What Color Is Your Heart?

If I invite a person of color to bring their gentle listening hand to my white person heart, what would they hear, sense, or discover?

If I as a white person, am invited to bring a gentle, listening hand to the heart of a person of color, what will I hear, sense, discover, about them? What’s available in this wordless, kind touch?

Try this in your imagination. Just start there.

Listen within for when to lean into this experiment and when to draw back. This is the art of building emotional resilience. We listen within ourselves paying attention to body sensation: it will tell us the truth of our experience in any given moment. It’s not a special gift of the chosen few. That deep river of listening is always there, awaiting our return, available to anyone.

This experiment arose quietly for me. I grappled with what to say in this blog post: what can I say that hasn’t been said about racism, classism and the need to reclaim a part of our collective soul? Maybe I don’t need to say anything at all. Maybe all I need to do is listen, listen with my full bodied humanity.

What might the next phases of our collective work be like if they are shaped by the memories of a heart met by an open listening hand?