My beloved housemate, friend, and the only person I really think of as family, is having keyhole surgery on her knee. She has been lying waiting to be prepped for surgery lookng out on mountains white with snow. She called me to say she was going into surgery and I said some loving and encouraging things but she was arguing with a ward sister and not listening to me. Never mind, she heard my voice and I said what I wanted to say.
This evening I shall do a healing ritual for her, send her strength and blessings. Right now and most of today I am grounding myself very deliberately and mindfully. I have the imagination of disaster and hate hospitals and even minor operations and grew up expecting the worst to happen in any crisis.
Earlier I went out into the back garden and rooted myself like a white birch. The wind was so cold I could feel my feet like cods of damp clay and felt less grounded and rooted than frozen in place and unable to move at all. So I greeted the birds with ruffled-up feathers and tucked-in heads, all 0f them sheltering in the canopied evergreen trees, and came indoors.
Where I found that rain was coming down the chimney like a sooty waterfall, black and silky and ice-cold. A very Cinderella moment, especially with organic white pumpkins piled high on the dresser. My small dogs barking at the ogre roaring in the chimney as I dashed about with brooms and mops like a wide-eyed peasant girl in the Perrault fairy tale. Shades of Angela Carter’s gothic noir too, the flue collapsing, black crows on the window sill, handfuls of rain flung against the glass like grey confetti. The prince off somewhere tilting at windmills.
Placing my feet on the lovely old worn rugs and afghans, I breathe in and exhale, feeling gratitude rise in me like a warm tide. There are no fairy godmothers with wands and the pumpkins are fine as pumpkins. The kitchen floor is awash with rain water and muddy paw prints. There is a hungry woman at the door reeking of cheap brandy and shame, drenched to the skin and refusing a change of clothes or hot food because only more brndy makes sense to her. My housemate may need to have another operation, she may not heal easily.
Yet this life is numinous and I open to all of it, the full unhampered consciousness of what gives joy and what brings in the shadow of fear and pain, the old remembered griefs. Grounding into the Mother, the deep earth under the rugs and the floorboards, the secret cellars and boulders and tap roots and sweet untouched soil and caves and a river of fire at the burning core. A phoenix in the sodden ashes.
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