Death Week of death year
First, i returned home from the Sasha + Digweed show with that skull radiance of an acid trip. A giant gorgeous club is a stupid place to dose, especially when they won't let you out for air if you want to come back in, but also because the general state of overwhelm and mild nausea only gets amped when the DJs set a new record for loud and i (happily) cannot even tell the difference anymore between the sound and the space and the crowd, feeling so all-at-once but also too so for enclosure. I remembered why i'd lost interest in using drugs without much sense of purpose or intention, though something always comes of it regardless.
With this death ride still flensing a loose layer from my own being, i arrived back in Athens to find my close friend and temporary housemate curled inside the couch, waiting for a rather different sort of pill to finish its work in her. That afternoon i gave my first full Reiki session to her on my back deck as she lay in great pain; when she woke up some time later, i got to see what an aborted fetus looks like at about two months: not much. We put it into an empty yogurt container for her to bury.
*
This lethal theme carried on in minor remarkable ways for some days (but really, all year) until it reached its Shocking Climax the following Monday afternoon, April 14, when my dog was hit by a car and died. I was lucky to have some time for the possibility to dawn on me that something might be just that wrong, rather than having it sprung on my total ignorance or happen under someone else's care. My last desperate measure to inspire Zoë to return to me, before i took off in the car to introduce myself to the neighbours at last and instead found her at the far end of the driveway, was something i'd never done before: i grabbed the frame drum that Bill had given me, stood on the deck, and banged the hell out of it as i called for her, called for angelic aid, called her home. Imagine my horror when i did find her so close.
I was hysterical, of course--this was my best friend of 5½ years, my delightful little anchor of pure love, this lone wolf's cub, the only haha i had when nothing else was funny, one of my best teachers ever. I'd raised her from 7 weeks old. She was too perfect, too special; this seemed too unfair--wasn't she exempt from that untimely-death shit? It seemed impossible, except that it had actually happened, that a little body so bursting with spirit could be simply vacated. But this is a thing that happens to all such beloved animals; they always go first. I still never would have tied Zoë up--she was my inspiration for moving to a small town and then out to the country in the first place, and i so loved watching her race at full speed through the horseshit. I'd always willed that she should go quickly, still in her full joy, rather than dying diseased and in pain--and she must have been chasing something good, to have hit the road in the first place.
I'd clipped her nails for maybe the 50th time that day, holding her in my lap on the back steps. I'd never once nicked the quick before, but that day i made two little claws bleed on the last paw i trimmed. I held her for a while then, until she leaped off to play, and i began winding flowers around the deck railing. I fell into an anxious nap upstairs before i began to worry in earnest--preparing for the long night ahead, i guess.
We buried her on the land where Zoë and i lived with friends when we first moved to Athens. Her site is at the far corner of the garden, beneath a rose bush right before the start of the trail where the doglet and i would always hike into the forest. Just as we tamped down the last of the dirt, we noticed a huge halo around the moon--"that's called a moondog!" cried one of my friends. The two big candles we lit on either side of the baby daffodils i planted there burned into the next evening. I was so lucky to have the support of some wonderful friends to help me through those first hard days--to find myself reaching out because i needed someone, and to find someone there, absolutely there for me, across the chasm. Losing Zoë has not been without blessings.
*
Pluto is still backpedalling towards one last hot whirl with my natal Venus--the lord of death dancing close with all my love. Pluto is also entwined with my Ascendant this year, a death mask tied to my face so surely i've come to mistake its image in the mirror for my own.
To quote "A Future With Pluto", "When Pluto transits... it leaves a swathe of destruction, but what is destroyed has often outlived its relevance." It had been easy to recognise this truth in every reflection of this movement in my life since Grug pointed it out to me, two summers back when i was going really crazy again, seeing every one of my sick or lame relationships with people i nevertheless loved turn to shit. The first time i found myself stumped for making truly soothing sense of any concomitant loss was when my precious trotsky died--my first taste of real grieving.
Of all the losses still smarting, this was the only one that seemed absolutely senseless on first, second, fourteenth glances and then some, because there was nothing definitely or directly harmful to my well-being about being with her, no matter how i looked at the responsibility and commitment involved, all that i did just for my sweet ratkin. I always said that having this dog was a huge pain in the ass that i wouldn't trade for anything in the world. I was completely in love with her! And she loved me too, so so much.
But back to grieving: i was surprised to learn that grieving would not take my own life away as well--that it would come and go, that i would cry and then be okay a while before crying again, and my heart would hold fast in my chest rather than simply falling out. When i found Zoë i thought i might live in total devastation for months, and in the blackness i could see nothing good left, but i was actually fine within a couple of days, to my fantastic amazement, and with much credit to my friends. Other griefs will be harder, but i know something about it now; perhaps it won't hold the terror of utterly foreign territory when i set foot there again.
I was also surprised to learn that all my philosophical choices had not proven perfectly flimsy under a hard knock: what i took for granted about death actually had transformed. I did not feel that conditioned attachment to the notion that death means true separation, utter rather than relative loss of a person or relationship. Was i intellectually compelled to believe that Zoë's spirit was dead, any more than i needed to believe that she now not only heard me still but even understood English? Ha. What pained me most was imagining that she could no longer feel & receive my love--but wasn't that only imagining too?
I realised that it was actually harder to believe such a vast light could be snuffed, than to suppose that she might yet run for sticks i threw or hear me greeting her, or lick my face in my dreams. The love between us remained--that was all there was to it, as far as i was concerned; i didn't need to attach it to a body or material reality to know that love lived. For that i thank the dog again, for maybe a spirit so clearly indestructible was what it took to confirm such a eufunctional perspective for me. Her name was Zoë: life itself.
*
I am not the same Fool i was, with my little dog gone--though i roam the more freely for it. The High Priestess has emerged repeatedly in the cards since then, out from behind the shroud of my felt incomprehension of her. I like how my aforementioned dear friend interpreted this archetype for me, the night she cooked dinner & read for me next to the fire and we declared Death Week over.
"Oh, that card's easy to understand!" she said. "Just imagine: the really, really, REALLY high Priestess--this is the girl stoned far, far out of her mind, in that moment where she. knows. everything." Ha--i finally felt a grasp on her elusive nature, beyond the mind's grasping. The card in the center of the spread that night was #13, of course: Death, reversed. So many things going, gone--let go largely against my will but in favor of my better interests, even if it was up to me alone to see it so.
Upon being asked "how are you doing," i remember telling someone at a potluck way back in March--it's nothing but potlucks around here--that i felt like i was in a kind of limbo, between one thing and another, waiting. This surprised me, as i had begun to wonder whether i was depressed, but i realised that depression was something different from this. This time of transition is not primarily an event of my emotions--or if it is, in part, it gives evidence that my emotional nature is mercifully maturing.
I think that if Pluto has his way, by the time he's long gone, Venus here will have learned what it means, and what it doesn't, to be truly alone--there being hardly a more fertile time to study that than now. Most illustratively: the only person i really longed to snuggle me to sleep on the night i most needed it had been too scared to speak to me for months. That profoundly powerful love affair--commenced with Pluto's own child on a Friday the 13th, an abstraction in time, but consummated on Highway 13, its place on earth--was also dead, though that great love too had merely disembodied, back into the ether of its origin, unable to keep its feet in this world of dirt (with an address like that! Change was its very name). I've had no choice but to rise from them ashes rather than wallow there; i am getting born again and again.
It is spring: when one tree blushing pink turns brown, another species takes up the task, and always another after that, there is still pink in the world. The magnolia moves on, or now the dogwood, but there's no destroying pink.
With this death ride still flensing a loose layer from my own being, i arrived back in Athens to find my close friend and temporary housemate curled inside the couch, waiting for a rather different sort of pill to finish its work in her. That afternoon i gave my first full Reiki session to her on my back deck as she lay in great pain; when she woke up some time later, i got to see what an aborted fetus looks like at about two months: not much. We put it into an empty yogurt container for her to bury.
*
This lethal theme carried on in minor remarkable ways for some days (but really, all year) until it reached its Shocking Climax the following Monday afternoon, April 14, when my dog was hit by a car and died. I was lucky to have some time for the possibility to dawn on me that something might be just that wrong, rather than having it sprung on my total ignorance or happen under someone else's care. My last desperate measure to inspire Zoë to return to me, before i took off in the car to introduce myself to the neighbours at last and instead found her at the far end of the driveway, was something i'd never done before: i grabbed the frame drum that Bill had given me, stood on the deck, and banged the hell out of it as i called for her, called for angelic aid, called her home. Imagine my horror when i did find her so close.
I was hysterical, of course--this was my best friend of 5½ years, my delightful little anchor of pure love, this lone wolf's cub, the only haha i had when nothing else was funny, one of my best teachers ever. I'd raised her from 7 weeks old. She was too perfect, too special; this seemed too unfair--wasn't she exempt from that untimely-death shit? It seemed impossible, except that it had actually happened, that a little body so bursting with spirit could be simply vacated. But this is a thing that happens to all such beloved animals; they always go first. I still never would have tied Zoë up--she was my inspiration for moving to a small town and then out to the country in the first place, and i so loved watching her race at full speed through the horseshit. I'd always willed that she should go quickly, still in her full joy, rather than dying diseased and in pain--and she must have been chasing something good, to have hit the road in the first place.
I'd clipped her nails for maybe the 50th time that day, holding her in my lap on the back steps. I'd never once nicked the quick before, but that day i made two little claws bleed on the last paw i trimmed. I held her for a while then, until she leaped off to play, and i began winding flowers around the deck railing. I fell into an anxious nap upstairs before i began to worry in earnest--preparing for the long night ahead, i guess.
We buried her on the land where Zoë and i lived with friends when we first moved to Athens. Her site is at the far corner of the garden, beneath a rose bush right before the start of the trail where the doglet and i would always hike into the forest. Just as we tamped down the last of the dirt, we noticed a huge halo around the moon--"that's called a moondog!" cried one of my friends. The two big candles we lit on either side of the baby daffodils i planted there burned into the next evening. I was so lucky to have the support of some wonderful friends to help me through those first hard days--to find myself reaching out because i needed someone, and to find someone there, absolutely there for me, across the chasm. Losing Zoë has not been without blessings.
*
Pluto is still backpedalling towards one last hot whirl with my natal Venus--the lord of death dancing close with all my love. Pluto is also entwined with my Ascendant this year, a death mask tied to my face so surely i've come to mistake its image in the mirror for my own.
To quote "A Future With Pluto", "When Pluto transits... it leaves a swathe of destruction, but what is destroyed has often outlived its relevance." It had been easy to recognise this truth in every reflection of this movement in my life since Grug pointed it out to me, two summers back when i was going really crazy again, seeing every one of my sick or lame relationships with people i nevertheless loved turn to shit. The first time i found myself stumped for making truly soothing sense of any concomitant loss was when my precious trotsky died--my first taste of real grieving.
Of all the losses still smarting, this was the only one that seemed absolutely senseless on first, second, fourteenth glances and then some, because there was nothing definitely or directly harmful to my well-being about being with her, no matter how i looked at the responsibility and commitment involved, all that i did just for my sweet ratkin. I always said that having this dog was a huge pain in the ass that i wouldn't trade for anything in the world. I was completely in love with her! And she loved me too, so so much.
But back to grieving: i was surprised to learn that grieving would not take my own life away as well--that it would come and go, that i would cry and then be okay a while before crying again, and my heart would hold fast in my chest rather than simply falling out. When i found Zoë i thought i might live in total devastation for months, and in the blackness i could see nothing good left, but i was actually fine within a couple of days, to my fantastic amazement, and with much credit to my friends. Other griefs will be harder, but i know something about it now; perhaps it won't hold the terror of utterly foreign territory when i set foot there again.
I was also surprised to learn that all my philosophical choices had not proven perfectly flimsy under a hard knock: what i took for granted about death actually had transformed. I did not feel that conditioned attachment to the notion that death means true separation, utter rather than relative loss of a person or relationship. Was i intellectually compelled to believe that Zoë's spirit was dead, any more than i needed to believe that she now not only heard me still but even understood English? Ha. What pained me most was imagining that she could no longer feel & receive my love--but wasn't that only imagining too?
I realised that it was actually harder to believe such a vast light could be snuffed, than to suppose that she might yet run for sticks i threw or hear me greeting her, or lick my face in my dreams. The love between us remained--that was all there was to it, as far as i was concerned; i didn't need to attach it to a body or material reality to know that love lived. For that i thank the dog again, for maybe a spirit so clearly indestructible was what it took to confirm such a eufunctional perspective for me. Her name was Zoë: life itself.
*
I am not the same Fool i was, with my little dog gone--though i roam the more freely for it. The High Priestess has emerged repeatedly in the cards since then, out from behind the shroud of my felt incomprehension of her. I like how my aforementioned dear friend interpreted this archetype for me, the night she cooked dinner & read for me next to the fire and we declared Death Week over.
"Oh, that card's easy to understand!" she said. "Just imagine: the really, really, REALLY high Priestess--this is the girl stoned far, far out of her mind, in that moment where she. knows. everything." Ha--i finally felt a grasp on her elusive nature, beyond the mind's grasping. The card in the center of the spread that night was #13, of course: Death, reversed. So many things going, gone--let go largely against my will but in favor of my better interests, even if it was up to me alone to see it so.
Upon being asked "how are you doing," i remember telling someone at a potluck way back in March--it's nothing but potlucks around here--that i felt like i was in a kind of limbo, between one thing and another, waiting. This surprised me, as i had begun to wonder whether i was depressed, but i realised that depression was something different from this. This time of transition is not primarily an event of my emotions--or if it is, in part, it gives evidence that my emotional nature is mercifully maturing.
I think that if Pluto has his way, by the time he's long gone, Venus here will have learned what it means, and what it doesn't, to be truly alone--there being hardly a more fertile time to study that than now. Most illustratively: the only person i really longed to snuggle me to sleep on the night i most needed it had been too scared to speak to me for months. That profoundly powerful love affair--commenced with Pluto's own child on a Friday the 13th, an abstraction in time, but consummated on Highway 13, its place on earth--was also dead, though that great love too had merely disembodied, back into the ether of its origin, unable to keep its feet in this world of dirt (with an address like that! Change was its very name). I've had no choice but to rise from them ashes rather than wallow there; i am getting born again and again.
It is spring: when one tree blushing pink turns brown, another species takes up the task, and always another after that, there is still pink in the world. The magnolia moves on, or now the dogwood, but there's no destroying pink.