Winter Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice
Have you ever been touched, brushed by a faint wing as it passes? Perhaps a brief hesitation in an other wise confident progress, or a stutter in your step as you return home? Some of us feel the passing of these birds of pray more than others. We’ve not yet perfected the thickness, a protection against stooping falcons of unrest, leaving our Selves out there, unprotected, waiting for the faintest grazing, perhaps seeking it, knowing the tentativeness is real, life fleeing either before us or behind us, who can tell which? Until it fails us altogether.
I’ve always been this way, though it got a burnishing after I entered college and studied philosophy, then anthropology. Doubt, skepticism, questions come so naturally to me I have trouble noticing when they take me too far, leave me out there, dangling by myself, a victim of my own questing beast. In my life there is no such thing as certainty. Perhaps I was born post-modern, always aware of the interpreter, always aware of the Self as interpreted, subject to oceans of ideas, rivers of feeling, no life guards on this beach, the tide out, vanishing out to sea.
It sounds, I don’t know, dark, or at least gray, but I don’t experience it that way. Instead, I take in things anew, fresh, not as expected, but as inspected, weighed, considered, felt. This gives life a newness, a just been seen character that, no matter how exasperating to the other, gives me a world born again with every breath, every step, every sight.
It also means you can’t count on me to agree with you, can’t trust my perception of things since it’s so idiosyncratic, in fact, I don’t trust the things I perceived a day ago. Perhaps this is true of everyone though I doubt it. It is the fruit, whether rotten or delicious, of trying to know myself.
When I set foot in Delphi, walked the sacred way up to the temple of Apollo and put myself on the ancientrail of others seeking wisdom from the oracle, I was at my holy of holies. Here you either learned to know yourself as the sign on the door way commanded or risked losing a kingdom. Just ask the shade of Croesus.
Listen, this new years, for the sound of flight, air moved aside by feathers, softly. It might be a raven who owns the sun, or an albatross who has ceased to follow the Ancient Mariner. If you hear her, go still, watch. Perhaps you can follow toward those caverns measureless to man.