"The mystic Simone Weil wrote to a friend on another continent, "Let us love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated." For Weil, love is the atmosphere that fills and colors the distance between herself and her friend. Even when that friend arrives on the doorstep, something remains impossibly remote: when you step forward to embrace them your arms are wrapped around mystery, around the unknowable, around that which cannot be possessed. The far seeps in even to the nearest. After all we hardly know our own depths."
I digest that while considering something Elaine sent me. She chose a pendant with a goddess on a tiger, not realizing it was a symbol of the goddess Kali. Elaine recently survived brain surgery, so she could really relate to these words she found on a website, as can I. These words come from this website. http://www.exoticindiaart.com/kali.htm
"Kali's boon is won when man confronts or accepts her and the realities she dramatically conveys to him. The image of Kali, in a variety of ways, teaches man that pain, sorrow, decay, death, and destruction are not to be overcome or conquered by denying them or explaining them away. Pain and sorrow are woven into the texture of man's life so thoroughly that to deny them is ultimately futile. For man to realize the fullness of his being, for man to exploit his potential as a human being, he must finally accept this dimension of existence. Kali's boon is freedom, the freedom of the child to revel in the moment, and it is won only after confrontation or acceptance of death. To ignore death, to pretend that one is physically immortal, to pretend that one's ego is the center of things, is to provoke Kali's mocking laughter. To confront or accept death, on the contrary, is to realize a mode of being that can delight and revel in the play of the gods. To accept one's mortality is to be able to let go, to be able to sing, dance, and shout. Kali is Mother to her devotees not because she protects them from the way things really are but because she reveals to them their mortality and thus releases them to act fully and freely, releases them from the incredible, binding web of "adult" pretense, practicality, and rationality."
My morning flow this morning may not make sense. Perhaps, placing it here honors my Kali child, the intuitive, irrational me. There may not be meaning, and in that, perhaps, there is. Hear the strike of silence, the banner of color, the streak of the wind, looking for a keyhole, to enter, in.
Kali
Living within
the house of myself
I dance with the tiger’s tail
as it swings
from the mouth
of a mouse -
for the sky
to peruse
the movement
of death and life
as it shifts
shakes
the lakes
where presence
sticks and unsticks
the hug
unleashed
in the splat
of steps -
to retuck what comes,
remake
what tracks -
