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.