Kimberly Priest
“Learning to be a Healer”
I wrote “Learning to be a Healer” shortly after my move from Michigan to Texas this past year—a move that proved to be quite traumatic after years of dealing with an abusive spouse back home. The poem began as a handful of separate reflections inspired as I read the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, a young girl abducted by Comanches warriors from her pioneer home on May 19, 1836, who eventually married a Comanche chief with whom she had three children. She effectually became Comanche, fully assimilating into tribal life, until she was “rescued” by white men in 1860, witnessing the death of her husband and never seeing her two sons again.
While Texans celebrated this rescue, Cynthia Ann did not share their sentiment. In Empire of the Summer Moon, S. C. Gwynne writes “Cynthia Ann—Nautdah—had drifted in the mystical cycles of the seasons, living in that random, terrifying, bloody, and intensely alive place where nature and divinity became one” and after the rescue, she fought her transition into European pioneer society where she felt “interrogated by polite uncomprehending white men who believed in a single God and in a supremely rational universe where everything could be explained.” To Cynthia, her rescue was actually her abduction.
This story surfaced a lot of trauma concerning my own experiences with religion and violence, specifically the way my ex-husband used religion to probe my heart, looking for its adulteries. I wrote the separate lines that eventually built this poem while thinking about religion as hostile space to those outside its particular expressions of faith, and how this hostility often arises when one expression perceives the other expression as unclean or not measuring up to its values, rules and expectations. Concerning religion, so much is about the lens we perceive others through, and this lens can effectually color our treatment of others, well intended or—as in my domestic violence situation—not.
While Texans celebrated this rescue, Cynthia Ann did not share their sentiment. In Empire of the Summer Moon, S. C. Gwynne writes “Cynthia Ann—Nautdah—had drifted in the mystical cycles of the seasons, living in that random, terrifying, bloody, and intensely alive place where nature and divinity became one” and after the rescue, she fought her transition into European pioneer society where she felt “interrogated by polite uncomprehending white men who believed in a single God and in a supremely rational universe where everything could be explained.” To Cynthia, her rescue was actually her abduction.
This story surfaced a lot of trauma concerning my own experiences with religion and violence, specifically the way my ex-husband used religion to probe my heart, looking for its adulteries. I wrote the separate lines that eventually built this poem while thinking about religion as hostile space to those outside its particular expressions of faith, and how this hostility often arises when one expression perceives the other expression as unclean or not measuring up to its values, rules and expectations. Concerning religion, so much is about the lens we perceive others through, and this lens can effectually color our treatment of others, well intended or—as in my domestic violence situation—not.