patti smith kimberly.wma -

Dear Joanna, I'm not sure if you know it, but you went on a trip to Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Alabama, and Tennessee last week. Your presence with us was so strong - memories shared with you, wisdom learned from you, changing into wedding clothes in the car with you, love, admiration, pride, awe, and gratitude felt for you accompanied us every day. This includes yesterday, twenty-nine years to the day after Georgia birthed you. In the morning we stretched and moulded our bodies into the ancient forms of the asanas, doing the daily work of love and courage. My practice was dedicated to you because you have worked your body and mind and heart so hard for love and courage, and I have been bearing witness to your stamina.

Dear Jophet, my three-headed accomplice in tooth-brushing and group decision making: Yesterday, on Joanna's birthday, a great wave of bliss and reality and the composting carcasses of dinosaurs - hatched from their dino-eggs, grown to greatness and then brought back to the bosom of the Great Mother without even a pine box to interfere - carried us other two back to the sylvania of our Birth. (We still don't know what it means.) Today, thirty years to the day after Laura birthed you, we sent our love to you and then continued the parting of ways - letting the nourishment we gained in our togetherness give us strength to continue the work of our individual lives.

Three decades ago, Laura and Georgia birthed you and you first unleashed your voices in this world with powerful cries - your souls had been in a place beyond life and death, weighing their options. With those cries you announced to us that you had decided to stay on Earth for a while, each taking on the form of a tiny and fierce human being. A little while later we met you, and in life-processes of which we were not conscious at the time, our selves began to intertwine. Now when we reunite there may be friction and there is always at least one of us missing, but there is also the succor of a rent being healed. It is with this unification so present to us that we celebrate your births - each of us having let you shape our identities, you holding each of us in yours.

Oh baby, I remember when you were born,
It was dawn and the storm settled in my belly
And I rolled in the grass and I spit out the gas
And I lit a match and the void went flash
And the sky split and the planets hit,
Balls of jade dropped and existence stopped, stopped, stop, stop.
Little sister, the sky is falling, I don't mind, I don't mind.
Little sister, the fates are calling on you.