A poem about therapy

Reclamation

I spent the first four decades of my life

At the mercy of my left hemisphere

Bookended between two PhDs

Hemmed in by syllabi

Awards and expectations

Nourished in a deep nest that loved learning

I swam in books and libraries

I learned from my betters

And just now in the last few years

Like so many strands of thread snipped and coming undone

From the stitching across my life

I find a new loom

A new canvas

A new way of being

The wisdom that has always been there

In my marrow

The girl with too many words

Found out she had just the right number after all

Pouring them out an hour at a time

Over and over again

In a sacred, a most sacred, and loving dance

With each person she sits across from

Sitting forward slightly in my chair

And now across a screen from you and miles apart

We sit and we weave words and images together

We sit at the loom of life

We talk

And we laugh together

We cry together

We sit in stillness and silence together

Together, though apart

You step into me as much as into each hour

Drape my nervous system around you like a warm coat

I echo and vibrate with the thrum of your feelings

Feeling and knowing I am separate and apart and together there with you all at once

A both/and that has a broad enough circumference to hold all that is

And there in that broad warm lap

We sit together

You and me

I am humming with your words and feelings and so many things unspoken

And there in the synapse between us

From antennae located I don’t know where

Come images of barren fields, of lonely curbs where you sat

Of kitchens that I’ll never see

Of childhoods that happened halfway around the world

We climb years like the rungs of a ladder

Stepping between and over memories

Through your life

Clambering up the umbilical cord

into the life of your mother

and her mother,

and her mother before her

and together we know how inextricably linked we are

and the same channels that carry forward pain

across time

are the selfsame ones that bring healing.