4:00 am.
4:30 am.
4:45.
4:46.
:47.
:47.5.
It's a slow, hot splashing tide pool. The old employer who didn't end things appropriately, leaving me hanging. The partner who promised everything in earnest for eight months, and then disappeared, with no conclusion. My mother's sickness, tied to my early childhood trauma- oh, it's all so stereotypical. Altogether, at too-early hours before dawn, they and others - including unfair comparisons and a complete lack of presence and what actually is - churn and chide, coating my tongue, the back of my throat, and the cavities that hold my heart, my lungs, paralyzing me to my feet with panic. And the dawn hasn't broken yet.
The digestion and cleaning of the house, the body, the habits, yes. Like a fiend, with pride and tickety-boo-ness, I make little checkmark boxes and feel some sense of cleanliness accomplishment, cumulative over time for a pride of caring for self. That's one kind of saucha. It's metaphorical with the intention of becoming embodied. It's one way we train our precious and malleable minds. But. The digestion: the cleaning of the mind when it creeps into dark places of unfortunate compulsions is another thing. Like an old forgotten friend, crying out for some justice in closure, these indigestions show up as an impossible child.
And that impossible child always seems to rise in the dark hours of pre-dawn. She lives in the subconscious, making herself visible in the empty space between dreams, reminding me of, and building a list of the things left unsaid, unfelt, unfinished.
All while the liver does its hard work by the waning moon.
This nocturnal haunting is one thing I am for sure I am alone in (LOL! Haha!). I used to call out in the middle of the night during these moments- Bom Siva! As if he could point his trident and burn, like a fire thrower, the undigested moments, and char them: swaha! Like the glass stomped on at a Jewish wedding, scaring away all the demons, I call out his name to banish the hungry ghosts. My loud voice is too much for those memories. It's a decent management system, but doesn't eradicate the issue completely. I need a different bag of tricks.
But like a tiny light that turns on, dim but present... Laksmi. Yup, sister. I forgot all about you for a hot minute, and you went away. She is called up from the hala hala, like my dear teacher Janet Stone says: a big cosmic soup, with old broken supermarket shopping carts, dirty diapers, toxic waste, microplastics and for these purposes, half digested experiences (...and manipulated elections, why not?!). I call out in the gestures I do know.
The blades of my thumbs connect as do the little fingers, my hands forming a chalice I raise above my head. Forgiveness cradles my hands, and further, the cavities that hold my heart, lungs, organs, all the way down to my feet, now standing. The hala hala splashes all about, and we rise like a Venus on the half shell, clean despite all that splashes around us.
***