by Katherine Latrans Mariani
Today I saw a man holding his daughter inside the church where all the women were wearing headscarves. And the priest came out chanting words with a voice that sounded like a bell that had been ringing for a thousand years.
He was wearing a blue cloak stitched in white and gold that looked like the door to heaven, if heaven was an ornate thing. He smiled and bowed and all the people bowed back, their hearts saying hello.
But I thought to myself: I see heaven in a mountainside, or the bark of a twisted pine. I see it in the silhouette of foam left after the tide marries the sand.
I see it in the reeds that grow where the water stands still, and I see it every time a cardinal crosses my path in a flutter of red.
I see heaven when the night undresses after all the clouds have gone home and once again the stars become the light that surrounds everything.
I look again at the blue heaven door and I think to myself: Heaven is really outdoors. But then I look at the man with his daughter.
She is playing with his beard, her little hands tugging at the edge of him, and he is smiling and laughing.
And then that thing that we are all searching for, to be so forgotten that we fall into awe — Then I see it everywhere.
Five years later, I see the young girl in the chapel of my memory. Can she find her father’s arms today? Are they still there to hold her, like a tall tree she can climb into?
Or have they been cut down by the wildness diseased that we call war? Wonder begins to slip from my heart.
But then I feel the arms of what was reaching forward.
I feel how they hold us, even when the truth of today does not.
Katherine Latrans Mariani is an equine-guided coach and founder of Tuono Koń, a nature-based coaching practice. Born in Buffalo, New York, they now live and write from the high desert of New Mexico. The Fourth River is their first publication.