Yes

1.  Dumping the compost bucket, I surveyed the garden, able to walk through it now without collecting the three inch thick platform sole of mud that must be scraped off with a stick picked up from the yard, leaving chunks of black mud in the grass.  The bean seeds had been washed loose, reddish gems lying in the furrows.  I pick them up and poke them back into rows.  And I wonder about the seeds I can't see.  I'll just have to wait and see what held tight through the storm.

2.  And I'm reading that all of it begins with "Yes."  What am I willing to give back to Him, as I accept it and then hand it back, whatever it is that has passed my way, has left my life, has entered?

Yes:  Storm.

Yes:  The things in my house that belonged to others before they belonged to me.  The story is not my story is my story.  Could it be true that there are only three stories that we keep telling over and over again?  And what are they?  Broken hearts?  Or is that too specific?  Who I love.  Who I worship.  Who I am.

Yes:  Nora's love and Nora's anger, how she negotiates the language of it with her body, kisses and kicks.  How I'll figure this one out somehow.

Yes:  A body that is sacred ground and how I hate it and want to change it constantly.  How I want to see it holy.  How this hate takes too much time.  A trap.

Yes:  Being alone.

Yes:  A garden, an orchard, a farmhouse and the work they require.

Yes:  A child.

Yes:  A classroom despite how I thought I could never speak.

Yes:  Good friends and listening and grieving with them, celebrating, too.

Yes:  and as I say the list out loud I am telling it to Him straight.

I am afraid of saying Yes because I don't know if You will take what I love away from me, if this is part of the Yes.

And it is.  And it has been.  And what has been returned?  Something deep and used and made of real things that continue to lean into Him at the end of the day, at the first light.

Do you trust me?


And this is the life stripped down to its essential parts--the bones and burns and what she wrote on her skin to take it all back for herself.  Mine.  Mine.  Mine.

Then the seeds are washed clean and replanted leaving another name for her written in the path she leaves in seeded rows.  And Yes.

Teach me Yes.  (Even though I'm still afraid.)  There's no need to be afraid.  (I'm still afraid.)  There's no need to be.

...maybe the soul is the soil that holds the fallen seed...
(Sleeping at Last)