We are beautiful

Photo credit: Marianne Møllmann 2024

Last week was overwhelming in many ways. I volunteered as a life guard at a not-for-profit sleep-away camp. I got COVID (again). I postponed a difficult conversation, but it continued to take up space in my head. I navigated sensory overload with several disregulated kids.

And lastly, I had vivid, and very (very) clear dreams.

In one of them, my adult child announced to me that she was going with her college roommate as an observer to Gaza. I knew that meant she would be killed. I sobbed so hard and for so long in my dream, that I couldn’t understand I didn’t have actual tears on my cheeks when I woke up. In the dream, I kept asking why, and my child said, what did you expect? This is a genocide, I am a feminist, I can’t just ignore it. But my child, I sobbed, you are my child! She said, every single person who has died is someone’s child.

I don’t know where to put this dream, this reality, this bridge between what I know to be true, and what I can hold. I don’t know how to process it, and maybe that is a good thing.

I just spent a week watching gaggles of geese landing on a small rural pond at dusk and leaving at dawn with the mist. This world is so beautiful. We too can be just like that.