I should be tracking the seasons.
I should be noting the subtle change of colors at the pre-dawn hour, how lavender becomes mauve as the winter enfeebles the light. I should be telling you how the earth is breathing its last life-respirations, is hiding its leaves and buds into deep earth, awaiting the safety of sun (the sun is motherly, coaxing death into life). Winter's death is simply summer's hidden life.
From Mircea Eliade I learned that some societies only recite their sacred myths during sacred seasons (the fall or winter) or deep into a black night. In the sacred seasons, our timeless mythology is birthed into the distorted fabric of temporal life (advent is waiting for the divine to be birthed into our polluted soil, birthed and then budded into divine justice, the insistent press of life into human-built darkness).
But what's so "sacred" about these seasons, anyway? Maybe it's this stillness on certain mauve mornings, as if all of earth were waiting for an eruption. It stops me in my tracks as I walk the dog, bathes me brutally in this only reality: there are innumerable ecosystems of complex life. And my life? The more I contemplate its profound uniqueness, the more silly seems the fuss.
A human may be a complex ecosystem herself: a crammed library of memory, a vast field of un-tilled possibilities. Yet we erupt from the earth like daisies (living to enjoy just a spot of sun) and are tilled back into the black dirt, sacred as snails.
These thoughts spring up when winter stills me to my core, to that wholeness which persists (some call this a soul).
I don't always still myself to the core. Sometimes I take Sophie outside, and we see a black cat with white boot markings. He is a strange cat- perfectly groomed and domesticated (his collar says "tux" but he is always running wild) and is friendlier than a dog. When I see him as a black crouching in the distance, I say "cat" and Sophie pats her head. "Hat" is what she is thinking. So I say it again: "cat" and she sees it bounding towards us and she understands now and squeals with delight.
This is an eruption: black crouchings leaping into "cats," the winter nameless bursting into its leaves, spacing itself outwards into the world of the living. The summer is for full sentences, fully ripened and clarified speech. Winter is full of black crouchings, dark amorphous things slouching beneath our sleep, like the four-headed creatures of primeval mythology.
This means nothing except that I am trying to understand the season that I fear, trying to understand and drinking mint tea, looking outward to the frosted mountains in the east.
-Sondra
Comments