Our society has a way of silencing the truth-tellers. It often places them inside a derisive narrative comprised of motivations severed from human actuality until an event happens that causes a moral explosion, and a revolution is born. The story reads like this: oppression, demoralization, explosion, revolt, then a passage of reflective time rewrites the original objectors of immorality as the new martyrs of history. The list of big names is extensive: Nelson Mandela, Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, etc. But there are lesser-known heroes and heroines in every narrative. I’m sure you know someone who’s held fast to justice and integrity. These are the ordinary/extraordinary voices that need a scaffold, and that scaffold is art. But how is it built?

Engaging in creativity means extending yourself as an active witness of your own truth. As a writer, I can’t, nor should I try, extend myself for the truth of all humanity. That would make my work, as well as the meaning of truth, banal, but I can add a rung that links another writer’s hard-won understanding, and so on, until a platform around a particular narrative exists. And we all live in our storylines; like it or not, mindful living is about untangling, reworking, and understanding the narratives we are born into, which is crucial to truth-finding. In this way, truth becomes less about fact, per se, and more about how that fact has lived inside us and, by doing so, becomes a piece of knowledge.

The distillation of knowledge from fact is the underpinning of revolution because it turns a fact, a digit, into a human experience that’s harder to trivialize or deny. So, the more creative a community, the greater the scaffold of collective knowledge, and when shared, it produces a keen sensitivity to potential injustices and an organized platform for protest. You don’t have to “like” someone’s creative work or even understand it, that’s inconsequential, what’s crucial is that you value the act of creating with respectful attention.

As always, wishing you luck and inspiration with your writing.

Be well friends,

Gret Heffernan

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