Safe Spaces considered 1*

this is a contemplation that begins in the middle

I was listening to an episode of Another Round, one where the words "safe space" were spoken and I smiled and it was lovely to consider how to listen differently while listening to someone else's safe space and then something happened and the women began to laugh. They laughed like I laugh. I could not see them. I imagine that they laughed with full open mouths and mirth and the sound was joyfilled and overwhelming and something landed on my heart and I understood something I had only known.

Safe Space.

Two spaces immediately suggest themselves.

One is a reading group that was begun by a good friend of mine. We call it Feminists in Love because she found herself surrounded, almost cocooned, but lightly, by conversations about how feminists can experience loving relationships. What does that look like in friendship? What does that look like in romance? Is it different in a same-sex relationship than in a hetero-normative-seeming one?

The big question that I notice right in the middle like some radioactive nucleus is: how do you learn to love? What the hell happened that this has to be sought out and learned?

The patriarchy: that sex-negative, racist, sexist, imperialistic, economically parasitic system that we have is not sustained by full and complicated and varied relationships. It needs a power structure that is based on control of others. Others can only be controlled at the expense of compassion, respect, honor and flexibility. We score people based on how many lives they control. You get more points the more the people under your control are there unwillingly.

Not the best place for love, for celebration, for friendship. And yet. We find each other. We have always found each other. At the kitchen tables, around camp fires, on the way to the bathroom, in the breaths between giggles at socially accepted ladies' gatherings. We always find each other. Together we learn to carve out time for speaking out of code; for speaking honest and terrible thoughts about the lives we've been living and how we are not loved. We speak in sentences as heavy as weights, that we must practice carrying from hour to hour and day to day until we can meet again and share again and learn to carry more awareness until it is nothing to recognize the need to shift, to move, to understand. We teach each other to be resilient and we learn to learn from those whose burden includes us.

Last weekend, The Movement For Black Lives convened for the first time. They spent three days together in Cleveland Ohio and shared empowering, community building, healing and vital time with each other. Time that is sorely needed in communities that are tested and tried every day with news of another murder by police hands, another suspicious church fire, another hanging. This Safe Space is necessary and strengthening. This Safe Space is sacred.

They met, at the end, police with pepper spray trying to arrest a teenaged boy waiting at a bus stop. People came together and prevented the arrest. the young man was reunited with his family. Safe Space engenders compassion, respect and strength in action. Safe Spaces are places to learn and to discover how to grow. They heal and help the people involved in them.

When I was a girl, I did not participate in the things that brought me into women's spaces. Nothing in those spaces made room for the girl I was. I spent years crafting room for my friendships out of scraps of time and park benches and obsessive focus. I did not understand how to be safe in a room full of my peers. They did not understand how to be safe with me. It is different now.

I learn to listen.


*This blog post is numbered because I have latched onto an idea, and it will take more than a few paragraphs to explore it.