The old woman sat on her woodpile in the woods, serenely waiting. She knew that soon someone would come along who needed her presence.
Indeed, soon, a soldier lurched and stumbled into the clearing, his uniform torn and tattered, stiff with dried blood. In his arms he carried the limp form of a small and bloody child, her head bobbing, as he dropped to his knees. Then he saw she had no more breath; she was dead before reaching her fifth year of life
Laying her gently on the grass, tears furrowing the dirt on his cheeks, he threw back his head, and gave forth a wail of purest screaming grief that echoed against all the mountain tops in the world.
At his side, the young mother quietly laid her body beside her child’s, as if she could transfer her own life across deaths chasm. She pulled her child close, as if she could return her to the womb and keep her safe. Her grief too deep for tears, to large to fit through her throat, she gave it up to the earth beneath her body through her pores.
The old woman reached out her heart space to embrace them, and only then, when the soldier felt that warmth, did he look up and see her, an old woman wrapped in a brown shawl, sitting cross legged on a pile of fallen wood, with eyes that seemed to hold the universe.
“WHY?!” screamed the man, words ripping their way out of him. “WHY?! Why did she have to die? WHY DO WE HAVE TO KILL THE CHILDREN?”
The old ones calm voice seemed to come on a sad, soft breeze.
“It is war, my son. It is the way of war.”
Nearly insane now, the man roared, “BUT IT WAS A JUST WAR! IT WAS A WAR THAT HAD TO BE FOUGHT!”
There was no answer from the old woman, only a deep, radiating stillness that seemed to penetrate the air and electrify it, bringing all sounds, all sights and sensations into sharper relief.
He looked down at the mother with her body curled around that of her dead child, and saw that she also no longer breathed. Unable to bring her child back, she had followed her into death, by force of her own will.
Then, ever so slowly, both mother and child seemed to grow transparent, and like a welcome spring rain, dissolved into the grass covered earth and were no more.
With a roared “NOOOOOO!!” the man threw himself over where they had lain, beating his fists into the earth. The old woman began to speak.
“Yes, my son, rest there now. Let the healing of the earth and the power of that mother and child come into your heart. Draw it deep. Make it a part of you.”
“This is the energy of nurturance and love. It is the energy of compassion and peace. It is the essence of all creative energies, always and forever more powerful than energies of destruction.”
“You are a strong and powerful man with powerful intellect and determination to control, to fix the world. Yet, as you see, these alone, could not save this woman and this child.”
“Hear this: within you is your own portion of another kind of power: a soft-strong power. It is what caused you to leave your battlefield, to try to save this woman and her child.”
“They are calling you now to acknowledge this, to call forth your portion of soft-strong power and embrace it with your consciousness. You are to liberate it from the dominion of your powerful intellect and all past teaching. You are to marry your portion of this internal feminine force to your man-power now, forever more, till death do you part.”
The man lay flat on his belly, sobbing and defeated, barely able to absorb the old woman’s words, exhausted in body, mind and spirit, until his consciousness faded and he slept.
In the early dawn, he came awake to the song of a single bird, its notes softly trilling up and down the scale, sweetening the air that he breathed. Sitting up, he saw the woodpile was empty, the old woman gone.
He saw that the grass under him, that had received the woman and the child, and had held his own body through the night, was a deeper, more vibrant green that the surrounding grasses, and felt warm to his hand.
He touched his chest: it felt somewhat strange. He drank in a deep breath of the morning air, and it seemed as if he could hold more air in lungs than before.
Then he noticed the absence of the gut-deep anguish and searing rage of the day passed. In it’s place was a strange new sensation; a blend of sadness, regret, and yet, a kind of deep, penetrating acceptance, of something having been completed, rejoined, made whole again, within. It was a feeling of awesome and calm power, and yes, love, that he had never before known, not like this. Not all through every cell, every nerve, every atom.
As he stood, he looked down at himself at the tattered, dirty uniform stained with the child’s blood. Slowly, he took it off, all of it, and laid it on the grass where the woman and child had lain. Soon it also grew transparent, and disappeared into the grass.
He readied himself to leave the clearing. It was time to go back to the world that he somehow knew would not feel like the same one he had left, because he was no longer the same.
His mind felt clearer and more elastic. He felt an eagerness to use its expanded powers: the tough strands of man-power now woven intricately together with the soft-strong, threads of his femininity. A tapestry equally wondrous from either side, a weave of immeasurable tensile strength, and the endless, nurturing, creative power of love.
With gratitude in his heart to the child who had led him here, and to the women who had loved him back to wholeness, the man wrapped it around his nakedness, and strode forth.
C 2006 gm
