Hold

You are held. You are accompanied. You are witnessed. You are loved.

I woke up today, my eldest daughter's birthday, with a vivid memory of holding her for the first time. It was a thrilling moment, mysterious and joyful and a little bewildering. My body knew what to do, as it had known for the previous nine months--curl around her, tuck her next to the breast she had yet to find, rock her gently as she opened and closed her eyes, unused to the light she had suddenly, shockingly entered.

I imagine most of us remember being held as small children. From the safety of my father's arms, I gazed in the awe of awakening consciousness at the night sky over L.A. In the refuge of my mother's, I fell asleep, comforted. My grandmother held me on her lap as I turned the pages of Winnie-the-Pooh and we laughed together. Holding nourishes children. Without it, they languish. Some, I have read, die in places where they are fed and housed but rarely held.

Once, idling at a stop sign, trying to pray through anxieties that had troubled the morning, a message came into my awareness as clearly as if it had been spoken aloud: "You are held. You are accompanied. You are witnessed. You are loved." It felt like a visitation, a moment when divine presence was almost palpable and utterly real. The words I heard that day have reassured me again and again in moments of risk or uncertainty or sorrow. In the hardest moments, I know I am held.

 In love we do this. We hold one another's bags. We hold dates and times to celebrate those we love. We hold open safe spaces for those who need a place to rage or weep. We hold one another in times of catastrophic loss. We hold one another in prayer, encircling each other with divine energy and light. Each of us is a vessel and channel of divine energy--"the force that through the green fuse drives the flower," as Dylan Thomas put it. We hold that energy and release it through the sluice gates of choice, participating each time in the surge and flow of what cannot, finally, be contained.