Sometimes you drink from an empty bowl thinking it is full and it is
Last night thunder and lightning opened the world. Hail beat down on earth, drumming the roof. I watched the round layers of ice bounce off the ground. This morning I wake early to the sound of the young horse running, to the voices of magpies teaching their young to fly, the wings fluttering as they jump only from branch to branch, the parents hovering, urging, flying away, calling the youn ones to them. A woodpecker hammers at a hole in Th. dead tree.
From the swaddling comfort of bed, I look out to watch such joy; It is a new morning and beautiful and I rise with the beauty to a morning knowing more of my past has slipped away and that night comes again, soon; this morning of beauty may also disappear, so I write it down.
Time. I have lost it, and I think of my ancestors who tied knots in ropes to keep track of it, or other tribes who painted events and each year revealed them, telling he stories.
Daily something is lost from me. It began with an accident I don’t remember, and impact to my head, a woman finding my body in the road. I do remember hearing once, as if in a very far distance, the sound of sirens, entrancing like the ones in the Odyssey, calling me to an island and I surrendered and went to that island where I still live, never going ack home, never returning to Th. e same journey and at night is the unraveling of memory that takes place and parts of my past disappear. Yet I am happy. I think, I have forgotten last month and it should matter, but it doesn’t.
I remain on that island without intending it, but I am conscious. I can recall many things; what I read, that I bought pillowcases. But not what someone said or a movie I saw. We laugh. I can see reruns and think they are new. And the shadows of words sometimes only float past. I try to recall them. I say, It is the thing with a handle. It is the thing that cleans the floor.
But I know there are rooms of jade. From the hospital bed there was a great traveling and I was awake in other worlds...........
But for me , I was going to live, and live with memory loss. Important events vanished from my memory. Some didn’t. it was random. I forgot neighbors faces. I remembered some small detail of a poem. Rumi; Break the wine glass and go toward the glassblower’s breath. The names of the wildflowers in bloom around my house would be gone. What I told someone I told again and again. What I asked, I repeated. Words were gone. I searched for them, coming up with things similar until someone guessed.
No one has ever seen an atom et they believe it is there. No one has ever understood how the brain works. Who could think that love might be electrical, or that consciousness, could be chemical? The brain is an organ. The mind is transient. But the body, I find, is not the husk for the soul. It is knowing. It is consciousness. For a time I was a divine traveler through no will of my own, far beyond my world and its limits. It was a virginal state. While I slept, a restless spirit woke to travel another reality, another realm or layer of existence. But my body, even without words, knows this world, every morning the first morning. I watch the light move, lengthen. Daily there is beauty. The wildflowers still exist, even nameless. They know their own names and those are beyond human knowing. Al me the name of the month and I could say October when it is June, but there is bread and butter. Pleasure. I listen to the thunder, look at the dew in the flowers. There is joy even in such vulnerability, such fragility. There is even happiness.
Awakening isn’t always to a state of enlightenment. It isn’t always a sudden change in consciousness. I can’ say I know what it is. I can’t say I understand the boundary the skin, between the worlds we may journey or where I now live. Stirrings, there I feel, but I don’t know.
Unconscious, a richness was there. Perhaps it is because I was missing. This is what is said about the self. That when you are given up, a whole cosmos opens. I remember Dakota Wallace Black Elk once saying about the space program that we have always traveled through the universe.
It is an infant life, too soon to tell what it will become but I trust it is a sacred beginning like all beginnings. Sometimes you drink from an empty bowl thinking it is full and it is. Sometimes you open your empty palm and receive. The world is always fresh. Sometimes ther is morning with birds and the sound of a running horse and you are awake.
From: "WAKING" by LINDA HOGAN (FROM PARABOLA)
photo: Follow The Blue Blue Light by Gabriela Camerotti