“[Tara’s] always the surprise ending before a rebirth beginning.” – Davka
When I slip outside the stars are so bright and close I can almost smell them. What was I doing louging on floors and tubs made of the blood of the earth, extracted, burned, coloured, and molded, when i was born to be inhaling this sky? I have been cheating on the moon with a bathtub. It is not a good feeling.
The starry air tickles my throat going down and stirs around in my chest, a pixie dust more eternal than faeries. This magical air is infused with the land. It’s been exhaled by birch trees with bluebells singing inside them and whispered over the snowy branches of a million scrubby black spruce. A few months ago it was light air, singing a million flowers and moose in rut and muddy rivers always sharing oxygen and songs. It is the same air, still, but thicker. You can not breathe here without knowing and becoming this place, this long cold darkness and the supple strength that endures and becomes it.
I walk a little trail, it’s usual traveller’s tracks obliterated by a fresh snow. All trails are thin and small in the winter. It makes my human feet seem so big and unweildy. I stop at the crest of a hill when I hear an owl. It is not the time of day for owls, but then it is not the conventional time of day for people either. The air around me tinkles, barely audible, with the sound of snowflakes and frozen air. I think the air must pull the moisture from the snow as it falls, and this is the sound I hear: air absorbing water from snowflakes and my breath.
Behind me I know there is still an empty mansion. Warmth, a stove, a bathtub, and windows that reflect the artificial light so that one can’t see the darkness. Empty manions are not the only institutions that do this, I think. A little lower in the valley the owl calls again. Owls are always calling to me to understand a whole environment and take out the unholy in one swoop of wing and beak. Swoop. Swallow. Somehow the process of shrinking worlds, cutting out the un-integral, is nourishing.
Standing in the snow, I make a promise to the air around me, which is the same as the air inside me. No more mansions with their tricks of reflected unwholey light and dark.
I spent a year living in rural Vermont, and this post speaks deeply to me of the sacred time I spent in that sacred space. It was a blessed retreat for me to spend a cycle of seasons embraced by the mountains, and my spirit does ache at times to be back there at bliss with mother nature. But my healing work brings me to the city – mother nature does not need me as much as my brother and sister human beings need healing. Thank you for your vision this morning – it brought me back into my memories and sustains me.
Intoxicating. Damn. I knew these flourescent lights and cubicle walls were slowly killing me. Ah, to know, to live such beauty… Bravo, Tara!
Sometimes, it takes a little diversion to better appreciate one’s path. By the way, have you seen Mars lately? SO beautiful.
I am totally falling in love with you.
Magic…simply magic
I grew up in rural Nova Scotia and would go out at night in the Bay of Fundy with my boat …used to take an air mattress and a sleeping bag and watch the Milky Way and try to spot shooting stars…fell asleep one night and woke up in the middle of the night …sat up and the plankton were making an incredible phosphorescence that spread out from the bow and stern wakes…tide was going out …dipped my hand and marvelled at how it glowed in the dark…glowing starlight dripping from my fingers