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Are you looking for a quiet place? But friend, you are already here. The repose of your blood between pulsations. A secret chamber in your chest where you have no enemies, no one is to blame, and the endless journey has never begun. Here even prayers for peace need no speaking. You can disperse into the finer element you are before you breathe. You can be the sparkling sky in the lungs of a hummingbird, smoke of sage in desert air, aureole in emptiness where the flame just blew out. Here you can burn away because you remember your body is made of vanished stars. You can stumble and fall into your own rhythm, which feels like you are not moving at all because your mind is at rest in flesh that needs no discipline of stillness. You are a nest inside the egg, a mother's womb that carries her own savior, the seed of what you have always been seeking. Now flower on a Winter night. - Alfred K. LaMotte
My DNA results came in. Just as I suspected, my great great grandfather was a monarch butterfly. Much of who I am is still wriggling under a stone. I am part larva, but part hummingbird too. There is dinosaur tar in my bone marrow. My golden hair sprang out of a meadow in Palestine. Genghis Khan is my fourth cousin, but I didn't get his dimples. My loins are loaded with banyan seeds from Sri Lanka, but I descended from Ravanna, not Ram. My uncle is a mastodon. There are traces of white people in my saliva. 3.7 billion years ago I swirled in hydrogen dust, dreaming of a planet overgrown with lingams and yonis. More recently, say 60,000 B.C. I walked on hairy paws across a land bridge joining Sweden to Botswana. I am the bastard of the sun and moon. I can no longer hide my heritage of raindrops and cougar scat. I am made of your grandmother's tears. I am the brother who sold you, and marched you to the sea. I am the merchant from Savannah, and the cargo of blackness. I am the chain. Admit it, you have wings, vast and golden, like mine, like mine. you have sweat, dark and salty, like mine, like mine. You have secrets silently singing in your blood, like mine, like mine. Don't pretend that earth is not one family. Don't pretend we never hung from the same branch. Don't pretend we don't ripen on each other's breath. Don't pretend we didn't come here to forgive. - Alfred K. LaMotte |
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