#23 Let's Hold Hands
Can we please hold hands? Can we all please get in a circle? Can we feel the love? Can you feel it spread from one hand to another? The love grows and expands as it keeps transferring and moving from one person to another. I don't have any room to hate. There is no direction or place for hate or regret. I regret nothing. I hate nothing and if I do hate something then I can willingly send it all my love. I know there is a place of love for you.
I am in my luteal phase and if you know the menstrual cycle you know that my serotonin is dipping. No, I don't have PMS. My body is preparing. It is doing hard work. So as my progesterone picks up, my energy lays low. It becomes harder to resist baking a batch of cookies and eating them all. It becomes a hardship to get to the gym so I walk to the nearest park instead. I am prefacing because I feel sad and I have sad things to say.
I am also in my Saturn Return and amid my quarter-life crisis. Lots of intersections happening. Divine timing. The Saturn Return will have you contemplating the ways you haven't been living your true self and breaking away from self-imposed limitations. Anyone who isn't meant to be with you in the long haul may have fallen away or is in the process of falling away. The timing was not right. I am so sorry. It is going to be okay. I love you.
The pressure is on. I should have my life figured out. It feels like time is running out. I want to be a mother, but the steps to get there have other subsections. I want to be with my abuelos in Mexico before it is too late. I want to give my young cousins a big hug. The big hug will connect us like the mycelium that sits under our feet. Our legacy of Sanchez sits quietly and is patient. It waits for the rain. In the Sanchez legacy sits twenty-two cousins. I am the oldest at twenty-eight and the youngest is not even a one-year-old yet. I held the youngest, Judith, in my arms last summer and I about cried in front of my grandparents ten plus uncles and aunts and twenty-two cousins. I am the beginning and the baby taking in the end. I whisper to her, “We are so lucky to be loved by these people”. I hold her tiny hand. “We are alive at the same time”.
It is hard to exist in the world where my grandparents live and the one here in NYC. When I was a child I would visit my dad’s pueblo in Mexico every single summer. Every time I left to go back to the States and my grandparents would send us off with their prayers, I cried like a baby. We kneeled and they would hover their hands over our heads and bestow us with love and thread so we could find our way back. I prayed for a place where we could all be. I would imagine an island where the people and the life in the United States also inhabited the people and life in Mexico. We both coexisted at the same time. I wished for this because I couldn't be in two places at once and did not want to leave my grandparents and the growing family. Regardless, I came back to the United States after every summer. Now my brother is married and to my best friend and their own family extends and the thread connects us to the vastness of Montana. It grows. How does he keep everyone in one place? An island can not exist.
So what I want right now is for all expectations to fall away. I can sit here now and imagine all the unanswered texts, my current status of employment, my current friends, and those who are no longer my friends, the anxiety of finding meaning, and all those types of things. I imagine love. I imagine a universe where there is only love. The feeling of love I feel for my father, my brother, the sun, my baby, my body, and everything in between. I circulate that in my body. Then I imagine all my people. I imagine the ones here on Earth side and those who are not. The ones in Mexico and the ones here. We are all holding hands. I am radiating all my love. Pure love. It is running through my body like a current. Love, love, love. The current travels from my Abuelo Severo to my mother to my late Tio Gustavo to my beloved friend Rachel’s later father Robert to my sister Mia to Guadalupe to Rachel to my new extended family in Montana to late Uncle Paul to Mary to baby Judith to my new friend Marissa and you see the vision. In this universe, we all exist. I can have all my people in one place. I do not need to imagine an island anymore. We are all here. Do you feel it too?