feral

Thursday, February 10, 2005

It's not so prickly, this desert place. I bend to pluck a plant from a clump at my feet. I will use this in a tea to make a medicine for my kidney, which aches today. The stem is stiff and dry. The little root has come up with it.

* * *

I battle to relax for journeying or meditation or whatever is this hybrid endeavor I experiment with. I find my lips tense, flattening grimly. I'm forever reminding myself--let everything go. Loosen your mouth and kiss your life sweetly.

Breeze from the south. Sky deep blue and utterly clear, transparent. A warm breeze melting all that remains of snow. No scary headlines in the morning email. The world must still be out there around us.

I skipped the llamas' grain feeding yesterday. They'll be anxious today. It's a treat, really, they've grown accustomed to, gives them extra fire in cold weather.

* * *

A picture named untothewoods.jpg

We're tramping happily now in bright sunshine across a clearing of tall grasses bordered by deciduous woods. My companion is a cheerful young woman friend, behind me to my left. "Am I making this?" I ask. "Sort of," she laughs. I smile, too. We have fluffy soft gold-brown hair that falls past our shoulders. And flowers in it. We wear long bright skirts over several light petticoats, and billowy white blouses. We lift the skirts over an arm as we walk through the long grass. She's taking me toward a shadow, a shady opening between two tall trees. "Is that where we're going?" "Yes."

I feel a little apprehensive but my friend is relaxed and smiling, and I trust her.

A blue-slippered foot stepping onto bare clean dirt. A hush. An emptiness--hard bare soil and straight clean tree trunks. A brief sensation of creatures disappearing just ahead of our movements. No paths. Dry, pale, untrodden earth in a dim wood. The trees are young, smooth-barked and slender. No undergrowth, not even duff of dried leaves.

Holding my arms out straight at my sides I can touch a tree with the fingertips of either hand, they are so close. We keep moving forward. After some distance the trees are heavier, of greater diameter, and farther apart. The bark is rougher, grooved vertically. I run my fingertips down the rough dry creases in the bark. The ground here is covered with a light litter of broad yellow leaves. The forest becomes brighter. Still there is no sign of a path or of any previous passers-through.

I realize my companion is gone now. She vanished at some point when I was distracted by the trees. I look around. No one. But I sense her fingers grasping the white billow of my sleeve behind my left upper arm. She wants me to be still.

The picture of woods before me is sort of ... sublimating ... becoming transparent.

At first I stand on what seems to be a lunar landscape--black sky, a ground of hard white dust under my blue slippers. That's what I want it to be, but it won't be that. No--the sky is a uniform lavender, the ground a barren yellowy crust. A fat cartoon penguin waddles past me and out of the frame. I giggle. The ground and sky shift colors continually, cycling through a pastel spectrum. Pale rose. Powder blue. I know I stand before something and I keep trying to make it into a structure--a house of some kind, with a door. But it won't be. It is merely a locus, a point of some imminent phenomenon.

A seam opens then, and a form steps through to stand in front of me. A willowy tall person of feminine or neuter gender with a cloth draped around it. The person holds something out to me. It resembles a slender cut-crystal bud vase, but it's meant to be drunk from. A crystal flute of colored liquid--sapphire blue changing to pale champagne gold. My mouth waters. I take the vessel and swallow its contents--sweet and viscous, like a thin honey. I get to keep the crystal object. I forget about the form--discard the image--and turn away to my left. I become more myself, who I appear to be at this moment in this life. My body this aging one. I am shorn. I wear a pale yellow light sleeveless shirt and pale linen short pants, a sort of orange color, that end above the knee. My feet may be bare. I just stand and wait, clasping the little crystal goblet in both hands and holding it to my chest, staring at the undulating horizon. Then I begin to experience something too powerful and surprising and deeply personal to relate.

* * *

All morning I hear the low roar and feel the vibration of passenger jets passing over. The dogs keep jumping up, expecting a vehicle that never arrives. It finally dawns that I see no contrails. Oh! Fooled again. It's a hard south wind through the junipers, the powerful engine the rigid trees become, taxiing down the tarmac.

1:00:15 PM

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