You Are My People and I Am Yours: A Talk on Reaching Out in Tender and Tumultuous Times: Everyday Magic, Day 1,128

At the 20th Power of Words conference Oct. 3-5 in Kansas City, I had the honor of giving the welcome talk, which I realized speaks to more than just people engaged in Transformative Language Arts (writing, storytelling, theater and other word arts for social and personal transformation and community building). So I share this here, hoping we all find meaning, stubborn hope, and belonging.

At our first meeting, you could see how different we were by our shoes: Birkenstocks, work boots, tasseled loafers, moccasins, worn-out sneakers, or sensible heels. We had come together – over 80 of us to my great surprise – to fight the state highway department’s plan to route a freeway through century-old farms, hidden native burial grounds, endangered prairie plants, even historical ruts from the Santa Fe Trail.

Some of us having lunch at the conference

We quickly found our unity through story – Transformative Language Arts in action.

As I facilitated the first meeting in 2001 of what would become the Franklin-Douglas County Coalition of Concerned Citizens, I realized quickly that the only way forward was to invite each person to tell their story of what this freeway would do to their land, community, and lives. In no time, old farmers – in their Sunday best or worn coveralls – stood up, tears streaming down their faces, talking about how hard it is to keep their five-generation farm afloat, and now this. A native American attorney and activist spoke about how, yet again, she and others had to protect their dead.

We wrote notes from their stories on giant paper in a meeting room we borrowed from the Unitarian Fellowship. By the end of the three hours, every wall was covered with stories from barefoot hippies and Evangelical Christians, farm wives and tribal leaders, left-leaning protesters and conservative Republicans.

To reach even more people, we had our next meeting in a giant tractor warehouse where over 300 people showed up to add more stories to the mix. Story led us all the way, even as some of our personal stories changed.

In the middle of the three-year campaign, I got breast cancer. With my husband Ken and our friends Retta and Ozzie, I was one of four organizers of the group as well as its spokesperson. When I started chemo, I asked the group, “Do you really want a bald, Jewish woman from Brooklyn and Jersey speaking for you at this point?” They did, so I wore a hat and continued.

Soon, we were working together not just on this campaign but on building our makeshift community, potlucks with tofu delight and Jell-O salads. Once when about 20 of us were spread all over our living room, dining room, and kitchen, maps everywhere since we were doing our own shadow Environmental Impact Statement to challenge the highway department’s one, my temperature spiked, an effect of chemo. “Hey, we’re going to the hospital. Watch our kids for us,” I told the group, leaving them with our then 7, 10, and 13-year-old offspring for hours.

As we completed our work, we got to know each other, showing up at each other’s homes for meetings, catching one another at the farmer’s market, meeting in a Chinese restaurant in a small town, even hanging out together at our son’s Bar Mitzvah, the first-ever Jewish thing for many of our members. Although we won a half victory – the freeway got built but moved over to avoid ripping apart so many farms, historic and indigenous sites, and protected prairies – what happened between us was perhaps even more important.

With amazing poet Kim Addonizio, one of our keynoters at the conference.

“We won’t know the full impact of what we’ve done until after we’re dead,” I often remind Ken as we’re falling asleep.

“If then,” he replies.

There’s a great Maya Angelou quote you might know: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Which brings me to the title of this talk: you are my people and I am yours. These lines, from the old testement’s Book of Ruth, come from a woman who lost everything, including her husband and land and community, telling her mother-in-law Naomi, “Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.” While I’m not in any way advocating we convert to one another’s religions, I find so much wisdom her for our time.

In the wild weather of our climate—the earth, the world, the political, economic, sociological, psychological and all other manner of climates—this conference offers people who resonate with the power of the word (out loud, on the page, sung, whispered, shouted or told) a place to belong, and good company for the ride or our work, art, activism and lives.

What we do to foster hospitality, welcoming, belonging is at the core of Transformative Language Arts (and other ways to connect with and beyond our words). We are and have always been about breaking silences, listening to those marginalized, ignored, or attacked in our world as well as learning to discern our own hearts and callings.

TLA is all about building bigger tables that bridge divides – something particularly essential in a time when DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) is under vivid attack in every sector of America. We know the old saying – “If you’re not at the table, you’re probably on the menu” – is true, even truer in times like this.

Yet it’s becoming a radical act to do exactly what we’re doing here at the Power of Words: to show up, listen to each other, grow our empathy, speak and write and sing our truths, stretch our hearts and minds and spirits a little wider to take in more of our individual and collective stories.

Which brings me to Alice the Kidd and stubborn help. A dear friend of mine, Alice Kidd (who I’ve always called Alice the Kidd), died September 13th after reaching out to her friends and family for extended conversations about living with stubborn hope. From her small trailer deep in interior British Columbia, she wrote Ken and me and dozens of others voluminous emails in the face of her coming death: 

My emotional state is stubborn hope and curiosity. Many years ago my mother told me, curiosity is the antidote to fear, anger, despair, and so on. Feel the emotion, then get curious. Start asking questions. That immediately opens up room between you and the emotion. Room for action. And once you start doing something, life gets better. And we learn and find the bedrock of love in our lives.

A lot of the writing, speaking, singing we do here opens up that very space. We are here because of our innate stubborn hope and our big-hearted curiosity, which speaks especially to now.

There is so much we don’t know about what’s going to happen no matter how many commentators tell us about what specific playbook is in action. This is not to deny that awful things are set in motion or already rolling over many people in horrendous ways, but so much of this story is not written yet. We are living in the middle of it without knowing the arc or ending.

The soulful Kelley Hunt, also a keynoter at the conference, at Unity Village, where we met

Years ago Kelley Hunt and I wrote a song called “Miracle,” with the chorus that came to me as I was sitting on a gravel road one evening, my arm slung over the late great Shay, our labaraner dog, and singing to him: "A round rainbow is called a glory./ What you survive in life is called a story./ You only see the arc of it after the storm./ To see the whole miracle, you’ve got to hold on./ The workaday miracle is where you belong, where you belong."

Holding on is the work of stubborn hope and curiosity. Holding on together is the necessary and essential outcome of bone-deep hospitality, listening, attention. Unearthing, then witnessing each others’ helps us belong to each other to help one another through.

We are here now from all over this ailing country to give, to listen, to speak, to write to ourselves and others, to sing wandering through the woods or in a workshop, and most of all, to arrive together in this specific time and place as each other’s people. This entails looking more closely than we sometimes do at one another, human and more-than-human, as we drop leaves and words, as we open up discoveries and blossoms, as we fountain into kinship with people and place. This also calls on us to listen not just to what’s said but to what’s not said because it’s too painful or not yet ripe or otherwise in transition.

Some of us at the conference closing

In other words, we are enacting a ceremonial village together that models the world we know is possible.

Let us make room for each other to dwell together in listening, learning, seeing with new eyes, and most of all dwelling in all we don’t know about what will happen.

Let us be afraid together. Let us be fearless and joyful together too.

Let us be angry, gentle, anxious, lost, and loving.

Let nothing vital go unsaid.

Let us begin right now.

See more on Changing the World with Words, the illuminating Tansformative Language Arts here, and consider subscribing to the illuminating TLA Substack here.