Dear Brave Souls: Mother's Day
For the Ancestral Mothers,
our Grandmothers,
Great Grandmothers,
Great Great Grandmothers,
Great Great Great Grandmothers,
Great Great Great Great Grandmothers
and beyond...
They belong to you
and are in good ways
with you,
and often part of your own talents:
those once little girls,
those young women,
those old crones
who truly lived,
had beautiful names
to grow into
who laughed,
wept, loved,
cared for,
created, grew
into so many adventures
during changing times...
and who truly were
the only reason in fact
that we, you and I, were born....
by their giving birth to
those who gave birth to,
who gave birth to
those who gave birth to,
who then gave birth...
so we are now
walking
the face of this Earth...
ANOTHER KIND OF CITATION:
I CALL IT “GENEALOGY"
Citations are required
as part of
professional ethics,
to note precisely
who said what,
when, where, and
where it can be found
in tome and tract.
But I call it genealogy.
What beauty!
that we can trace,
as though beholding
an x-ray ...
where certain seeds
are handed down
to others, through
gifting of those seeds,
to plant
in new soil
of another time…
This genealogy being
a little to a lot
different
than a solely
academic take.
Rather genealogy,
to me,
is first-order
and proper citation,
for it includes
our strange
and wise
elders
and our two eyed,
and three eyed,
and two legged,
and four-legged,
and no-legged
but rather winged
ancestors
of blessed
memory.
I remember
the first time
I cited
my abuelita Victoría
in a college
psychology paper,
for her knowledge
about calming
frightened
animals...
the professor wanted to know
—'What she had written? That
I should cite her books.
I said,
She cannot not write.'
He thought I meant,
she was too shy to write.
So then he said, 'Well,
what is her research,
and whose work
has she read?'
And I said,
'She cannot read.'
And he made
exasperation marks
all over
his lips and chin,
for he thought
abuelita Victoría
could not read
but only because
she was so old
and her eyes were bad.
He said, 'At least
note the year she told
you this... and by the way,
when in fact
did she tell you
about this precise way
to speak to animals
giving birth?'
I said,
'Last week.'
Which was true.
But I did not tell him
mi madre grande
had passed
to the other world
many years before
last week,
nor did I mention
that the worlds
leak
on a regular
basis.
He reluctantly
allowed me
to leave the citation
of my grandmother’s,
as he called it,
“research”
in my paper,
but was annoyed
that she had not
written a book
that could be
"properly”
cited.
I sadly noted
he did not realize
abuelita Victoría
was a gigantic
library in and of
herself,
bursting with
thousands of
memorias
written
in code
on her mind
and heart
and body —
her very soul--
so that farmer-fisher
people like herself,
who could not read either,
could read it all immediately
at first glance.
That she was
carrying
volumes
and volumes
from memory,
and to wherever
and whomever
had need
within her physical
and psychic reach...
Her vast
eye witness
treatises,
her numberless
hands-on
accounts
of the old healing
ways for broken
flowers,
for ruint water,
for plants that
soothe, enspirit
and heal...
for lost animals
to be sheltered,
for women
near to giving birth,
for men for whom
the ‘heart theives’
had shown up
driving them
into bewilderment…
and so much more
in the endless
logbooks
in spoken,
not written, word.
In actions,
not in pages.
Yes, she could not
read nor write
as some or many
or most of our own.
your and my
farback kin who
did not have ciphering
in the high schooling
sense.
And, we could
shed tears together
when some call
such souls,' illiterate,’
for our farmer,
fisher, mountain, ocean,
prairie, river, desert people,
carried the land and sky
and the ways of humans
and animals, a literacy
often of the highest and
most fiery
percentile…
over many others who
simplistically ’read this
somewhere’ but
have no genealogy,
no hairy thriving rootstock
to, or for, or from
what they might believe,
but do not truly know.
And so,
my poor professor,
not looking further,
did not realize,
not only was abuelita
a giant genealogical
library
with multiple clean
dirt floored
rooms,
with multiple
fallen-branched
orderly walled
rooms,
within which are
multiple rough sawn
board shelves, held up
on folded bundles
of no-more-mendable
coats and overhalls...
and atop those,
all the treasures
of the ages
out in the open.
My poor professor
did not realize
this:
in abuelita’s
heritage line,
as in your heritage
line that leads from
the headwaters
of your grandmothers
to the tributary that is you--
that is us...
my poor professor
did not realize
that we, the daughters
and the sons of those of eld
are the last standing
keepers of the ancient libraries.
We are
the last ones standing
With fullest knowlege
handed down.
We are the last
standing
librarians
in service
of holding the
doors open
so others might
enter…
and learn.
That we listened,
that we remained near,
that we shadowed
our elders
in small or large ways...
THAT Genealogy
is what makes us
the living keepers
of the old ways.
Blessed Blessed Blessed
be all the Grandmothers,
all our ancestral
Grand, truly Grand Mothers.
In utter gratitude that they
all lived, so that we also
could come to live Life
to our fullest.
This come with love,
dr.e
