To love you...

I will build
statues to my anger
monuments of rage
tumultuous wrath,
stone pillared totems
in remembrance
of everything
I had to surrender
to love you...

Today's Spiritual Homework: Forgiveness, letting go, loving even when you don't want to. I'm trying, but there is no try, only do and I find myself at a crossroads. Growing up black in America,especially growing up me in America, a 4th generation outspoken black feminist woman with too much education for her own good, is no easy feat. I still have so far to grow. Maybe I've read to much or lived too much. Maybe I've taken it all too personally, the history, my understanding of when and where I enter, but here I am at this moment in time where I am being called to give up something, something I should be happy to get rid of, something that lives with me always. My challenge is to forgive, to release, to let go and let scars be healed,let myself be made whole, but I don't know how and even as my anger is all consuming and destructive, it is mine, a familiar companion on my life journey. Without it, I don't know who I'll be.

I have a history, a genetic make up and a corresponding story about how I became this black American, and beyond the broader script I have a very personal relationship to my identity. When some racist asshole makes a comment to me, I don't want to forgive him. I want to hate him. I don't want to be the bigger person. And yes, it's fucking personal. How can it not be? But I also know it poisons me and that holding onto pain is why black Americans have higher rates of hyper tension, diabetes, and heart disease than anyone else. We are literally dying from all the hatred we absorb,so logically, intellectually, I know that it is in my best interest to learn how to do this thing, to learn to let it go. But there is some part of me that doesn't want to. Is that crazy?

Today I choose the other part of me...perhaps equally crazy, but the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting something different. I'm ready for something new. I'm ready to move on now.