Wholeness

 

Words moist like morning mist

blow in from from each side

right and left

meaning taking form in consonants and vowels

drifting

falling earthward

alighting on my wing bones

and sliding down into my hands

and into gravity's clasp

like an invisible handshake

reminding me of an agreement I don't recall making.

Yet here I am committing to it again.

I am remembering again my mother's last breath

engraved in the sinew of my soul

how I was there with her

holding her to the last breath

walking by her side 

right up to the invisible doorway she slipped through

going where I could not.

I stood there for a long time

feeling the expanding absence.

By the time she left

I who had come flesh of her flesh from her body

had been with her longer than not

we had the singular intimacy of having shared 

the space of one body

as the mysterious process 

of multiplication and differentiation unfolded 

into tissue and organs a second body my own

and I crossed into this world 

across the bridge she had tended

her body 

that had once grown within my grandmother

she my mother

ushered me into the world with a brave shout

"Come on baby!"

It had taken 2 days 

I had been in my own life and death struggle to cross the bridge or not.

She was barely 24.

(I was and remained an only child)

When she left

the one person whose rhythms has whispered to my marrow as it formed

left.

She the one who had rocked me her body's ocean belly

the one whose voice and laughter had rippled through my cells

the one whose quest and stories didn't allow me to forget

the importance of dreams and visions

(and something she encoded as "the dream"

something her father had shared with her

that was as mysterious as it was sacred)

she shared by example not only walking but water dancing

the love of mystery of awe and silence

and the love of words 

(and I know I reminded her of these things: 

towards the end of her life I remember her musing

about "how we cause each other.").

With words she had tried to make sense of our wounded lineage

and to speak of dream time.

But wherever she was words could no longer be pronounced 

where she had gone was beyond languages' syllables

she had gone to the place that some words only point to

like small humble guideposts at the edge of the untamed,

like small glistening gems reflecting the light of the stars.

The quiet was all that was left

an absence whose dimensions were beyond thought

and there was peace as inscrutible as it was enourmously generous

and space opened up like a blossom from the depths of everywhere.

Space had gathered her up

the same space that holds everything even gravity.

In the time that followed 

it was incomprehensible to me why we learn words and how I could exist 

without this other body of origen also existing

here in the place we call the world...

Recently in attentive contemplation 

sitting on my earth seat

I watched swirling smoke rising

from a single stick of incense into the cool fall air

tumbling upward in ascention

a dance of myriad curvacious currents and changes

fluid forms of liquid air 

the same dance as all the waters of the planet

waters of gestation giving birth to form.

I watched 

seeing myself in the mirror 

in those changing diaphonous currents

multifarious forms

appearing and disappearing 

arising from and absorbed by space itself

then I recognized myself as the space,

And again and again one and then the other 

dancing tendrils of form and then space— 

space that feeds and holds and consumes and is the same as the tendrils.

The two became one 

and I became peace

impeccably whole 

neither space nor form

neither one without the other

beyond creation and dissolution

residing in the eternal moment of aprehension beyond time

without conditioning

pure a mirror as clear as an untouched lake:

I rest in the absence of perturbation

I am that

body with no body

no body with body

I am the particularities and that which holds all particularities

wholeness

I am home

I never left

–Lorena Wolfman