Song of Remembering
by Victoria Ouellette
Deepest stirring. A rustling of forgotten leaves.
A thing of green emerges from old rot.
A wide wooden door creaking open,
remembering a secret doorway carved out of itself.
Everything begins as a movement, a sound, like swelling,
cracking, rushing—
a deep, golden note.
A body’s density becomes a carrier of lightwaves.
Fingertips carrying messages, codes, electricity, soft and pink as rose petals.
An overlap of human and divine—a humanness
made of wet soil, dark earth, root vegetables.
Beet blood, mineral bones, veins and capillaries, their own spindly network of roots,
that tap into deepest source.
You are both this solid body and the light that plays behind your eyes.
Hold strong the visions that appear in silence.
Hold them in your hands, your wide heart, your mind’s eye.
Feel their signature moving through you,
flooding your cells with information and emotion, like water.
Watch as they cascade across the face of your reality.
This is your power.
Your hands have eyes.
Your hands and your pineal gland are old friends.
Let the mysteries and the magick of the body reawaken you.
What quality of paint do you create with?
What is the flavor of your thoughts?
What songs do your emotions sing?
We walk this earth half admitting that we are human,
half admitting that we are bleeding from the inside out.
Distracting ourselves from the chronic pain of separation,
the ache of cultural and spiritual amnesia,
of severance from our own wild and mysterious core.
We run from the wounds that have been spun into the tapestry of our tissue.
You are water.
Can you open the ocean of your heart wide enough
to contain all the wounds?
Allow the wicked aches and sharp pains to crash into the ocean of You
and then dissolve back into silence.
The smallest of movements can shift the tides.
The art of healing is an art of waves and ripples.
Remember that the psyche can sometimes powder its face
and dress up in costume—outfits stitched together
by thought, belief and paradigm
When these too-small garments begin to cling and choke, we must go through
the labor
of undressing.
We shoulder injuries from ancestors we’ve never met in the flesh,
but who live on, by some miracle,
in our blood and teeth and marrow.
Sometimes, late at night, or in moments of gnosis,
we cry for them.
In this way, we hold each other.
Can you open your ocean, all salt and sweet water, to hold,
not only your aches, but theirs?
Can you swallow and make love to them,
then let them spill from dripping fingertips, thoroughly loved,
into the river, to be ever-transformed?
Can you smile in the face of ancient grief—all teeth and rough hands and dark eyes?
How do you dance with the weight of sadness?
You are water, and a dancer.
You are breath.
You are stillness that moves.
And your hands communicate when they hold and cradle
and cup another’s sacred heart.
Your thumb traces an ancient story as it
gently
strokes
skin.
This is the story of remembering that we are magic.
Remembering to admit it.
To shout it at the sky and whisper it to the leaves—
an overlapping of human and divine.
The child with glinting eyes and head thrown back in belly laughter—
the one who lives in you. She knows this.
All barefoot in the grass, tasting the clouds and laughing with God.
She is the long tide. Hers are the hands of the universe.
Her hands can withstand the aches.
What is the work that opens these inner hands,
that spreads wide your wings,
that lights the candle at your altar?
This is your work. Attend to it.
See that you keep that flame fed.
The light behind your eyes flows from a well that is deep.
It is the spring, at the Heart of creation.
See that you keep the channel open.
See that you walk with open feet, with which to hear the Earth
and make music upon her back.
Her grasses and trees are the hairs gracing your arms and legs.
Keep an open crown to suffuse your melody with the lilt of angels.
This song is truly sacred.
The aching itself is sweetness.
When the ravens fix their eyes upon you and ask who you are,
tell them you are salt water,
and beet-red blood—
the radish root and the water that it drinks. You are nutrients.
You are hands with eyes. You are mouth and heart and dirty feet.
You are everyone that came before you,
and everyone that will come after.
You are the arms of a mother, reaching for her child.
You are cradled in her arms.
You are the doorway.
You are lavender fields and moonflowers,
You are the weaver and the woven,
the song and its memory.
Open your hands to see.
