Eggs
So that peace shall be our constant and only purpose.
To the alien, from another side. // Earth used to be the most beautiful place.
You could go running, under-leaf, through waist-deep tangled-grass jungle, wondering about snakes but not stopping because you had lost something in there, your heart breaking along fault lines in egg shells of worry and the impossibility of searching this dense pocket of hiding. The sharp limits of eyes. (It could start to rain and the drops, clear pinpoints and gashes on your naked arms, would feel body-temperature, not quite cool.) You would give birth to yourself, clambering out from staggered layers of green into a rice field, shifting pale to yellow, (footsteps uneven in cracking, caked mud, swaying in) needle-soft fibers cascading with grain. A sea of it. (It could start pouring, but the heavy, like wind-whipped-metal, grey holds.) Do you go left, right, forward into the field, or back to the jungle? (Ok, good choice. Turn to page 56.)
Words come from behind you, you don’t understand those, but fearful fluttering heartbeats, you do. From underneath places, trembling invisibles look back, lines of sight never meeting, from too many directions. You never held what happened, there. Life was snuffed out in missed-crossings, disappeared, or worse, waited past the faltering light, as if to be found again, hoping but knowing, skin and memory growing thin and colder, until heart stopped. It gave up, it was over, but then, you were found. A strange struggle, distracting but home again, having made plans that seem irrelevant, at this point. Washed a sink full of dishes. Sat on the floor, scratching stray sentences in dust. It would be dark, but not raining, and anyway, you would be under the solid wood floor of another world, with footsteps relying heavily on the grammar of your (earthy) answer.
Somebody who loved you might bring you food that was soft and crunchy and salty and sweet. And a lit stick of honeyed incense. Parts of you would fall back in right places. You could remove clothes, find yourself misshapen, and step into a hot shower under pitch-navy sky. Becoming twin bodies, ocean and sorrow in a breathy coccoon against deep space. I would work my fingers into your scalp, and medicinal smells of sudsy substances would rinse off in slippery streams to either side of your (kissed) face. Scrub around ears. You could be clean. (And the miracle of that.) You could put on clean clothes. You could slip between clean sheets underneath a comforter blanket that was the perfect thickness for this night’s chill, with just enough weight to let you feel, well, enough. Plus a cat, on your legs. Yes, cats were amazing. You could cover your eyes, and drift off, as a warm hand slipped softly into yours. Everything that was lost, would be home, would be dreamt or forgotten, singing or held, would be tucked under feathers, bed scattered with blossoms, and the waning crescent would disappear into the better side of night.
One felt gratitude, and mistook it for fear. That is how beautiful Earth was. We couldn’t contain the joy it put into us, so we turned it upside-down, into fear.
Honeyed wafer set lightly into smoked amethyst sky. Grace’s nine eggs hatched into nine tiny black puffballs. Nine infant roosters, cheeping-cheeping… and she loves them with an intensity. Selamat purnama✨🌕✨
Grace, sitting.
Waking, as thinking, what we do with time. // Spending or wasting, as of fixed amount, and therefore an imperative, to put to good use. (Better wake up now, then.) Using it. As time is material. Filling it, or, as time is container. A schedule, with slots of, empty blocks on a page. Empty ones to the right, can be filled; empty ones to the left, empty time-passed, and nothing.
A fantasy of time: if only one could have all of that empty time. And then fill it up, past overflowing.
Go to see Grace. How is it she is filling (her) time? What is the action? (I called it sitting.) The eggs (under there) are her contemplations. Or perhaps, she is bodies, these days. Night passes, cold passes, sun comes and light warms. She is still, in the green, gives me nothing at all. (Am I empty?) My time is not hers, or her time is not here. She becomes barrier, wall of the garden, as stillness. A being of no-time, mother-protector of inner-other(s). It is paradise, in there. (And ten tiny, red-blinking heartbeats. InsyaAllah.) I am the against-witch, (against-which), I am the hunger. I am the waiting and the wanting-to-know.
There’s only so much one can do, in the morning. Coffee-making, cat breakfast, floor-sweeping, some laundry. Nongkrong with Frankie, putting shapes on a page. Skip around the old playground, as if forever, then, sent, posted, past. Hang out the laundry, as shadows shorten. Seek shade and retire. Dust returns to floors. As daytime becomes, all at once, too much heat, too much light, too much everything.
μουσικὴν ποίει καὶ ἐργάζου. // Mousiken poiei kai ergazou. // Make music and work at it.
(This message comes to Socrates repeatedly in his dreams, as Plato describes in the Phaedo, (at 60e6), which takes place on the day of Socrates' death by hemlock. Socrates also describes himself as experimenting with his interpretation of the message.
This is an example of a daimonic message, in Diotima’s✨ sense of daimon, which is something that goes in between the human and the divine. One might keep it as a mantra, or reminder, subject to interpretation…)
An interesting thing, about (poetry, and) prayer, is how it can’t be reverse engineered. (Pretty sure, and as always, Aristotle points out something similar in the Poetics, using terms almost im/possible to translate.)
And everything remains equally important.
Awake, not yet twilight, cats causing chaos. I cover eyes, determined to go back. (Wow, it worked.) Hours later, waking as digging out from under concrete. It seems more likely I never woke up.
(The invention of prayer. Begin with sleep and the way it/you works. Body is not machine. Simple acts are a negotiation, while the deepest consist of letting go. Make yourself an offering and the infinite becomes kind. Practice savasana, learn how to fly. Īśvarapraṇidhāna.)
As if death were the missing half of wonder.
Aspiring to harmlessness.
When in doubt (which should be much of the time), mind your own business. The trick is figuring out which business is (truly) your own. So, self-study. So, politics (in a failing, always, because they always fail, democracy). So, the divine. Which is infinite business, but try to make it your own.
Tomorrow, as begins a new lunar year.
Bismillah Hir Rahman Nir Rahim.
May our homes and our passages between homes be blessed. 🌘🌑🌒