Perle Champion

Quothe Malory in the ‘before time’, in his Morte d’Arthur, “Morgan le Fay was not married, but put to school in a nunnery, where she became a great mistress of magic.”

A nunnery?  I think not.  Put to “School”, yes.  I can identify with that.  I was chosen and was put to school.  I was one in a long history of my kind – recognized at birth, sought out and nurtured by my own.  I was born in the year 2107 of Danai and Charon, an adept of the Wyse and the normal male who loved and married her against his families wishes.

On the day I was born, Nanna Seti came from The School and she talked to me mind to mind from that day forth.  My earliest memory was that soothing mind-touch, like cool water washing away all the hurtful noises.  Slowly, day by day, Nanna showed me how to build the shield that would serve me all my life.

It is her mind I remember as a warm blanket shielding me from all the thoughts from outside.  It is her teachings and stories I remember best, and her I regret most hurting in this stand I now take to take our story to the outside.  For it is she who brought me here.

I remember the day as t’were yesterday.  As I sit in this highest window of ‘The School’, in this my aerie, I remember.

I wonder if I am ready.  As I contemplate going out again into a world that views my kind askance, I am at once thrilled and not a little afraid.  I have become a mistress of magic, one of the Wyse, as have all of my kind since time out of mind.  But the time has come; the outside world beacons, and I have a plan.

no, no, no! no more t.v. – silence

off!  all the extraneous machines

and in that frightening void

let the mind fill of it own

accord.

hear again the vibrations

of the earth – gentle song

of the universe – music of the spheres

courage now, the ocean ebbs,

but it also flows

the sun sets, but it also

rises

quiet the din and venture

in

again.

can i begin again,

damn

no script at hand

I ran away today.  When the sun didn’t come,
I sat back on the sheltered balcony and watched the clouds pour forth to wash fresh my world.

The steady din of rain upon the roof of this small place is a song, one of many that I love.  The storm passes and I’m free to walk on.

All the sounds of life surround me: bird song, wind rustling dead leaves that still cling to some trees.  The surf-like sound of distant drones returning to their caves of steel.

Tomorrow I’ll be one of them,

but for today I’ve run away to some beach

somewhere that exists in a far corner of my mind.

The daily urge to write is one I must pretend some days for a while until it comes naturally – today is such a day.  I’ve committed to and will follow through posting a Blog a day for an entire year.  The challenge was posted on WordPress, but I’m simul-posting the identical post on Blogger and WordPress to see which one fares better out in the world.  Kind of like a dual experiment.

Seems all the other participants in the challenge have a focus, be it shoes, cooking, the ubiquitous weight loss, etc.  I don’t.  I’m a Jack or all master of none, but like the kid that learns to play an instrument, I’m practicing first this then that and hopefully my true love will show up.  I’m running scales that for me are words in all manner of configurations.   I’m hoping that as it did for my FB friend Ken, the daily writing will eventually lead me to my own focus.

For now it is enough just to write through to that magical place called flow, when ideas come so fast my pen’s speed is hard-pressed to get the words down.

After reading and re-reading ‘Simple Abundance’ some years back, I started sporadically keeping a ‘Gratitude Journal’ on my nightstand.

Every night before turning off the lamp, I write 5 things I’m grateful for that day. It’s like a pop-quiz at the end of the day.

I find myself grateful things as simple as the waking up to the heady smell of wet earth on a rainy day and knowing it’s Saturday and I can just lie in bed and enjoy it, yet wanting to get up anyway and be out in the midst of it.

Nothing is as fragrant as wet earth, no memory of childhood as vibrant as walking in nature rain or shine on my face.

Is this world all there is?

I find myself reflecting on the road I’ve traveled and those I’ve not. We are after all the choices we make, the roads we take, and those we don’t.  I’ve always thought I’d write my memoir and call it “The Memoirs of a Not-yet-Famous Lady”, or better yet, ‘The Memoirs of a Not-yet-Infamous Lady’.  Am I a lady? Sometimes.

I wonder, though, if this is all of it.  Is there something to the road not taken that is somehow a part of me? When the roads diverged, did a me walk on with the other decision into a parallel world?  Who is that she that is me having made other decisions.  Is her life any better or worse?  Would I like that me better?

I’ll never know, but, I wonder where she is now?  That girl, that me, the one who married John and moved on.  Where is the one who had an abortion and sans child, moved on?  Where is the rock collector faery child, who lived in dreamscapes of her own design?

Each is a piece of me.  I want to follow their trail.  I want to know where they are on their life’s path.

Did so many me’s diverge from this me that I am but a shadow.  Did I perhaps spin off a poet, too, and only kept for me a glimpsed flight of that fancy.

May Sarton said, “…if you dilute yourself too much and try to do too many things, you do none well.”  I digress.

Where is the artist never encouraged?  Is that why I only go so far then let each piece go?  Each a bubble blown from a child’s wand reduced to one little moment of brilliant iridescent color fading then to memory.

What if each was real? What if each was a real me, a me that diverged and in parallel worlds of infinite possibilities walked away.  What if a real me took each path, and my sole job on this plane is to dream – to begin each me and send her on her way.  Each a whole and complete life, and I just the dreamer with no real life of her own – destined at last to run out of dreams and paths and she’s to set upon them and at last empty to cease.

If that is the case, what now?

childhood 

tomorrow is forever in coming

if it ever comes at all

boy! tomorrow is a million miles

away, tomorrow is

my birthday

youth

it’s coming soon that day

just you wait and then

you’ll see

21 and I’ll be free, free

to go my way on my

21^st birthday

maturity

where did all the days go and

why

does the time seem to fly

seems I’d just begun

this one

and here it is again

today’s the day

my birthday…

Merry paradise falls as
destiny posing, stops
to eat joy, kiss dreams
and fast grasp
celestial means
off to court the stars
frolic mid clouds
drink violet dreams
breathe orange skies
bathe in velvet winds
slide on moon beams
home again
oh dreamscape – so real
much more than
corporeal.

The children asked her again and again to tell them of the before time.  Today, red-haired Jenna, thirteen and serious, asked.  “Tell us of the last day, the day of the Fall.  Please Mistress Seti, tell us about that day.  What did it smell like, taste like, sound like.”

Seti’s clear gray eyes became the stormy slate of a winter sky.  “Smell?  It smelled of smoke and burning things – things that were not meant to burn.  It tasted bitter blood  and salt.”

“It sounded like a lullaby – I eyes grow moist when I hear it.  It was there by the roadside.”  She began softly speaking while sending mind pictures to the children around her.  It was time they knew.

“There by the roadside, a woman lay dead and flies buzzed around her and a little girl sat by her side and held her hand and rocked to and fro and sang over and over ‘ToRaLuRaLuRa ToRaLu RaLa , ToRaLuRaLu, mama don’t you cry…’ singing her mother to her final sleep and I bit through my lip and tears mixed with sweat trickled down to sting the wound, and the acrid billowing smoke made rainless clouds that obscured the sun.”

“It sounded like a lullaby, It smelled of smoke and burning things – things that were not meant to burn.  It tasted bitter, of  blood and salt.

That memory is forever forged into my very soul.

“Who was the child, Mistress?  Did she live?”  Jenna asked in a voice scarce above a whisper.

“Yes, she lived and thrived and she daily makes me proud.  That child was you.  You loved well, and you live well.  Your mother would be proud.

“The oldest known set of footprints… are 117,000 years old and thought to be those of a woman and possibly a child…” (New Scientist magazine, 31 January 1998)

I climbed the rock at dawn and gazed long at the footprints.  The scientists want to cut them out and take them away soon – seal them up in a back room somewhere far away from prying eyes and questioning minds.  Before they do, I must do this.  I step barefoot into the small indents of stone, and I fit.  I knew I would.  Like a glove, the stone holds close my soles.

I close my eyes and feel deep into our mother’s bones, these stones.  Does she remember me?  I remember her, so long ago.  All our works are gone; it is so strange that our solitary prints remain.  What quirk of nature prodded the saving of so small a thing as the trace of two small pair of feet, when all else was leveled and washed away beyond all recall.

The prints tell but a breath’s worth of our trek; they do not show our haste, or the dampness of the child’s tears against my flesh.  They cannot begin to tell of the woman-child I was, the family I left behind all dead, the fear and dread of venturing beyond the ends of the known world.

The archaeologists in search of traces to prove we lived then will be sorely disappointed.  What traces remain are faint and deeply buried if indeed they are there at all.

We few souls have gone on rebirth upon rebirth to the world of now.  Too few of us remember the before time.  I do, and here I stand again, poised on a small precipice, looking out to the march of destruction that looms on this world’s horizon.

The millennia rushed past us at a dizzying pace.  The faithful once again prepare to meet their maker each in their own way.  Armageddon nears again.  It is not the first time, nor will it be the last.

I shake my head and smile; they’ve not yet learned the lesson of the mother, who, ever hopeful, gives us life again and again.  Some were with me then, and some are with me now.  Nature will once again wipe the works of man from her face and banish some of us for a small time, but some always survive. We will wait in queue to enter the willing wombs of those believing in tomorrow enough to harbor new life and bring it forth in joy.

Life is a circle not come full, always ending at the beginning.  We travel new paths and learn new things until, like the one called Christ and many whose names we never knew, we finally understand and can shed the flesh and ascend – never to return again.

© Perle Champion