It's All Coming Back

little ribbons and metaphors

I’m folding ribbons on gifts for little babies and their moms. Purple and green, I cut the length and then extend them as a basket around the box. Bows, little figure 8’s, I admire the way we carry on what feels like traces of ancient tradition. There is a symbol here, in the everyday, and we don’t even know what it means.

I am often naming sights as reasons. Like when flowers are planted along the pathway to welcome participants to our non-profit’s door. “Enter with dignity,” they are supposed to say. I go on about how these little yellow vessels too, are breathing just so that those in states of extreme stress, can take a breath in, that might offer grace and ease. Replace the flight, and the fight, and the freeze.

“I keep stepping on them,” says a student here.

“Poor flower,” I say.

He goes on, “It’s like something I’d do to someone I hate, or after a relationship, they did me wrong, I’d stomp down all their flowers.”

“What a metaphor,” I say, and at first he, and the other students laugh; but then I go on to ramble and find the message there: denying another air or growth, uprooting, saying that you did not nourish me, to end this chapter…

The car goes silent.

People often do not take my little wonderings as serious. I suppose that is ok; they don’t have to. But I long for the people with clearer eyes who meet my ramblings with their own and cry along with me as I pick up the yellow flowers that are crushed and killed.

I want to be the person that then takes this exchange of idea and metaphor, and more literally, the deadened flowers, and places them to the earth. There is another part of this offering which is the understanding that life and death are endless sisters dancing. What is now alive, will die, and give its body to the next one. In a way, this mindless stomping was that dance. And the earth received its rhythm. She was ready to welcome those little petals as promise to create more. In a way, this silly car ride was quite impactful in the same way. In that it spoke to the cycles of our ideas as humans.

For so many generations, we, as a modern imperialist world, have been focused on killing. The earth, the sky, the body, the soul, difference. We wanted the wars we made. We wanted the mean energy of power to replace the kind. We chose grey over green. The earth captured this dance. She remembers it.

Now, She is revealing to us, her dance. The sky has sent the bright birds to whistle long forgotten melodies. And with worn ears, so tired from all this noise pollution, gunshots, violence, we have turned towards the curious melodies of nature. I believe we are beginning to listen again. To each other too, we are beginning to grasp difference as opportunity. Our hearts are opening to the grief we have inherited. Finally, we are naming what has happened as “grief-worthy.” So much death.

But we, we came in for life.

Long ago, we must have honored those that saw metaphor. I know in Ireland, at least, poets were our mystics. They were translators more so than writers. Spirit comes to human brain. That’s really what we’re always doing, translating. Our truth lives in abstract shapes. To communicate that to others, explain it, is a big feat of bringing this internal world to the outside. I think we were taught the opposite which is to consume, and most of our beings were made of those past choices — grey damage. “I am who I am expected to be.”

But again, this generation came in for life. “I am who I am.” We are the painters, the singers, the dancers. We are the mothers who bake bread again and lean into wearing our dresses as signs of freedom. We can move our legs as we please. We are healers, with more and more people turning back to something greater and collecting crystals and cards and whatever makes them feel connected to this greater source. I think we are a generation of hope. Because we have to be, we are a generation of hope. If we do not believe in creation, then destruction persists.

We do not carry only the morals of our recent past, but those of our ancient ones. We are the Irish mystics reborn. We are the water-carriers who healed through wells. We are the ones who kneaded the dough and fed our loved ones. We are the ones who loved. And so, the earth remembers this dance too. She has been waiting for someone to exchange this stomp — the one that kills all the flowers — with an intended step — the one that kneads the dough of soil.

We mostly walk in a practical way, in a useful way. As in, I need to get from point A to point B. Imagine even in such the utilitarian act, we brought intention forward. Now, as the tribes believe, we are dancing upon this ground. We are here for a reason. It’s as simple as perception. It’s as courageous as faith. It’s as necessary as air.

I go back to folding ribbons into bows: the infinity sign, the number 8, my day of birth. It’s all coming back around. Through my fingers, in the birds, in my words, it’s all coming back.