Threads of our scars

Cancer survivors;Martha, Sharon and Brandie.Courage and beauty embodied

What I have learned is that we are made up of scars. Fabulous, awful, cutting and dangerous scars that connect us. Connect our stories and our alone. Scars our bodies weave. Scars we weave.

Knit them gently. Oh so gently. Let them be a landscape.  Delicate embellishment.  These scars that connect us. Never knitting them so tightly that breath becomes labor. Not making a tomb, creating of them a casket of fear and longing. Knit them gently. So we can pull a tendril here, or there. A thread of seeing. A thread of knowing. Of  I see you and of the telling.

 Let us be a landscape...a story. Let us sing of longing and desire and pain. Sing loudly. Sing boldly. Intertwine these scars ever so delicately. Press them into our skin, our spirits with grace. Let the sediment sift down in between so they don't define us as much as our stories about them. Let these scars illuminate strength, fortify fragility with the knitting together.

Inspired by Andrea Gibson poem, "Birthday".

Our bodies will walk with the strong fiber of being. Walk through this world with threads trailing behind. Don't pull too hard. Let them brush against our skin as we walk. Stitch us together in resilience, their tendrils entangling. Kindred spirits facing dark...facing hurt. Spirits facing light and breathing it all in at once, until the scars can barely contain the fiber. Until the dark nights and lonely days turn into soft. Until the tide of your existence can ebb and lull without a battle.

We are not at war with this world. With it's stories told upon our skin. Our scars are not all battle wounds. They stretch with our coming and going. Becoming silken threads. They float with us as a trail of braided wonder. Touch them.  Yield to them. Feel their ridges describing this terrain.

Our craters and lumps, our tears and engravings, the gaping holes we try to fill that scream of longing not met. That meteorite impact can't be filled. Except with wonder; or maybe occasional chocolate. Look in awe at this skin carrying cells. Broken and vast and whole all at once. Own this terrain.

This fearless wonder of a machine that has not yet taken us out of this world. When it does, I hope our scars are soft and perfect and woven so gently we can breathe down into them.

Let them be a cradle to carry our stones and eggs and beautiful things. Let them be an ark to carry our iron, our blood, our dreams. Rocking inside that boat of scars, across the voyage of forever. Our star-stuff embodied in not-so-broken flesh.

This flesh that walks like a flash on this sphere before morphing into other star stuff. Cocoon ourselves in this scar-boat carrying us across the vast. Love it; every cell is art, stories, earth, and salt. It's varied forms were never meant to last.

"500 Reasons to Love You"

*Credit and thanks to Keith Dixon Studios for photography.
Art available at Ren Allen, Artist online gallery.