Emanating Light

"The yogini sees herself in the heart of all beings, and all beings in her heart."

Suddenly, how we can awaken!

The rain stopped sometime in the night and first thing this morning, glancing out the bathroom window, sun touches leaves, brilliant and bright. Catching the cadence of that meeting, light upon its subject, lifts something heavy from me.

River refuses to take off her jammie top, demands to wear her flowy skirt again, no change of socks, big-girl pink underwear pulled over her diaper. Ready to go.

Independence everywhere this morning.

The wind is up on our streets. Swaying to Lucinda Williams as we drive - River bobbing in back, hipster that she is, catches the wave of my moves from the front. I'm in slow circles, following the lead of wild Cherry trees, dipped down in the arms of furtive winds, hair free to the ground.

And then I feel like a woman. For a moment I feel just like a woman. Flowering from the limbs, all the trees wave their color to my passing color. At a stop sign I drop my head, thankful tears.

The kindness of flowering trees - that souls so old should take a moment for my upliftment, opens a door that I have stood outside of for days, knocking, no one home.

Moving down the road, every turn a woman's curve. She opens me to appreciate and accept voluptuous form. The belly softens and I breathe again. Redwoods in line surge to the sky while surrounding palms part at the top with a far-reaching embrace. Even in my car they carry me to the sky, and I see anew.

Everybody's lover as I stand in line at Peet's, silent. Looking down at floor tiles I wade through variables of grief. A decade of living and loving, friends and lovers and teachers and trees lift a hand to wave good-bye.

I am leaving this place and everything around me is looking so alive. As it always was, but I am waking up, the way we do when we lift from the roots, and I notice the light emanating from all these things...and from me, too.