mother's day

Boulders stretch further than my eyesight. It is something to behold. Me and hearts and people climbing, bouncing from rock to rock. I sit on a granite boulder, quartz and rhodonite, ommmm slightly. There is a man yelling at his young son to be a man and stop crying about spiders. Something dies in him that someone else will revive, someone will tell him that it is okay to cry and he won't know who to believe. 

But I am a heart, weeping and meditating in a group of boulders. I am one of them. Grounded, yet unsteady as others walk on me. I am sick. My lungs ache and my nose won't stop clogging up, making speaking damned near impossible. So I ohmmmm, and remember being here last year, Thor on my back, my belly full of baby.

My friend tells me that the blog is dead, and we are now a twitter culture. I believe her. I see it happening in spaces I thought were eternal. Where to live now? How do we get strong? Uncluttered? How does literature exist in this universe where writing is concise and more clever than honest? How do we gather when we do not have the attention span to sit and read a thousand words anymore?

The trees hold no wisdom that doesn't already lay dormant within your heart. You are part of earth and nature. In that way, we never die. Not just the wise ones. Even the unwise ones. They too are part of nature.  Do not forget. 

My belly is big and lays low. I have swallowed a boulder. BURP. TOOT. I never birth it. It just sits over my womb, resonating with a vibration of iron and hematite, the center of our earth. Nothing is in me that didn't already stand waiting for my activation, even the boulder. My crown opens, and my heart sings, and my belly remains big and full of sugar, even when I say no more sugar and no more big. But my womb, it is closed and achey remembering last May.

I throw a quartz stone in my water bottle and fill it with filtered water, sip on it through the day to make my belly small and full of superficial things like eyelashes and gossip. My husband clears out all of our plastics and contaminants and estrogen-producing chemicals, and asks me to stop wearing make-up. It fucks with your body, Ang, he says. And I stop. It causes a kind of shock to my sense of self, throws me into a feeling of vulnerability, self-consciousness, or rather self-centeredness. No one noticed I don't wear make-up, but me. I am wrinkled. And splotchy. And maybe it seems I don't care anymore, what with my big belly and lack of make-up. I stop putting on big gawdy earrings and hanging stones around my neck. And I sit with that feeling of less-than. I am this. Right now. Big bellied, and lacking in womb power. No war paint. I am a boulder without adoration. No bling. No shine. No color beside earth and rock. And yet I am still the same boulder as before.

We will camp this weekend, pack up the kids and dog and walking sticks. We are returning to the place we were a year ago, when the raven and hawk fought overhead, and I bent over in pain, bleeding from the death of my last child. Darkness moves over me, not in fear or anger, but in a reminder of loss and middle-age and wisdom. The baby is dead. We cried our tears last year. We grieved. We don't think about him much, even. He died. I couldn't control it. 

It is Mother's Day after all, and we want to go camping. We will walk to the falls, and swim in the mountain stream, though it is cold and the sun is not high in the sky. We will let the water wash away those boulders in us, take them downstream. We will ask the sky to remind us of our love and our family which is beautiful and whole, though we are missing some. We will open our palms and walk barefoot in the woods, and lay in the moss.  Spiders will crawl near our faces and we will blow them to another place. Later, after a meal, we will sit around the campfire and tell the story of our last child's short life and long death. We will ask him to come to us in a dream and say hello. We will not imagine what it is like to have a six month old, because that path closed to us while we were in the woods and a hawk and a raven fought overhead, I bent over in pain, whispering, "Farewell, my love."