What do you do when pain charges through your system so savagely that you lose control? Convulsions from the shock rip through you worse than an epileptic episode, and you find yourself biting your tongue or your lip and don’t even notice the bloody damage.

Waiting is a womb pregnant with hope and fear. Worst case scenarios wrestle with words of promise, and through it, a deeper yielding grows inside.

“Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin

Dance me through the panic ’til I’m gathered safely in

Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove

Dance me to the end of love”

~ Leonard Cohen

Now the two of them went until they came to Bethlehem. And it happened, when they had come to Bethlehem, that all the city was excited because of them; and the women said, “ Is this Naomi?”

But she said to them, “Do not call me Naomi; call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. I went out full, and the Lord has brought me home again empty. Why do you call me Naomi, since the Lord has testified against me, and the Almighty has afflicted me?”