I feel as if I have been in a trance for eight days. Eight days without posting, while time slowed around me into a golden pool that makes me think of the moment that Pwyll spots Rhiannon, our Welsh Faery queen, and tries and tries to catch her, and can’t, though she appears to be moving slowly and he sends horses racing after her. I feel as if I have been in a trance like that: I am moving slowly, the world around me whirls, I am almost unreachable. And I think that that maybe the secret to Rhiannon’s command of time is not her divine nature but the way time is bent by love.
Stuff has been happening, which has been wonderful.
However, I have not been writing. Which is not wonderful.
I mean, I’ve been writing. I wrote on February 2, for instance, like I said I would. I wrote about making the seven-pointed star out of rose canes and naming the forces that I was calling into my life. There are seven of them, one for each point. I started with Courage and Creativity, and then friend Kimberly Larson said “What other C words?” And I added Kindness, (honorary C) and Compassion and Candor and Connection and…
Wait. Now I can’t remember the seventh. See, this is part of the trance of spellcrafting for me. I can’t hold words. When I am sitting on the low green velvet chair, feet on the hearth, the firewood and poker within reach, the drum at my elbow and the lights low enough that the flames dance like bright animals eating the past as the old spell burns and I take my shears in hand and cut the rose canes, bend and tie them into a circle, into one point, another, a third, rearranging them by the dancing light, balancing them on my knee until the spell has formed and I tie the points down, name them one by one…
When all of this is going down, and the magic is moving through me like music, I can’t hold words. It is difficult, later, when the trance has passed, to write it down.
This may also be part of the trance of spending, oh, say, five hours, in a bed on Bainbridge Island, in this man, this beautiful man’s bedroom… looking through the windowed ceiling into the black-feathered fir trees as those hours passed: The sun wasn’t up, the trees were only silhouettes against a silver sky. We kissed. The sky was pale blue, the trees had become darkest green. We kissed, talked. The sun was in the tops of the trees, lighting their crowns. We kissed, talked, laughed our asses off. The sun was hitting the silvered trunks, and all the greens had come in, mossy and blackish and olive and grassy and deep. And as all these hours unspooled around us, we lay naked, eyes open, eyes closed, and I was turning toward him and toward him and toward him again.
After that I could barely pay the parking garage ticket with my love-drunk hands, my skipping brain, much less catch the thread of these words and tie them down.
But today I got on an airplane, and Bam! I walked into the fleet, unrooted nowhere that is every airport in the world and time stepped back onto its old track and as the plane leveled off, I felt the cogs of my brain begin to move with their old, wordy precision. I could see the world behind me, not through the shimmering bend of love but through the good glass of language.
I think, though, that I have learned something about Rhiannon’s command of time, of being there, still and deep. She has found time’s eddy, it is lit by her breath, moves to her own gait, is held in the throes of that which she finds beautiful and worthy.
And now I remember the seventh point. Of course. It sounds like a drum: Celebration.