Digging a hole to plant some purslane, I found a penny, old, worn, thin, dirty. I rinsed it in the kitchen sink and squinted, then took a picture I could enlarge. 1982. I was 18. Graduated from high school that May, then off to college in August. Feeling grown, feeling alone, feeling hopeful. The world ahead bloated with possibility.
If I hadn’t planted the purslane, the penny might have remained buried for years or longer, much longer, until it aged into a relic from a time no one would remember.
Like this time will one day be – the demons and the dangers and the demagogues of this era rubbed thin and rusted and hard to even read. Buried. Spent. Their bloated possibilities nothing but history, nothing but the dirt-caked bones of a time no one will know.
There is a Goddess who lives in my Essence, the landlord of my heart. She offers communion, grace, peace, and mercy, and I want those gifts more than anything.
More than anything? Yes, more than anything. I know that I know that I know this is true.
But the goddess sits on a small stool in a corner, present but quiet, infinite but cramped, shoulders hunched over, arms wrapped around her knees,
Is this enlightenment? The Divine lives within. I know it. I recognize her. There she is. Her presence is undeniable. I have this awareness.
I visit her often. I sit with her, offer her food, pray to her, sing for her, chant her name, light a candle so she can see, light incense to give her pleasure. But she just sits there, patiently, as if she has all the time in the world. She doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t seem to be upset. She sometimes even smiles at my offering. But, mostly, she just sits.
I, however, am impatient. I get frustrated. I get angry. I abandon my prayers and chants. They start to feel futile. I leave her alone for long stretches of time. If she is just going to sit there, I’ve got better things to do.
When I come back, (I always come back) she is there, on the stool.
I throw up my hands. “What do you want from me?”
“I want to dance with you,” she says.
“I’m ready! Let’s dance, for heaven’s sake!”
“Look.” She motions around the space of my heart.
It’s as if her single word turned on the lights. I see boxes piled high, thousands of them, floor to ceiling, stacks and stacks. How is it I never noticed there is hardly room to walk?
“What is all this?” I ask.
Again she says, “Look,” more softly this time.
The boxes are labeled. Work. Relationship. Past relationships. Political Ideology. Upcoming Vacation. Expectations. Pride. Hurt feelings. Things I love. Things I hate.Traffic. Money.
The largest boxes have the most specific labels. The Sense of Rejection When Not Cast in That Play. Guilt About the Girl in Tenth Grade When You Sided With Her Bullies. Victimhood about Never Being Paid What You’re Worth. Family Dynamics since the Pandemic. And one just called: First marriage.
I turn to the goddess. “These are . . .”
She nods. “Attachments.”
I sigh out loud and figure I might as well get started, so I roll up my sleeves and open the first box. When the goddess stands, I’m so startled that I stop and look at her.
“What are you doing?” She asks.
“Figuring out what needs to go and what needs to stay.”
“It all must go.”
“All of it? But I might need this Work box, and I want to keep the Upcoming Vacation box, for sure.”
The Goddess sits back on the stool and rests her elbows on her knees, chin in her hands. The look on her face says it all. There will be no dancing today.
“C’mon,” I plead. “Surely you can’t expect me to get rid of all of this. This is my entire life. This is my story. This is who I am. Some of these boxes hold great loves, achievements, happy memories, great times to come.”
“None of that is here. These boxes hold the ropes that connect you to the memories, hopes, desires, expectations, likes, and dislikes regarding what is on the labels. And the ropes have to go.”
“What about this one?” I pick up a huge box labeled Spiritual Journey. “Surely this one gets to stay.”
The Goddess chuckles. “That one especially needs to go. Listen carefully. You’re not releasing the journey; you’re releasing your attachment to the journey. Don’t you see? No exceptions. Not one attachment can remain.”
“Not one?” I ask.
The Goddess stands again and walks to me. She puts her hands on my face, like a mother to a child, and whispers, “Do you want to dance with me?”
The power of her touch surges through my being. In that instant, I know that giving her the space to move freely through my essence is worth more than all of these boxes a million times over. I know it is my greatest desire to make my heart her home. And I know that the path to peace is found in complete surrender.
“I want nothing but to dance with you,” I say.
The Goddess smiles. “Turn around.”
I turn and look. Emptiness. Beautiful emptiness. I feel light and empty and full, so very full of love and joy and peace. I lost nothing. I gained everything. And for the first time, I know what freedom is.
I turn back around. The Goddess is already dancing, her golden white dress shimmering in the uncovered light of my surrendered heart.
Spring cleaning has me in the darkest corner of the sunroom with a stick in hand, wrapping old webs around the far end like drab cotton candy.
The spiders staked their claim last fall, orb-weavers, I think. I didn’t get too close, and nights were longer and cooler and spent indoors, so I let them have the corner.
When I reclaim it on a warm May day, the abandoned webs cling listlessly to wall and screen and bench and reach as if alive for the oar I offer from a far shore.
The weaver of the orb mustn’t mind rebuilding her home. It seems to be the point, to start again from the beginning.
The cardinal builds a new nest every year, sometimes even twice. Moles burrow constantly and don’t use the same tunnel again.
The hostas in my front yard disappear completely each winter and always come back, from a tiny green peek through the dirt to a maturity even grander than before, fueled by energy both fresh and remembered.
Everything starts over. Life is not always added to. It is sometimes begun anew.
John William Hill, “The Dead Bluejay,” watercolor, 1865
I saw him on the bench as I pulled into the carport, a bluejay, on his back, pencil-lead feet curled around a ghost perch.
I took my dinner inside to eat before it got cold and to give the bluejay a chance to rouse if it was only a stunning.
It was not.
Satiated, I went to the shed, got the shovel, then thought twice, and got two shovels.
With one flat at the bluejay's edge, the other tipped him onto the metal -- I feel it was a him -- bluejays so often seem more they/them.
I suppose I could have thrown him in the woods. But I didn't. I took him to the spot where I dump yard trash -- not trash trash, yard trash -- sticks and weeds and the dried husks of hanging baskets I forgot to water.
I dug a grave, a shallow grave, no more than six inches. I was tired, and my full belly didn't care for so much activity. But, still, I dug a grave.
I put the body of the bluejay in the hole and stood for a moment. Should I say something? I didn't know what. I just looked at him, saw him, stayed with him in that moment.
It took just two heaping shovels of dirt to secure him in his final rest, and I thought, I wonder if he knows that every time I take yard trash to this spot, I will think of him. He will be remembered. HIs grave will be visited. He will be mourned.
I took my shovels back to the shed and only then did I think of my father, placed into a cremation oven before I could see his face one last time, buried in a jar that sits on my stepmother's mantel, I suppose, or was he scattered in the mountains? No one ever told me.
I have no grave to visit, no headstone to decorate, no symbolic point where his memory lives on demand.
His voice fades a little every day. His smell, I can almost . . . not quite. His laugh, the music of his laugh, dying away. And I don't know where to go to bring any of it back even for a moment.
Deb Moore 