Letter from Tracy Howe

Today’s Letter to the Future comes from Rev. Tracy Howe. Tracy was one of the leaders selected to participate in the Center for Storytelling and Narrative Change gathering. Rev. Howe founded Restoration Village Arts, a learning and action network of artists and theologians building a just and beautiful world and working in today’s specific and intersecting movements of liberation including borderlands justice, earth justice, queer justice, and racial justice. Her letter reminds us that we are called to be part of the life cycles of beauty-making in the world, a message and prayer desperately needed in these polarized times.

Auburn friends and supporters,

I am writing to tell you I have died and am now in the Great Embrace.

We are light, energy waves, particles of stardust, soil nutrients from the earth, water, gratitude, love, memories, faith, all coded in our neural pathways, our body, and the imprint of our love and action that remains on the human and more than human kin we lived with. Death is a transformation of all these things, all we are, into the Always Ongoing.

The Always Ongoing is not any different than our terra life in that we remain interconnected and interdependent to all that is and ever was, called All Possibility.

We continue to care for multispecies living and dying relationships. The illusion of linear time falls away and we are deeply aware, we experience, we embody, all the love that holds us, and all the living and dying relationships we are response-able to.

The stories that first formed me in my terra life tried to convince me I was not responsible to living and dying relationships I did not choose or that did not appear to benefit me. All Possibility beckoned with something more compelling: “You were born in this time to be a part of something beautiful and know the power and purpose in all relationships, even those you did not choose, to be healing and new possibility for all that has been.”

The struggle for healing and beauty, for justice and community, ultimately nurtured me and began to transform the mal-formation and violence I was born into and complicit with.

All Possibility, the truth we could believe about ourselves, a giving story, an abundant story, is always only ever a remnant on earth, seeds of community and creativity, acts of resistance and protest, surviving cultures and faith traditions, defiant beauty and practices of hope.

— Rev. Tracy Howe

Tracy is a songwriter, producer, director, emerging filmmaker, activist and minister and toured full-time from 2000-2009 playing music at colleges, small music venues and festivals, churches, house concerts, and prisons throughout the U.S. and Latin America. Tracy (she/they/womxn) is a cultural worker, descended from people in Southeast Asia and Europe, and born on the Native lands of the Cheyenne and Arapahoe people in what is now known as Boulder, CO. After finishing an M.Div. at Harvard in 2012, they began producing for other artists and organizations, releasing Songs For 1,000 Days for Bread For the World and the Oscar Romero Cantata for Luis Alfredo Diaz. Tracy has served as the director of art and liturgy for many ecumenical and global events, working with the Latin American Theological Fellowship, Micah Global, Sojourners, Ecumenical Advocacy Days, Bread For the World, and the United Church of Christ. You can learn more about her at Restoration Village Arts.