I'm reading a wonderful book by Terry Tempest Williams called When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice. It's a book of reflections by the author after her mother had, in a long tradition of Mormon women, willed her daughter all of her journals when she died. When the author opened them, she found each and every one blank. When Women Were Birds is the author's reflection on all the myriad of possibilities those empty journals might say and mean about her mother's voice. A few passages in this book remind me of all of you:
'The stars are our ancestors,' write Mary Evelyn Tucker and Brian Swimme in The Journey of the Universe. 'Out of them, everything comes forth...For stars, creativity depends on maintaining a state of disequilibrium...It is the dynamic tension between gravity and fusion...outward expansion and contraction...Stars are wombs of immense creativity.
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Conversation is the vehicle for change. We test our ideas. We hear our own voice in concert with one another. And inside those pauses of listening, we approach new territories of thought. A good argument, call it a discussion, frees us. Words fly out of our mouths like threatened birds. Once released, they may never return. If they do, they have chosen a home and the bird-words are calmed into an ars poetic. The [members of] my family didn't always agree, but it was in their company I felt inspired and safe.
Thanks to all of you for being that family of safety and inspiration. I can't wait to see what ideas we test, what new territories of thought we explore this year together.
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