Hostages Home, Home, Finally Home

I will just write my heart out, like a wise woman told me, in a circle of soul sisters that just understood. That understood the feeling of being in the dark, over and over again; knowing that there is something you are meant to do, or something you are meant to say and you have to learn to stop letting all the worldly things get in your way.

I felt the light begin to return today, like a gentle, pale, purple butterfly flapping her wings. The light returned in circles and swirls, it tickled our toes and softened our ears. Our hearts were full, overflowing, almost bursting. We didn’t even know what it was we were feeling. We were welcoming someone returning from the dead.

We were long-haired, and barefoot, booted, and scarved. We held babies on our shoulders and held the hands of toddlers. We held flags waving in the early, winter, evening wind, and we held signs welcoming you home, home, finally home. We sang non-stop. We sang songs that reminded us that we are one nation, that we have faith, that we are not afraid of darkness. We know light will prevail, it always does in the end.

God created the light, the darkness is just what was. The light is the future, of course it is, and I felt it, we felt it as we swayed, and laughed, and met old friends, and hugged new ones, and cried, and shook, and stood with our mouths open in disbelief, not knowing what it was we were feeling, for we have never felt it before.

These have been two full years of emotions we can not name. Of an existence we cannot describe. Time has taken on new meaning, so has tragedy, so has brotherhood, so has reality.

I have tried to lean towards the light. Take long walks in nature, listen to the hawks soaring in the sky, talk to the hedgehog that visits me nightly. I have listened to the pine cones slowly cracking open in the sun, and stared at the sky knowing my brothers were in darkness.

Tonight I stood with a flag held high above my head for over an hour, waiting just to see you, risen from the dead, next to your mother, next to your father. To see you coming home to a sea of brothers and sisters who have been waiting, and praying, and visualizing.

I remember last year at Ori’s birthday in the woods. We danced and sat around a fire. We were beautiful women in shadow on the earth, next to a vineyard. We were just being and we were being in a new way, a way that didn’t care about dress or look, a way that felt our kinship, our sisterhood, our freedom, our gratitude to be alive.

For Ori’s birthday we gathered in a circle, women singing ‘We are sisters, all of us, those imprisoned and those free. We are one.’ Ori asked us to envision the day when all of our hostages would come home, and we did, we became the light on a moonless night.

Tonight the moon is a crescent, it is waxing, the light is coming back again.