Sacred Space: or, Sitting a Spell

 

This meditative essay has been published in MockingOwl Roost (Volume 2, Issue 3:  Introspection), and is surely nothing if not introspective.  I felt extremely lucky to have found the space inside this discombobulated year to dwell from time to time in a lovely cerebral realm, lofty and light and well above the fog-line, and was happy to be shaping a gauzy blue and silver tissue of ideas in defiance of my off-and-on-again dull fuzzy-headedness.  The finished piece feels almost like things I wrote in graduate school, when I was fully in my element.

 

At some point while sitting a spell, I came across this poem about quiet power that seemed to beautifully sum up the power I was summoning (or hoping to) in my meditations.

 

The Quiet Power

I walked backwards, against time

and that’s where I caught the moon,

singing at me.

I steeped downwards, into my seat

and that’s where I caught freedom,

waiting for me, like a lilac.

I ended thought, and I ended story.

I stopped designing, and arguing, and

sculpting a happy life.

I didn’t die. I didn’t turn to dust.

Instead I chopped vegetables,

and made a calm lake in me

where the water was clear and sourced and still.

And when the ones I loved came to it,

I had something to give them, and

it offered them a soft road out of pain.

I became beloved.

And I came to know that this was it.

The quiet power.

I could give something mighty, lasting,

that stopped the wheel of chaos,

by tending to the river inside,

keeping the water rich and deep,

keeping a bench for you to visit.

– Tara Mohr

 

 

image:  Antelope Canyon, Arizona (reminding me as well of the quiet and sacred space—humming with possibility—that has been photographed by Adrian Borda inside cellos)

Day of the Dead

 

This story, just published in the Emotional Transitioning issue of Woodcrest Magazine,  moves through dreams and memories and hazy longings from San Miguel d'Allende, Mexico, to towns in northern New Mexico; makes brief forays to Georgetown and the Hudson River, to the Oregon coast and off to Turkey; attends a wedding on a southern California beach; and leaves us for the time being unable to travel to the mirage that is Paris, France.

 

"Lili had started dreaming of San Miguel d'Allende just after the New Year, when colors had been leached from the world as they had long since from her parched spirit.  Flavors and smells too—though the ravaging disease that took those things away officially was mostly still unknown, wouldn't arrive in the southwest United States for a couple of months.  Since Xavier's death Lili had suffered from a color deficiency the way others did a deficiency of iron or vitamin B-12, vitamin C.  Her grown children had tried to coax her out of it, with varying degrees of concern and exasperation, not knowing what healing tonics to offer.  Herbs, roots, spices (like pineapple Tepache from the streets of Mexico, with allspice berries, cinnamon, cayenne—something Xavier's grandmother would have ladled down her mercilessly at the least sign of flagging or floundering.  But she'd been resistant to all efforts to cure her until the kachinas brought colors back on Christmas day, and after that the dreams began and like Abuelita Juana and her herbs, like Xavier and his hog bristle paintbrushes, wouldn't let up. Cajoling and prodding, butting in until she couldn't possibly do other than they wanted.  Invite him back."

 

The main characters here appear in my linked stories "Tin Mask" and "Kachinas," not yet published, and are connected to the characters in "The Persian Warrior" and "L'Inconnue de la Seine."  The denouement in Paris follows in another of the linked stories, "The Inheritance."

 

 

image:  source unknown