Belonging to Self

I was a girl who moved across spaces

Who became a woman

I am a woman who moves across spaces

Who will one day bloom into a grey-haired sage

The elder I will become will one day take her last breath

And disappear

My body laid in the earth to feed new life

My soul - I imagine - will rise into the air and float

Whimsy in the wind, electricity in the clouds

Laughing across oceans, freer than a bird

Free to explore and delight

Which helps me see

That now -

However fixed in time I think I am

However grounded by the laws of physics I may feel -

Time travel

And teleportation

Are possible

If only because the mind is a miraculous thing

I can return to that hot green summer day

Bounding and splashing in the pond with the other kids

I can sit atop a wind-swept mountain

Drinking in the miniature world below

I can go there - anywhere - in my mind’s eye

But the flow of this world lives in the present

And so I will expand my ribcage with a breath

And observe and wonder

What do I see and hear right here?

A beating heart

A yearning to belong

A thousand hurts that could make me small

That could cause me to feel apart

That could dampen and drown out the voice of my soul

I also see and hear another choice

A beating heart

A yearning to belong

Others’ pain for which I can make space and be a balm

And also, richness at every turn - of which I am a part

Connection, and courage, to turn my soul to singing

I belong - not to you, but to me

And by belonging to me, I give permission for you to belong to you too

And though we are born and we die on different days in different ways

And live charting our own courses

If we each chart our true course

And learn to yield our north stars

Then we honor what is within us

And we honor the mystery and time we are given

And we all find space to belong

I do, and you do too

March 2021 mantra

by: Els Van Woert