Tomorrow: Relationships in the Sky

The eclipse will be available for viewing around 11:30 tomorrow morning in my area, give or take 15 minutes on either side of this time. I had a picture in my mind of sitting outside and just experiencing it; the Moon coming between the Earth and the Sun. Just my sitting there and waiting for the sensations of being in the day and having the light dimmed.

Will the birds stop singing? Will all of us and the plants and the trees and the animals be disoriented for a time? Will the dogs bark … cats hide? Will there be a sense of peace or chaos?

Then I read details from the Navaho Nation, the Hindus, and the Yaqui. They honor this as a sacred event. “Do nothing,” they say, “during the passage of this time. Be inside. Do not look at the phenomena out of respect of their coming relationship.” Almost as if it’s an intimate connection between our three solar objects.

Our Earth is on an oval trajectory, I think, around our Sun. We are held there by a mysterious pull due to our size, weight, magnetic field of the Sun and of our own. Around us circles Moon in much the same way. I’m sure scientists have a more detailed account of cause and effect. The point is, we and our Earth and Moon hang around this Sun and have been doing so for billions of years or more. Without that Sun, we wouldn’t be who we are, what we are, and what we are capable of doing. We, all of us, no matter what skin color or religion or political leaning, are dependent on this fact of rotation. We have good reason to be sun-worshippers. There is no life as we know it without this Sun and how we circumvent it.

Another thought is that the tilt of our axis determines a lot of how our world responds to this relationship. I used to think the Earth had a metal pin through it just like the models of Earth in the school library that could be turned to locate continents and oceans. I would get dizzy and almost sick, when a student played with the globe and spun it rapidly like a top.

There is no real pin. There is a center around which we are oriented.

The entire set-up is dauntingly awesome, and unsettling. I can’t help but feel ungrounded if I’m not careful.

It all being a mystery is just not as worthy a phrase as I would like to impart.

I can only imagine in the earliest years how animals responded to serious darkness in the middle of the day. Would the First Peoples have been fearful that their world was finished. I wonder if they ran and hid, bowed deeply in supplication, or sacrificed someone or anything to appease whomever they believed responsible for this phenomenon.

This coming Monday seems as if the current society will be making a party out of it, well, maybe not everyone, but many. There appears to be a much more sophisticated attitude toward nature and natural spectacles now. A bit narcissistic in a way, as if this event was staged as an excuse to get out of town, gather with coffee and doughnuts, or ‘tokes’ and snacks, or any other manner of refreshments.

Am I strange that I don’t want to see it? That I want to feel it? Because I can’t help but consider this eclipse is more like the daily ‘tween-times’ or those precious moments when light transitions between day and night and night and day. Like a crack where the magic can get in. I want to sense the strangeness on my skin, the variation in the quality of the air, the changes in the temperature. I want to believe that the Sun, being covered by the Moon, is perhaps a metaphor of the Sacred Feminine offering herself to heal the searing heat of the Masculine with her caress. Perhaps in these brief moments, these two can be united in the vision of yin and yang. I want to feel the power of the Moon as she performs her so infrequent ministrations of being on top of himself the Sun. I want to pretend I understand the feeling of their grief at having to pull away because each must move on to perform their singular roles and duties as a brilliant light and a reflective orb.

And I want to pray that, if this is a sacrifice, on either of their parts, that it is for something to come into our world that is good and peaceful and promising.

End of A Road

On the hall wall by the bathroom hangs an original oil painting by a neighborhood friend of my mother’s family. Dr. Carl Quosig picked up the skill of a paint brush after he put down his skill with a scalpel.

I remember meeting him once in his attic room turned into a studio. His house was as weathered as his face and the welcoming warmth of its interior matched the cheerful gleam in his eyes. Fascinated by his many canvases, my mom and I were treated to a range of subjects from landscaping, flowers, city streets, and several depictions of monks in various stages of inebriation. My mom chose the one of the monk passed out in the wine cellar with the monastery’s cleric looking disapprovingly down a very pointed nose. Dr. Quosig gifted us with the one that is now hanging in my home.

The 8 X 11 canvas shows a once muddy road, now drying under a late summer sun and disappearing through a stand of trees whose leaves are gloriously orange and yellow and red. In the distance, gray mountains stand beneath mounds of white clouds looking as if recently whipped into stiffness and waiting to top a fruit cobbler.

This carefully crafted scene housed in a frame my mother refinished in cherry maple stain appears to me as if I’m looking out a window. For all the years it hung in my parents’ home and then in mine, I have studied every detail. As a youngster, I wondered what it would be like to live at the end of this road. On every trip I took with parents, mostly when we were ordered by the Marine Corps to a different military base or one of our rare vacations, I would look for the earthy driveway into the trees, thinking I would recognize the scene and perhaps talk my parents into turning around and investigating the end of that road. My dream continued as an adult, traveling with either husband or by myself. I wanted to know who lived there, what kind of house, and were there horses and cows?

About the same time I began imagining the end of the road, my parents and I visited the family farm in the southwest corner of Colorado. Uncle Lee and Aunt Lois, with their two sons and their families, farmed the land. Uncle Lee had the brightest blue eyes and admitted he could count cows on a hillside, miles away, but could no longer read newspaper print. His sun-dried skin was etched with spidery wrinkles, his wispy white hair held in place under his lop-sided straw hat which had seen rain and sun and sleet and snow. Aunt Lois’s face crackled with every emotion, worry lines from tending children and animals, angry lines when I let the pigs out by carelessness, laugh lines that came out like sunshine after a storm. Even mad, her eyes were merry.

In my memory, today, I learned so much in the week we were there because once you set foot on the land, you were part of the activities. Yours were another pair of hands to stir the gravy or soup, dig and wash the potatoes, peel the fruit, iron the sheets, feed the pigs, or find the eggs.

Whereas, I was left to my own devices and homework when I lived as an only child with my parents, at the farm, I was part of something. A team of some kind with a common goal of survival is the only way I can describe it. With my mom and dad so involved with each other, I was more the observer of life, like an appendage.

At the farm, we cooked constantly with foods picked from the garden, fruits canned in blue and clear jars from the previous fall, meat brought up from the freezer that had been one of those pigs or a cow or a steer or a chicken who’d stopped laying. I learned about the cycle of life, the dying and the living, and about outhouses.

So now I had a picture of what life could be like at the end of my well-traveled country road through the multi colored trees.

I’d like to say I found my dream. In a way, I did. The unpaved road to our home in Laytonville didn’t lead to a farm house, but my late husband and I did build the eight-sided hogan ourselves. We didn’t have farm animals but we did have a dog for a time and watched the ravens and wild turkeys pick at whatever food we left out, heard the pileated woodpeckers and sassy squirrels, relocated rattlesnakes, and tried to keep the garbage cans safe from the bears.

In my mind, I believe I tried to sustain what I remembered of that team work effort so all who lived or visited there could feel part of something bigger than themselves.

I suppose I did find my ‘end of the country road’. Interesting though, the memories of the farm in Colorado are more distinct now than those of the 27 years on our land. What clings most from the early childhood experience is the idea of the togetherness, the purposefulness of our lives, the relationships initiated and forged. It’s that commonality I miss and am continually looking to create in my current one bedroom bungalow which stands past a two-car long driveway, behind a garage, and at the end of a cement walk which travels under the shadow of a fruit-filled plum tree; my own version of a country road. 

AFTER THE HIGH

Monday morning! And after a wonderful weekend of visiting, driving my new little car on an adventure, experiencing the enthralling creation of a singing community in less than two hours of being together, I am strangely ‘down.’ I have had to ask myself every hour on the hour, “What is going on? Why am I feeling out of sorts?”

Everything seems to fall out of my hands onto the floor or collapse in front of me. The only successful thing I did this morning, in an unexpectedly short amount of time, was water the newly-planted vegetables in the raised beds and new felt containers. Sitting in the sun was the most I could do for one solid hour.

Going through my emails and scrolling Facebook entries took up another hour.

Of the many projects on my kitchen table, I did tackle a tax receipt problem for my mom which has entailed finding the paperwork I sent out last week to attempt, yet again, to get my Power of Attorney in place so I can do her business. This is an ongoing challenge because the POA is 20 years old. If I was to try to get another one signed, I would have to contact Ombudsmen to have them approach her with new papers. This is because she’s in a nursing home with dementia, thus making the accomplishment of her signing anything more than a simple task.

The point to all of this is not to whine about details and challenges. No, the point is, I am trying to answer the question: “What has gotten me into this place of no energy, no continuity with thoughts or trails of paperwork I started last week or last month, and why am I grumpy??

It’s a good thing I’m not in any kind of relationship or I’d be biting their head off. Then I think, maybe that is precisely why I’m in a poor mood. I don’t have anyone to share the wondrous experience of yesterday: the singing, the harmonies, the new meaningful songs based on extraordinary poetry. Maybe, I am missing what happens with companionship: making memories together so that each can help the other keep the magic in place behind the drudge of everyday routine. Sigh! I am beginning to believe that my excuse of not being in relationship with a significant other is a cop out, is irresponsible, and not really the truth. I AM in relationship! With myself! With the Earth! With friends!

So that makes way for another possibility. After a high, I am asking myself, is there a resultant low because the high was so high? The acoustics of the large room bounced sound and harmonies among the fifty or so people who were sharing two hours of their time to open their hearts and mouths for beauty. We gave each other healing by standing together and memorizing words and tunes of songs presented by two masters of direction. We sang of heartbreak and mending chaos. We reminded each other of the importance of open hearts, open minds, compassion, determination. We sang counterpoint and left the doubts and fears of our daily world outside that room for a short time.

Would that I could hold on to those words and tunes forever, but just as they flowed into my brain, because we sang one song after another, those thoughts and rhymes flowed out again. I can’t think of one of them today. I want to hold on to at least one little ditty to repeat and repeat so I can attach myself to a small piece of the joy of yesterday. But, damn, I can’t reconstruct a one of them.

And I want more. Is this what it feels to those who go to one expansive experience after another? The lack and the need of lightness, so much so that they push themselves into the next experience and then the next one? Never knowing how to create the linchpin to ground themselves to the feelings they had during the expansive experience? Is this my trouble today? Wanting more? And not knowing today just how to open to the world the way I did yesterday?

If that’s the real cause of my dumps, then I owe it to the experience and to myself to get up and find what will bring back one small portion of the same level of joy from yesterday. Maybe if I experiment enough with every tiny opportunity I can make, I will eventually fill my day with just as much love and light. Maybe that’s what yesterday’s experience requires of me. I’m supposed to be learning how to regroup, reframe, and rekindle in myself that sense of wonder I forgot I had before yesterday. Worth a try!!!