How heavy are flowers?

On trust in unknown moments

Trust

The branch leans
on the ground

How heavy are flowers?

Bird perched 
on tiniest twig

Can I put the 
whole weight
of my worry
on this Earth?

A rock falls apart 
into two faces

Grace only multiplies
in this world.

When I lean my limbs
upon the Earth
I hear Her 
ask me—
will you let yourself 
be a creature here?

Unafraid of growth or death,
willing 
to walk with bare paws
across the savannah
of the life 
you’ve been given

Can you trust the 
shell of an egg,
so thin,
is yet hard enough?

Can you 
let yourself
be what you are?

an animal
with a heart beating wildly
an animal
in fear
an animal 
on the other side of this 
rich mud swimming hole
shaking, 
shaking it off

coming back to the
truth 
all animals hold
in their bones

trust is a heartbeat
you cannot hear

but know
you know
it’s there.

Time folds into itself when you’re a mother.

As I watched the time change again this past week, the last hour of the day pressed early into night, I found myself thinking back on all the autumns of my life as if an accordion of photos, a folio of all the moments I’ve loved and lost and recovered.

This time last year my daughter started sleeping in her own room.

This time the year before I had just tipped into the third trimester.

This time the year before that I was pregnant with another child, one who would leave my body early.

This time the year before that I kissed my aunt’s crown as she lay unconscious, ready to depart to the Otherworld.

I wrote this poem during the third trimester with my daughter, when all the leaves were finally gone from the trees. A time when I thought the fear of losing her would have faded, but still returned every night like mars on the horizon.

Rereading it now, it spoke to me in these days of early falling darkness and thin veils, global fear, and a body that wasn’t designed to withstand so much.

In the ancient Celtic naming of the wheel of this year, we are soon entering a time called Dumannios, or the darkest depths. Every year it surprises me just how apt, how hard, how needed, how rich, that darkness is.

As I move through layers of healing and compost and needful darkness, I’ve been asking myself…what would a wild human do? What does the wild animal of my body want?

Sometimes its food, or rest, or celebrating.

Sometimes its drawing close to another’s body.

Sometimes it’s shaking.

Sometimes it’s just the acknowledgement that I am, despite it all, still wild.

That I cannot control the tides of emotions that flow through me. I cannot control the deepening of the night, the sharpening of the stars, the anguish or the joy that are the twin poles of the world.

But that I can, always, choose to take a step back into the night, the sheltering night, of trust.