Re-Weaving

I am not where I thought I would be, and I am glad of it.

Weeks can be months, you know, or years.  It is an understatement to say this, and I don't think I can begin to make this clear through words, but the weeks I spent in Europe felt to me like years; better said, maybe, that I lived an entire life in the space of little over a month, the moon's full turning and then some.

Between two feasts of saints drest up to cover over an older truth, an older god, I wandered streets of cobble between ancient buildings in another land which feels ever more mine than the one into which I was born.  No longer difficult, really, to understand why so many stories of heroes or fools taken into the Otherworld become to them entire lifetimes before returning, I feel myself having somehow partaken of a stream issuing forth from time that is more than time, and, returning, am a bit off-balance, a bit confused, staring at pavement where once there were stars.

But this is not bad.

I did not dislike my life in Seattle while I was there, despite the ever-encroaching legions of profiteers and enthusiastic spenders spiraling the cost of a meagre existence ever upwards.  I did not think myself unhappy, and, truthfully, I was not until I understood what could be had.

Sometimes, we bury dreams we do not wish to let see light because they are so dear to us we'd hate to watch them wither.  But a funny thing about what we bury--sometimes, after winter's frost and the earth's heaving, after cold rains and unseen tumult of worm, some buried dreams sprout through the soil and live anyway, independent of our fears.

One of those is this: I'll be moving to Berlin next year, by Beltaine or Midsummer.

Until then, I've some re-weaving to do.  I'm wearing a pair of shorts with holes in every pocket through which coins and stones slip to the earth, and I find this an apt metaphor for my life.  Things which have worked but not completely, things which sufficed for only some things but not for everything. Things becoming threadbare with time, needing attention despite my desire to ignore them even as things I could have slip by me.

Did you know I have two unpublished manuscripts?  Just under this pile of soil and leaves over here, near the tree I didn't water but it lived anyway.  I'll be editing those.  The worms never fully got to them, it appears, and they've been tentatively reaching through the packed earth towards the sun from which I tried to hide them.  Published officially or online, you'll be seeing them soon.

The guy who buried them hadn't heard rivers whisper back, hadn't met spirits in dream who offered him ancient villages.  The guy who wrote them thought he knew the meaning of words like "will" and "manifest," until he hauled a 50lb pack up an old druid mount and then met some people and heard some things under the moon that he still can't quite understand but figures another part of him already does.

And there's some other re-weaving to be done.  Ancestors are tricky and sometimes kind of revolting, and I've got some stories to re-write on their behalf so they stop being so revolting and instead be what they are, souls for which life was unlived and death came either too quickly or by choice to escape what life should have been but never was.  There's a reason I'm near family just before Samhain, and there's a reason I'm too dense to plan such things.

I'm still here.  Actually, I'm more here.  I don't know where here is, though it has a name and has some fascinating trees and some endearing souls and lots and lots of distances crossed by big bits of metal on wheels which remain out of my comprehension.

Meantime, I'll be re-weaving stories.  Ones I've written, ones others failed to write, one which cannot be fully written until I've gone away.

And, also, hey--thank you.  You who've been reading these, who've sent me emails or comments, who've had dreams about me and were kind enough to pass them on, who've divined or prayed or maybe just merely thought upon me while I was watching the world explode into brilliance and meaning about me.  The pilgrimage was for myself, yes, but I hope my words warmed you, I hope my attempts to paint with symbols-for-sound what I saw made more beautiful your world.