finding my stride here

to get to this place. no, to let go into this place. no judgements or filters keeping a watchful eye. write what is. the finger prints on your cheap ikea desk, crumbs in the keyboard, a glass of wine at your elbow. this is what is. this is my life. it echoes and haunts and tricks me. somedays I want to be one thing, the next hour something else. and is this okay? I ask but only I can answer.

tonight I want to be honest. raw. I want to find words that really say something. words that will remind me in 10 years why I cried this week over people who plunged to their death, falling from sky to sea somewhere at the edge of a brazilian island. but there is honor and rightness in a death like this I guess. this is how we all come in – coming from spirit into our mother’s warm sea. and so the return from sky to sea. maybe I should weep tears of joy for them. maybe their angels came and whisked them home before they felt the plane tear apart, shuddering and whinnying and creaking into oblivion. maybe the 11 year old boy who travelled all alone from his home in brazil to boarding school in england never felt fear. or pain. or regret. and I wonder if the mother who travelled with her seven year old son had time to kiss him one last time, if her eyes were an island he could hold onto as he felt his body spin away into the wind. these are the things that haunt me. wake me in the night as a dream unfolding. but it is not a dream. it is what I know. the images and stories stare at me from the computer screen and tell me it is real. so I send up prayers and my palms sweat and I see the lightening on the plane’s wings. and I wonder, will it be me someday?

death stalks me. not the death part. the dying part. if it is possible to choose, I’d like to choose a quick death. death that takes me before I see it coming. or death that gives me time. time to prepare and write letters to my children and leave advice for their wedding nights, give them their history to be kept and read over again when I start to dim in their minds. but please, god, great mother, spirit, cosmos…if you are listening, do not let me die in a fire. or drown. especially not in a plane crash. I don’t want to know it is coming when there is nothing at all I can do about it.

sometimes I think this might be the death I need. the death of surrender. because I don’t know how to surrender very well. I hold tight and hang on and force and resist and struggle. eventually I will give in, but not in the 2 minutes it takes a plane to go down. surrender is the essence of islam. in fact, I believe that surrender is exactly what the word islam means. and the willingness of people to die for islam, even when it is extremist, holds honor. to give one’s self over to a greater force. me? I fight the giving over. always. I fight and struggle and resist until exhaustion overtakes me and I just give in. but it takes me so much time and agonizing suffering. maybe this is why the airplane death stalks me and breathes chills down the back of my neck. if I went down in a plane crash, I would be taken before my process was finished.

…

right now I am alone. it is quiet. there are beef bones boiling on the stove to make broth. my blood feels weak right now and the accupuncturist told me that boiling bones makes good soup. so I boil bones even in this heat. I add brown rice and kale and lemon juice to bring up the iron content. it smells good, like earth and red wine and the hint of garlic blowing on the wind. my own bones need this gift of the cow. thank you cow for giving yourself so that I might be stronger. when you say this, you realize how much we take food for granted. packaged meat in the grocers cooler. too easy I think. a few weeks ago, turtle boy followed the lead of an older boy and smashed crabs at the ocean. he didn’t realize until it was over that he had stupidly taken lives. we talked about thanking the crabs for the lesson he learned, that they gave their life so that he could feel the true value of it. and we thanked mama earth for giving us her crabs, for the chance to build trust between us as we worked it through. that night, in our prayers, turtle boy told mama earth that he would never, ever, ever kill one of her creatures again. unless he was hungry. and even then he would eat the whole, whole thing. so I too give thanks for the flesh that feeds my own.

…

scar tissue does not stretch. it breaks.

I first learned this lesson while attending a birth sometime ago. it was mama’s second baby and she had torn badly with the first. her perineum was a solid wall of well-healed scar tissue. as this second child moved out of mama’s body and into the world, the mama yowled like a she-bear, unable to wrap her head around the fact that this baby could come through the band of resistance that kept them from becoming two bodies. all of a sudden, the pelvic floor released and baby’s head emerged. the scar tissue did not stretch. it had broken. but the breaking allowed opening and the baby was born.

last week I took my first yoga class in ages. as I placed myself in the hip-opening poses, I felt the tightness breaking. the scar tissue of holding and inflammation and tension snapping and resisting and creaking. so I gentled my way in…another milimeter, and then one more, easing into the opening. able to take only so much breaking at a time.

there are emotions in our bones, our joints, our organs. our bodies tell their own stories. and right now my pelvis is tight. I, of late, have been uptight and witholden. my pelvis, my source, my womanhood held hostage to my loneliness and grief, to my rage, to my resentment at my man for some shit that went down this year. and so my hips, usually so seductive and luscious and loose, they were rigid and brittle and the scar tissue needed to break.

I worked through the pain of opening my hips. I breathed while I broke through the wall, inviting space to move into me. I focused on the space instead of the tightness, visualizing the hip joints coming free, letting my upper thighs release, moving out of the way so the kundalini could rise from the center of my being. and by the end of class i was able to break through.

perhaps things are not related, but maybe – just maybe – opening my hips and loosening my pelvis has opened the floodgates. perhaps the language of my body moved through the resistance and said yes to the opening. the sex this week has been life-giving. after such tightness and protectiveness for so many months, sex a marital agreement rather than the rapture I craved, the swollen need has returned. joining with my man is a pleasure again, not a dutiful arrangment. and I feel roominess in my belly and lower back. my hips can make seductive circles, I sway when I walk. and the funny thing is that my expansiveness in my heart feels like the joy in my hips.

…

baby sleeping. god she is learning to scream. she is loud. sometimes when I say shhhhhh…I fear she will become a resentful mouthy feminist who goes to group therapy and tells the others that her mother never let her have her voice. but I can’t take it. and this girl, protest is in her bones. I don’t want to break her. I don’t want to silence her. I want her to feel safe and held and nurtured and understood. but can’t she just ask a little more politely???

…

closure, finding my way back out. never easy. nothing to wrap up. just words left here on the page that feel real. tomorrow will they still be my truth? i don't know. but it is okay to share them now, enough to stand alone just as they are.