Dear You

I thought of you today. I hope you are well, that you are happy, that you have joy and fulfillment in your life.

Sometimes I guess paths diverge in painful, angry ways and that pain turns into hostility and enmity. The world through your own eyes can become a cruel one, and you walk cloaked in an armor of your own making, deflecting even shafts of sunshine and kindness for fear they might be arrows sent to pierce you.

Let me go, let me go, you say, and then when you are released, you don't fly. You aren't ready to stop fighting, you need to be right, you need to blame. You need someone with whom to measure yourself. And so I am with you, dancing the tangled dance of fearful bonding, building a nest of anger and grief in which to hide myself away from flight. And then I abandon our angry nest and shed our armor and soar into the sun, and find that my world is bigger than us. I can live apart from you. I thrive in flight. I am not going back.

Are you ready little bird? Have you taken flight?

I wonder where my judgment has gone. Is it with you?

Maybe you remember only my imperfections, cast against your perfectness. Or maybe there is comfort in my frailty and terror in my strength.

I pray not, for my strength is my frailty; my forgiveness is my judgment; my love is my acceptance.

Lift your face to the sun. What do you feel? I feel it too.

Mary Batchelor
January 28, 2010