Wait. Waiting. Remembering.
I have been in a deep, gentle undercurrent these last few weeks - a challenging place to write from when I am in it. I am marking this time as best I can: the slowness, the dreams, the deep shifting and synchronicities, the beauty, the connections, the disorientation, the slippery-ness of time. There is familiarity here, fecundity. There is no fear. There is quiet. I know this to be a space of transition, of transformation. Wait. Waiting. Meaning may arrive in time, and it may not. For now, I am in the rhythm of not-knowing.
Remembering / Rhythms:
The familiar sway of long distances on foot along rivers, across continents, ecosystems, woods and plains and mountains, through all kinds of weather at all ages. A rhythm that carries it’s own momentum. The felt sense of altered-time guided by daylight and hunger and the movement of feet and organs and shifting pack-weight. The slow dispersal of thought, the leak of worries and narration and what-ifs until a quiet settles in and through.
The rocking lull of my mother's boat, the delicious magnetic pull of sleep and dreams, my subconscious suddenly taking an easy lead. Carried, rather than carrying.
The waiting with you, in the pre-dawn darkness. Listening, holding your hand, entirely helpless to what may come. Entirely and fully with your still-breathing body.
And the earliest rhythm, of which only my body remembers. Your pulse, sound as sensation, the floating in and of the water of your body. Carried. The in between, pre-verbal, cellular consciousness. I am a bridge between worlds. Maybe this is why my current state feels so out of time, primordial, transitional. It's not a mistake this is happening now, 21 years from the last time our physical bodies were together and 50 from when my body was a part of yours. It feels natural for this of-the-now waiting to accompany the season of your dying, your transition, and the cycle of Springtime grieving and growth.
Another memory: of my delayed encounter with a book from your shelf which I consciously passed by in the claiming of your possessions, and which found me later anyway through a dear friend on our very first meeting. Of how my passover might somehow be related to my own self-understanding and self-creation, and how a particular chapter was a remembering. How it still speaks of truth to me, even after sloughing the accultured skin of womanhood. A broadening. A deepening.
Always behind the actions of writing, painting, thinking, healing, doing, cooking, talking, smiling, making, is the river, the Río Abajo Río; the river under the river nourishes everything we make. In symbology, the great bodies of water express the place where life itself is thought to have originated. In the Hispanic Southwest, the river symbolizes the ability to live, truly live. It is greeted as the mother, La Madre Grande, La Mujer Grande, the Great Woman, whose waters not only run in the ditches and riverbeds but spill out of the very bodies of women themselves as their babies are born.
The Río Abajo Río, the river beneath the river, flows and flows into our lives. Some say the creative life is in ideas, some say it is in doing. It seems in most instances to be in a simple being. It is not virtuosity, although that is very fine in itself. It is the love of something, having so much love for something—whether a person, a word, an image, an idea, the land, or humanity—that all that can be done with the overflow is to create. It is not a matter of wanting to, not a singular act of will; one solely must. The creative force flows over the terrain of our psyches looking for the natural hollows, the arroyos, the channels that exist in us. We become its tributaries, its basins; we are its pools, ponds, streams, and sanctuaries. The wild creative force flows into whatever beds we have for it, those we are born with as well as those we dig with our own hands. We don’t have to fill them, we only have to build them.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes - Women Who Run With the Wolves