Walking Underwater

Embracing Tenderness as a Guide

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash.

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There’s been a heaviness to this past week. I feel like I’ve been walking underwater dragging a stone from a rope tied around my waist. Have you seen the photos? People actually do that to build strength. Maybe I need more exercise.

It’s not depression. I don’t feel hopeless, more like past mistakes are showing up as physical presences and saying, “You’ve gotten away with this for too long. It’s time to make amends so we can all more forward without all this sticky resentment.”

Some of these past mistakes are situations, circumstances, events and relationships from my own personal biography. I understand those, and while I may dread confrontation, I’m willing to make the corrections as they’re needed. Apologies are in order, so are cutting ties-with people and places. Never easy. Maybe just wait a little longer till you get back up to the surface for a breath? I’m not sure who says this, but I think it’s good advice. I’ve lived through depression that lasted years without a break. I can take another week until I have to breathe again.

Some of these past mistakes are not part of my body’s biography at all, at least not in this form or dimension. They belong to my ancestors. Yet here I am living with the results.

What is an ancestor? We tend to think of them as the people in our family tree, but if we go back far enough, farther than we can actually measure, we all have the same ancestors. We might call them the first humans, but they were something else before that.

Were they plasmic beings, primal ooze in our atmosphere? Were they pollen or stars? Those stories are all in my marrow feeding these bones held so tenderly by the skin covering these hands writing to you.

In pua’aehuehu, Naua, the fern of Emotional Tenderness, helps us with the ability to negotiate. When we soften, we become more open to what we perceive as other, but is really just another mote of stardust caught in gravity’s spiral being carried down to Earth.

I wrote this poem as a negotiation with my ancestors, the ones caught in time and carried in what seems like an endless river, and for those that came before, and most of all for those who will come after time ceases and the spiral reforms. The form is a pantoum, a Malay verse form with interweaving repetitive lines.

Poem To My Lost Ancestors

In search of faith I came again to the forest,
laid my hollow bones down in ferns.
Looked up. Begged the shadows for a boon-
touch my face, soothe my shame, accept my secrets.

Hollow bones down in the ferns,
longing for tenderness I moaned:
touch my face, soothe my shame, accept my secrets,
so I can trust again. Longing

for tenderness I moaned
in surrender to the shadows
so I could trust again
the path my ancestors walked in dark forests

in surrender to shadows.
My name taken by the wind
on the path my ancestors walked in dark forests
in search of water’s source.

My name taken by the wind
I rode a dream horse into dark clouds
in search of water’s source. In the
eyes of a newborn foal I saw myself

ride a dream horse into dark clouds
running from loneliness.
In the eyes of a newborn foal I saw myself
hesitant at the edge of a clearing

running from loneliness.
The foal was not afraid of me,
hesitant at clearing’s edge.
What was I waiting for?

The foal was not afraid of me.
The mare on her side lay covered in blood.
What was I waiting for?
Light anointed skin like holy water,

the mare on her side lay covered in blood.
Fern spores dusted me gold; light
anointed my skin like holy water.
Without asking

fern spores dusted me gold. Light,
I was delivered through clouds by wild horses
without asking,
across two oceans flowing as one

I was delivered through clouds by wild horses.
In the shelter of the trees’ rooted shadows,
across two oceans flowing as one
my bones came to rest in the river sound.

In the shelter of the trees’ rooted shadows
my ancestors found me
bones resting in the river sound
born and reborn.

Kō aloha lā ea

Concentrate on love by way of the light