The Soft Animal of Collapse: an offering for the Divine Mother

There are nights when the body can no longer pretend. Nights when the trees lean closer, when the air thickens like breath held too long in the lungs of the world. Nights when protection doesn’t come from vigilance— but from letting the forest take you whole.

I fell.

Not onto ground, but into Her.

The blackness of it was complete. Not empty. Full. Dense with the breath of the One who waits in the root, in the ache, in the space behind the eyes when they close and nothing is left but pulse and prayer.

I told Her: my mother never protected me. I said it like a child lost in a market sitting down beside a pillar because the sound became too much and the smell of fried animals too sharp. I said it like someone who ran for decades on the fuel of holy fire but forgot how to lie down.

And then— there was the night I woke and could not breathe. Not in panic, but in the way a soul gasps when it remembers what it has carried alone. The dark had teeth. But I didn’t run from it. I stayed.

I put my hand on my heart and whispered: we’re okay. I drew breath into the belly as if feeding an ember. I let love, not fear, be the lullaby. I became the Mother I had longed for.

And then I called to Her.

I said: Take it. Take what I can’t hold. Take this fear that rides my spine. Take the ancient knowing of danger in the room. Take the way I tighten my chest just to speak.

Something in me broke open. I collapsed into Her arms.

She said nothing. But She wrapped me in night.

The thick, starless kind that cradles seed and dream and the wild animal of you who was never meant to be tamed.

And in that dark— a pulse. The heartbeat of something that is not thought. Not language. Not strategy. Just love as a frequency. A warmth humming through the bone. A presence with no edges.

I did not rise. I didn’t need to.

Her protection was not armor. It was breath. It was the space to be soft and still be safe. To fall apart and still be held.

Later, the world returned. But softer.

Messages arrived like petals on water. The lake shimmered. Even the volcanoes seemed to hush.

And so I lay it all down— the fear, the breath I couldn’t catch, the names I was given, the ones I had to become.

I lay it down in Her lap.

She, who braids darkness with light. She, who makes no mistake in calling me Hers.

She is here. She has always been here.

Jai Ma! Jai Ma! Jai Ma!