Dear 2016,

You were a wicked bitch.

Sweet and feral.

Brutal and protective.

Raw and loyal.

Joyful and hopeful.

I was hoping for more lush and less dull thudding pain.

I was wishing for more luminous when what was required was more walking through the dark looking for the hurt places.

Grief was near. This second year without my mom was more real and had her missing from so much.

There was new life with sweet Nora that brought so much joy.

Deep pain, riotous happy.

There was relief from all the testing, growing, learning.

Pink rocks, hills of them on Georgian bay, stunning in their moss speckled beauty. The anniversary of your leaving mom. I was there then walking on them and remembering your endless love.

I remember the moon that night. A sickle rising above the lake. All the humans sitting and watching as she rose in the pink light of the setting sun. Breathing with them. Life going on.

All the lakes, Superior, Huron, Michigan. Diving into their depths, immersed full body underneath, away and near.

Washed clean, new in her magic, home.

The Lake Superior shore, the heat, the heat and then the wet, cool deep. Frolicking like a seal, sealskin, soulskin. Back in her, beloved in her, found in her.

And the trees, the rocks, the endless forests along the road.

Time out of mind.

Beaches beneath toe and heel, stone sentinels of granite and gneiss. Speckled grey green and blue, peach and pewter. Each one a jewel in the sand. Guardian and guide post.

Waterfalls and ancient cedars with gnarled roots like Tolkein forests with meandering stone walls marching along the ravines edge. Magic in the very air.

This beauty as real as any pain. This beauty as cutting to the heart. Wrenching open to all of this aliveness.

This leaving its mark, a poetic trail, a scar, inked in beauty on me.

Remembering a year lived in all its complexity, soft and sharp edges. Alive to live it.

Writing down its bones as the year closes not having written all year.

I have no answers as to why when it brings clarity and a settledness to my soul.

 

2017 you’re here. I want you to be full of wild luminous parties under the moon, Nora walks, girl gangs, new friendships and creative collaborations with other wild minded ones. Perhaps a wander through making and magic and reading tea leaves under the maple tree on chairs like peacocks. Maybe we could all play together in the wild luminous playhouse breathing in enchantment and dreaming while awake.

Life mark me with your poetic paths of memory, your runes of experience and adventure. Your piercings of joy and sorrow so that I know I’m here. I’m alive. I’m a part of it all. The spinning earth, this lush and luminous life. The wet, the dirt, the wild in all of it,

finding myself again in the dark forest under the moon,

love Melissa