Free to be Dust
I, too, am an Ash Wednesday Girl
My dear Love, Breck C, wrote the poem that follows. It has held my heart since I first read it back in February.
I am, if nothing else, forever an Ash Wednesday girl…we’re all gonna die. love hard.
God knows your worst shit already, and They’re all good.
you are made of love. you are made of dust.
love is sacred. dust is sacred.
speak the truth. say the thing. be a person.
humanity and divinity need not be a binary. death and life need not be a binary. binaries are evil, because they over-simplify reality.
we are free to be dust, to follow the Wind.
we shall return to the Source, to the Center, to Belonging.
holy, holy, holy, y’all.
*****
I am dust. Do you feel this? We are dust. This could feel small, but for me it feels magnificent. It feels freeing. I have a tendency to think I should help people. Which is good. But then I begin to think I am the center. I feel that their fate hinges on my action. I too often think I must be the savior. I should help everyone. But I can’t. I can’t help everyone. I can’t give all. Of course I can’t. I am not all powerful. I am not God or Goddess or Divine. I am dust.
I am dust.
And I speak my dusty words to the dustiness that surrounds me. I am dust speaking the love that my mother, dust, spoke to me, dust, and that others, dust, will speak when I am dust again. My dusty self speaks to those dusty selves around. And to those dusty selves who come after. All I can be is dust, tumbling in the wind. Free to tumble. Free to follow the wind.
I think of this as I step into the next steps of this dance, the journey I follow. Queerly called to a ministry that rocks the boat. We are meant to rock the boat. We are not meant to sit silently, placidly, in the storm. We are meant to wake up. We are meant to tumble and fall and rise and be dust in the air, dust in the ground, dust in the gears grinding everything to a halt so we can queer how we begin. Again.
Follow me, if you will, on this dusty journey.
Beautifully stated. The essence of all we are—dust. It’s good to remember that life is short, and sharing that love in the time we have is all that truly matters.