journal 6.4.23

I started a full moon ritual in my dreams yesterday.  I remember looking down at my hands, smeared with honey, and saying, “The sweetness of life sticks to me.” The rest was lost to the spiritual trauma of waking up to thudding noises overhead.

But I smuggled this pearl out of dreamland and so the hour of 3 a.m. did find me with calendula-streaked honey on hands, face, and throat, closing one circle and slipping onto a fleetingly quiet balcony to sit in moonlight.

Today woke to an altar awash in dried flowers, a cauldron scattered with seeds, and bright red blood.  Feels auspicious to be bleeding on one’s (soon-to-be) fortieth birthday.  Here I believe the lady is meant to gasp and say, “Can it be? I feel so young inside!”  I am more inclined to ask: Has it only been forty?  I feel at least a hundred years old. In all the most splendid and awful ways.

The trees are so suddenly and so blindingly green it feels almost violent.  This is the Earth as I first saw her face, yet summer’s ascent always takes me aback, makes me want to retreat into darkness and just dip a toe in the searing golden pool.  Never quite certain of what might jump out.  Perhaps the imprint of being born under a long sun and waning crescent moon.

Depending who you ask, upon arrival that sun was in the sign of gemini and moon in aries, or it was taurus and pisces, or ecstasy and beauty, or the year of the water pig and hour of the earth snake.  All of which seem reasonable to me, making astrology as it’s commonly practiced seem rather unreasonable — but I have a fondness for the last story, the serpent and the pig, cosmic opposites that feel so familiar and inevitable.

It’s such an ordinary thing, to be born.  The most shocking things always are. Birth.  Death.  Flowers.  Moonlight.  Blood.  Ink.  The impossible ordinary.

As I write the sun has set on my last day as a 39-year-old.  There are blue clouds on the horizon but I know better than to say it looks like rain in this land, where clouds are notorious tricksters.  Even the fattest, wettest-looking ones, riding in on damp and restless air, may open their mouths to breathe fire instead of water.

I am sorry for all the moments in the past year that I missed.  I am sorry for the many moments in which I cursed the one of my birth.  I will try to meet you again, Sunna, guardian star, if I remain for another sojourn around your fiery heart.