Walk Like Thunder

A rant about human rights...

Walk Like Thunder
Posted on January 23, 2011 by marriedtoeveningprimrose
Kimya Dawson has a song that says ” so hold on to your loved ones, yeah hold on for dear life, Try to walk like thunder leaving footprints that are light, Hold on to your loved ones, hold on for dear life, Try to walk like thunder leaving footprints that are light..”

I had to quote Kimya Dawson just a little because I think she’s brilliant and I got to see her live in Portland less than a week ago and it was amazing! She spoke some very great truths in her songs, especially a song she sung about her own struggle with addictions and how she almost ended up dead and how a friend who came to visit her in the hospital leaned over her bed and whispered “walk like thunder!”

This is a powerful phrase, which means a lot of things to me. I thought about the phrase “walk like thunder” while walking about thirty blocks in the Portland rain, letting my hair be washed by the rain. I think, for me, walk like thunder means speaking my mind and using tragic events in our lives to fuel our fire and keep us focused on the work that needs to be done. For me, walking like thunder would be helping to point out the injustices of a world where mentally ill people are being gunned down in the streets when they are having a crisis, where children start getting medicated at age four and told they have some “disability” that sets them up for a lifetime of misguided beliefs about themselves and low self-esteem, leading often to poor choices, drug use and jail time, standing up against a social service community that works to ridicule and criticize those who most need encouragement, standing up against the rampant racism I see every day, and, at the same time, thundering my way towards becoming a radical midwife and a part-time farmer.

Someone who walks like thunder must be a powerful person, or so it sounds. Derrick Jensen has a powerful imagine in one of his books of salmon beating their bodies against the dams that are killing them, slowly, slowly breaking down the cement with sure will. Whenever I walk around a city, I picture my feet slowly, slowly helping to break down all that cement. I think that is what “walking like thunder” means too.

My anxiety has been heightened lately because I’ve been acutely aware of things that are wrong in this world, some of which I’ve listed above. I’ve been spending lots of time with a variety of people on the East and West coast, both young and old in both ages and experiences, and it seems, overall, that most people don’t seem to have a deep, fulfilling sense of worth anymore. And I think, more than anything else, people crave love and they crave a sense that they are important, that they do important things, that they are worthy of the air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat. Kurt Vonnegut explains in his brilliant book “God Bless You Mr. Rosewater,” that there will come a time in the future when most people don’t have a real purpose for being on Earth, because machines will have replaced most of our work, and then the challenge will be, he says, to make people still feel important and loved. I think that time is now. I see lots of hopeless, unfilled, unhappy people wandering around, trying to fill emptiness with those tried and true boredom fillers; drugs, alcohol, television, and countless other drugs.

What can we do to bring meaning and peace into people’s lives again? How do we help unemployed and perhaps unemployable people find ways to reach fulfillment? I myself have been having a sort of ongoing panic attack about being almost thirty and still feeling like I haven’t found all the pieces to the puzzle I want to put together to make my life. I’m raging in all directions while simultaneously trying to love everyone who comes into my life, regardless of their “achievements”, their “employment” their “mental state” or any of the other ways we tend to judge people.

This particular world wasn’t created in a way that is conductive towards building self-esteem and helping people out of the ashes; rather, the fierce competitive nature of this corrupt system tends to make bullies out of all of us.

I want to give up bullying altogether.