I have been a trauma therapist and educator for more than a decade and in that time I have encountered countless stories that have fundamentally changed the ways I experience myself, others and the world. They’ve pulled me closer, they’ve pushed me away. They have radicalized me and politicized me. Stories that have brought me home to myself and to the need for deep, radical love and relationships that reject the confines of normativity so that we can move through the world not just together, but together differently. The throughline in all of this? Stories. 

Stories that attempt to capture the horrors that people have experienced and survived. Stories that remind me of our confounding capacity for evolution, transformation and joy (in the face of it all, somehow). One of the great gifts of my work has been becoming a deeply committed listener of stories. 

Stories are an attempt to capture a moment, an experience, a life. They have been a central form of communication for all of time. They are the written and spoken word, song, movement, dance and the shape of a body. All a means to capture moments in our lives when something shifts. Something as small as a sudden piercing of light through clouds over the ocean, a song that cracks something open inside of us and moves our bodies, the weight of heartbreak that rearranges us, the gravity of another’s prayers. Moments that move us into new ways of seeing and being.

Our bodies are the vehicles for our stories and there are certain moments that can unlock and unleash these stories. Some of these stories are held softly –  like water quietly lapping against a shore. And sometimes they are held fiercely – like a heartbreak, the rumble of a protest, or an exclamation of a truth too long held quiet. Either way, these moments are our invitation into aliveness, embodiment and connection.

And yet….how often do we talk about them?

We live in a time of profound disconnection from our bodies, from the earth, from art and awe, from each other. I fear how rarely we allow ourselves to feel,  to be vulnerable enough to be deeply and truly impacted, to let empathy rearrange us. Without that willingness, we cannot find our way from individual to collective transformation.

Storytelling is our connective tissue. Like muscle fibers, we are meant to pull and stretch and hold each other. We cannot build collective impact without stories that move us, without letting ourselves be changed. We also cannot step more radically into love and connection without tending to the scar tissue inside of us and between us. 

That is why I am starting MOVD.

MOVD is a space for conversations about the moments that alter us. The poetry in quiet moments. The gravity that pulls us toward each other. The raw, ordinary and sacred stories that remind us we belong to one another.

I move and allow myself to be moved, as Mark Strand wrote, to keep things whole. To keep me whole.