Consciousness, Mist and Motherhood

Entering the blogoshere is like entering the Amazon. I've never been to that forested place, but I go there all the time inside. Entirely on wings of breath, wings of prayer, wings of the love of journeying, I travel. And I travel far. I once found a passage in a book, an explanation by an Amazonian shaman of shamanic language. He called it a 'twisted twisted' language, describing how with vision granted by the plant spirits, he sees clearly into the weave of the way of things. With normal (rational) language he would bump into what is not rational by nature. Life itself, for instance (and may I remember this). Can you envision him (in the dark) looking into spirals and strands (DNA?), moving around consciousness the way one might circle a monument, a beautiful statue in the museum?

I have spent many, many hours, after the baby goes down, into the wee hours exploring the world of blogs. And why is it that I still do not know how exactly to enter. I'm all about process, the way we get to where we are going, not simply the route that gets us there. I've learned not to put holy books on the floor, not to point my feet at deities, respected teachers, elders, and so I walk gently into the blogoshphere.

Looking for a map. Looking for tribe. Not sure which direction to head. What's new?

I feel the same way about motherhood. Hundreds of nights I have entered my baby's room, adjusting to the dark, but I still can't see. So my ears become eyes, my feet become eyes. Eyes open that do not require the light of day. In this way I approach the crib and look into that forest. I never know where she is really in the night, or how to find her, really. The great birds from above, the ones that circle dark canyons because they can see what most of the world cannot - these friends help me to see. Do you see her down there? Sometimes I wait for minutes, and those minutes feel like eons when I know she needs me. Often I just go in and search. Like a small plane trying to land in the rain forest, I look for any opening that will agree, and slowly find a clearing.

Last night she dreamt - she sang stilted Twinkle Twinkles in rounds. Every hour or so she called out a muffled Mama! For the past two years whenever I heard that call I ran. But not last night. I waited at the edge of that place, and I do not know exactly what place that is, but it is her place. Where the night takes her. She is almost two, and though I go back and forth between heartbreak at the thought of how small she is, so then do I also place my hands in salutation to her rising spirit, so old before me that all I can do is bow to her. And that's my work. Downstairs on the couch, surfing, riding, exploring the blog land, I listen to her journey through the monitor. I had to sit on my legs and hands so that I wouldn't run upstairs.

This morning, racing around the kitchen like an idiot - what's the rush, Prema! Rushing River (no pun intended) to get her shoes on, I then rushed to find her coat. Come on, River, let's go I repeated four times as I circled each room, looking for my own shoes.

Slow down. Slow down. I reach back to her carseat at a stoplight, touch her leg, "I love you, baby. Mama loves you."

I don't know where I read it, or how I heard it, but I remind myself that it's not important how many times we fall, but how we recover that determines how we will survive. Those of us who seem to navigate many roads at once, like layers of hills, one behind the other, all shrouded in mist...and yet the image is also our medicine. We look to it again and again. Because this is how life is - twisted, multi-layered, partially hidden.

May we remember to weave all these layers together. It doesn't matter if we use string from the street, found after we forgot to look at all. Just don't let all the layers fall away. Call it chaos, call if confusion, fine. But it's also a symphony and I love the sensation of the minor (or major) shift required to open to the beauty of it all.