There is a love festering in me, the tension of a staged play.
The breeze kisses my lips and I taste him. I smell his hair in the ashes of sage. It is the breeze embracing me, and the warrior sage swooning me. A musing. Is this titillation an ancestor, a lover, or me ravishing myself? A knowing birthed as curiosity emerges. The breeze is a paradigm, an homage to first and last things, an invitation and a rejection: What are you doing here? What took you so long? A microcosm of every savory kiss, first bite, last dance, final breath.
I am the luminal space, the purgatory where emergent and fading songs weep and laugh on their way to christenings and funerals. I feel it at all times.
Gram came to hold my hand this morning as I prayed with grandmother sweetgrass. I wrapped them both around my palm, their medicine coursing through my arm, healing the pain of a displaced rib, cauterizing leaky veins; with each mending, a searing of flesh. The rage of every woman in my lineage percolating beneath the surface. Disconnected from their bodies, the land, the ancestors who cry out to them: their aches so familiar, they’ve become home. How does one stitch a pulverized limb?
I am possessed by the alchemy of their pain always. I release it at all times.
Gram whispers a love note: Let love into all the holes where grief leaves the body; fill those nooks of angst with the aroma of sweetgrass as she cradles you through morning prayer.
The breeze again. He grazes my shoulder with his bottom lip, feels the yearning ooze from my pores but leaves me to my crone musings with the elders. Sage grabs me by the face, fingers pressed tenderly into my throat: You are strong enough.
I’ve known this. I embody it at all times. The festering wound again: Love.
“Let love be the medicine,” Gram says. He was consuming me, but in a good way, the way maggots free a wound of dead flesh.
Sage, sweetgrass, the breeze: they were all-consuming; they were all consuming the weeds of bitterness, resentment, fear, aimlessness, apathy. I could feel the dead weight lift from my body as tears rushed in to fill its place. Brackish water. The licks of new love took shape inside my ribcage like the smoke curls of sage dancing in moonlight.
I give alms to honor the dying while cracking open at the root to soak up love’s gracious anointing. I pay homage to death and emergence in every breath.
Exhale: Death. Inhale: Rebirth.
I am all of it at all the times.