Vigil

Full Moon April 6, 2023
July 30, 2020

She stares into the sheered off rock – grey – her naked body pressed against the cold and mineral stone, smelling of metallic earth.  She feels the jagged edges,  the layers of rock face, impenetrable, unwelcoming.

The painter thinks of Rilke’s grief poem.  Rilke asks god to be fierce and break through to him.  How like a man she thinks, asking God to be fierce and break in.  She remembers Rabia, the Sufi mystic whose heart lives in the other world.  When asked what she was doing in her wandering, she responded “I am sorrowing.”  And why are you sorrowing?  “I am eating the bread of this world while doing the work of that world.”

The painter sits and witnesses the woman facing the rock of grief, feeling the constriction in her own heart, knowing the Spirit of grief is the sovereign one here.  The grieving woman not so much waits as stands vigil at this wall of darkness, solidified tears, being.  Is the woman staring into rock, or listening for instruction from that other world? 

She fills the brush with the rich clay of burnt sienna, stroking a blanket over the sorrowing woman’s body, who reaches up to clutch the corners, as if ready to pull it around herself as she stands staring into the grey cold.  A Mantle of grief, cloaking her in the dignity of sorrowing. He is gone, he is gone. 

The painter waits, a faint golden light bleeds through a rock seam above the woman’s head while the woman’s heart bleeds into the center of the mantle.  

Behind her appear bear, fox, coyote, and raven who sit, curious about this woman who stands facing the place of no entrance, no exit.   Sun sets, moon rises, giving way to another dawn. Still they sit.  On the third day the painter approaches the easel.

They turn to the painting woman, who gazes into their eyes in turn. They look one to the other, until bear says, do you see the heart, the bloody and broken heart at the center there?  Memory unleashes a river of sorrowing for her dead cub on the side of the road, and fox, her mate’s fur strained dark red by an exploding bullet.  Coyote shivers the ancestral memory of slaughter.   Raven rides the current of old memory, her people’s gift and sorrow, this ability to see death coming.

Moved, raven flies to the north of the bleeding heart, fox pads south, coyote silently slinks west, while bear delicately moves east.  Taking up their stations, they will wait with the Vigil Woman.  Of course, there is no other way but to wait, no other way but to honor the Spirit of sorrowing.  Bear with cub, fox with mate, coyote with so many, woman with beloved, while raven remembers that only grief breaks the heart, only love pierces rock.  They settle in for this long ceremony of repair.  God has come.