Talk Thursday - Drinking In

I've been tagged by Enlightened Fairy, and this phrase from a song on the radio this afternoon just stuck with me, "drink me in like water."

In June, just before school let out for summer break of my six grade year my mother had a baby boy. I distinctly remember my parents being annoyed with my cousins (who were preggers at the same time) for choosing to use the name David for their baby if it was a boy. A silly argument really. Not one that harmed anyone but in the eyes of a 12 year old, pretty senseless. A sentiment underlined by the death of my brother, one day after he was born.

I remember it being still dark, when my father called us all in to the living room, maybe the drapes were closed, I can’t remember. He told the four of us that our mother was in the hospital and David had been born. And I distinctly remember him saying he’d been born too blue and had holes in his heart, so does Dee. Strangely my mother does not remember, her heart has ached and grieved all these long decades past, not that she realizes it, but when June 13th rolls around, my mother inevitably has a migraine. I also remember it was the first, and only time, I have seen my father cry.

This strong woman is incredibly optimistic, through thunder clouds and lightning she will search for the silver lining and has always believe everything has a purpose. When a door shuts, a window opens out look on life. In my mother’s eyes David touching our lives, ever so briefly was to unite us as a family. This might be, it makes sense, and I look at my family past and see the results of his passing to this day.

That summer after David died my family took the first of several summer vacations. My dad had three weeks accrued and in August of that year we loaded in the Econoline and drove cross-country to my father’s family in Ohio and West Virginia. The next summer my aunt and uncle, several cousins came out and we began a series of summer vacations that began and ended at Morro bay with the redwoods and Shasta Lake in between.

During the autumn, winter, and spring we’d travel out into the desert, to Phoenix, to Mexico, where ever that Econoline would haul us. David’s passing certainly brought us together; we hiked, we camped, road motorcycles, adventured together, and we laughed. We learned about the land, the sea, the stars. We learned about each other, and we learned about the world.

The nights in the desert are mesmerizing. The stars out the Milky way spread out like a twinkling blanket, shooting stars dying out into black nothingness, the cold, white moon on an frigid spring night, UFO’s, and jet planes on journeys that we could only imagine. You could lay on your back and drink in the universe, the immensness of it all, and the reality (at age fifteen) that you are a dust mote of time and biology. A grain of sand on the desert floor of a green planet somewhere in the Milky Way. You feel the hand of God. Of time. Of the universe.

These moments, adventures, epiphanies of growth climaxed one autumn afternoon in my sixteenth year. We’d spent the weekend at my aunt’s in Scottsdale, before turning north to see the Grand Canyon. Now where the Grand Canyon is in relation to Mesa Verde, I don’t’ know, I just know it was the same trip, a trip that would change me forever. We wound our way through Oak Creek Canyon, where brilliant red monuments stretch in to an amazing blue sky. We laid on our bellies to peek over the canyon’s rim at the bottom a mile away. We stared across the expanse to the eastern side of the canyon in disbelief at the distant vista that the Colorado had etched and painted over the centuries. Visions of wonder that I will carry into the next plane.

In the moderate heat of that late afternoon we arrived a Mesa Verde. Mom and dad were armed with maps and brochures that gave body to speculation to the Anasazi who carved out the mighty Montezuma’s Castle.

Stepping out of the van, I was overwhelmed with emotions, my senses laid open to an onslaught of feeling, impressions and emotions. I closed my eyes and literally drank in the still peace of the mesa. Peace that filled me with calm surety, I knew who I was, I knew why I was there, I knew that all and nothing else mattered. I was suddenly at peace and fully ready to handle what my future would bring me. The lessons that I would need would unfold in front of me at their time.

I visited the ancient ruins and I drank in me.
Sith,
Cele