From the founder

Sometimes healing doesn't begin in a Basilica. Sometimes it begins in a one-person tent in the dark, with frogs singing and the wind moving through the moss. Sometimes it begins when a woman finally stops running long enough to lay her scars out in a circle around her. That is where this story begins. I call it:

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Making My Scars Proud:

 

I've been running with my scars for a long time. Stuffing them into my skort pockets like contraband candy wrappers. Tucking them into my cheeks like unsent screeds ripped from a spiral-bound notebook. Scars from digesting anger and anxiety for so long that my belly became permanently scalded.

 

Maybe I took too many long whiffs of the noxious potions my sister and I delighted in mixing from half-used cans and jars we found in the smoldering sections of the dump. The smell of melted plastic and spoiled mayonnaise was darkly satisfying. Looking back, I think it's because I have long been kin to the language of ruin.

 

Sometimes I hid my scars in my sturdy black boots and ran deep into the marsh until the mud sucked me in so tight I couldn't run anymore. An honest place to ride out storms. Just me and the wild cattails swaying in a sacred space where no one dared, or cared, to follow. The half-rotten land of decay between worlds matched something inside me. On the edge between brackish bayou and saltwater Gulf, my soul nodded at the smell of death. It made living feel intentional.

 

I have long envied those boots that got stuck so deep they were never retrieved, forever entombed in that defiant, lonely, honest place.

 

And now I have laid my scars out in a circle around me like a Girl Scout in a one-person pup tent, sitting with them in the darkness. The rhythmic chorus of southern frogs comforts me like a mother. And I begin naming them.

Rage. Recklessness.

The deeper ones my father gave me.

Debasement. Shame.

The one my mother gave me from the screaming void of her silent retreat. Because knowing costs too much.

And the ones I gave myself from too much running.

 

I've come back to sit with a little girl inside me who has a lot to say. She is no longer fleeing or fading. She is strong, authentic, and kind.

I built a small campfire outside our tent, but I do not intend to burn these scars. I will honor them.

 

Out here, in the familiar, restless moss, I sense fierce ancestral magic present in these old wounds, the healing energy of a lineage of Grandmothers. Wisdom and hope carved out of tragedy and bone. And something wild and wordless too. A need to bring other women to this sacred place with me. I call it making my scars proud.

 

We all carry scars. But they are not the end of the story.

He said he made me. My body was his to covet, despise, control, discard.

But a body has a heart.

And a heart is built for dreams.

 

My story will not end until I lay down this pen, and my message from this small tent in the thick, anointing mud, is simple: Here is my hand. Come sit with me. There is room. Bring your scars. We will lay them out in a circle. We will hold them up to the firelight. We will discern their names and truths. And together we will conjure the holy oil, born of storms and sisterly potions, and discover the real, redeeming power poised inside every wound. And I promise you. We will dream.