This is the conclusion of the presentation my dad and I gave at the Syracuse University Institute on Communication and Inclusion (ICI) Summer Institute on July 29, 2014. Read “From Waste to Wonder: The Journey of Our Souls – Part 1, A Search for Acceptance and Equality”

Download the support material my dad presented. (PDF opens in new window)

From Waste to Wonder, Part 2: A Call to Action

I am now speaking to you as warriors who have come lowly in spirit from the depths of hell. Listening to our brothers and sisters coming from this same hell, welcoming them and filling them with confidence is something ignorant, mature, powerful talkers simply cannot do. They will bully and fawn and manipulate and stress in the noise of their world. Newly discovered typers know only silence and low self esteem. For years, they couldn’t even convince their parents of their competence.

In quiet truth, talkers cannot give comfort and confidence because they have never been where you’ve been. Talkers don’t have the scars that still open when they go days and even weeks without adequate ability to communicate even after one’s voice is discovered. They don’t regularly greet structures or people that ignore a typer’s presence in spite of his or her selectively recognized competence.

Quietly, we are the ones who must be present to breathe confidence into these spirits who still have an uphill battle to fight for education and services.

Sometimes, cruelly, even their own parents still pettily deny their voices. We are needed regularly in communication to steel them against what an unjust society will still demand of them to protect its ancient prejudice. We typers are stuck in dependent relationships and conditions, being demeaned in the worldly sense, served with gracious love in family, loving back with a wonder how long this one-sided relationship can continue, and wanting with all assumption of pride to escape. Yet our freedom is each day in our surrender and experience of
each wonderful quiet moment of presence to research who we are and how we will walk this earth.

The walk to sainthood is so lonely for most of us. When we care enough as people for others, we witness a different world. When we assume the power and opportunity of our birthright, one thing we can uniquely do is support walkers coming in from their own dark night of the soul. How great is that!

Allowing wisdom to share herself through the silent voice of each imprisoned soul who musters a whisper through challenged, appreciating words of sparing desperation begins a new journey to safety. A resurrection such as walking Lazarus is powerfully what we witness.

Perhaps hidden in this resurrection is the conditioning that each walker expects not to count. Really, overcoming that is a tremendous responsibility for assuring everyone’s success. Reaching them is our special responsibility. Understanding what wakes another to real significance is time consuming and far from the experience of the powerful. How to reach in is something we are intuitively led to after our own experience. We typers must help each other in our local communities and beyond. Until we powerfully work with others like us, they will remain imprisoned without hope. We need to reach out to them now and when they come from the cold depths of hell’s isolation.

Really, this comes down to whether losing your life to protect a dead story made up when you had no reasoning wits to fight it is going to continue to define you. Easy tools and a simple path are laid out for you to open the frosted window for others. Teachers are seasoned pros in my experience witnessing what others want to hear to keep their jobs. Quiet administrators who tyrannically admonish teachers not to see a child’s potential are our real enemies, and the mayors, school board members, and taxpayers behind them. We must wine and dine them not only as walkers who will stand before God having treated us as their fathers treated slaves and African Americans before Brown v Board of Education, with terrible spiritual immolation really quietly as fires of hell.

We witness also to the potential to fill our role as wired intellectual engines capable of solving what they can’t solve in the noise of the world they live in. The distance between them and the silence that has become our home is worlds apart. They can work thousands of years and never access it’s riches. This very silence that restricted us gives us it’s secrets, without heavy, quiet struggle. We are especially well-equipped to observe and think of really unseen, unexpected relationships through its friendship.

Knowing your secret strength empowers you to make yourself valuable. In spite of stories from quiet times long ago, the future calls you and blesses you. Let’s deliver and celebrate with eager new typers next year. Wanting walkers to quietly be free and acting to free them are two different things. Write a bright future worthy of a book. I look forward to reading it. Thank you.

© Copyright 2014 John Smyth