I Have A Dream!

As Americans, we celebrate Martin Luther King Day each year. A day to honor, not only Martin Luther King Jr., but to honor his commitment to stand for justice, to have his voice heard, to bring hope and light to a people who were in darkness. Mr. King fought his battles to the death, in a non-violent manner, to end segregation and racial discrimination. He was assassinated for standing up and doing so. This year, the day holds even more meaning for me.

This past year I've been victimized, abused, cheated, lied to, taken advantage of, and discriminated against. I've seen first hand what it is like to feel completely helpless against other people, their actions, ideals, and beliefs. I've felt the frustration and pain of feeling pressed against a wall against my will (figuratively speaking) and I've witnessed abuse at it ugliest, abuse of the soul and mind.

And what I've learned, among other things, is non-resistance is powerful. That hate can't take the heat of love.

That forgiveness brings peace to one's soul.

And that nothing lasts forever.

The old cliché' "We've Come A Long Way Baby," may be true, however in many ways we are still standing, over forty years later, in the same darkness that Martin Luther King Jr. was trying to shine a light on. He was an incredible man, an incredible change agent for social justice.

If you haven't ever read it, or if it has been awhile since you have, I recommend reading, "I Have a Dream."

I will include in this post a video of his famous speech.


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You likely will recognized that the changes he was asking for then, in 1963, are still problems we face today. Yes, we've come a long way in some areas, however I've also had the opportunity to watch my oldest daughter, Rachel, teach children who have been terribly abused. She works in a special school just for children who have been so abused they can't manage in life outside this confined, controlled environment. I've also had the opportunity to know those (personally) who work in urban middle schools, where they still see great segregation and poverty.

The difficulties these kids face everyday would be haunting for most of us. Life for them is one of survival. Even here in the mountains I call home I see the children in the public school system. Some of them… lots of them come to school hungry, dirty, sleepy, and scared. Their parents drug abuse, or mental/emotional problems have driven them to live in such a way that is unimaginable to most of us. Some live in cars, some on the streets, and most are just trying to make ends meet. They're doing what they need to do to provide for their families. For some students, school is the only place they will eat or feel safe that day. The playing ground is so very, very far from being equal.

Here are some of Dr. King's words, expressed over forty-four years ago in his "I Have a Dream" speech:

"Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.

Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children."

As I watched Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his speech, "I Have A Dream" I cried, again. Though I've seen it and read it for decades now it still touches my heart. Sadly much of what Mr. King fought for and died for has yet to become reality. But the hope remains… in me.

As we celebrate Dr. Kings birthday, let us not forget what he stood for, what he asked for, and what he died for, and do our part in each of our lives to bring his dream into reality. May we all begin today.

Change begins with me!
And the world wins!

Peace and love,

CiCi
© Cynthia Stewart is a literary agent, an international speaker, author, and promoter.




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REBECCA, BUMBLEBEES, AND BELIEF

Father’s Day is a wonderful day and a day of celebration for all who have father’s, or are fathers. For our family the day is a mixed bag of blessings complete with gratitude for having had wonderful father’s, both me and the children, and sad because they are no longer present in our lives, at least in a way we can touch or smell. Since the death of my husband and the father of my five children, I have spent a great deal of thought and energy to create for them a special day. One Father’s Day a few years back I spent the day with four of my five children and friends on a beautiful river outside of Nevada City, California. It was a gorgeous place deep in a gorge, trees reaching up toward the heavens and the calming sound of the river as it dipped and curved around the granite rock outcroppings. The river was clean and cool and filled with wonderful swimming holes much to the delight of my children (and me!)

I watched my youngest daughter as she attempted to swim, unaided, for the first time in her life. Rebecca tried over and over again to keep her little body above the water as she kicked her tiny legs and moved her arms as fast as she could. But time and time again she would stop as she became afraid that she might sink, or worse. After explaining to her that as she was swimming in water that came up to her chest and that she could put her feet down and stand up anytime she needed to, therefore she need not be afraid, her confidence level rose as she began to believe that she was safe and she began to experience more and more success until we had to literally pluck her, blue lips and all, from the water!

While watching my daughter in the river I was reminded once again how we limit our potential by our expectations and beliefs. We get out of life what we expect to get, what we believe is possible, what we think we deserve… and often those expectations and beliefs are the very things that are limiting our success, or our ability to really enjoy life.

When Rebecca thought of the possibility of sinking under the water, she allowed her fears and expectations to keep her from even trying to swim. After all, she wasn’t a fish! She had legs that were meant to walk on the firm surface of the earth, not fins that were mean to move around in the water… or so she believed. Until she changed her belief, she was unable to swim.

This reminds me of a story I once read about the bumblebee. Some time ago, aeronautical engineers studied the bumblebee. They measured its wing span, computed its body weight, scrutinized its oversize fuselage, and concluded that there was no rational reason why a bumblebee can take off or land safely.

See, the bumblebee doesn't know this. It doesn't know that its wingspan is too short, or that its fuselage is too heavy to sustain flight. So the bumblebee flies anyway.

I've got hundreds of true stories about people who have done amazing things because they didn't know they weren't supposed to be able to do them. And I know hundreds of stories about people who didn't do wonderful things because they had it in their heads that they couldn't.

You see, belief puts a lid on your potential. Your beliefs are what determine what you can do in this life. It's not your gender or your intelligence or your personal wealth or your parents or your age or your race or your looks or anything else.

So, if you change your beliefs about what is possible for you, you automatically change your performance to match. And when you change your beliefs and your performance, all sorts of wonderful surprises are in store for you. What can a bumblebee teach you about the relationship between your inner potential and your beliefs? Everything! So spread your wings and fly!

Anything is possible!

© Cynthia Stewart

Through Janie’s Eyes

Over 30 years ago we didn’t have ESPN, or MSBC, or cable TV and 24-hour news, though it wouldn’t have mattered much to me if we had. I didn’t watch TV; perhaps all those hours of cartoons during childhood made television news seem boring. Besides, I didn’t have time to sit still, much less in front of a box and even had I been so inclined, I doubt very much I’d watch whatever news was airing because it made my grandmother cry when she watched it—morning, noon, and night.

I was just hitting my teens, typically self-centered and somewhat detached from the ‘adult world’, I don’t remember what I even knew about war, about politics, about Vietnam… but I do remember when some of the boys started coming home, and I remember when some didn’t.

I remember the look of emptiness in their eyes… blank, vacant, as if they were absent from their bodies in some odd way. I remember the ones who returned in wheelchairs, dismembered bodies crammed awkwardly into uncomfortable and cumbersome contraptions into a world ill prepared for them, or them for it. I remember people staring… I remember I stared too. I remember being afraid, scared of something, yet I didn’t know what. But what I remember most was Jerry.

Jerry served in Vietnam. His sister, his twin Janie, was my friend. She was older than I was, had a job, and provided a safe haven of refuge for a somewhat wayward teenager like me who was fighting wars and battles of my own. It was really through Janie’s eyes that I saw Vietnam for the first time.

Growing up in Texas, the twins, Janie and Jerry, clung together and clawed their way through, and out, of the middle of a family of twelve and into the world side by side. Identical twins couldn’t have been closer than those two. They went to school together, played together, and fought a little too, yet held on to each other through the ups and downs of report cards and rejections, dates and disappointments, elation, divorce, illness, and even death. They were best friends.

As I remember it, from the first day I met Janie she talked about Jerry. Jerry this and Jerry that… you’d have thought she was talking about a new boyfriend or God, or anything besides just a plain ‘ole dumb brother, that is unless you looked into her eyes. Those cavernous blue eyes, echoing the words her mouth couldn’t utter, and the feelings she was unable to release—those dark daunting feelings—the kind that eat their way through you from the inside out. The kind that show up suddenly when a song comes on the radio that reminds you. The kind that rise up in the middle of a sleepless night when you feel too weak, too tired to hold them a moment longer and so you let out the fear, the rage, the unspeakable pain. Those are the stories Janie’s eyes told me when she talked about Jerry, and about Vietnam.

Afterwards she told me many other stories about Jerry. She showed me pictures of their childhood; two towheads turned brunette, plopped in the middle of a mud puddle back yard, white teeth peeping through mud covered heads—pictures of small faces behind gigantic pink ice-cream cones, pink dripping off their chins and down their t-shirts—pictures of the past. Memories anchored to feelings held on paper, and Janie’s attempt to preserve the past, clinging to it, almost as if to postpone the uncertainty of the future. Pictures of perfectly groomed children preparing for first communion. Pictures of birthdays, of holidays, of high-school graduation… two blonde heads with big smiles in the center of a mass of blue robes; pictures of college; and finally of Jerry’s farewell.

As that year passed Janie let out more and more of those dark feelings that wrenched her gut through the day and held her hostage in the dark hours of night. I remember the night she brought in the carved wooden box that sat on her dresser and held her precious mementos. It was a dark mahogany color, carved on the top and sides with roses. I watched her holding it with reverence, as if the contents were more precious than rubies. Her petite white hands carefully unwrapped envelopes postmarked from Vietnam, from places I’d never heard of before, from a world I didn’t know. Letters filled with words I didn’t understand… “Fires in the hole” or “Gooks in the wire”. She read those letters to me from Jerry, her twin, her brother, her best friend; words on paper that evoked a horror and repulsion in me I didn’t even know existed until then. And then she cried. I’d never seen anyone cry so hard, and for so long and in the years that followed I remembered I’d only seen her cry twice. That night was one of them, and when Jerry returned home three years later was the other.

The pain that followed I can’t speak of, it isn’t my story to tell, but anyone looking could read the tale in Janie’s eyes. Those blue eyes spoke volumes. They spoke of fear, anger, and of heart-crushing pain. They spoke to me when Janie wouldn’t… couldn’t… but they never again shed a tear. Something changed inside of Janie the day we met the plane and watched as Jerry came home. Many soldiers came home that day. We stood in absolute silence as the boys came off the plane. I couldn’t tell which one was Jerry. They all looked the same; caskets draped in red, white, and blue.

I remember afterwards leading Janie by the arm through the airport towards the car, gently pushing our way through other families who had come for their own reunion with their brothers, husbands, children, or fathers; families who were forever changed, altered in an indescribable way through their loss. I remember the melancholy that hung so heavy around me and in me, I could barely lift my feet to move through the throngs of people, women with faces still buried in their hands, red-faced men, and children clinging to the legs of their mother’s or siblings. Then I remember the shock that followed, and soon the repulsion, and finally the fear and anger that came as we exited the airport that day.

War protesters they called themselves. I didn’t understand then. I do understand now. I remember thinking, “Why were they screaming? Why were they here?” Waving homemade peace signs while at the same time inflicting acts of violence on these heart-broken families… screaming obscenities, waving fists in the air, spitting on the clothes, shoes, and even some faces of these grief-stricken people who, with heads bowed, made their way quietly through their sorrow to their cars. I don’t remember what happened next, but I do remember the look in Janie’s eyes…

That’s what I really know of Vietnam… the Vietnam I saw through Janie’s eyes.

In memory of Jerry C ~ August 1974
© CiCi Stewart ~ Written Winter 2000

Learning To Live My Life

Learning to Live my Life

As I re-read the words of a friend’s message, contemplating the relation to me and my own experience of learning to live my life, again the questions hovers just beyond the reaches of awareness, just outside the grasp of understanding. Almost as if to repeat the mantra of tragic occurrence, 'why' looms in front of the next impending thought, above the ceiling of reason that seems so very low at times such as these, behind the reservoir of familiar and comfortable thinking from which the mind draws its normal sense of solace. Not knowing anything about the mystery of God's will or the sometimes misery that accompanies the playing out of the human drama, I can only share my profound sense of hope.

In sifting through the fragments of my own memory, the recollections of strange turns-of-event and the unexpected twists in the roadway, I regret that I have little wisdom to offer myself, and to others for that matter, that would suffice to mitigate the pain and difficulty that is so much a part of human life, its endings and its many false hopes. And although choice affects a considerable part of one's perceptions of these things, life is still difficult at those points of departure or radical change that are so inescapable. The only illumination that I have found on the horizon seems to come in the form of acknowledging that the entire sequence of living is a path; one that must be endured and shouldered, but one with its own offerings as well.

I have conceded that there is no time limit placed on getting “it”, no schedule on the arrival to any zone of eureka, however temporal it may be. I think that the process lasts the entire duration of our stay here and thus, perhaps, there is no time frame for understanding, in spite of the tricks played on us by our perceptions. Maybe it is that we are asked to endure a full lifetime of learning, repeatedly engaging the lessons, the mysteries, the rhythms and the patterns of the human drama, until the time comes when we are called elsewhere. Realizing that life is a gift in spite of the occasional misery, I simply pray for sustenance, for endurance, enlightenment, and for the opportunity to grow within, with patience and some measure of understanding.

I don't know if I will ever get there, if there indeed is a 'there' in human life, but I continue to welcome faith, for myself and for all others for whom the word has meaning.

Life of the present has taken me on a journey of ups and downs so far and so high I’ve yet to catch my breath before another wave hits. Truly, if anything, I’ve learned I am certainly not in charge and the best I can do from day to day is to seek for His continued direction and the strength to carry out His will for me. I am sure that there is a very meaningful and profound correspondence to it all -- perhaps something that is known in depth, at the present time anyway, only to God above.

I have been searching for words to effectively describe the changes that I have experienced these past few months, the shifts in awareness, emphasis, perception and detailed focus that is coming from somewhere beyond or somewhere deep inside. It feels as though there is a woeful deficit in not only my understanding of this energy, but in my ability to describe it in the spoken or written word. I admit that this missive will probably be only the first of many attempts to unfold the understanding and, in turn, describe it in words that make any sense at all -- simply because I am learning as I write, as I think, and as I take each daily turn that emerges moment by moment.

There are subtle changes that I am aware of, changes inside my soul, I suppose, and changes that confirm the understanding that I rely upon almost superficially at times to explain the fact that life is constant change around me, around all of us. Striving to learn from my past, and equally from my present, I can offer to you only these simple words that reveal the very strong responsibility and accountability that I feel to my own life, to the path the is unfolding, however nebulously. I am not sure how to approach its description, the painting of the picture, for in these recent days I have been at a pronounced deficit of self-assurance -- a phenomenon that always seems to accompany an impending understanding, an impending new phase of life. These things come from somewhere way down in a realm of intuition, a realm that is sometimes without words, without description.

I feel an incredibly strong responsibility to discovering the right way to live my life, (if in fact there is a “right” way,) devoting all the energy that
I possibly can to being accountable, responsible, sensitive to the connection that I feel is ever developing, constantly unfolding, between the life of spirit, i.e. God's pure intention, and the my own assimilation of it in my life, and how my actions ultimately reflect the understanding. It is difficult because sometimes I honestly don't know where to put my feet; sometimes the understanding that I had yesterday has already exhausted its relevance and its usefulness, whatever it may have been. I can admit that things have been difficult, financially, emotionally, intellectually and on the level of basic human confidence. Some of these things I have share with friends and others have remained unspoken, but they all are related to some larger picture, some direction of new responsibility and, forgive the term, mission.

I have a profound and firm belief in this sense of mission in my life, however ill defined it may be at the moment. All the events that have transpired in recent times only further confirm my own desires to understand and delineate my place and my responsibility with respect to larger picture. Trouble is, I cannot succinctly define for myself what the larger picture is. My intuition tells me that life on this planet, our gifts and our abilities and our talents, are profoundly essential to those whom we know personally and others more distant -- a thought that I have had for some time, but only we as individuals know the details and the relevance of how they are applied, or how they will continue to affect those that surround us.

I apologize for the fact that my efforts to discover, to understand and to find my place may come across as strange, or distant or somewhat diffracted, but I can only offer that at the moment I am trying, desperately at times, to figure out what all of this means. There is more to be said, much more to be described, defined and shared, and when I have the words I will surely give them, though I hold no expectations of time or space as they relate to my ’getting it’ and I may fall grossly short with the reality of what is and what may be to come. I try to simply accept things as they are, and acknowledge the fact that the cloud I have walked beneath for protracted periods at a time, still lingers above the path.I will write more words, if and when they come. Until that end.

© CiCi Stewart