I Will Not Be Quiet

I, like so many, am outraged by the article in Rolling Stone about the University of Virginia and the culture of sexual violence that exists "on grounds" and that is not adequately addressed by the university administration. If you haven't read it, it's a very difficult but important read. You can find it here. Sadly, it is a problem that exists on many college campuses. It's time to raise our voices. 

I Will Not Be Quiet 

Lynda Allen

I will not be quiet.

I will keep shouting,

“They are all our daughters.”

Every one.

Each girl that is raped on a college campus in Virginia,

or on a bus in India,

or as an act of war in Africa,

or in her home by a relative,

or by a professional athlete,

or by a teacher,

or by a celebrity.

Every one of them,

They are all our daughters.

Shaking our heads and being angry will not suffice.

I will not be quiet.

My voice will be raised in opposition.

My voice will be raised for safety.

My voice will be raised for justice.

My voice will be raised for respect.

My voice will be raised for education.

My voice will be raised for solidarity.

My voice will be raised for peace.

But make no mistake,

My voice will be raised.

I will not be quiet to protect your reputation.

I will not be quiet to protect your good name.

I will not be quiet while you sweep it under the rug.

I will not be quiet while you look the other way.

When you look the other way, you will find me standing there.

When you pick up your broom, I will take away the rug.

When you look to your reputation, I will hold up a mirror.

When you speak your good name, I will speak truth.

I will not be quiet.

Our daughters deserve better.

And they are all our daughters.

Loss and Holy Ground

I will warn you that these two pieces are sad, and if heaven forbid, you have lost a child, you might want to think twice about reading them. Thankfully, I have not had to endure that pain. However, recently a student at a nearby university was abducted and killed. It hit close to home for me and I struggled with a lot of different emotions in the weeks following her disappearance and the subsequent discovery of her. The strongest emotions I felt were for the young lady's parents. It is through my empathy for them that I was able to open my heart to these words. I admit I resisted for a while for obvious reasons, but my heart would not be still until I allowed the words to move. What struck me, which you will see in the writings, is when I heard that her parents went to the site where they found her. I was so moved and saddened by that. My heart still aches for their unimaginable loss. 

The first piece is sort of stream of consciousness as I was opening to empathy and feeling the loss, pain, anger and confusion of any parent moving through this kind of loss and so it alternates between he and she. The second grew out of the first and has a more organized flow. They are offered with much love, sympathy and compassion. 

Would it help to stand where she stood? Would it help to walk the same path that he walked? I have no way of knowing, I have no frame of reference for this. There was no preparation I could have been given to imagine what her last breath might have been like. There is no one who could train me to deal with the haunting of the words, “Was she scared? Or did it hurt?” If only there was some type of surgery that could be done to extract the words, “What if,” from my mind so they wouldn’t repeat over and over until the end of my own days. My own days, which should have come to their natural end long before his. He should’ve been standing beside my grave talking about what a long and full life I had. Now no one will be able to do that, because my life is no longer full. There is an empty place that will always remain vacant. Yes, there will be love and laughter again, life will continue with sunrises and sunsets, or so they say, but it will always be just a little bit different. There will always be a slightly different tune to the harmony of my universe because her laughter won’t accompany my own. I don’t know what to do with all the comfort that I want to offer her that will go ever unoffered. I can’t offer it to myself. How could I live with that, knowing he had none? If I could at least have been there to put my arms around her, that might have been enough. Probably not, but surely it would be better than this nothingness, this inadequacy, this burning anger because I was not there, because I could not save her, because there was and is nothing I can do to reverse it, to ease it, to erase it, to protect him. Nothing. And strangely, that is what I feel. Who knew that if you mixed intense sorrow, anger, fear, loss, heartbreak and despair, you would get nothing? A strange recipe indeed, with a bitter after taste. If I could taste, that is. There doesn’t seem to be much point in flavor or pleasure. They tell me there will be one day. But how can there be when I would feel such guilt at ever experiencing joy or pleasure again? If she cannot, then why should I be able to? I have given up raging about it because I have no one to rage against and even when I did it provided no relief, no resolve, nothing. They tell me it will fade. They tell me he would want me to go on living. But I’m so afraid to. I’m terrified to live if living means letting go. We had so little time to share, just the blink of an eye really. It’s not fair. We deserved more. We were going to have more. We need more time. I can’t breathe. The awful irony is that now each minute seems a year. Each week an eternity. How the days can drag so glacially on now, I have no idea. If only I could go back. How very many things I would do differently. If only. That has become my phrase of choice, my mantra. I think it hundreds of times a day, a minute probably, without consciously doing it. It seems to come unbidden from the stratosphere, drifting down like millions of snowflakes; if only, if only, if only. I stand silently within the blizzard of if onlys. I catch a few of them on my tongue and so give them voice, while millions of others drift quietly to the corners of my mind, creating drifts here and there for me to plow through later. I sometimes wish for a snow blower to come through in my dreams and blast them all away. I simultaneously wonder if I will ever fall asleep again without seeing her face and then fear that I will and what that will mean when I do, if I do. If you can really call it sleep. Mostly I toss and turn until I pass out from exhaustion and then wake up with a start at the slightest sound. I can’t tell anyone any of this. They seem to think work will get me through this, will take my mind off it. What they don’t know is that I don’t want to take my mind off it, off her. They say time heals all wounds. But it’s not true. It won’t heal his. I want to scream in the face of their platitudes, yet I know they are trying to offer comfort however they can. They have no frame of reference either. No one ever taught them how to comfort a friend who is grieving the loss of a child. Let me tell you now, there is no comfort you can possibly offer. You are better off not trying. Instead, let your quiet presence be what you offer. It will be enough to have company through the long, blinding blizzard. 

Holy Ground
Lynda Allen

To the human eye, it seems just a lonely patch of land,

deserted and quiet.
A few animals pass by and the plants grow in peace.
I wonder if any of them were witness to it,
if I would even want to know what they saw if they could tell me.

To my eye, this lonely spot

is sacred, holy ground.
Not because a miracle happened here,
but because it did not.
I hadn’t known that the absence of a miracle
could create the holy.
I wish with all that I am
that I had not learned that particular lesson,
in this particular way.
I hope one day to have the courage
to believe in miracles again.
But today I do not.

Today I walk in silence
listening for echoes
and finding only loss.

How do I stand here where they found her,
and still go on breathing?
Too many unanswerable questions scream out
in my far from silent mind.

So I turn my attention to this place.
Somehow, despite what happened here,
it is able to hold the sacredness,
express the fragility,
witness the loss and the pain.
If only I could learn from it, how to hold all those things,
and still give forth life, beauty, light.

Instead I do the only thing I can do in this moment,
I sit on a rock and weep.
I weep as if weeping is the only thing I have ever known.
I weep every tear of joy or pain that would have been offered
throughout her life, that I will now never get to offer.
I weep for every first and last never to be lived.
I weep for each breath lost, every idea unborn, every laugh not heard,
every heartbeat not felt.

I weep without ceasing,
with only this place as my witness.
My tears fall upon the quiet earth 
in search of a miracle.

I Love You

I love you.
What if, I love you, was all we could say?

What if our tongues were bound by a spell that would only allow us to speak those three words?
And we had to mean them to be able to speak them.

How many of us would go through life
silently?

How many of us would lose our voices and have to learn to speak all over again?

What would our days be like if all we heard was, I love you,
and in hearing those words, we knew the sentiment was true?

I love you.

Energy Travels

It is appropriate that as I sit here writing, I’m listening to the wind blowing outside. For a while now I have been thinking about storms and energy. Then the other night we had some powerful thunderstorms that brought the thoughts back to me.

We were sitting on our porch watching and listening to the storm. The lightning flashed and we counted; one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand and on.

I don’t know how accurate that measurement system is for judging the distance of a thunderstorm but it makes me think. A thunderstorm can be miles away and still I can see the flashes of light. That light, though miles away, lights up the sky where I sit watching. Even though the clap of thunder originates miles away, still that sound travels all the way to my waiting ears where I react to it.

Then as the storm gets closer, my experience of the light and the sound intensifies. Later that night with a storm directly overhead the streaks of lightning that lit up the sky made me shut my eyes because of the brightness and the explosive sound of the thunder directly overhead made us all jump and made our hearts beat faster!

Once in my life I saw lightning strike a palm tree across the street from where I stood. It was like experiencing an explosion. There was a huge percussion and the palm tree burst into flame. It was frightening to witness the power of the storm and its potential for destruction from that close and from an exposed spot under a metal canopy at a gas station! Not only could I see and hear the lightning, but at that point you could also feel the electricity in the air.

As I have been pondering all this I have been looking at it from the perspective of energy. The energy of the storm can be seen and heard and felt, as the windows rattle, from miles away and what you see, hear and feel intensifies the closer you are to the storm. Or from the larger perspective, the energy of the sun can be felt from millions of miles away and can even burn your skin depending on how close we are too it at any given moment.

What all this made me wonder about is the energy of human emotions and how they touch our lives.

I’m sure we have all experienced the energy of someone’s anger. Have you seen a child cringe in the face of someone’s anger, as if shrinking from the clap of thunder or flash of lightning? Have you witnessed a fight from a distance but still could feel the intensity of emotion? As your own storm of emotions has risen have you seen how it impacts those around you?

We have all seen the power of the storm and we have all seen the power of anger. What then about the power of love? That’s what all this set me to wondering about. What if I allow the energy of love within me to expand and grow in intensity? How far out would that love reach? Is there no limit to how far it can travel, to how many hearts it could touch? What if the source of love within me could be seen for miles, like a flash of lightning? What if the sound of unconditional love was loud enough to reach your ears in the next town or to be heard across the universe?

The natural world is such a wonderful and clear teacher for me. As so aptly demonstrated by the storms I have been witnessing, energy travels. And with just a glimpse of our sun after a storm I was reminded that energy can travel across great distances. All of this has left me with the question; knowing its ability to travel, what energy am I allowing to travel from me? And better yet, what will I do with this incredible opportunity and responsibility that being alive offers me?

Only Love Can Do That

In this country and in our world today, it can be so easy to become frustrated and angry by what I see and hear. It’s a simple thing to then give in to that frustration and so let it become the lens I see the world through, which in turn, in my opinion, only adds to the anger and frustration in the world.  When I read about or see the way members of our human family treat each other, it’s easy to think that is how everyone treats each other. When the majority of what is reported on in the media is sensationalized (hell, even weather.com  has all sorts of articles about tragedy as if that is all nature produces) and focused upon the negative it can be difficult to remember that I can change the filter on the lens I look through.

I could easily give in to the frustration and despair that there is nothing I can do to change the world around me, and believe me, I have days like that. On those days especially, I have to consciously remind myself that even though it’s not reported in the news, every day, every moment there are people all around the world working to bring peace, treating each other with kindness, creating their world from love. Some are working in big ways like the Dalai Lama or the Elders group and some are working in small ways in their own lives with small acts of love. I remind myself that those small acts of love make ripples. That love moves out into the world and touches others, one person at a time. That’s what I remind myself of, that a small act of love that touches one heart actually touches many hearts. The love that I offer one person, may then remind them and so they offer that love and kindness to another, who then offers love and kindness to another, until one day all those ripples of love reaching out actually meet up as they extend out all over the world and the world is awash in love.

The trick is to not just offer it to those I love, those I find it easy to offer love to, but also to offer it to strangers or to those I have challenges with; to everyone equally. I’m sure I will have days when it’s easier than others, but on those days I will remind myself of the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” Only love can do that. We witnessed what love could do through the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. and countless others who chose love in the face of violence and so changed this country. Only love can do that.


Yesterday, a young man in front of me in line at a store jumped out of line to put an item back and to pick up something else. When he came back he headed toward the end of the line. I smiled at him and said, “Do you want to jump back in where you were?” He looked surprised and grateful and stepped up to the counter. I don’t know what that small act of love and kindness did for him in that moment. Maybe all it did was let him feel seen for a moment, let him feel kindness, let him feel community, let him feel cared for. Only love can do that.  

That is where I will begin. I will remind myself that only love can do that, that it begins with one simple act of love.

For Our Daughters in Nigeria

I can’t reduce it to a meme or a hashtag. I understand the intent behind it and it’s well intended but I simply can’t. They are human beings, they are someone’s daughters and sisters, they are my daughters, they are your sisters. They were taken, they are being sold, they are being raped, they are being married against their will. Why? Because they wanted to learn, because they wanted to live their potential not hide their light. They are being used as pawns in a global game of fear and the inhumanity of that appalls me and I can’t reduce it to a catchy phrase. No hashtag can contain their pain or the loss their families feel. The only thing that can contain it is the outstretched arms of our love. The only thing that can reach them now is our global, resounding no. Not this time, not our girls, not our family, not our world.

We will not be held hostage by your hate. We will meet your forces with the forces of love. We will meet your fear with forgiveness.

We can do this because we know you are also part of our family, a part we don’t want to look at, or own. But it is time for our family to come together as one and heal. To call back the ones who have strayed into darkness. To surround them not with the arms of war, but with the open arms of love, to surround them with the light of that love so that there is no darkness to hide in, so that the truth is illuminated.

We are one. They are our daughters. Release them. Then let us all heal together in the light.

Original Self

I haven't posted this writing since 2009. It feels like it is time to share it again, today, on Good Friday. 

At this point in my life I don't practice any one religion. I do my best to practice the tradition of love and peace that is found in all the worlds religions. I come from a Catholic upbringing. One of the things that never made sense to me in the Christian tradition was the idea of original sin. If we are made in the likeness of God, if we are children of God, how then is it possible that we are somehow born unclean? That didn't make sense to me and still doesn't. I certainly can see that as we grow we learn all sorts of behaviors and ways of treating each other that stray from the Divine. However, for me, those are things we learn not things we are born with. These are things I ponder.

Then one day when I was sitting by the river, the following writing flowed through me. Original self is an idea that made much more sense to me than original sin. I share it here with love and respect and gratitude for the powerful teachings and example of love that Jesus provided. 


Jesus did not die for original sin, Jesus died for original self. He did not die to cleanse us of some imagined sin that we are born into, but died for the original self that we are born into and quickly forget. He died for a remembering. He died to show us what the original self looks like. It is risen, and glorious and eternal. It is faith and light and truth. We are not born into darkness but into light. Not into sin but into self. Our divine God self. That was Jesus’ greatest lesson. He taught of our original God self, our inherent connection to the divine. We are made of the same thing that God is made of, we are divine, we are divinity, just as Jesus was. He hung there on the cross in demonstration of self not in cleansing of sin. Hate and fear could have no power over him in his original form; they could not touch his divine heart. He revealed to us the divine heart. One that is of light and love, one that guides to truth and is eternal. There is no other lesson. The divine lies within each heart. That divinity is who you are, your true original self. That is who you were born to be. That is who can emerge from the human self if you allow it. Then the Divine Heart brings the human heart with it on the journey. They work in unison for joy. Joy is the celebration of the Divine and the Divine within. Let the Divine Heart lead you as it led Jesus, with joy always in his eye and the eternal Divine always in his heart. Live your original self.