Re-Membering: Story and Bone

by Ruby Sara

Greetings, Pagani, from the soggy and sterling silver streets of the fiercely wild urban midwest!  It has been a rainy week here in the city, and the trees, now full and rustling, are thick with water, dropping showers on unsuspecting passersby with every leap of some startled wren or industrious squirrel.  I do love this weather, though I miss the sun.  This is a relatively new feeling, illustrating a turn in my spiritual story as an embodied worshiper of the Mama.  Once upon a time, in my much beloved plains, hills and deserts of Texas, New Mexico, Colorado and Arizona, I loved the sun as any might, but I relished cooler nights and spectacular rainstorms more.  Since living in the midwest, I find myself more and more than ever lifting my face to that best and most beloved star, seein’ as how precious it is in these colder climes.  I have become an ardent lover of that great burning sphere – that golden eye of heaven, lighting the cobwebby corners of my mind, tricking out lost memories, the ghosts of sweet songs, favorite dresses, raspberry jam, good books, and shooting stars.

I know I’ve been silent for weeks, friends.  Full days, the summer coming in and shaking out all the sheets – my companion badgers savage my ankles with renewed vigor – the heart heavy as salt and light as woodsmoke in turns.  And also, through it, contemplating too and hard the horrific subject I’ve been trying to talk about for weeks and haven’t: the BP oil spill in the Gulf.  The epic disaster that is still unfolding there has me triple tongue tied.  There is only so much mindless despair that can be communicated in the written word, after all.  Others have said so much, all needful to say, and I don’t know that I have much to add but that it’s all I can do when faced with it to stop rocking back and forth, asking old questions that sound ancient and silly and stupid with repetition, but still have no fucking answers.  What have we done?  What have we done?  Where will it stop?  I admit – the world of late has been sacking my reserves, pulling at my loose threads, and weighing my spiritual feet.  Where’s the meaning?  Why bother with all this religion and all this poetry?  For a while, pagani, I admit…I forgot why, and that’s a hard time, and I’m all exhausted from empty.

So today I will go to the lake, and sit on Her shores and stare into Her shifting waters, and think about the slings and arrows of rocking and rolling on this mossy stone, dreaming.  The raptures and the doubts.  The honeybees, the floods, the music.  I will make a practice of re-membering.  I wonder sometimes if forgetting is our greatest problem (maybe I’m projecting, it’s true…or not – really – it seems awfully viable that one of the great projects of civilization is the cultivation of forgetting…remembering the Real makes people get up and get angry, and you can’t have that sort of thing when you’ve a world to burn), and that story and ritual and in fact all of religion are really just enormous signposts designed to remind us of things we always know but constantly forget.  Fingers pointing at the moon, as I’ve said before.

Remember the moon?  Remember the night when you were fifteen and you crept out of your house at night when you were supposed to be asleep, to see the moon?  And it was so bright you could barely believe it was real, and the glare from its shining made an enormous cross in the night sky, and the grass was a dangerous carpet of silver blades, and the trees all had sweet dark secrets they told you, carried to you on the wind that touched your bare arms, cold as butter?  You saw it then for a minute – the great map of the planet and all the stars and whirlpools in the black honey of space spread out before you, and you stood as though you had been driven feet first and planted in the earth, knowing this would be your religion, forever.  Well, somewhere inside you there is a story and a dance for that moon and that night and they are waiting for you to give them breath and body.  Because the more you dance the moon, the less you will forget Her in the face of terror, clocks and currency.  Birds covered in oil.  O Religion!  Bind me to the moon.  Bind me to unforgetting, and in that binding the unfettered freedom of Knowing how to continue, and going about the Work with holy resolve.

It always comes back to that.  Ritual – the telling of stories with the body in order to encode in our cells the Things We Cannot Forget.

So I will sing the new summer by Mother Lake today with another ocean in my heart, that one run hot with oil and death.  And the irony of the in-spite-of-it joy in singing Beauty will slice up my spine and re-member me piece by piece, saying “oh yes, and simple things are holy, bowl of bread, table of fruit.  oh yes, and the Mama is still alive and sings even when she is burning.  oh yes, justice and compassion are good Ways to live and people can be breathtakingly, achingly and brilliantly beautiful.  oh yes, there is meaning somewhere and there are more stories to tell and dances to dance.  oh yes, the Moon.  oh yes, the body.  oh yes…the blooming lilac and the starling…”

The starry sky and the road without end. Amen.

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Content soon, promises promises!  Orderly thoughts and interesting things…strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff.  In the meantime, stay fiercely beautiful, pagani!  As you are so often wont to do.