Elder Mother

We found her around dusk, slowly rocking on the porch swing of a house half fallen down, her memories dancing far away from her as her legs gently moved her out of habit. When she finally returned from thought and noticed our noise nearby, her eyes were clear and calm, a rarity to find.

“We are friends” spoke Peter softly, with the quiet voice of trusted healer that had so often calmed a fearful stray. Her lips curled in a warm smile, though she would not tell us her name. She did say that her husband, children and children’s children did not survive, only she. And that she believed she was completely alone, here only to wait her turn for death’s arrival, but then we had arrived instead.

She stood with relieved purpose at the sight of us all, dusted her hands on a comfortingly patterned apron, and walked through her front door as she turned to say “You are so very welcome here. And you all must be quite hungry.” Shortly after, we shared our first ‘family meal’.

She, to this day, has never spoken her name to us, or not in any way we can decipher. But we no longer ask, for it would matter now, and because her wishes are to be someone new.

“My life before is over. All that I built around me has come down, and if it is my God’s will, then I shall rebuild it again. But this time on new ground, with new stone and new mortar, and for new purpose. My life and my name are no more, for with my family I died, but when you came to my door that day I was reborn. I saw that my purpose was not over, even if the only life I had ever known was over, it had simply changed. Now, I wish to be everyone’s mother, to do what I can for all of you who saved me, and for the children, for the new world they will build, with whatever time we each have left.”

And so we have come to call her “Elder Mother”, mother and grandmother to us all. When a child needs comfort, to Elder Mother does he turn for the arms of safety and love he so craves. When an adult needs an ear, a shoulder or a sweet word of hope, to Elder Mother does one turn. Disputes in our group are mediated and resolved with objectivity and kind fairness, if Elder Mother is asked.

And she, like a true mother, demands that at least once per week the whole community we have gathered all sit to eat together at one time - our ‘family meals’. Elder Mother is our glue, holding us together in so many different ways.

Many evenings, Elder Mother tells stories. ” To help the children always remember who we were, and to help them see who we are capable of becoming.” In her stories, she never reveals which are her own stories and which are simply those she saw around her. But her stories weave us into a tapestry of dreams and hope and pride in our ancestry. She reminds not only the children of who we are capable of becoming, of how vital love like hers is in this new world. I aspire to one day hold within me the unconditional love and wisdom with words that she carries for us all.

Lost but no longer alone.

There is no way of knowing how many of us remain, wandering. But as JRR Tolkien once said, "not all who wander are lost".

Sometimes I wonder if our previous lives weren't in some way a preparation for all of this. Struggles making each strong enough in one way or another, to keep us alive when so many others have died. Some would call it "luck", but our little group over time has shown an exaggerated variety of unexpected but crucial abilities, experiences, skills and strategies that, without, we'd never have made it so far.

Is it our genetically coded instinct to survive that reminds each of us just how much a mind really can retain and blend into creatively cunning ways to fix whatever is thrown at us? Our desire to win a challenge, to prove life wrong in its assertion that death be imminent?

We find ourselves relearning what resilient creatures we humans can be when properly motivated. We are unafraid, though often unwilling at first, to fight; but fight we will when survival is threatened.

That's more than likely part of why we have become the adopted family to so many children. In our travels, we find them - alone, barely fed, dirty, cold and afraid. But so many come to us with their tales of parental heroics in the face of insurmountable odds. Tales of sacrifice, barters with the world for the life of their young in return for their own.

We all seem to share that human value that puts our children's lives above all else, especially in these times. I am proud (yet saddened of course), but always deeply and soulfully indebted to those who have come before us and passed into the unknown after this life, to hear their stories of a child saved in the direst of moments by the love of a mother or father or both. To hear of another human, holding onto a faith in the rest of their human race, that this sacrifice would not be in vain. Holding onto a hope that these children, so dearly loved, might be found, saved yet again by the next who is able, to live and to love, and maybe even laugh again one day.

And to carry the lesson of love and survival to the next generation to come. That we shall stand, and we shall sing, and we shall wander, lost for now, but no longer alone.

A Patience in Particulars

We are no longer restrained by the dogma of religion in this new world of ours, as all the leaders of faith have been recalled to their masters. Those who remain are confronted by current events, life defying us to believe that all this is for some worthy purpose. The idea of a Divine Design is harder to hold onto now, but many who never believed before, do now.
It is difficult to understand why "God would allow all this to happen" and yet at the same time, grasping the a hope that some end will indeed justify these means we have survived so far is a desire that has grown within each of us over time.
But within that, an new clemency of discussion, a patience in particulars, a grace in the unknown, is developing among us as well. Perhaps the mistakes of our past, the dissolutions of unity via vain attempts to answer all life's mysteries, will refrain from regrowth in this new era we are creating.
In the loss of so much, so much more may now grow. I am enticed by the wonder of it's coming bloom.

My ears assumed it a Dream

They came upon us from both sides, in the dusk of a setting sun, dressed in darks, intimidating and broad. Their number was about that of ours, but only if you count our children, and so equality in the encounter was impossible.
Immediately, instinct echoed ominously through each of us, and without speaking, the strongest found ourselves wrapping around the weakest, a circle of the forsaken, still desperate in the hope of survival.
But when the tall leader spoke, with eyes and face mostly hidden from sight, my ears first assumed it a dream. Hearing a voice from another life, a voice from a past I barely believed real any more, and my heart released it's fear for just a heartbeat. I risked breaking our circle of deceptive defense, as I stepped just a breath closer to hear. To believe.
Can coincidence follow us even this far? Or has purpose reared her head once again?
I breathed in the anticipation of this twist, this quake in my soul, as my own life too is redesigned like the unwilling earth I travel upon.

Quakes Unbound

The ground trembles beneath us almost daily now. Small tremors, and now and then, larger upheavals of land, changing the earth in ways we know we have yet to discover. As if the world itself quivers in the fear of a new future, as our own fears quiver in the eerie silence between the shaking.
Each time the ground quakes, the adults pass worrisome glances, but hold a feigned courage and confidence about our safety for the sake of the children cowering below, frantically clasping onto the legs of idyllic parental stability.
Ripples of pavement like waves along the road, concrete scarred with delicate cracks like glass, dirty water flows cutting new highways through a landscape slowly redesigning itself; signs the quakes both follow us and precede us. The ground seems to shake no matter where we travel to avoid it. The boundaries of the tremors seem never to be reached, and so we walk on.

Lost should mean "able to be found". But not always.

We lost Elaine today. She was expecting a child, so the loss was exceptionally difficult for most of us to conceive. Each soul still surviving in these days is a blessing, and a new birth is cherished above all else. To lose any is a devastating truth none of us wishes to accept.

A fever had swept in overnight and put three to bed in hours. Our medical focus was, for obvious reasons, on the children first. Peter suggested we make a separate camp for the weakest members of our group; it was the first "quarantine" since we left our "lives" behind, months ago.

Because two of the children are mine, I was asked to help at the quarantine camp with others. Peter stayed at the main camp to attend the sick, of course. Elaine and child were the only ones lost in the end, helped by Peter's quick thinking to isolate low immune systems from exposure immediately.

The void of Elaine's presence lingers still, almost a fortnight since her passing. Quieter evenings, less laughter, but I witness hints of healing grow in number with each rising sun. And we have grown more aware again of the risk we face with disease, in this new world of without many of the pills we once took for granted to save the day.

At least we have Peter, a former physician's assistant. He has blessed our wandering community with his decent mind for diagnosis, knowledge of many prescriptions and some surgical experience. I do not think so many of us would have survived without him.

He has truly stepped into a leader, a role he seems to only begrudgingly accept. But I believe those who wish it least tend to achieve much. Yet I wonder, do we make him our leader because he is so essential to us as our doctor, or because he is actually the wisest choice to lead. Does one guarantee the other? Are they even related?

Perhaps we put in him our hopes for a future, to survive and one day flourish in this new world we are discovering. For without him, such hopes darken in fear. With him, destiny's chance to manifest can yet again be a dream.

I suppose it is, as anything, a mix of many such reasons. His skill, his demeanor, his strength, and belief that a doctor's purpose is to "fix", that feed our confidence in him. Footsteps I have grown to have faith in following.

And often, as is Peter's way, to create my own directly beside.

scents & stews

I often wonder what the others are thinking. Distant thoughts of what "should have been" or "could have come"; flashback nostalgia as so often I have had? Set into swing by subtle smell or melodic muse?

I reminisce of the days when my daughter was very young. Mists of music from her bedtime CD flicker past my present. I hum as I walk. I am anything but alone in this habit now, but memory makes me question just how common such practice was, before.

There are smells I miss the most. Billowing clouds drenched in laundry tides, folding up into cold air from a dorm or apartment building basement. The smell of bubble bath seeped in hot steam, trapped within the borders of bathroom porcelain and tile. Most of us would give just about anything for a hot bath these days, well, except perhaps the cherished and now rare cup of coffee. I doubt THAT smell will ever disappear from most human's desires, at least in my lifetime.

But here we reside, in this new life of ours, be it what it may. Discovering new scents and stews, planting new seeds of memory, regardless of our former selves or stories. Desperately trying to believe survival to be a blessing, regardless of all that's been, and of all that we each know is still yet to be.

But, without work, hands are idle; without strife, struggle no purpose. Without memory, no comparison grown for joy, for pride to achieve.

And I still have my daughter, though as young as in my memories she'll never again feign to be. For more reasons than years on earth, bittersweet to admit. Yet I can still sing to her the lullabies of that long lost bedtime CD, and somehow, even now, it can be of comfort to us both.

They never told me just what to write, only to "keep track". I often wonder if to some that meant keeping only dates of births and deaths, of landmarks, successes and failures along the road, like the cover of a Bible on a shelf. To others, I imagine it meant to record the minutes as if in a corporate meeting, so that all moments be not lost, all conversations searchable later, and nothing forgotten.

I myself "keep track" simply by this, committing my inner thoughts and observations to paper, for so long as such parchment survives in this world.

I write with no expectation that my words should last "forever", though I believe some I travel with assume falsely that they will. Has this lesson in our smallness, our insignificance, gone unlearned to many even still? That nothing we as "humans" do will ever remain for eternity, except perhaps our own inner evolutions, as that is probably the only thing we can truly pass down through our generations of procreation, an evolution of creation.

Perhaps we now move on so slowly, so consistently, so sorrowfully yet hopefully onward, to a new creation. Perhaps these words really could survive at least long enough to remind us, once in our new home somewhere, how far we have come, what we have fought and defeated, and how even just a few of us remaining continues our whole species to continue to survive. Perhaps our evolution could not continue in the situation we had put ourselves in for so very long. Has history not taught that one must die to be reborn? And that this 'death' is not always the impending fearful end of our lives that we may think it is?

We have all died now. In one way or another. The death of 'normalcy'. The death of all we knew to be true for so very long. The death of our way of life, until recently. The death of loved ones, of routine, of government, of security, of stability. The death of what were our homes, up there in the now snow-covered north. Even the death of the weather and nature's patterns we thought we could so easily predict with our 'science'. Probably the same 'science' that messed it all up.

Now we walk and walk and walk. Like corpses suffering through the trials of the underworld, we walk. Onward, to our rebirths.

They asked me to be the one to keep a record, once the reality of "home' no longer being behind us, but somewhere ahead still, finally sank in.

I think they asked me to write it, as the only true baggage I carried out of our pasts were journals & newspapers that could one day remind us where we started, or where we ended, or both in one. No one ever asked me to read a word from my luggage, as if remembering so soon would still cut too deeply. But someday they will.

And we all seemed to agree that a record of our present journey ought be kept, though our reasons for such opinions surely did not.

in the beginning, there were but pieces...

The problem was water, so rare to find any safe enough to drink. So we kept moving, kept hoping the next place would be the spot. A place we could find all we need, to settle, safely. Hoping just maybe this time.

Walking for long periods of time can often lead to reflection. So for vast portions of time we walked in silence. Pairs and singles, carts and creatures, dogs, horses, even an alpaca.

There were children with us, of course, who, for the most part, kept together during the days, as children do.

The nights held singing; and now and then, should new love or new life be born, even dancing.

No matter how hard things seemed, or how tempting the idea of giving up became, suddenly the river of children would mob by in laughter, or rainbows after raging storms might fill the sky, and somehow tired bones lightened, heavy hearts lifted, just that little bit more to keep sore feet walking. Ever on. To water. To a new home.