Children who are entwined in a mother’s distress are embedded in confusing signals.
Our mother is the first ground of our being.
My mother was the first ground of my being.
To fall into this consideration is suddenly be transported to the watery, rippling land of Peralandra.
You know where I mean: some mythopoetic version of Venus, a distant but knowable planet, the one that CS discovered down his rabbit holes.
I forget how he described it exactly, but I remember it as
a raft of solidity floating precariously in a vast and unknowable sea.
Our motherland. Something like that.
“A raft of solidity floating precariously in/on a vast and unknowable sea.”
Some version of this is scientifically verifiable.
A raft of knowability in the unknowable sea.
Reality really is real.
This raft is a metaphor for our relational dyad with mom, but also further, a metaphor for her relational dyad with her mother, and so forth: Turtles all the way down to the mycorrhizal aunties, where we arrive large again and in step with the planet and beyond.
This journey takes us upon a knowable dance step,
one we all understand and get and agree too.
Breathe. Pause. Breathe.
And even before this
Somewhere further
deep and early and always present we hear that gentle rhythm,
faintly in the background.
a noticing that brings us abruptly
after an seemingly endless journey,
to the first beat
the one that tweaked our drums in the murky awakening
we found in our mother’s womb.
Was it our own heart, or our mother’s, the first beat?
Don’t ask that question. you know the beat was one and the same…. a blended symphony of same and different. An inver river where the differentiation into me and my story began to take root. As for you too.
This is the early magic of this place, this dancing ribbon of beauty and mistake.
The perfect error.
again,
on a perfect day.
But what of old Bear Ears?! What did he forget that he can Rage through his mother’s land, as a tyrant of immeasurable grief.