I am an energy reader: I know how to sense the deeper layers of connection between you and me and the ancestors or the spirits of the land. It was something I think we all could do when we were living in the wild, on the earth, bare feet treading on soil. When our breath was shared daily with the cedars and we birthed babies onto beds of moss, we certainly knew, even though we likely never pondered, that we were part of a wholeness–a whole continuum of breath, and being, vibrating with this life energy and then the quiet repose of death, an exhale that was meant to occur lying on the soft earth.
This is why, I began to circle round–from the fires ignited in buildings rising so far from the earth that people had to fall to find their way down. I saw the reaction in the pain of remembering and the reflection of the separation that took us too far from what we were meant to know in the bodies of women who came to see me. I started there, in my own body, in the body of writing, in my young sons, in the women who came–all of us finding our way back to the center, to the pulse that invites a gathering together of cells, of people, of prayers, of the fire of spirit that ignites our passions and the body which is meant to walk upon the earth.
And this is why, as I found myself in the August sun, near the lavender buzzing with bees, and the grape vines heavy with leaves, I placed my hands onto my 14 year old dying German shepherd.
Though the grief lifted me away, I remembered the earth and placed both hands around the thick red fur of her neck. Her last breath came and went, her body heavy on my lap. And then the energy moved like water, from her body beneath my hands into the air around us. Her spirit moved across the quiet grass, brushing over my skin, shining on in the gold light.
9/11 ripped a hole in the fabric of our world, but perhaps one that we can use to see where we lost touch and to remember the way our energy moves like shared breath, along rivers, over fields, like spirits touching down to earth.
0 Comments