Quietly Quitting a Long Marriage
It has been a pink thread and big stitches that basted our stories together,
a regenerative and frail connection
reliant on its care and feeding.
Then there is quiet quitting, an often-forgotten way to reclaim power,
a subtle recalibration.
When marriage serves as initiation, everything is possible.
We choose the magic we make.
Subordinating conjunctions suspend the moment,
bring a discreet signpost to a thought,
dew drop unpacking light.
After, as if, because, when, where, since – here are words,
I tender to wing open a line.
When marriage serves as initiation for the fireweed years -
those days of forging ahead, slower, living from our belly -
and there is nothing to prove, what emerges?
What falls away?
Since nothing is new under the sun and the moon,
and we are subjects to the first law of thermodynamics,
it is easy to neglect the first letter of the next word.
It was an O when we moved into our own bedrooms, my floor, your ceiling.
It was daunting to break open the hard rind of stale language as the house shrank
in the space growing between us.
When climates change, living things move, adapt, or die;
the world is a MAD place.
When I laid down the Tarot Chariot card, my belly quietly said, walk away.
Brown Pelicans invited me to join their migration.
There is a German proverb –
to change and change for the better are two different things.
Subordinate implies dependency. Dependency implies weakness.
Independence is an illusion.
With such loud conversation in my chattering mind and the drowning knock of knees,
I had to study the wind in the trees to learn how to bend in stormy weather.
My heart cowered in a hurricane.
There is no alone on this beautiful planet.
A river and her channel share the same skin.
We will always share this life.
As we peer beyond ourselves, there are countless pieces that look back,
one for each breath and being in the web of us.
And under the second law of thermodynamics,
we will continually slip from one angle of repose to the next.
As we peer beyond ourselves, into all our countless pieces,
we can meld with this evolving horizon,
into this moment of bright jonquils before the Snow Moon,
this vernal promise in the chill of a waning winter.
Soon enough the runnels of gray water will do their work,
open new avenues of initiation in the widening hours of March
with its orange dawns and a red vixen snug in her den.
Horseshoe craps have spawned on beaches at the spring Neap Tides
for four million years.
We belong to such a deep rhythm. There can be no lost when we listen.
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