N’s birthday. Early evening, but it feels late. //
Saw a white Prius today with a red bumper sticker that read MILK DRINKERS MAKE BETTER LOVERS in splashy white letters. Weird to think about. “Big Cow is really powerful,” I said to J, who was driving us home from Gross-Out after the sauna.
J had never seen “Casablanca,” and after an early dinner we put it on. Every time I watch it I catch more of the little jokes. I wore carnelian beads today for strength and healthy flushing of the blood. I read about liver function and the relationship between digestion and estrogen balancing. Cruciferous vegetables and pumpkin seeds are recommended. And expressing your emotions, and accepting that you have them, letting them flow through you and be released; especially, of course, grief, and rage. Tomorrow is the first day of the strike; I am still weak, and feel unsure that I will be able to join the picket for my shifts. I feel wistful imagining how I will write to my professor about meeting soon despite the strike. There’s so little tying me to the university to begin with. These meetings have buoyed me singularly since they began last spring. Oases.
I dreamed about the forest last night—running through it, getting lost taking a new path. It took longer than it should have to zigzag my way back to the cabin. The next time, someone was waiting for me—my mother?—and when we took off again, this time we just used the acknowledged path, which was partially paved. It looked sort of like the bike and walking paths that criss-cross the Prater Park in Vienna, just slightly elevated, with welcoming green tangles of wilderness on either side. Although I knew this way to be reliable, and technically more time-efficient than the one that had me anxious in the bramble, I caught myself, in my dream, imagining that more difficult path.
J hums “La Marseillaise” now. For the more physical pain, I apply a salve of beeswax, lanolin, and grapeseed oils infused with cayenne, calendula, and yarrow, and Wintergreen, eucalyptus, cinnamon, clove, ginger, and marjoram. I bought the small pot of butter-yellow blend from a massage place in South Bend, Indiana, sometime last summer. That was the second time I got in trouble for getting a massage scheduled during the menstrual phase of my cycle, as is strongly discouraged (can’t be rubbing things the wrong way).
In both cases, as with every massage in my life, it had not been my choice, purchased and arranged by someone trying to do me a favor. The woman assigned to work with me was very sweet, with fine ash-blond curls and doe eyes, and was in night school, and had a baby boy, and we talked about birth order and disordered eating. She started the hour with a little Reiki (she was learning in school) which was very amateurish but somehow charming, and for some reason relaxing. I’d never had a masseuse ask about sexual trauma before a session, and found the disclosure, well, healing. I bought the salve because she used it during our hour and I wanted to remember her, and have a way to call up feeling safe.
I’m wearing what N calls my “forest beads,” the long string of gray-green and yellow-purple stones we bought from Bairabi. J said earlier I looked like a shaman in them. Usually they’re too heavy for my neck, but relative to all the other discomforts, I can barely feel them now.
I got the hit last night during a meditation that Nu spends almost exactly half of her time in the spirit world and half her time here in the physical. I watched her today and noticed her usual weirdness: the languidness, how she moves and rests like a pool of oil; and what I call her “astral travel face,” when she gazes knowingly through solid walls for minutes at a time.
She’s over there a lot more than most humans are. I was visiting Rowana’s cabin when I saw Nu hunting moths in her front garden, and I knew it was the same creature, not some ghost or doppelgänger. The precise animal who lives with me in Oakland travels also to that world; and, more stunning, is as comfortable there as she seems to be over here.
In that way, it’s reminiscent of the snail on the base of the Nine of Pentacles: Everywhere is home.
