A Body Marked by Love.

A tracing of the invisible marks love leaves behind.

artists right to left: Mark Borthwick. Sonam Yeshi. W. Eugene Smith. Elena Edington. Brianna Fay. Unknown. Stephen Gil. Amber Fillerup Clark. Robert Demachy.

One robin’s throaty song repeats, rising above all other voices of the forest. Threads of glistening spiderweb are strung between the tips of lavender.

Heaven sits in the silence and waits for me.

How simple remembering is. And yet, how easily I am distracted.
How wild the world. And how still the world is beside it.

I wake and know it is Monday.
How strange, the way days of the week shape us.
Monday feels like opening your eyes at dawn into a swirling mist of uncertainties—
of climbing, of doing, of building and rerouting, of destruction and resurrection.
Of sadness, defeat, curiosity, overwhelm. Of excitement and anticipation.

The day where everything begins.
The cycle. The story. The becoming.
The humanity.

“I am,” I say to the overwhelming weight of my aliveness.
“I am,” I whisper to myself in the morning,
declaring my home in this body, on this land,
in this world with all its demands.

I announce: I am. I am. I am.
Here. Alive. Willing.

How curious it is to be alive.
To be willing to stay, even as we know how violent the world and its storms can be.
Like a small ant on the edge of a churning sea,
carrying what shard of bread it can to its family. Its home.

Any day, a single drop of sea can steal the path, take the bread, change the story.
It can toss that small ant body wayward.

But the ant is still here. On the edge. Beside me.
Not with wings, but with small feet and marching orders.
Jobs to do. A life to live.

The kids have just a few days of school left before summer break.
Soon, I’ll be immersed again in their worlds—
deciphering their needs from mine,
holding their feelings alongside my own.

This motherhood—this entanglement,
this fleeting, constant togetherness.

I prepare to join with these lives that live independently
yet depend on me completely.
And I feel the full ache, the throb, the quiet thrumming of my heart.

I love them like a lion. Like an eagle.
With an eight-foot wingspan and a roar.
Like oceans crashing against cliffs.
Like soft grass brushing bare legs.
Like raindrops on leaves.
Like crushed petals from the apple tree.
I love them like I love the world—so completely,
so terribly,
so entirely,
so eternally.

I’m certain I’ve lived countless lives,
and all the memories of my children live in me as breath.
They are the breath.
The essence of my aliveness.
The very thing that makes me live.
They are the entire world.

And one day soon, they will leave.
They’ll go into their world.
They’ll cast off their coats—
the coat that is their mother.
They’ll close the wounds from where they cut themselves free.

And I will bandage this body that never truly heals.
The scab that never forms.
I will walk open and exposed forever—
a body marked by her children.
The place where love left home
to build its own.

The robin chicks tumble new from the nest in the cedar,
down into the tall grass.
The snakes are waiting.
The hawk is silent in the branches.
The mother weeps her songs into the wind.
Her wings ruffled.
Her heart forever marked by their departure into the unknown—
into the Monday mornings.

The beginning and the end.

The life coming for each of us.
The becoming.
The departures.
The arrivals.
The circling.
The hesitating.
The swirling around our open eyes.

I am.
I am.
I am.

May the ache in one body awaken the heart of us all.

Love,

Sarah