Take Off Your Shoes

 

Go outside. Take off your shoes. Breathe sunlight through your fontanelle, the soft spot where the bones of that old story never healed.

Feel honey trickle through your neurons, dripping down your vertebrae. A ray of violet bathes your furrowed brow, transmuting anger into joyous useful fury.

Rays of song-bird yellow caress your throat, healing grief. Clenched heart-bud softening in glow of ancient forest green. One thousand petals unfurling, each shaped like a perfect wound.

Knotted thorns in your belly disentangle in a fragrant breeze, the whisper of the name of the Goddess, and you notice the rose that was already there, blossoming in your diaphragm.

What's this, fermenting in the cauldron of your hips? Your weary disappointment, changing­­ into purple wine.

Through the soles of your feet, breathe out the shattered sunbeam, spilling down your spine through a rosary of prisms. Didn’t you know your body was made from infinitesimal quantum sparks of astonishment?

 

You give birth to the rainbow. Yet for the surrendered, who have no choice, even light is not enough. There is a wilder holier secret. The arc of healing does not shower from the sky, but gushes upward from below.

The burnt-umber wheat-toned phylogenetic rainbow beneath you, percolating from compost, amber-glow of bone splinters, afterbirth of mushroom spores, give birth to this!

Microbial song of the earthworm, piebald treasure of the decomposed, gift of darkness, give birth to this! Breathe in through your soles, as you breathed out. Inhale the olive energy of death, the diastole of crystalline detritus.

Glorify the loam. Gather tiny relics of your ancestors' flesh, still warm with embered sacrifice, and fling their swirling ashes into night. They are the stars.

Image: Tapestry by Annelie Solis