Into the Dark

Good Morning -

The Virgen you see here is entirely inspired by my new Rob horrorscope for the week, which came out yesterday:

This oracle was originally commissioned by a spiritual wilderness school to train its students in high-stress meditation. It has been tested by disciplined explorers who've learned to be fluid and resourceful in the midst of natural chaos. Now it's being made available to you, Leo -- just in time for the last stretch of your dash (or crawl) across the wasteland. By contemplating the code phrase that appears at the end of this message, you will discover the key for turning poisons into medicine, taking advantage of your weaknesses, and knowing your direction without a compass. Here it is: Love the beauty and intelligence that are hidden in your darkness.

So, to that end, we have an image of the desert at night (if you look closely on the left side of the Virgen, you can see a silhouette of a cowboy on a horse) with a simple, sparkly thread border.

I certainly felt dark yesterday, enough that I encouraged my partner to call me by my full name, which means "dark one", rather than my nickname, which means "graceful". On good days, the sentiment is interchangeable and I can be graceful in the dark and darkly graceful, but yesterday was pretty clumsy, sitting and stewing in the dark, dark, dark.

There are a number of precipitating factors that have created this dark night, none of which I'll get into here save for the over-arching conditional factor of the nasty weather that is July in southern AZ. Supposedly we're in monsoon season and, while I see plenty of clouds building darkly on the horizon every day and feel a humidity that could rival coastal Louisiana in August, very little rain has fallen on or around our house.

I grew up in the perfect weather zone that is the front range of Colorado, so my barometer is set in such a way that triple digits in heat and humidity furrow my brow into a scowl and have me spitting fire, which in the ridiculously high humidity, comes out like a bic lighter on its last breath.

We can't control the weather outside, but we try to manage it inside with our sub-par cooling equipment. The swamp cooler is officially obsolete at this point because there's too much moisture in the air for it to be effective. We run it anyway during the day for the cats because we can't bring ourselves to leave the window units running while we're at work. This keeps the cats alive, but has us coming home to a tropical rain forest, such that our brows drip with sweat as we do simple tasks like sit at the computer.

As soon as we get home, we turn off the swamp and turn on the dueling window units, one at each end of the dining room where we now have our bed. Because they're small and can't cool the entire house, we hang sheets at the door from the dining room into the living room and from the dining room into the kitchen. We decided that cooling one small space decently was better than cooling many big spaces ineffectively, so we focus all our cooling energy on the dining room.

The first time you go through the sheets, it feels whimsical, like when you made forts out of sofa cushions as a child. The second time you go through them, you begin to feel the closing in of small spaces and limited vistas, like a prisoner moved from a cell block to solitary.

Because the dining room is now the most cooled space, the choice becomes whether to sit in another part of the house (the back master bedroom isn't even a choice for these months and basically becomes a storage unit) and stick to whatever surface you touch, or sit in the dining room where you're blasted with icy air and have to work to hear yourself over the whir of the two units, the fan trying to move the cool air around that space, and the ceiling fans trying to keep the cool air circulating.

My partner and I navigate and experience space differently and I think she takes this all in stride. When I told her a moment ago that I've got David Byrne singing Cole Porter's "Don't Fence Me In" running through my head and am stricken by the limited vistas we have in our house now, she smiled and said, "Yes" - the "yes" that means "you and I, we are so different, and I love you." She also then suggested in High Buddha mode that if I focus on the fences, that's all I'll see. I told her with the wheezy sparks that is my fire under humidity to save her Buddha, I wasn't in the mood. She smiled. That's love.

Speaking of love, that's what Rob suggested I do with the beauty and intelligence that hides in my darkness. He didn't say to find it (since it's hiding), or understand it, or focus on it, or draw from it - just to love it.

That may sound simple or silly enough, but it is definitely a challenge for me. As much as I love my darkness, I'm always a little hesitant to spend too much time there or give it too much attention, lest it take over and become the What Is. I suppose part of his message, though, is that there is beauty and intelligence in that darkness, so it's not a wholly objectionable place.

Sounds like a good enough mental exercise for the week. Perhaps I'll retreat to the sweat lodge that is our living room and see what comes to me there.

Here's to loving your darkness.