My mother in the emergency room after 10 hours of tests and mostly just waiting, sitting making our small, good jokes. The doctor came in and for a moment it was like a bad movie, just like people always say about bad news, that it resembles a movie. How you wish you could just change the station or turn it off all together and he said it was ovarian cancer and he said he was really sorry.
While he was talking I couldn’t move, there was this little roar in my ears and I was staring at my Mom’s hand and all I could think about was how much I wanted to hold her hand. I couldn’t move until he left us alone behind curtain number 3. And then I went and sat with her and we cried and held each other and I looked into her face and she absolutely glowed in that moment- the way a newborn glows with all that blood. It was all of life and death I saw in her face. It was truly the face of Kali and the Corn Mother and Yemaya and Hecete and on and on and on.
There is a lot of talk about women as the manifestation of goddess and stuff we use at times to prop ourselves up but in that sterile, strange place the goddess showed up unexpected. Like most things in life when the illusion is stripped away, when all the busy chatter is silenced in some way, it looks nothing like you expect and it does not resemble a movie or an image that has been fed to you. It is being, not seeing.
For days after Mom’s diagnosis I felt her like I was moving in her body, the walls dissolved and I could feel the connection so deeply. There was no separation and I breathed in and out of that.
Back from the hospital, I rubbed her back as she lay on her side and the stretch marks from two babies and 61 years of growth spread across her round hip like the sun, like oak branches. I am telling you, I have never seen anything more beautiful. Why now with a tumor in her body was I experiencing her and by connection myself as more fully a part of earth then all my years of struggling to decolonize myself from this white supremacist, earth hating patriarchy?
The answer came standing barefoot between her house and the neighbors at 5am before her surgery, praying for her blood to stay the course, praying for her heart and spirit to be strong. With my eyes closed, standing in my bare feet with my arms outstretched I was her, and I was finally beyond analyzing truly Earth. Because we were fighting for survival from the ravages of pollution and disease that plague us. That plagues my Mother, all of our mothers, the great mother.
And to love your body, is to know your body is of earth is to finally know that what is done to the soil is what is done to us, what is done to the water is done to us, what is done to the frogs and the polar bears and the wolves and the birds is what is done to you and me and my mother and all our children. To love our bodies is to live in our bodies with Earth; move in our bodies not as a metaphor for freedom but as freedom itself. Not like holding a picture of Earth in your mind as a big blue ball from space but as what is right in front of you, right now...the diseased, healing, Earth and my beautiful Mother, smiling back at me.