hi•ne•ni
Widening Circles Collaborative
Water skin woman
8
0:00
-8:04

Water skin woman

for grandmother Sue
8
The song featured is Wulu Dream by David Darling & The Wulu Bunun.

Good morning, fam. I have prayers for water on my lips today in so many ways. The forecast shows light rain. In the western US, summer is now synonymous with wildfires. Everything around me is thirsty. Rain in June is a miracle.

What is the status of your own waterways? Is there anything your own body of water is seeking right now? A refill? A cry? A deep sigh? I’ll join you.

I’m so grateful you’re here. Thank you.

If this well feeds you, please feel encouraged to invite in someone you love. It is wide and deep enough for all of us. No one left out.

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Her eyes hold an edge of water that brims just over the rims of her eyelids and lingers there. I am entranced by this detail of her aliveness. As we speak, I hold her gaze and wait for these warm cups to overflow and spill down her cheeks. They never do. She is always on the edge of tears. 80 years of life swell in her vessel. Her mind drifts along the rivers of time as she speaks to me in memories, both past and future, of who she's been, and who she's becoming.

Bright morning light softens through the enveloping veil of marine mist that dances around us and the trees and all things as we stand in a circle. Her knee braces are strapped tight to hold her bonsai limbs steady. Soon we will kneel to the soil and kiss our hands to the Earth, our shared mother, who makes life with us, through us.

But for now, we are gathered in our weekly ritual of greeting each other before the day's farm tasks are laid out. Our prompt: what is something you're currently learning about? Her wet eyes glitter. She's radiant as she describes how it feels to learn Mandarin. She shares the symbology of her favorite words.

"Grandmother is made up of the symbol for water, and the symbol for skin, and the symbol for woman. Isn't that beautiful? Why do you all think that is?" she beams with curiosity.

screenshot from Sue

Synapses spark with the buzz of resonance. We are a chorus pouring out a waterfall of English words in reverence for the alchemy of three sacred symbols that already say everything in their poetic elegance. Silence might be a better companion, but our excitement is a flood.

“It makes me think of the symbol for the water bearer. The woman bears the water to hydrate the whole village.”

"The womb itself is water. The baby and the seed are both held in water to germinate and grow. All life is held in water."

"Skin is the vessel for life, the way we are incarnated into form is in the containment of water through our skin..."

"Water is woman. Water is life. The source of all life. All the lives we've held in our skin...”

"Woman is wellspring and watershed. Grandmother has nourished two generations of life through the sacred waters of her body's own well.”

"Woman is well. Woman is wellness. A community is only as well as its women. A community's well is its womb bearers."

We pour out streams into a collective watershed of inspiration.

The buzz of voices swirls in the dappled light. They rise into the sky like prayers.

Then she tells us the symbol for woman is present in countless Mandarin words, even ‘building’.

We are enchanted.

We are contemplative.

We are heartbroken.

Woman is life and yet we fight for existence.

That long awaited silence settles. We are melted into the waters of our grief and our grandmothers' grief. The tears well right up to the edges of our eyes but they don't fall. The rivers are within.

The gods and the grandmothers are present, and they carry us on the current to the ocean that is being woman, mother, grandmother, granddaughter. We float on the waves of unwept tears. Our circle holds many unheard voices. We listen.

To be woman is to hold the ocean inside you. Blood and water. Womb and world.

Life is born as a promise to itself. We are tugged by the tide to make vows in the moonlight of our interiority. Medicine and magic are stored safely in our cells for right times, for safe times. We are the seedkeepers. Our bodies need not bear children to birth new worlds. We are held in the wise ways of the grandmother wingspan walking the way toward well worlds.

Soon we will wail in public.

Soon we will wash the world with centuries of tears.

Soon we will weep and weep and weep until all that has been unmourned and ungrieved can't help but be swept into the wild rivers, the wide oceans.

We will not be lonely in our grief, because grief is the ocean.

Water is the womb. The well will be so full we'll forget what emptiness meant.

We'll have no words for it.

We have skin and water and woman.

We have life.

We walk together to the fields. She cups the Earth in her palm and places a tender broccoli plant in its new/old womb.

She asks me about my grandmothers and great grandmothers, whose worlds I am watering in my book, rehydrating their lives and their wisdom with every word I type. Her eyes glisten.

"Telling the stories of women, that is good work. Too many untold stories of the makers of the world."

"Thank you..." I say with wet eyes. I keep the word "...grandmother" silent. Kin are not only biological but chosen. For now it sings with the beat of my heart pulsing the rivers inside me. One day I will tell her, or maybe she already knows.


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hi•ne•ni
Widening Circles Collaborative
cultivating cultures of belonging and economies of care // practicing more possible futures here and now
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