By Lindsay Airey (right, on the banks of Nandewine Sippy)

You say
I have a heart
so big
it needs its own moon
to orbit around.

I say
this heart of mine
feels weary
from carrying around
so
much
weight
it often feels like
it will drown me.

You say
what clarity you bring!
What love
and
joy
and
challenge…
How is it possible?
In one being.

I say
I am so tired…
from being one being:
feeling
fire-tending
raging
weeping
feeling it
seeing it
saying it
wiping your tears
building you up
holding you up
digging you out of the pit
with all these
hard-fought
tears, and knowing.

All those nights spent weeping
days tending fires
coming up from:
these streets
my own belly
a chorus of unheeded ancestors.
Ghosts…
haunting a white collective refusing to pull back the veil.
Refusing to unlock vaulted hearts.

You say
I don’t know what I’d do
without you.
Without your wisdom, your support.

I say
I am being eaten alive without you.
These fires are too many to keep tending,
this ocean of tears threatening to burst
under the weight of too much grief
pushing at the seams of
this
one
heart.

Will you pull back the veil with me?

Together,
We can tend these fires.
Keep watch.
Exchange notes on what we see.
Share in the weeping and testifying and story-telling and laughter.

Perhaps, then
my heart can stop being super-sized.
Perhaps, then
those who weep
and carry too many burdens,
piled high upon their backs by the whiteness
sucking all the comfort and safety out of the room,
out of the Earth, Herself…
Perhaps, then
these Burden-Carriers can have some comfort, too.
Or at least
some long-denied reprieve
from the life-long sentence of threat and toil foisted upon them?

I know you are scared.
I know well the first steps into that unfamiliar dark and deep,
out beyond the confines of the white shallow
Those steps that beckon and woo,
but also threaten to undo…
But I will not leave you there alone.
In fact,
contrary to what you’ve been told,
there is deep spirit magic out here.
The white fathers work hard to hide it from you,
lest you be tempted to defect
for these “riches awaiting you in heaven.”

Together,
we can tend these fires,
take back the loads
breaking the backs of the Many Sacred Ones,
drowning under the weight
of their own super-sized hearts.

Together,
we can right the wrongs,
left the rights.
Brave the darkness
we’ve been told is too frightening to bear.
Life resides there.

Together,
we can wrestle the white demons,
force back the guard,
grow our starving hearts
back to regular size.
A size that self-warms…
so when we forsake their white fires,
sold to us at the high price of our souls,
we will not be left out in the cold.

They can keep their fires!
Let us storm their fortress.
Take back our hearts.
Plunder their vaults,
overflowing with hoarded riches
milked from the blood of the people.
Let us suck them dry of
all.
that.
stolen.
soul force:
that not-so-secret,
not-so-unbeatable
weapon,
that one thing keeping their hoarding-stealing-enslaving-machine alive.
Always feeding, never satiated.
We must starve it,
or be starved.

Together,
We can pry open it’s mouth,
take back the spirits it devours to keep alive.
And when we have wrestled them back
into our own bodies,
who will stop us?

Let us join all our hearts
back to their rightful place:
inside our own chests,
within this one moon’s orbit.
Join the long-lost chorus of ancestors.
Then wait and see…
what kind of world gets unleashed.

Okay,
maybe not all.
But can we start with yours?

Lindsay Airey is a licensed marriage and family therapist working for Kardia Kaiomenē, a community-supported non-profit, partnering with families and faith communities to equip and accompany all those whose hearts burn for intimacy, community and justice.