Child, go back to sleep
590 women authors in the writing contest of the Sororistas Collective Women write the world of tomorrow https://www.sororistas.fr/. It's great to see this explosion of talent. I am one of them, and I am proud of it.
Did you attend the vibrant award ceremony. If not, it's high time to read the texts of the 20 finalists and of the winner Laura Carpentier-Goffre, whom I warmly congratulate for her story "Covid vs Goliath". Texts at the bottom of the page https://www.sororistas.fr.
I also want to share my text which is close to my heart, "Child, go to sleep", written in July, it has all the more meaning as I have just learned that I will be a grandmother in June, and I am doubly happy to have written it and to dedicate it today to this child who will be born.
Bravo to the Sororistas collective for its passion
In the year 2000, I had already had my share of millennial terrors: Y2K said the computer specialists, the beginning of the Aquarian Age, said the most esotericists. In short, everyone had their own deep fantasy. The Konis had announced it. That is to say!
And my daughters being 10 years old, I had shamefully and secretly stored sugar, Nutella, pasta and ketchup. Gummy bears with marshmallow too. Organic food had not yet gone to my head at that time. The worst thing that happened to us, on that night of December 31, 2000, was a New Year's Eve!
In the meantime, the cow was mad, the birds were contagious, the blood was contaminated and the Levothyrox was adulterated.
And I stopped trying to plan everything, even the snacks! On the other hand, I didn't eat meat anymore, I sorted my garbage more or less, and I was infatuated with chia seeds and almonds.
I had also lost much of the use of my legs, though it had nothing to do with global warming. And like a sudden urge to pee, I started writing and searching for the meaning of my life, of our lives, from stories and history.
In 2020, given the string of personal disasters in 2019, I thought "nifty", a twice 20/20 year will do. Indeed...
It started well with a lentil dish at Alice's on January 1st. Everything was fine. Good fortune.
The media was just beginning to hum COVID, a yellow peril? in charge of animating the vacuity of this time of the year and which appeared to us seriously inflated with pangolin.
On March 8th at Debout Citoyennes at the Zenith in Paris, we were 100 women to speak, to embrace each other, stuck together in the dressing rooms, laughing at each other, before going on stage in front of nearly 2,000 people. It was the last public stage of the Zenith for many months. The last hug too.
That night, a friend of mine died of that strange flu. I wasn't laughing anymore.
On March 17, 2020, the containment was declared, martial, in France, and then in the world.
This first confinement lasted almost three months. And the unthinkable happened: forbidden to go out, to travel, to see our grandmothers, to see our children, to work, to go to the pub, to meet, the social life stopped, the businesses, without imperative necessities, closed, the exchanges and the commercial developments frozen, each one in its region and blockade of the borders. Decreed by the men.
The other had become a potential danger, humanity atomized into probable postillionary strains. Then, in the summer of 2020, we went to "clusterize", oh the ugly word, which only has a pretty past, a very different one.
This March 28, 2030, I am 75 years old, thirty in my head. You, you want to come to the world.
I am not going to tell you again what we have just experienced. There are so many fools who will still want to give you their structured and smoky analysis.
And yet, know that the secret of incarnation does not lie in the only knowledge, certainly necessary, of the past and the facts, but much more in the experimentation by oneself, in the road, by the path. This path that I have taken, this place that I have been able to claim.
Child who is going to be born, it is of your incarnation that I speak. Your road of yellow bricks!
We, humanity, are still here. As since the beginning of time, humanity, almost identical, unchanging, whatever the technological and scientific advances and the metaphysical and philosophical debates.
Gone are the days of the caves, the lights and the steam engine, gone are the accursed kings, the Gribiche calf's head and the personal computer, gone are the thirty glorious years, Facebook and the gasoline-powered car, the cities are different, the infrastructures are different, the daily lives are different. But we persist in seeing only what we know, we give in to nostalgia, we still delude ourselves of a past golden age. Don't get bogged down in making more of what we have known, invent. Imagine.
The world does not change, however it advances, by stages, with beautiful falls. It was said, in my time, that one remained for some time in the Prison box, without touching 10.000 francs (francs? forget it!). These are stages, the world is in work, it is a great perpetual building site.
Yes, the world has not changed as you come to it in the year 2030.
It has just split a little more between two poles, two tendencies, two hopes, without knowing yet which obedience - the dominant one or the collective one - could take the final hand, and whether or not we will be able to gather authentically in a federative and constructive, and enjoyable project. I'll explain this last term in all its meaning a little later, I promise: for now, enjoy the amniotic peace!
Indeed, I, we have known the world "before", but the world after is curiously still in gestation.
Whatever one might have hoped for in terms of an immediate change bordering on the miraculous at the end of 2020, it has not happened, it cannot happen. The gestation of the world is done in eternity. The women, your mothers suspected it. The fathers know it now.
We are such stubborn animals, bound by our beliefs, and attached to our experiences and territories, again and again. We need time. In 10 years, we have just learned to ally ourselves, women and men, to find our deep humanity, in a mutual respect of our identical and different breaths, in rhythms that are particular and complementary to us, to be able to give you a chance today.
In fact, what is 10 years in a history of humanity of so many thousands of years.
How arrogant of us to think we can do better in such a short time, the insignificant time of a life, of a fleeting generation.
The urgency, you will say to me one day: it is insufficient to radically sweep away the "isms" of all kinds of these last two millennia, the bad folds have the hard life!
And yet the earth turns, the earth is still beautiful, in remission, although it has already lost its colors, like a painting not yet restored, an ink faded in front of merciless and devastating aggressions.
There is always the light, sometimes cold, sometimes violent, and the beauty of the dawn.
And then, there is the other, this Other, with whom it is still so difficult to communicate and build together. This other who is a part of ourselves that we find difficult to accept. But with whom, little by little, we agree on a proximity, a common identity, a complementarity, an alliance. That we begin to know and recognize. Whom we are becoming responsible for, whom we can no longer leave on the road or on dangerous shores, or displaced in areas of darkness and misery. We all have the right to life. Together.
It is in this walk together, in this acclimatization to the existence of the other, in this friendship for what unites us, and also for what differentiates us, that we have made the most progress since 2020. Slowly, in small steps!
Anima and animus integrated, complementary and equal, to weave your cradle.
Far from the great projects, the beautiful theories and the economic and political conglomerates - and besides, why differentiate the two which are only the faces of the same medal -, not by great movements, lyrical flights. No, in the intimate, the micro-movements, the discreet, the profound, by small, gently invasive touches.
Women and men, Humans of good will.
Yes, it is in the proximity, the intimacy, the delicacy, the listening, the attention, the sensitive, it is there where the outline of the world "after" germinated.
Having lost all our comfortable points of support and our absolute certainties in this prolific year 2020, we were able to learn to connect, again, but millimeter by millimeter, slowly, and feel both our new equilibrium and our precariousness.
Social distancing did not get the better of our common desire: Together.
The air to be breathed commonly may have been potentially viral, but there came a greater breath to encompass and nourish us, a call of air, a flight, which, like a wave, propelled us into a trampoline of joy, excited as children in front of a new game.
I could, as a child, tell you the good and the bad, the pretty and the hopeless, the openness and the confinement of those years. Sad stories, heavy stories, but they are just stories, don't pay attention to them!
No matter the steps, the setbacks, and even the advances, no matter the tools, the means, and the terrible fears, and the losses: there has been life, there has been movement. There has been desire, there has been choice, and another world is inescapably in gestation, while you are born in 2030.
None of us can predict your life, as none of us could predict ours. And that's the way it is.
The present belongs to you, and your future.
However, what I am sure of, whatever your country -if you have a country-, whatever your race -if you have one-, whatever your gender- and sexuality, whatever your culture you will draw, whatever the society in which you will live, which you will influence, whatever the climate, which you may not hold against me, and with what you have in your cradle, but also with all that you will contribute, is that we are waiting for you. Welcome to you.
You are profoundly, wonderfully human, you are a gift that life brings to our history of Humanity, which I will have to abandon in a while, to my great regret, because it enchants me.
This morning, your mother will give you life, a life among those of billions of human beings, who have followed one another for millennia, for centuries. A unique life. A life like so many others too. Your life.
And this thread that makes us human is the love you will receive, the amazed look of your parents, your confident joy of a baby bird to perceive them, the caress of a hand, of a finger, the song of a lullaby, loving words babbled in your ear, the depth of your sleep, and your plenitude once nourished by all this and in your body.
2030, this does not evoke anything for you, because you are innocent and virgin of the knowledge that you will discover.
You are hope, you are life.
Child, go back to sleep, I am watching over you.