I am a Vessel

Two summers ago I had a photo shoot in Nashville where this image was captured.  I included it in "The Real Thing" CD.  Although it was unintentional, I think the image evokes my maternal nature...and isn't that fingernail polish bangin'?  I still have a little of it left.  Interestingly enough, I ended up getting chiggers from this particular pose in the grass.  All of the bites where on a location on my body that rhymes with "grass."

My friend and photographer, Lori Faith Merritt, sent a distressed email this week that she has had a recent run in with chiggers during one of her photographic adventures.  But enough about chiggers.  This blog is not about parasitic pests...it's about something far more profound.  It's about being a vessel.

We are all vessels.  Our body is nothing more than a vessel and vehicle for our spirit.  In a special way a woman is a vessel and a co-creator with God in bearing children.  My children make me endlessly and annoyingly happy.  Today my two youngest are playing "hotel" with little packed suitcases and now they are playing "work out" and have my weights and mats laid out through the living room. They are little pig-tailed vessels of imagination.

I'm going to be brave (gulp!) and share a poem I wrote last week about being a vessel. We are every day filling and being filled.  May your Summer be sunshine filled and chigger free!

I am a Vessel

I am a vessel.  Fill me, mother.

I will wail and you will whisper

sweet words of love I don't remember.

Make for me that special air...

free of gravity...always there.

I am a vessel.  Fill me, lover.

My heart hungers for the hammer

of blood when not else matters

but your taste and touch and the strange economics

of alters, rings and purist promise.

I am a vessel.  Fill me, daughter.

Stretch my womb as you stretch my soul...

beyond borders of comfort and careful control.

Delight me with ten perfect fingers and the same in toes.

Joy once guessed I suddenly know.

I am a vessel.  Fill me, Father.

Bow me in the gales of glory that come

with too much rain and dearth of sun.

Hold me divinely down till I look up

and music fills my feeble cup.