"Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair."
Monday, October 31, 2011
Forget Not
Saturday, October 1, 2011
Words Without End
I've been called a storyteller. A conjurer of images. A record-keeper, of sorts.
I've had many opportunities in the past few weeks - hell, just yesterday alone - to begin to tell my stories again. Its been a while. I've missed them.
It is no secret that the past year has been simultaneously the most transformative and most difficult of my twenty-one on earth. I have seen and done things quite foreign to many, made life-long families and friends, traveled the world and seen both its most radiant triumphs and darkest secrets. And so the stories I share can be both beautiful and full of light... as well as horrific and riddled with darkness.
As much as I love to share my stories, the fact is simple: sometimes, someone just says it better than I ever could.
Watching Carlos Andres Gomez perform is somehow like watching fire dance. Maybe that simile is nonsensical, but its all I can come up with to describe it. When he came to Lafayette last week, I wasn't even sure I wanted to go see him... I knew about this poem. I knew it was about Rwanda. And I knew it was, wrapped up in a neat six-minute package, everything my time in Rwanda meant. Everything it did to me.
Being a storyteller is difficult. It means letting the world into the darkest things you've seen, the most difficult things you've done, but somehow finding a way to turn that into something positive. Into something people will feel hopeful after hearing, instead of just empty and alone.
These stories are not really mine. They belong to the people of Uganda, the people of Rwanda, my Nile-group-makeshift-family and every single person I've shared these stories with since.
They belong to all of us.
Maybe if we all felt ownership over them, this world would begin to change.
So I will tell my stories, their stories, our stories, until it does.
I'm thinking of the night sky in Gulu tonight.
Nkwagala nyo.
I've had many opportunities in the past few weeks - hell, just yesterday alone - to begin to tell my stories again. Its been a while. I've missed them.
It is no secret that the past year has been simultaneously the most transformative and most difficult of my twenty-one on earth. I have seen and done things quite foreign to many, made life-long families and friends, traveled the world and seen both its most radiant triumphs and darkest secrets. And so the stories I share can be both beautiful and full of light... as well as horrific and riddled with darkness.
As much as I love to share my stories, the fact is simple: sometimes, someone just says it better than I ever could.
Watching Carlos Andres Gomez perform is somehow like watching fire dance. Maybe that simile is nonsensical, but its all I can come up with to describe it. When he came to Lafayette last week, I wasn't even sure I wanted to go see him... I knew about this poem. I knew it was about Rwanda. And I knew it was, wrapped up in a neat six-minute package, everything my time in Rwanda meant. Everything it did to me.
"I don't have enough intelligence, or hope, or enough empathy in these stupid bones propping me up to call what I'm feeling pain, or sadness, or even anger."
Being a storyteller is difficult. It means letting the world into the darkest things you've seen, the most difficult things you've done, but somehow finding a way to turn that into something positive. Into something people will feel hopeful after hearing, instead of just empty and alone.
These stories are not really mine. They belong to the people of Uganda, the people of Rwanda, my Nile-group-makeshift-family and every single person I've shared these stories with since.
They belong to all of us.
Maybe if we all felt ownership over them, this world would begin to change.
So I will tell my stories, their stories, our stories, until it does.
I'm thinking of the night sky in Gulu tonight.
Nkwagala nyo.
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