when our heart has a good listen

from the sea (5) –  merging and menopause, hunger for home part 2  by freda karpf

Except from riding the waves:  a tale about being home in the world by freda karpf    @thewildblues

     Mrs. Scattergood would know this, but never when she needed it. The stories that call to you, the ones you remember and forget are the ones that can bring you home. There was a time when the call of the owl haunted her. Why?  She didn’t know. There was trouble in her home. There was distance when there should have been intimacy. The owl, tracing its secrecy within her psyche; flying without sound, flew around the margins of her daily life. Why she had to know about owls?  She tracked down information about them because she couldn’t actually track them. Those are the trails that you go down, never to return the same.  The wrap of her desire to see owls, the turn of events, the whole round of relationship going on near her home, Baubo, Barry’s loss, making soup, not knowing who she was, all of it was something she knew but didn’t know.

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     The vague feeling of presence, wanting to be with integrity but pulled by hunger was a long time ago.  She reduced her burning to words and felt crazy without a form. The story was one that Baubo knew intimately. It is what Mrs. Scattergood would say called to her since she could remember story, the myth of Demeter and Persephone.

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     She felt as if she wavered through reality like the shimmering skin of a street horizon baking in the heated pool of a minor mirage.  The only destination that made any sense at all was to stop.  Every stop and pause becomes a listening post.  She might not have known it then but she had an ear to other worlds. 

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     Who has come through the changes with her?  What is left in the net?  Her sister, her mother, her brother, Barry.  She was relieved to remember.  Some people find their home in the volcano’s shadow. Lava so hot can melt your bones in seconds. Those that live there know this but this is their home. “Whoever is afraid is lost.”

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     Your inner compass is always pointing toward your true home.

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     Rachel Carson wrote that the moon was pulled out of our earth and resides in our skies forever in relationship with us; that “…when the moon was born there was no ocean” and we did not have a home on our blue planet yet.  The moon was once a part of the earth. Rachel could tell you just where the moon pulled out of the earth and how the oceans came to be. She knew and reminded Mrs. Scattergood how she often goes to the grove of pine trees on her property in the moonlight no matter the weather. Your inner compass is always pointing toward your true home but sometimes you have to reach out to the moon to find this.

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     Losing someone you love, losing time for your work, losing your heart for the wrong person is as big as the moon leaving the planet. It leaves a hole. When the moon left the ocean came. But nothing is permanent. The tides remind you. Back when the moon left, the ocean came; fish began to walk on land and birds flew off their fins toward the trees. But only you can come back to center and find your true north. The only compass being a sense that leads you without words. It could be invisible threads that guide you toward your home like a trellis the flowers so they can climb toward the sun. Nobody knows why we feel lost when we’re sitting in our living rooms; nobody knows why we are found when our heart has a good listen. But these things are true. Just as true as the tides and currents. Just as true as the flow of memory into and out of our days.