I stepped into the shower, suddenly missing my mother more intensely than I have in a while.  Damn grief always showing up like an unexpected guest.  My belief is our souls are entwined, divinely connected by some unexplainable creation agreement.  So she is constantly with me.  Why then is grief so surprising when it comes calling?

I greet my Ancestors each morning upon waking.  She is among them.  Which just sounds weird.  How can my mother be an ancestor?  But she is.  Ironically I greeted her ashes this morning too.  I don’t always do that.  A copper box, sitting side-by-side with Jaymie’s small wooden one, Wyatt’s necklace and jewelry, Kali’s footprint – all on a shelf overflowing with books.  As though loss and grief can be contained in one place, while outside the winds drag the very last leaves from autumn trees.

Grief.  Reminding me of some piece of love I hadn’t considered for her.  For myself.  Always she reminds me of this now – self-love.  She wasn’t able to do so when I was a child, surely no one had taught her.  Fortunately, I know who her parents were, they didn’t get the lesson either.  Few do, the heart having been left out of these past few centuries by design Lee Brown discovered as he wrote his dissertation for his Ph.D.: Humankind has gone through a suppression of the heart which has caused a split away from the values of interconnection. We educate the mind but we do not educate the heart in emotional development.

Yet we love one another to the best of our abilities anyway.  Humans can’t help but love .  We are love at our essence.

It’s become a practice in the last few months that I go stand barefoot on the earth.  Today in the cold rain, wet grass as I make a prayer – tobacco in hand, standing between the heavens and earth – my heart a rose with its thorns.  Abrupt tears joined the shower water and cascading thoughts.  Love tears in rain chilled prayer.  Dry your hair!  The cold feels good.  Or is it the earth?  The grief itself?  Perhaps I brought this upon myself having greeted the box.  Maybe the thorny tangled fears of being a mother, or that of the daughter?  All of the above?  None of it?  No matter, the depth of the loss is equal to the breadth of the love.

“Self-love is always the answer.”  ~  Northside Dreamers

Mitakuye Oyasin  ~  All My Relations