Come as You Are

Sarah R.

‘Come as you are, as you were, as I want you to be…..’

Hyperfixated.

the bass line tracks coming from underneath my brother’s bedroom door 25 years ago.

Kurt’s voice through my speaker, four days ago.

‘As a friend, as a friend, as an old enemy….’

Over and over this past week, the voice has haunted me.  Obsessively listening in the car ride to work, at work, home from work, in my dreams, on my tongue. In the words of the note.  I wrote them on my mirror.

‘…the guilt and empathy I have for everyone. There’s good in all of us and I think I simply love people too much, so much that it makes me feel too fucking sad.’

What in the hell.

‘come as you are, as you were…’

As I was.

Come, as I was.

When?

Kurt was born the same day as my grandma.  Tomorrow. February 20.

…is that you, Grandma?

Come, as I was?  How was I?

I was seven and I was in a field.  I was sitting in the tall grass watching the heads sway in the wind.  I was god and god was in me.  The way I breathed god in and through my lungs and out past my lips.

I was ten and in the kitchen, stone grinding wheat berries into flour, kneading it into dough, baking it in the oven, Grandma’s oven, her fingernails filthy from the lambing barn.

I was fifteen and carrying water buckets to water the mothers and their lambs, the smell of ammonia from the lambing barn stinging my nose, my back was strong.

I was twenty five, carrying an orphaned puppy in my overalls, her mother.

I was twenty nine giving birth without medication, her mother.

How I am and how I was is how I am meant to be.

There was knowledge there.  There was a circle that did not end.  It started with life and ended with death that started with life and again.  In the middle was terrible fucking joy and pain and messy human smells and animal joys.  There was strong muscles for carrying and soft breasts for feeding.

The indoctrination began because I was a good girl.  ‘a smile knitted together with hope.”  What are we hoping for?  To what end are we searching, heaven?  Give me a break.  My credit score won’t save me when the registry is being written.  My PTO won’t be available when the cattle call comes.  There will be gnashing of teeth when the systems crumble.

Come, as I was, as I am, as I am meant to be….all 46 years of messiness to build with my strong back and my soft heart what I knew to be true in that field at the age of seven.  That I simultaneously love and hate people.  I love and hate myself.  I am so deeply  moved by failure and their scrambling for sense, how we talk in circles and walk in lines straight into the incinerator, ignoring the possibility inertia could afford.  Turn that wheel slightly sister, ever so slightly.  Make a break for it! To the grinding stone, and the spinning wheel, the fish hook, and to the midwife’s towel.  Turn it toward the righteous anger the deep lament, the triumphant call.  The treeline……

Isaiah 32:9-15 NKJV. “Rise up, you women who are at ease, Hear my voice; You complacent daughters, Give ear to my speech. In a year and some days You will be troubled, you complacent women; For the vintage will fail, The gathering will not come.”

Could you smother your own child to save his life?  Could you snatch in the dark for Harriet’s hand, to heed her HUSH, to pull the trigger…on the road, and in the district.  Could you?  Have you?  WILL YOU?

They have….countless women, have and are, and will beeeeeeeee, yeah.

Memoria, memoria.

Psalm 68:11: “The Lord announces the word, and the women who proclaim it are a mighty throng” 

Heaven is now.