Mother / Bring / Guide/ Time/ Forgotten/
Ears/ Remember/ Remember.
Rooted/ Cornstalk/ Kiss/ Lavender/ Hold/ Myself.
Imagine/ Dirt/ Wet/ Warm/ Mycelium/ Reminders.
I/ Sweet/ Death/ Teach/ Progeny/ Land/ Trust.
Playing/Dominance/Dying/Hiding/Nocturnal/Bear.
Abundance/Too/Condition.
Always/Be/Expansion/Yes.
Dear Mother. You tell me not to worry about patience so much as I could worry about expansion. Am I saying yes to that which brings me more? Am I saying yes from the throbbing core of my erotically charged, orgasmically felt YES? Me, the daughter of You, the daughter of water and earth and air and fire, of four directions and landed Mother and Spirit Sky. Little one of Luna who smiles at me every night. Child of the constellations and fragmented bits of star dust.
I am the ancestor of mycelium, the smallest among us, and also the Vikings of Scandinavia, and the foam bubbling in the sea. I am the healed and the healer, raw kinetic energy, the student learning of the compass buried inside me.
The more I resist, the greater the snapping back will be, a rubber band flung across fertile land, a red stripe of memory. Nothing can escape the pull to return. To what? I ask. To Gravity. Inside of me, just as the moon tugs the water her way, a heavy comforter warming her body as night turns to day, I too ebb and flow with delight, with undulating waves of pleasure and might, with riptides of rightness, and undercurrents of joy. Simplicity in the wonder of childlike toys.
I step into the quantum physical mind, in the visits we imagine and try to rewind, in the replay with one another as our energy fields collide, merge, meld into simpatico, a shared reality though, that we grow and tend and love like baby weeds. Say Yes, say yes, to what you need.
It all is happening now. How playful, might it be, to water possibility seeds, to feel into every encountering with heart curious and willing to say yes, and to feel the bristling of that winter wind no. That, Madre nods, is self-love. To No myself. To know myself.
To carve myself deep like the Canyon, wide enough like the Himalayas, stretch long like the gray highway from Nepal to Tibet, a highway unknown by Tibetans who Chinese and Nepalis stop from walking those steps. For all who long, we stretch long together, imagining the journey home.
To know myself in history books not written by women’s tongues nor sung in the stories of all, yet somehow, to know that I still am here because existence is both the surrender and the resistance. Never passive, but insistent in fulfilling the full-bodied sigh into what is right, here, right, now. To live and be satisfied, but to never stop striving for what could be better. What’s mine is yours and yours is mine. Beyond the capitalistic letter, there is a grand sharing that comes when we tap back into our mycelular structures to refresh that collective memory.
Not so very long ago, in the Madre Tierra archives of time, we were all together.
From that delineation of mycelium into fungus and animals, we grew into the cannibals of our own culture that we now seem to be destroying. We consume our own creations.
The wendigo, Native people say, is that desirous being who, starved for eternity, wanders with backwards feet to slay perpetually. A monster of the night. It is the same as the monster of the day who will always say that a product will set you free. Color in your empty spaces. This one will bring you glee. Sir, I say unto thee, there is nothing empty about me that needs to be filled. Like a garden making room for something new to grow, the spaces that might seem empty to an outside gaze- like how I open quickly and deeply to love’s ways, and how I can let my inner critic rage, and how I don’t always know how to be or what to say—these are the growing pains of my roots becoming free. Don’t sell me your promises. There is nothing broken inside of me.
What is inside me, rather, is smooth, grinding bliss. A kind of love where when I stretch, I lean forward to give a kiss to my own knees or shoulders in the morning, where I walk around without clothing covering myself from showing who I am today, at thirty, with lines and scars and dimples that show I am alive. It’s a kind of bliss that means I wake up before the sunrise because I know that’s what serves me best. When love turns to practice, I move from reflection into action. It’s praxis of my self-adoration that veers away from narcissism and more towards celebration.
I get it from my Mother, from that blue, brown, black, green, yellow, red wonder throbbing with the weight of her offspring, the billions of beings she supports with every foot step, stumble, sigh, sink, hurt, and wounded pain. On us, she rains a wetness of grace, of still somehow holding my face and kissing me with windy lips because even though we have ripped her to shreds in our upbringing, she knows we are of her, and somehow, she forgives us.
Buddhists practice having compassion for one who causes harm, but to give compassion is not to condone what was done. Mother Earth is the embodiment of that almighty One- of Buddha and the Bodhi tree, of Jesus and forgiveness received, searching Abraham and wise Mohammad, Shiva and Kali energy. Earth is Bahá’u’lláh and Jina, Guru Nanek Dev and Tlaloc, Marys who are human and the cutting of Sampson’s locks. Brigit of the Celts and Odin of the Danes, the voodoo Loa who connects us with spiritual planes. Sky Woman falling and the animals who help her, the Trinity existing beyond human ink and feather. Consciousness is within us, the tidal pull pulling us forwards, and as we’ve grown into letters and words, we have also shifted into warriors.
The mental battle rages within, beyond wrong and right, between truth and sin. Justified by bloodlines and slavery, upheld in the chambers of colonial legacy, hidden away in the erasure of history, seen in the oil and fire guzzled freely, but still, today, I believe there is a message that extends beyond the hatred and complacency.
Before words, letters, markings or sermons were heard, before everything was labeled in scientific order. There is something grander that waits beyond the systems we’ve created, pulling us to shallow sand beds where seashells have dilated.
What’s left when we release all that we’ve become into who we are, when we realize how to be and we open up to see. That message, resounding, is untethered, and always here. It comes to us nameless and shivering, without fear. And though it is impossible to say so much in words, I feel it, coursing river, as a knowledge already heard–a promise sealed with a kiss of erotic, screaming yes, held in the hug of a motherly caress, brimming with a beat of a heart-thumping guess, known in a way that can never regress. We already know all that which we seek; the answer is found in the soles of our feet. And at the same time, it’s not there, it’s everywhere we have walked, and so we lay the words to rest, and begin to talk without talk.
