Helllllooooo, Spinners! (Although I guess technically this isn't Furious Spinner any longer. Still, I think of us all spinning along.)
In any case, I'm back, a few days early. I hope your summer has been going well.
Me? Well, I've been having a time.
As I've mentioned before in other posts, I think the most important thing in life is relationships: our relationships to each other and to our world. I've been attempting to have me some of them there relationships these last six weeks. I'm a little shaky at it, I admit it. It's so much easier to write a book.
For six weeks, I walked in the woods a lot, hung out with the Standing People, the Fleurs, and the Invisibles. I talked to the Wind and the Clouds. Whispered love songs to the Stars and the River. Cried a lot. Ate. Didn't write at all. Except for a poem or two. I was awakened in the middle of the night to this poem wandering around in my brain. I wrote it down and then I went back to sleep. It went something like this:
Love breaks us open
And pieces us back together
Like a contractor for the soul
Putting a window
Where once a brick wall stood.
Now flowers bloom amongst the ruins
And faeries admire our scars
Like patrons at an art gallery.
They know we are rooted in compost
Even as we comb stardust from our dreams.
Open the window, they tell us.
Let everything out.
Let everything in.
I went to workshops. Sat by the River. Went to a healing circle. Started a healers circle.
I was so grateful to have the time to grieve. To do nothing some days. To run around too much some days.
Every time I came back to the computer, it broke down, as though some part of the Universe was saying, "No, no, no. This isn't life. Go, go, play outside with life."
So I did. And I didn't worry about not having a computer or money to buy a new one. And then the kind computer man said, "We will give you a new computer." And so it happened. And still, I left the computer alone, even as it sat new amongst the ruins, a tempting white thing, like a beautiful piece of marble waiting for Michelangelo.
No Michel me.
I stayed away.
One Saturday, the day after the full moon, Mario and I drove out to Stonehenge and watched a group of actors recite faery poems and love poems by Yeats, and then they enacted two short plays by Yeats. Mario and I sat inside the circle of stones with strangers and friends as the day faded and then darkened into night. Stars above. A moon fat and gold from wildfire smoke rose into the sky. Bowls of flames wavered atop the stones, creating shadows that acted like theater walls, making us cozy in the darkness together. We sat next to a Methodist minister and talked about peace and sustainability during the intermissions.
It was a wonderful night.
I just wrote much more, but I deleted it. I'm still unsure of how I'll proceed. What I will write about here.
I got a copy of Ruby's Imagine. It's a beautiful little book. I hope she does well out in the world.
There is more. Much more. But I just wanted to say hello. Tell you I'm back. Ask how you are. How are you all?
More words later.
May You All Spin in Beauty, Babies!
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
My Summer Vacation
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2 comments:
wow. that sounds lovely. how did you hear about the Stonehenge event? I'll be in England next month, and would love to be able to attend something like that...
==Melinda==
Hi, Melinda! I should have been more specific. It's Stonehenge near where I live in Washington state. Go back in the post to the link on the word "Stonehenge" and it'll tell you about it. It's a replica of Stonehenge before some of it collapsed--and it's made from concrete! It's a bit incongruous, sitting in scrubland above the Columbia River Gorge, incongruous and wonderful.
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