Agents of Ourselves: Part Twenty-Six

Last week we assembled, as is our Wednesday wont, for Finding Your Voice, our writing workshop. Yvonne Jones, Laura Staley, Maribel Cardez, Tom Dietzler, and I began with a brief discussion of our new project. Following in the footsteps of Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner, Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson, and Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, all of us are going to tell the story of the same character in our ways, in our own voices. The only knowledge of the character we share is that she’s deceased.

Then the conversation turned.

What followed was a discussion that yielded a series of moments so sublime, so uninhibitedly human, all of us knew we were sharing something truly sacred (to use the term Laura applies to the space we create in and for all of our meetings). Those moments taught me this:

For all of our longings, perhaps none is so powerful as the longing for connection. We all want to be known, accepted, embraced. We all want to be recognized for our strengths and gifts and to have the darker aspects of our personalities, our shadow selves, acknowledged, understood, and forgiven. We want to be loved without fear of judgment or rejection. We want to be part of something that includes us, that transcends us, that inspires us to reach higher than our highest aspirations and deeper than our deepest doubts.

I can’t share the nature of our discussion here. I won’t betray that hallowed trust. But I will say that everyone in our group changes me, teaches me, brings out the best in me, and accepts the worst of me.

After a shared silence of reverence and honor — of family — we agreed to end our session in that exalted moment. I would have felt no different had I been leaving a church.

If you want to know more about something I can share with you, our writing project, please watch this: