THE WEB

“WHILE SPEAKING, STAY FOCUSED ON THE WORDS FROM YOUR HEART”

TITLE, THE SECRET | WRITING, RACHEL BLACKBURN

WABI-SABI The Movement launched on August 3- yeah-yeah! Leading up to this day, I spent every spare second writing about it, thinking about it, talking about it and buying multiple note books (each better than the other) to plan about it. I breathed WABI-SABI The Movement and I agonized about sending it out into the world. Was it ready? Would people understand what I was trying to say? Would they understand the words I was trying to get them to read- would they even read it? Well, the answer is a resounding yes. The world picked up WABI-SABI and sucked it right in. It’s now being read around the world, including Romania, Aruba, India, Netherlands, Spain, Italy and France. THANK GOODNESS! 

WABI-SABI is about life, about finding the beauty in imperfection- the imperfection that our lives are. Feng shui is what you do in your home and WABI-SABI is what you do in your life. Life happens, and when it happens, unpredictability happens- whether we want it or not. As I began to write this week, I found the little self-doubt ego driven monster had crawled secretly into my life. Nothing out of the ordinary, just the usual “what difference can you make Rachel?” that ego talk. After speaking with friends, I realized that the monster had to go- and it did. Because WABI-SABI isn’t just about me, and it isn’t just about you- it’s about us- as a collective. It’s about speaking up when others wont, about being loud when others are quiet and about making noise when people just want silence. This is about the right over the wrong, the opportunity over the restrictions. This is about having the freedom to sit at my laptop and be able to openly and freely write about women and children around the world who are unable to write for themselves. This is how I write but more importantly, this is why I write and why I will continue to write.

Last week someone very close to me was diagnosed with breast cancer, that's the fourth person in my family to be diagnosed with cancer in three years. It made me reflect on WABI-SABI and what it is The Movement is trying to do- what it is The Movement IS doing. This isn’t about the division of people and issues, whether something is worse or harder or whether someone is experiencing something far worse than you. The Movement is about enabling space for issues to be spoken about. Cancer is awful, it’s out of our control and it’s horrible to see someone you love go through something like that. When we speak about women in Sub-Saharan Africa and the issues they are dealing with, we are not comparing but we are joining the thread- like a web. Cancer has received low priority for health care services in Sub-Saharan Africa. The reason is undoubtedly the overwhelming burden of communicable diseases. But in fact breast cancer is the second most frequent cancer in Sub-Saharan African women and is usually diagnosed in women younger than in developed countries (mean age: 42-53 years), with later stages (III or IV, i.e. with axillary nodes and distant metastases). My point here is- we are all human and at a biological level we rarely differ at birth. In life we have heartache, we have pain, we have happiness. We are human- and this is the thread that WABI-SABI seeks to strengthen. We need to discuss issues, be a collective and join together rather than separate and segregate. We need to build the web and help those who cannot yet start theirs. Just as the spider builds her web and others can climb across, we too can start the build.

“While speaking, stay focused on your words coming from your heart”. – The Secret. 

Love and smiles, WS x