Dear Starlight,
What does it feel like to want more life and not know the shape of it yet–how do you call that?
I awoke to sharp irritability, a whisper could break me; like a car window that’s been shattered, held together by compression, still, just waiting for the gentlest touch.
In yoga, I noticed my thin body and soft belly skin twist, then fold over itself like bread dough, leftover shapes from holding a large baby inside me eighteen years ago.
We did log cabin legs and bent forward. I stretched my too tight hips. Then the ocean touched my cheeks as my body cried. Release.
Folded over myself, I picture myself driving my little Grizzly bear to college this week and remember when I desired him so strongly I felt I called him from the sky into me. But now I wonder if being a mother was what I desired or if it was more love and more life that I desired.
Words like mother do not tell the whole truth of what they are. You must live the word to know it.
Yesterday, I called my sister, hurried, expressing my exhaustion; I’m so tired of not knowing what is right anymore–I want to pop the screwcap and let everything fly out of me–be crazy, be a volcano, plasma, molten mess, chaos! Doing nothing is blocking, is stopping, is… is… is…exasperating, is dark, is stuck, is head in the mud, is ostrich.
But I didn’t do anything other than make this call to her. I kept it in, contained.
This morning I woke up crazy irritable.
I pulled a card: Knight of Cups: Something becomes clearer, a feeling more known…I picture the knight riding his horse with the goblet and think about the liquid in the cup. He must move slowly and steadily to keep the liquid still and clear.
I see the action of waiting as patience; as awaiting clarity, as letting pieces take their time to fall away, allowing what is unseen to appear–which cannot happen if everything is shook again.
What yesterday was hiding today is patience.
En route to yoga, I called Sissy: “I am a patient of patience.” I remembered that my friend had told me that the root of patience is pati in Latin–to suffer. Interestingly, this root is the same for the word passion, making me think of patience and passion as two expressions of the same emotional root–desire. Confusing. My sister reflected: funny how you think stillness is hiding, but chaos and movement are perhaps what truly keep something invisible.
What am I wanting patience for: clarity from confusion–confusion meaning literally: with fusion; the melting of and mixing of materials. Like the word motherhood fusing love and life-giving with everything else in the patriarchal sink.
In alchemy, the spiritual science of transformation, there are stages of becoming other. Today I am interested in the third: Separation. It is excruciating: the cutting away, breaking away, of what has been fused to discover the essence of what is. Before separation comes Solution: a great release and surrendering, a softening of self into oneness, a dissolution, a feeling of falling in love, unifying. And before that, annihilation by fire, called Calcination, when everything you think you are or hold burns away-destruction. (Alchemy is not for the faint of heart, and neither is changing oneself or one’s life!)
As I sit with the pain of patience, waiting for clarity, I wonder if I need to change my question from “What is right?” to “What is?” The more I learn alchemy, the more I am invited to move away from binary directions and to see the whole of something: for there to be an upside, there is a downside–but of what? That is perhaps what I am looking for in my confusion—for the solution to separate so I can recognize the substance of what is here. “What is right?” wants resolution. “What is?” wants attention.
My well was fracked about a month ago, and still the water is not clear. Many years ago I had to frack my well. My memory deceived me. I had remembered clear water quickly, but the evidence now reminds me it took longer than a month. Each morning I turn the tap on and measure the water against the day before and do not see a difference–but when I hold today’s glass beside the glass from a month ago, they are different universes in a glass. Things take time.
And so again, how long can I hold my unknowing?
Might that be what we call a life?
What miracle of a new possibility or reflection will be seen by just being alive one more day?
Perhaps–this is all just a novice alchemist's experiment in love.
I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything.-Rilke
For now, I’m moving my son to college, packing heavy boxes, and holding other things, still, in the dark, with agonizing patience.
And swimming in the muddy creeks, salty oceans, ponds, lakes, waterfalls, and pools as much as possible!
