I was there when my mother took her last breaths…

Last Summer, just ahead of the Assumption of Mary, I joined the Sun at the Water’s Edge atop the staircase to the sea.

Me and thethe lapping of  the waves. the diving loon. the rising peach orb

To this my soul responded, rather surprisingly:

“I was there when my mother took her last breaths.”

I was, I thought.
How infinitely large,
Like the sun rising over the sea
Revealing
Through the morning fog
An island–

Anita Shreve’s yellow house aglow.

“Come Here,” I heard whispered, and I looked to my left and to my right and behind me, but there was no one.

Only me, and the sea, and the island and Anita Shreve’s house greeting the morning.

I remembered an affair I had several years earlier.
How I rose in the dark of winter and ran toward the first tinges of light over the ocean into His embrace.

“Come Here.”

Yesterday, in the soft rain, my husband and I walked down the beach and out the narrow strip of land that connects the island at low tide.

As the rain began to fall harder, I opened the small umbrella, but only one of us could stay dry in its confines, so Casey continued on in the rain, but only halfheartedly, and so I admonished him:

“Receive HER!”

“I am,” he replied, “Because of what you said to me the other day. I want to feel into the messy, wet, fullness of her embrace.”

To which I felt a tinge, no, a fire, of jealousy, rise up and chastise me:

Why had I introduced them? Why had I pushed him toward such a Lover as one to which I can never compare?

And then I remembered: “Come Here,”
As He rose higher and higher,
And the seagulls took flight, responding to the Call.

And we are all, Here.
In the marriage of Sky and Earth.
Conceived in the first kiss of the day.
Light awakening into the One.