Connected With Love

Dear Starlight,

“What if her reality is real?” I asked my mother. “Why do we have to tell her what she believes is happening isn’t happening?”

—-

Dear Sister, do you remember the time I tried to hold your hand through the telephone as you told me about miscarrying cats and sleeping under your bed? You were so far away, in some hospital on the other side of the country. You were so far away. The doctors and nurses said not to agree; I was to tell you the truth, that what you saw was not real. You were not really miscarrying cats. But I wondered—if what was true for you was so very real. So I listened to your suffering as you bled your menses and cried with fear. I believed your pain. I tried to make my arm stretch across fifty states and touch my hand to your heart that I could hear pounding a million miles away. Did it reach you?

—-

I have harbored a terror of the immaterial mystery of our interconnected existence. Afraid because I was born into a proximity of madness. And yet, the gossamer veil blows in the wind and sometimes I am touching what I cannot see. And despite the fright it feels good.

—-

Walk, Feb 5, 2025: I find a crow’s wing on my path. I sense it’s a gift and take it home and cure it in cornmeal.

Dream, March 11, 2025: Someone places a handful of small objects in my palm; maybe a diary or video tape. “Thank you for giving me the opportunity to see her life through her lens,” I say. I wake tears in my eyes.

Walk, March 11, 2025: It’s my brother's birthday. I see the sun rise and feel it’s his namesake day. I think of my dream of my sister's belongings being put in my hand and feel a swell of familial love. I remember my crow’s wing is ready to be made into something.

Later: I read about crows and their gifting culture. How they leave gifts for their family to find.

Crows are known for their familial bonds. Ornithologist Kevin McGowan describes them as having "family values"—watching over one another, defending against threats, ensuring survival as a collective.

I think of you, Sister. I think of how you loved our family fiercely, even in your suffering, and how we loved you too. I think of how we didn’t know how to help you feel safe; not only in other worlds but in the one we walked together.

I go to my craft closet, searching for buttons and baubles to make something with the wing. As I lay out the materials, I pull out a plastic bag—one of many passed to me when my mother moved from our childhood home. Funny, she left there last year at this time. Inside is a small coin purse and an old spoon. I had never seen them before. I open the purse.

Inside is a folded note.

I unfold it, and my own words spill back at me—

Dear God,

Please bless Summer with the abundance of your love, please help her feel your never ending care for her. Please keep her safe from harm, always! For this new year, please bring her guidance, please show her your beautiful path that’s lined with gold for her. Please hold her hand and guide her. Thank you God for blessing Summer with your love for her and thank you God for blessing me with a sister so sweet and special as her!

xoxoxo Amen Love Dawn

A prayer I had written for my sister on her birthday, the year before she died.

—-

In my dream, I was given a gift: the chance to see through my sisters eyes. Hours later, in waking life, the gift was revealed—my love, the note, she had carried, now returned to me.

—

What if belief is a door?

What if love is an invisible, never-ending filament to which we belong?

What if time is a room, and we are all inside moving in different directions?

—

Earlier in the month, I had felt called to work with dreams and set that intention.

–

And the spoon.

The spoon belonged to my great-uncle Fritz. He was beloved by his mother—my great-great-grandmother, Marie Mohr, who had come to America from Germany. He died in the 1918 flu epidemic in Philadelphia. That is all I was ever told: that he was loved greatly by Marie, who was exceptionally cruel to my grandmother.

I polish the spoon and decide to carry it with me. To use it—for tea, for eating, for planting seeds. This silver spoon has passed through generations, and I wonder what value it still holds. I turn it in my hands like a key, curious which ancestral story it might unlock in me.

—

In yoga this week, my teacher read this poem:

How the Healing Happens

by Rosemerry Troomer

Again today
I dig with my teaspoon
into the soil
of sorrow.
It is said
there is healing water
somewhere below.

Perhaps I wished
for a shovel.
Perhaps there was
no shovel to be found.
Perhaps I did find a shovel,
but the work was
too heavy, too hard.

It is not hard
to dig one teaspoon
at a time.
Anyone can do it.
The hole gets wider,
deeper. Soon
it feels like a well.
It is easy work.
It’s the hardest work
I’ve ever done.

I thirst.
Yet what heals us
is not only
the promised water.
What heals is
the work itself,
dry and slow,
one spoonful,
and another spoonful,
and another parched spoonful,
and another.

—-

This morning, a doctor shared a podcast with me on telepathy. It happened after I commented on her jade stone bracelet, which led us to a conversation about dreams.

The podcast spoke of non-speaking autistic children who read minds—not with their eyes, but through direct knowing. They inhabit multiple realities at once. But they can not read the minds of those who don’t believe they can.

Some parents were afraid. Afraid to believe.

All the parents spoke about how the doctors had told them that their children were empty, and could not communicate. The doctors judged them on their inability to fit into this world's view of normalcy.

When my sister died that was my one regret. Something I couldn’t see until she was gone. That we had kept trying to get her to fit into our world, our way.

—-

I have had many small, psychic experiences. Each time, I freeze. I become afraid. I stop believing.

But what if we are meant to be in greater relationship with the unseen? What if communication is always available—through the circuitry of wind, dust, atoms, and love?

What if memory is infinite?

What if, when I have a question and instinctively reach for my phone to find the answer, I am only mimicking something we have always known how to do? People think they need tools to talk to one another from far away—books, radios, phones, photos, computers. But what if memory never had to be stored that way? What if it was always carried in breath, in wind, in the echo of a name felt with love?

—-

Dear Sister, I think of how belief shapes the doors we open or keep shut. How, you reached for me through a plane you exist in. You’ve shown yourself in song and light, and often when I am taking flight. You know I get afraid when boarding giant jets. Thank you for the gift of sharing back my love to you. I love you, forever.

PS. Let me know if this thank you note reaches you, I’ll look for your reply in the sky, on wings, and everywhere.

PPS. Do you have any ideas about this spoon?