I fell asleep with a splitting headache last night — slathered in lavender oil with an icepack on my neck. I woke up free of pain this morning. It was a transformation. I was healed in the quiet of the night. I hopped out of bed, threw on jeans and a sweatshirt, let the dogs outside, played with the kittens for a moment, stepped back in the house, fired up the studio, put the kettle on the stove and turned on Rose Cousins’s “Let the Light Come In” — a song I play when I want to be cracked open.
I stood in the kitchen, my bare feet pressed tight against cool hardwood, the grey light of morning streaming in the windows. I reached my arms out, feeling the slow pull of my chest muscles reaching deep into my biceps, down to the bones of my wrists, into the buzzing tips of my fingers. I raised my hands above my head, pushing at invisible things, sinews heaving and hauling. I burst into tears right when Rose sang the word “forgiveness”. I stayed there in the kitchen, swaying and moving to the music, folding and unfolding, paying attention while shifting and sifting through my body, from top to bottom, isolating and caring for specific muscles and joints, stretching them and rotating them until everything felt loosened and lubricated.
I thought a thousand different thoughts while I was moving to that song.
I heard the kettle heating up.
Penelope barked.
I saw water turn on in the side hayfield and I watched farm boy head down the driveway, his morning irrigation duties attended to.
I recalled my time with my grandmother in Saskatoon, how I took coffee over to her place and as I sat down in her living room I remember distinctly thinking, “I will sit on the loveseat because the sofa is Grandpa’s spot.” Even though he is gone, I wanted to leave space for him in the room. The whole time I talked with grandma, I was aware of his absence. If he had been there with his twinkling blue eyes and his funny laugh I’d have asked for a couple of good stories about the olden days and draft horses and thunderstorms and heavy machinery accidents…like I always used to.
Where did he go, anyway? Where does everything go? What were these aching cells of mine before they became me?
The sun suddenly hit the canyon wall and the world turned gold and the palest blue, like faded robin eggshells. Rose sang out, “Let the light come in…embrace it…” and I reached out wide once more, opening to the morning, to the new day, to a blank page, to possibility, to daydreams.
The kettle whistled.
I began again.
