Walking with Indy
I have a new puppy in my life. A labradoodle we brought home in early June has engaged me physically and spiritually in these summer months. At least two walks a day has become the routine and both of us have benefited. For me these walks have become part of the fabric of my new empty nest, 50 year old life. Chances to wonder deeply about myself as an introverted person in a world that seems to be screaming for extroversion every day. I have journeyed in my early mornings with Indy into our town cemetery. It is close and has wonderful paths through wooded and open terraces, hills and lawns, a brook to for Indy to grab a drink, and of course it is quiet. It is quiet in the way that you would expect a cemetery to be but just behind the solitude everywhere you look there are stories that are asking to be told. Names engraved on a multitude of stones, names that have a history all their own, Abel, Hattie, Edwin, Amos and Tilla names lost to us echoing of a different time . Pethena, Leonora and my favorite Trustum; Trustum C Haynes to be specific. Where did Trustum come from? Who were his parents? Was his name a comment on the times? It has always seemed to me that names fit a person and maybe that is true but during my walks on these mornings I wonder how much of these names reflected what these parents hoped and dreamed to be true, true for their children. Life was harder in the late 1800s in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont and it seems none harder than for the family of the baby's Charlie. While there are many broken grave stones and many suffering from the neglect of inattention, time has broken these two nearly in the same way, broken as the hearts of their parents surely must have been.
I have not been able to walk amongst the stories in the morning without wondering about my own story or what has been happening in my own story as this year continues to unfold. And this morning more than any other, this morning after Charlottesville, I am haunted by something Bryan Stevenson said to a room full of independent school teachers and administrators. Stevenson a civil rights attorney and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative has spent his working life trying to bring justice to inmates on death row in the deep south. Stevenson told this audience of privilege, this audience that works with the privileged young people in our society, that “we are all broken”. In chapter 15 of his book “Just Mercy”, he continues, “…that being broken is what makes us human”. Further he offers “We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.”
Every morning when I walk by the two baby Charlies, I can’t deny the brokenness. The stones scream out that pain that must have been so real and so much a part of life for so many in those days. And on this morning I cannot deny the brokenness of this country as the images and stories from Neo-Nazi, Alt Right and white supremacists marching, as if going to war, race across the screens. I can’t deny that I feel broken more often these mornings, I find fleeting comfort in the walks with my companion’s boundless energy, but it is not long before the solitude begs the question of loneliness, before my need for thinking and processing leaves me longing for connection, in a world that seems hell bent on fracturing a greater divide.
In his address to us at that conference, Stevenson, brought the issue of race relations front and center, this was two years ago, before the impossible happened, in a time where so many of us were so hopeful that America had turned a corner. He talked to us of the failure of America to deal with race and the persecution of its people of color. He asked us to consider how other countries have worked hard to put aside their painful past and almost begged us to realize that we have never dealt with the atrocity that slavery was for us as a nation, that is was for our people, that it still is for so many. He never said it but I can’t help but wonder, how many times he thought, that if we don’t deal with it, deal with our brokenness, find the will and the courage to come to grips with what slavery was and how it still holds us hostage, that the landscape that we call America would look like this on Sunday August 13th.
There is nothing accidental in the events in Charlottesville, there is only the fact that we have refused to learn our history and now our history is teaching us a lesson and I, for one, believe deeply that Stevenson is right, we do have a choice. Our choice must be to embrace our brokenness and embrace compassion as our best hope to start the healing. Racism has no place in the America I love. We are all broken and we are all human and believing in our humanity is the beginning of our long walk together. It must start today.