A poem to remind myself to embrace sleep and the dark
By Sherein Bansal
A beam clashes
The window rings. Loud.
“Still trying to get in?”
Dark blanket smiles
It slithers in slowly
My small room greys
The loud muffles
The sky orange cuts out
One ray sticks out
From the window pane
But it slowly fades
Darkness sets in
Finally.
A blackberry night
Sleep negates light
Trauma-rise: the healing dream train
By Juliette Grossmann
Healing Sirens
By Marie-Michèle Larivée
As I walk back to my house on a cold autumn day, I see a fireman truck and it’s sirens connect me back to a moment of healing. A couple of years ago, fire trucks, police cars and ambulances had to change their sirens types to make it more soft. They used the power of music and memory to create this space for its citizens, a space of healing, healing after trauma from a traumatic event involving these professionals.
Like a chant around the city those melodies are now music we can all connect and heal to. There is no one power or one reconciliation path, individuals can listen and reflect on the passage of emergency response staff.
Fiery muttons
By Daniel Kaplan
Coldly hot, fierce muttons
and sweet saurians -
each with their mortal compasses
pointing us towards their North
while we point them towards ours:
A recipe for just wars,
humane massacres,
compassionate oppression…
So perhaps,
decompass:
Let No North Be Everyone’s North;
compashuffle:
who cares whose North this is?
compashare:
light up as many North as there are people,
ending up with a wholly lit planet
(sorry for those who wished to sleep).
Beyond the Binary of Trauma
By Ashi Arora
Often, we understand ourselves as “victims” to generational & systemic trauma, which then prevents us from seeing a way to heal cycles of trauma, tap into the wisdom of our ancestors and land, and build joy, abundance, resilience into our lives and communities. We are contending with navigating structural violence and racism, systems built upon colonization and imperialism, the pathologization of the impact of oppression and violence on our health, capitalism, surveillance & control of the bodies of people with uteruses, and more. Through being in community and tapping into ancestral wisdom, we can hold space for the rage and lack of resonance we may feel with how we exist in our realities, build resistance through relating to each other, and recognize and embrace each other’s wisdom and power. This then allows for the alchemy of that trauma into joy and collective power, allowing us to re-imagine and build communities of care as ancestors of generations to come. When the current reality and world we live in does not resonate with us, that does not make it us versus them. We are not victims to our reality, but rather, alchemists, creators, healers, and space holders.
Ashi, reiki healer, womb keeper, alchemist & radical imaginator, researcher & advocate
ashi.arora321@gmail.com
By Saloni Kalambe
Green Grace : as I absorb these words..I see trees and nature and grass and how soft it is. And is that not a space without violence? I ask myself.
That space could either be vacuum; where nothing exists and everything’s destroyed or it’s a forest; where co-existence isn’t an effort and life flows.
By Aïssa Nem
Songs of a chosen silence. I can’t write. I will do it tomorrow. I might dance once, with colors that I thought we knew.