12 Nov 22
A bright day, bad for pain. //
The neighbor’s wind chimes ring, the highway dins. I visit my place in the forest in my sacral center. The cabin is wet from steady rain and the floors are soft and springy, like the ground in groves of redwood. I come here to meditate and be myself. She is not always happy to see me, but she never turns me away.
It’s as much my place as hers, even when I am gone for long periods of time. The clearing in which the cabin stands is quiet and breathes evenly. It’s not a place for sharing but there will be imprints sometimes, like of the Green Man, his myriad forms, detectable in the fire and on the walls. Rowana ignores them and sees to whatever she’s making or mending, but she smiles and sometimes even talks to herself, and I know that she’s talking with him.
Someone born with the sun in their seventh house finds herself in her partners. It seems easy to bungle, and would have been dangerous if I had not been so risk-averse, so shy. We still got into scrapes, of course, and still led double, sometimes triple lives. They’re all on-going. N used to say, they’re all always present for you, aren’t they? That’s just the way you love.
Rowana never feels guilt, or mercy. Those are not forest feelings. She feels hunger, and satiety; safety, and thrilling; exhaustion, rest. When anyone visits, she strings her bow. I need the protection and don’t usually feel like Aurora hemmed in by the fairies for too long.
I couldn’t tell you if she ‘likes’ me. That’s the wrong question. She is me. Why should she like me, too? It’s an issue of acceptance more than preference. Being kind does not necessarily come naturally to her. The isolation of her dwelling must explain it. She would say she’s in so much contact with the natural spiritual worlds, what need is there for human kindness? But then I visit, and there’s this friction. I feel ignored. She does her best, and prepares soup, tea, herbs to smoke. I’m like a little dog that keeps running away, and running back.
She stays up smoking and watches once I fall asleep in her bed. There’s a mixture of pity and real care in how she sees me, human heap, beneath her wool. I am not a natural survivor like she is. Or, I need her help to live in a way that she needs no one living thing. She’s my connection to connectedness. Through her, mycelial, the infinite nonhuman relationships are grasped, conceived, conducted, woven, worn. I hate where I’m from and I want to stay with her, and learn how to become her. But whatever is hated recurs; and there’s no use pretending she’d let me escape and live fugitive life in her shadow.
She cares for me and sends me back through her forest and into the wasteland where everything else happens, where I am bound to be. But I look like her sometimes, and feel stronger after drinking whatever it is she serves me when I come. We love the same things. But I am the one of us who has to share them.
