Sometimes the light is harsh, the edges are sharp, the haze is thick and life wounds us until we bend into silence. We almost forget to breathe. It hurts too badly to feel and we close, we numb, we hollow out and the scream hides within - scratching, biting, clawing for release.

But we don't scream. We try to be polite, sane, quiet. The scream that saves us hides; waiting. The scream that holds the anguish, the heartache, the anger, the hate for the unfair obligation of being human.

And in hiding from the scream, in turning to the polite, we fade. We depress, we shrink, we feel only the fear and we reach for the ways of those who also hide from the scream. We take pills, we drink, we run, but we never sit and allow the scream to heal us. And we lose.

Or... we remember. We feel the spirit of the women who were strong enough to scream, to yelp, to wail, to pound the earth and demand to be heard. They nestle us in gentle arms and nurture us through the tears, holding us beneath rustling wings of time, until we breathe again.

They make a path we can follow and we rise slowly, shaken, but intact. We walk the trail of tears they've left, then one day we notice the tears are but the softness of a star, the sparkle of a deeper sea shining under a moon crafted from the depth of our love. That is when joy creeps back. When what we've lost stands whole and near, and a quiet singing fills the void. The same void we feared would swallow us has become our ally, our meditation. Nothing is quite the same. We've been to the belly of life and found it leads back to the eyes and heart. We know life is fragile and we know we bend, but we don't break.

We look up and see the sister that can't scream and we nestle her in these unseen wings and tell her the twisted story life has woven in our soul that made us stronger than we ever wanted to be. We rock her, sing to her, let her scream and later, we teach her to walk upon our trail of tears as we point out the stars born of the grief the others walked before us. And we smile, because it is ourselves we've learned to rock, to walk, to sing to. It took time, but we've returned. Whole.

We need to tell the stories that engraved our names on the dark side of the moon. We need to wear our scars proudly, as a sacred scent. This is when a woman becomes a Goddess, a branch, a river and a leaf. This is the glory that pain etches into us with a knife we thought would kill.

Light candles, burn incense and gather together, Sisters. The path is there on our tears, the journey leads to joy and none of us walk it alone.