There Are Mornings
Even now, when the plot
calls for me to turn to stone,
the sun intervenes. Some mornings
in summer I step outside
and the sky opens
and pours itself into me
as if I were a saint
about to die. But the plot
calls for me to live,
be ordinary, say nothing
to anyone. Inside the house
the mirrors burn when I pass.
Lisel Mueller, Alive Together
In my neighborhood, I’ve watched the irises rise from carefully maintained yards, revealing pinks and yellows and purples and oranges. From little buds to wide blooms, they stretched themselves out towards the sun, with bellies full of water from the nearly normal winter rains.
I recognize hope not as a feeling, but as a movement. I know its power in the way it can trip me into believing in something that’s well out of reach.
How it can lure me into the possibility that what is coming is something of magick.
And I fall for it every time.
(Thankfully.)
Because these irises are almost gone now. Shrunken into dry petals or removed completely, as though they never existed.
But they did. I saw them. I smiled at them.
I looked for them every single day.
I hoped, knowing they don’t live forever.
But they will return.
I remember that.
What Hope Pours into Heart
I recognize I am dying every day. Maybe this isn’t the thing to say on a Monday morning. Maybe it is the perfect thing to say. Maybe it is something you leave a trigger warning on.
And it’s true.
I am one day closer to whatever comes next. One breath. One heartbeat.
The irises tell me. The uncertainty of the world screams this in my ears.
I am writing this on a Thursday. And my body is afraid. My heart is racing. I feel like someone is about to yell at me. I feel like I’ve done something wrong or I’m about to agree to something I don’t want to do.
Nothing is happening and my first guess was that my PMDD was playing up, trying to tell me that everyone hates me and the world is against me.
I’ve learned to name it, laugh at it, and try my best to ignore it.
But there was something else. Like a movie I’d seen before.
I went to my calendar and found the evidence of this body keeping the score. A conversation that’d emptied my heart. I placated and promised and shattered.
I poured myself onto the ground, like some sort of offering to the dead.
And I was the dying before the dying.
Calling to Life Again
These moments of flashback and fury surprise me and celebrate me. I am not that moment anymore. I became something new, something that only fit my frame once I stopped using someone else’s measurement.
Once I stopped looking in mirrors that were shaped to distort and dismiss.
The poem at the start of this essay/post/diary entry found me weeks before now. It was waiting in a folder for the right time. A time when I could have turned into stone, when the world seemed to want that so badly. When I wanted that so badly because standing still sometimes seems safer. Easier.
Quieter than the voices my head creates to test and tempt me into oblivion.
But hope is there. I remember her.
A little dry, a little tired, and slightly out of reach. Stretching out from beneath the bed, like my cats do. A tail or a paw as evidence of presence. Of being able to lengthen and reveal the exact location.
Hope is here. She is disheveled and dusty. And she pours herself onto my skin anyway, like a warm wind on a hot day. There is no way my tears can fall any further in these conditions.
I remember her.
I remember this plot calls me to live these minutes, these memories, mostly out loud. Not because I fear vanishing, but because I fear drowning. There are mornings when I can remember irises, mortality, heartbreak, and hope all at the same time.
I can place them on a page, step back, and see the inherent magick of being a messy, multi-faceted human. Someone who doesn’t have it all figured out.
Doesn’t want to. Doesn’t need to.
I’m soaked in hope.
And even out of reach, I can recognize her anywhere.
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(To listen to the first part of this week’s post, click below).
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What’s Going On
June 13: Witch Wavelength Podcast with Sheena Cundy - recording available later
June 13: Fika with Vicky - LIVE interview about Artemis - recording available later
June 17: WitchLit Book Virtual Chat - me and others chatting about magick in writing
(More on my website here.)
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Thanks for reading, for breathing, and for showing up the way you do in this world.
In love and magick,
Irisanya Moon
PS - Feel free to reach out with ideas, questions, poems, etc.
Some days, all we can do is deal with one moment at a time. As I was reading, the line from Oscar Wilde's play Lady Windermere's Fan popped into my head: "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."