I Choose

I choose to be a figure in that light,
half-blotted by darkness, something moving
across that space, the color of stone
greeting the moon, yet more than stone:
a woman. I choose to walk here. And to draw this circle.

- Adrienne Rich, from 21 Love Poems

A friend of mine is recovering from surgery, the kind of surgery that requires all your focus to return from, the walking through the valley of the Shadow of Death kind.  I've been there, done that, been to that place where all of you is focused on surviving minute by minute and you build your strength and stamina step by step, day by day.  At such times your soul is close but not quite with your body.  It hovers wondering if it should stay or go.  Only when the body is well on the way to healed does the soul begin to consider this second chance, this rebirth.  At least that's how it was for me.

Before her surgery, she asked me to collage her as a goddess.  It took me a while but I did, just before I left Sacramento for this new life.  I don't know if I made her as she was then, before her surgery.  I made her a moon goddess, peaceful, beneficent.  I wonder from from her, my heart with her recovery but my body far away, if maybe I made her as she would be.  

"Not everybody gets to be made into a goddess," she writes me before her surgery.  "You are a goddess, truly, not just made but living, breathing," I reply, not sure why I write it, only that at that moment I know it as truth, and I wonder as I write her after her surgery if maybe this is what happens at each of our rebirthings, if the goddesses we were must be abandoned for the goddesses we become.  Maybe this is why the Greek goddesses had so many provenances, reflecting their growth, all the deaths and rebirths, those endless becomings.

I died with my heart attack and was reborn.  I clung to what I was when what I should have done was place place the old me in the sea to be worn away, like they do at the Hindu Temple by the Sea, Bryan and I visited in Trinidad.  You don't throw away these forms that are full of divinity.  Rather, you let the elements wear them down, reclaim them.  The is what we do too, let the wind and sun, water and fire take what we were, what's no longer needed now, as you make your way as what you are now.  

It makes sense to me, the last two plus years, the change of life that had me wondering as well as those who knew me.  Why did I leap so quickly and completely?  It wasn't like me they said, and they were right.  It wasn't like the old me, but this was a new me, a form I did not really know.  It would take an odyssey to wear away what was me.  I couldn't give up the old form of me, although I didn't know it.  And so, I leaped out of desperation, out of a need I didn't know I had, so I could become, be reborn, more than stone, more than form -- woman, function, new goddess born of chaos and the sea.

This explains the discomfort I've felt lately, this trying to fit into my old life and my old way of doing things, and never quite being able to.  This explains my restlessness, the distance I feel as if I'm watching myself do things as I would have, react as I would have, and having it just not fit.  This new life requires the new me, not the old, and finding that new me hasn't been easy.  I've kept myself so cluttered, all the things I should have let go of and didn't.  

Somewhere out there I know there is a poem about these deaths and resurrections, these becomings.  This realization isn't new, although perhaps each woman has to come to it in her own way, in her own time.  We get so attached to that old form of us, the goddess we were, we have trouble giving her up, honoring the new form.  And that is my goal now, to honor this love but to see the leap and change as more than just the love of a woman for a man and he for her, but a love of the Self, of what we are and what we can be, will be, if we allow ourselves.  I think, once I get to know her, I will love this new me, the one who isn't afraid of new beginnings, of fresh starts, of travel, of wind and water, of risking everything for the chance of more, of everything I can be and am.  I let go of the old goddess.  It's time to open my eyes and see at last, the new.