Mama

My Mother has been getting progressively more fragile ever since last October. When I returned from my three month stay in Spain, I found her so changed from the Mother that I had left in September that I've had a great deal of difficulty adjusting my thoughts and my feelings over our changing rolls. She is no longer the Mother who taught me about life, who talked me through every difficulty of my childhood, my Motherhood, my marriage. She is no longer the Mother who laughed with me, who took care of my hurt feelings, who's feet I would sit at for hours listening to her share with me her wisdom, her joys, her own childhood stories.

I am now finding myself tending to the simplest of tasks for her that she used to so independantly take care of on her own.
When I returned from yet another trip away from home, for just one week, my spirit wrestled with my anger over the new position I was finding myself in. Anger that I didn't understand. Anger that left me feeling guilty because I couldn't understand it.
And so I went to my Crone alter. I lit candles. I saged the alter, I saged my staff, all the while remembering my ceremony, the symbolic saying goodbye to the Maiden and the Mother and welcoming my new rite of passage as The Crone, the Wise Woman. I needed that wisdom now to help me understand where my anger was coming from. Why was I angry with my Mother for simply growing old and feeble? I called upon the wisdom of all my Sisters, present and past to give me an answer.

As I sat watching the smoke curl upward from the sage, and while I watched the dancing of the candles, and as I held my staff, these words came whispering to my heart.

"Anger is but a signal that tells you, a need is not being met. That need is coming from the child in you that doesn't want to be abandoned, that is afraid of losing her Mother. You are no longer that child who needs a Mother's nurturing, a Mother's strong arms protecting you from life's dangers. You are the Wise Woman now and the things your Mother is experiencing is HER experience. It 's her time to choose how she will live out her last days. You and your Mother may have agreed in a previous realm to live this experience together now. She experiencing the pain, experiencing the moments of confusion, experiencing her decline, you standing by as her compainion to help her over the rough spots, to love her unconditionally and remind her that everything will be ok, that everything is as it should be. You must remember that these are her experiences and hers alone. It is not your reponsibility to try and fix what you cannot fix for her. It is only up to you to love her and to be gentle with her and to let her experience this time as she has determined she will experience it."

That is what the whispers from the Women of Wisdom said to me.

So my Mother and I will be companions in this experience and I can let the anger go because it was only a signal. Now that I have identified why it came to me, there is no longer the need to fear that my inner child is in any danger of being abandoned.
Namaste.

A Love Like Ours

A love like ours has no words that can define.

A love like ours has spanned a thousand lifetimes.

A love like ours, when we have picked our way though countless other relationships and have found each other again, deserves a few brief moments for sad reflection.

Each time we have touched, the heights to which our emotional attachment has reached, bridges the chasm that has kept us apart, making that void vanish and there is only you and I, looking into each others eyes with a knowing that tears asunder that temporary veil of forgetfulness. We have always instantly known that we are one and the same. That we have always been we two.

A love like ours deserves to be honored with these moments of sadness for our many separations.
Separations that we have always arranged as a reminder to us both, that there is no love like ours.

A love like ours is more powerful than distance, than time, or other binding circumstances.

A love like ours never dies, never diminishes, but remains strong and is of epic proportions.

A love like ours has a give and take that is balanced for the good and growth of us both.

When I am in need, you are there to give it. Freely.
When you are in need, I am there to give it. Freely.

These two hearts know when the need is shifting and we are always up for the task.
There is an instinct within us that is always on course in this regard.
We may not see each other but we always feel each other.

A love like ours makes it possible for our attention to expand to include others, to include the world. Because,
A love like ours knows no limits.

A love like ours is great because it exists,
Our two hearts have created this love like ours.

We desired it, we molded it, we thought it, we felt it.
We've written about it, we've discussed it, we've shared it.

Although apart for the moment, it takes but a thought to bring us instantly back "home" to each other.

So when I am sad for a brief moment in time such as this, I am honoring with these broken pieces of my heart, in great humility and thankfulness,

A love like ours.