Share
Your Medicine
“Open up
and allow others to see your Medicine. In that way, you are offering
a gift to others who may have need of your talents. Every person
carries a legacy of needed talents that will support the growth and
expansion of the Tribe.”
Jamie Sams
(Native American teacher, quoted in Wisdom Circles by C. Garfield, C.
Spring & S. Cahill)
Having a community with
which to share your story is a healing and supportive way to grow.
You may not think of your circle of friends as a Tribe, but if you
are able to be authentic in good times and in not-so-good times with
a group of people you trust, that is a tribe (small t). Belonging to
such a group is essential to happy, healthy human existence.
I've been clearing out my
house of extraneous “stuff.” Right now, the focus is on the
basement, which has been chock full of every manner of memorabilia from my sons' childhoods and college years, part of our eBay
business, all my art supplies and boxes of old papers, whatever I
dragged home from my mother's house, Mrs. Ruth's entire collection of
clothing from 96 years of living on planet Earth, and on and on. I am
simply overwhelmed by the job, and even though I've been at it for
months, I look around and can barely see a dent made. When my friend,
Ellen, and I had our writing group this week, I was physically
exhausted and mentally flat. I shared with her what I was doing, and
she said, “I'll bring the truck and help you haul away the things
you want to donate.” We selected three shelters for women that
always need clothes, loaded 7 or 8 boxes of Mrs. Ruth's “gifts to
the world” into the back of Ellen's Subaru Baja, and off she went.
What a relief!
Another friend, Suzan,
told me that when I get ready to pull up the basement carpet, she will come
and help me do it. She's done it twice before, knows how to go about
it and what tools are needed. That's a tribe. If I hadn't opened up
and been honest about how overwhelmed I feel in the face of my
intransigent “go-it-alone” personality, they wouldn't have been
able to offer their “Medicine,” and we all would have been poorer
for it. All of us have abilities and services to offer one another.
Our tribe benefits when we offer those gifts and talents, and we
benefit from being humble enough to speak of our need. Sharing our
stories with others allows them to know who we are all the way
through, and not just on the surface.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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