Journey of the Heart

Gently Until Morning by Caroline Mellor A poem for my son, age 5 When you were little, you had these big, enormous dreams -   like you’d wake up in the night screaming and  I’d have to hold you until morning  just to calm you down. Sometimes  you’d lie in bed for an hour after waking,  not wanting to talk to anyone, still coming round  from wherever you’d just been;  your dreams were so real  they’d stay with you all day,  as though you half-lived in this other place  where I couldn’t find you,  where I couldn’t stop bad things from happening,  more than you did in the waking world.  The night terrors stopped -  but you always had one foot in the dream world,  you were always partly not mine.  One day, when you’re grown,  I know I won’t always be able to find you,  or to stop bad things from happening.  When that day comes,  I pray the world holds you gently until morning....

  Dawn by Caroline Mellor And when you first stepped out into the pink blush of dawn did you feel the soft, dew-soaked earth rise to kiss your feet? Did you notice the trees  breathe blessings down upon you in luminous bundles of green and gold, how every breath of woodsmoke, mist and mulch filled your lungs like a cool river? Did you feel yourself attached somehow to each fading star of night like a puppet held on threads of silver light? And when the beautiful future which you dreamed of so long  down that hard broken road finally burst over the horizon and tumbled towards you like a wave —  Were you ready to catch it? *This poem appears in the author's debut, newly released poetry collection The  Honey  in the Bones: Poems to  Rewild  the Soul ,  Golden  Dragonfly  Press, Dec. 2022. For a copy of your own , click here.   Caroline Mellor   lives in East Sussex, U.K. with her husband and two children. Her writing has fea...

  Water Lettuce by Caroline Mellor The water lettuce has thick, spongy leaves and is covered in fine hairs. Its roots hang free so it is not anchored to the ground.  (I know this because David Attenborough tells me so, his blue eyes twinkling like fresh water). I think of all the unmoored souls on the planet, cast adrift, roots severed or cut. Not anchored in place. Those who, like me, feel the loss of connection to ancestral home and wisdom,  to themselves. The water lettuce has some remarkable adaptations, says David.  Its free-floating roots mean it can travel. What a beautiful teaching, I thought, for anyone whose roots have been torn up, for anyone who finds family to be a place of wounding rather than of anchoring. To know that they can travel the flooded rivers and the great highways of life gathering all the minerals and nutrients they need from the water  as they go; to know that, like the water lettuce, being rootless,  they too have one more rema...