So many ways to be small

I am practicing so many ways to be small.

When the two chattering women with their two roaming, rebel dogs pass by, the heather is a purple-flecked mask, the rosemary protects my scent.

There’s the way I crouch, feet flat, toes splayed, a pale raven.

Sometimes I lie on my belly and look into the pond, my face among the water-striders, submerged mosses growing into my eyes, blue holding shades of green, brown, the shed wing of an insect (hmmm, is that a shade, or only the idea of loss?).

Leaves of water lilies, as if green hooves spreading across the water, tell me something bigger than me wanders here.

If you call my name, I won’t answer any more than the garter snake who once stretched out in that very spot. If you send me a text, I’ll pretend the ding of my phone is what happens when a bead of dew pops open and lifts as a tiny cloud.

The pressing up of pebbles into skin are a kind of returning, no, reclaiming.

The body is made of pebbles, stones washed soft and stacked high for awhile. I felt it, washing my mother’s back, each vertebra of her cancer-thinned frame. Stone to bone to stone. Ah, God, Dao, whatever awareness permeates this universe, you are such a poet.

There’s the way I go small when the sun is high, a shadow compressed, folded into ferns. There’s the way I go small when the moon is a silver eye, and I lean into a massive redwood, one more bit of furrowed bark.

There’s the smallness of always being a child who simply grows older. The smallness of being the one who listens and listens.

Remember the woman who told you the most valuable part of a vase is the emptiness inside?

There’s the smallness of being a container that everyone fills. My mother’s grieving has always been the water, holding the cut stems, the blossoms above beautiful, but breaking, a pile of petals in the palm always becoming something else.

Remember the smallness of being one cell, microscopic, made of two incomplete cells dissolving into something new?

That cell is long gone. Life constantly replacing itself, but carrying memory encoded in mitochondria, re-shuffled DNA, epigenetic markers bearing physical traces of lived experiences—joys, loves, traumas, moments of attention and of absence, spectacular in their own way.

I have never been only myself, and you, never only you. Think lineage, think one story recast and told slant.

What happened to that garter snake by the pond with his electric-red tongue whipping the air, each flick a question his body asked the world? Once I was part of the answer.

The cells of one body remember the cells of another. That is not small at all.