That angel baby (might be actually you)

Tho I grew up Christian I rarely think about angels. But I want to. Because my life has been as full of them as a meadow is with wild flowers in spring. And thinking about them recently has brought me to new heights of awareness of how ultimately beautiful humanity is and made me very hopeful. Which is medicinal as fuck in these times.

An angel, as defined by the American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition, is “a typically benevolent celestial being that acts as an intermediary between heaven and earth.”

The first angel baby I consciously remember being near was a feisty “communard” when I was living at an intentional community in Rutledge Missouri called Sandhill Farm. Angle baby Lindsey was visiting and in the two days she’d been there she’d incited the women to a frenzy about the injustice of not being able to also be topless when it was hot and we wanted to. She also joke-scoffed at my washing a ziplock bag for ten minutes to get it grease free. She spoke often of how our hearts knew how to become simple and in tune with the earth and each other, but our minds would always mess things up worse because it just organize recreate patterns from the past. In the week she was there we voted to try out the topless project. It had mixed results. I ended up burning a titty while frying bacon and also got to make a whole field of Mennonite men wildy uncomfortable while I and my fiercesome maidens harvested sorghum in a field beside them, tits OUT.

I often think of that week, a kind of stolen pleasure, a pattern of freedom and embodied playfulness and equality I have rarely had a chance to experiment with in real time in this life. I still have a little bacon splatter scar on my boob.

Then there was old jazzer Teddy, on an all night bus ride to Georgia. How did we fall into feeling so comfortable with each other? I was a young white woman going to get my kiddo, he was an old and accomplished black musician and producer and we stayed up all night telling each other our deepest secrets, and singing and working on harmonies together. When I arrived at my destination in the morning I felt as tho I’d had the deepest and most restorative night of sleep in my life when in fact we didn’t even attempt to sleep. When we said goodbye we somehow knew not to try to stay in touch. There was a heightened awareness in the air around us. Something precious and irreplicable had happened. Some force greater than ourselves had orchestrated our rendezvous, an entirely platonic but LOVE SATURATED time of human togetherness that filled and renewed both our coffers.

My angel baby lady son met me when she was eight years old, and her mama had joined our community in Cumberland Maine. One night Lila was studying me rolling on the floor with the kids, doing acroyoga and decided that she had found a parent but didn’t need a mom, and since her father was awol, she later asked if I would be her dad. I said yes in an almost joking way (a dad? What?) but then we lived into it, over time, unpacking what that decision would or could mean for us. She began spending summers and holidays. We found a particular groove of her being able to explore her authentic self with our family because that’s one of our central values and not of her family of origin. I began to understand the power of consciously choosing family and bringing devotion and my best self to those choices. The presence of a lady son in our family has expanded and pushed the boundaries of what we know to be true about ourselves, family and love. Being her dad is one of the greatest joys of this life.

I met my angel baby priest friend recently in a comment section about collapse. I watched her shine lights on people’s struggles, to reframe the hopelessness to be born with inquiry and intentionality. I fell in love with the quality of light within her that cannot be diminished. As our friendship has deepened (she is far away in Canada and there is enough political and border instability that the friendship has started to feel like a wartime friendship where we hold each other thru the insanity and unbearable suffering, but can’t yet meet in person.). Each day we send each other “our moment” in a voice memo, the one experience from our day where we felt fully alive or deeply true in some way. I didn’t know that I needed a friendship as big as Life itself. I didn’t know that a friendship could function as a spiritual dojo, like the way the giant pine outside my window houses hundreds of birds and their beautiful birdy lives. I find myself leaning into the friendship, the more I share, the truer I am, the bigger it becomes as she rises in kind. It’s a refuge, an island of sanity, a place to unravel a bit in order to discover where a new coherence is emerging.

Lastly I recently met two angel baby lovers in a glorious plant bar in West Asheville where I was out walking well for the first time since I broke a lot of bones in my encounter with a Mack truck. I hadn’t worked out in the world in a long time (hurricane Helene put our world on pause in so many ways) and I found myself drawn to the counter filled with plants and a view of the sunny sunny world. After some time a gentleman in a handsome sweater and a birdlike fairy woman in robes sat beside me and I felt the energy of my work suddenly bloom, an energetic infusion. Whiffs of their connection and conversation would drift over me like lilacs in bloom in a neighbor’s yard. I noticed how unguarded and playful, while being deeply revering of each other. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a couple interact with less codependence. She was so full of poetry and insights, him quiet and grounded and so fully receiving her. It was a dance of balance and harmony in action. I was delighted to be in the frequency of their loving play. Before I left I shared a tiny bit of my respect and deeply felt joy in being able to witness their stable and devoted love and found out they’re substackers and were working on their articles together. Later that day when I shared my moment of the day it was this tiny second where her sharing of a moment with a spring ephemeral coincided with a man on the street coming upon a dog tied up outside and the absolute joy bonanza reunion those two had in front of me (tho they had just met.)

Plant bar with a mocktail Mertini = hot heaven

I’m collecting nutrients. After we meet and heal our shadow places there is often a barren bleached out crater where we couldn’t grow or receive Life’s gifts safely. So the sweetest nutrient receiving often comes in those thirsty crater spaces. These angel babies are also bringing their authentic bloom as a gift to the world and to me. That bloom often has tendrils of future patterns we are growing towards being able to capacitate and embody.

I’m fully on Angel Baby Watch now. My soul is weary of tracking the way people are dirty shits and scoundrels. My innate negativity bias will track the Going Wrong without me having to do anything. But if I’m not careful, my core relationship to humanity itself and her wild beating heart can become crudded and hideful by such relentless unbalanced noticing.

Most of you reading have been/are an angel baby to me. Freaking sexy Hannah with her lush poetry unfurling, petal by petal and inviting us to unfurl with her. The former infantry man who posted about meditation and which gun to get for the apocalypse whose sense of care and balance of the masculine and feminine was truly inspiring and shook up some examined places in me. Which I mean to say, all y’all, let’s keep being angel babies to and with each other.

As always, you honor me, and our shared culture building, with your comments and stories. Who are your angel babies now? Who’s deeply affected your life and wants an angel baby shout out?