An increasing number of headachey days have been amplified by increasing bouts of indigestion and now depression, followed by this afternoon’s surrender to a napping meditation which stills me into the magnitude of my son’s footsteps in the room overhead, soon to be silenced by his absence; and didn’t I, once upon a time, numb my head in pain, so that all of the nerve endings were preoccupied, staving off the terror of too much understanding, which crept in at the edges of childhood, without proper companions to ease the way…
…And while this awareness does little to dispel the intensity of an approaching migraine, it does awaken me into my body, into the re-membering that I am not alone, that there are companions at the edge, at every edge in fact, even death; “a wide-open eye in the dark,” said the Benedictine monk of prayer, and hasn’t my life been a constant prayer, and didn’t I hold the hand of those more terrified than me, and come to sit beside others at their own edges; and once arrived across the shore into the sovereignty of my own belonging, didn’t I return to the dark, with a light, to find myself, and wasn’t she waiting, in the corner, and not just trembling, but beaming, welcoming me, here, into my body, where I find an unexpected lightness of being, like I did this afternoon in meditation, like I do on the mat, and for no other reason than instead of abandoning, I entered, Now.
The Motherless Muse 
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