After the Storm

You dry off your wings and settle back into the stillness.

Breathing deeply, the thick, moist air.

Grateful to be out of the wind.

Your shoulders loosen, inching downward, as you bathe your body in soft, cleansing morning light. Filling your lungs with the sweet scent of Nature’s restorative aromas.

Safe, at last, from the buffeting of ravaging turmoil.

Your heart is quiet, for the first day in a basket of many.

You rest.

Waiting for life to pick you up, once again.

Nudge you back into her slipstream – far away from the lusterless, grey-toned bardo in which you now find yourself.

A space of in-between.

Her death has forced a meeting with your own mortality.

You do not know the words to that song and you don’t wish to learn them.

Though the scenery may look the same, your inner landscape has been pruned back, stripped away. You have lost the person you were.

On your lips, still moving, is the prayer you’d repeated over and over, after her passing. Like a mantra.

Love, show me,
Show me the way …

You feel the turning of season, but you are not ready for another cycle around the sun.

Springtime and summer, having been lost too swiftly.

Soul time cannot be measured or rushed.

  Love, show me the way …

“In the space between chaos and shape there is another chance.”

Jeanette Winterson

A chance to resist closure, provoked by an itinerary that no longer serves the Spirit.

You consider what it means to become your own best friend.

And a defiant little NO strides into your head, taking a seat in the front row.

Like the youngster she is, she needs you to know – make no mistake — what it is bearable no longer.

She tells you she’s deleting ‘auto-renew’ on those insufferable demands that bleed her creativity and color.

That she refuses to shapeshift her integrity by pretending to be someone she is not.

That she’s done being treated with inconsistent kindness and respect.

You notice the little green shoots taking root in your garden.  

A growing self-stewardship and blossoming of self-fondness.

You reach out a hand to yourself in loving friendship.

Step into the skin of your most devoted ally, confidante, companion, lover.

In your own fine company, you are never alone.