This day has been met by so many tears, so much gratitude and so much ache for fifteen months of transformation. I’ve been dying and returning to my essence. Moment by, sometime torturous and sometimes elated, moment, I’ve been loved and forced back into my body.

It was time for my return.

I’ve known intimately what it is to not know anything, to not control anything, to not do anything other than rise when called and stay standing far longer than you’d ever dreamed possible.

And it is somehow possible. I can’t tell you how, only that it is.

Today, I revisit the words of Shawnacy Kiker:

If it’s about love at all
(which it’s not)
it’s about the kind that’s ragged and mud-caked
and sees too far and knows too much and holds too tight.
The kind that reaches inside your body
through skin and muscle and bone and sinew
and grabs your heart like a vice-gripped thief;
and you with nothing left to pump your blood.

…

It’s the kind that snarls at you with wolverine teeth
when you’re even the tiniest bit less than everything.
The kind that rips and screams and tears things down that have
no business being there–
tears them down with fingernails and sweat
and the decimating force of the hatred of all that is untrue.

…

Something big and wild and wide and hot.
Something untouchable. Something that burns and beats and ravages
and doesn’t waste time being sorry.
because it’s too busy turning you inside out
and re-arranging organs
and pulling you to the edges of the universe and
looking out with you on everything else.

This Is Not A Poem About Love {these excerpts are only the parts that pull at me savagely – please go read the poem in its entirety.}

This poem was an incredibly harrowing and healing experience for me. When I came across it months ago, I broke-open with gladness and grief at reading my unnameable, named.

As I reread her words today, I’m doubled-over grieving. There are no words, because only tears can fully translate my past fifteen months. Only an emotion-wracked body can honor the pain. Only howling can speak my anguish. Only living can truly honor all of the dying.

I am most grateful for this day of grieving, this day of rejoicing, this day of celebrating my son’s living and my own.

…

About these ads