VI The Lovers

image and prompt from Pamela Eakins, *Tarot of The Spirit*

The Lovers

Children of The Voice

Splitting Apart

Making Connection

Crossing The Abyss

Does the Gap Between Worlds

Help us

To Realize Love?

Past Lives, And Fences

I’m not sure if past lives exist

Or if ancestral/epigenetic memories are real

But I feel like this lifetime

Has me reliving, re-membering,

And disbelieving

All the various forms of magical paths of previous skins

From cunning folk

Hunting down leylines with dowsing rods

Scrying by the augury of nature

To Druidry, Spiritualism, Crowley-esque seances

And skyclad Gardnerian circles under the moon

To dabbling in dissolving and coagulating via alchemy

And achieving Masonic handshakes and Golden Dawn initiations

Upon checkered floors

Tendrils travelling through portals

Ancestors tugging from all directions

“Complete me! Finish my work! Carry on the magical line!”

Like being torn apart on the rack

I do not know how to handle it all

I do not even know

If it is real

I sit on the fence

I’m a lifetime fence sitter

Watching all of this approach and retreat

I’ve found myself role playing, smirking inside

Each time the opportunity invites me to embody identity

I step in, explore, and bow when I part

But nothing sticks

And I wonder at how so many

Can be Sure

Lately, though

It’s been getting pretty real

Egypt keeps coming up to me and introducing itself

As if I need to wed it and bed it

To learn all over again

Coincidences of two, mulitplying

And I find myself questioning my disbelief, my impartiality

I also find myself questioning

My urge jump off the fence

To become a believer

To be that person saying that thing

“I have received a message, praise be the Lord!”

While all of my charred sisters cringe

While famines and wars and violence

Unfold in the name of some crazy-ass and

Unseen certainty

I stay sitting on this fence

Looking at the whole menagerie of beliefs

At what is real, at what Real is

Asking who am I?

Am I an amalgam of all of these beings?

Am I some crazy wizard priestess

Reincarnated over and over again

Just now meeting my “Soul Family?”

Just now receiving “the Teachings?”

There’s something so tempting

About deciding to jump off and join

And yet something keeps me here

Watching

Something keeps me here

Listening

Something keeps me here

Loving

All

This splintering fence

I’ve made it pretty cozy

With my steaming tea, and my ice packs

I can see pretty far

And most days the weather is fair

I’m not sure if past lives exist

Or if ancestral/epigenetic memories are real

Even if it’s fun to entertain

That I’m some crazy wizard priestess coming back time and time again

Even if they keep coming

Swearing they’ve seen me in ceremonial gowns on the Nile

Even if holding my measuring cup, counting grams

Hearkens me back to some cold and specific ancient laboratory

I can’t quite do it

Decide with all my being

Who I am, why I’m here, and who is

Wrong

Even with all the tendrils, pulling

I think I’ll stay here

On this fence

In this lifetime

For now

Issues

Photo by Juan Pablo Serrano on Pexels.com

Why did you go, Daddy?

Was it something I said?

Why didn’t you call, Daddy?

Did I do something wrong?

Was I not enough

To make you stay?

All those years, wondering

All that

Silence

Sometimes I get so angry

At the hole you left behind

I do my best to forget it

Yet I keep recreating you

To find the answers

But Daddy

You’re dead

And I’ll never know

And this longing

Confusing, sexual, childlike

This rage, Daddy

Has nowhere to go

Is This Love?

Is this love?

And I, running

My heart stands

Confused

Is this love?

Or do I trust this hesitancy

All these

Good Reasons

Do I go with the gut?

Do I draw the line?

Is this love?

If it is

Does it matter?

Can I enter

Fresh from multiple ER stays

Disembodied from pain

Terrified of past emerging present

Heartbreaks, deaths, betrayals

All the usual defenses

Can this be love

And can it be right

To refuse it?

It taunts me, pulling at my core

Is this love, instead

Something to open into

Something to receive

((I am so faulty at receiving))

Is this love

The Medicine?

Is it the counterintuitive move

That will fill the cracks with gold?

Does it even matter

Whether I run

Or stay?

If this is love

Will it wait?

Will it wait

For the months

For the years

For the decades

Before this body

And all Her terrors

Are ready?

Will it call again

Will it

Return?

Yesterday I said no

But now there is a space

I am thinking about you

And a wondering haunts me

If I threw it all away

If all of my stories

My can’ts and shouldn’ts and

How could I evens

Decimated a sprout, so gold

Before it reached out of its casing

Before its right to bloom

Was given a chance

Did the sword of my fear

Slash it to the ground

Before its innocent yearning

Could even begin

To radiate?

Is this love?

And can a love

Hold a broken body

A terrified, can’t make it to dinner

I am hemorrhaging again

Kind of style?

Is this love

And will I ever know

It’s been so long

The firefighters and soldiers, always at the ready

Defending

Is this love?

And I, running

While still, thinking of you

And your pictures of sunsets

Of past lives and magicks

Is this love?

My heart stands

Confused

Who Am I

Exercise One: Who am I?

I am a woman

I am a prisoner in my body

I am 50 years old

I am someone who has been through a lot

I am someone who has felt strong as a result of this

I am someone who usually sees the positive in things

I am compassionate

And

I am angry

I am scared

I am tired of being in pain

I am not sure I can keep doing this

I am a shell of who I used to be

I am tired of feeling fragile and powerless

I am tired of being sick and unable to do the things I love

I am not sure what to say anymore

I am not sure who I am anymore

I am nothing

I am nothingness

I am presence

I am acceptance

And

I am rage, resenting

I am a fire burning, perhaps burning clean

I am a Tower

I am crumbling

I am old foundations disappearing

I am all comforts and surety erasing

And when this is done, I hope

I hope I am dancing

I hope I am laughing

I hope I am writing

I hope

I am free

Sneak Attack

The sun, shining

The geese, hissing

The water, lapping

I am laughing with her at the lake edge

Maybe today it will be okay

Maybe today

It will be okay

.Just to play it safe

I end our connection

I make some time

A need to rest

I fear what may come

I lay down

Just in case

I am listening

The sun, shining

The geese, hissing

The water, lapping

I am chanting affirmations

In the back of my mind

And suddenly

In you rush

A sneak

Attack

You come out of nowhere

Dropping your force

Terrorizing my field

All creatures within my soil

Run for cover, trauma shaking

They know not what to do

One minute it is peaceful

The sun, shining

The geese, hissing

The water, lapping

And the next…

Decimation

I feel your violence pentrating

All levels of my being

Cataclysmic, destroying

Any sense of plans, identity, joy, hope

Obliterated

In one moment

And now I lay here, sobbing

Avoided betrayals welling

The stones, aching

Darkness obscuring

I cannot see where I am going

And there is no future

But pain

How can you and I come to peace

When you keep annihilating me covertly

When you keep making these

Sneak

Attacks

Just when I’ve found a place of center

The sun, shining

The geese, hissing

The water, lapping

The children

Giggling

This is not the way

Somehow, you need to teach me your language

Somehow, you need to help me understand the hurt

Somehow, we need to get to the core

Together

Will we ever get to the core, together?

You and I, standing?

The sun, shining?

The geese, hissing?

The water, lapping?

The children

Giggling?

Will we ever

Get to the core?

Will we ever stand together?

Will we ever hold, and heal

Where it hurts

Finally

Fully

Instead of these

Uncompromising

Traumatizing

Immobilizing

“Incredibly successful”

Walled off, endless

Solution-less

Sneak

Attacks?

The Knot

Help me serve from this pain

Help me find the way

Help me see through the latticework

Squeezing my visions with fear

Help me open to clarity

Dreams to embody with ease

Instead

Of this moldy, wretched knot

I keep trying to untie it

I keep trying to understand

My brittle fingernails

Pulling, twisting, struggling

Just to make one tiny, tiny opening

For the light to come through

This knot

Dangling, chiding

Taunting me with its solid persistence

Disgusting me with its growths

And fungal putridness

I’ve sought out guidance

Over and over again

Only met

With question mark eyes

I’ve stared at it for so long

In so many ways

From every direction

Fingers, aching

Mind screaming

Life force dwindling

Asking

What is the message?

How do I not drown?

How

Can

Transform

This?

I know there has to be a way

Just to make one

Tiny, tiny opening

In the mass of these frayed edges

For the light

To come through

Bless And Release

Photo by Luis Felipe Alburquerque Briganti on Pexels.com

Uneasy

Overwhelmed

NO MISSION

I want to freeze

Food sensitivity

AMNESIA

Expending more than consuming

Thinning

no dreams

OBSESSION

Pain, sickness, death

Hopelessness, apathy

Ineffective care

Nobody’s listening

WHY

TRY

IT’S

NEVER

WORKED

BEFORE

Tiny boxes

Strangulation

Resignation

Confusion

Fear

Sacrifice on the stone

Rite is turning

Fire is burning

The young one reminding

Bless and release

May we

Bless and release

Moving forward, clean and free

Into

The Strawberry Moon

Bless and release

What will you

Bless and release

Moving forward, clean and free

Clean and free

And so it is

The Edge of Fear

There’s really no other way to describe it

The way I now feel inside about you

Other than a once dreamy relationship

Now having veered into nightmare

Where previous, the feeling of your warmth on my skin

Soothed me, comforted me, made me feel real

Spiraling now into a sense of terror when you’re around

Even a hint of you sends my feelers on alert

Just a twinge of your presence opens doors to future horrors

It is so sad

So terribly, terribly sad

This connection we once forged

This connection I prayed for, yearned for

Many

Years

And when you came, all that work I’d done

Our rhythm, our dance

You were so steady, so reliable, so deep

You made me feel

Real

But now, after several trips to the emergency room,

And numerous encounters with the crazy makers

I look back and see there were hints

Hints of your coming erratic swings

Hints of that once reliable presence, its sacredness

Starting to crumble

My heart hurts, such grief at losing our connection

Now medicated, I don’t even know if it’s you I feel

Even with that illusory sense of control

To quiet your outbreaks, to keep you from

Killing me

I still brace, wince, all the things

When I feel you return

How did it come to this

From such a deep sense of reverence and beauty

To this mistrust, confusion and wishing you’d disappear

Will we ever find our way back to each other?

How can I return to you, the you I remember

The us I remember, dancing, praying, offering

Instead of living, forever confused

Beholden to the pharmaceutical reins

Marionetted by diagnosticians

And when you’re around

Always

On the edge

Of fear

Solutio

She’s dissolving,

Again

Flesh evaporating like steam,

Again

Waking…empty, confused

Again

A hunger so deep

A terror so vast

They are battling,

Again

The cycle, repeating

Again

The same damn excuses,

Again

The doors not opening,

Again

Body rejecting nutrients,

Again

But something’s different

This time

She’s angry

And wailing

Unlike the passive defeat

Many

Times

Before

This time

She’s angry

This time

She showed up

Screaming, and yelling

And yearning, and slobbering

And wanting

Wanting

Much

To change

This time

She pounded

Fist to your pine-laden floor

Growling, bursting

Demanding

This has to end!

She howled

Over and over again

She howled

This has to end!

And you

In what may be the fiercest love

Just circled her

Holding gently

And letting her dissolve

Into particle tears

Absorbing

And rocking

And letting this old, old way

Have voice, and volume and fear

So that all of the creatures of the forest

Flee

You held her

Dissolving

And let the awful silence

Of her disappearing

And the next steps,

Not knowing

And the horrid, horrid

Wanting

You let it