Our Lady of the Nurse Log

 

She dwells in my body as this very breath, a gentle lightning bolt in my spine. Every quark of my gristle sings to an invisible star, about some incomprehensible connection between pain and beauty.

Angels cock their heads, perplexed and ever so sweetly troubled by the music emitted from my nuclei. Something about my gravity and grief gives them courage. They long to clothe themselves in bone, the very stuff that weighs me down.

She whose body is Laniakea, a hundred thousand clustered galaxies, reaches her golden hand through my flesh in the form of my vagus nerve.

Then she releases my milk-weed, lifting me up on her breeze, yet in a way that honors my fallenness, placing me down in the meadow again, rooting me wild, nurtured by dust, mushrooms, and the forgiveness of the ancestors.

Of course, you may call her Chi, Prana, Ruuh, Shekinah Kundalini. Or just let her take the shape of wings in dissolving frost. A drunken worm in the golden apple. The shadow of a cloud brushing dew from a faery ring of toadstools. A hairy caterpillar crawling toward its rainbow of doom.

But let me call her Magdalene, because I yearn to know her, not merely as an archetype but a Person, the way Jesus is a Person, and you are a Person, the living energy of a Love who loves back.

And isn’t this what God is doing here, eyes sparkling with playful tears? A single I Am breathing into separate bodies, falling in love with the Self as an Other again and again, one sap risen through billions of quivering stems in a chaos of green?

I am sitting on a mossy nurse log beside her, after wandering barefoot all night in the forest. There are no words. I have un-named the fires of heaven. Listen! The rustle of growth all around us, sigh of photons, song of mitochondria, creation’s first breath.

Infant saplings tremble up out of dead cedars, fir spores fungus down their shakti into loam. Miryam reaches out her naked cinnamon foot, nudging my big toe.

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Photo: took this in the Carbon River Rain Forest, Mount Tahoma. LISTEN to this poem read aloud.