Nothing but Love for You

Thumbnail image lovingly lifted from Jerry Pinkney’s illustrations for Rabbit Makes a Monkey of Lion, by Verna Aardema

There’s a way that you can be too precious sometimes, holding onto something so tight, squeezing the life out of that little baby bird. Of course it comes back to life back to life when you let you let go, don’t want to disturb you. Sometimes you want to pick the flowers. Sometimes you want to plant flowers. Sometimes you daydream for hours, sometimes a few seconds feel like hours. You lost your right to reverie, somehow they took it from you in your younger years. Somehow they took it along with so many things they stole. But it can be gotten back now. Along with all the things they stole.

There’s a way that limestone can be shaped to be a bowl, and all the things that you have gathered can be used there. You could be living with the mountain lions, you could be living as coyotes. Maybe the red tailed hawks, golden eagles above. You could be living as the valley you love, you could be living as the river. You could be living as moving clouds as they sweep along, the moving golden lights. You could be moving like the limestone that comes down slowly to the oceans from the cliff face. You could be the little bits of granite, that the snow brings down the mountains to the sea. You could be polishing plateaus, you could be growing crystal songs in your heart, strangely light-filled caverns, unexpectedly spacious, you could be resonations, reverbations, you could be the trembling body of the earth, the living trembling of the earth.

You could be the channels and the pathways of water. You could be the ice and the ocean. You could be snow clouds, heavy with snow, and then the snow coming down. You could be trees that sing when no one’s around, you could be the pines that pine together. You could be the needles that make a blanket on the ground, you could be a warm and fluffy feather, you could be an extra layer of fur. You could be an unexpected opening, a place to pass the winter together.

You could be the first thing that opens in spring, or the last pocket to melt, you could be where the river dumps itself out helplessly, gratefully, out into the arms of the ocean. You could be the wide and silver beach, and its creamy loving reach. You could be the place where the sun rises up out of the mountains, or the place where it tucks itself into the horizon.

You don’t have to be what you’ve been taken to be, little body. You don’t just have to be what you’ve been told to be, little body. We hold you safe in our spaces and our ever-expanding arms. Look around you, it’s only loving faces, in our ever-expanding arms.

There’s nothing but love for you!