She wrapped the columns of her dreadlocks, silvered brown and black, around her neck casting them over her shoulder like a shall meant to keep out the cold. Her hand a pin locking them in place against her breast. Through the buzz of summer's heat, over the stillness of a barren desert she hummed to life the story woven between the wrinkles on her hands, along her lips, around her eyes. She was a wanderer. A mystic. A woman without a home, but home in all the world's shade, a queen at table when met with an oasis.
Her eyes remained closed. The white and red striped paint dried and cracked when her dark, bushy eyebrows rose and the creases of her face shifted from tension to elation. A laughter from deep in her belly rumbled out across the distance between us and into my own soul where a pensive coldness used to reside. She was a wanderer. A mystic. A woman whose voice rocked the heavens into streaming tears of rain. Where her feet touched, beneath her very soles, grew a life lush and green. It was the magic of her people, the earthliness of her spirit which urged into action the alien plains of sand and wind. Within her sphere, though surrounded by chaos and perpetual change, she stood unmoved. Her feet deeply rooted in the fine sand, her body solid as a mountain.
In a single breath she unlocked the secrets of the world and when she inhaled the light of the sun flooded her body leaving only the night's sky above and the flickering brilliance of a painted black canvas. I stood before her lost, but found. Eager, but at ease. Locked in a communion with nature.
She was a wanderer. A mystic. She was my mother. My guide. She was everything, everywhere, and when I focused too closely on the lines of her face, the color of her lips, the strands of hair which danced in the breeze her image would float away and disappear.
She was a wanderer. A mystic.
Click HERE to see the image which inspired this piece.
