Imbolc 2012

Imbolc 2012 - a reading

Every year is full of endings and beginnings. Birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, memorials. Days, months and years marking events of real or imagined importance. Earth Day, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the Year of the Woman, the Third Millennium, the Age of Aquarius. Like a long spiral staircase ascending and descending or an intricate double helix twisting and untwisting, the pattern of our lives repeats.

Nine days ago, we entered the Chinese Year of the Dragon, the Black Water Dragon to be precise. The Chinese consider the Dragon an auspicious year. For some, perhaps it will be. Certainly not for all. For a few, it may seem that they’re accursed.

I was born in the Year of the Green Wood Dragon. For many years, I used that sobriquet as a pseudonym on a Daoist discussion board. I loved the juxtaposition contained within that name. I mean, who would carve a fearsome dragon out of green wood? These days, that’s what I feel like, an unseasoned beast ready to crack and split as I age and continue to be tested.

I’ve always been fascinated by dragons. Dungeons and, Uther and Arthur Pen-, the red of Wales. Chinese dragons are powerful and noble. By contrast, European ones are greedy and fierce. The last battle of Beowulf. Fafnir of Der Ring des Nibelungen. The Legend of St. George. These are the dragons of my people.

Five years ago, I stood rearguard as my wife slew such a dragon. The landscape of that quest resembled Cymru, a native land of dragons, cloudy and craggy, shrouded in mist and mystery. The road through those mountains was hard, the siege against her fortress treacherous, the final battle in its lair fierce. Fortunately, she was victorious at every stage and that particular wyrm breathes no more. Though some nights, its long shadow haunts our dreams still. So, at Candlemas, we light votives to aid in our forgetting. Day by day, those memories are dispelled like ripples fading from the surface of a pond.

Since then, for me, each passing year has become a goal to attain, a quest to fulfill, a series of obstacles to overcome on the path to a glittering treasure I likely will never possess. As humans, we long to take comfort in the future. In auguries and names, we search for stability, an understanding of this life. Eons ago, someone categorized and compiled the names of these years based on a perceived pattern of events. Good years or bad, like a face on the surface of a distant planet, we are predisposed to see patterns even where none exist. But their beauty or ugliness is firmly rooted in the eye of the beholder, not the beheld.

Like a lamb stirring in its mother’s womb at Imbolc, the life of this black water dragon has only just begun. Whether it grows in the Chinese or European tradition has yet to be woven by the Norns. I suspect it will bring a bit of both: joy and sadness, wealth and poverty, misery and health. Ours is but to receive its gifts with patience and with grace, knowing that next year it will not visit us again, at least wearing the same scaly guise.


© 2012 Edward P. Morgan III

Winter Solstice 2011 (six days early)

Winter Solstice 2011 - a reading (on YouTube)

Next week marks three significant anniversaries for me. The first is the 20th anniversary of Karen and I celebrating the winter solstice by lighting the house only with candles. The second is the 12th anniversary of the first solstice message I sent out, at least the first one I have archived. I have managed to put out a winter solstice message every year since. For just over five years, I've written seven other messages throughout the year to mark each of the eight Celtic holidays.

The third is the fifth anniversary of the test that led to Karen's diagnosis with breast cancer. That adventure started three days before the winter solstice of 2006 with what should have been a routine mammogram. As fate would have it, I'd accompanied her to that appointment as we'd planned to kick off her vacation by doing some things together downtown that day. We spent that winter solstice trying not to worry as we awaited more appointments for more tests, which eventually led to her surgeries and treatment. That year is not one of our better holiday memories, though we are thankful we can look back on it with the good fortune of having everything turn out ok.

This year, I had planned to write a winter solstice message from the cat's point of view to celebrate these three anniversaries. Before I tackled that, I'd planned to have the final installment of the Abrami's Sister cycle posted. And another Christmas story out for which I'd jotted down an idea late last year. I'd planned to review where my writing was headed and how to approach each of the various websites I maintain. At Samhain, achieving all those goals still looked promising.

Once again, the universe laughed at my plans.

The words "cancer" and "chemo" have made a reappearance in my life. They entered in mid-November when I received a card from my father telling me he had lost his voice. Three weeks later came an email saying it was from cancer. Two days ago, another email arrived saying it was aggressive and that he starts chemo next week.

My father and I aren't what you'd call close. The people who know me know why. With Karen in 2007 I knew my role and my responsibilities. They were written in my wedding vows. This situation is more complicated. Once, I wanted to prove I was somehow worthy of this man's affection. Now, those thoughts are ashes blowing through barren fields. And yet I still feel empathy and sadness for his situation.

Since that first note, my writing has become frustratingly sporadic. I have completely sketched out the last Abrami's Sister story. I can see all the details but haven't been able to download them from my mind. I want to write, but I've found I've been waiting for news that is slow in coming from a man who, on the best of days, is not what you'd call a natural communicator.

Writing at its heart, whether a story, an essay or a memoir, is about communication. Most days, I struggle with how much of my personal life to reveal to strangers, what to say and what to leave unsaid. There is no point to this message, no clever words, no epiphany, no surprise that ends in hope. I feel trapped between empathy and history. Expressing that is all this message is about.

For decades, I haven't liked this time of year. The holidays strike me as fake, false, a saccharin-sweet fiction like Santa Claus, or the false-front Potemkin village that are the pictures from my childhood. I began celebrating the winter solstice twenty years ago as a way to reclaim this time, a way to make it my own. Our own. It turns out my wife's family life needed a little rehabilitation, too. Maybe everyone's does.

In a hundred years, no one will remember any of the events I struggle with. In the light of history, they will be meaningless statistics at best. In the light of nature, they already are. The flowers in the garden don't care about my struggles. Neither do the squirrels, the birds or the cats. The sun still moves through its progression. In a week, the winter solstice will arrive whether I'm ready for it or not. Even if I do not mark it, the darkness will approach and recede.

This week, I read a quote attributed to Steve Allen that said, "If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the absence of prayers." I don't pray for people or their situations. It's not in my makeup or a part of my beliefs. I think about them, I worry about them, I reach out to them, I help them if I can. And I light a lantern for them to help me remember.

When Karen and I were married, we received two Wolford lamps as a wedding gift. For the longest time, we lighted the pair of them on the winter solstice. One year, I broke one of them moving a piece of furniture. The survivor now lives on the stove. We light it when our friends or family are sick. We light it when someone we care about has died. And we still light it on the winter solstice to celebrate the night, as we hopefully will again this year.

As long as we're home over this holiday, that Wolford will be burning as a reminder. I don't know what the immediate future will bring. I don't know how I'll react to it. But that has always been the case. Life is fundamentally what happens while we're making other plans.

Whatever your plans for the approaching holiday, may the memories you form be pleasant and your treasures be left unbroken. And as always, may your solstice be warm and bright.

© 2011 Edward P. Morgan III

Black Fingernail Polish

Today, I'm a bit pensive. Just over a year after Karen completed her adventure and three of the people reading this are having adventures of their own, one today, two tomorrow.

Which has me thinking about waiting in various hospitals during Karen's surgeries last year. Of all the things I remember from those hours, black fingernail polish is the one that stands out most.

It was the day of Karen's primary surgery. I'd been sitting in the fourth floor waiting room since they wheeled her through the maze of corridors on the ground floor of the hospital, you know, the one where the minotaurs like to hang out and have a smoke with their axes propping open the emergency doors. I'd just done a drive-by of the Starbucks clone in the lobby, wondering that if "whiskey" translates to "water of life" from Gaelic, what "coffee" means in Arabic. Probably the same thing.

Waiting is not my forte. I had a book and a pair of earplugs, two essentials in my hospital survival kit. An older volunteer had taken my name and handed me a pager. The first buzz would be notification that the surgery was over, the second that the surgeon was on her way out. The TV's were loud, the chairs uncomfortable. My cohorts in the holding cell were each wrapped in their own individual crises, some major, some minor, some as yet unknown. I'd found an alcove by the elevators where I could hide out with my book and my own thoughts. I was tired and nervous though I tried not to show it. Karen had been more of each when I'd last seen her disappearing into the inner sanctum where the surgeons perform their rites. I still had my game face on. I read but the lines of my book refused to make any fundamental sense.

The first buzz of the pager shocked me alert, the second had me edgy with anticipation. A few minutes later, the surgeon emerged through the backstage doors marked "Doctors Only." She began telling me the details of what she had found.

My mind entered a schizophrenic mode, the one I found so handy in compartmentalizing secure information from unclassified impressions back when I had a clearance so many years ago. The logical segment of my brain listened and absorbed what it was hearing. The emotional portion drifted inward, as it is often wont to do. On one level I noted the information the surgeon related, while on another a memory surfaced of her in an examination room during one of Karen's appointments. It was Monday morning, early. Not 5 a.m., hospital early, more like 8 a.m. first appointment. I remember looking at her hands as she was talking to Karen and noticing her fingernails. Being that she was a surgeon, they were neat and short, shorter than mine generally. They were also painted a deep and glossy black. I remember thinking, there's something you don't see every day, a surgeon with black nail polish. Perhaps that revealed more about her weekend than I really wanted to know.

Oddly, I drew comfort from that nail polish. From that moment on, I trusted her, I'm not sure why. Perhaps because she went from being just an abstract title, a doctor, a surgeon, an archetype or a caricature, to being a complete human being, one with unique tastes not usually associated with her profession. That black fingernail polish was like the device on a knight's shield, a declaration of who she was for all the world to see. Tiny, black enameled bucklers on the end of each finger that would protect Karen while she excised the beast within.

All that flashed through one of my segmented minds as another glanced down at her nails to see that they were still black then back up to meet her eyes while the lowest portion searched them to see if I could trust her, if she was telling me the truth. Of course she was. But the animal mind is always hungry for that confirmation in whatever form it comes. With that need sated, all three of my minds merged back into a unified whole. I smiled and shook her hand as she said goodbye and not to worry. I knew that I could trust her.

So, S. and J. and H., I hope you each find some black fingernail polish of your own to comfort you and shield you through your day. Know that Karen and I will stand beside you each in spirit.


© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III