This image was sent to me this morning by my granddaughter, Olivia. She called it Beautiful Nanny Dancing. This is Olivia’s love speaking. Sixteen years of love and exchanges of all sorts have led to this moment – when Olivia photographs the release of her grandmother’s joy through dancing.
And so it happened, one week ago today: By affirming the essential contribution of my mother – earth to my father’s sky – my own flight was released, and with this flight came a completion that could only result in joy. Remarkably, there were witnesses, though participants would be the better word. Angels – human and otherwise thronged the room: sat in the chairs with smiles and/or tears on their beautiful faces, or swirled and swooped in the very air I breathed.
It has taken me all this week to be ready to write of the performance in the Ocean Springs Community Center for the twentieth anniversary of The Walter Anderson Museum, and I know even now that I cannot really convey what it was. Spiritual happenings are like this; moments when harmonic energies converge so completely can hardly be spoken of. How can one describe something that is too miraculous to remember clearly?
I can say that prior to the performance I was ridiculously human, my knee aching and threatening to lock, an esophageal burp threatening to erupt. Age and infirmity were doing battle with my faith in transcendence. Interestingly, wonderfully just before I entered that room of expectancy, two vaguely familiar figures appeared in my path. Gaby and Laurent Charbonnet, Godchildren of my extreme youth, not seen in so many years that I cannot count them. And they tell me that their mother is with them. Grace! Grace will be in the room with me. This woman who had been a second mother to me during years when my need for mothering and guidance was excessive. Grace was a different sort of mother: youthful, beautiful – even glamorous – without the tiredness that my own dear mama couldn’t hide. Grace laughed and I forgot the challenges of life at home. So Grace was in the audience. The mother element was manifest as I sang the poem that had accompanied my walks for months.
“I have loved the earth mother today
heavily sensuous
curled to her broad warm back
like a baby –
I am secure –
The center of me
which is wont to cry out in the night
is connected –
Mysterious fears are vanquished
by the mother pull,
for I know that the other side of her
is love –
Day comes and the night
in shadow lies
As I lift my head to behold her gaze
the sun and the moon
polestars
and I am the morning star between –
Bright sunlight invites me
to sink my trust
into valleys of yielding depth,
impulsing a flight that takes me above
her mothering hills
to praise her gift of abiding love.”
Yes, I did go on to sing of the father- sky, and to ascend and to dance “with the little winged blessings in my father’s blue eye”, but that can wait for a future post. For now I am most content to rest in the arms of Grace.