Medicine

I turned forty in the midst of great suffering....and this was my medicine. My best friend, straight off a moving truck for four days, flew in from Idaho with her 8mo old baby to pull me out of bed. Two other old and dear friends arranged child care and made their way to the city to celebrate at a lovely tea house.

My sister, having just moved herself, got up from tearing out flooring and spontaneously hopped a flight from Wisconsin to meet me by afternoon in Berkeley. She stayed through the weekend to help me recover and find my footing again.

This is the great medicine. A circle of women who love me and stand by me....and use their collective strength to help me find my own.

Blessings for their generosity, humor, clear and audacious thinking.

Devotion is medicine. Love medicine. Humble and true, it rights us again.

Now my girl is down -- I hear her labored breathing through the monitor at this late hour. But we're ok.

What I've learned: if I don't go deep and tend to what I deeply love - indeed, if I forget what I deeply love and in that forgetting overlook myself altogether, my life will take me to the root of myself in an uncompromising manner.

Rumi says:

You are a ruby embedded in granite.
How long will you pretend it's not true?
We can see it in your eyes.
Come to the root of the root of your Self.

You came here from the presence of that fine Friend,
a little drunk, but gentle, stealing our hearts
with that look so full of fire; so,
come, return to the root of the root of your Self.

I've been in the mud at the bottom of the pond and now I wait to see the lotus unfold. Happy to be submerged for the sheer trustworthiness of gratitude born from that darkness.

Slowly out into the morning, my girl with her head on my shoulder, "Wind, mama!" I squint in the sun, "Put your head down sweetie, stay warm, I have you." Like this we merge back into the story, the world pages ahead of us, and us, wide-eyed at the newness at the back end of lost time.

Everything fresh. Simple. Tender. Unsteady in a good way, a newborn colt. A new year.