Refuge

Almost four years ago I encountered Terry Tempest Williams' writing in a memoir about her mother's death: When Women Were Birds, Fifty-Four Variations on Voice. When I put the book down, I wrote to her and thanked her.  I also told her my story of leaving the LDS church. Her meditations on being a woman in that world, on birds, on wildlife, on family, was a turning point I will always be thankful for.

This fall I visited the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, which she wrote about in her book Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. A marsh in a desert, around a great inland sea.  A great expanse of sky along the granite folds and ridges of the Wasatch range.   How do you ever forget such a landscape?  I never have.

I have learned that part of healing from trauma is reconnecting with your body.  Part of reconnecting for me has meant allowing my body to be in the place where everything once fell apart. Hearing the voices and seeing the deep blue eyes of my family members that lived through the trauma with me, and have put together the pieces in their own lives as much as they could.  I am convinced that trying to forget about pain is a form of disconnection with oneself, like a pipe break that spills beneath the soil and prevents anything from growing. I am not saying that dwelling on the past is advisable, but that there is a healthy kind of remembering, the kind that walks on an old trail and is willing and able to look around in a way that invites all that has changed to coexist with the pain. A meditation of sorts.

I once moved to Utah, bright eyed and hopeful in a story of eternity that glowed like the temple in the night sky out my window.  I dreamt of temple marriage, of being filled with god's pure love, and of waking up without shame.  I believed in heaven and angels and in visions and personal revelation.  And while I believed all these things I learned what poison tasted like, and my body learned how it took over, and I learned that my spiritual home was neither safe, nor were the men who watched all the doors. I learned my voice would never be mine in the world I inherited, and when I left I was gasping for air more than I was having any great revelations. I had to leave.

If you ever wonder if you are free in a relationship or within your religion, try to leave.  See what they do, listen to what they say or do not say. I have read volumes in the space of their silence.  My voice has grown in the hollows of the church's eyes.  I have learned what love is in exile, when the only one left to love me was myself.  I have learned to take their grimy teachings off my body, and to to find refuge in spaces they cannot see or control.

The mormon church is led by men with more power than they should have, who are corrupt and weak, and do not know the Jesus of whom they speak.  They believe they are filled with prophecy and benevolence, and their words are hollowed out by hatred and fear.  They cannot imagine a world where women are brave, powerful, and loud.  They haven't seen the visions I have, all the women they have made invisible.  I hear their wings, I see them soaring everywhere.

In Solidarity

Hard to put into words how beautiful it is to watch Tyler Glenn look the God of the LDS church in the eye and say he feels betrayed.  His new album, Excommunication, is worth listening to from beginning to end.  It brings up so many shared experiences for me and I imagine, many others.

Last lines of a great poem

...

Where then will I find the country
where women never wrong women
where we will sit knee to knee
finally listening
to the whole
naked truth
of our lives?

— Dorothy Allison,
The Women Who Hate ME. Poetry 1980-1990, Ithaca, NY, Firebrand, 1991

Ijeoma Umebinyguo

Linda Sillitoe

When I read Linda Sillitoe, I realize, I am not the first one to see the bigotry, the need for control, the fear of true feminine power in the words and actions of the mormon prophets, in the patriarchy, in their sky high and sacred temples where members are taught to whisper and be pure.  Bird shit is white on the outside but in the middle it is greasy and grimy like crude oil, and I believe the winged creatures have perfect aim, like so many leaders at the top, evading responsibility. I am among the few who know what the fall is like from their tower, and also to look up to realize the shattering of my worldview was actually a gift. 

The following poem was Linda Sillitoe's, written to her friend Lavina Fielding Anderson, who was fired from the staff of a famous and widely read church magazine, Ensign.  She had the audacity to provide the manuscript of a talk that had been stricken from that year's general conference, to another publication. If you are unfamiliar with mormon culture, it is important to understand that the dissemination of information must be done through the proper channels, through priesthood authority, not some woman who just wants to write it as it is. I have learned from the experience of feeling exiled, that on the outside, the landscapes become endless, your mind learns to shape shift as it slowly begins to recognize that reality was there all the time, and that no one can ever really silence you, no matter how hard they try.  

One by one
they throw us from the tower. 
And we spread our wings 
and fly. 

Rebecca Solnit

“The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood.”

Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics