Imagination and Reincarnation

Wade in the water....
Wade in the water, children 
Wade in the water, 
God's gonna trouble the water...

Sometimes I sing this old spiritual. I don't know why. I don't even know where I first heard it. But it rises up inside me as if it's always been there. Whenever I sing it, like tonight, I see an African American woman, my age, but stronger and braver than me, and with a whole history book of unspeakable abuses carved into her family tree, hung from her family tree. She's an escaped southern slave and she's following the stars toward freedom. Her muscular body is neck deep in a strange, cold river. Wading in the water, she holds her boots above her head and waits for the dogs and bounty hunters to lose her scent and turn around. Her eyes shine in the moonlight, but she shuts them whenever she hears the distant howling of hounds or the bray of horses. She tries not to pant or move too quickly for fear of making ripples and rings in the water, but she's also steadfast on survival and freedom and so she must keep moving. While she moves in the moonlight, she whispers the words of this song, the song her mama once sang her, before she was sold to a fat white man at the timid, tender age of eight.

Wade in the water....
Wade in the water, children 
Wade in the water, 
God's gonna trouble the water...

What if I was her in another life?

Imagine a world where reincarnation is not only real, but remembered. We would have no reason to discriminate against one another. We humans would experience bodies and lives all over the world. Imagine babies born with wisdom. History would never be repeated or forgotten because we would all have lived through it. We would have endless stories to tell of past lives; not just from our own recent childhoods and unfettered youths. We would intimately know death, illness, injury, and love of all forms. Imagine if every straight person remembered what it was like to be homosexual. Imagine if every man understood what it was like to be a woman and every woman understood what it was like to be a man. Imagine a world where everyone could relate with transgender persons, disabled persons, depressed persons... Imagine if every wealthy person felt distant hunger pangs whenever they met a beggar on the street who was broke and starving. Empathy would be visceral and emotional and full of action. Every soul would know what it was like to be bullied, beaten, and tortured until cruelty itself became extinct. Imagine knowing and loving the world as deeply as we love our mothers. We would prevent pollution and climate change and the destruction of rain forests and rhinos. There wouldn't be dictators or concentration camps or nuclear war. There wouldn't be human trafficking, child pornography or forced marriages between the raped and their rapists. There would be peace and quiet.




On July 28, 1917, exactly 100 years ago today, the Silent Parade took place in New York City. It was the first of it's kind. Some say it was the start of the Civil Rights Movement. The organized silent march was an anti-lynching parade. Lynchings were still so commonplace in 1917 that a mass demonstration had to take place, but still lynchings continued. Imagine if the lynchers became the lynched. It's an interesting thought, but we shouldn't need it. We shouldn't need reincarnation to achieve equality. We humans have hearts and imaginations. It shouldn't be so hard for us to envision life in another's skin. To feel that desperate, illiterate woman inside you, hiding from her hunters in a river at night, her clothes soaked, her skin cold and wet, her tattered boots above her head. We should all imagine what it would be like to want freedom so badly that we'd risk hanging from a tree by the neck to get it.

My Climber

Amelia wobbles at the wall with one little toddler foot pressing onto my bedroom's baseboard. She stumbles back before turning to say, "It's hard to do."

"What is?" I ask.

"It's hard to do, Mommy."

"It's hard to climb the wall?"

"Yeah. Hard to climb wall."

Be Where You Are

While I walk in the woods, I look up and around to mark my progress and to find and follow the trail ribbons tied to the trees, but mostly I stare down, watching the dirt as it passes beneath my swinging feet. For when I notice and really see the place where my body is, I don't trip on raised roots or fallen trees or moss covered rocks or into mud puddles. Instead, I step on or over or around them. I want to let this be a reminder to me - perhaps a way I can try to live. For when I dwell or worry about where I've been or where I'm going, what stupid thing I said or how dorky I look, I trip into misery and anxiety, unhappiness and regret as if they were all roots, trees, rocks or puddles set in the earth to knock me to my palms and knees. So look where you are going and look where you've been, dear, but mostly, watch your feet and be where you are. 

A B C B

In two months, she will be two years old.

"My girl...my girl! Lie t'me." She sings our Lead Belly lullaby out of tune and without most of the words. She sings, "tinkle tinkle little 'tar, how I wonder what you aaaare!", as well as an abridged version of the alphabet, "ABCB...H....I...Penny Doggy!" and Raffi's "baby baloooooga. Baby balooooga!" And when she dances, she twirls in slow circles.

One morning, while reading the newspaper, she wanted my attention and so she stood on her table and belted out, "PAPA GONNA BUY YOU MOCKING BIRD! Don't sing!" from the old folk song, Hush Little Baby. She also climbs the stairs, while letting out short exaggerated exhales: try. to. catch. ME., every breath, stomp and stair slap implies. 

"You need to wait for Mumma!" I holler, running after her, which only makes her climb faster and breathe louder.

She also squeals and screams when she wants me to look at her.

"Ouch! That hurts my ears, Amelia." I say. 

Sometimes, while sitting beside me, she'll press her teeth to my bare arm and through a sly smile threaten to bite my flesh. When I pull my arm away, she rattles off a list of people she isn't supposed to bite. "Don't bite Mummy. Don't bite Daddy. Don't bite Lily..." It is a long list.

"What can you bite?" I ask.

"Cheese!" Cheese is her first response. I don't know why. I ask her about bananas, blueberries and bread and she agrees - they too are appropriate things to place between her teeth. Some of the time, she lifts her mouth from my wet skin and skips right to: "Don't bite people! Don't bite animals! Bite FOOD!"  

Last month, at a birthday party, under a silky red parachute, she just about lost her mind. The grownups were holding the outside edges, making the parachute wave, flutter and billow. She was so excited, she made all the other jumping jubilant children appear ungrateful and bored. She sprinted barefoot back and forth and in circles, jacked up on joy, squealing, while looking into the eyes of all the other children as if she say, "Can you EVEN believe this?!" Her enthusiasm was contagious. I was so happy I let her have a scoop of vanilla ice cream. We even stayed past nap time, leaving mid-afternoon. She fell asleep in the car on our way home. Parked in the driveway, I sat with the windows open, reading my newspaper, while she slept behind me in silence.

She still goes on long unintelligible ramblings, but most of what she says, I understand.

"Na night, Daddy. I la' you. Daddy washin' dishes." She says, climbing the stairs at bedtime.

Last week, she weaned herself from nursing. I wasn't expecting it. I assumed we would get to it eventually this summer, but I was dreading it. Nursing had always been one of her favorite things. She'd practically clap her hands and dance whenever I'd reach to unbutton, unzip or pull down my top. Then one night last week, she simply forgot. Our bedtime routine had been: Nursing in the rocking chair. Books in bed. Lights out. Then one night, she didn't mention it. So I didn't mention it.  We dressed her in pajamas and climbed into bed, read a pile of picture books, and turned out the light. "Mumma lie down. Mumma, lie down." She fell asleep with a hand on my hair. The following night, she asked to nurse, but I distracted her with books. In the middle of the night, she asked again, so I sang her to sleep. A week later, she still mentions it occasionally, but it sounds more out of habit. 

She says, "nurse?" 

And I reply, "Amelia doesn't nurse anymore." 

Then we discuss all the people she knows who no longer breastfeed. It is a long list, one that includes her cousins, myself, and her father.

In the fall, she will attend school for the first time. I've been offered a job as a toddler teacher in a Montessori school on the other side of the river. I'll be teaching children her age, but she'll be next door in the other toddler classroom. I'm excited. It feels right for us. I think it will be interesting, challenging, exhausting, rewarding, fun, stressful, beautiful, and busy.... all the descriptors that make life. For now, at the end of June, she and I are wrapped up in summer's slowness, in searching for libraries, gardens, raspberry muffins, sandboxes, strawberries, playground slides, sprinklers, worms, woodpeckers, and sweet drippy popsicles.

Bugs

In the basement, we sit on the couch and share two berry rhubarb popsicles and half a bag of pretzels. It's cooler down here. Upstairs, the temperature reaches the mid-nineties before mid-morning. After our walk with the furry dog and the mosquitoes and the sharp sun rays, we retreat to the cool dark basement to play and read. It isn't a scary basement, but a walk out with windows and second hand furniture, cream colored walls and closets full of coats and old baby clothes. With us, we have the basket with the swinging handle. It holds my unread newspaper, our bottles of water, a magazine, a few toys and picture books. My pale pudgy daughter sits beside me. She is covered in pink bug bites. They love her fresh flesh. They bite her through her pants and long sleeves and cap. They even bite her skin when it's still wet with bug spray. We grownups talk about how the mosquitoes must be from all this rain and from the pine tree that fell this past winter and was cut into pieces and put into a pile down the path. It wasn't this bad last year. Right? Weren't we outside playing all the time? And it wasn't this hot. Was it? We can't quite remember. 

"What if this is our climate change? A massive amount of ticks and mosquitoes and 90 degree heat waves."  I say.

My husband shrugs. 

 

We let most of the spiders live in our ceiling corners, though I confess to carrying three to the porch banister the other night and watching them skitter away into the dark. It's because they all looked to be cradling egg sacks. 

The other day we hiked through the forest to the dam in the rain. I wore my daughter on my back and held our umbrella and the dog's leash in my hands. I saw only one mosquito the entire time. Of course, if there were drops of water falling from the sky that were the same size as me, I'd be hiding too. 

Little black ants claimed the coffee maker last week. I kept finding them gathering at the base. I'd wipe them away with white vinegar and then see more soon after. It took me awhile before I realized that an entire colony had claimed the inside of the machine. Out of sight, beneath the plastic dish for the grounds, a queen ant was hatching little white eggs while all her fathers carried them with their legs. I nearly screamed. At first glance, I thought they were maggots. Why are those ants carrying maggots? I thought. Oh. Eggs. I hate to say it, but I threw the machine onto the porch and sprayed it with bleach. What a terrible person I am. You'd think a mother would have a bit more sympathy for other mothers, even insect mothers, but no. Unfortunately my imagination makes me itchy. I'm happy to co-habitat up to a point, but the eggs just feel like an invasion. I worry they'll cover my kitchen counters and walls and my skin while I'm sleeping.  So sometimes I spray them with bleach until they stop moving. 

"Come on guys!"

She says, cracking herself up in her car seat in the backseat, while her dadda drives and I hand her pieces of blueberry muffin. A berry, banana and yogurt smoothie sits wedged between her legs. "Come on guys!" she says again, laughing so hard it sounds as if she's being tickled. I said the phrase a couple days ago. It was my impression of our dog, who was sitting at the top of our basement stairs, looking down at us, waiting for us to follow and open the door so that she could get to her bowl of water. "Come on guys." I said in my best, most gruff doggy impression. She repeated me then, but we haven't said it since. Then this morning, out of nowhere, while sitting backwards and munching on muffin and sipping her smoothie, my 21-month-old daughter recalls my joke that made her laugh the first time she heard it and she says it again and again. "Come on guys! Penny. 'Stairs! COME ON GUYS!" Her squeals work like high-pitched punctuation marks as we all laugh and laugh in this forgettable moment I so badly don't want to forget.

My Fictional Amusements

For months now, I have been hiding inside my own inventions; stories I've created out of adjectives and actions. In my spare seconds, I rush to the computer or to a pencil and paper and write my tales from the depths of my wandering/troubling/vigorous imagination. I've been now on several journeys. After I surface from a story, I worry whether my work of words is embarrassingly trite, but I keep writing because I feel compelled to keep writing and because I know that if every creator quit because she couldn't overcome her fear of failure, we'd all live in societies where only the narcissists and the lunatics felt bold enough to speak. So if you've been looking for me here, I apologize for my absence.