I delivered this talk in an unprecedented way this year.  My annual birthday reflection was given at the very end of a reading and talk I was giving in Seattle about the anthology, to a packed house at Black Coffee Coop where they laughed, clapped, and wildly cheered and say Happy Birthday.  The lyrical parts of the essay – I actually SANG them  into the mic.  Me!  My terrible singing voice.  Fear, be gone.  I did it!  I gave the address to a crowd.  Bucket list shortened.

The other day I caught a lyrical moment while I was cleaning.  That iconic song was playing, “to everything, turn turn turn. There is season turn turn turn.”  Nearly everyone knows it.  It’s based a popular Ecclesiastes passage in scripture that poeticizes that for everything in life, there is a season.

As I was folding laundry, I found myself singing along, “A time of love, a time of hate, a time of war, a time of peace.”  My attention drifted in and out of the song, and at one particular moment when I drifted in, the lyrics are “a time to rend, a time to sow.”  But when I heard is a “time to wren, a time to sow.”

The actual lyrics say a time to:

To rend R-E-N-D is to shred something violently into pieces.

Sow. Would put all of that back together.

But what I heard is a time to

Wren. W-R-E-N. Meaning the small, brown-feathered songbird with a perky head.  Although a noun, I thought turning wren into a verb was a clever way to communicate a time to fly.  Since the music group who sang this classic song was called The Byrds, I figured this is what they meant.  At time to fly.  It made sense.

To sow, I thought it meant a time to cultivate the soil, to till the earth.

As I look back on the past year, on what 34 revealed to me, I think it was year to rend. R-E-N-D.  The ever growing matrix of raising a 4 year old in this world that would love nothing more than to squeeze out every gentle, creative, non-linear tendency rends my zealous ambition to preserve and develop it.  The razorblades of rejection letters from online publications, magazines, and journals rend my delicate tongue as a writer.  Simply existing sometimes rends my dreams of love, justice, healing, and simply allowing myself to be imperfect in a dangerously hypocritical world that is itself flawed but seeks to emotionally persecute and criminalize the imperfect.

To rend R-E-N-D is where 34 began, but it didn’t end there.

Tonight.  Tonight I stand before you in my time of wren – W-R-E-N – flying, soaring. being a person who has finally come into her own song, as someone who decided that I’m finished tilling the soil.  It’s time to wren.  It’s time to fly.

Tonight my flight comes full circle, as I stand here in Seattle, the very place where, 13 years ago I ruminated about a thought I had for a book that may help survivors of rape and sexual violence know that they are not alone.  Tonight I stand before you as its anthologist, a person who emerged out of the ideas of “maybe someday I will do that” and into the light of “I did that.”  I am 35 years full of beauty and brokenness.

I believe that, as woman of color activist by quilt trade, Carolyn Mazloomi, once said of her decision to pursue quilting as her life craft, “I left my job to quilt because I believed I deserve a life of joy.  I deserve to go after my dreams.”

I believe I deserve a life of joy.  And as a women of color declaring that I deserve the opportunity, the unequivocal moment to express who I am without backing down in fear of racism, sexism, kyriarchy, catcalling, harassment, mockery, heckling, or anything else to silence the voice that I have come to know and love as my own for the past 35 years, yes, I believe I deserve a moment to say I deserve a life of joy.

I believe you do deserve that, too.

This is my song.  This is me.  This is 35, a time, indeed, to WREN. W-R-E-N.