Our souls are separate from our stories.
Our hearts are never quite as sequential, as chapped, as chaptered, as stowed safe and silent in those peppery worn pages — entrusted with holding our growing truths.
We are nesting dolls.
Each version I’ve ever called by name sits soft inside the next. When an innermost part has something to share that needs to be heard, I must pry open my multitudes, layer by painful layer — until I can echo the achingly unanswered wails of that rosy-cheeked babe, fold her in my palms, and pray.
Unlike the other conversations I so often share — with the steam off my morning coffee, or the hawks over the highway, or some other solitary specter of God — the words that I whisper her way are no tender gauze of gardens to come.
Instead, I share my sorries and strength and safety, my voice dripping sticky nectars of salted buttercream and maple blood in the tapping tin and beeswax kissed by wild clover honey. I breathe out balms to soothe the tender bruises gone by. I gently deliver their promise to the divine inside her, from the divine inside me, which is really the same as her own, inside us, inside you —
Which is only really to say, I speak aloud the light she needed to know.