Becoming Home

A Safe Harbor for Precious Pearls

I was born on Pearl Harbor Day in 1978

A date that marks the invasion that began a war between nations.

But this story of invasion

is not just history

but a living thing

that keeps repeating.

When I was 16 I had sex for the first time.

My body was invaded, penetrated by a boy who didn’t love me.

It was my choice.

But is it really a choice when it comes from a mind

that’s never really been mine?

When it comes from a place that’s been mined for centuries?

Stripped from its source of knowing

what is truly aligned?

Is that choice really mine?

My mom has high blood pressure.

She blames it on my father,

who moves at a slower pace.

She thinks trying to match his rhythm

all these years is what led to her hypertension.

But when I look inside I see a little girl who never got to play

and who’s hungry for attention.

My mom decided at a early age

that it was her duty to take care of her mother and her brothers.

to make sure everybody else was happy before she could feel free

she worked so hard and so tirelessly that the neighbors thought she was a a step child or a slave

but no, this was a choice she freely made.

Or was it?

When you’re taught to believe that love means

taking on what belongs to another…

that it’s wrong to be happy if anyone else suffers.

But it’s right to usurp another’s authority

without their permission

to occupy a foreign nation and call it protection…

Is that not invasion?

We call America a free nation but we force children into a system that teaches them to listen to voices that suppress their instincts and we call it education

There’s a theory about women’s liberation that it was a conspiracy to take women away from their homes and their children

to have them fight for the right to become slaves like their husbands.

Since when did time

exchanged for money

become more valuable

than loving life into being?

You are not a slave to time

You are its creator,

like Ouranus- the Great Liberator.

He fathered Time,

then was castrated for his sins.

For Ouranus had tried to kill his own offspring-

the ones he’d judged as ugly.

While Mother Gaia

saw all her creations as beauty,

As if you could kill one,

without damaging

the entire human family.

As if you could kill time,

without injuring eternity.

With no one home to

connect with our children,

they’re vulnerable to the constant streaming of pop culture poison

that tells us we are not enough.

Then this hole is filled with drugs and other addictions that fill our hospitals and prisons

then we shame the people in them and

blame them for our broken system.

This is mass mental manipulation.

Is it not the worst type of invasion?

If we are all too busy being slaves to the system,

Who is there to listen?

To be the safe harbor?

To teach our daughters to transform their pain into pearls?

To teach them the

power of their own rhythm

To know the beat of their

own drum so perfectly

that no foreign noise

could ever invade them.

I’ve always been impatient and

rushed to get ahead.

Yet, here I am. 44 years old

and still feeling behind.

What if what I’m so busy looking for

is a place that I’ve been before?

Then the faster I move the further I get from home.

Why do I believe I’m any different from a flowering tree?

In nature there’s no such thing

as behind.

Only, the fruit’s not yet ripe.

The way a flower grows…

so gentle and slow you can barely see it.

But in the dead of winter

in a field of nothing

Suddenly, inevitably there is spring.

What if I knew I was already home?

Exactly where I’m supposed to be.

And every visitor that comes,

everything that happens to me

is a gift

growing me, however imperceptibly without me having to do or change a thing… just naturally.

It takes a lifetime of acceptance

for a speck of sand

to become a tiny, shining pearl.

How much more might it take to make a woman out of a little girl?

What if I just woke up? Returned to my knowing beyond thought, beyond clocks.

What if I realized that any voice that tells me

I do not belong

does not belong to me.

That voice is not truth.

It’s an intruder.

That is the voice of the invader.

and

I was not born to be colonized.

I am a sovereign nation and

I cannot be invaded

for I AM HOME.

Home is not a place or a thing.

It is who I am.

And I welcome you.

Come in

and rest awhile

and I will sing you a timeless song

and you will remember the country

to which you truly belong.

*Click here to see video of spoken word performance