Self Portrait #2

FULL MOON
October 28, 2023

This is a different kind of dark.  The color of cycles, the Great Holy Wheel turning.  The one who paints, the one who grieves, together bundle up in thick sweaters against the coming cold.  In the dusky light, they climb the hill together.  One, the eye of beauty, the other, the eye of sorrow.  They sit together against the wide deep body of the White Pine, nestled into a little seat made by roots on either side of them.  They lean back against the tree.  What are we not seeing, they wonder.

            The one who sees beauty, notices the death all around, ghostly back lit snags reach up to sky, bodies in praise giving refuge to insects, birds, a nesting racoon perhaps.  A Praying Mantis lays on the ground next to her.  Body, antennae, legs, arching upwards toward the night.  Each year giving more of itself to earth. 

            Night does not fall in the forest, night arrives from the ground up, rising from the needled floor, submerging the dark shapes of fallen branches, the leaves and snags.  Here the white pine, dead cedar snags, black and white birches shape shift in the alchemy of shadow against the pale grey sky.

            She falls into herself softly, like the ruffled edges of mushrooms melting in death to the forest floor, falling inward, private, sacred.  Work done.  She is surprised to realize this is the closest she has felt to herself since he died.

            Cool of night kisses earth’s warm mouth, their meeting a wet mist a in the east, infusing the air heavy with the scent of pine sap, needles, and earth.  The Sorrowing woman lifts earth to her face, drinking, breathing earth, she rests in her body.  They enter each other, the Sorrowing woman, the Woman who sees beauty. Refuge.       

            Night rises like water, her hands become shadows, nothing more, then dissolve into the darkness.  She draws in the dark, the pungent scents of death, her body melding with the Old Grandmother she leans against.  The owl calls.

            She sits under the tree, dark rising all around her, hidden in the pocket of night’s skirts and yet, here in her invisibility, she finds herself.  Her heart stutters in surprise.

            A little hut down the hill glows like a lantern.  Inside, another world. She rises  and goes there.