If we root deep into wonder what do we find? Digging through the detritus, can we allow the seed to unfurl its etiolated form?
In the cocoon of the womb it is eternally winter until the spark of wonder ignites the growth of potential. Where can I go from here, the seed asks. What exists beyond the darkened embrace of holding?
I have been sitting long with potential. Inside the womb I stir its seeds. For decades, or perhaps a lifetime and more, I have been adding seeds, so many seeds. They pile upon each other, waiting to be sowed into their own pockets of humus. Grow me! I hear their voices, near pleading. It is time.
Yet time keeps its own clock, and here in the slow breath of winter I find wonder daring to defy the cold seconds of stasis. Who says movement needs the spark of spring? Wonder asks me to figure out the mechanisms of trust. It asks me who holds the pendulum from swinging and who releases it?
The chimera of the imagination showcases its magic with ease. Look! It shouts. Can you believe me?
I have catalogued and filed all the forms I can capture. “You could belong here.” I play with a plot of reality. “And you here.” “What if we wove you together? What might grow out of this union?”
And as I play in this liminal space I find myself dancing beyond the boundaries. Pushing through the compacted surface, I stretch the daring tendrils of this life I want to nourish and show them the light to have a look around. “What do you think?” I ask them. “Can we dance together in the sun?”
A sign (not mine) from yesterday’s “No Kings” rally in Concord, NH
It is likely my personal experiences are not so different, in some ways, than yours. I don’t think there is a person who exists without having experienced, to some degree, the effects of narcissism. We all know a bully, and perhaps we have been the bully at one point. We all have the capacity to harm, to allow harm to occur to others, and to cling to false truths. What factors inform our lives shape who we become and the values we cling to. We don’t have to be psychologists to examine our lives and the effects we have on others, as well as the effects they have on us. Sometimes, though, it helps to have a professional’s perspective.
For example, it didn’t label my childhood experiences as abusive until my therapist slipped the word “abuse” into one of our sessions. I was in my mid-thirties. In some ways, it is shocking, even alarming, that it took me so long to come to this realization. I am sharing my story because I believe it is far more common than it should be. And, I think my personal experiences help me to understand my frustration with people who celebrate narcissists who are cruel and heartless, and who we sometimes elevate to the role of leaders who would be kings.
I lived with a would-be-king growing up. My childhood, adolescence, and young adult years were informed by his wishes, and I learned to comply at an early age. To obey, and even praise his rule of law. I knew if I did not, there would be consequences, often physical ones. It didn’t matter (although it did), that his rules were often illogical, often cruel, and always controlling. “Don’t flush toilet paper if you just go pee.” “Don’t close doors, not even your bedroom or the bathroom.” “Don’t grow your fingernails and never paint them.” “You can’t ride in the car with me without conversation.” “You must show interest in what I do.” “You must call me your father and refer to your birthfather by his name only.” “You must do what I say.” Always there were consequences if not. The strong hand grasping my throat, silencing my words into submission. Fingerprints left on skin. The booming voice racing the heart back to fear.
But I never knew this was of living was really not okay until someone outside of his reign told me. A professional I could trust. You see, living under the rule of narcissism often comes with complicity. My mother was, and still is, his greatest sycophant. I also lived with her words. “You are so lucky.” “We should be grateful.” “He saved us.” “You have a good childhood.” “He feels bad when you don’t call “dad.” “He gets sad when he feels left out.” “He had done so much for us/you.” Etc, Etc.
And so I believed all of it. Every word of hers became my truth due to my own need to be loved and accepted. To feel secure and safe, even when I was anything but. I elevated the narcissist who ruled my life to the statues of hero and savior, because that’s who he was in his eyes, and in the eyes of my mother, the person who I worshiped, loved, and adored above everyone else.
I wonder how many people have stories like mine? Different circumstances, but similar effects? When I was a teenager, I witnessed the harmful effects of narcissism and bullying through my peers. Who has not? Those that wanted to feel more special than others inflicting their cruelty and dominion to be elevated in social status. The sycophants who followed their lies and took them for truth so that they would not become the bullied. So common.
I believe our personal and collective traumas allow us to perpetuate these patters without realizing how harmful they are. My own mother, when confronted by me with evidence, averted her gaze to the window and asked, “Where was I?” How frustrating and heartbreaking those words were to hear knowing she was there, always there, to bear witness. Yet, she carries the burdens of her own traumas. I know this, because they informed my childhood too. I grew up with her personal stories of abuse and took her wounds into my body. By default, I became her confidant, as well as her protector. As did my sister.
What child does not love their mother beyond logic? And so I use my personal stories and trauma during these challenging, global times to try to understand what is seemingly beyond logic. On the other hand, I allowing limitations to what I will tolerate. I will not condone atrocities and complicity. I will stand up for what is right and be a voice, when I am able to, for those who need one. I will move continue to move through discomfort to find courage despite the trauma of consequences I still hold in my body. I do this, because I know I am not alone. There are people, much braver than I, battling for truth, kindness and unconditional love.
Lately, my thoughts about connection have turned to roots. In particular, the roots of ancestry. This is where grief is now pointing me, and I find my eyes eager to fill with the loss of separation when I think of where I have come from. I used to believe it didn’t matter. Later, I believed that perhaps the longing I felt inside of me came from past lives. I think, in part, it does, but that is not the longing that pulls the sorrow from my lids these days. It is the longing to find my roots in this life.
At the end of summer, I will turn 50. Instead of a party, I have chosen to travel. For many week I have contemplated where, even though the longing pulls me to Croatia. Beside me, I can see the ghost of my paternal grandmother nodding her head. Come home, she whispers, Come home to your origins. She is wearing a black dress, as though she is mourning with me, but I get the sense through her smile that this mourning can become a rebirth.
When I search for flights and places to stay, the old gnarled fingers of doubt take hold of joy and start shaking their habits at me. It is too expensive. Be practical. It is too long of a journey.
But, it is my choice to decide to shed the habits of lack that have been with me since birth. It is my choice to rebirth a different belief.
When I think about this return to origins, I think of how I used to believe these origins were never mine to claim. A foolish thought, perhaps, but the circumstances of my life have always told me otherwise. Not ever feeling as though I truly belonged to an extended family, even though I had three sides that I could, in some way claim, has taken a toll on my sense of connection. It has pulled up my roots and left me feeling a thirst that drains my eyes.
It has taken me some time to realize why I no long feel the urgent pull to escape to the ancient lands of Albion to find this connection I am longing for. It is not that the wild places of magic do not call to me still, but they are not the missing pieces I need to reassemble at this time. I need to, I am realizing at this half-century point of my life, rebuild the structure of my DNA. I need to weave the strands back into unity. I need to fall in love with my origins, and realize my origins have never truly abandoned me.
Come home, we are waiting for your return.
So for now, this is a post that waits to be continued. I am not going to question why my paternal side of origin is the one calling for home the loudest right now, because it feels right. It feels like a coming home.
Years ago, I walked into the office of a healer, and before she placed her hands on me she looked into my eyes and asked, “Why are you so sad?”
I recall being offended. I had not felt sadness that day, but rather excitement for this new experience I was about to try. But she was right. Sadness lives inside of me. It always has. This sadness, I am realizing, more and more, is something I need to address rather than ignore. Grief made a home inside of my cell before birth. Some of us are born into loss before we realize we have lost anything. And, so I need to begin at the beginning. I need to begin at the origin of cells finding union before separation.
It was never a secret that I was an unwanted pregnancy. My parents were too young and unprepared to have a family. Yet, first my sister was born, and then I. Sometimes, I find myself wondering what words and emotions my body molded into being as my cells became tissues, organs, and bones. A human molded into form without the tightly woven threads of love to support her came into the world as a girl named “truth.”
Rejection did not take the form of abortion, but of unwanted birth. And in those days before sonograms warned us of sexual organs, I was expected to be a boy. But love found me in a complicated way, and I was not given up. Instead, I was wrapped tightly inside the wants of my mother, who never seemed to understand that I had wants of my own.
And so I made her my everything, as all babies do who have the privilege of a mother-bond. I followed her through the leavings that became losses as grief began to make an uncomfortable home in my growing body.
The first leaving left everyone I knew behind except my mother and sister when I was two-years-old. That was the spring and summer we went into hiding with the Hare Krishnas. I never knew what it was like to wear PTSD in the body until four decades later when I was in a mantra class for yoga teacher certification. That day, while practicing the “Guru Mantra,” the traumas of the two-year-old girl living inside of me cried for release as my body shook and my mind swirled into the past.
“Why are you so sad?”
The words haunt me with their call for recognition, and so I follow their story and watch a two-year-old girl leave behind her father, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends. I watch her struggle to unravel the structure of DNA until her genes float unmoored inside of her wondering where they came from. Wondering why there is nothing to tether them home. And, I see her longing grow into a wave that she swallows over and over again until she can no longer swallow it because it has become her.
Grief is the manifestation of lost love, and I now realize how much it has become a part of my cells. It is the ripping apart of connection. A boat unmoored from its anchor, floating alone on the sea. Yet it is a human condition, and not a metaphor.
And, so I return to the two-year-old girl and watch her cling to her mother and the tangle of her wants. I watch her follow the only bond she feels she can cling to as they travel across the country to form a new extended family. Here she finds friendships. Some of which become the untethered loss named grief. Here she also finds new grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, yet their love is complicated, conditional, and not woven tightly with the strands of DNA.
But it is this DNA that complicates their union. Her mother has chosen to love a man that is her cousin’s son. The cousin is her father’s nephew, but they are of the close age that they lived together as unhappy brothers for many years. I have been brought into a family that is not wholly welcoming because of the strains that can be imposed upon DNA. It is a tethering without want.
Yet, love finds me. I grow to love my stepfather who has made himself the sun in our small system of orbiting planets. I dutifully cross out the name of origin that belongs to my father, and learn to separate the strands of DNA inside of me without realizing those strands are beginning to tie knots of ache inside of my belly.
And I learn to love my new cousins that come into being, and their grandparents. Even the one who has a hard time looking at my face, as well as the faces of my mother and sister. I call them my own. All of them. I have a new father. I have a new large, extended family through which I share birthdays, holidays and the long weekend of Labor Day on a tiny island in Maine. But I will lose all of those connections. Another choice made by my mother.
“Why are you so sad?” The words tangle with my grandmother’s “Why did she give you up? Why did she choose him over you, and your sister, and her grandchildren?”
Because she made him our sun.
But I tried to stay in his orbit. Oh, how I tried, even when I watched unhealthy patterns that I experienced as a child take form in the grandparent-grandchild connection. I tried until I could try no more, but long before I let the orbit, my mother decided to disconnect from the family she married into, and so, by this law of attraction I have with her, so did I.
When I left the orbit, my mother stayed.
I have come to realize that reconnection after separation of these genetic bonds we carry inside of us in the form of family is like trying to reattach a limb with nerve damage. But I am trying. The loss of my mother, stepfather, and step-family has come with a re-connection with my birthfather, and some of my paternal cousins, aunts, and uncles. The love we share has deep roots, yet its unearthing exposes the grief of all the losses. All those birthdays, holidays, and celebrations not shared. All the words never uttered, the hugs never felt.
But, how grateful I am to have this reweaving.
I have learned, through grief, to love from afar, even those I have lost forever, because I know forever loss does not exist. In each loss that has led in a death of the body, I have found the reunion of the soul-connection. Each of these soul reunions have felt blessed as they do not carry with them the burdens of hurt. They carry only the light of love.
“Grief” in spoken words by Alethea Kehas, video credit attributed to Danilo Riba of Pixabay
I wonder if there is anyone who does not contemplate erasure, even if they have never experienced it first hand. When I was a young child growing up in an atheist household, I’d often find myself frozen in a self-imposed terror while thinking about nonexistence when I should have been sleeping. It’s probably safe to say that the concept of nonexistence has driven many lives towards various forms of religions, spiritual quests, and existential crises. After one has experienced existence, the notion of nonexistence becomes a little hard to stomach.
This is not a post about erasure after we die. It is about erasure while we live. It is a story about my personal experience with erasure.
Yesterday, through a Google search, I discovered that my step-grandmother had passed away at the end of last May, at nearly the exact same time my maternal grandmother died. No one told me about her passing. In fact, if you read her obituary, I don’t even exist as a part of her life.
My memory, though, tells a different story. A story of a little girl and her older sister flown across the country to be integrated into a family that wasn’t theirs. A family that struggled, some parts more successfully than others, to accept them. And one of the more successful people with that acceptance was my step-grandmother. She, in my memory, tried the hardest to accept my sister and me as her own, at least for many years. And, my memory tells the story of a girl who loved her step-grandmother and longed to be loved in return. I think I was, at least for awhile.
I once wrote a poem about this complicated love. The poem was about a little girl and her step-grandmother mixing together the ingredients of zucchini bread on a kitchen counter. I couldn’t, though, get it right, as much as I tried to revise and rework it. Which seems fitting, I suppose.
My mind has not erased this memory, even if my muse cannot recreate it. My body remembers the rhythm of the shredding of squash against a grater, the stir of the wooden spoon inside a metal bowl, and the dusty perfume of cinnamon filling my nose. I still use my step-grandmother’s recipe for zucchini bread. I even corrected my mother’s intentional error in the recipe book she gave me years ago, crossing out my maternal grandmother’s name and writing in my step-grandmother’s. Making bread with my step-grandmother is one of my happier memories with her. A memory I have chosen not to erase.
And there are more. The days when she took us on the “fun” instead of the “educational” outings that came with required essay writing. Those rare days when my step-grandmother, my sister, and I would ski through the snowy woods of the White Mountains, or slide with gleeful abandon down the water tubes at Weir’s Beach. My tongue still recalls the sweet pleasure of butter crunch ice cream at the end of a hot summer’s day…
And, that inner child inside of me still wants to be beloved.
Yet, she has been erased. Again. Erased from a life because she didn’t fit herself into it in the way that was expected. A product of conditional love. Still, I refuse to believe my step-grandmother and I didn’t share a love for one another. I refuse to erase the proof that lives inside of my cells. And so I will allow myself to feel this complicated grief, and try as best as I am able, to process its messy, uncomfortable form.
The last time I saw my step-grandmother was approximately 17 years ago, even though we lived, for most of those years, just 15 minutes away by car. I didn’t see her because that was my mother’s wish. Yet, my mother was not erased from my step-grandmother’s obituary. Instead, my mother erased her own daughters.
In the years before my maternal grandmother passed away, she would often talk about my mother and wonder why she had chosen my stepfather over her daughters and grandchildren. I could never answer that question because it was not mine to answer. All I could tell her was that it hurt me. It has hurt a lot of people in many different ways.
Everyone bears their own unique story, but love is the light that threads through all life. Instead of erasing the darkness, it illuminates its shadows and allows us to see them more clearly. I’d like to believe the nudge I have felt over these past several months to Google my step-grandmother was from the thread of love that comes from her. She, after all, didn’t choose to erase me. And, I have not forgotten her.
I don’t often go on Amazon to check my book reviews, in fact it’s very rare that I do. Today, though, I had some time and decided to give them a look. That’s when I discovered that a cousin of mine had her husband post a 1 star review of my memoir after she found out my grandmother left her out of her will, but not me. I’m now in the process of having the review removed, but it’s been there since July of last year. Shortly after my grandmother passed on and the will was released. Sadly, this is just one example of the retaliation my sister and I have received from angry relatives. I have never once spoken an unkind word to my cousin, and I have never met her husband.
If nothing else, this is a reminder to look inside ourselves to discover the source of our pain instead of inflicting it upon others.
I wonder if any writers out there have similar stories?
It’s been a week since my grandmother left this life and rejoined the realm of spirit. She was 94.5 years old, and for the last two decades of her life she awaited the day when she would be rejoined with her beloved husband, the man I used to call Poppy.
Donald and Elizabeth Davis, aka Poppy and Gram
I feel lucky to have had my Gram in my life for nearly half a century. It is a much longer time than most. My mother was a young mother when she brought me into the world, and her mother was there to welcome me into this life. One of the last memories Gram shared with me, as she often did, was of that day.
“Did you know, Alethea,” she reminded me as I sat beside her on her bed, “I was the first person to hold you?”
Gram holding my sister and me, newly born
I know the story well, as I do so many others Gram used to like to share with me. Although we lived, for most of our shared lives, 3,000 miles apart from one another, Gram and I spoke regularly on the phone. When it became evident that she was getting ready to transition out of this life, my sister and I decided to fly the distance to visit our Gram one last time.
It was, in many ways, just like old times. Except it wasn’t summer, there were no longer mystery meals to unwrap on the plane, or cigarette smoke to pollute our lungs. It was, though, just the two of us again, flying west to see the family we had left behind when we were four and six years old, if only for a few days.
And we are both glad we did. We spent many hours of those two days sitting with Gram, trying to help her find comfort in her increasingly uncomfortable body, and even wheeling her outside for some time in the fresh air to look at the gardens surrounding the facility where she lived.
Gram’s weariness with life was apparent, but so was her unfailing love for us. Gram was happy we were there and didn’t want us to leave.
Although our Gram and Poppy had their faults, as all people do, they always exhibited unconditional love for me and my sister. It was something we needed as children, and clung to, despite only seeing our grandparents for a few days a year, if we were lucky.
In those few, brief visits, I have compiled a lifetime of happy memories. Sitting on the sun-soaked deck of my grandparents’ pool and eating homemade dried granny smith apples with Pringles and cans of pop is one of them. As are the moments when Gram would take my hand and trace each finger from the base to the tip before she took her emory board out to shape my nails and push back my cuticles. “You and your sister have such pretty hands,” she’d tell me, “just like your mother’s.”
Mine was a childhood filled with a sense of not belonging, of feeling like I constantly needed to prove my self-worth and earn my keep, but never was that the case at Gram and Poppy’s house. For those few blissful days each summer, my sister and I were able to relish the bliss of unconditional love, and even of being spoiled a bit.
At Gram and Poppy’s we’d watch forbidden cartoons during daylight hours and gleefully open cabinets filled with the junk food of our choosing. Outside, we’d turn handstands on their perfect lawn and lift our feet above the water in their chlorinated pool. Whenever I smell cedar, I think of Gram and Poppy and their home atop Mt. Scott in Portland. It was the closest place to heaven I found in my godless childhood.
Gram and Poppy sold their house on Mt. Scott many years ago, but during our brief trip west to say goodbye to Gram, our father drove my sister and me to see it. It looked the same, but very much changed. Just like life. Just like the entire trip.
The heaven/haven of my childhood
The night before Gram passed, I had a conversation with her in my mind. I told her how much I loved her and that it was more than okay to leave. I knew she was ready. She had been working hard, in fact, at letting go. Gram knew I believed in life after death, even if it wasn’t in the same way she did.
“Send me a red bird,” I requested the following morning after I learned of her passing. “Let me know you made it okay.”
I was in the car, and as I turned the corner, a red-breasted robin stood in the road in front of me. It looked at me, then flew away.
I turned the radio on, and through the speakers came the word “bird.” NPR was doing a showing on birds.
My journey into the world of podcasting continues with episode 88of Steve Silverman’s “World Gone Good” podcast. I had a wonderful time chatting with Steve about healing, writing, reiki, yoga, and following your joy. Some of the highlights include our Jodie Foster stories, how we healed our stomach aliments through mindfulness, and how we channel our inner truth through writing.
It was a genuine honor and pleasure being on “World Gone Good.” If you have thirty minutes to listen to episode 88, you can find it here. Better yet, start following Steve’s awesome podcast!
I just finished listening to part of a YouTube astrology post that a blogging friend of mine shared. The astrologer triggered had me at the word “trigger.” To say these are “triggering times” for many of us is probably an understatement. We don’t, in fact, need an astrologer to tell us that volatility and instability surround us and stir the sense of unease within us, but it’s helpful to know how we react to what triggers us. It’s helpful to discover the cause and the effect.
Triggering events are what spurs life into being. If you recall yesterday’s post where I discussed the five elements and their corresponding seasons that cycle through our lives, you might bring life’s triggers into the perspective of the natural patterns of Life. And these need not be negative. We need not view them from the lens of judgement. The union of yin and yang energy that brings forth life is often pleasurable, just as a “triggering” song might inspire us to dance or sing with joy.
The key lies in the response. What do we do with what we are given? How do we learn? How do we take action that yields new growth, which brings us closer to the state of being that resides in joy?
Often, when we are triggered by something that we perceive as “negative,” we dive into defense-mode. We externalize our feelings to guard and protect our sense of security. It can take tremendous vulnerability to let go our guards and dive inside instead of outside of ourselves. We forget that herein lies the gift. When we go within we find the seat of our strength and our inner power, because that ever-wise inner-self calls us home to who we truly are.
I have experienced many triggering events in my life. Some days I experience several over the course of just a few hours. I probably don’t need to tell you how exhausting that can be. We are energy, and the more we are pushed to expend our energy and then turn that push into defense-mode, the more exhausted we become.
These triggers remind me of the guards I still station around my joy. They are irrational in the moment, but rational when I dive into the body’s wounded stories. What a disservice, though, it is to myself and others to perpetuate these myths and to allow them to wreak havoc on my interconnected mind/body/spirit.
There are times where it doesn’t take much to spur the creative action of grown. Years ago, I decided to get my palms read. I was a vendor at a local metaphysical fair and during one of the audience lulls I went over to a booth that had caught my eye. I’d say about 50% of what I was given during the reading rang true, the other 50%, well some of it triggered within me with the feeling of untruth.
As the palm reader was studying one of the lines on my hands, she declared with absolute assertion that I could not be a writer because I lacked the line for creativity. This statement triggered a whole series of wounds inside of me before it spurred me into growth. It triggered my sense of self-doubt and the idea that I would never be good enough to do what my heart knew to be truth since the moment of earliest memory. It temporarily unraveled my sense of identity and had the potential, if I had let it, to unravel my dream. I pushed aside the fact that the reader had also got a lot of other things wrong, like that I really didn’t listen to, nor like in the least bit, heavy metal music. Instead, I immersed myself in the one statement that spoke to my wounds.
And for those of you who follow my writing, you know that I haven’t stopped. We can feed our energy bodies or we can deplete them with the stuff of life that triggers us. Many of you may also know that when I was in my early thirties I suffered from debilitating IBS. For two years I allowed my energy body to suffer because of its untended wounds. Then, on Mother’s Day of 2008 I awoke from a hellish night of my body’s agonies and decided that this trigger I was experiencing was not going to defeat me. I was going to defeat it. Or, let me put it more kindly, I was going to grow from it and heal it. For the sake of my children first, and my own wellbeing (still always second, I’m still learning), I dove inside and released what needed to be freed. It was the same day I gave myself permission to write. I had 30+ years of words buried inside of me, it was no wonder my body was ready to explode. Thus, you can perhaps image how triggering it was to, years later, hear that palm reader tell me I was not, in fact, a writer.
I tend to be one of those people who always looks for the underside of the story of an event. I like to dig into the “why” to discover a deeper meaning, and how it might relate to the bigger picture of my life, or life in general. It helps me make sense of a world that would otherwise seem chaotic and randomly unjust. I don’t always like doing it, but it’s essential for my own wellbeing.
I am currently reading a book I don’t like. It’s a sequel to another book I didn’t like. The author, Octavia Butler, was a fine writer, but her apocalyptic choice of genre is triggering for me. I suspect that was a large part of why she wrote the books she did. In these particular books, the nightmaric world she created for the future illustrates a future out of control due to all the triggering events that lead up to its dystopian creation. Climate change, greed, the lust for power…it hits hard with a possible reality that is difficult to stomach. Yet, I keep reading it. It is triggering my shadow-self, that part of me that I don’t always like to visit, and that part of humanity that Butler is asking us to see for all its potential horrors.
There’s a section of the population, including the lead character of the books, that Butler calls “sharers.” It is another word for empath, but in the case of Butler’s stories, these empaths were created from a drug their mothers took. The stark reality, though, is that we are all empaths. Some of us hide it better than others. Some of us build shields to protect what we don’t like to feel. Butler’s books are uncomfortably close to our global reality, and because they are so dystopian, they stir more despair than hope through their plots. Yet we can still use them as triggers for change. We can dive deep, deep into the shadowland of the individual and the shared self to find out the root cause of our actions or inactions and allow the trigger to inspire positive growth.
It is always a choice. Life, in each moment, unfolds a myriad of options at our feet, asking us which way we would like to walk. We can, quite literally, in each moment choose the path of darkness or light. Love or hate. Peace or turmoil. Wellbeing or disease. The choice is always there.
I wrote this poem before drawing 12 tarot cards as a reflection upon this day. Forty-eight years ago I was born into this life. A life that seems, at times, difficult to define and accept. Birthdays have never been easy days for me, in large part because they have been days, like all the others, not wholly mine to embrace and be embraced by. I knew I would find the chalice in the cards, but I thought it would be The Queen of Cups, as this is how the “I” has reflected itself over the years, but 12 cards unfolding this journey brought The Ace. I had, after all, asked for something new...
The Light Behind the Story 