Wednesday, September 28, 2011

The Promise of Stillness

As yet, the grass is unaware  of the shift in season and indeed today it could easily still be summer. The leaves that punctuate the lawn speak of autumnal blazes, but the grass, barely cool yet, is still green beneath my feet. The sun in my hair is hot to the touch. I send my own roots deep into this soil, engage a promise that gurgles in my deep belly. It is a promise to my sons, my loves, to stay put. To find the beauty in stillness. To embrace the winter's cold.

I anticipate the snow and shiver slightly, an imaginary chill drifting across the tops of my shoulders even as they glow with September's last light. It is how we grow, how we change, what we give to the babies we bear. Oh. I am so deeply in love with them, and their little voices jingle in the air around my ears like country wind chimes: their gratitude, their faith in me, their utter love, all hung at odd angles but perfectly balanced and gently singing.

Thank you, sweet boys, for making me want to be the best thing I can become. For choosing me to be your mother--what luck! For your soft kisses before bed each night. For your hands in mine every morning. For the abundance you have brought to my life. For the weight of what we are--together. Namaste, my sweet bunnies. Namaste.

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Meditation for Pierce

Your face is radiant, and your attention is directed entirely to your mother as I look on. I can see that you want to communicate with her through me, so I pay close attention. You show me a sequence of scenes that culminate in you, much taller than your mother, now white-headed and small with age: you are a man and you enclose her with your embrace, assure her with your wholeness.

For now you sit across from her, all nine years of you, cross-legged on the lawn, and the remnants of what has ailed you these past years is drawn like bits of magnetic sand to a cord of light. It follows the line of your spine and plunges down into the earth. The opaque little bits slide down the cord, bright with its light: divine healing. They are released deep into the soil and your mommy, she laughs because she is watering the ground and watching as daffodils emerge and bloom, absurdly time lapsed, right before your eyes.

These flowers are the tender fruits of your suffering, your fear, all of it suffused with purpose: your own divine intent. Together you laugh and the golden umbilicus that unites you, ties you gently to one another, is visible between you, spanning the space between you there on the grass. Daffodils pop to life all around you. Sunlight plays on your skin with the promise of days so light, so insubstantial, you will feel intoxicated by them, infused with their beauty and their freedom from fear.

Pierce, you are a special boy, and you have not struggled for nothing. Your mommy is awake. Awake and aware, and ever moving, sliding, morphing to keep you in her love's embrace, even as you grown, even as your heart remembers the joys of life on this earth.

I will tell her that you are staying. Fear not, sweet one. I will tell her you will stay, so that she can rest in the palm of your heart. In the moonstone lilt of your perfect love. In the assurance of a lifetime of your kisses. Namaste, love. Blessings.








Sunday, September 25, 2011

Skinny Post 2: Om Mani Padme Hum

Om mani padme hum. The Tibetan blessing that has resounded in the cavern of my skull these many years. The recognition of all that is divine in this Universe, the connective fluid of a million suffering souls who still find cause to rejoice. "We would give anything for what we have," says the poet. Oh, teach me to see what I have, live it without trepidation...to be the thing that I am in the place I happen to inhabit. To know perfection when I see it, and to love it with abandon. Om.

Skinny Post: "Write it till it's gone"

"Write it till it's gone," she said, and I nearly wept at the simplicity of it, its resounding truth, the way it saved me from my own terrible censure. I have since been freed from that tangled topic, extricated myself from its sticky web, but others take its place, and I know them as ones that must be written by me and which will not be denied.

This urgency of our stories, it breathes us, occupies our linguistic landscape, regardless of what we try to place in the foreground. Perhaps all we can really do is acquiesce. Let them take their places and animate our words with their light...until they finish and pass quietly into the eternity of stories that stretches out behind us, gently reminding us of where we've been.

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Love Song

Your face is the landscape that promises abundance, nourishment. Stone and moss, wind and sea, we--Oh. Even in your presence I long for more of you, feel jealous of the moments in which I cannot be conscious of your beauty. I wrap myself around you in my mind's eye, an amorous snake sliding her affection by degrees down your body. I nest in your heart where it glows our secret promise: forever. In this lifetime and the next.

Love is a wildness, it is a pause and an acceleration that surprises me even as I try to direct it. We have grown this thing--hydrangea heart, lilikoi love, delphinium dialogue of our affection. We grew children together--they become our enchantment, the exterior expression of our harmony, our philodendron faith.

I climb the rock face of your offering to me, know that I rise beyond all knowing. It is you, it is me, we are. This.