Soul Growing Ramble

March has been going along like a held breath here in Squat Town. I've been on the edge of some kind of illness, my first cold of the season, maybe, or an allergy, though I've never suffered allergies before. Whatever it is, it has me somewhere down near melancholy, which, if you're ever asked, is really a place. It's not somewhere you want to hang out though, there are snarling little beasts there and worse. It's where the whisperers hang out. I heard them as I walked around the house yesterday with the sky outside the windows shoving all that grey in toward the glass. Dr. Shell calls them the "what-ifs" and says they'll crawl in your ear. It's true, Mr. Silversteen, they will.



The whisperes wanted to know what I was about, what I was doing, hanging around here in all this. They seemed to think I'm surrounded by too many bountiful blessings. Looking about, I tended to agree with them. What was I thinking, accumulating so much. I could easy remember the time when I was proud, Thoreau-like, to not own anything.

You see, don't you (?) how the whisperers work. Catching you on the edge of an ill and making their case. Sometimes no more than a sigh. Then later, a dream, brushed away before morning. Maybe a bit of a song from the past. (How I've been hating those old songs. I've heard them too long. A bit of difference please. Something new). I look at my old clothes and pick up a sweater, a skirt, a scarf -- how could I ever have worn that -- what was I thinking?

Nostalgia, too, came with this ill. All my battling with the ways -- tea and vinegar/honey and garlic -- nothing could quite eradicate the thing, whatever it is. Tired. Watery eyes and sneezing. The way some folks get with goldenrod or ironweed. And I'm on the verge of remembering. Something. Don't know what.

But don't think I'm a lost puppy. I know what to do. Candle lit. Drum played. etcetera...
Staying busy is difficult. I couldn't give a care is what it is. Let dirt take the floors. And you can see, I've fallen to cussing. That can't be good or lead anwhere practical. Though I still maintain a cussword, well placed, is a useful thing.

Feeling though, the way I used to feel when I'd see a porchful of folks all gathered in to someone's house --- where's mine (?) I'd ask -- where's the family? Or when I'd see old people. Our old people are all gone now. We ARE the old people. And hell, we're not old. We were the ones who danced to Presley and Beatles. How could we be the old wise ones? No. Much as I'd like to claim that title, I know it's not so. And yet, we have no other old ones. Last year, the last of the ones I knew moved on. The ones just before the Avon generation. Oh, those are still around, in their eighties some of them. But they mostly don't know jack about old ways. Those were the ones who paved the dirt roads and carpeted the hardwood -- what do they know? Where are our OLD PEOPLE?

Complacency? That seems a symptom of this ill, too. And i pace a lot, Doctor. I pace past my spinning wheel. (Don't have the energy). I pace past the garden space (there's snow -- there's rain), I pace past my bookshelves and my sewing machine. All the distractions make me laugh. But it's sardonic.

Yeah, sure. I've checked the calendar and the astrology. Even that, with a smirk. Moon is in a waning square. And that three day dark I would suspect is a week away. I even dealt the cards to see what their 2 cents might be, but it was all greek to me. Something about the 4 of air, the 6 of cups...

Ah... new moon. I'll pin a hope or two on you. This is nothing more than a tsunami of the dreamtime. I know the Persephone drill -- into the darkness to come to the light. Dazzling light when dawn comes.