do you remember how to be cared for?
i want you to know these things in your spine
I have been afraid to divulge the fullness of the world which I inhabit. Not afraid of the world itself, but of how long it has taken for this dark, sensuous, slithering palace to develop. Longer than I thought it should. I am not, however, interested in what I think should happen because it really does not matter. What matters is the rising and falling and expanding spaciousness. Perhaps I will take a lesson from sourdough bread, the kind you remember to leave the butter out for, just in case.
What I want you to know, she says, venom dripping from her lips, is the way you taste when you are living from the precision of vertebral wisdom. How does one communicate this world, built of fluid breath and luminous presence — the blue translucence of dragonfly wings. This world thinks no thing of worn through concepts. This world breathes itself into being, the scent of jasmine and amber wafting from the lush, mossy forest, dense with soft, swaying leaves that reflect every stream of sunlight in a display of sparkling.
This world, built of hands and fingers tracing curves across cream cotton paper, awakening the dream and the dreamer.
Your intellect is no good here.
If you approach from the head, you’ll be asked to swim around the moat several thousand times, until you tire and sink into deep ocean currents where you will travel the underwater pathway of oblivion. Have you been? Some need three trips to ready themselves for the palace.
I know you have knocked at the stained glass window shining raspberry and cerulean through gilded framing. You must find the doorway of your heart. You need not shatter glass or set off explosives; there is no way to enter that space which has yet to open through force.
What you need is slow embers at the centre of a spiderweb. Touch one strand and the whole web quivers. Breeze comes to touch your wanting skin. The delicate hairs on your arms reveal their electricity. Your breath deepens. Are you still underwater? Have you felt the chamber open?
Swim with your whole anatomical presence. Stay beneath the surface. Stay where the oxygen is. Drink yourself. Drink. Is it salt water? Or volcanic crisp with mint, lemon, slices of plum and purple blackberry running down your chin.
A hawk flies overhead, her shadow glides across your back, and for a moment, you have wings. Or have they always been there, nestled in dense bundles of nerve endings, waiting to emerge in a singular moment of specific sweetness only you could inhabit. A moment that makes you remember what it feels like to let him touch you, turn you into taffy in his hands, pull you over and over with rhythmic, hymnic care. To be cared for.
Do you remember in your spine, and in the spaces between each of your vertebrae, and in the spines of each of the opalescent feathers making themselves known in your backbone? Do you remember in your breath, and in the way you have just grown an inch? Do you remember that you are cared for? Do you remember how to trust his strong hands? Do you remember the pressure — the squeeze of your ribs, his fingers tracing the outlines of each curve chambering your lungs? Do you want his fingers feeling every rounded edge and making their soft, slow entrance, curling beneath bone, wrapping your delicate protection in caring attention? Do you want this?
Do you want his fingers tracing your waving hip crests and tucking in to what ever skin and space will create more contact?
Do you drape your head back, now your spine is sweet saltwater taffy, and your opalescent wings are spread? And do you let him have you? You. That you. Wet and loose and hungry for ripe plums and purple blackberries and salt on your skin illuminated by the raspberry and cerulean of the stained glass windows. Do you enter the temple? Do you let him?
Wow... I read every word carefully.
Got big love for you Faye xx