It's my birthday! / Build your boat (from journal entry 9-3-11)

It's 7:26am and I am at Clara's again. We had a good day together yesterday. A good day considering... And I see today being another good day. She is sleeping on the living room sofa right now so I have a little time to write.

Today is my birthday! Yay, I made it to see 42. Thank You, God. Sekou called me at about 1:30 this morning to be the first to wish me a happy birthday. We talked for just a minute and it was really nice to hear his voice. Janice called a little while ago and sang I just called to say happy birthday to me. I loved it. I'm happy.

In the moment I am thinking about the conversation that Therman and I had while on my way to work yesterday morning. We talked about legacies and what we will pass on to our children, to the children of the world, to the world after we leave. We discussed the relevance of leaving our thoughts and ideas.

It is easy for one to take the attitude, "Who me? The world doesn't need my two cents." Yes, your cents too. It was Anne Frank's two cents that she the best light on what she and many Jews experienced during their persecution. As a seventh grader, reading her words, I hid in the basement with her. I heard the footsteps she heard. Cried when she cried. I believe that all of us have a story to tell a particular way to a particular people. Now, we may not know

C: Did somebody get my teeth?

(It wasn't until I got back from her bathroom that I realized she was talking in her sleep.)

Many of us may not know who our audiences are, for some of us, the audience may not even be born yet, but that's not our job to worry about that. Our charge, I believe, is to put the work out there. Take the pictures, tell the stories, write the poems, build the houses, sew the clothes, find the cure. Each one of us is charged as Noah was, to build the boat. Whatever your boat.

Telling your story, as you know if you have read more than three of my posts on this blog, is something I am passionate about. As Therman and I discussed, we, black Americans especially, come from a people who kept quiet about such things as domestic violence and sexual abuse, even a lot of the racial prejudice they experienced. I do understand that the silence could have been the best way they felt to protect themselves and their families. But we can use our voices now to help someone going through what we went through. We can use our voices now to gift the world with our view of the elephant. I invite you now to push beyond how insignificant you think you are or your story is. I invite you to get so busy living your life and taking in your story, so busy building the boat you were charged to build, that when others cross your path you have headspace enough, decency enough to see that she is just building her boat. He is just leaving his legacy. Appreciate the courage it takes to fully live a life. You living your own leaves you little desire and time to judge others. In fact, consider that every judgment of someone else is you physically taking a plank of wood off a boat they are building. Imagine the time and energy it takes to literally do that. And at no benefit to you. At no benefit to the world.

I think about people who have produced popular movies and written popular books and the many many people who came along later to criticize the work. The critiques are often very well written and thought out and so I wonder why the critic just doesn't spend time creating his or her own art. But then that is my judgment, I guess, on them.

Awwww, Michael Datcher called and sang, rapped, spoke me a birthday song! I do love my community.

A few months ago I was listening to a friend and awesome poet, Nyasha Khalfani, also called Shonda Buchanan (now professor at Hampton University). She read a poem she wrote about us caring for other human beings, being concerned about something outside of ourselves. In the poem, and I wish I had it in front of me, she said, when a woman comes up to you and needs... "have the decency to stop the world." "The decency to stop the world" I love that line so much. It inspires me to care enough about another man's, another woman's journey to give more that I take. Whether or not I am going where he or she is going on their path.

Ghandi was lying ill from malnutrition and dehydration from his own hunger strike. A man bent before him and begged him to eat, asked what he could do to get him to live. Ghandi told the Hindu man to go and find a Muslim child whose parents were killed and raise the child as his own. The Hindu man agreed and Ghandi added, "And raise him as a Muslim." The decency to stop the world.