Next Day

Dear Phoenix on the WEb,

Good morning.  Woke up wanting to write some more to you.  The labyrinth has been overtaken by weeds this summer.  My neighbor has totally neglected the path.  I've been trying to stay detached and not get involved with her about it as our relationship is tenuous at best.  I've not been walking it at all because of all the weeds and such.  It's been so hard to watch the path be consumed.

Then last week something different happened.  One of the lawn care workers began to weed eat in the labyrinth.  I was so relieved! Then he stopped and moved on to another area of the yard before finishing!  I hollered at him to ask him to finish, but he could not hear me over the mowers around him.  I figured maybe it was just as well not to get involved, so I let it go.  For now.

Then the next day the person who mows my lawn came and I asked him to go ahead and finish weed eating the labyrinth.  He used to take care of that yard when my former neighbor lived there, so he said he'd be glad to for no charge!  He was equally disturbed by how she had abandoned the care of the labyrinth.  I came inside and wrote a letter to my neighbor reporting what had happened and that I went ahead and finished the weeding in the labyrinth because I care about that sacred path and that I would be honored to continue to take care of it while she got caught up on the others things she's trying to get done.

Yesterday walking this labyrinth was the only thing I felt like I could do from that place of the sinkhole.   The hardest part was walking through a large area where there used to be a Lamb's Ear plant.  M. mistakedly mowed it down.  All that is there is black earth and white flecks of the plant.  It looks like ashes.  I shuddered then and now as I recall.  Lamb's ear: Phoenix's ear.  I am shaking inside.  Still so much grief and devastation materialized.

And, it's raining this morning.  I am seeing the rain sink down into the roots of the Lamb's ear and soothing the trauma, the sudden decapitation of leaves and life.  The roots being calmed, their shaking quieting.  The sound of the gentle rain, a sweet humming into the earth, into the Lamb's ear roots.  I ask for regeneration also from this rain in time, from the soothing deep in the roots.  In time.  I know such things take time.  For now, I pray for just soothing.

I am grateful for the Path again being cleared.  Truly.  It's 'just' a configuration, but it's one that leads in and out again.   I need to know that Way even if I'm just wandering feeling oh so terribly lost.  Thank you, Goddess for this Path.  For the clearing.  For the soothing.

I love you, Phoenix, this day of the Crossroads when I decided to live the life that would never have existed if I decided otherwise.  I am quaking with that Yes.  So unsure.  So so unsure of my way.  The other night I dreamed that I went to visit a young person in an institution.  When I came in the room, this young person was sitting in their bed, facing the headboard, howling.  I sat next to them and howled too.  What else can one do?  That is my siren.

Love,
Me

Not a single siren nor arrest

Dear Phoenix on the WEb,

Last night and today have been the worst times so far that I can remember since the nights and days after you were killed.  I have felt so very lost, like I don't know what I'm doing.  I feel out of control of my life.  And the grief has been huge and growing/deepening, like a sinkhole, dragging me further and further in.  At one point in one of the huge surges of grief, I heard an ambulance in the distance and I went right back to the night you were killed and I lay beside your lifeless body, waiting for J. to get home.  There were no emergency vehicles to come help you or make any arrests.  With that awareness, I almost came undone.  I do not know how I will ever recover from this.  I know I've been saying that for over two years now and I still cannot quite convince myself that it is simply True.  I will never recover.  I can stop trying to.  It will never happen.  Not in any way that I will recognize 'normalcy' as I once knew it.

I have left a way of life, I tell myself over and over.  Not just a relationship.  A way of life.  And I've left a womyn who quintessentially is such a good person.  I miss her and her ways of thinking and understanding life, of making me laugh and feel safe.  They were home to me for a long time.  And in this sinkhole now, I feel lost, directionless, without a touchstone of home, of roots.  I am desperate for connection and contact with her. 

That is not to deny any of the new relations I've been growing or what they bring me.  They are not roots.  They are something else that I don't quite know yet.  They feel mutable.  I do not lean very hard on them.  Not because I don't trust them, because I do not trust myself.   Not now.  Maybe not ever again.  I am not looking for a replacement of my relationship with J. in person or in structure.  I've left that way of life.  And this new life now...well, right now it doesn't feel like much of anything that I can hold on to.

And...two years ago tomorrow was the day I met myself at that Crossroads of life and death and I got really clear about choosing life.  That I will not and cannot take my own.  It's not who I am in my Essence/Beingness.  I never knew that for sure about myself before that day.  I am grateful to know this, especially for someone like me who falls into many sinkholes.   Yes, I am grateful and distressed because it means I am staying on the planet, no matter how Lost I am and remain.  No matter how undone I come from the lack of sirens and arrests for atrocities in my life and for wimmin all over the planet.  I honor that Knowing.  And the Work I face most days to endure.

I love you, Phoenix.  Thank you for calling me back to our WEb.
Love,
Me