Her Sacred Reclamation

Today I am taking a walk for a friend. Your friend and my friend. The world’s sweet friend. So many have gone and for now we are still chosen to be here. It won’t always be so. One day the earth will call back for our bones. “They were only a loan,” she’ll say. “They were only a loan.”

I wonder when I will be able to stop talking about grief. That simmer pot on my stove which I have stopped tending so that it sends smoke and burnt herbs sliding through my house. Sneaking under the cracks in the doors.

I am twisted down here in the roots of the earth with the aching desire to feel only and ever more human. I worship skin and teeth, blood and bones, fur and tears.

The thing about healing is that sometimes we must have our breath stolen in such a way that we find a new way of breathing. A new way of being.

I found new lines around my eyes when I looked in the mirror before I brought you to school and for a moment I wondered if I should buy that eye cream again and then later I remembered how much I cherish those lines while I washed Gigi’s hair and wondered if I’d have the luck to live until I was 90.

Healing culture has us all in its grip as if we are each a library of blank pages begging the teachers to tell us the words that need to be written down.

But today I did only soft, slow things and that was enough. Today I decided I forgave someone, though I may never say it out loud, and they may never know anything momentous happened. And it was just a small, quick knowingness that I had done it. That I wanted to do it. And the love that flooded my heart was a homecoming I didn’t know I needed.

I heard the unmistakable sound of china smashing on tile floor. Shit… I had foreshadowed that sound enough since that morning that I knew it was for real this time. So I’m a soothsayer, an unfortunate manifester, or have just been a mother long enough to know it was going to happen and to still hope for the best anyway.

Today I am not feeling gracious or forgiving or in any type of hospitable temper that would become a “healed” woman. Today I am shaking with rage as I drive down the highway from my children’s school, as I stop at a red light, as I see red, as I go home to paint my lips red for another hour in front of a screen being my best version of a hospitable woman.

The flowers at my wedding were dusty lavender roses. I loved their deep, subtle understated color, almost looking slightly wilted, slightly wild, at the edges. They looked like they knew something old and important but didn’t feel pressured to tell the rest of the world. They looked like what it is to be something effortlessly breathtaking. Like the Sufi teachers next to the waterfall in Maui who told me to stop focusing on what I was supposed to do, and instead focus on the “being” part of how I walk in this world. They looked like primordial wisdom.

It’s July of 1994 and I’m at the start of the longest twenty minutes of my life. The twenty minutes between the time my mom finishes fully slathering me in sunscreen and the moment that I am finally allowed to sprint into the Atlantic.

I live in a small, historic port city of cobblestones, bricks, old lilacs and centuries old, pristine houses. There are so many flowering trees dropping their petals right now that half the city looks like it snowed white and pink. Every sea breeze smells like lilacs and cherry blossoms. The epitome of old New England charm.