Into the Wilderness: Story 28
This is how long we have been silent. We’ve been a deranged set of rescued cats hunkering flat footed, ears pressed back, seeking safety in the late Covid and post Pandemic (not that it’s ever going away, and now Monkeypox is spotting the globe) environment. We finished high school, started universities, found and lost friends, gained and lost weight, lost jobs, started first jobs, remodeled rooms, restructured thinking, cooked, grown abundant herbs and tomatoes and wildly weedy lettuce. We’ve girl-shopped, tatted and dyed hair. We even learned dances from TikTok. SORT OF.
Really- We’ve entered unpredictable new life paths- some voluntary, others not. We are older- I have permanently etched forehead horns, Chuck has lost more hair. Catina is lithe and lovely in her college niche, and Athena has officially changed her name, cut inches from her butt-length hair, started and then taken a break from school to find herself. After all, she graduated high school earlier than most and then started Uni at the terrifying and unformed age of 17.
In short, our lives have been messy and blessed, terrifying and light infused, shattered into glass shards, swept into the dust pan but not discarded. Imagine me with tiny tubes of superglue trying to find the pieces that fit together. Pieces are always missing. And those Super Glue tubes never work. The tubes crack and the glue adheres your fingers together or to a paper towel and now you’ve got a whole new problem to sort. I’m not putting things back together as they were. I refuse. Who needs to build the familiar? Nope. I’m after something I’ve never seen before. It’s kintsugi, the Japanese tradition of repairing precious broken objects with gold. As gold is poured among the crevices of the shattered bits, something new and wholly beautiful emerges. We three- my daughters, myself- and I’ll add a few more female loved ones-are kintsugi.
Mind you, I haven’t yet found the pieces or reimagined the beautiful new forms. But it’s there, on the edge of vision, still shadowed but glowing in the full moon’s spell.
We are, after all, still Walking the Moon, the name with which we started this blog. Our moon walk is far from over. Our mother-daughter healing is still in process. ASD- and PTSD-never go away. We are practicing shared female resilience. Our lives? We are going to kintsugi it. Just wait to see what we create.
Walk the Moon 