Seeking You

You.
God, Goddess, Godde. Being, Beloved, Father, Mother; Great Mother. The Divine, The Sacred,
Source. Creator, Infinite, Spirit, Infinite Spirit, Divine Being, Sacred Source.
All That Is. The Mystery. The Unnameable.
The Nebulous, the Numinous,
the Ethereal. 

You, whom words cannot name, language cannot imagine. You, for whom I did not know the intensity with which I have searched. But then last winter. Last winter I glimpsed you in the dew clinging to the tender new shoots of grass. I felt you in the soft mist rising from the deep belly of the earth. I heard you in the house finch song, the cry of the hawk, the distant, terrifying keening of the coyote, the soft, otherworldly mating call of the great horned owl, her magnificent body a dark outline decorating the topmost branch of a tall, half-dead elm tree at the last of twilight, day succumbing to night. A monotone angel tree topper. 

It turns out I find you not in the kind of names I have long wrestled with. Surely not in the word God. Not in Father or Mother. The other words light me up but bring me no closer to knowing you. Or do they?

I found you in atmospheric rivers, in pounding rain, in feet slipping on muddy trails, in swollen creeks singing in the most beautiful melodies. You're in the owl's eyes that stare at me across the wooded floor filled with dying grasses and colorful poison oak. You're in the dappled light, the soft moss crawling up the tree, the whole huge limb lying flaccid on the ground next to its mother, green acorns shining in the morning light, the spotted towhee on the low branch calling day after day after day, is she calling for her home and her beloveds? 

I find you in beauty but know not how to find you in the vast suffering of the world, the bombs and brutality, the hunger, the dying Earth home, the power hunger and greed, the way generational trauma runs like hot molten lava through the DNA, dimming precious light in lives far and near, the helplessness of utter despair, my child's, my own, the world's.

This is when I cannot comprehend the creation of such a world. This, Beloved is when I need most to find you.