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.

There’s a man yelling “Masking is child abuse” and I want to scream at him to shut up. But then I imagine one of my children saying it to their sibling and my follow-up scripted response. “You can tell her you are angry, but you may not be hurtful towards her because of it” and suddenly I’m sitting on the brown plaid couch as an eight year old in the living room of our mobile home in a trailer park affectionately dubbed “the villa” not saying any of the things I needed to say because I was afraid of being hurtful.

May I tell you what I need to trust you? Because it’s not a link to the “credible source'' of your argument. I don’t need to hear you regurgitate someone else’s thoughts the way the kings took an ancient, divine text and rewrote it into something that suited their fucked up agenda.

That ache in my shoulder… The shaman told me it was the shield I held. Which may be true. More often it feels like a sack. The kind you tie up on the end of a stick when you’re running away from home.

How oversimplified we have been taught to live that we should bucket the seasons of our life into three distinct periods of birth, life, and decay.

“How is your heart today? Have you felt forgotten? How can I love you in the way that will make you remember that you are my most precious and treasured beloved?”

Today I took a walk in the forest and I am starting to believe that the trees like it best when it rains.

What is your pleasure, sweet, wild man? Because mine is the glimpses of dirt on your hands. Mine is the image of you, knees in the earth. Mine is the scent of licorice on your breath.

On my mat, sacred space. I come fully to this place where I have been hundreds of times. Where I have blurred the lines between my feet and the earth. The dirt from my feet, the heel of my hands imprinted like love notes on the spaces I land.