Testimony by Rebecca Badge
Reflection by Lisa McElaney
Reflection:
Rebecca Badge’s poem Testimony, written for her two daughters, is a lifeline for me in COVID times. I want to believe it. But sometimes that means I have to assert belief. So many of the those I work with are contending with ongoing challenges in the face of the pandemic and the necessary work of racial reckoning. The exhaustion is palpable and resilience is stretched. I feel called to renew my own faith in humanity – and in humility - when I read these lines.
Testimony
by Rebecca Badge
I want to tell you
that the world is still beautiful…
I want you to look again and again,
to recognize the tender grasses,
curled like a baby's fine hairs
around your fingers, as a recurring
miracle, to see that the river rocks
shine like God, that the crisp
voices of the orange and gold
October leaves are laughing at death.
I want you to look beneath
the grass, to note
the fragile hieroglyphs
of ant, snail, beetle.
I want you to understand that you are
no more and no less necessary
than the brown recluse, the ruby-
throated hummingbird, the humpback
whale, the profligate mimosa.
I want to say, like Neruda,
that I am waiting for
"a great and common tenderness,"
that I still believe
we are capable of attention,
that anyone who notices the world
must want to save it.
Lisa McElaney M.S., LMHC is a clinician in the Center for Early Relationship Support at Jewish Family and Children’s Center of Greater Boston (JF&CS). From there, she is embedded as an Infant/Early Childhood Mental Health Consultant at Horizons for Homeless Children and Dimock Community Health Center, both in Boston. Prior to becoming a counseling psychologist in her fifties, Lisa was a documentary filmmaker and Principal Investigator on NIH supported research about women’s and children’s health at Vida Health Communications, Inc. As a psychotherapist, Lisa is trained in trauma informed modalities such as EMDR and Child-Parent Psychotherapy. Currently, she and her team of Early Childhood Mental Health Consultants at JF&CS are engaged in a Workforce Expansion Project which includes training in infant and early childhood mental health consultation using a racial equity lens and cross-cultural understandings of early relational health and systems of care. She is married to the photographer/contemporary artist Abelardo Morell, who collaborated with Kevin Nugent on his book, Your Baby is Speaking to You.