Boulders

In December of 2024 I left MN to spend 2 months in California. Just before I left, I found my Mother Wound; a heavy, dark boulder that lives inside my chest and weighs heavy on my abdomen.“Any wound but the mother wound” I said to myself, writhing on the couch in my air bnb, crying and gasping for air, “I would take any wound over the mother wound.” The pain is felt beyond any words I could ever find. Heavy in my chest, sick-to-my-stomach, ‘please erase me from the earth”, twisted tight like a towel mid-wringing, physical, cutting pain. Though I may try, it is indescribable.

My mom carries one, too, and her mom, and her grandma and all the generations before.

While I was in California at the beginning of 2025, I held it and wished I could crack it open. I wished I could yank it from my mother's chest and throw it off a mountain. She may never understand how deep her wounds are or where they came from. She may never have the chance, or the drive, to turn some of the rocks into sand, and it breaks my heart. She didn't deserve this heavy, silent, gut-wrenching sadness, and neither did I, but this curse wasn't hers to break. It's mine.

I wrote this 'song' for her. For me, my little sisters and all the daughters and children with sore shoulders from carrying backpacks full of rocks they never asked for. And I wrote the passage below to help me make sense of the insidiousness of the centuries of the existence of these boulders.

1.5.25

Immovable. Stubborn. Relentless and enduring. A boulder spends centuries rested on a precipice like it’s been preparing for its tumble since the beginning of time. Wedged between bigger and smaller boulders, camped out on shelves of sediment, lethal in its own right, stoic and stunning under sunlight. Where centuries of waiting have done their weathering, winds whipping through the ages. Immovable. Stubborn. Relentless and enduring. Before us, there were boulders, destined to leap and bound across the canyons, stumble through the baggage of the earth and put out the fires making fountains on their surface. Make their mark and keep it moving, dig in & sit still wherever they land; boulders don’t argue with God. They don’t move the mountains, they make the mountains,  they are the mountains, and the chips always fall where they may. 

Bearing witness to generations, a boulder learns to fit in the palms of hands, take deep breaths, lay down to rest, still waiting for a net to appear, and a gust of reassuring wind to knock it off its feet. But there’s no falling from a closed fist. And so it sits, across lifetimes, across blood lines. Heavy like all the time it spent sitting this still wasn’t in vain. Immovable. Stubborn. Relentless and enduring. 

That weight can take your breath away, sunshine bouncing off the top of its head, stretched up past the sky, rocky ridges like staggering towers that could swallow you whole. Holding hostages with no handcuffs, to be witnessed, felt and formidable. Immovable. Stubborn. Relentless and enduring. Resting behind the small trenches of the rib cage, rattling around, loud, restless friction lodged in front of smoldering wounds.  Gray like white sand when it’s under the moon, embers at its center, cold around the edges, a boulder of the ages that doesn’t know better than to stay put and sit still. Boulders don’t argue with God.

And life goes on. The chips fell in my arms.