* We Flood With Memories *

Water is the way we remember and become....

Time, memory, water

Structures of reality

Waters that remember

I think that in some way our social media is a ceremony

A place where we can direct the flow of memory

And pause in reverence for what has been

Before what is to come unfolds

I need to make this ceremony now

Before the world keeps sweeping me forward

Pocketing my memories into safe places of forgetting

Before I give myself to all the new creations swirling

And the excitement of what is birthing very soon

First I must stop and breathe and bow to water

When we arrived at the sea Islands at the start of May

Orphea’s first observation as we careened on our golf cart passed the alligator inhabited rivers and marches, bordering the vast expanse of silver-gray wild Atlantic ocean of South Carolina, was that ‘there was too much water and it was dangerous’.

The next day, on the beach, she was digging with a determined face – just where the waves crashed in and touch the beach, flooding with white tips onto the sands - saying that she was preventing the ocean flooding across the land.

This is the wisdom of a little girl who lived through the dark fairytale of a 1,000 year flood in the world’s most ancient mountains.

The font of the world’s womb waters.

The last time we visited the ocean was last September, about 2 weeks before Hurricane Helene hit on September 27. It rained for the whole time.

Azra and I squabbled, the weather was moody, Orphea was bored. We were all out of sorts I remember, as if some deep part of us knew what was brewing.

The Owl messengers knew. Those ancient claw foot friends of the Goddess.

Last September, for two days, whilst friends from our mountain valleys were with us at the beach, the Owls hooted in the trees above us, and flew across the house, and above our heads, screeching to get our attention.

So many of them. A Warning.

Never before or since those strange two days have I heard or seen them act like that.

Back at the ocean, 8 months later, I could feel we were purging the fear and memory from the ‘hurricane’ – should I call it that? Helene feels better, a goddess banshee, an elemental femme fatale who shrieked into our lives, like a tear in the fabric of the boundary between the gods and creation, to forge a new portal in time. A strange new landscape, a new current, a wild new surge from the secret quantum mother mind.

Of course, life is grand theatre.

In case we missed the memo, nature pantomimed it.

During our time by the ocean, a weatherfront moves in called “The River” which promises to land a “deluge” of water. On Sunday night it is raining so hard, I quietly leave the warm bed with my daughter at midnight, and check online in the darkness to see if there are any evacuation notices. You learn.

I scroll and refresh anxiously but see nothing.

The rain outside is torrential, battering the glass, filling the marsh right on our doorstep, and I see the large water serpents of waterways that wind between the tall grasses, and further on the churning waves of the ocean.

We are in a water world.

I imagine if there was an evacuation notice. We are surrounded on all sides by water. The only exit is a high sweeping bridge that rises over a vast expanse of water – where ocean, river, marsh meets in an otherworldy expanse of mesmerizing hues.

I go back to bed feeling uneasy, unsure if I should wake Azra.

Instead I listen to the pulse of water from the darkness.

She is the mother.

Who swells and flows and surrounds and immerses all things.

She is the primordial Mermaid.

In these last 8 months she has flooded me with memories.

She has remembered me. It is an awe-ful gift to bear.

The inner destruction, the debris, maternal devastation, is miraculously written outside, like a cosmic parlor trick. I see the damage inside the feminine body written now in trees, and twists of organic debris, ripped from roots and thrown downstream.

The mysterious threads of my life have been woven together and illuminated with the diamond dakini eyes. The Diamond Womb of wisdom. Our Black Pearls.

There are two paths, one of healing the identity you think you are so you can navigate an enjoyable and fruitful life, and one of being remembered, in all its terrible glory, into your true identity through the torrents of memory that bespeak the unpalatable truth, and reveal the magnitude of your original knowing.

The structural waters are changing. This is what the Crystal Womb of the mountain told me during those liminal days when time had paused as the waters broke.

On returning home, we are surprised by the intensity of the green.

The trees and plants have fully returned after their lost winter of broken bones and hard memories. The land is lush, the green covering so much of the scar tissue with its new potential. We recoil almost. It takes a moment to meet the shimmering of new life from our wintered watery hearts.

So today, my first day back at my “office porch” surrounded by the green of the future, I want to pause…

And bow my head in grief and reverence to those memories who hide away like shy deer in the night…

To feed them and call them close, but not too close as to startle them.

To move forward holding the fractures.

To dedicate this Spring to those who will only ever see the green return through the eyes of the Ancestors.

To two little boys, and many others, whose voices are missing from the joyful songs of the mountain hollers.

Today is made sacred by grief.

By remembering.

By honoring what has been.

We are Swimming with Mermaids Now.

La Sirena. She of the Deep.