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
