Thrumming with Life
A hawk circles above me, white-bottomed feathers fanning wide to ride the breeze gracefully, sweeping around and down and drawing spirals in the air. Does it circle me waiting for my time to be up, or does it smell the blood leaving my body from all the way up there? Do they smell death in my blood, or do they sense in it the line of women who have come before me, bled freely, felt fierce pain I have not yet, pain that passed through their bodies that I cannot see but carry somewhere in mine? Hand on my chest, the pulse beats within me, of women before me. I set my crystals out in the sun so I can wear the vibration of life, hot and thrumming against my absorbent skin. Pour steaming water over tea leaves picked and dried from the ground by another woman whose soul I feel tied to in that way you can’t really explain in words, like that secret language we all share. Vulnerable in the field, miles below the birds, I feel the touch of a kind of breeze that’s gentle and light, like a mother’s caress across my cheeks, between the bird’s wings and through the strands of my hair, with just a touch of cool that reminds me to stay alert. That brings me back here, now. I lie and let my head tilt back, my hair the color of the bark falling in between lush blades of grass, green and brown blending, the complexion of the Earth. The hawk in the distance screeches, And my lower abdomen contracts in rhythm with its call, each twist and ache an incredible reminder of the passage of time, a reminder that the moon is full tonight, Of distance away from a girl I used to be and toward a woman I’ve heard a lot about but haven’t met yet, not entirely, and I wonder if she’s more like those women that came before me, or if I’m a mutation growing from them—for better or for worse, for openness or for habit, and I don’t know, but I know somewhere deep in my body that they also liked to let their hair become grass and their mind be carried by her gentle breeze from thought to thought like the clouds that keep passing over the sun to give me some moments of warmth and some of shaded chill, and to feel that comforting touch of breeze that winds imagination like a spider spins its web, And that was all it took to be content.
As we transition into May, and spring feels like it’s peaking—like all around me is thrumming with life.
I feel like I just touched grass - thank you