Outside My Window

Outside it is raining, maybe it will snow. I hope not. Southerner that I am. Who knows in St. Louis? I have had a long day beginning with my 6:15 am class which I truly do love teaching. I love the early hours of the morning. The Amrit Vela beginning at 4 am and extending until daylight, seems to carry over until about 7 am anyway... I've got my plates renewed; clients taken care of; lentils, split mung dal, masoor dal and Kala chana purchased at Seema along with those precious curry leaves so I can cook in bulk again; five little beanies knitted for Winter Solstice, and a box of raspberries. Um! My Danish mother would smile if she were here.

I'm looking forward to Bound Lotus again. What were these last three days of hell for? Maybe I just needed to be alone for a while to heal. Away from people's judgements and confused looks at what they deem odd about me. I like myself. Too bad if others think I'm wierd. I also selfishly like the fact that I never married nor had kids, and therefore have no attachments to things like ex-husbands I'd prefer not to know ( my sister unfortunately has to speak once a week with the abomination that she married so foolishly more than 20 years ago).

I wish her the peace that Bound Lotus can bring for me. I'd like to give that to her. I wish for that man to be out of her life.

Arising from Bound Lotus like the goddess Inanna in the Sumerian myth, who goes to the Underworld to save her sister Erishkegal, I pick up Jean Shinoda Bolen's "Close to the Bone: Life-Threatening Illness and the Search for Meaning". The page opens at 66-67. This book is one of three in my lifetime which have struck me as luminous lights on their respective bookstore shelves. The other two are Tsultrim Allione's "Feeding Your Demons" and "Motherless Daughters". The latter literally fell off the bookshelf at me in late 1995, early 1996, while I stood in the old Library Ltd. In Clayton toying with the knowledge of my mother's recent Stage IV CUPS diagnosis: Cancer of Undetermined Primary Source. I knew she would die, and I knew as well that none of my friends had the balls to stay by me. They ALL left. And I became like Erishkegal. In pain. Angry. Able to strike someone dead with a mere baleful look, or so I wished. The only friend who stuck by me was dear Sonia Smith, who left me after I'd spent many years in the 'Underworld'. My sister left me too...only where she sees me as dark and wracked with clinging demons, so is she. We are BOTH Erishkegal, and the world had best beware. She and I, we are turning into Crones at our respective ages. Learning to be present and honest, blunt and straightforward like an old woman. Like the old woman my mother will never be...

Where will my sister and I be at 57? For my sister that is 11 years away, for me: 15. Who will be our loyal Ninshiburs as we move past that seminal age and live longer than our mother? Had my mother not been ill, would my sister have moved home before her husband hurt her eldest son? Would I have lived at night for so long in the shadow of a living demon I chose for a mate?

Now I see. As I read Jean Shinoda Bolen's book back then, I saw my mother as Erishkegal, myself as Inanna, but there was no loyal Ninshibur, and I rotted on the 'green hook' for 10 long years - "Ten Years Gone". For the last five I've been searching, venturing again into the upperworld. I was in Hades for so long, and there were creatures there who stood by me better than many here in the light, save for my father.

Thinking out loud, I realize that my father was our, my sister's and my, Ninshibur...though we chose not to believe. Or I did. And who was Inanna? My mother in my dreams, no less.