the arms of a woman

i could almost hear it audibly… “no one is coming to save you. get up. get up…”

for two weeks i didnt know if i could pry myself from the safety of gaia’s arms and i surely didn’t think i would rise like a phoenix when i could barely get my legs to hold the weight of my body. the grief felt fossilized in my bones and i wasnt sure it was something that was ever going to go away.

the death of my dad opened the floodgates of grief so old it lay dusty and dry on all the dark corners and hidden shelves of my psyche.

but with every act of courage and with every decision to get back up i reclaimed something old and ancient. some of it was mine and some of it was the women who went before me but it all smelt like salt and sounded like secrets never spoken.

i knew i was powerful but it wasn’t until i lay by my dad’s dying body cupping his ankles and washing his face with a wet cloth that i knew it in my soul. and when you know something in the soul you realize knowing it in the mind means nothing at all.

and the thing is when you see it, really see it for the first time you will never unsee the depths of the lies they told to you in every direction.

so here i am grieving the death of this giant and also grieving the fact that it has taken me so long to meet her.

and every night i would lay on mother earth as i poured out my heart and i spent years looking up to him and it wasn’t until i looked down to her that i felt the love and safety i was promised would come but never did.

each landscape offering medicine i needed… every forest an iv drop, every valley a glass of cold water. i didn’t know there were offerings this rich…i didn’t know there was balm this sweet.

did the men on stages with their bibles know this the whole time? did they know god herself was under our feet and in our hearts and did they know that when we merged there was an ecstasy so sweet no money in the world would be enough?

did the ones who made the romance movies that indoctinated me and the skincare lines that chained me know what they were doing when they drained my power with every look in the mirror and with every glance at the size of my stomach?

and the lies are so old and so sinister few will see but when they made god a man i think the world cracked and we forgot who we are… but i remembered every night i lay curled on the beating heart of mother earth.

i cried tears that tasted different as i pressed my womb against the earth… letting my incision rest on her soft flesh. i wailed as i remembered the sterile white room where they ripped babies out of me because of a hospital mistake… the same hospital that killed my father and i have never let raw pain exist and be exposed in the way i did in that moment. no human’s arms could contain what she held that night somewhere between idaho and utah as i felt the womb of gaia ache. i had never felt so understood. i had never felt so filled with whatever existed when the world was made… i mean when the world was birthed.

and it was no accident that i ended up in that old arizona mining town on my last night and a woman with magical eyes told me to go sit by the mines. i sat and i saw the gaping hole so beautiful done with hands so violent it takes your breath away… so beautiful but with a cage all around and i thought if you are going to rip her open and take it all at least let her be free. and i wished right then and there that i could pry the metal fence off with my bare hands but i looked back and i knew she was telling me to be free for the both of us. and i thought of the day i walked out of those church doors for the last time and i havent been able to stop getting free since.

i sat with her, peering down into her depths and i let her whisper again and again “you are not alone, they did it to me too”.

and as we continue to kill her, continue to take from her she can’t help but be beautiful and maybe beauty will come from my excavation too.

i knew i was going to be douling my dad into death but i had no idea that she would be douling me to life. i was held in the rawness and i let old parts die and noone will ever understand a woman’s unique pain like she does. and she will be the place where you die and she will be the place where you are born again…

and do not be deceived i am still dying and i still can’t see much but i will speak and i will write and i will be here to scream what is true because when the world is run by the great lie she needs every single one of us to scream from the top of our lungs that she is alive… and we are too.