What is Mine Will Come to Me

  

“When I run after what I think I want, my days are a furnace of stress and anxiety; if I sit in my own place of patience, what I need flows to me, and without pain. From this I understand that what I want also wants me, is looking for me and attracting me. There is a great secret here for anyone who can grasp it.”

Rumi

I used to measure beauty by the absence of wrinkled skin; my worth by whatever threads of innocence I still crossed myself with, like little veins, transparent as twine.

For years, I watched the women in my life shrivel in sickness, some would die.  Others were left with scars, irremovable indentations.  My own mother, her breasts stolen by the scalpel, she fastens a bra laced with prosthetics...the perfect sized breasts!  Fear of change (and of age, and of death) lead me to eccentricities.  Silly little superstitions, like the fear of pavement cracks or of ravens cawing toward the clouds.

Wound by my nerves, I spent nearly four years creating paper collage art, then dismantling each one into one-inch strips.  I'd write words from my heart, and erase them from the paper one by one.  Fear left me nimble, every little deviation from my monotonous day would set my heart to fluttering inside my chest like a wild bird caught in a cage.

And then one day they came, like a message from the Gods, words sent by astral-mail, they landed amongst my alphabet soup.  They spelled for me the remedy.

Since then I paint my lips a shiny shade of coral pink.  And I've long since let my dark hair free; it dances like a Medusa one windy days.  I fill my pockets with crystals and go for two-day night walks.  

In all the old fairy tales, the woods are dark and dreary and dangerous.  Now there is a new story:  the woods sparkle with old magic, the ancient oaks wave their arms to invite me!  I click my heels three times beneath a corner street-lamp and make a foot-path between the trees.  I pray to the moon, she winks back at me.  Generously, I leave little caps-full of honey beneath mushrooms for the fairies.  I dip my fingers into a stream and bring the manna of mother earth to my lips.  I become witch and wizard, ageless to time. 

And although my closet may hold a box full of dissected pictures, a paper graveyard made of indecision, I no longer fear the days of age.  I stir a spoonful of magic into my coffee each morning, and pray alongside my ancestors.  I no longer fear any quick, dark, unbecoming for I've learned to love things how they are, and to leave wild things where they roam.