Reclaiming
a meditation
As I write this, it’s Saturday morning. I am seated on my couch covered with a faded red suzani. The cloth is embroidered with concentric circles of flowers in many bright colors. The effect, sitting on it, is of being surrounded by whirligigs of flowers while the trees outside the window remain unmoving. It is quiet except for the faraway hum of someone mowing their lawn and the occasional tap of a moth against the glass. The room is scented from a small cone of incense, containing honey, sandalwood and frankincense among other things, that a friend has hand-rolled and kindly mailed to me. I let myself sit in this fragrant moment of not knowing what to write. Will the words tumble out, like the warm bodies of my children when they were young, and impatient to get outside and play?
I’m interested in new directions for this newsletter, and one idea I’ve been contemplating is to do a kind of written meditation on different words and phrases, and see what comes up for both of us. What words are alive for you in this time? For example, a word I have been mulling on is ‘reclaim.’ I searched online and apparently, one etymological antecedent of reclaim meant to call back (used in falconry).
Does a visual image come up for you when you hear the word reclaim? What sounds do you hear? How does it smell? Is something hiding behind the word? What energy does it carry? Or, does it leave you unmoved? (There is nothing prescriptive or some singular rightness in anything I write, so take what resonates and leave the rest.)
Every time I whisper the word, I see a color, a dark green that is almost black at the edges, like a forest after nightfall. Reclaiming smells like the soil, that womb of all growing things. I hear the plop of water drops, like you would after a spell of rain, steadily dripping from leaves, rolling down tree trunks, gathering momentum, and sliding, flattening, into puddles. To reclaim something feels like returning somewhere (that was once, or might still be) teeming with life. Of re-inhabiting a place I have lost connection to. Of re-learning its contours. Perhaps I might reclaim time. A capacity. A boundary. Rest, or a right to rest. For an experience to not be invalidated and thus, flattened into invisibility.
There seems to be a kind of warrior energy to the word but when we slow down, we might see that an act of reclamation has to be preceded by an awareness of loss. So, perhaps, reclamation is also, always, suffused with grief.
I wonder if it is grief that calls us back.
It’s your turn. I would love to hear if the word reclaim brings anything up for you.
OMG, Priya! You couldn't possibly have known this, but the heart of my post today reflects on that same word, "reclamation" (it's even in the subtitle!). Love the synchronicity! I totally resonate with your sense of loss and grief, and with warrior energy. I agree, it's a fierce word, and I love your sense of its color. For me, it's a bodily, felt sense, a groundedness, an alliance with the Earth, an embrace that insists on being heard, seen, and felt. On taking up space. On fighting for justice.
My writing friend shared an essay with me as we were workshopping my piece & considering how the language of recovery and repair is used to excuse abusers. That "reclamation" is more what we're going for. The author considers the way that abuse is often swept under the rug in families, in an effort to "forgive and forget," which does violence to the abused (often a child), b/c the harm is never addressed. She writes, "Some demand a cheap form of forgiveness for the abuser, which asks for redemption with no repair." (That essay is here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/metoo-part-ii-155646304)
The images that come up for you are similar to mine, earthy, soil-laden. When you described it as dark green, my soul said “yes!” Reclaim evokes for me an image of digging, unearthing a lost or forgotten treasure. It also brings a sense of staking out, a marking of territory.