More Than Your Own Safety

In one of her poems, Further Notes to Clark, Lucile Clifton asks:

What have you ever traveled toward / more than your own safety?

My deepest regrets are the places in my life where I experienced failures of love or failures of courage. Often, they were the same thing. What I did not say; what I did not do; what I saw and did not voice; what I heard and did not challenge.

Someone I dated once sent me a photo of himself jumping off a bridge, 143 feet high, with cables attached, towards a river below. I responded:

I’ve never been drawn to hurl my body off precipices – my work gives me all the adrenalin rushes I need.

My director says: I want to encourage you to go There. To FEEL in rehearsal, however scary, so you can access that feeling on stage.

What have I ever traveled toward more than my own safety?

A largeness I could not put a shape to. Something beyond the reality I live in. I want my life to have mattered on this earth – to be reflected in what I did - for justice, for beauty, for truth. Not in what I accumulated.

I think of 3 million Darfuris displaced, dispossessed. Of Lebanon in broken bleeding shards. Of Eddy Zheng in his prison cell.

The question is not what have I ever traveled toward. It is: Do I understand, each day, the hugeness, the wealth, of my freedom to choose my journey?