Nadia

4/26/22

Today my body remembers miscarriage. The welcomed pain to focus my sadness. The horror of what must come out of my body, be seen and comprehended.

But before that… pregnancy. Unplanned. Jolting.

How could we be so irresponsible? They might say that.

The church had helped us through a rough patch and people can be so afraid.

Never mind, I became the hope I needed, waxing like a magic moon, having done this many times before for myself; my fear fell into firmament beneath my feet.

Oh it was breathtaking - the determination of embracing what could have been so problematic with my whole heart. Willingness. That was my spiritual practice. For another it may have been something else that was required.

From emptiness, I chose willingness and I was full.

But then that little heartbeat was radio-silent.

From willingness, emptiness.

What a fool I had been to be vulnerable. What a wholehearted fool I am!

God I love her, that fool, in this moment. Oh how I choose her.

The pregnancy had held a strange connection to Nadia Bloom, a family friend's autistic daughter, wandering lost for days in a Florida swamp.

News reporters and search parties.

A small TV in our living room.

Girl I've never met.

Her face so familiar - like Anne Frank.

It felt like she was wandering through my womb space, avoiding alligators and mosquitos and sleeping under ball cypress trees in there. Curled up and facing the night with wonder with my blooming babe.

I believed she would be found and that she was o.k. in the wild.

I knew she would be found.

Long after statistics said there was still hope

and the world needed this hope…this Something Bigger. Oh, Spirit.

For me it's never really been a choice to experience the other. Strange empathy visits like an unexpected guest. I became prayer.

A body of prayer.

Then… a man named King dug deep into the swamp, listening to God's voice as the only thing that set him apart from all the others searching.

Nadia was found. Many saw.

I returned to my body completely.

Days later, my baby was lost. She was laid in the woods amongst wild trillium and tangled roots.

In a fortnight, on Mother's Day I sat on the front row in church and my friend danced before me with her newborn baby and held her out to me like an offering, ecstatic.

It sounds cruel. But the boldness of the act was as familiar to me as my passion for Nadia Bloom. A moment of holy suspension.

Everyone belongs to everyone.

A visitor at my bedside had told me "don't rush into having another one until you are financially stable” as she left me a potted plant. That WAS cruel. And there was more of that to come later. For other reasons.

Like how weird and wild-rooted I am, for starters.

But my true church was already growing within and around me: a tangled flowering of wild vines, people I'd never met, crocodiles, herons and blooms unfolding in distant places.