S.G, Delhi, India
I am suddenly alone after my partner of years left me. I had to move house and I’m 52. I find myself sucked out of all happiness, I am rudderless, I seek something to hold on to so I can find hope for the future.
Dear SG,
Hold on to these:
See this limb, flapping in the night wind? Spectral and solid at once? Almost a sail, and definitely a semaphore? It is some great beast’s vestige; it is some warrior’s embrace; it is some proffer of some moment of grace.
It conducts a pace tonight, from the banks of the vast Bay, that suggests the ebb of an august body of water. A body of water that takes temporal dictation from none other than the moon.
The moon itself being a satellite of the earth. Being a piece of itself flung off, and out.
So, truly,
it conducts
itself
itself.
I will muse that with you again:
it conducts itself.
It flows and whimpers and waves and wallops and eddies and wages and weeps and slaps, brightly alternating opaque, under the quiet face of its
own moon’s
own pace.
As do you.
Your temporal roils and tender runoffs are all of your own syncopation. Your own score.
Which is not to say that you are alone.
Which is not to say that your own composition is not imprinted upon/that you’re not at times forced to coda; to respond.
But every day the tide twice comes in carrying something different. Some gift, some grift, some trinket; some thieved delight. Some new-sloughed perfection. And makes off with some nascent else, wiping the littoral to tabula rasa. Then returns, leaving some cryptic scrawl of sea grasses; some flotsam scribèd thing. Then voltas again, and: spectre.
Many drops of sea probably thought they’d be a pond. Or a silting delta.
Or a plain-faced and obsequious mid-sized lake, with regular borders, and nary a seiche.
Turns out you might be an ocean.
Alas!,
and hooray!
The arrhythmia of your current life is a fraught scend, and I send love; and I’m sorry.
Though, ever gently: might you be mistaking the sacrificial rod for the rudder?
The sacrificial rod is an overlooked appendage; an altruistic move meant to protect the precious parts of the vessel. It too is a limb, and not the full container.
Cast it off now: it’s done its job. Jettison with abandon! It has served you. Corrose no more!
Also: cats purr to speed up time, so as to heal faster.
Bodies in motion are sacred, an Elder once told me.
Now is the time to set your hand to the oar and row hard.
Pull toward horizons, and let flit landscapes.
Take in the smalls and narrows, the geysers and gyres;
the many benedictions of spindrift.
When you feel the buzz and blush of a goodly bouquet/squall/thrall of time having passed,
toss the fucking paddle.
You are vibrating in a moment of endless possibilities.
You are the sea, and you are the barque.
Armada and canoe fleet and all spectralities between.
The keel was never gone.
You are yar, and can cant when you want.
Call forth all your possible versions. See them there arising? Castellating and hologramming at the meniscus? Halluxing, blinking, glitching? As ghost ships? As Fata Morgana!
Lean in. Read.
Choose, and work backwards.
From that satellitic moon back to the full earth of you.
I might gently suggest these medicines, for the phases:
When they plow their fields
and sow seeds in the earth,
when they care for their wives and children,
young brahmans find riches.
But I’ve done everything right
and followed the rule of my teacher.
I’m not lazy or proud.
Why haven’t I found peace?
Bathing my feet
I watched the bathwater
spill down the slope.
I concentrated my mind
the way you train a good horse.
Then I took a lamp
and went into my cell,
checked the bed,
and sat down on it.
I took a needle
and pushed the wick down.
When the lamp went out
my mind was freed.
~Patacara, 6th century BCE
translated by Susan Murcott
All things
are too small
to hold me,
I am so vast
In the Infinite
I reach
for the Uncreated
I have
touched it,
it undoes me
wider than wide
Everything else
is too narrow
You know this well,
you who are also there
~Hadewijch of Antwerp, 13th century
translated by Jane Hirshfield.
I Realize
There is no conclusion.
I am not afraid.
I know the Thunderbirds.
They swirl around my heart
a red river
of fiery rapids.
Sometimes the tame
are once again wild.
And always realizations
are astonishing.
Ninaaminonendaan
Gaawiin nigiizhiitaasii.
Gawiin zegizisiiyaan.
Nigikenmaag Nimkiig
Giiwitaabizowag indeng
miskwa-ziibii
gizho-bawating.
Okaanag aangodinong
aawiwag wesiinhyag.
Apane apii maaminonendamoyaan
maamakaadenidizoyaan.
~Maragaret Noodin, 2015
English & Anishinaabemowin
Small Hours
tonight the totality of all being weighs
less than a feather
less than the movement of eyeshine
radiant in the thicket
less than the weight of tomorrow
balanced on a single blade of grass
[…]
this is the longhand of holy writ
rising from the gloaming
like dandelions pushing up through
the soil each a spiritual gesture
each like the Buddha overcoming his fear
of death and decay like the Desert
Fathers tracking sand through all the
halls of paradise.
~Don Domanski, 2021
AND TOOK HER BY THE HAND, AND CALLED,
SAYING MAID, ARISE
we came out on a road between a field
which was the sea incarnate on the land
its grasses allatonce bothatonce coming and going,
which is to be understanding of the wind
which is to magnify the wind its turnings
in sudden feints and rallies, lyings down
in lying down and maid, arise arising
in fabulous yellows and greens and darker greens
and one might stand all day in love attending:
attending with precise and loving care
the motion of meaning in a field of grasses,
the sea beyond them and within them there
~Luke Hathaway, 2022
To hesitate: from the Latin: to stick fast, stammer in
speech, be undecided.
To adhere, hold fast. Hold back in doubt or indecision.
Think of the tongue as a ship’s rudder.
~Kristina Bresnen, 2023
Me again:
think of the tongue as a ship’s rudder.
Speak yourself into a new course.
with love,
~Coco.
