River

(For Noadiah, whose wisdom is gold)

Been traveling these wide roads for so long
My heart's been far from you
Ten-thousand miles gone

Oh, I wanna come near and give ya
Every part of me
But there's blood on my hands
And my lips aren't clean

In my darkness I remember
Momma's words reoccur to me
"Surrender to the good Lord
And he'll wipe your slate clean"

Take me to your river
I wanna go
Oh, go on
Take me to your river
I wanna know  --River, Leon Bridges.

Lines across the page, pen and paint dipping back and forth to ferry color in bits, I sat letting my mind wander through so many things while listening to Leon Bridges' song River on repeat. It's been a grey day full of that thrust that wants to keep things moving forward, reaching, but the tug of the grey is strong and the deep soul of this song will not let my mind rest. I've been thinking about the river all day, about friends who will observe Yom Kippur tomorrow, about the cleansing and healing power of gathering up shame and guilt and attendant sadness and casting it upon the water so it can fan out and away. Tonight over dinner, friends and I were talking about the ritual of bread taking in the quality of those emotions and, in turn, nourishing the aquatic life beneath, the movement of that energy from harmful to nutritive. There is a surrender to the water, be it nightly as I shower or sitting beside the ocean listening to her crash and call. My nightly showering ritual started in a ramshackle college dorm in Rome, Italy where I was living for the summer, two short months after Hunter died. My grief was unmanageable and unmooring, stuffed down by copious wine and a distancing from myself that had gone into overdrive with my dad's death four years before. Nightly showering was a way to strip off the day before I crawled into the twin bed in my lonely room and let tears stream into my ears while I stared at the ceiling. So many years later and in the weeks before I got married, I stood on the shore of Whidby Island and held hands with my girlfriends as they all wished their peace for me before I threw myself into the water of the Sound. I wanted that water to wash me anew, a clearing between what was and what would be. Tonight in the shower I was thinking how beautiful it would feel to be baptized now, at this age, not so much into the realm of the church, but into the light of joy. To receive the intention, to be held and plunged back, to come up for air in the shattered sunlight, cleansed. There is something I crave about that feeling. Perhaps it's surrender. My chest draws toward it. My heart has a need.

Listening to Leon Bridges reminds me that we are most resistant to coming to peace when we feel our most unworthy, when we have blood on our hands and our lips aren't clean. We want to put the pain down, to let the sins and feelings flow away but we feel too broken to ask. And this is precisely why these rituals exist, to allow us to release the shame and the shit and the static that keeps us from one another and from moving forward in our lives. My friend Noadiah told me that his beloved minister once said "Prayers aren't being answered? Well, who are you still mad at?" When he said this, a face lept to my mind as clear as day, boom. There are others, but this is the mad that is sticking the Universe in a loop for me. And it's my own atonement to do, not because I have wronged this person, but because I have wronged myself in holding on to so much anger. 

It's humbling and messy and I'm making my list of things I want to think through as I walk to sit by the water and be present to this idea of giving some of this a rest.

Join me.