purgatory

My desk sits in front of a very large window that faces west. It is on the second story of my home and if one were to look down, one would see the ground 30 feet below it. I have spent days and days here, looking out this picture window watching barges head up the northern current to Alaska.  From this perch I have watched the color of the sea shift from pink in the morning to steebluegrey at late in the day. I have seen the calm sea of morning change to a whirlpool of white caps and sea swell by early afternoon.

I will often sit at this desk until late at night, fighting my fatigue. I stave off sleep and the comfort of my bed, where rosie, my dog, sleeps and snores incessantly, breaking the quiet of this hill at night, shattering  the tenderness of the owls singing .

 I have rubbed myself raw with oils of neroli and helicrysium and myrrh just in order to sleep.  I do anything I can to find sleep and the safety it brings although often times sleep does not comfort or soothe me at all … it propels my psyche into past lives that I never loved and I often kiss men I have never met and both my ex-husbands meld into one person. I often dream of my family, all now passed on, all but me, and they arrive as if they were real life. They are potent apparitions, unrepentant and

urgent.

This astonishes me, awakens me, and frightens me even though I do often wish I had my mother around, you know, just to make everything feel all right. For solace and haven. I often wish to be held or consoled but I am neither.  So, I look for answers, consolation and balm in rose bushes or under the artichoke plants, behind the pump shed, under the Burmese honeysuckle, amid the tangle of fragrant sweet peas, the rich humid earth, the cool marsh by the creek.  I look under the wings of Ravens, beneath the newly budded tiny peach blossom, beneath the young fruit, the tiny new pears, beneath the bronze stalk of the pomegranate tree.

I call out.

I call  out to ancestor, Arab, Grandmother, Inuit, Whale Goddess, I call to Spirit in the form of predator bird and omen, I call to omen in the form of a piece of paper lying on the street, just near the old Laundromat, I look for clues on this old crumbled artifact for wisdom, for a way forward, for an explanation, a map, a treasure. I look into the eyes of the old Miwok men who come every Wednesday to the post office, where they pick up their government checks, their eyes are clouded with yellow milk and swirled brown earth and they tell me nothing, I know they see everything, but they say nothing of my darkness, my longing, my fate. They tell me plenty about their darkness and their place in the 15^th bardo, the bottom of the rung bardo that fills one’s liver and spleen with sorrow and despair. The meat hook, the fiery pit. They are No Longer Willing to evoke, conjure, or speculate.

They do not give me the answer because I am filled with Light. I

 know this, even  as I bellow and wail and force my will upon the course of my private river, I will always fill myself with light every time I see the moon.

They know this. The Miwok men can see the moon in my soul. They know I have sold the moon my dreams.

 The moon does not elevate me nor will she answer my questions about my future. The Greybluesilver Sea and the barges speak nothing to me of their journeys, nor of mine, or of the Miwok men at the post office. The moon will not reveal my destiny, illuminate my darkness or speak to me about my transience.

  I have been holding myself in this suspended place for so long that I fear if I were to be released from it, my feet would touch the earth and crumble into dried ambergris. I would be devoured by the Spirit of Whale and Fox, I might be left out to dry on a driftwood rack, as if I were a Fileted Cod , Salted and Curing.

Here now, at this big window, looking west, over this tree canopy, over the nesting ravens,

This moon just simply fills me with light. Unobstructed light. Unfiltered, irreverent, elliptical, proficient light. I may someday find my passage here, under this Moon that remains silent, says nothing, is no fortuneteller, is no gossip, this Moon that refuses to be an oracle.