Thanks, 2020!
In Your Bones: Poems of Radical Forgiveness was published in May of 2020 in conjunction with Studio M Publications.
Copies of this book have been happily donated to the Women and Children’s Alliance (where they were included in graduation gift bags) and Faces of Hope in Boise, Idaho. Thank you to Carrie Prange, Carolyn Warner and the Southminster Presbyterian Women’s Association in Boise for help in this endeavor. Many copies can now be found in the library at the Willow Domestic Violence Center in Lawrence, Kansas, and some were used in small groups at the Idaho Women’s Prison.
This website, atinylight.com, was first published on September 1, 2020 in an attempt to explain and share the journey of making In Your Bones with the world and to spread more of the light and healing that it represents. Tiny Lights: Small Poems for Big Moments then followed in November of 2021 as another step in shining a light on healing and love.
I remember telling someone I had just retired and she said “Well what are you doing in Boise then?!?” And yet, although I didn’t have a name for it, I was already deep into an ancient tradition called stabilitas loci which is the practice of remaining in one place. Mystics of all kinds practiced this when they made a vow to not leave a place of retreat until they came to a certain realization or completed a spiritual task, much like the Buddha sitting under the bodhi tree waiting for enlightenment. I’m no Buddha, but I had a task to complete.
The year before my retirement in May of 2019 I began to gather together random poems from throughout my life and started to see how they told a story. It was a beautiful story, but it was a hard one. It was that same old story of vulnerable people held captive by a more powerful person’s ego. It was a story that ended with me trapped inside it because the one thing that makes that story work is a pact of silence. When I read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou I was transfixed by her ability to not speak to anyone but her brother for 5 straight years after enduring a series of traumas, but when she did speak, we all know how she sang out loud and clear. The world would be more empty had she not found her voice again. I’m no Maya Angelou, either, but I could relate to that bird and to her story. Too many stories end in silence. But silence is no substitute for the outpouring of a heart into words. It can be an earthquake.
It took years for me to understand why I had always wanted to be a nun, not even being Catholic. It was the realization that I needed some peace and quiet to collect my thoughts and process the trauma of a challenging life. But at some point in that process there was a need to talk, to share, to defy the pact. And it’s hard to be traveling when an eruption is happening.
And so I stayed in one place (Caffeina coffee shop, to be exact) and began the exhilarating and terrifying task of pulling the poems of my life into one story. My goals became 1) to select and revise a group of these poems into a storytelling arc, 2) to figure out how to have them made into a physical book, 3) to donate as many of these books as I could to places where they might help someone else trapped in silence. What I did not expect was how much sheer joy all of this would bring me (please read the Prologue). When you live in a cult of silence there is only one dream you dream and that is to be free to express yourself. It’s a greater dream than any travel destination or prize award could give. It’s the ultimate dream. It is enlightenment. It is loud, explosive, and jam packed with words, even before you can voice them all. And from that, In Your Bones: Poems of Radical Forgiveness came pouring out (see books).
But I was unprepared for people’s reactions to those words. While so many met them with understanding and encouragement, others met them with surprise, maybe even horror. These words brought comfort to some and disruption to others. Some worried for me not knowing how much I was celebrating, even singing. Others were challenged in their own ways maybe by having to think about what pacts they’d, perhaps unknowingly, agreed to. At first this made me want to try and defend this little book, or at least try to keep folks from pitying me. In the end I’ve had to return to just exactly why I wrote it. It was my intent to show a world that will always know gaslighting, oppression, and heartache how a heart lying dormant for decades can still erupt into something messy but totally and joyfully cleansing at the same time. Sometimes you have to stay in one place for all that to happen. Thanks to 2020, for being the year of my finally being able to make it all so…
You can find me at “A Tiny Light” (My Facebook Page).
