That Starry Dust
The cards tell stories written in the ink of intuition.
One about disappointment and renewal traveling through the butterfly-shaped root system of the lotus. The persistent lotus.
One about Lynx, keeper of secrets and systems of occult knowledge. Silent, clairvoyant cat of the boreal and subalpine forests.
“Were you thinking of anything?” my sister asks.
“No” I say.
She plies the universe in her strong mother hands, splaying possibility like a fan in the lamp-lit living room.
Is that ever true I wonder while watching hawk medicine fly into her fingers.
As creatures driven to survive in concrete and vast plains, do we ever not think? Even when the evil ones put mercy on pause, they are thinking. Not with kindness but with an edgy madness, a ghoulish force dunking billions of heads under the water in the way too deep end of our blue globe.
In these seasons when snow is thick and mornings run late, we think a lot. Maybe more than usual because we have fewer of the familiar things crowding us into the frantic mindscape we inhabit in the non-holiday times. Fewer emails (hopefully), fewer meetings, no lecture slides to post.
It’s a time to let the air out. And then welcome it in again, slowly. It leaves us more relaxed, although being relaxed can be harder to achieve than we might imagine. How bizarre. How terrifying.
It’s a time of year—the holidays--when amygdala posts for seasonal labourers to help with the influx of spread out thinking and the pesky resurgence of memories. The kind that sprout up when you return home. The kind that you were sure you weeded before you left the place you arrived from. The kind that used to numb the knees you fell to repeatedly in the early healing days.
The kind that might always be in the garden. The kind that can hurt but also teach.
Where do these seasonal helpers come from? Probably the hippocampus, trekking from chemical saloons and sailing along capillary networks as dense as the Amazon. Docking at the almond-shaped flight or fight complex, they help us reconnect the wires of real and remembered; of what is safe and what is not.
What old magic they spin.
The cards show us how we might return home. That dense nerve center borne during reptilian epochs, when excess amounts of lusty atmospheric oxygen made creatures 10x larger than their present size. A time when life was jungle and wisdom was forged on the back of a moth that pushed its way into the cosmos from a cocoon as vast as the galaxy.
Spotted, brown, and luminous in that starry dust ignited from the biggest bang no one heard.
Do we still listen? Can we?
Cup our ear to the sonic spirits sipping lemon water in darkened rooms, the spirits warming up their voices until we can hear them again. The spirits that ride along warm feather stems in Hawk’s glorious coat, parting the feathers to see the future.
To see freedom.
