Lament: (lament, an expression of sorrow)
First awaken and lament
To brown and black bodies I say to all of you that all the ways my ancestors have hurt in any way seen or unseen, known or hidden, remembered or buried, denied or walked away from, I sit in true lament.
To all the actions big and small that have offended you, hurt, injured, or maimed you and your ancestors, due to my living in a white body, I sit in true lament.
For my capacity and privilege to be able to walk away, to participate in a seemingly drive-by sadness, may I stand still instead.
May I find the courage to stay and be present to the complexities of what is happening and that which faces us as a human family, now.
May I find the strength to stay present to me, my ancestors and to my white cultural contribution.
May I find the presence of mind to stand in the fatigue, to not walk away and to stay in the conversation. To all of this, I sit in true sorrow of my complicit and conflicted contribution known, unknown, understood or misguided.
May I remember I am blessed to sit in my confusion, my sorrow, my anguish and to feel the power of just that. Why would I know what to do for myself if not first, I sit in the ocean of Sorrow.
As I wander around in my own white body, disorientated, stretched tight across fields of unnamed cultural guilt and shame, I am fully disrupted; as I should be.
I sit in desolation for something that has already occurred and not in my power to reverse. Help me to fully wail and fully show up in my discomfort.
Bless me to step and follow actions of my heart that contribute towards a gathering of one human family, beyond race and division.
Help me to not yearn for shortcuts but to acknowledge that I was born into a white woman’s body and I have work to do. Work that has been put off to avoid the crushing weight it has put on others, yes even me living in the liberal white mindset.
I am still ignorant because of the luxury of “I could”
So I say to all the bodies that are not counted as white, I commit, as a first step, to feel the deep sorrow and from the valleys of humility and of grace, I sing my lament and I pray for mercy. May I from this place of feeling be shown how to dismantle my white structures to benefit the greater human family. May this lament be in support of the generations to come and in the holding up of the creative human spirit. An inspired spirit willing to change in herself the bigger dismantling, in order that there is space for all of life to breathe together.
Sarah Maclean Bicknell
June 3 2020
Photo of a petrified tree from Sarah’s photo collection