First Ground of Creation

Two inhales, one exhale.  Fast enough and long enough to make my body tingle and my hands cramp into claws, my primal hands held before me as you appear to watch me weep and breathe.  We started at twilight and the sky is dark now. 

Flying or falling, only those two with us, never the sacred third - free. 

Your soul’s patience, kind and tender, meets me through the mirror.  It whispers sweet somethings to me.  My beloved, it says, that thing you think I have and won’t give you?  I don’t have it, I never did.  That thing you think I am and won’t be for you?  I’m not that, I never was.

You show me, with such gentleness, the rugged terrain of us. You show me that the treasure was in my hands all along, whole and complete.

Time shifts then, past, present, and future stack up and are all now.

The creation of all our us-ness is now, this moment, here on this ropy blanket in this very darkness.  

The woven shawl of time has wrapped itself around my life and brought me onto your path then, all those years ago, so you could be this for me today.  The one who whispers through the mirror.  The one who said yes. I will be this lie for you so you can find truth.  

Free.

I do not know, I may never, what I have agreed to be for you. But I pray it is a gift, or will be someday.  I hope you'll have a moment, maybe while you're waiting for the darkness to envelope you, when you realize that everything you thought you could find in me, is already there in you. 

She who welcomes

Not loud, just persistent.  Repeated, rhythmic even.  Knocking at the door for months or maybe even years, they all feel the same now.  I don’t believe in time anymore, other than to meet a friend for coffee.  We agree on a moment and call it a time. But using it to pace and measure moments of my life? Befores and afters and whens seem like dangerous concepts meant to keep me on a track that doesn’t exist unless I play along.  

Back to the knocking of the uninvited intruder outside. What will I find, weariness, when I let you in as a welcomed traveler deserving of minimally civilized hospitality?  As opposed to ignoring your pleas for food and water at my door?   

Your stay is more brief than I expected, you breeze through like a draft when I thought surely you would be the worst kind of squatter, impossible to dislodge. I feel the change in decor though, even as you leave.  This is a home where weariness can find shelter, however brief.  There’s now a new painting in my living room I’ve never seen before but now love. It is deep blues and night skies and a calm I thought impossible if you were in my life.  I felt my bones give in while you were here, I thought it meant I would collapse.  It did not.  It meant I could stop wearing the heavy coat of she-who-shall-never-be-weary.   Instead, those bones remembered they’re a living, responsive system of collagen and mineral crystals that adapt to context and load.   They adapted to the relief of one less retaining wall to hold up.