What I Want For You

What it takes some days to arrive at this page… to believe in the voice these words contain. It sometimes takes half the day of staying present to the anxiety. Of doing what I have to in order to move through it. Long walks, hot showers, enough sage burning to make my neighbors suspicious.

And then sometimes, I can settle enough to sit still. To start to listen. To not judge what I hear, and just type. And it always arrives once I’ve sat with the anxiety long enough for it to show its true face: anger. Gorgeous, red and gold anger.

Anger that I still struggle so much to believe enough in my voice to simply use it. Anger that so many women writers, theologians, artists, voices from the queer community I know are struggling with me and have throughout time. Anger knowing that this lack of belief is a symptom of patriarchal dominance.

This is why I call it gorgeous, the anger. Because it’s galvanizing.

The anger reminds me that I’m alive, and that everything is still possible. It compels me to choose something other than the paralysis of anxiety. It reminds me of all the voices that have been silenced, the voices with not enough of the gorgeous rage to fuel them into words. And, it reminds me of all the voices, like Thecla’s and Mary Magdalene’s, that were buried. Burned. Destroyed. And of all the voices that still silence themselves. This is what always ends the pacing, the anxiety, and the disbelief in myself: the memory of so many who were not able to use their voice.

When here we are, me and you reading this, still able to use our voices in service of love. What makes anger sacred for me is that it connects us. It’s easier for me to believe in your voice than it is to believe in my own. And there’s something sacred about that configuration. It means it’s easier for me to hold you up than it is sometimes to hold myself up. And if we’re all doing that for each other, there’s a sacred exchange, a divine symmetry. Where I want for you more than I know how to want for myself, and you in turn, do the same.

I want you to feel the joy that sometimes finds me when I can get still and quiet enough inside to simply become a scribe to the love that pours through me. I want you to feel a bravery, collective and true, well up from within you each time you’re in a space of disempowering doubt and anxiety that lets you say or write what’s held within you like a firefly in a mason jar. Maybe every time feels apocalyptic. In each next generation. Maybe every time is ultimately an uncovering, a revealing. I don’t know.

I just know that this time, now, is all we have. And that using our voices in service of love has always been the calling.

To just say what sets the firefly free.

With only more love,
​M.