On The Weaving and the Unweaving.

I would walk with her held in my arms for hours. Meditatively treading a small spiral of passageways familiar as my own breath, warm breast at her cheek, feet moving slowly through what had become the safe, cocooning labyrinth of my home.

Her face, so new and vulnerable, would be soft with sleep. I’d trace its lines with my gaze. The skin built up in uncomfortable patches on her nose and chin, her crown. I would stare at those beautiful brown eyes when they’d flicker open - see the absent eyelashes. Will god to give her hair, teeth. Her hearing, sight. Outside dark clouds would rumble and pass away. Outside the sun would rise unyielding and burn full at the centre of the sky. While inside, every kind of weather would pass across my heart; torrents and tidal waves, broiling deserts. And LOVE - strong enough my soul felt scorched by it.

What would her future be? This little girl with a rare, genetic condition I never saw coming, that would affect her in so many ways. What world would this child face and would the world have her?

At night I would lie outside in the heat, something wild and silent curling inside me, the stars and moon so neutral to our fate. And all the while she slept inside, oblivious. The next day I would take her in my arms again and hold her firmly, more determinedly.

And walk.

With this birth of brave new life, my new child born with a serious and rare genetic condition, came a death and a dissolution of an old woven world.

As we walked a labyrinth built of uncountable footsteps in my sanctuary of humble hallways. As I stared into that peaceful face, working words through my mind with each new prognosis, sometimes better, sometimes worse - each step soon blurred into endings. Of dreams and hopes each mother has for her child and new words forming with harsher shapes, like sorrow, rejection, pain, unknown. Deeper. Into anger. At god, at life, at the unfairness of life and of suffering. And through it all was the shining face of this little girl. This beautiful countenance as her sparkly eyes would open as she lay in my arms smiling up at me. Incandescent as a new star.

Slowly, and with each passing day the knots untangled. The weave of old stories and 'should bes' loosening with the wind. And the labyrinth beneath my feet began to wind free, spiralling its way up, up. Until it found its way within me. Until one day there it was - the unweaving and the weaving. The stories that no longer served us on this new quest sloughed off and left behind like an old skin.

And from these silver threads of love and sorrow came a new weave. A real one, one that could not untangle with life’s storms and sudden changes. Each sorrowed step coursing golden paths and flowing rivers through wastelands of old belief, where, in silence my own soul challenged what was needed to be happy, to be beautiful, worthy, and have meaning in one's life. Heart opening to perceive vistas I had been too blind to see before.

And as the years passed and this little girl moved from the safety of my arms and into her own life. As this labyrinth wound from my feet and from my heart - out, into the world, this brave and brilliant little girl, so full of fire and kindness, so full of humour, and a strange and somehow ancient wisdom in the face of storms - and they have been hard storms - continues to teach and transform others through who she is. A light of the true nature of love and happiness. Of the deep expressions of true beauty. Of the profound gift of being. And the sheer power of the soul's will to experience life.

You see, in our hearts and minds we are always weaving worlds, never questioning until life's storms come raging. And those storms will always come, to wash so much away. To unweave what cannot hold, so we might weave again, structures and even whole civilisations on a deeper Stone. To stop seeing if a thing should exist and to rather, see all things in terms of how they serve or do not serve something deeper. For the soul is always ready, whether we are or not, to call us onto new paths we would never choose ourselves...

Paths that lead to more challenging but infinitely more rewarding, destinations.

And to what is truly real.

~ R.A Falconer

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