Oh, Phoenixx

My beloved Phoenix on the WEb,
I have remained home all day today, clearing closets, drawers, files, boxes. It feels like it's time again to filter out what I no longer need. Of course in the wake of all that, I find grief again. I stumbled on something I wrote in May of 2009 when you and I made a trek to the ocean. It was a couple months after the passing of Hekati (my sweet black kitty from Lesbos) as well as a few months after J. was diagnosed with cancer.  You and I fled to the ocean for a couple of days to find ourselves again. There are photos on this WEblog of the happiness we found with one another and Her. The close up photo of us still hangs beside me here at the computer these seven years later. I also came across a collection of photos mainly of me during various experiences/travels with J. and before that partnership began. Last winter, I went through our huge crate of memorobilia casting out almost all letters and notes which I burned in a fire this summer. I organized photos and stored them as keepsakes of that part of my life with J. Today I have felt such grief for all that has come to pass in my adult life. I am aging, Phoenix, I am aging. My body will never be what it was, I will never have a partnership, my friendship with J. is dead/gone, my connection with K. also gone. Next month will be two years since Beetle has died and today Myrrh is acting very ill, not eating etc. I worry the best is done and the rest of my time will be biding it.

And, I know, there is so much more to my life than just biding time. My sweet soestre, our work, our sweet love, my friendship and tribe/herdmates, my darling funny Hestia, my incredible garden and home, The Heron House, my activism, my health and joy.  I have gone on with my life and my Living, Phoenix. I have. And, I'm still brought to my knees with such sadness and loss. I came across a quote from the movie, Labyrinth, that I recorded years ago:

               "Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered I have fought my way here to take         back what you have stolen." 

I think that is some of what this WEblog has been for us. It has been a fight to take back the life of you and I that was stolen: something of the joy I have lost or

given away. It's amazing sometimes that I still love and create beauty. It's amazing I still fight. I am Phoenixx in my own right. You and I are a pair to be reckoned with, our hope, our love and connection and determination to keep weaving something of this world and the next.

I love you and all the losses and strings of life that have been severed or stretched beyond their carrying capacity. My body will never carry me through all those particular and precious channels again; she reminds me I am forever changed and my life forever different. I walk forward, step after next step through the labyrinth, fighting, loving, preserving and letting go but not believing the lie that the best of my life is over, gone, dead. There are and will be many bests.

All of my love, forever and always through the veils and beyond time and space,

Phoenixx

It's July again, you would be 16

Dearest Phoenix on the WEb,
Your sixteenth birthday was a week and a day ago: July 2. Today was the day five years ago that J. moved out. This is a month of anniversaries, births and deaths. It is also the month of the Amazon. It would have to be, hm? Remembering my strength and ability to affect change in this messed up world is a daily act. I wish I knew how to better organize; I think that Patriarchy depends on my ineptness and of course other's ineptness too.

I'm feeling a mixture of strength and sadness today, so I come to write you again. So much intense hatred in the world, violence and hatred against the most vulnerable. It's what killed you six years ago: one man's hatred and violence and gun. Sometimes I just don't know what to do with my own hate and anger. Taking up arms is not an option for me; I must find my own revolutionary path. That is not easy because men's path is so well grooved, guns so readily available and encouraged, violence so well modeled. Hatred of women has never wavered in spite of good things that women are doing for women. There is still rape and as long as there is still rape, there is still male hatred of women. It's not a less or more thing; like somehow we are doing 'better' in the world because there is less rape or some such argument. If any woman is raped, we all are at risk in men's unstable world. The concept must be eradicated from the human heart and mind. And to do that takes men stepping up and saying enough. The burden is on them.  In the meantime, we Amazons continue to protect and defend.

So, that is my feminesto. As Andrea Dworkin said: I want a 24 hour truce of rape. That's all. 24 hours. Seems like that is doable. Wars succeed in truces: guns laid down. And yet, can men do that? Can rapists put down their weapons? Turn off their porn? Stop prostituting women? For a mere 24 hours?

Not likely. No one seems to be trying because that's what rapists do. They rape.

So, my dear Phoenix, this is my cry onto the WEb: despair and clarity and desire to find action that continues to protect and defend.

I love you. Thank you for your presence through the WEb. It/You never go

unnoticed.
M.E.

Six Years Today

Good morning, beloved Phoenix,
Today it is six years since you were murdered, cruelly taken from me. As the years have progressed, I have walked the labyrinth's weaving path of forwards and backwards, inward and out.  I have wept from the deepest grave beside your bones, incapacitated and hopeless.  I have scoured your silken remains and found no bullet to return, no restoration or rightening of this injustice. I have raged against ghosts and madness, having to stay mindful of my safety and preservation in the world. Beetle and I have found a loving shared path together somehow and now, she too, has died. I imagine you two have joined forces and sent me Hestia, my Bassett, who is a blend of your silly gleefulness, Phoenix, and your intensity, Beetle. I have found joy again, companionship and comraderie with this new four legged. And, I still weep at the injustice, the missing what was completely unique to us, Phoenix, and for the natural course of the rest of your life.  Of course, by now you likely would have died from natural causes of age, wear and tear. After all, you'd be 16 this coming July!  And, I still wonder what the rest of our time together would have brought on this side together.

What I know on this day, the sixth anniversary passage ('through the keyhole of the needle I must pass through all alone') is that not everything returns from the Deep.  Not everything takes new form. There are truly some things, some configurations between beings, that just live once. I have said goodbye to my relations with many over these six years since you have been taken and I realize for the first time that some of them, two of them in particular, will never Return. It's a very painful realization for someone who does have some deeply buried belief that Life seeks to return, to repair. I do think that is a natural Law; I feel assured by it just in watching The Wheel turn year after year after year.  And, I also now understand, that some threads of Life are too weathered, too frayed that they easily rot in the Deep. There is no preservation possible, Phoenix, no Repair, no Return. This too is a natural Law. And I'm not even sure about the compost metaphor anymore. In other words, I'm not even sure that the death/end of some relations serves as some ideological 'compost' for something new. It's too abstract a leap, it seems to me. It's a bit New/Toxic Age thinking for me. Some things just end/die/stop.

Clearly, though, you and I have not.  We have this incredible woven web between us that now includes Beetle and Hestia, Ferron and Amoja.  I am so grateful for this, all of this we have worked to create again in our Labyrinth path.  I am not the same womyn because of you,  because of us.  And I see the strength of weaving in this way, daring to go beyond the supposed limits of death, in ways that those relations that have ended/stopped/died did not have the courage or integrity to. I am proud of our tenacity, Phoenix. I am proud of me and of you.

My love always,
ME

Coming to the WEb again

Dearest Phoenix,
It is now 2016, three days now. You came to me in dream the other night, replaying the trauma of your death, though the conditions were different. You, Myrrh and I were taking a walk and I noticed how our path was getting closer to a busy road, so I tried to call you both away. You kept going, not on a leash, and I saw the inevitable unfolding. It was so painful of a re-living that even my dream self couldn't actually show me the event. There was a blank moment in the dream and then I am there seeing you in the road after you had been hit by a car, but you are not dead yet. You are trying to get up, clearly in pain and distress, and I am far away and cannot run fast enough to get to you to hold you in the last moments of your life. There are people around you acting confused by what to do; they are not your person and your person cannot get to you. I         cannot           get             to you. I run and run and run and I cannot get to you to hold you into your death.

It has been over five years now and also not even five seconds since that day, March 19, 2010.  Three weeks ago O's beloved dog Ferron was hit by a car and killed instantly.  The trauma of that is still with me too.  From the other side of the WEb, I have asked you to meet Ferron and help her find her way back to O...and you, along with other beloveds on that side, have done exactly that and more. Thank you, Phoenix. Thank you. We now have Amoja, Female Magic, to love and adore.  And you and Beetle have combined forces to send me Hestia, my beloved Bassett. She is 'the short one' as per Beetle (who died Sept. 23 2014 from tongue cancer).  I am grateful for my life with my life here on this side of the WEb and my life with you through the threads between. It is not always easy, nor does it always/often feel fair. When you come to me in dreams, I remember the pain as well as the lovely comfort of you in my physical life and I am grateful for that as well as the reaching across the veils to me. And I love knowing you are just right there. Right there. Never left my side.  Sometimes you come through Hestia, sometimes now with Amoja, certainly with Ferron and sometimes I just know you are there when I talk to you, your photo. I just know it.  Thank you, my beloved guardian Phoenix. I am so sorry you died there without me in that moment. And I know that all that we have done together over the years since then has been a repairing of that horrific tear. It is what She does...Life seeks to return, to repair.  And so, we continue to do so in the face of hideous and painful rips and tears on the WEb, on our hearts and lives. There is no 'lesson' to be learned, no karma to be paid. There is patriarchal violence/hate, there are terrible careless mistakes and accidents, there is death who comes in many guises all of which are loss.  And there is Life, She Who seeks to return, to repair.

I love you. I love you. I love you.

ME