a version of this foto essay was first published
April 2019
Spring is life.
A mother rabbit birthed at least three bunnies in a niche of the house – enclosed on three sides with only a northern mossy exposure – mostly safe and hidden from owls, hawks and coyotes. They nibble on young dandelion and clover leaves. They are joy.
My one and only baby’s very first Easter and Spring. A surprise of daffodils under a white oak tree at our first house and home on Grace Street in Chicago. Mother, son, full of grace.
I don’t know where the stuffed white rabbit with pink, acrylic eyes and pink, satin ears came from — exactly. But I’ve had it forever, before memory, so I pretend that it was presented to the baby girl born in late October, just before Halloween. Or gifted to the baby girl on her first Easter. Or won for the toddler girl at her first carnival.
Before I was a mother to a boy, I — an only child — was a teenaged auntie to a beautiful boy named +Tony+ [Giovanni Anthony Martinez] born in Spring 1986. I learned from him that I might become a mother to a son one day even though I was sure I was meant only to be a mother to a daughter. And that, was a wonderful revelation.
Here, me and Tony pose with our Play-Doh sculptures we made for Easter: an Easter bunny AND a skull.
Young people whom you adore, may die before you do, and it will shatter your heart — and for a long while, your peace.
Here he is late-afternoon fishing on Devil’s Lake, Wisconsin during one of our group camping trips in the aughts. Rest in the Mystery, sweet boy.
Existence is an ouroboros. We eat our own tails and are nourished and reborn from our mistakes. Or we chase our own tails and never learn. Again and Again.
My golden boy communes with an urban bunny in our backyard of clover and hydrangeas.
It all goes by so fast. Easter baskets, dyeing eggs, and filling and hiding plastic eggs for him to find on Easter morning, which later became Easter afternoon.
A blink of an eye.
Become a seeker of the unchanging, of the eternal.
A Polaroid photo of my Pop in his very 70s turtleneck – and a real life devil next to him; this man had, unbeknownst to my parents, harmed me.
We all descend into hell — pushed against our will, complacently wading into it, or parachuting willingly. Some of us rise out of it, and others disappear unto it and become it.
And here’s me – a Polaroid taken in my too-short pink Easter dress and coat, worn for the second year in a row, along with my white hat and beaded purse — on the lawn of the Chicago Housing Authority’s Julia C. Lathrop Homes on the 2800 block of North Leavitt Street, when I was 8 or 9.
Its quality is like an aged mosaic of peeling pixels.
But that little “Morton’s Salt” girl — she had the secrets of Existence. She knew the Pleroma, the Zero Point Field and the Liminal before she knew those words or The World. She has been relearning them over the last two decades, the former as bereaved daughter and mother of a fledgling,
the latter, as a crone coming into her once-lost, truest Self.
Remember thy eternal Self to keep holy.
the limineen | earthling, poet & crone 