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#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream

Last night I dreamed my mother loved me. I dreamed the feeling of this, not the idea. A felt experience, a memory, really. Of course she loved me. But I had forgotten what it felt like, in the moment, to be in her presence, the energy of this unspoken truth. I can't remember, after waking, a single detail of the dream. Only this hangover of love, and what does love even mean? It felt like what I give to my daughters daily, they're both at home. It isn't about doing. It's about being. Yesterday, while I was prepping for a workshop I was about to teach, my daughter, P, sat in the red leather chair (across from where I sit to work on my silver love seat piled with books and notebooks and papers I have yet to sort) and we had a spontaneous, deep conversation about secrets we've kept from each other in the past: we surprised each other with stunning information: the truth. The truth about feelings and facts we had left unspoken, for good reason. What does this have to do with my mother loving me? Because I didn't tell my mother deep truth. And, she had a problem with alcohol that got in her way of being receptive or inspiring me to speak. And, I didn't love her the way I wished to when she was in the state of being not herself, when alcohol poisoned her memory, her truth telling, her mood, our togetherness. But I dreamed her in the time before this, when she could comfort me purely, and wanted to, all my little, nameless, unspoken hurts and discomforts, she helped some, she did and I wanted her. But what does any of this have to do with butterflies? The butterfly wing I posted yesterday, and a different monarch photo from the day before, one still alive, still in flight, because this is LOVE, helping to make broken beings whole again. P, she is doing this. This is the story she told me from the red chair in the morning, just after my walk before my workshop, we made this time together pulled it out of thin air. She told me how she helped a broken being, a wingless, motionless broken person whose wings were clipped by opiates. It's this "crazy weather" we've been attending to. Her wholeness is helping to put broken people back together again. How can a daughter be a butterfly, or a mother? How can the broken wing of a dead butterfly be put back together? It's impossible. Unless. . . .somehow. . . it is. . . .

All text and photos copyright Kelly DuMar 2017