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There are some more words I need to say today, and some words that I need to borrow.  First I will say that I would rather apologize to bugs as I take their lives because I need to eat them than sell or give away any of my words – or my rights to them.

Secondly, I will say that when I had my vision in my teens, that vision revolved around a song rather than around a story.  In the beginning our species developed a musical brain before we developed our verbal one.  In the end, my healing, our individual healing of trauma and abuse is not only about healing our own story; it is about healing our own song.

I hear daily from my first grandchild’s mother, my daughter, about the growth and development of her son.  He smiles now, smiles that light up the world.  I assure my daughter that she is watching his little brain form, one caregiver interaction at a time.  His brain’s happy center is forming, the one he will rely on for the rest of his life – right now.  Right exactly now.

What my daughter also shares with me as she holds and cuddles him while talking to me on the telephone is the singing this newly forming little man does all of the time except when he is sound asleep.  His brain is preparing for speech, but in order for speech to come, in order for his words to appear, the bedrock of his musical brain is being formed – right now.  Right exactly now.

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The human race is going through a revolution right now.  Because we each live every moment as an intimate part of this revolution, we don’t usually pay attention to the part each of us is playing in this grand transformation.

I promised you some borrowed words, and here they are:

Perhaps you have heard of “Chief Joseph.”

“The man who became a national celebrity with the name “Chief Joseph” was born in the Wallowa Valley in what is now northeastern Oregon in 1840. He was given the name Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, or Thunder Rolling Down the Mountain, but was widely known as Joseph, or Joseph the Younger, because his father had taken the Christian name Joseph when he was baptized at the Lapwai mission by Henry Spalding in 1838.”  See this link for more information on the PBS website)

The following words were spoken by “Chief Joseph” in his surrender speech on October 5, 1877:

“I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. Looking Glass is dead. Toohoolhoolzote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say, “Yes” or “No.” He who led the young men [Olikut] is dead. It is cold, and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are — perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.”

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From my own writer’s point of view, I find it significant that during this same year this important event also occurred:  The first step was taken by playwrights in 1777 that led to the French Assembly passing the first law in the world to officially recognize authors’ rights to their written words.

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From here, I now turn to some more borrowed words.  This time the words, used by President Roosevelt during his 1936 campaign radio address, are borrowed from their original source as they were originally spoken in 1779 by the American Revolutionary War hero, John Paul Jones as described in this paper on the biography of John Paul Jones written by Dennis M. Conrad.

These famous words — “I have not yet begun to fight.” – that Jones returned in battle to a British warship’s captain who had asked him if he was ready to surrender stand in stark contrast to the equally famous words spoken by “Chief Joseph,” “From where the sun now stands I will fight nor more forever.”

Both of these statements reflect the opposing ends of a continuum about personal and collective power in circumstances of great duress and conflict.  Both of these statements contain reference to our physiological nervous system’s ability to face obstacles by using some range of abilities linked to the human fight-flight response.

Jones and his crew prevailed in this Revolutionary war sea battle.  “Chief Joseph” and his people did not prevail against their enemy.  Both this success and failure came with the cost of great suffering and tragedy.  Both of these statements were born out of trying and traumatic conditions.

Jones and “Joseph” are long dead, but their words live on.

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On this website, “Quotes From Our Native Past,” I found these words:

“Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children.”   Ancient Indian Proverb

As I returned to the out-of-doors this morning to continue working with the wet earth’s mud in my adobe-making project, I had this thought come through to me:  Just as we do not own the earth, we do not own our stories, our words, or the songs that spring out of the earth of our soul.

What we seem to THINK we own are the rights to our property, including our stories, words and songs.  Because I exist in a material world within a culture that values what it owns more than just about anything else, I cannot set myself, my words, or my writing process apart from the structures of my culture and society.  I therefore have had to take a stand regarding my RIGHTS to my words.

In the vision I had about singing in the wilderness when I was a teenager, I did not OWN the song that expressed itself through me.  Yet in the very real world I live in, the issue of RIGHTS becomes critical.  While I might rather this reality was different, I have to face the facts.

What I believe is that the healing of traumas and the impact and consequence of abuse happens at the same time we heal our story-song.  This is the revolution we are all participating in.  As a species we are involved in creating a terrible story-song for all of life on this beautiful world we live on.  We cannot separate our own individual healing from the healing of all.

Therefore, I cannot heal my own story without following with integrity the pathway that unfolds itself before me.  I cannot write about Universal Human Rights of children and adults while excluding from these rights our own right to tell and claim our personal story.

In an antagonistic world where competition for resources results in abuses of power on so many levels, the issue of Human Rights remains at the critical center of all that we do.  At the same time we can say that America had the right not only to fight a revolution to win its freedom from foreign rule, and that it had the right to destroy well over 350 Indigenous cultures within the boundaries of the land America claimed as its own, we can also say that great wrongs were committed that very few wish to recognize, claim or attempt to make some kind of restitution to those who were so unjustly doomed.

In an antagonistic world having rights honored versus forcing them to be relinquished matters.  When I married my second husband, and as he went through the process of legally adopting my daughter from my first marriage, I had to legally relinquish my parental rights as my daughter’s mother and then adopt her back again at the same time her new father did.  Even though it might have been a legal technicality, and even though the period of time I was actually NOT my own daughter’s mother, I will never forget how horrible this procedure felt to me.

In the same way I will not even for an instant relinquish my human rights to my own story, even though I do not ACTUALLY own the story itself – or the words that I use to tell it – any more than I own the earth I walk upon.

My desired solution is going to be the creation of a legal entity that is a Lloyd family publishing trust that will own the rights to my (and my parents’) words.  It will be the response-ability of this trust to take care of these words that do not belong to anyone individually.  I believe in the reality of ‘the bigger picture’ our human story belongs to our species if not more broadly to all of life itself.

Life is loaned to us as long as we are in our body.  When we leave here our story remains.  I WILL eat bugs rather than sell what does not belong to me in the first place if that is what it takes to keep what really is mine – my human right to HAVE a story in the first place — and then to ‘sing it’.

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