mama said there’d be days like this

Mama said there’d be days like this:

days when you crack open one eye and the slate grey sky is pushing through the window and your demons have let themselves in the back door and are sitting at the foot of your bed thumbing through the photo album of all your regrets, pointing them out one by one, waiting to tell you that in a past lifetime you were the fire keeper and you let the flame go out.

days when a murder of crows lands on your roof demanding answers and you think you’re supposed to apologize but you can’t remember for what.

days when the child in you is on a hunger strike for everything but sugar and the fragment you are trying to grab from your dream last night that whispered instructions from your ancestors has dissolved along with the melody you’re still straining to hear.

days when all your good intentions affirmations visualizations donations and inspirations have declared a time out and are sitting around a card table drinking Irish whiskey, while shame is circling the room, ready to pounce.

days that ask us, despite the storm, to get up and step out onto the broken ground of dysfunction, to create the world anew by telling a story, one that helps make sense of the chaos that will rekindle our spirit and ease our soul.

new stories about how there is no outrunning the shadows that pursue us, how to turn and welcome them home, bring them water, a warm place to rest, sing them the lullaby we learned from our mother’s mother, ask where it hurts and listen.

stories about how our tears water the ground and how the garden that blooms there restores us to life.

stories that reconnect us to the living pulse of the natural world and the underlying wholeness of life, about the crows and jays, the flickers and finches, that invite us to notice we are not alone, have never been alone, and when we ask for help it arrives.

new stories about the radiant world beckoning us to slip out of our minds and into her open arms, how when we put our finger on the pulse of her one beating heart, we find the rhythm of our own wild, and how dancing breaks a sweat that breaks the trance.  

the story of how to see beauty despite the destruction, how wonder and suffering live side by side, how laughter is the doorway to the divine.

 story by story we are spooning our words into the baby bird mouths of the warriors who, may it be so, will grow weary of blood and the cry of revenge and want only to lie under the willow and hear the old songs as they pass down through the soft mouths of women.

this is the story of how everything we do is sacred, how each moment of joy is precious, each touch a healing. The story of the bonds between us that cannot be broken, of the hate that will burn itself out and the love that will flare up, incandescent like the phoenix, and sink its teeth into our hearts and refuse to let go.