YIN BIRD
On the precipice of a great integration, I prepare to carve out time to let all of the wonders and sorrows of these past seasons and decades and bloodlines sink in beyond my skin. There is a burning grief blistering my flesh; ashen palms beating at the doors of me. It’s getting colder out and the sorrows grow hungry for care. I can feel their longing to warm their hands upon the fires of my heart.
And how could joy travel far without sorrow? Their interbeing would seem a law of mutual root. It has taken me a good long while to know that living is but welcoming them both into the safe shelter of my bones to sip hot marrow and laugh until we are all weeping. To feel my two palms full of the hands of the blessed dead. To know in my cells what it is to love, and to embrace its shadow. I do not account for the price of it anymore; I do not wrack my mind with figures weighing the joys and sorrows of a lifetime. I no longer attempt to measure how much more I cannot take. There is a place beyond reason that knows. There, beyond the valley of fear, long lives the unquestionable worth of letting in the joys knowing full well the cost. And how maddening and downright humbling is the fractal forgetting and remembering my way home to it.
Oh what a time it has been, to have stood upon this soil for these decades to find myself only just beginning. Who here could hold back laughter? Who could deny the joy of what it is to be in the good company of ghosts. Who could deny the carrion birds the scraps of time I would carve away so carelessly in my missing. Is that why they flock so readily to my side? I wish they could stay. I cannot bear to lose them, too. Though would it not be a greater tragedy for them to heed my wishes for their unbroken company? To never witness them, black winged, vanish into the bright charcoal sky. Oh it would break my heart more than their leaving for them to forsake fate merely to sedate my fears for a time. I wish for their soaring. For their vanishing is at once their arriving.
It is excellent to have friends in vultures. Who do I want to be in this lifetime, if not a friend? I wish them updrafts and absurdity. I wish them play and good feasts and dry wings. It is no easy task. It is no easy task, to be here, but this is what we were made for. We were shaped by the eternities pulsing in the red rivers that flow beneath these skins. Can I not hear the ancestors singing throughout the sixty thousand miles of my blood vessels? Can I not feel their hands guiding mine?
I think I need a stronger brew of stomach acid to digest the things I’ve seen. This life sits like a stone in my gut. The stomachs of vultures are ten times more acidic than mine so that they may eat the rotten dead without ail. They were made for this. The peace of a life nourished through scavenging too oft goes unrecognized. I nod to the nobility of it; to the ones who live the interweavings of life and death as intimately. For the honesty of it brings me home to the truth of my own path. I was born to the precipice of a great integration. Am I ready to answer to the hungry grief that is my birthright?
It is with a hard won faith that I trust the fires in me to warm any sorrows who come knocking. It is only through time wizened eyes that I recognize the joy in sorrow and the sorrow in joy as one. It’s only with a heart cracked open enough that I can embrace their wholeness like an old friend standing upon the threshold. It is with inexplicable certainty I know the hard edges of grief will thaw back into the love from which they were born. For one shapeshifter will always recognize another at their door.
After a thousand generations, the doors of my skin are finally soft enough to open. I welcome life in. I welcome life in its entirety which means I brew a cup of tea for death, too. Not unlike the scavengers, I was made for this.