Marking Time
by Ruby Sara
Greetings, best and brightest beloveds, from the really really really really really cold and also cold…and cold…streets of the fiercely wild urban midwest!
It’s cold, and it’s not getting any warmer the next few days…quite the opposite in fact. But Imbolc is rising, and don’t I need to hear its promise of coming light and melt beneath the rock. In the heart of winter the seed cracks open and breathes, and we will pause in our business to listen for its singing. For right now, though, we’re in the thick of it – cold. And predominantly gray…with occasional savagely lit afternoons, when the sun reveals itself, and blazes fast and bright but bitterly cold on into evening.
Amidst the freeze and the blowing snow, I look out the window of the train as it speeds past the cityscape, and I notice every time some new trick in the concrete – a building with boarded windows shifting in character with the wind and unraveling the story of its years, the cemetery from above dotted with stone and snow, empty tracks winding back between old trees. I think about all the human sorrow those trees have seen. I think about all the love inside that sorrow. Some movement of the light makes the roots of one of the largest trees catch my attention, and I am suddenly flooded with memories of winters in Colorado, as though those same roots, in conspiracy with the slate sky and the snow, are whispering straight into the inner chambers of my heart. Reminding me of when, as a child, I perceived time and space as grand and vasty things – of the seemingly neverending roads and woods and plains of my youth, the secret eternities of evening. The Mama is the keeper of real time, all of it – organic time rolled up in pine needles and the crazy feathery quicksilver eyes of deer. In that remembering and revelation some part of myself knits together…and I say thanks to those roots for the reminder – I say thanks to the train that took me there. I say thanks to the gray sky and the snow. All winter I rock between cursing and blessing the sky, but today its bonelight has been a part of some small mending, and for that I can only offer thanksgiving.
These meditations and mendings have, of course, been manifesting only within the unspoken and unworded relationship between my body, movement, light, sound and dream. And they have remained so unspoken and so unworded. I mean, I have been a whirl and a tumble of thoughts and wonderings this month. Yet, when I go to speak or write, I find myself lately strangely mute – a burning mind and an empty mouth (despite waves of enthusiasm as in my last post, this seems still to be so). I have struggled for weeks with words – fumbling through half-finished blog posts only to discard them, sitting before empty screens and staring at empty paper, marveling at the clean loveliness of a pen but unable to pick it up – the act of articulation seems herculean and behemoth.
What can I tell you? There is smoke rising from the vent in the building across the street – backlit from behind the trees it is the color of late peaches one moment and copper coins the next…unspeakable colors that can only be wrought by the sun itself, lashing the earth with strokes of genius as it sinks into the fields and over the grinding, humming city. Even industry…even industry the Mama can make astonishing simply by turning and breathing and being – wrapped in a shivering mantle of ice.
It’s all I have – this marking of time. So the crows on the fence tell me – so I ask those roads and mountains in my memory to remind me of the sweep of things and forgive my lazy tongue. Just mark time. Just mark time.
I show up. I light candles.
Maybe tomorrow.
Oh I love you for writing this and publishing it so that I could find it when I am so in need of comfort and encouragement.
I just spent almost three weeks in the southern home of relatives who are evangelical christian and I was raised in that tradition. I have been so tired from protecting myself from the weight of tradition that can still move me and then this evening I am referred to you by Hecate. Thank you so much generous soul, thank you.
breathtakingly beautiful, Ruby.