Mother of the World

In my dream I am screaming for my mother. It is an angry, powerful screaming. A furious demanding that she show herself, but not a desperate one.

I am not weak. I am awake.

I am not screaming for my earthly mother. I am screaming for a different kind of mother--and I am ready to open the door and let her in.

I've begun to recognize this mother as the one we've all been crying out for.

Our own mothers could not appease this cry.

I've begun to recognize this mother leading us to her.

We can't find her alone.

I've begun to recognize that it is we who have kept her shut out. It is we who've forgotten that she exists.

Little by little we are remembering--together.

And the perfection of this.

How seeing her would be through learning to see.

A reunion.

The perfect happily ever after, after the happily ever after.

And when I finally found the door, I opened it, and invited her in. I was no longer afraid I'd burn up in her presence. I was strong enough to greet her without the need to fall to my knees in worship. It was a strong embrace we met in, both upright and sovereign.

We've been getting very much acquainted.

She is an amusing companion.

I hear her narrating my life in 3rd person. I revel in her description as she helps me take notice of my most wonderful adventure. She makes even my cat peeing in my shoe, and me subsequently stepping into it, a hilarious encounter.

She helps me to see my younger daughter, who has a knack for climbing shelves and cupboards to get down all of those things I've placed out of her reach, as the ambitious and charming girl I would root for in a children's book.

She perks me up to feel the morning breeze, and to wonder if it is speaking to me as it rustles through the leaves.

And she makes sure that I pay head when he has heeded my call, to come back to me. I see his hands at the post office. His face in a young entrepreneur. The softness of his voice echoing like an old song in my mind. His encouraging presence in the man helping me navigate the self-check out at the grocery store. In the movie, when he writes the young widow letters from his grave, and tells him that he worries not that she will forget him, but that she will forget herself.

The narration continues, and tells a tale of a woman rocking it doing push ups, and then eating ice cream in the next moment, and she recounts the delectable naughtiness of this. I laugh at her prose, when she describes how the push ups and the ice cream both have the same very new punch of pleasure, because someone took the right stone out of the tall tower she'd been locked away in all her life, and brought it tumbling down, setting her free.

Her narrative describes how the character feels like it must be impossible for her to contain her joy at a world burst full of sensation and color. And I love her description of this:  how the character imagines herself at the highest mountain top, flinging her arms wide open, and screaming, "This is living!!!!!"

I love that this holy Mother lives within me, is me, and that softly, I am tipping more and more in favor of expressing, loving, creating, healing, appreciating, smiling, playing and savoring, through this aspect of me. And when I am not--when I am spinning in my messy humanness, she is the soft place to wait it out.

Her loving eyes, wait ever so patiently for mine to meet hers. But if I am too lost to meet her gaze, I know that I am more and more aware of a part of me that knows, that no matter what, I am in her soft landing place, and that she has never left.

She is caressing my hair, until I wake up from a bad dream, where I am calling her name.