The Center of the World
Pecos, Texas, Friday night, May 14, 1999, 9 p.m. at the Rodeo Arena
(Guest speaker for an all-night Cancer Society walking relay. Delivered by flashlight. Three to four hundred people in attendance, lighting luminaria candles in memory of their friends.)
Thank you. I am honored to be here in Pecos.
On January 1st, I began my walk to Washington D.C. from Los Angeles, some 1,200 miles ago, and all of those miles have been walked in a place that is best described as the land west of the Pecos. On Sunday, I will wade across the Pecos and enter the other half of creation. But tonight I am here at the center of the world and am so proud to meet all of you who live here.
I thank you for having me here on such a beautiful evening. Life is a beautiful experience, and here we all are together, alive at this moment, breathing the same cool air. The issue that brings us here tonight is a terrible disease, of course, and we fight it because we naturally rise to the fight against any evils that threaten us and those we love.
Deep inside we can be joyful to remember that nobody really dies in this great drama of the soul we live in eternally. Some of us move on faster than others, and we so deeply miss those who have left this stage before us. Tonight we see that there is something we can do with that loneliness and pain.
When my husband died several years ago, and when my best friend, Elizabeth, died last year, I looked at my life and my lifelong beliefs and said to myself, what shall I do now? What can I do to honor the memory of the people I have loved? How can I turn my pain into something beautiful in the world? Something beautiful? Let me tell you that great Art and great Writing often are the transformation to beauty of suffering. Life is full of suffering, and what we must do when we have more of it than we can bear is to trick it into beauty through a medium of exchange such as art, or handiwork, or a written story or poem, or good parenting, or good friendship, or the creation of good work in the community, or the pursuit of some unfinished work we may find unfinished among our lifelong interests and concerns, some of which we put away in the attic for too long. What work can I do that may be done now as a memorial to those I miss? What can I do to amaze them and fill their angel eyes with tears and laughter as they watch me lovingly from the other side?
And so, if you are here because you are remembering someone lost, you are turning that loss into the Art of this special evening we share together. And if you are here to pursue your own battle with a dangerous disease, or to give emotional support to someone you love who is doing that or who has lost someone, then you are a part of that creative transformation of pain to beauty. What is more beautiful than people warmly sharing an evening together in the glow of candles? What is more healing, more healthful?
The issue that I decided to do something about as a memorial to the people I loved and still love is political reform of our elections. It is, of course, a fool's errand. It is just an old woman walking across the land, wearing Elizabeth's gardening hat until it fell to tatters, talking to whomever will listen about the kind of political reforms most people don't believe can really happen. But there are two things I would like you to understand about impossible missions. One is the fact that, sometimes, all you can do is put your body in front of a problem and stand there as a witness to it. That is part of healing because it is not denial of the problem, and our individual conscious mind is part of the larger conscious mind of society. What you think and how you think does affect the world, and your actions do matter.
Never be discouraged from being an activist because people tell you that you'll not succeed. You have already succeeded if you're out there representing truth or justice or compassion or fairness or love. You already have your victory because you have changed the world; you have changed the status quo by you; you have changed the chemistry of things and changes will spread from you, will be easier to happen again in others because of you, because, believe it or not, you are the center of the world.
There is a second thing you need to know about impossible causes and it is this: there are no impossible causes on this earth if they are good causes. We can do anything together, and we really do remarkable things. We will cure cancer most certainly because people like you walk through the night to make it so. We have nearly eradicated polio woldwide, we have actually cured smallpox, we are curing many of the diseases --the cures for which were thought impossible dreams a short time ago.
My dream of political reform will come true. I may live to see it from this side of life, or I will smile to see it from the other side. But it will happen. It will happen because people love this country so, and this democracy so, and because they have given their sons and daughters and the best years of their own lives to defend it. They will not let it be destroyed before their eyes by these obscene floods of special-interest money that come into our elections from big business. I know we will end that outrage and we will be able to run our communities and our nation to look after the interests of the common people, for that is what a democracy is all about.
I walk this road for my late dear friend Elizabeth, and for my dear, dear, late husband Jim, so that they will be surprised and proud of me and we will have something new to talk about when next we meet. And I do it for myself, and for the thousands of people I have met along my path who love this country and who are deeply worried about it. I do it for you as your political granny, if you will have me be that.
I wish all of you good health. I wish all of you the courage to live out your emotions and your beliefs in your daily lives, as you are doing tonight. I admire you all tremendously, and I will always remember this evening at the great center of our beautiful world.