Donna's Muse Papers

My friend Jackie Dove-Miller is a poet and a spoken word artist. She writes about things that matter to women. She gets into the heart and soul of what women feel. Her voice is the voice of a best friend, a mother, a pastor, a teacher, a counselor. She tells us to re-examine who we think we are, to stop listening to those voices telling us we are not good enough, because we are women who CAN. I met Jackie when we were volunteers for the Obama campaign in 2008. We quickly learned we both were writers and I invited her to a writers’ group meeting. She shared her poems and they made me cry. How did she, a black woman, know this white woman’s truth? Jackie’s words show that we women share a common truth that transcends race, culture, or background. Sometimes the words are laced with humor, to help us bear our internal truths, and then the eternal truth shines through, that we are ALL God’s children. That knowledge lifts us up out of despair and hold us up as we walk forward, na

The phrase, “Well, bless your (or her or his) heart,” has been assigned an undeserved negative connotation these days, I believe from Yankee writers who pretend to understand the South. When I was growing up, blessing someone’s heart meant just what it says. Folks said it to or about folks who were going through a difficult time or situation because there just were no other words to convey one’s sympathy, or more importantly, empathy, because we’d all known hard times. We were asking God’s blessing on that person. Take for example if you were standing in the churchyard after services talking about sister Beth who had lost her husband, or someone’s child home sick with chicken pox, or brother Clyde who just came home from the hospital, “Well, bless her (or his) heart” preceded the plans to take food to them, visit, and pray for them. When a little one fell and skinned her (or his) knee the grown up in charge would scoop up the child and with a “bless your little