“Deepen and continue,” I repeat, as I struggle to feel old parts of me I thought I had left behind resurfacing. Fear hallows the chest. Rumination and foreboding sit heavy in the dirt with me while I hold my small breath and read the leaf for storms.
How humbling it is to discover that no matter how far we believe we have travelled, we can fold so quickly back into our oldest shapes. How we can be returned to them as easily as a wave returns to the same rocky shore. Here I am again, in all my embarrassing ways, rattled by my own company.
When will I greet these old familiar rooms with something other than shame?
Summer has come down on us with fire, bellows of smoke, and a sun so close and so large she seems to be pulling every drop of moisture from the garden and the fields. We have lived on this piece of land for ten years, and the water level of the glacier-fed pond—home to two dozen goldfish—has dropped lower than in any other summer. Will the little orange pulse survive? Will we?
A spell of grief washes over me, followed by a surge of adrenaline, as my mind decides we are no longer safe and begins urging us to flee.
“Flee where?” I snap.
Nothing answers, yet it never stops urging me toward another place to live. Another life.
The kids are home and I am again startled by the force of them. The almost constant tumbling of heavy boots and laughter. Two young animals brought indoors, making a wilderness our living room. I see, with startling clarity, the difference between who I am when I have time to write and to wander, and to listen to earfuls of silence, and who I become as a mother with little time to herself.
I do not adapt easily to the change of velocity. I wish I were more available to them and to their bigness and the continuous wake of two growing boys. I wish I could leave the silence for a while and meet them there, without feeling so easily overwhelmed. The day pours its wild light across the floor and asks me to be in it. She pushes smoke and ash through the windows and settles, bitter and hot, and stubbornly alive, in my throat.
I want spring and fall, even the dark cave of winter. Anything but this season of burning.
The world contracts to the exact size of my grief. I begin to believe I am living in a different world than everyone else. My phone shows me endless pictures of idyllic days and strangers eating peaches in sunlit gardens. Outside, the trees stand muted in a grey drift without complaint. A million perfect lives scroll past my ashy thumbprint and sore heart.
The day is not interested in confirming my despair.
Still, the dry garden spits out speckled green and bright lemon squash. It births sweet French beans and milk-dipped coral dahlias, smooth globes of scarlet tomatoes, plump pearls of peas.
Still, the many wings of the wind shift and bring cool days now and then, free of smoke with a crystal blue sky as reprieve, eclipsing whatever place I was feeling trapped in. Still, the arbutus, in her skin of peeling rust, holds my son within her timbered arms. She, the gentle cradle for his beating heart.
Still, even with my sharpness, my impatience, my unkindness, love continues to find me.
Still, the bear lumbers through the brittle grass with her playful pink-nosed little ones and looks at me. The old and tired eagle blesses me with a few hours of company before its death. The owl sits above me, in the branch of a tree and offers me its wide and refined presence. Sunlight bleeds a soft rainbow into the cloud.
Still, change turns me over and over again, revealing new angles of myself to reclaim, and see, and love.
Still.
Each day I enter one deliberate moment of calm and wait for whatever my body has come to say. Sometimes it is song. Sometimes silence, awe. Other times, tears. Lately, all that has been coming is short bursts of crying out to something that sees beyond my narrow frame. A kind of prayer.
I find myself reaching toward the living world and the unseen, asking for certain qualities, for second sight. I find myself loosening my grip on the belief that I alone must know the way, turning instead toward whatever keeps arriving with wings, with many eyes, with broad moss-covered backs, with rain-heavy bellies, and green hands reaching from the earth. It is my way of stepping beyond the confines of myself and entering into a larger conversation with all that I forget whenever I become caught in the snares of my own pain.
Over the next few weeks I will share some of these letters, because I have come to believe there is nothing we cannot cry out to that will, in some way, listen. The moment I shift my attention, even slightly, away from the small orbit of myself, I discover a buoyant kind of life, a graceful many moving all around me. If I can name the sorrow of the hour, the suffering of this moment, I can also place it gently into the hands of whatever lives and breathes through every surface of this world, so it may carry it with me through this difficult hour.
I may not know the way through my life right now, but I know how to shape the words that become a bridge to something larger than myself. I know how to see every living thing as a mighty little god walking beside me. I can reach out to them. They can help carry me through.
Dear Mother of the Living Word,
I lie beneath your hot breath, upon your warming skin, inside this small home growing heavy beneath your long gaze. If you have rain to spare, let it fall. Let me breathe again the scent of your damp, ever-giving earth.
I kneel before the hope of your mercy. I am so small. But when I enter your quiet, I feel as though I am standing within your eye, within your ear, where only you and I remain.
This morning I feared your ways. I wondered whether you would leave us bereft. If you would scorch the fields and empty the rivers, withhold your seeds. Would you take from us the birdsong and the four-legged, the wild who have carried your voice long before we learned to listen? Would you remove all we forgot to bow before? Would you wean us, as every mother must, until we learn to stand inside a strength we never believed we had? Will you leave us breathing shallow against hot stone, beneath your relentless sun?
Mother, what am I to expect from you?
If these are the days we have been given and if this is how the world must change, then I pray you do not let love leave with it. Stay close enough that even in our darkest hour we never mistake your silence for your not being near. Do not leave us alone. Stand on every side of me and steady my feet upon your body. Give my children eyes that can still find beauty, even if ash drifts through the air and the birds fall silent.
I offer you my tears so you may pour them back upon the earth as rain. May I still feel your hand finding mine as the road narrows and my heart reaches for its old armour. Teach me to bow in gratitude as you reshape the home we have known.
Mother of ten thousand faces, lift me to my feet, or to my knees—whichever love requires. Here, before your walls of smoke and fire, may I still speak your name with joy. When the days grow bitter, open within me the spring that does not dry. Lay both your hands upon my heart and speak my name again and again, until your voice rises above every fearful one.
Until all I hear is—Beloved. I am here. I am here.
Love,
Sarah
