Dear river, dear metal, dear thread, dear wish,

There is a pile of long slender candles to your right as you enter. The room is small and smells like honey and metal. I stand for hours in this room, blinds closed to the city, as the day turns to night. At home my children are always looking for the moon now. Here though, in this room, I hold water in my hands and hear the wishes of those who stand across from me. 

I listen to the echo of the wishes shared, the call and response of the wishes a human heart knows how to hold. Wishes are negative space, a longing in our bones, the dream an ancestor carried, a knowing that needs to be spoken, a desire that is searching for a form. 

In this room there is space for two human bodies, three bodies of water and the astral body of the person invoked by name; the grandmother, the child, the lover, the sibling. Those who walk with the cherry blossoms. The river, the lake and the ocean sit in bowls on white fabric 40 feet long sewn by my mother, carried in a bag with 600 pennies. 

This is the story of an evening of ceremony in a room within an art show. At the end of which I felt emptied out, becoming a vessel for the wishes of all those who visited the well. Sometimes we become water. This night I was water, moved and moving in response to the moon and the tenderness a human reveals when they utter a wish. A wish holds within it humanity, the vulnerable vibration of a want, a longing, a desire unmet. To have a wish is to be human, to be unfinished, to hold within you a desire for some thing. 

I wish for my son to know peace 

I wish to find someone to love who will love me back 

I wish for my power to be known 

I wish for my mother to be healthy 

I wish for everything to be as good as it is now

I wish for protection over the women in my life who are pregnant 

I wish for the will to keep going 

By candlelight and by voice 

By beeswax and by thread 

By water and by pennies 

By longing 

and before the witness 

We cast spells with our hopes 

Intentions and wishes 

A small flower was picked 

And she died soon after 

She lies before the wishing well 

Her body a poem 

The well is her ocean 

May we honor water in all its forms

May we honor the wishes that live in our hearts, minds 

And imaginations 

May we remember that each of us carries within us 

Unmet desires and the ability to cleanse 

And cast a wish

To be tender, human and wanting 

Before one another.