moon, waves, backbone
stream of consciousness
at the Reservoir, 3/10/22
Today I watched the moon traveling through the waves of my backbone.
I don’t know what that means, she says.
I say, today my thoughts of death came from underneath like a gentle wind, stirring, and then unfurling with wings that spread across the reservoir, and as I stretched into that moment just beyond the tip of unfolding, I fell from the sky to my knees onto nothing, feeling the moon rise up from somewhere deep inside of the place that is nowhere which is also somewhere, that void we sometimes talk about as if we’ve actually been there.
Even in my deepest moments I wonder if what appears to be that place of nothing that births everything is merely just another surface I’m walking on, because today in my meditation I dove underneath my quietest darkest places to another space that exists because of what’s beneath and above it, and my depths became my surfaces; and again I dove underneath and found another place beneath the place which knows itself because of what’s underneath and above it, and here I am maybe in my depths, maybe also in my surfaces, and whether there are infinite layers or just this one more to pull up over my head like the sweetest and warmest of covers, I don’t know.
What do you know, she asks.
I know that I have breath, knees, and a backbone, and that somehow I have fallen into the moon and the moon has fallen into me, and we are weaving through waves and bones, through a wide blue sky, through the darkness of nothing, and we emerge as stars breaking through the frozen surfaces of this reservoir.
I know that, as I fold my wings back into arms back into body, and stand here on this ground, with the moon elsewhere and the news of your arrival in the spaces between everything…..I am here.
Here, in the midst of the heartbreak of death’s undoing and the aliveness of being.
Thank you for your presence here.
video & photos: me; Ashokan Reservoir, March 10, 2022.