My Mother often told me the story of how she was in labor with me for three days.  Her pains began on a Wednesday and wait as they did for her delivery to take its natural course, the doctor had to induce her to get me out by late Friday.

Apparently I was having none of this being born business.

I can in detail, imagine my Not Yet Born self, feeling safe and serene inside my Mother’s womb.  Being one with her, my amniotic abode, and the Higher Source (Self/Spirit) from which I was sent.  I can imagine being so obstinate that at the last moment, after fully realizing what my mission on this Earth would be, that I would want to change my mind.  Limbs and fingers splayed, desperate for something to hold on to that would keep me in a little longer.  Mind over matter, begging my Mother’s contractions to slow the hell down.  Perhaps I thought what I was sent here to complete would be too much for one Being to bare.  Maybe I just didn’t like the cards I was going to be dealt.  But as with all things that are bigger than Oneself, some times there is no going back.

On Friday the 13th of June, a small (I say small because in hindsight, I was to be the smallest of my Mother’s five children), 6lb. baby Girl was forced out into this world.  She would be named Sandra, she would have a head full of resilient, coarse, curly coffee-black hair, she would be curious, she would be nosy, she would be picky, she would be the loudest, she would be the shortest, she would be the one that most resembled her Mother in looks and in the mid-moments of her life, temperament and she would time and again meet the most important errand she was sent here to accomplish: to write.

I say that I keep meeting this errand to write because I’ve often ignored it.  Going so far as to forgo pencil and paper after a particularly bad experience with a spoken word poetry group.  But besides school, writing has been that steady companion that enabled me to make it through some of the hairiest bits of my existence thus far – how could I ignore it completely?

And so, like a road weary traveler, I crawl back in bed with the words that have often known me better than the solitary lover I’ve had thus far.  It is always familiar, no matter how long the months, how treacherous the perils or deep the hurts.  If I sit still within myself long enough to admit the traumas and not huddle in shame at the devastations, the words, they come.  They find their ways from the dry river beds of my being and spring life eternal to my parched psyche.

They in essence birth me from the confines of my physical existence, back to mySelf.
-S