“The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.”
― Maya Angelou
I just got to my home, after presenting at an academic conference for a few days. The last talk that I gave for the weekend was called “My Soul is a Witness: Sitting in the Clearing with Black Disabled Bodies.” In that lecture, I offered the fictional Clearing space that Toni Morrison crafted in her novel Beloved. If you have been following me for any amount of time you know how pivotal this Clearing space for me. This place deep in the woods where the character Baby Suggs, holy invites Black children, women, and men to come and release their burdens. She invites them to laugh and to weep. To dance unashamedly. I have so much to say about this place, but for today’s restful musing, I want to talk about her words of love. She offers the gift of her great big heart and soothes their worries as she invites them to love and be loved. How healing.1
“When warm weather came, Baby Suggs, holy, followed by every black man, woman, and child who could make it through, took her great heart to the Clearing--a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what at the end of the path known only to deer and whoever cleared the land in the first place. In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees.
After situating herself on a huge flat-sided rock, Baby Suggs bowed her head and prayed silently. The company watched her from the trees. They knew she was ready when she put her stick down. Then she shouted, 'Let the children come!' and they ran from the trees toward her.
Let your mothers hear you laugh,' she told them, and the woods rang. The adults looked on and could not help smiling.
Then 'Let the grown men come,' she shouted. They stepped out one by one from among the ringing trees.
Let your wives and your children see you dance,' she told them, and groundlife shuddered under their feet.
Finally she called the women to her. 'Cry,' she told them. 'For the living and the dead. Just cry.' And without covering their eyes the women let loose.
It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath. In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart.
She did not tell them to clean up their lives or go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure.
She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.
Here,' she said, 'in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard...” Toni Morrison
I believe love motivated Baby Suggs to go to the Clearing and give these words of life. And. I wonder what Clearing spaces we can create for those we love and those we come across daily? I wonder what words of life our loved ones desperately need? Sometimes, we allow ourselves to move from thing to thing without the reality of our finitude. The truth is that we have a sparing amount of breaths in this life. My sincere desire is that I use them wisely and appropriately. I don’t want to hold back on offering words of comfort. I want to be generous in creating a Clearing for others, even as I create one for myself.
This week.
Today.
Let us hear your words of love.
It was a beautiful time indeed to lecture from the place of the Clearing. As I read through the scene, I invited the audience to close their eyes and allow their imagination to take them to the Clearing. I watched as people took deep breaths, some cried, and others seem instantly lifted.
Robert, I love Morrison’s Beloved but haven’t read it for a quite a while. The idea of the Clearing is so beautiful. As a spiritual companion/director, I create space for people to be. When I do retreat work or workshops, my goal is the same. Even my Airbnb space Sojourner House (yes, a nod to Sojourner Truth) was created as a welcoming space for travelers to feel at home. As I’ve gotten older, Ive realized that one of the reasons I have been compelled to create these spaces is because I did not have such spaces for a good portion of my life. I couldn’t be. I couldn’t even really exist in my own right. I’m grateful to have a sense of self now and a way to be. I so appreciate your work here around both of those things and so much more.
I love that the people waited among the trees until she signaled she was ready to receive them. They respected her space and timing. Powerful. 🤲