MOMMY'S SONG IN ME

PART 15

I sometimes think we shrink a bit so our children can measure their growth better. I think at other times our children's growth in later years is made to endure and become more than they imagined when our lives shorten, and death is more engaged with the possibility of tomorrow. It is an interesting thing to speculate. Each year laws are working indifferent to our feelings. We grow and become, give birth, our children become adults, our parents age and die, we become the elders, and our children learn to become, and if they are powerful enough learn to forgive and evolve their understandings. So many questions to answer and ask, so many things to accept, or be forever mystified by, it seems, at every stage of life.

How does our parent’s death teach our spirits, and instruct our children, and their great-grandchildren? If anything it teaches us to play and to pray differently. © Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 

PART 18

Mommy and I spent a lot of time alone or together in the medina in Rabat. Many a morning, an afternoon I spent wandering local medinas discreetly watching women paint henna designs on their hands and feet chattering with each other oblivious to everyone passing by about an upcoming wedding, and the prospect of marriage. Mules, and beggars, tourists, families were common to the medina. The stench of tanneries in Fez, or the mellow sense of place in Rabat, or the frantic energies of Tangier, and the dizziness of Marrakech’s medina could produce within you in one day were always the place women engaged in something mysterious and aloof from the things men liked to believe about women. © Gregory E. Woods

PART 29

“You'll know the songs of the singer dancing within her soul, or the contemplation of the Muse by the poems she inspires. You'll hear her words as syllables of words unspoken in your native tongue, and think she is divine, or that divinity is a touch. The accessible codes of conduct in the physical world are not the ruling force in other worlds we gaze into when the veil thins between worlds not too long before our deaths.

A woman is the mystery of becoming. Her body holds secrets of bondage, and freedom, of birth and life, death and release, storm and tempest, peace, tranquility and the scope of life shapes within her in moments accessible through sex, intimacy, marriage, food preparation, the words of her man’s heart to her heart. The spiritual powers she holds are the energies formed to birth us into manhood and masculinity from the first tinges of vulnerability she inspires by her glance into our souls.”  © Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 3.18.13