Red dust. White-skinned ghost gums. This is the dreaming land. Alive with tens of thousands of years of walking, remembering. One does not venture here without waking sleeping memories riding deep.

This is the dreaming land.

Ten months after my mother’s death, this journey is my journey to find a way to start to speak to my loss, to begin to loosen a tightly woven, deeply buried grief.

It starts with a dream. The first into which she has entered. And it is an absence. An eerie, haunting absence.

A house, strange, empty, but for a dress hanging in a vacant room. Yellow. 1960s style. I don’t quite remember it, yet I know it’s her. Another room, another dress. Turquoise. Coral. Soft green. Each one suspended, mid-air, as I move from room to room.

It disturbs me. My mother aches my sleeping soul.

I never see her. I sense her. I feel her near. Not the bent, fragile figure of her later years. The younger. The beautiful. My mother. My friend.

I wake in tears. The first since she died. The tears will rest on my dusty cheek, choke my voice, now, every time she comes to mind. Every time I speak my loss. My pain.

The dreams, strange, distorted, struggle to the surface. Nightly. Mother. Sometimes my father too, but he has presence—odd, ghost-formed—when he appears.

But my mother will continue as that absence, that spirit, rising from the land, rocky passages, red dirt, ghost gums. The woman who birthed me will be carried on my breath, my heart beats. Slow, cautious, painful steps. As we walk, as we sleep, here in this precious, harsh, and gracious desert in support of the women who know and live this land.

My mother is their gift to me. My song of mourning. Night into day.

This is the dreaming land. One does not venture here without waking sleeping memories riding deep.

…