From a Healing Soul

I met Doreen in Milwaukee when I was looking for an alternative to Western medicine several years back after months of various antibiotics for a severe bronchial infection. I was grateful then as I am now for her eternal wisdom - and yes, my body healed and has not needed antiobiotics since that time.


From Doreen:

I was daydreaming as I stood in the 45 minute long Early Voting line in Orlando, Florida USA a week and a half before Election Day, grateful for the ease of registering in this state of my new residence, for the swiftness of early voting, and for the phenomenal organization of the Obama campaign. Still, I had some cynicism about the last election, the irony of me now casting the most important vote of my lifetime in Florida of all states, and hoping my vote would honestly count this time). I imagined as I quietly hummed to Leya swaying on my hip as everyone around me seemed earnestly somber, that an excited exit interviewer would approach me as I was leaving and say, “Who’d you vote for, can I ask?” And me smiling and replying, “I was a single mother from age 22-30 after putting myself through college and starting my own business; now, that daughter is 18 and in her first year of college. I was off work for three full years with a medical disability a decade ago, have spent some years of my life with six figure incomes, and some years with zero. I am now newly married to a 63 year old retiree (who won a Social Democracy party Senatorial race in Portugal in 1976 helping overthrow the Fascist government there, before he decided to immigrate to the U.S. instead). And this beautiful 9 month old on my hip is our new daughter together. Who do you think I’m voting for?

But more important than all of those reasons, it was a day and an event of unmatched spiritual, political and emotional proportions in my life as an American. I was writing a letter to my eldest daughter last week trying to explain to her the significance of this election, and I had to borrow the words of Caroline Kennedy, quoted in Change We Can Believe In: Barack Obama’s Plan to Renew America’s Promise: All my life, people have told me that my father changed their lives, that they got involved in public service or politics because he asked them to. I have never had a President who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But I believe Barack Obama could be that President -- a President who reminds us that we all have something to contribute to this country that has given us so much”.

I was born in March 1968. Somehow I’ve always felt the aftermath of the assassinations that preceded my birth. I still feel the anxiety and injustice of the racial riots that drove my grandmother from her home in Milwaukee, with snipers on her house’s rooftop and army tanks driving toward each other down her street as she barreled past them to escape to our cottage up north, that year of my birth. I’ve always longed for the political activism and hopes for peace and unity the songs and sentiments of the 60’s still echoed in my early environment. I have often said I feel that I was born in the wrong place and time. Maybe a few years too late, maybe entirely on the wrong continent. Because I have never for a second in my life felt American. America from 1968 to 2008 has been a time of confusion, mostly. If looked at as a timeline of its own, the period of my lifetime so far has been an end, to a Beginning. Finally! I told my daughter as I urged her to vote, “This is the first time in my lifetime I have been able to vote FOR a candidate instead of against one”. It’s about damn time!

I watch Barack Obama in his full fuel and balanced energy, and I say “This is not a man whose ego or mind is driving him to sustain all of this: this is a man living his life’s purpose, this is what he was born to do, and he’s remained humble enough to be the vessel to let all of this flow through him, it’s not him doing it, he’s just accepted it and he has lots of Help”. To some, that may sound religious in some way. But to me, it resonates with the black american I heard interviewed yesterday, someone who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr, who said, “the announcement of this presidency was the most spiritual experience I’ve had in my life”. It is so much bigger than one black man winning the American ballot.

It is difficult for me not to get impatient, and even a little angry, at how much emphasis there has been the past two days on Barack Obama’s blackness. It helps me realize how oblivious I am to what it means to grow up according to societal rules that make one oppressed. I have complete impatience and disregard for divisiveness of race, culture, age or socioeconomic status. I have often said, “If I am prejudiced against anyone or anything, it would be white America more than anything else”. That is the internal confusion that has ruled my life as an American from 1968 - 2008. I lived forty years not feeling patriotism even for a second. Even as a young child, Independence Day seemed not quite true to me, I experienced anger and feelings of injustice or hypocrisy by nature more so than anything else when looking at our national flag or hearing the national anthem. My parents were patriotic, my upbringing was too, but somehow I was never able to buy into it. From 1968 - 2008, there were not enough cultural events in favor of hope and peace and unity, and far too many that confused me and disheartened what I innately always felt America should and could be.

Today, I finally know why I was born an American in 1968. The hope I always longed for and knew should be our birthright as Americans has finally been reborn. For the first time in my life, I believe our new President and Vice-President are men of honor, “normal” people, moral, humane, honest and pure of heart. I believe that many of us who are American citizens have worked hard in our own lives and our own evolution to build momentum leading up to this as our collective effort. I believe that globally and beyond, the spirit of revolution and evolution are allowing this renewed sense of unity and purpose, of hope and equality, of a more peaceful and prosperous future for all. I now believe that my 18 year old daughter and my 9 month old daughter have a chance at futures that we are now finally starting to help more than we have hurt. For the first time in the history of my life, I can say I am proud to be an American. I didn’t think it was possible. I didn’t think that would ever change. But now I understand personally the sentiment of America’s existence, and for the first time in my lifetime I believe this country can truly be what it has sought to be since its founding.