Caela’s Story #32

 

Another mother appeared, ghostly drifting in sudden mist. “Did you grieve for me?” It is Letta’s spirit, a mother’s love Caela has not felt since she was almost too young to remember it’s sweet beauty.

“I grieved for you while you still stood before me in strange imitation of life. I tried so hard to reach you. You would not be reached, would not respond, would not know me.”

Caela felt that grief again, a scarred old wound that could still throb when disinterred, angry, red, infected, long controlled into quietude.

“You know I never meant to leave you. I never meant to betray our bond. As you say, my life ended long before my body died. I never knew it could happen that way. I never knew how to find my way back to you. It wasn’t that I loved her more, no longer needed you. All love, all feeling, was lost from me. I had nothing to give, no way to receive. But, look at you. You give and take in more than anyone I have ever known. I am gifted with this chance to feel the love, pride, pure pleasure, in knowing what you, my precious daughter, have become.”

And she was gone, dissolved into the mist which itself dissolved into a sweet, brightly colored flowery glade. Caela stopped to smell the flowers, inhaling a heady mixture of scent memories. She sat, relaxing her weight against a broad tree trunk, letting her freely flowing tears water the landscape until she drifted off into a different consciousness.

“Why do your people divide? Not just here and there, spatial separations, but even within? Mothers and children separate to expand living. Death separates, but renews – feeding the whole. Yet your whole rebels, rejects connection. No, some connect. But not the whole, not seed to root to stem. Even a healer can still be divided. You have strong presence, strong awareness and integrity of self. You are separate from your kind, also because of your own conscious striving to wholeness of self. How is this? To what purpose? Feel your way along the division, healer. Can you weave it whole? See this spiral dance? Reattach your shadow as a companion of play, and dance so sweetly, so free, complete in every movement, every moment, in living embrace of music vibrating eternally. These are your pictures, your words, imbued with that which is love calling between us.”

As other loves had implanted their brightly precious cuttings through Caela’s being, she now accepted this growing loving friendship with sentience not of her kind, nor of the world her ancestors called home. What is home but where we learn to be and feel alive?