Our Lady of the Nurse Log

She dwells in my flesh as this inhalation, 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.

Call her Laniakea, 100,000 clustered galaxies, my vagus nerve her golden hand reaching through my body. I am pollen on her sticky feet, I am milk-weed on the breeze of her exhalation. She honors my fallenness, sprinkling me over the meadow again, rooting me wild, nurtured by larvae, pierced and stitched again by symbiotrophic fungi, fertilized by ancestral forgiveness.

Of course, you may call her Chi, Ruuh, Shekinah, Kundalini. Or let her take the shape of the Mere: mere wings of frost dissolving on a window. 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. Merely what is...

And isn’t this what God is doing here, glistening in your tear, which might be the portal to a new earth, when the beam of your seeing makes a prism of it? A single I Am breathes through our separate bodies. Impermanence is the poignancy of love. Self and other merge again and again in micro-orgasms of perception. But the seer and the seen are one sap, rising through billions of quivering stems in the chaos of our greening.

So now I loaf on a mossy nurse log, having wandered barefoot in the forest at midnight, un-naming the fires of heaven. No words here, only her Presence. Listen! The rustle of death, the murmuring of birth all around us. Sigh of photons, song of mitochondria, creation’s first and only respiration, breath of the Mere.

Infant saplings tremble out of a moldering cedar. Fir spores ciliate their shakti into loam. Miryam reaches out her naked cinnamon foot, nudging my big toe.

Photo: took this in the Carbon River Rain Forest, Mount Rainier. A poem based
on this forest murmuring is in my book, 'Strangers & Pilgrims' (see below).