I have been feeling pretty down. Just a contracted feeling around my heart, with my shoulders and back rounding, ribs hollow, and a soft bruised-feeling pearl of a heart, resting gently upon a diaphragm that hardly moves, a domed cathedral lifting the lightest cross. Sadness, but not knowing from where it came. 

I resisted. I distracted. I looked the other way. I hardened. I distracted. But today I could not keep it up. My mind stroking my heart again and again, like a hand holding a worry stone – what is this feeling? What am I resisting? What am I afraid of?

My parents thoughtfully brought me a bottle of wine. Tonight, I reached up to put it in my liquor cabinet, and I found an old glass pickle jar, dust on the lid, with just a little tincture of Motherwort my partner made me many many years ago. The Motherwort plant still in the jar, I cracked the lid and inhaled. Yes. I inhaled again. My body said Yes, again.

I poured a small amount (a teaspoon?) into a glass. As I swallowed the first taste, my heart softened. My back muscles relaxed. I could feel the space between my lungs and my ribs – they communicated gently with one another. Motherwort – I felt the maternal loving of the plant, the many years of her wisdom infusing the alcohol. 

I don’t know the answers to the questions I have been asking- the whys and whats. But I do feel softer in my body, in my heart. A warmth of my own body embracing myself, the maternal wisdom already inside me, loving me.