Category Archives: Emily Every Day

Yes, I have fallen behind. Way behind. I am giving you this morning’s meditation because . . . it’s here and I’m here. Then when I have time, I will fill in some of the missing days. I did keep up in my notebook. Somehow I stopped before putting it on the blog. It all just got too delicate for public view. Now I feel differently. Don’t know why.

Today’s poem follows.

#533, c. 1862

One Crucifixion is recorded — only —
How many be
Is not affirmed of Mathematics —
Or History —

One Calvary — exhibited to Stranger —
As many be
As persons — or Peninsulas —
Gethsemane —

Is but a Province — in the Being’s Centre —
Judea —
For Journey — or Crusade’s Achieving —
Too near —

Our Lord — indeed — made Compound Witness —
And yet —
There’s newer — nearer Crucifixion
Than That —

There she goes. Emily takes a flying leap off the cliff of heresy. She tells us and her 19th century imaginary audience that Christ and the crucifixion are a metaphor. Not the literal truth. Or at least not the one and only literal truth. But a story that exists in the personal self in each of us.

We die to ourselves again and again. We suffer, die and are buried beneath the weight of something. On the third day . . . something happens. We hope. The point of the story, however, is that one does not know, or rather cannot know at the moment of “death” —whether a psychic death or ego death—that any part of us may live beyond the death.

Whatever it is that dies within, you have to undergo the passage without the comfort of knowing how the story ends. Otherwise you miss the benefit of the story.

And she’s right. It is too near, too excruciating, to speak of more than once. That one story will have to do. The rest of us will have to take it as our template and learn from it. The metaphor stands in for our experience. It is, in that sense, a sacrifice that gives life. The story of the sacrifice is what makes the sacrifice meaningful.

Emily, how many times did you dangle over the chasm of nothingness? Not knowing. Falling through the dark into infinite empty space. How many times did your poor self undergo such a “death” before you retreated into the upper rooms of your father’s house, and your paisley shawl, and your gingerbread? Or maybe you never stopped falling. And writing.

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.