Woman and the Badger

DARK MOON
February 9, 2024

Summer 2020

She wishes the  brushes were badger claws.  Digging, digging, gouging beneath earth of her skin. Burrowing, flinging the protections, the walls out with her hind feet.  Badgers get at the truth of a thing, down to the bone.  She is hollowed out in a way she has not known since childhood. An empty room with no exits, no windows, no color, the light surreal.   She wants out. 

The division of self, the griever from the painter, has not happened yet today. It is summer.  Her third without him.   She sits staring at a screen full of little boxes with people in them.  Her Art Sangha.  She sits with them, heart dead.  They check in, speaking of their vacations, their coupledom unspoken, yet a brush stroke that slices her heart.  Provincetown, Vermont…their places once.  She blacks out her image and sobs.

Sitting before the canvas, she wonders who she is.  Where are we?  His death, now the pandemic, fires of protest in cities, fires igniting ancient redwoods, the memory keepers, fires razing houses, killing wildlife.  Senseless murders of black men by those pledged to protect.  The world is singed and flooded with mourning and shock.  And insanity.  Yet she knows there is a larger truth, an eternal truth.  Badger digs deep into her gut to find it.