It's Like This

I am a part of this – never beginning – endless.

Lately, star meditations at 4 a.m. are my jam. Autumn air begins, still smelling like summer's gestation with hints of crispness to come.

To come.

Acorns fall like stones or hail, echoes cracking like one-off gun shots in an unobstructed night. I am not so zen that I forget the gunfire forcing us to the interior of the house in Kenya. I don't forget the bodies or the screams. I remember the sounds of machete violence and the panic and dread deep in the throats of women giving birth in a camp of 8,000 displaced people.

To allow, hold loosely, forgive – is it the same as forgetting?

Sun rises first on my left shoulder. John Denver says we don't forget entirely. And yet, the thoughts, awareness and feelings rise only to be let go.

Giving once important things to the river becomes more than symbolic. Soon we shall lie down in the shallows along the bank and float back to the sea. Maybe we already have.

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I am my mother and father, my grandparents, and their parents. I am colonizer and colonized; queen and peasant; volcano, glacier, and sea. It all lives in my body and I am responsible for our healing and peace. It is now my only work.

This is like this; that is like that; our happiness depends on each other.