A Closing Prayer to Open

Cycles refused and never lived. 

I have always criticized the endless pursuit of Spring and Summer. Creation and full-expression on endless repeat.  That could have been my first clue that I was in my own endless pursuit of Autumn and Winter. Twilight and night, death and dying, mourning and grieving, distilling and hibernating in the cellars of life's offerings my favorite palette.  

Traffic jams on bridges, dead ends, one-way streets going the wrong way, dark alleys, thresholds transformed into endless hallways, hinge moments that rust with immobility. Dust and grime are still gritty under my nails from all my bricklaying and (de)construction work.

So I went to school. Thinking I might learn how to do this better. How to be different. 

I cannot name what I learned, only that it was not that. I can only name what I feel as I stand here, ready to walk deep into the cave I've never visited but unconsciously tried to replicate thousands of times. 

Comfortable warmth surrounds me, a hooded cloak on my shoulders reminding me that I was literally made for this. Hunger and thirst for nourishment I've never had hone my focus forward. Echoes of love, acceptance, and the sound of my name whispered on the lips of so many sisters a soft breeze reminding me that I am not alone, even here. Especially here. Reverence is at my side; this is nothing less than a pilgrimage. An invocation of my own holiness and the desperate hope I will find it.

I did not leave school with empty hands.

My cloak is heavy now, tree sap seeps into the fibers and sings gentle songs of flow in harmony with my lymph.  The steady pulse of drums penetrates its weave, inviting my heart to dance, dance, dance.  Iron runes amplify the chanting wisdom of my bloods, all of them.  Glyphed codex patterns the colors, reflecting moon and star light, inside and out. A mystery shimmers over the fabric, a whispered echoing response to the secrets my womb holds. Shield, sword, bow, and arrows sheathed inside and invisible, offering quiet readiness for necessary predation ever present in my hands.  

As I take my first step, I offer this, my closing prayer. May it open me.

As I sink my feet into the sand of my internal shores, may I embody the truth I have witnessed.  

The ocean welcomes all rivers, as can I.

As I unbury myself from the shallow grave of survival, may I live the truth I have seen.  

Spirals are not labyrinths, unless I make them so. 

As I face the day and all its brightness, may I feel the truth I have known.

The sun also shines for me, no matter how much I exalt the night. 

As I encounter loss and pain, may I cherish the truth I have felt. 

Pyre ashes hold the truth and burden of the past, not I. 

As I experience death in living and life in dying each and every day, may I rejoice in the truth I have received. 

Each sunrise and sunset is a promise kept.

May I be the dignified guardian and reliable witness of the sacred and the wise inherent in each step of every path, starting with my own.

Amen.

Hood up, I follow my gaze with my footsteps, going into the dark again, yes. But not out of habit this time. This time it's to find a different way in, and finally, a way out.  This is not a dead end.  For the first time and always, I go into the dark, guided by the flame that shines through my eyes even when they are closed.

 

L’amante

 Lover, love-her.

Let’s start at the end of this beginning and work our way back.  Back through the fourteen doors between before and after, between you and me. 

When midnight blue and flame orange were the alone and lonely colors of us.  When sunlight was just a bright light and air was just there. 

Dance with me, you said.  Feel what you cannot taste, see, or hear. Let doors be veils we strip away, one by one, their opening an invitation into infinite pleasure, endless seduction. 

I do not say yes, but let my body dance its willingness, snake its way to open. 

Your hair silks along my own, you lay down on me, in me, the weight and weightlessness of you caress me from the inside, feather brush of soft skin on my blood, my bones.  Another subtle body, this one a lover.  Our constellation can no longer be mapped on a flat surface, the texture you’ve brought demands more. And more we shall have. 

Your fingers massage my sinews and my veins, you sing the song my blood knows now is the anthem to life, to being alive and to receiving life.  

Lonely and alone colors run arms wide open into each other, midnight blue of a night sky meets the blaze of a raging fire and dance the perfect night together. 

They whisper love to each other.  They dance and revel and marvel at the beauty they are and that they create in their togetherness. They say silent prayers to the stars they cannot see but know are there. 

May we never again be parted. May we walk and taste this life together.  May we love it all. 

Behind the I

I see you and then ask that me who sees you, who's seeing you?  And her?  I find an endless well of I.

A well, even an endless one, has a bottom, even if the current I isn't blind enough to find it.  

What lies beneath the well?  A river blacker than the darkest night.  Home to everything that becomes nothing because it cannot be seen, it's too dark. Or just dark enough. 

Perhaps all of this, or each part of this, is about extinguishing the lights, one at a time, to arrive in this inky blackness where each thing disappears and becomes both everything and nothing. 

Perhaps that is also true for you, in this life. Unraveling the tangle of power cords to turn off all the artificial lights, the ones that show the parts you think you like, the parts you think make you likeable. Acceptable.

Does the tree next to the streetlight forget it's part of the forest? Does it sing in sweet relief when that light goes out and it is absorbed back into the blackness that is its origin, its creation, and its home?

In my own sweet and brief moments of relief, when the shining light of an I-am-this is put out, may I sink into the ink beneath the well and let myself be written into the darkness, free from a light that would define or identify.  May I find my true sight in the deepest darkness where I can identify nothing, not even parts of me, in a vast forest where my roots touch yours. 

What was

What did I lose when they took you? It felt like it was more than just you. A wise one spoke your voice to me and shared your love for me, your facet of our parting. You told me we were more together, but not less apart. May I learn this math of love and loss.  May I know that I am not less me because you are no longer here in form.  May I remember that your essence is scribed deep inside me and cannot be removed.

The path to losing you was not linear, it was both my losing something and them taking something. No ceremony, no ritual, no honoring of what was, no one to treasure or even use what was taken. For a time, I lost access to parts of me, although maybe that was the plan all along.

This entire lifetime I have danced with form and content. It’s better said in French, forme et fond. Fond as the deepest part, the depths. Form to my south, depths to my north, that is what was written for me.  

A friend offered me a gift recently, the idea that form can be the depths expressing all the way to the surface, rising up to meet the outside world in form. May I honor your absence by embracing my wholeness and enoughness without you here to make it unquestionable.  May I free the she in me who questions it. May our parting be the invitation to allow the depths of completeness to rise to the surface and express as form in movement, not the perfect picture it once was. 

Even if you are with me differently now, I will miss you forever. The more we were together. 

May I offer the honoring that never was, may I find a different kind of more in the loss of you.

I am here for you

The ground vibrates, plates of land slide and crumble, everyone moves, shifted to a new place.

In this land reconfigured, I watch you stand and wonder, confused and still.  You ask, “Then who am I if I am not that one?” You know there is no answer to that question, only ideas that will never be true. Or maybe they’ll be true for a moment, but never accurate.  You ask it anyway, we all do. 

I have no more answers than you, but I do have something to offer. My deepest devotion to what you bring to each moment, forever. 

So let the tears fall and I will drink them all, for they are homeopathic remedies.  My tongue welcomes the salt of your struggles. 

And show me your rage and I will let it burn me, for those flames cleanse and forge.  My skin marvels as it burns and blisters and heals. 

Give me your angst and anguish and I will lap them up, for sour and bitter flavors bring balance and contrast.  My mouth waters for your twists and turns. 

Play your drama and theatrics, I delight in the spectacular spectacle they create, for they whisper to parts within. I have season tickets for all your shows. 

Amplify your deepest pleasure, your most ecstatic jouissance, for your ecstasy is nectar. I could live on its nourishment alone.

More, more, give me more. I will be your greatest lover, I will love it all.

You are not everyone’s medicine, but you are mine. 

The Songs of Grandmothers

No fairy tales or ballads even. Just the music that suits the truth of the words you have to share. 

What don’t we know? Please tell us everything. Not to justify or explain, this is not about those things.  This is about showing us who you have been, the picture of each moment. Not through the lens of a make-it-pretty retelling, but through the voice of the reliable witness. She who sees who she was when it happened and can honor what was, no matter how ugly or beautiful any of it was. 

Grandmothers, who were you when you baked pies and canned vegetables, when you held grand-babies with reverence, when you soothed the tears that others couldn’t?  And then also tell us who were you when you married the predator, when your child died, when you gave your firstborn up, when you beat your child’s thighs with a switch, when you stayed silent to be good, when you taught your daughters how to castrate and flay the men in their lives just as your own grandmother had, when you swallowed your anger and held your tongue, when you lost the ability to stand straight on your own two feet and began to bend like an orchid? Sing us the song of those women that you were.  Strong, weak, lost, terrified, wronged, bitter, angry, joyful, free, afraid, alone, relieved, caring, loving, nurturing, harsh, judgmental, condemning, welcoming. 

Sing us the song of the steps on your path so we can remember that we came from somewhere. We came from a path you were part of. Show us so we can know what we are made of. 

Tell us the truth, tell us everything. We want to know all of it.

If you have already passed and didn’t sing us your song, sing it to us from beyond. We will hear you.  We are listening. 

Please sing us your songs, Grandmothers.

Tell us who you were.  

Come to Life

Let this be the end of fine. 

I told you I went through something hard.  I saw the fear in your eyes, it was once in my own.  You quickly ask me if I’m okay now. 

I ask us both silently, when was I not okay? Was it when I had cancer? What about when I walked far from the edge of the bridge, lest I be tempted to jump, but still went to work and bought groceries? When I was outside-okay and inside-miserable?  When I was spread so thin, between the rock of my internal pressure to perform and find value in the eyes of others and the hard place of a world reflecting that back to me?  We did not wonder about my okay-ness then.  

What did the not-okay-ness of having cancer mean to you? What did it mean to me?  That I will die? That’s always been true and is still true.  That you will die?  That has always been true and is still true.

What does it mean when I reply that I am okay now? That we can forget it ever happened?  Pretend that my death, or yours, is any less certain?

All the landscapes of my experience, all the seasons inside of it. I don’t live there anymore, but the time I spent there changed me and wanting or needing me to be okay feels like a desire to build condos on a cemetery and pretend like nothing is buried there.  

Things were laid to rest in that cemetery, parts of me.  A breast, a layer of innocence, a dysfunctional relationship with work, habitual self-sacrifice, powering through, chronic overriding of my body’s request to stop, to rest, to be, to feel.  Echoes remain but they’re just echoes. 

Before I had cancer, I survived, nothing more.  Now I live, or at least try to. These past four years have been about coming to life.  

So I will not build condos on that cemetery, no one should live there, including me.  Nor will I build a monument there.  May I let it be a resting place for the past, the remains at peace, undisturbed and left to slowly return to ash. 

May I remember that fine and okay are just words, not promises.

May I honor the dead and remember that I am alive.  May I honor what has been and embrace what is. May I allow that tome of my life to be closed and placed upon a shelf while I turn to the next tome with a beginner’s mind.   

Magicienne

Your footfalls silenced by the soft forest floor, you move towards the meeting place where you never meet.  Closer still, greeted only by silence and a heavy wooden door.

Shelves of wood carved from knowing trees, lined with bottles and vials, potions and elixirs. Reminders that deep work is done here - transformations, macerations, alchemy.  That work is not your mystery to hold, it belongs to another, the one from the north who works in the shadows. 

The forest surrounds, grown so tall that daylight is subtle and soft, and the dark is never far. 

In this place,  past, present, and future are now.  

In this place, you are the night sky.  

Moon held softly in your hands, you whisper into the wind.  The wind that knows that past, present and future are now. 

It is to that wind that you make your offerings, that is the mystery you hold.  Discernment, knowing which spell to take off the shelf and speak into the wind. Faith, believing it will be heard and received.  

One more offering as you leave this place, a gift to the keeper of this space, honoring the devotion to her craft.   You walk away, honoring your devotion to your own. 

Be Witched

What if I took my own sword, heirloom and legacy, down from its place above the mantel and made it the sacred blood-letting tool for this rite?

And what if the shining blade of each scalpel that carved into me, was, in fact, the tip of that very sword? Shape shifted for precision work, cloaked and disguised for your hand so you could play high priest, lay me on your altar and slice me open again and again?  

That would mean it was always and ever only my ritual, not yours.  

That would mean I am Sorceress.

And what if each slice transformed me into a stained glass window, lit from behind by the moon? 

That would mean the reflection in the mirror that tells the story of deep cuts is a codex that speaks of a cauldron in my belly. 

That would mean the traces on my body are runes, crafted by me, for me.  Spells that etched themselves into my flesh, guided by the whispered invocations of my cells.  

That would mean my craft resides in my very flesh, the strongest spells from my grimoire scribed on my skin. 

What if those runes speak of pleasure, desire? What if they invoke power, presence?  

That would mean I am Witch.

A Prayer to a Season

Autumn calls me forth to honor and release.  Harvest and grieve.  

Wise Willow, I found you here, the living breath of your growth and survival an invitation to find you in me.  Sacred Birch, forever starry in my eyes, I found myself in your sky space for the first time.  Trees of my childhood who held me and offered me shelter and solace, mystery and magic, silent witnesses to the homeless ones within me.  

May I know you are here even when I cannot see you.  May I release myths of rootlessness and isolation, abandonment and rejection. May I relinquish the refugee and embrace the sovereign.  May I know I am as much a part of this forest as you. Nourished, safe, connected, home where I stand. May I know my roots intertwine with yours no matter how far I travel.  May I know I am always home, for I am here. 

Waters.  Temple tears, a call to dance, flow, feel, remember.  No drop of water is ever wasted, there is no such thing.  May I know this of my own waters.  

Dragonflies. Little books, tales of adventure and journeys beyond the illusions of limitations. 

May I hope, change, and love life as you do.  May I accept transformation and let it bring me into my fullest expression of beauty as you do, acceptance based on nothing but faith that it will be so. 

Weave, in and out, over and under. 

May I remember all this as the same artistry that also created me. May I see life through the stained glass window of your beauty.  May I cherish my breath as a cool autumn breeze. May I revere my tears as wild ocean waves.  May I worship my flesh as magnificent landscapes.  May I glorify my blood as hearth fire. 

That was out, now comes in.  

So far in that I find emptiness. The ribbons of others left to fall and furl back into their source. 

Channel or container, may I remember that here,  I am no thing, no one.  

May I remember that I am the promise of elements responding to the breath of the moment. 

Shimmery and reflective.  Water at night on a full moon, let me show you to you.  

May I dance us back home, sing us awake.  

 

It is done

She blinks, awakening to the harsh brush of rough stone beneath her fingertips, surprised to be standing. Images flood, not fall, into her eyes as they blink and pull her out of the trance only the deepest of art-making can bring.  Her nose just a breath away from that same stone, she cannot see the art that must be there. The smeared paint on her fingertips tell her it is there and that she has made it.  Or been a part of its making.

The echo of a whispered possibility of a somewhere else that might have been or might be floats down, soft as rose incense into the cave.  How does she know this place is down? Because nowhere this dark could exist anywhere else.

Rose calls to her, she follows. 

She moves through worlds, free.  Memories of a someone who might have been her a lifetime ago float in as scents change and light becomes a possibility.  Those memories dance and flow around her, brightly painted scarves she doesn't need to wear.  She feels no chill in this air.

Steady footsteps, her own, land and ground on each step as they appear before her.  She climbs, breath strong, steady, and sure. No rush, no effort.  She does not wonder about what comes next, there is no next, only now.

Exiting what was and what has been, seven staircases later, her feet are met by the caress of morning dew, soft medicine like the tears she has wept, a promise of a sun that will rise.  She casts a final glance to the steps she has climbed, the unseen spiral they formed.  It is done. She sits in the grass wet with the promise of morning and becomes part of that promise.

First Ground of Creation

Two inhales, one exhale.  Fast enough and long enough to make my body tingle and my hands cramp into claws, my primal hands held before me as you appear to watch me weep and breathe.  We started at twilight and the sky is dark now. 

Flying or falling, only those two with us, never the sacred third - free. 

Your soul’s patience, kind and tender, meets me through the mirror.  It whispers sweet somethings to me.  My beloved, it says, that thing you think I have and won’t give you?  I don’t have it, I never did.  That thing you think I am and won’t be for you?  I’m not that, I never was.

You show me, with such gentleness, the rugged terrain of us. You show me that the treasure was in my hands all along, whole and complete.

Time shifts then, past, present, and future stack up and are all now.

The creation of all our us-ness is now, this moment, here on this ropy blanket in this very darkness.  

The woven shawl of time has wrapped itself around my life and brought me onto your path then, all those years ago, so you could be this for me today.  The one who whispers through the mirror.  The one who said yes. I will be this lie for you so you can find truth.  

Free.

I do not know, I may never, what I have agreed to be for you. But I pray it is a gift, or will be someday.  I hope you'll have a moment, maybe while you're waiting for the darkness to envelope you, when you realize that everything you thought you could find in me, is already there in you. 

She who welcomes

Not loud, just persistent.  Repeated, rhythmic even.  Knocking at the door for months or maybe even years, they all feel the same now.  I don’t believe in time anymore, other than to meet a friend for coffee.  We agree on a moment and call it a time. But using it to pace and measure moments of my life? Befores and afters and whens seem like dangerous concepts meant to keep me on a track that doesn’t exist unless I play along.  

Back to the knocking of the uninvited intruder outside. What will I find, weariness, when I let you in as a welcomed traveler deserving of minimally civilized hospitality?  As opposed to ignoring your pleas for food and water at my door?   

Your stay is more brief than I expected, you breeze through like a draft when I thought surely you would be the worst kind of squatter, impossible to dislodge. I feel the change in decor though, even as you leave.  This is a home where weariness can find shelter, however brief.  There’s now a new painting in my living room I’ve never seen before but now love. It is deep blues and night skies and a calm I thought impossible if you were in my life.  I felt my bones give in while you were here, I thought it meant I would collapse.  It did not.  It meant I could stop wearing the heavy coat of she-who-shall-never-be-weary.   Instead, those bones remembered they’re a living, responsive system of collagen and mineral crystals that adapt to context and load.   They adapted to the relief of one less retaining wall to hold up. 

Dissolution

That which you spent years, decades, building from the outside falls away; you remember that concrete is made of sand. Another consequence of no longer running from water.  The water runs you instead, it has sought out the hidden places and made its quiet path to the deep down darkness. Without you even knowing it, it has dissolved the structure from the inside, all your engineering prowess now muddy depths you must walk through.  

Like the first time things shattered, you did not see this coming. You dress up for the ballet and end up in a mosh pit. And while - obviously - some part of you must have wanted this, your own sneakiness comes as a surprise. Again. 

What you always worked so hard to have, to be, those are now only ideas of what might be. And what has been left behind, a trace of what never was.

Nature of lies

He tells you to strip.  Or maybe he asks.  The distinction, while important to you, is not to him.  His delivery of the word allows it to be either and most certainly permits him to believe it was a request when he retells the story for his most wrapt audience.

And so you strip.  Not particularly slowly or even carefully, this is not a striptease - this is a revealing, an unveiling. Seven layers down, clothes off, what will meet your skin? Not the warmth you expect.

Scrutiny, assessment, evaluation, appraisal. 

You can only stop what starts in you.

You learned this once, on a platform in a train station.  You felt the fish hook perforating your gut and with calm precision, you unhooked it, held it up to the light and let it go. Such a simple task and yet so difficult, it took years to get to that train station.

This is no fishhook, it is a web of lies, grooves on tracing paper from so many reproductions. His signature on it, amongst so many others, surprises you. He would not like to know it’s there. 

This natural thing, used unnaturally. You remind yourself it is wood pulp and charcoal, this web, these lies.  They willingly yield to the flames you light to burn them. 

The only thing we know

A pointed look that groped and grabbed, despite, or maybe even because of the crowd around the playing field.  Home field advantage and this is not your home.  This is a math class.  Do you remember that day? The day when that math teacher, or was he a wrestling coach, taught the whole class that you were the sum of your parts. He was the math teacher, how could we question a formula he taught us?

Decades later, when the sum of your parts has been altered, all the accounts of the past have to be recounted, ledgers balanced, coupons redeemed. 

Mull this over.  With tea maybe,  probably an oolong because this is a time to recognize the subtle gifts of oxidation and fermentation.  Of exposing things to air and waiting.  Of letting things go off a little bit. 

Air is your element now, with a flick of your wrist the axis shifts again, linear time becoming vertical, just long enough for the scales of justice to balance out.  You leave that class again, but this time the mistress of a different kind of math.  

My new lover

A coffeeshop artist, you have found so many creative ways to state and restate your suffering as art, your victimization breathtaking nudes of you on the walls and everything done to you as living theater, played out again and again, encore performances for rapt audiences.  A subtle shift, but not really, in the music they play here has made you rethink the basis of your performance art.  You’ve seen others spin softer tales to match the times, think maybe you should.

This is not that.

This is scrubbing through the plaque on the arteries of what beats beneath all of that art.  

A different kind of detective you’ll be, no longer looking for art in the stories, but rather sleuthing for beauty and meaning in the blackest sky of the darkest night of the deepest descent.  Not to deny the night sky.  There is no pretending a descent is anything other than what it is.  Not to sprinkle artificial sweetener on poison.  Nor even to create homeopathic doses of it to trigger immune responses.  

This is not that either.

This is a wild dance with darkness.  Facing, an embrace.  You feel his grip on your nape, his lips on your neck, his other hand on your hip, leading this dance.  You’ll still bleed, it’s still a dance with darkness.  But this embrace, this wicked dance, it is where the honey comes from. Just enough to staunch the bleeding and save your life. 

Dangerous lover, barely a lover at all.  But a lover nonetheless.

Redemption

The whole point of tapestry is to capture the story, weaving in colors of time and context.  To be hung on a wall, maybe inside a museum, seen by many.  If the sources of light are managed, the colors can last for thousands of years, preserving the tales it tells. 

A lifelong patron of the arts, you’ve made unique contributions.  As you sit on the floor unraveling a priceless piece of art, you’re forced to reconsider that particular commitment to the arts. Security guards run in, you nearly get tasered. They settle for a fine, but it’s a hefty one. 

Best purchase you’ve made in a long time, maybe ever. 

As the tapestry unraveled in your hands, the past was not undone, the events remain as they ever were.  But the tales told now, the colors used here, they are colors that didn’t exist then.  They are the deep shades, gem colors of mercy, witnessing, and compassion. Not the blind kind.  The seeing kind.  

The hand that once covered your mouth so you could not scream, the other that choked you so you could not breathe, the knife held to your gut to keep you compliant and in place, the ropes that tied your hands and feet so you could not fight back or run.  They are all reunited with the other side of their coin.  

The rivers of blood and truth run together and you dance on its banks.

Hell and high water

Engineering runs in that family, usually the more well known kind, their lives filled with structures they’ve designed and built.  Civil, but not really, the father built dams and locks, worked on rivers his whole life.  No mistake there, a man of water himself, he never concerned himself with what holds the rivers in, but rather trying to control and manipulate their power, flow, and force.  

At the mercy on the inside, we work on the outside. 

One generation down, another one, a linguist this time. Analyzing the slippery intent mapped into structure, sound, and meaning. Decomposing, composing.  Years spent reading the braille of depth, feeling and energy in clumsy stick figures.  Feeling the lies and making an artful science out of studying them.

Another generation down, the structure of connection and connectivity.  The central column he’s named science for now is a quest to identify, create, and modify links.  He feels too much, holds too many so he’ll spend his life understanding how they work, trying to make them work for him. 

In the space where time is vertical,  these three live at once, their lives spent running from water, while calling it something else. 

In traditional time, one Sunday this month, one door closed. No more dams, no more locks. Just a river and its banks.  Free.

One day soon, the quest to understand the lies, make them somehow true, make their utterance somehow acceptable, will end. Another kind of freedom.

Someday maybe the scientist of links will uncover what he doesn’t want to know.  He was always free. 

And so we dance

Smooth, refined. Hands that don’t exactly match the whole, you’ve contemplated them many times. Now you know why. They are hands you know.

What are hands if not extensions of the heart, worldly instruments for the otherworldly? Those hands have reached out to you thousands of times. 

As they brush past you this time around, you wonder at the music playing in the background.  Its tone is deep, saturated with something strong and ancient.  A song that was composed forever ago and that is textured and layered each time it plays for us. Another unclosed loop, we hear it and in response, our pulses, our blood reach out to it, caress it, leave traces. The moment of its creation and our listening forever on a vertical axis existing all at once and weaving us into the music itself. It does not end.

Thick and heavy, nostalgia and regret were the first couple to make it onto the dance floor this time. Why exactly have you invited them to this life?  Their haze is thick, we can barely see each other.

But there it is, as it has always been, home and belonging in the scent of smoke and earth that is you. 

Heart and lungs full, yes. But we know life is in the exhale, not the inhale.  Would you hold your breath if you thought it were your last?