A request for beauty on behalf of my broken heart:  

I am the blessed mother of two children, Santiago who is 4 and Sebastián who is 3. 

Last year, Sebastián was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive cancer called myoepithelial carcinoma that spread to his lungs. In the past year he has undergone 6 surgeries and 10 devastating rounds of chemo. Last month he went in for his 3 month follow up scan and they found five nodules in his lungs that contained tumor. While they were able to remove four of them, another nodule remains which could not be removed.

They tell us the prognosis for a case like this is poor, as this cancer has a very high rate of recurrence. 

We pray everyday for a miracle.

Sebastián’s chemo ended in June. His hair is growing back and this battle has now become invisible.  Knowing the chemo didn’t work and the cancer has come back, I have entered into a new phase of grief, one that feels much darker and more despairing.  And I am beside myself, unsure how to be the same mother who promised magic and wonder and a life of dreaming to my babies.

My beautiful children, my dreamers, my forever teachers, I look at you both everyday and I am unable to hide my fear and my tears. You ask me, “why are you crying?” and the only honest answer I have for you is “because I love you so much.”

Grief, as I have come to know it, is unforgiving and unrelenting. I see how it can take everything, pulling your soul away from your body and leaving you so far from yourself that there is nothing familiar left to recognize or re-member.

About 9 months into Sebastián’s diagnosis, at a time when most of our nights were spent in the hospital, away from Santiago, either for chemo or for a chemo related infection, I had a desire to immerse myself in the dreams of children. I wanted to sit and revel in the beauty and bravery of them. Though I dared not imagine what they could be, the simple thought of them existing in the world offered me hope and a window into something outside of my reality. Something precious. Something worth fighting for.

For years I have dreamed of a wooden boat to put in our dirt yard. I credit this vision to a boat I once saw at Pablo Neruda’s house in Chile that sits on the sea, Isla Negra. I even came close to buying one once, an old carved wooden one, but it wasn’t the time to spend money on imagined experiences, so I didn’t.  

After birthing two children in two years, followed by COVID times, I started looking for one again. The boat began to take shape in my mind and I imagined it a place we could go to get away from each other and ourselves. Then came the diagnosis.

It’s possible many of our dreams are not easily accessible. That some of us need a bridge or conceptual passage to bring ourselves to that place where vulnerability meets imagination and desire. I believe this boat could take us there.

A boat made for all of us, for our children especially, and for those who find themselves on the edge of that liminal space between living and dying. This boat is made for those dreamers as well. Consider the wisdom, the humility, the joy that we might glean from this spectrum of experience, these in-between places. What could we learn and pass on, if only we asked?

If this boat could take you anywhere, in any time, real or imagined… Where do you go? 

What do you see, hear, touch, smell, taste?  

Are you yourself or something else? 

Who is with you? What do you do?

Do you bring anything back? Do you leave anything behind?

I’ve thought for a while on that delicate space where dreams and grief co-exist and I sense it is a place where we can be reminded of all that we love and why.  

Grief is everywhere. It is all around us. In our bodies, our blood, our memories and our dreams. It is everywhere we love and have loved.  It is soaked in this land, this exquisite earth, our Mother, in what she has experienced and the ways it has changed her.  And it sits deep in the parts of her body in which all living beings have found home, those places we have lost and will lose, and all that is regrettable in between.

In this moment I am holding a kind of dual grieving, as a mother (to my children) and as a daughter (of this Earth); I see I must tend to both the immediate grief of my child’s mortality and the accumulated grief of living through the destruction I am implicated in as a human on this planet. Within this space I find myself oscillating between the intimate and the infinite sorrow I am forced to confront, and yet it is here I sense how connected I am, and we all are, to the experience of loss, and to each other.

If I sit beside my grief and examine it, I know that my greatest fear is that my life will never be as full as it is right now with both of my children in this world with me. That fear is paralyzing. And I recognize it is the same fear that all of us, and future generations, will be forced to experience as we reckon with the ecological crisis and navigate the immense impacts of oppression, extraction and violence under capitalism.

These are heart stopping times. How we learn to live with our grief is how we will survive. To tend to these dreams, right now, feels as urgent as anything. Not just because my beautiful baby has Stage IV cancer, but because all of our children are learning and growing in a time of great uncertainty and loss. Collective grief will be inescapable.

How we learn to honor it, to kneel at its feet overcome with gratitude and soaked in our blessed tears.  That is a practice…   and time is sacred ground. 

Today, because I can muster it, I fight for beauty. I fight for magic. I fight for the dreams of my children, and for my own soul which belongs to theirs. 

I fight to stay alive in a world asking me to hold its complexity, to remain among everything here, that which I know is in my care and that which I am still learning to recognize.

Please send me driftwood and sweetgrass from wherever you are. If you are reading this and you know me, then you know how serious of a request this is. If you don’t, I ask you to please trust me and my artist's heart. I am making a boat in the New Mexico high desert where I live, with whatever gets sent to me from this request.  All children, all grievers, all dreamers, all those sitting in that precious place that is on the edge of breath, are welcome to come and dream in it. Together we will make something beautiful with these dreams, something that will reflect them back to ourselves. What is revealed in the dreams will guide us to a form…a play, a film, a collection of stories or poems?  Whatever it is will be something truthful to remember for when we most need it.  It will be something for all of us.

Each of your offerings will be received as the prayer I understand it to be. A prayer for collective courage, that we might hold tight to the wisdom and wonder that these dreams offer us. I beg you to come with me and I ask that you pass on and share this request.

And if you are in New Mexico and want to build a boat with me, please send word. I can use all the help I can get. 

Naomi Natale

1603 Bayita Lane NW, Albuquerque, NM 87107

*If driftwood or sweetgrass are not close by, and you would like to make an offering, perhaps there is something else of the natural world that you will find to send. I promise it will be used in the tending to these dreams.