from
the sea (5) – merging and menopause - inner pirate , part 1 by freda karpf
“...each
of us carries in our veins a salty stream… in almost the same proportions as in
sea water. This is our inheritance...” Rachel Carson
“NJ
lies in the middle of the Atlantic flyway and thousands upon thousands of shore
birds, waterfowl and other birds migrate along the shore each spring and fall.” Joanna Burger
What if it’s not just the birds that
belong here?
~
Mrs. Scattergood remembered when she
prepared for her period; or when her period prepared her. When she became aware
that is was coming she had already felt like she was swimming through the day.
She’d command herself like the pirates in stories, “Arrgh.” She would go around and “Arrgh” for a while
because words weren’t available so much as guttural sounds with the vague
promise of spit in them. Her inner
pirate would allow her to say “Arrgh”, to everything; to not worry about a
thing. Whatever. Whatever. Once she knew
what was happening, she would take the day for herself. It was something they
did a long time ago. Late in the game, she knew it was something she needed to
do during the precious few periods left. She had to make this time with herself
less of a thing and more of a not thing so that it takes place. In the fecund fertile darkness of yin,
encased in the yin night, possibilities.
~
She felt a little lonely sad at times. A
friend was heading over to her place to practice qigong. The little bubble of time before her arrival
allowed her to take in the last bit of the sun.
She had been hibernating; stowing away the good for another time. She
would tell you, people crave people even when they desire solitude. She thought her period was over. The blue
period. The solemn period. No, it wasn’t; they weren’t. Even a storm was coming to punctuate this
time away with another permission slip. Work sent her home anyway. Home a verb meaning to cook, to be, her body
swimming through the day. It was
glorious. Wouldn’t you know all that nesting she was doing was her preparation
for getting her period. She didn’t know. Her body knew like a shadow knows
where it has to be.
~
Pirates rarely take days off to be wrapped
in the cotton of their menstrual cycle.
Well, who really knows about pirates? Their whole inner life stolen by
fairytales and movies bringing unreality to the reality of everyday people
basted in bad information. Consensual
reality is layered with the stories the culture wants to repeat. Feeling a
connection to your own reality can feel like borrowed time. But it is burrowed
time, often the same kind of time that a period brings on. There may be some treasure in that.
~
Mrs. Scattergood wondered if men know that
far away feeling you can have within yourself. Wondered if when menopause
finally leaves if the distance between that time and inner reality will be something
she remembers. It is not longing. Will she remember what it is to feel as if
something really important is near, in another string of reality abiding a
parallel wave to this one? Just two
weeks ago she felt the isolation brought on by grief. Now she feels wrapped in
cotton.
~
The difficulty today is tomorrow. The job.
Today, she knows her great fortune in friends; feels soothed and smoothed over
by this last period. It is an old fashioned one. The kind she used to get and
would call out, even though broke and desperate for money. She'd call out and
be in her soul swoon, cocooned and in the place that this world does not offer
often, a sense of timeless being.
~
Bad
mantras drumming through her brain. What mattered most was getting to the next
morning. After that, it was a slide as long as there was black tea with goat’s
milk and stevia. When the old birds fall out of the sky because they decided to
stop flying you’ve got to ask yourself, “Did I opt in to this because the
miserable bastard and my mom didn’t even consider birth control?” Or, “Was there another reason for being on
this blue planet?” You know don’t
you? You know right there you got
everyone, the gods, the heroes, the aliens tuning in to every mind on the
surface. The animals and then your dear friends love the fact that you called
up from the fabric of everything to remember we are on the blue planet. Shoot, nothing better than that really.
~
The mystery of the oceans
will never go away no matter how mapped or mined. And pirates should know, by the way, that it
was a woman that mapped the oceans. Just
as it was a woman that mapped the hands and feet for reflexology. You don’t have to stretch the taffy too far
to realize that each map, almost always, there’s got to be an exception,
right? Each map is about the whole. It
pretends to be an exploration about the particular but as it turns out, each
particular is about the whole too.
No comments:
Post a Comment