Family

SoulCards(c) Deborah Koff-Chapin

We are family, the voices in me; we share our thoughts and visions. All are blessed. All are important little children of mind, all lined up like daffodils in a row with their faces glowing and colors showing. Within the dreams we share, our energies merge and separate as cream rises unique each time in subtle ways. Who is yearning to be heard? Who wishes to reveal a secret wish or an idea or to solve a problem? I sleep with them growing from my mind, wrapped around my head like the nightcap of blue-flowered flannel Grandma made for the child-me, warming and comforting. We are family.


Image of comforting visions, reminding me of the gratitude I feel for the family--chosen as well as given--I have been blessed with in this life. Sorting photos into piles, removing the pictures from albums that create linear memories. I am reminded of how much I liked going through Grandma's photos all jumbled in boxes, without organization. That's how memories arise or thoughts of past ideas . . . without proper place . . . or how dreams come up and we wonder where they developed from . . . the mysteries of origin. I enjoy not knowing what image my fingers will touch or turn over next, to skip years and decades, easily hopscotching around from place to moment to space, a smile here, a landscape there, a furry familiar face blurred by time, a park we visited so long ago followed by the trees from last fall. We are family.


Gaia wears each soul, each being that has come into form, each consciousness that has become manifest. She wears all of us upon Her and within Her, and we are all as uniquely beautiful and valuable and loved as any of the voices in my mind or the members of my family or community or friends or colleagues or those I meet during daily living. And Gaia wears us with a smile of love and compassion for we are family, all life, all beings. She wears all of us from the cats and dogs to the cactus and the redwood, to the cosmos and the tulip, to the orange and the green bean. We are the many voices of Gaia. We are family.