I wrote it for the first time at the end of a December 2011 blog; “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” I wrote it a few more times and then stopped, until you told me you missed it and wanted to keep reading it again and again. So, it became a sort of tag line. Someone asked me the other day if I was quoting Alice Walker. I said no, but then looked and sure enough, Alice wrote a book in 2006: “We are the Ones We have been waiting for” (Inner Light in a time of darkness). I am reading it now. She claims to have taken the title from her friend, poet June Jordan. I will include the poem below. There is also a song, by Sweet Honey in the Rock, included here as well (Note, the video is from a protest 8 months ago, and at the end one of the protestors says “There is no dream that is impossible when we can work together.”) The thing about truth is that it lives in us. It has always been there. June brought it out, Alice and I followed suit. Others have and will continue to do so. That is the wonderful thing about oneness, once you become aware of it, you see it everywhere. It becomes who you are in every breath. It is an honor to be in the good company of June and Alice and the Hopi (who also use the phrase)! Here is June’s poem: Poem for South African Women Our own shadows disappear as the feet of thousands by the tens of thousands pound the fallow land into new dust that rising like a marvelous pollen will be fertile even as the first woman whispering imagination to the trees around her made for righteous fruit from such deliberate defense of life as no other still will claim inferior to any other safety in the world The whispers too they intimate to the inmost ear of every spirit now aroused they carousing in ferocious affirmation of all peaceable and loving amplitude sound a certainly unbounded heat from a baptismal smoke where yes there will be fire And the babies cease alarm as mothers raising arms and heart high as the stars so far unseen nevertheless hurl into the universe a moving force irreversible as light years traveling to the open eye And who 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. Written by June Jordan (1936 - 2002) |
