We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For Read online

  ALSO BY ALICE WALKER

  Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism

  By the Light of My Father’s Smile: A Novel

  The Color Purple

  In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose

  Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart

  Possessing the Secret of Joy

  The Temple of My Familiar

  The Third Life of Grange Copeland

  The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart

  We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For

  Inner Light in a Time of Darkness

  Alice Walker

  To Scott Sanders, Stephen Bray, and Gary Griffin With more gratitude and love than you can probably imagine. You are the men the ancestors and I were waiting for. Congratulations.

  and for Amy Goodman, Bernice Johnson Reagon, and Ayi Kwei Armah in recognition and to the Young everywhere who are standing up

  IF WE ARE TRUE TO HER, THE GODDESS WILL COME TO US. FINDING THE PATH IN ALL DIRECTIONS.

  And what will join this standing up and the ones who stood without sweet company will sing and sing back into the mountains and if necessary even under the sea

  We are the ones we have been waiting for

  —from “Poem for South African Women” by June Jordan

  It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness. It was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity. It was the season of light, it was the season of darkness.

  —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  1. Three Fates

  2. Childhood

  3. When Life Descends into the Pit

  4. All Praises to the Pause

  5. Crimes Against Dog

  6. This Was Not an Area of Large Plantations

  7. I Call That Man Religious

  8. Now That You Are with Me Like My People and the Dignity of the World

  9. Metta to Muriel and Other Marvels

  10. How It Feels to Know Someone Died for You

  11. The Glimpse of Life Beyond the Words

  12. Sent by Earth: A Message From the Grandmother Spirit

  13. Orchids

  14. To Be Led by Happiness

  Permissions

  Acknowledgments

  I wish to thank Diane Wachtell of The New Press for her warm acceptance of We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness. I am likewise indebted to Ina Howard for her thoughtful comments and editing expertise. Her sensitivity to the tone of the book has helped the creation of its present form.

  It is a joy to thank my agent of many years, Wendy Weil, for finding just the right publishing house for a book that contemplates, on a deep, often intimate level, the spiritual trials and practical requirements of this quite alarming period we are living in. I thank my beautiful family of origin simply for Being; for teaching me each day that I was never as lost from my “place” as auntie and elder as I imagined. This is a precious gift for this part of my journey. I would not have missed it for anything.

  I thank William Poy Lee for being a powerful ally and friend, whose Capricorn/Tiger instincts quite often save the day.

  I thank my parents for loving me beyond my ability to comprehend what they had already lived through by the time I arrived. I thank my grandparents for unconditional love and no reprimands whatsoever.

  I thank the community into which I was born for its beauty and simplicity; and the community that continues to nurture me—sangha, circle, women’s council—in which I now live.

  Namasté.

  Introduction

  We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For

  It is the worst of times. It is the best of times. Try as I might I cannot find a more appropriate opening for this volume: it helps tremendously that these words have been spoken before and, thanks to Charles Dickens, written at the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities. Perhaps they have been spoken, written, thought, an endless number of times throughout human history. It is the worst of times because it feels as though the very Earth is being stolen from us, by us: the land and air poisoned, the water polluted, the animals disappeared, humans degraded and misguided. War is everywhere. It is the best of times because we have entered a period, if we can bring ourselves to pay attention, of great clarity as to cause and effect. A blessing when we consider how much suffering human beings have endured, in previous millennia, without a clue to its cause. Gods and Goddesses were no doubt created to fill this gap. Because we can now see into every crevice of the globe and because we are free to explore previously unexplored crevices in our own hearts and minds, it is inevitable that everything we have needed to comprehend in order to survive, everything we have needed to understand in the most basic of ways, will be illuminated now. We have only to open our eyes, and awaken to our predicament. We see that we are, alas, a huge part of our problem. However: We live in a time of global enlightenment. This alone should make us shout for joy.

  It is as if ancient graves, hidden deep in the shadows of the psyche and the earth, are breaking open of their own accord. Unwilling to be silent any longer. Incapable of silence. No leader or people of any country will be safe from these upheavals that lead to exposure, no matter how much the news is managed or how long people’s grievances have been kept quiet. Human beings may well be unable to break free of the dictatorship of greed that spreads like a miasma over the world, but no longer will we be an inarticulate and ignorant humanity, confused by our enslavement to superior cruelty and weaponry. We will know at least a bit of the truth about what is going on, and that will set us free. Perhaps not free in the old way of thinking about freedom, as literal escape from enslavement in its various forms, but free in our understanding that our domination is not a comment on our worth. It is an awesome era in which to live.

  It was the poet June Jordan who wrote “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” Sweet Honey in the Rock turned those words into a song. Hearing this song, I have witnessed thousands of people rise to their feet in joyful recognition and affirmation. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for because we are able to see what is happening with a much greater awareness than our parents or grandparents, our ancestors, could see. This does not mean we believe, having seen the greater truth of how all oppression is connected, how pervasive and unrelenting, that we can “fix” things. But some of us are not content to have a gap in opportunity and income that drives a wedge between rich and poor, causing the rich to become ever more callous and complacent and the poor to become ever more wretched and humiliated. Not willing to ignore starving and brutalized children. Not willing to let women be stoned or mutilated without protest. Not willing to stand quietly by as farmers are destroyed by people who have never farmed, and plants are engineered to self-destruct. Not willing to disappear into our flower gardens, Mercedes Benzes or sylvan lawns. We have wanted all our lives to know that Earth, who has somehow obtained human beings as her custodians, was also capable of creating humans who could minister to her needs, and the needs of her creation. We are the ones.

  June Jordan, who died of cancer in 2002, was a brilliant, fierce, radical, and frequently furious poet. We were friends for thirty years. Not once in that time did she step back from what was transpiring politically and morally in the world. She spoke up, and led her students, whom she adored, to do the same.

  We were not friends who saw each other often; not the kind of friends who discussed unpublished work. In fact, we sometimes disagreed profoundly with each other. We were the kind of friends, instead, who understood that we were
forever on the same side: the side of the poor, the economically, spiritually and politically oppressed, “the wretched of the earth.” And on the side, too, of the revolutionaries, teachers and spiritual leaders who seek transformation of the world. That any argument arising between us would be silenced as we turned our combined energy to scrutinize an oncoming foe. I took great comfort in this reality. It seems a model of what can help us rebalance the world. Friendship with others: populations, peoples, countries, that is, in a sense, impersonal.

  Many people are already working on this model. They are the ones who go to places like Afghanistan and Iraq and place their bodies between the bombs of the United States and the infrastructure of the local water supply. They are the ones who collect food and medicine for those deprived. The ones who monitor the war(s) and report news that would not otherwise be heard. They are the ones who feel no joy at another’s defeat. No satisfaction at another’s pain.

  In fact, the happiness that imbues this kind of friendship, whether for an individual or a country, or an act, is like an inner light, a compass we might steer by as we set out across the lengthening darkness. It comes from the simple belief and understanding that what one is feeling and doing is right. That it is right to protect rather than terrorize others; right to feed people rather than withhold food and medicine; right to want the freedom and joyful existence of all humankind. Right to want this freedom and joy for all creatures that exist already, or that might come into existence. Existence, we are now learning, is not finished! It is a happiness that comes from honoring the peace or the possibility of peace that lives within one’s own heart. A deep knowing that we are the Earth—our separation from Earth perhaps our greatest illusion—and that we stand, with gratitude and love, by our planetary Self.

  When you read this book you may not be surprised that many of its “meditations” were delivered as talks. There is a reason for this. Perhaps you already know that many writers write because they secretly believe they cannot talk, or they don’t like to talk, or they feel they have nothing to say. This describes this writer more often than not, in any case. Or did describe me until a year or so ago. Until that time, whenever I accepted an invitation to speak—to a college or high school graduating class, an association of yoga teachers, a gathering of Buddhists—I sat down and wrote what I wished to say, frankly worrying that if I did not write it down I would forget it, memory of the nonfictional not being a strength. One of these pieces has since become a small book: a talk to midwives that I gave shortly after 9/11: Sent By Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit, another a CD: Orchids; What It Means to Be Black, which was delivered at a gathering of Black yoga teachers. The talk that I gave some years ago at UC Santa Cruz commemorating Martin Luther King’s birthday and publicly affirming my grief over his assassination, “How It Feels to Know Somebody Died for You: Living With the Voice of the Beloved,” is sometimes played, in celebration of his life, on radio.

  I have been cured of my dependence on a script, however. It happened in the following way: I was invited to visit South Korea by a Korean priestess who failed to inform me until we arrived in Seoul that I was expected to deliver nine lectures in two different cities in six days. They were each to be two hours long. This was of course humanly impossible, at least for this human. After explaining that I would never attempt to talk to any stranger for more than an hour, but that I would entertain questions from the audience after each talk, we set out on the most grueling tour of my life. In addition to the lectures, the Korean priestess and I had written a book together (about Women and God and Life) that became a bestseller in Seoul, and there were print and other media interviews practically non-stop. I returned from South Korea seriously depleted. But I gained important self-knowledge: when faced with thousands of people who spoke En glish, if at all, as a second language,

  I could talk for at least an hour, hopefully without repeating myself. I talked about everything under the sun, and as I talked, more of what is under the sun was revealed to me. Toward the end, talking in this way—and seeing by their faces and responses that I was getting through—seemed entirely miraculous. As miraculous as writing.

  I will give you an example: I did not think I could survive the last talk. Talk number nine. We’d flown into town at one o’clock, sans breakfast or lunch; the talk was at two. On the way into the building I’d seen lines of people patiently filing into the auditorium. I sat in a huge vacant room someone had led me to, regretting the intensely spicy food I had been eating for two weeks, which made me feel bloated and dim, and attempted to gather my thoughts; thanking all the Buddhas who ever lived for insisting on meditation. I had ten minutes.

  Even as I approached the lectern I had no idea what I would say. I was committed, however, to opening my mouth. After that … it was up to a power greater than mine. I looked out into a sea of alert, curious, interested, and I think on some level surprised faces. Who was this little brown woman, her graying hair tinted the color of autumn straw, with nothing in her hands? And as I looked at them, all Koreans, all appearing healthy and well-off, and now living in a new city built after the old one had been bombed into bits, memory of one of my brothers came into my mind. I recalled a photograph he’d sent to us during the Korean War. He was falling out of a plane.

  He was falling out of the plane because he’d joined the Air Force after being expelled from high school in the eleventh grade because he had slapped the principal. I suppose he’d been taught, by the U.S. military, how to parachute “behind enemy lines.” That must have been what he was training for, in the photograph. But how had these people in front of me, whom he’d never heard of until a month or so before he parachuted down among them, become his enemy? And that is what I found myself talking about. About my brother’s obvious anger and hurt as a teenager, about his youth. He was so young. About his lasting dislike of Asians. And how that dislike, which had so startled me when I took him on a stroll through Japan Town in San Francisco, was undoubtedly the result of his fear, to be so distant from his rural home in Georgia, little more than a child, among people who were better off—except for the destructiveness of war—and with a longer history, than any, including white Americans, that he had ever seen. And that they would have been trying to kill him. The ancient universities and temples still standing after years of bombing would have astonished him. It must have puzzled him endlessly that he was asked to kill people who were of color and that these people of color owned their country. He must have admired, even as he dreaded it, their ability to fight. I wonder if he ever understood, beyond the propaganda, what the Koreans, Northern Communist and Southern anti-Communist, were fighting about. Or who benefited, ultimately, from the war that lasted so long and caused so much harm. I wondered if he had killed some of the relatives of the people in the audience. Had he done terrible things to children or to women? When he returned, there was little he could tell us. And now I marveled at how difficult coming home must have been for him. Talking to his family about Korea would have been more challenging than telling us about the moon. We could see the moon.

  During the question-and-answer session the topic of a quota of young Koreans being sent to fight in Iraq came up. As a colony of the U.S., though a seemingly prosperous one, this is a requirement. Wars that the U.S. fights are considered South Korea’s.

  Don’t send your children anywhere, I said.

  It was only after I returned home and discussed this new awareness of my brother’s life with an older sibling that I learned even more of what was “under the sun.” Her husband, she said, fought in Korea. His best friend was blown up right next to him. He couldn’t talk about it, so he drank. He was also very violent, though I did not mention this. And our older brother, she continued sadly, who so rarely says anything, was also a soldier there.

  This is what I mean about this time we are living in. Although only 7 percent of Americans have passports—a shocking realization since we seem to be everywhere—99 percent of us have television or
the Internet. There are still libraries, bookstores and books. Documentaries. There are still teachers. To begin our long journey toward balance as a planet, we have only to study the world and its peoples, to see they are so like ourselves! To trust that this is so. That different clothes and religions do not create people who can escape from humanity. When we face the peoples of the world with open hands, and in honesty and fearlessness speak what is in our memories and our hearts, the dots connect themselves.

  You may say to me: But Alice, all these connecting dots connect disasters. True enough, but they also connect millions of people who worked hard and beautifully to prevent, defeat, or transform them.

  The best of times.

  Being in Korea, which I’d only “seen” on M*A*S*H, a television program that often made me laugh, I remembered my first trip abroad as a nineteen-year-old. I went to Russia, part of the then–Soviet Union. I had no idea what to expect; were white people the same the world over? I wondered. Would these white people in Russia think it “natural” to segregate me from themselves, as white Southerners did in the United States? Imagine my surprise when they did not, but instead embraced me the same as they embraced everybody else, with a kiss on each cheek and a bouquet of flowers. I knew in that moment that war with them, which we were constantly on the verge of, had to be the least intelligent move on Earth.

  I felt the same a couple of years later in Africa. The people in Kenya and Uganda (pre–Idi Amin and Daniel Arap-Moi) were the friendliest, most gentle people I’d ever met. They cooked delicious food, too, and created lovely music. The thought of anyone harming them because their leaders might force them into war was painful. In fact, while I was in East Africa the only things I saw that needed “attacking” were poverty and ignorance, especially when it came to women: it was there that I first learned of the genital cutting of young women and even babies in an attempt to dominate them and control their sexuality. I would later write about this practice, an assault on the health of the entire people, as I discovered, in my novel Possessing the Secret of Joy.