Bridging the Abyss

Dark Moon – November 23, 2022

April 2019

Looking down at the white thick paper, the woman who paints darkness lays down Mars black, and rolls it, then more and more until the paper has absorbed all the light into itself as if it had always been this dark ready for whatever life brings.  The woman who grieves knows the dark, it has enfolded her into itself, a refuge from the glare of white that seems to demand a buoyancy, a light so bright it absorbs nothing.

But this dark, she knows, will not be luminous, will not be a refuge. This dark absorbs life, she thinks, takes life and light into itself.  It is a snuffed and ashen place.  A Charnel grounds.  

Under her brush, a woman emerges, balancing precariously, arching over a canyon carved in the earth by a coldness so encompassing the world froze. A maw where light never lives.  The woman imagines blind, eyeless creatures dwelling there, and that in time she will become one of them.  Her toes dig into the edge of the abyss, her hands clawing for grip on the other.  She cries out, “where is the ground.  Am I gone?”  

The painter, who does not hear her, sits and gazes at the image of the woman, who thinks about letting go, the seduction of imagined peace, rest, to be a blind eyeless beast, or to cross to where He is.

It is time.  The one who paints begins packing up her brushes, her paints.  Desperate, the woman cries out “don’t leave me suspended here, I won’t make it.”   The painter does not hear her.  Her distorted vision seeing only a figure on a paper, not a woman who can’t hang on much longer, who doesn’t have the strength or desire.  

The painter slips her into a portfolio of darkness, gets into her car, picks up her dog at daycare and driving home returns to the woman who grieves, returns home to a house of absence, her breath suspended between before and after.  Before he died, after he died.  There being no ground yet, no bridge except her fragile memory.

Faithful, she returns the next week, pulls the suspended woman from the dark portfolio, lays her on the table.  The starkness of her fear now palpable to the one who paints.  She sits.   Do I paint her into a relief she does not yet feel, or do I stay honed to the truth of what is, she asks herself. She wrestles in her heart with the perfectly pitched ring of truth and the nauseous dissonance of painting a lie.  Or is it a lie to paint relief, to paint joy?  Perhaps we paint, we write ourselves into the future. What might be if we imagine it?  

Or perhaps, is there another one here, she wonders.  The one who holds the brushes, another who knows the deeper wisdom directing her hands, insisting deep truth, insisting on initiation.  A trinity. The one who grieves, the one who knows, the one who takes Her direction.   

Now the abyss is wider, a golden glow rising from its depths.  A backbone appears, white, snake like running down the woman’s back.  Twining roots of blue and turquoise, their colors, emerge from her belly, descend to the floor of the chasm between before and after.  A large blue hand descends from above, blessing her.  His hand.  While a steady stream of hot blood pours from her heart, the rivulet now an artery.  A spiral snake uncoils down to meet the root.  What else is there to do, the painter asks herself, asks the wise one, knowing the woman must make her back a bridge between what was and what will be.  I’ve given her a root, a blessing, a strong backbone.  She must find a way to hold this tension, to arch over the in-between, the unseen world of descent.  

The suspended woman wonders, have I scaled the walls of this jagged earth scar only to find a precarious balance, or have I received a back bone, a blessing, a root to descend yet again, or for the first time?  Surely not the first time, she prays.  

Despairingly she shouts into the abyss, no more, tell me there is no more.  Cursed Echo’s voice ricochets off canyon walls, enters her body, pulsing, resounding.  More, more, more.   

Her heart turns to stone, its bloody weight pulling her down, loosening her grip, she drops into space, hurtles off canyon walls.  No, No, No.