Mandee told Gretchen the storm would be here soon and would last for 36 hours, and it made me laugh and reminisce on how I used to describe Oregon Coast weather when I first left here and moved home to Maryland in 2005. Coast storms? We call them hurricanes back east...
It was steady the rain, all night. I took a long, long lavender and Epsom salt soak in Gretchen's tub reading til past midnight and the rain by then had already taken on a soothing rhythm, like someone was steady going over and over the roof with a giant rolling pin. Now, outside my window the only thing that cuts the rolling hum is the counter beat of splats from the gutter overflow, and the tweet of some soaking wet birds. I woke up to the heaviest dream, heavy in content but also like sludge in my muscles that's how deep the sleep was. Jamie my brother's fiance was sedated and in my care which felt odd and irresponsible to me, it was her wedding day, we were all running late, I didn't have my dress and felt awful, my brother was detached and sad, we all were wandering the desert in fancy clothes trying to get there on time. But the last thing, before the dream switched and varied between Amy and Rudy who kept morphing to Jasper and back, was this sense in the desert that no matter what happened between Sean and Jamie with the wedding it all was ok, and they knew it, because they had each other. I saw it underneath the blankness in their eyes, there was the seed of shared heart beam. I wanted that myself, and chose to serve them out of respect for it, instead... I opened up my eyes eventually, and looked at my cell phone expecting the time to be around 8, thinking that I'd slept late since the time difference has me up by 7 am. Instead, it was almost 10. Gretchen was in bed, awful sick with a stomach flu that came in the night, I checked my phone and got a message from Sam, and called right back because I know what news stands behind messages like that. And the news from the east coast was startling and sad. Funny how much can change in the night...
Now I am in bed again, it is almost 12, waiting on my laundry to finish. We called Mandee again and found out this isn't even the big storm, with all this rolling rain and occasional wind. So I will start down coast today before it gets here, take Gretchen's little pickup south. I wont camp, I cant in all this rain I dont have the gear, the constitution for it or the desire. Thankfully, as timing does, my state taxes came today so motels and cabins it will be. I am going driving with the sea. I am going road-tripping, for the first time in my life with no destination at all, and with the only passenger: me. When the time is right, I will go in to the mountains. Tell ppl to burn white candles for her, I texted Sam. Tell them to send prayers of healing and light, and burn white candles, that's what she needs to return to her source she is loose right now, wandering but not free. I'll find a mountain side somewhere, some lake or stream, make offerings for her of flight and peace and make offerings for the tribe back home. Death scatters, but is the door through which we each, and especially the ones left behind, must go through alone in order to make whole, too.
The rounds they come, the rounds the rounds they go. We are always in some part of our own round. We are always in some part of our own journey to from or returning home.
I will go now to the road with the passings that came to urge me on in the night.
Prayer for Molly with White Candles, in the wind
Writing of fire on the slab of jade,
the cleft in the rock, serpent-goddess and queen,
pillar of cloud, and fountain struck from stone,
the nest of eagles, the circle of the moon,
the seed of anise, mortal and smallest thorn
that has the power to give immortal pain,
shepherd of valleys underneath the sea
and guardian of the valley of the dead,
liana that hangs at the pitch of vertigo,
climber and bindweed and the venomous plant,
flower of resurrection and grape of life
lady of the flute and of the lightning-flash,
terrace of jasmine, and salt rubbed in the wound,
a branch of roses for the man shot down,
snowstorm in August, moon of harrowing,
the writing of the sea cut in basalt,
the writing of the wind upon the desert,
testament of the sun, pomegranate, wheat-ear,
a face of flames, face that is eaten away,
the adolescent and persecuted face
the years of fantasy and circular days
that open upon the same street, the same wall,
the moment flares up and they are all one face,
the procession of faces of this calling,
all of these names are unified in one name,
all of these faces are now a single face,
all centuries are now a single instant
and throughout the centuries of centuries
the path to the future shut by these two eyes,
there is nothing before me, but a moment
recovered tonight, standing against a dream....
excerpt, at random by the heartcandledlight, from Sun stone (Mexico City, 1957,) by Octavio Paz. Italics mine.
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