and welcoming to me and so dangerous to someone ‘different’. I didn’t have the conceptual understanding of privilege, or social justice or even bystander behavior as a third grader. Why did I step into the circle? Why wasn’t I afraid?

            My passion for humanity and justice has just grown. It has often pushed me to the brink of both disaster and insanity. It has cost me a marriage, my family, my faith and many friends. But at those moments of breaking apart inside, I think of the eight year old girl who without thinking stepped into danger for another person… and the rocks simply stopped.

            I built my entire career on social justice, human rights, and activism. I have slept with the homeless, marched with the displaced, stood in front of bulldozers, allowed myself to be arrested...none of it making me afraid. It is the gnawing fear of writing that grips my throat. It seizes me like a tiger that claws to get out. It says, you will die if you do not write.
It's fire burns deep within me…like a descent into a necessary hell that connects me with people I love and will never meet.

            One night as I went into the indigo space of my own mind, I saw myself in a war zone with smoke and bullets flying overhead. Buildings crumbled in rubble. The gray haze of rocks and dust covered the landscape. I crouched behind a rock for protection. There was a woman there. I did not know her or her country or even why there was a war. I could feel her terror and I did not want to run away. We looked into each other’s eyes and I could sense her life would be short. I knew our paths would never cross; but it felt good to care for someone I would never meet. It was the kind of soul hurting that most would walk away from, and yet I didn’t want to walk away or blunt the harsh reality of her life. I wanted…to connect across the distance. It wasn’t a sense of guilt or privilege that drove me to see her, feel her, understand her…it was more like our life force filled each other.

            I have been plagued by the idea that I must choose between my passion for teaching social justice and the solitude of writing. But the tiger is still there…still clawing its way out through my voice. Now as I contemplate my writing, I don’t see the answer as an either/or decision. It must be a both/and. It must birth itself on it’s own terms. I don’t see my writing as political commentary in the endless spin of partisan hate and bantering. I see allegories, new mythology, stories that connect and live beyond their own time.

I praise the grace of fire and risk
In the dusk of my red-crone being
My wish is a homecoming
From slights and jilted times
From reliquaries of memory
To truth of preciousness
Away from hate and rage
Living into the answers
Knowing In the midst of destruction
A light burns for peace
And someone always sings.

Top of Form