The Awakened Woman

by Tererai Trent

  I shared the experience of meeting Jo Luck with my mother. Despite my fears, I reaffirmed my desire for an education. I told her, “The woman makes me believe that I can get an education and that my children can, too.” You would think that my mother—like her mother before her—who had suffered through tremendous adversity and abuse, would be worn down by life. But not my mother! What I said was music to her ears! She told me to hold on to this dream as though my life depended on it.

  She said, “If you believe in this dream of education and you achieve it, you are not only defining your future, but that of every life coming out of your womb, as well as those for generations to come. What you want to become will change how you see the world around you.” My mother repeated this mantra often, which, to this day, keeps me grounded.

  My excitement, however, was deeply vulnerable to the realities of my situation—poverty, an abusive husband, and my low self-esteem were ever-present to mock my excitement, to laugh at my dreams. My mother knew I needed to go back to my foundation to find my roots. And so she encouraged me to write down my dreams and bury them in the ground. She told me that Mother Earth would nourish them beneath the soil and help them to grow. To ease my doubts, she added, “Vimba naNyadenga, nevadzimu vedu, zvaunoshuvira zvinobudirira”—“Trust the universe to honor your dreams.”

  My mother trusted that burying my dreams would establish them deep within my psyche. My people are a farming people, and so we live by the spiritual and practical practice of sowing and tending the fields. She handed me two plastic bags and an old tin can that once held beef eaten by Rhodesian Independence soldiers. I carefully placed the scrap of paper holding my recorded dreams into the bag, which I then put into the can. When the can was wrapped with the second bag, I buried it to prevent rats, mice, and bad weather from destroying its precious contents.

  I wrote my dreams in the Shona language: “Ini Tererai, semunhu we mudzimai, ndaona kuti hupenyu ndisina dzidzo hwakaoma. Ndinofanira kuve nedzidzo. Ndasangana nemudzimai we ku Heifer International andishingisa kuti ndikavimba nezvandinoda kuzova pahupenyu hwangu, ndikashanda nesimba, ndinogona kubudirira ndikafundisawo vana vangu.”

  “I, Tererai, have decided that as a woman, a life without education will be a burden. So I must educate myself. I met a woman from Heifer International who encouraged me to believe that I could achieve my dream of educating my children and myself. Here are my dreams:

  1. To go to America;

  2. To get an undergraduate degree;

  3. To get a master’s degree; and

  4. To get a PhD.”

  When I showed the paper to my mother, she said, “Zvose zvaunoshuvira muhupenyu zvinobudiria kana zviinetarisiro youkukurudzira nzvimbo yaugere”—“Every dream has greater meaning when tied to the betterment of the community. This is what creates a meaningful life.” It is one thing to achieve a dream based upon individual needs and another to build upon the common good. Her words inspired me to add a fifth dream:

  5. To give back to my community, especially to alleviate the plight of women and girls.

  “The fifth dream is sacred,” my mother told me, although I had no idea of the significance of this fifth goal at the time. In writing my dreams down, I felt like I had redesigned my life to reflect the future I wanted. My mother told me that this new narrative and the respect for the ritual of writing and burying would influence positive outcomes for my children and for generations to come.

  On a bright sunny morning, with a timeworn garden hoe in hand, I headed to a place where I used to herd cattle as a child. I found the rock where I spent hours practicing my vowels and doing my brother’s homework as a hopeful little girl. I remember vivid details from this day. In the background, two doves cooed and the savanna grass and the tree leaves rustled. I remember the feeling of the wind on my skin. I lifted the rock, dug a hole, and placed the aluminum can into the ground. I buried my dreams. Before leaving, I found a small, smooth, round rock to take with me as a keepsake.

  As my mother would later explain, this act was more than just a symbol of respect to an ancient sacred practice of planting and harvesting. I had weaved the threads of my hurting soul, spirit, and mind together, enabling me to trust that I was more than my circumstances. Something bigger was taking place. No matter the forces that silenced my true potential, no matter my low self-esteem, the burying of my dreams reminded me that my desires now have a sacred connection to the earth below my feet. They had taken up space in the world. And I could take strength from the idea of my dreams growing. It felt good.

  I developed a private ritual, in the months after meeting Jo Luck and burying my dreams, that kept me grounded. Early in the morning, I revisited the site of my buried dreams. I unearthed the can and reread them, savoring every word. As I held the scrap of paper, I imagined what life would be like if I achieved them. I could close my eyes, see myself in the new life, feel it and savor that life for an hour or so, knowing there was no turning back now. I called these times of reflection my “holy grail hours.” The rock guarded my dreams as I envisioned the life and future I wanted and the work it would take to achieve all my dreams.

  Becoming Symbolically Whole

  Why is rootedness so important to reclaiming our sacred dreams? What was it that my mother helped me do when she instructed me to bury my dreams, and why was it so crucial to achieving my long-silenced and forgotten longings?

  Study after study shows that women in most cultures are socialized to question their voices and to distrust their bodies.1 What my mother helped me to do by encouraging me to write down my dreams and to bury them under a rock was to give me a solid foundation from which to grow. She helped me give my dreams weight—she emboldened me to let them take up space in the world, and as a result, they took up space in my mind and my life, in my words and my thoughts and my actions. We need to get comfortable taking up physical space and to claim the power of our voices, beloved sisters. And in order to do that we need to feel grounded and safe. We need to be symbolically whole.

  You see, my sisters, burying dreams deep in the soil under a rock is a simple yet sacred act. While I am proud to have been born among the indigenous people of the Korekore, who believe in the energy of the universe and in our relationship to it, all people have an intuition and instinct to enact sacred rituals and connect with the universe in their own lives. When we are connected to a strong culture, we are connected to the elders who share these powerful traditions, who honor our connection to the living, breathing earth. It is when we are missing these traditions that we must form new ones, create our own, and share them with each other.

  One tradition I like to share from my people is the burying of an umbilical cord at the place of one’s birth. Many ancient cultures have a similar practice, and the common existence of this very old ritual is a testament to the sacred act of birth and transformation. In my village in Zimbabwe, a child’s birth is not symbolically complete until a female elder carefully snips a piece of the umbilical cord, ties it with a piece of worn cloth from the mother’s dress, and buries it deep in the ground near the mother’s hut. My people believe that a child whose umbilical cord is buried in the ground will never forget their birthplace, literally and spiritually. Both my mother and grandmother strongly believed that once planted, the cord’s gentle throbbing protects, sustains, and provides energy to the person it had once nourished in the womb. It is believed that a child whose umbilical cord is buried in the ground will never forget her family and from where she originated.

  At an early age, I learned to appreciate that the soil connects us to birth and death in ways that defy simple explanation. After my own physical birth, my adopted maternal grandmother, Mbuya Mafukeni, birthed my spiritual being by snipping a piece of my umbilical cord, tying it with a piece of cloth from my mother’s dress, and burying it deep into the ground near my mother’s hut. At the birth of each of my six children, my mother and grandmother repeated this ancient practice, explaining that it connects the Shona people,
irrevocably, to our spiritual and collective home. As part of the ritual, my grandmother sings a song, a kind of prayer for wholeness with the umbilical cord as its central image. She sings:

  Naked, vulnerable, you arrive in this world tied to a life support—I the umbilical cord / Tiny, vulnerable, you are welcomed in this world either with love or with regrets—I the umbilical cord remain the source of your life / Shriveled and tied in your mother’s tattered and torn cloth, I am buried deep under the shade of the Musasa tree near your mother’s hut. At the base of the tree, just where the roots are to bud, soon I become part of the root strengthening and nurturing all that is around. / I become the source and symbol of your dignity, and I remain to remind you of your identity / Wherever you go in the world, I hold your past, your future, and your dignity / Don’t forget the roots, rhyme with the roots, time to the roots; it is the power within grounded deep down into the Mother Earth / When all is done and gone, I remain the only identity you have to your humanity / I remain to remind you of what’s important—the power of your identity, the power of “we,” the power of your roots / So ancient is the practice, and yet so powerful to your past, your present, your future, and your identity / I call you back home, to your groundedness, your foundation. I am the umbilical cord!

  The singing of this song and the act of burying part of ourselves is a matriarchal tradition that ties us to our mothers and our mothers’ mothers and to Mother Earth. Ultimately, it ties us to a strong and fertile foundation of ourselves. This incantation implores us to dance with our roots, to organize our lives around our roots, to honor root time above all the many clocks of modern society, and to know ourselves as deeply, deeply planted. Whether we enter this world with joy or regrets, my grandmother sang, we are fed, we are rooted, and we are home in a very spiritual and earthly way.

  Even when villagers go off to seek work in urban areas or journey even farther afield, they maintain a strong connection to home. Their umbilical cords remain behind, binding the travelers to their tribe and cementing his or her place in the larger universe. Its groundedness and sacredness cannot be overestimated. Even when threatened by an employer or landowner, my people say, “Usandisembure, handina kupisa musha, ndinoziva kwandakabve, padzinde rangu, pamusha pandakasiya rukuvuhete rwangu”—“Don’t trouble me; I cannot take your insults anymore; I never burned my home; I know who I am and what grounds me in my identity. It is the place where my umbilical cord is buried.”

  Let’s be expansive about what “home” means. I imagine it not just the physical location of my family’s home, or even the geographic region where I’m from, although those ideas are very powerful to me. This groundedness also connects me to the broad, sprawling histories of the strong women who came before me, to so many wise ancestors, to sacred mysteries, and to the throbbing power of the earth’s deepest and most transformative capacities. Burying the umbilical cord or your written dreams or some other item of significance is a physical manifestation of our connection to all: community, history, spirit, and earth. This act provides an endless source of strength and empowerment.

  I buried my dreams under a rock as a reminder of the power of the earth and its connection to my umbilical cord, and of the power of a spiritual connection to something bigger than myself. Writing down these dreams preserved them, and also gave me strength to right the wrongs of my past, ultimately aiding me to find my own redemption.

  We are alive, in flesh and blood and we have physical and spiritual weight and depth and power. In order to be whole we need to connect ourselves more fully to the ground, both literally and symbolically. Just like the ancient ways of burying a child’s umbilical cord, bury and preserve your dreams in a safe place, a place of your choice, a place that centers your being.

  Wherever you go in the world, the buried contents of your heart’s desire will always stir your mind and soul—reminding you of the sacredness of your dreams, of your courage in naming them, of their rootedness in your being. You may have shelved your dreams or you may have not yet even realized the dreams within you. But they are there, waiting to be tended.

  Dig deep into the private chambers of your heart, and build a foundation of strength and confidence on this path toward empowerment. You are embarking on a momentous journey to awaken your sacred dreams. You will need bravery and confidence and a strong center. You will need a sturdy root to hold on to when doubt and fear seep in. You will need to be symbolically whole.

  It’s easy for women to be uprooted in this world. So many of us put the needs of others before our own to the point we lose sight of what our own needs are. So many of us shrink back during moments of decision-making, or are afraid to make demands of those around us for fear they won’t like us or they’ll leave.

  Dear sisters, if we consciously or unconsciously understand that the world prefers our smallness, our silences, our uncertainties, or our weightlessness, then in order to reclaim our whole selves we have to get bigger and more substantial. We have to ground ourselves, to come home to ourselves, our bodies, our histories, and the physical world around us. It’s time we take up more space, from our roots to our branches and leaves. Make your desires and your dreams concrete and link them to the material world around you.

  This rooting and grounding is an important first step to recovering lost parts of yourself, or achieving seemingly impossible dreams. I know this not only from my own experiences, but also from the stories I hear from the many women I meet in my travels.

  I met Michelle Stronz, chairperson of Women’s Leadership Council, United Way, in 2014 in Hartford, Connecticut, at the United Way’s Power of the Purse conference. Inspired by the encouragement to bury her dreams, Michelle went home and buried her dream in her garden. She was just beginning the process of ending her twenty-year marriage and launching a new business.

  Michelle wrote to me later to thank me—her dream had already begun bearing fruit. I asked Michelle why she thought getting rooted in the earth was successful for her; she said it’s because writing down and burying our dreams gives us pride in the knowledge that we are creating something truer and bigger than who we are.2

  I have seen it happen time and time again: when you bury your dreams you plant seeds. Now you have something to tend, something to water, and something to watch grow. This very physical and spiritual practice shows you the power that is in your hands, the power you alone have to birth your dream into existence.

  SACRED RITUAL FOR PLANTING YOUR DREAMS

  I offer you a practice for rootedness and planting your sacred dream seeds with the intention of grounding you in the face of busyness, adversity, fear, and the common chaos in our modern lives, of inspiring you to remain on a clear path toward your true purpose. I invite you to read it more than once, to spend some time thinking about it without any specific goal in mind (just let your creativity free flow—daydream about it). So clear some time for yourself, sit down in a quiet space, and do the meditation and writing practice.

  This prayer offers much to you, but it also asks a lot of you: it asks you to spend some time in purposeful reflection on what needs to be healed and what longs to be manifested. I know this can be an intense experience. But consider this my plea for you to do this important work to awaken your beautiful soul and nourish the sacred dream that lies in your heart; feel it stirring, feel its significance to you, write it down, and like a child’s umbilical cord, bury it deep in the ground.

  Find a quiet place, your masowe, where you can relax into the moment. If you have a meditation cushion, go ahead and use it. Choose whatever position is most comfortable. Read the following words, take a few deep breaths, close your eyes, and begin.

  Dig Deep into the Visceral

  I ask you to dig into the chambers of your heart, into the viscera and the depths of your being. Search inside yourself for the place beyond fear where your dreams remain untapped. Dig and get to the core, glimpse into the solitary space of your own soul.

  Return to your responses about what brea
ks your heart and how it aligns with the greater good. Ululate to grow in confidence of your voice. Then ask yourself: How can I make this Great Hunger of mine a ritual for healing myself and the world?

  I invite you to speak the words that have surfaced in your body. These are the raw materials of your sacred dreams. Your hunger and your heartache have guided you here. Your voice is ready to proclaim your dreams; you believe you have that right. Name how you will act on your desires. Perhaps, like myself, your dream is an education for the purpose of lifting up others. Perhaps, like my friend, your dream is to support and befriend refugees struggling from global unrest. A whole world of possibilities is open to you.

  Pause for a few moments, roll the shape of the dreams around in your mind, perhaps sway your body side to side, feel your hips rooted to the ground while your lips enunciate the shape of your dreams. Like a basket weaver thread the strands into a goal, a plan. It gets stronger and stronger as your mind imprints them on your body, as your hands become more adept at weaving.

  How will you turn the hunger in your heart into a practice for personal and communal recovery?

  Sacred Writing

  Now I encourage you to practice what I call “sacred writing.” Sacred writing is writing from the depth of your feminine energy. As though you are about to give birth, call into the power of your creativity.