Weaver at the Crossroads

A cigarette burns between her fingers An old ritual, a language of smoke. Sometimes she hides behind it. Sometimes she steps inside it and dances. Smoke becoming veil, veil becoming doorway. She has spent a lifetime reaching between worlds. Not the world of fairy tales. The world of dishes. The world of grief. The world of ancestors who arrive while the laundry is being folded. She stands at the crossroads, calling names older than memory, carrying every version of herself: The little girl the wounded child. The one who wandered, the seeker, the mother She carries them all. And in her eyes live both wonder and heartbreak. Joy flashes there. Then sorrow. Like wind changing direction. She gathers the threads and keeps weaving She has climbed mountains. She has sat in ditches. She has counted coins for groceries. Sold her blood for beer Traded freedom for safety. Buried dreams before people. She has walked beside the broken, held them, listened to their stories as if they were sacred texts. Sometimes she wonders whether compassion is simply brokenness learning another language. She keeps walking. Not because she has mastered the road, but because the lesson is always waiting a little farther ahead. The mountaintop pagoda. The city street. The chanting. The drumming. Walk through her living room. Past Buddha heads
and plants reaching toward sunlight. Past candles,
bones,
and small altars
built from memory. A monk in one room.
A drunk in the next. Incense and Grand Marnier.
Prayer and heartbreak. She moves between them
carrying coffee,
carrying prayers,
carrying hope. Another strand, another knot Dreams faded. Visions remained She welcomes change, then cries out in fear when it arrives. She falls. She rises. She gathers another scar. She enters the forest again. The dark one. The living one. The one that lights a single step only when she is afraid. She knows them all She has walked beside them— Hecate at the crossroads, Persephone beneath the earth, Oya inside the storm... Their voices rising from dreamtime, from root and river, from memory and bone. Fairy folk at the window. Ancient rhythms rising from the woods. Elders placing medicine into hands she still does not trust. Ancestors whispering. The dead. The living. The unborn. The remembered. She belongs to them all. She has crossed another threshold. Grandmother. Elder. Crone. Not an ending,
but a widening. Her medicine has become quieter. Less about seeking. More about tending. More about witnessing. More about placing
a thread
into another's hand... then watching 
as they begin
their own weaving. She looks back across six decades of chasing something unnamed. A path winding through heartbreak, wonder, failure, grace. She no longer mistakes healing for becoming someone she was never meant to be. The loom awaits The cigarette has burned nearly to the filter. Smoke curls upward. Like every prayer
she has ever forgotten
she was praying. The voices call from every direction. From root and bone. From dream and memory. From the living. From the ancestral realms. She listens. She steps forward. the forest opens. the smoke parts. She knows every path now. The moss. The roots. The places where light hesitates. And still
every time she enters
it asks her name. As she steps forward,
she carries the loom. Heavy now in her weathered hands,
filled by grief, wonder,
and names she refuses to forget. The broken. 
The holy. 
The living. 
The dead. She gathers the threads. And keeps weaving.