Pluto stations at almost zero degrees Capricorn, getting ready to make his turn to direct motion. This is the stillness between the inhale and the exhale.
#1383, c. 1876
Long Years apart — can make no
Breach a second cannot fill —
The absence of the Witch does not
Invalidate the spell —The embers of a Thousand Years
Uncovered by the Hand
That fondled them when they were Fire
Will stir and understand —
Yesterday morning, I ran into a former friend, distant, absent. Completely non-existent, really. Maybe I invented him. The Incredible Disappearing Man. He was so startled he almost fell off his bike. Then I nearly caused a traffic accident by lurching into the intersection while the light was still red. I backed up. Horns honked, the man in the car behind me yelled. In all, a flustered few moments for everyone concerned.
Now this morning Emily sends me a reminder that the past isn’t dead. It’s not even past. I’m reading her poems, but she is eavesdropping on my life.
When the light turned green, and I continued driving, two large blackbirds squawked and flapped onto the grassy levee along the bayou next to me. Moira, a Scottish Witch and friend of mine, once told me that when crows fly across your path, there is magic afoot. Moira is correct in most things, but she lives on top of a mountain and almost never comes down into the realm of mundane events. She exists in perpetual sacred space. Her daily life progresses as a ritual, enveloped in a glow of magic. The crows love her. She scatters the remnants of her bagel for them each morning.
I relay this information because I had never noticed the blackbirds around me in the past. They may have been there all along, but I just wasn’t paying attention. So they effectively weren’t there because I didn’t see them. In the last few months, however, it has seemed as though they were following me. I couldn’t step out of my house without some damn noisy, obnoxious blackbird cawing overhead. Wherever I went with Lance on our morning walks, there they were, flapping their big wings and making a nuisance of themselves.
This morning . . . nothing. No blackbirds. Only quiet. The spell broken. A squirrel fell out of a tree (they’re so clumsy) but apart from that, nothing in the sky. The page turns. A new chapter opens.
I have no idea where the blackbirds went. They disappeared without saying anything. Gone back into the tesseract or the wormhole or wherever magical creatures come from. I’m so glad they’re gone. They were bothering me, those birds.
Emily Every Day 