Using Music to Discharge toward Bigger Leadership
I am a fifty-five year old woman and have been an activist since I was fourteen. I have activist strengths and struggles. I can care big, work hard, take initiative, and think collectively. But I also feel isolated and “different,” have difficulty resting and relaxing, have great feelings of urgency, and tend to want to think and act rather than feel.
For the past few years I’ve been taking initiative on climate change and racism. I want to be able to think and act bigger than I’ve been able to so far, but I don’t think I can without facing big early material [distress].
For me, it’s been really hard to discharge on the genocide of Indigenous people and the destruction of the environment. It has mostly felt too unbearable. (One exception was at an Allies to Natives Workshop led by Marcie Rendon, the International Liberation Reference Person for Native Americans.)
I grew up in the United States with a grandfather who was from Scotland and who grew up in a Gaelic-speaking home. My grandpa and I were close, but he never told me that he knew Gaelic. My mom told me that her grannie (my grandpa’s mom) had been hit in school for speaking Gaelic and that she had taught Gaelic secretly to other young people whose parents didn’t want them to lose the language.
I recently found a woman on YouTube who is a native Gaelic speaker and sings beautiful songs in Gaelic. Her music, sung in my grandpa’s mother tongue, has been allowing me to cry and cry and cry. I can feel the connection to my ancestors and grieve huge losses and defeats. I can cry hard about the destruction and loss that are currently going on [happening] that we are not yet in shape [in a condition] to prevent. And I hope that I am freeing up some of my intelligence around being visible and leading.
Eugene, Oregon, USA
(Present Time 191, April 2018)