you will find the honey

You will find the honey that you need, little bee
when you begin to seek the feminine in me...
the sweet well of being, the power of now.

So she is back, the quiet woman by the blue-tiled pool. The grasses this year are even taller and tinged with mauve on their grain tips, the azure salt water of the pool is crystalline, inviting, but the weather has cooled; a dry breeze blows through the birch trees, moves the floating rings around the stone-edged water. Over a simple lunch of Ry-krisp, avocado, tomatoes and sprouts ,she admires the swaying grasses and briefly closes her eyes to hear a cicada ringing its loud buzz overhead. Silence, except for the public works trucks beyond the cedar hedge. She imagines she is back in the peaceful life of the ashram (when she wasn't busy cooking for ten people) -- the simple stark bedroom, white shag carpet and blue cloud wallpaper. A lit candle and a small photo the only decoration, her white comforter and foam mattress her only furniture.

Compared to her present house, with its many rooms, library, home-office, vast gardens of perennials, that lifestyle was bare and simple. When she longs for a simpler life, that is where memory flashes back to - not the chaos of her overcrowded family home with seven siblings, but a few brief years of service and meditation. She is simplifying things, but in any case, the blank white room is the reference point - the stillness of a room alone, and this is her week without children, before the week of retreat without spouse or cats or dogs.

Reading the newspaper induces anxiety, stirs up the idea-making machine. This is not a time of goal setting but of clearing, emptying out, entering the void and trusting, going past her fear, time to discover whether she, alone, is enough. Her contribution will not arise out of anxiety, fear and panic. First, pull back. Keep out of sight. Find the inner alliance, ask for help in finding like-minded people for encouragement. Like last night, she hadn't asked for anything, and yet there appeared the most gorgeous double rainbow, brilliantly fluorescent in the dark grey sky. For twenty minutes it followed them as they left the trailer park where the kids were staying for one week, the sun in back of them, dark clouds in front. As the sunset began, a bronze-tinged mist filled the southeast sky and purple and grey clouds in the northwest - spectacular skies! isn't that what she was eager to see in Taos, the play of sky and cloud and desert expanse - god's paint board. She prays to be ready for the changes coming, for leaving part of herself behind, and for finding a truer understanding. A strong woman fearful of opening up to her own unknowing.

(written July 24, one day before trip to New Mexico).




musemother