i found god in myself
& i loved her / i loved her fiercely.
i remember when i first discovered ntozake shange’s, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, it was like finding the older sister i didn’t even know existed. it was the first time that i realized that the dark road i often travelled was not mine alone. that in many ways it was shared by women before me, women beside me and women after me. the anxiety, the fear, the aching loneliness was a silently shared burden.
the experience of being out on that ledge is eclipsed only by the experience of coming back in.
the coming back in is not just about being smartened but about being humbled. your life is not your life. your losses are not the final judgement. and inside, at the center of the very center is a spark, an energy, a quickening that cannot be extinguished. somehow you sacrifice each day a little more of yourself until that spark is a veritable fire. and that fire a conflagration.
i look at that picture of ntozake shange in 1976 and i see all of the dearest women in my life.
I know this journey and praise the Lord that I did not stop–He had a plan for my life and today I know that many others are on this journey and I can share my testimony that life is worthy the living because today I live to LOVE.
cynthia, thank you so much for your comment. there is nothing greater than realizing that your life is not accidental and that ALL of it is an expression of and journey towards love.
I am *not* a believer in “The Lord” or any other monotheistic religious God. In fact, I feel to make these religions “OK” is to undermine my own personal experience. But I love Ms. Shange’s quote. It is my favorite quote probably in the whole entire human language. In some ways, as a white woman, I feel like a creep borrowing her beautifully eloquent lines, but they spoke to me so powerfully at age nineteen. And, now, at age 37, they speak in the same exact way. Your words, “the experience of being out on that ledge is eclipsed only by the experience of coming back in,” resonated in a similar way. Thank you.