I Open the Door and

Mostly I feel like I've come home to tie up the loose ends on a life that is ended. You know that feeling like when someone has died and you go to pack up their house and dispose of their things and move their accounts and execute their will?

That feeling.

I opened the door at midnight after flying all day and these were my thoughts. I moved through each room and, while I was glad to be home, something had changed. The next morning I noted them in my journal and commented on something else I noticed --

I'd awakened in the desert to the rosy glow of sunlight on the mountains and returned to a grey, cloudy, and cold northeastern morning.   

The contrasts were startling.

This morning

I woke early and took out the trash. 

I looked up, and there in the still dark, early morning sky I saw a beautiful waning crescent moon rising with Venus, the Morning Star. It is unseasonably warm and there are soft winds. They caught my hair and lifted it against my cheek. 

Venus has been absent from our sight for about six weeks. Her familiar presence in the darkness disappeared while she was in the beams of the sun during her retrograde period, so close to the sun we cannot see her light. 

When she sets as the Evening Star and moves into the retrograde period, she rises as the Morning Star, visible in the early morning sky until the next retrograde period, when she'll set as the Morning Star, disappear into the beams of the sun, and then rise again as the Evening Star to light the night skies. It's a familiar cycle noticed by people since ancient times. 

It may even be the origin story for the mythic Underworld and Wilderness journeys and the corresponding movements in the human soul. The times we go deep within and then return with wisdom, insight, knowledge, and new understandings. 

Last night when I was writing, my journal fell open to the day I flew home and to the poem I posted yesterday. At the top of the facing page are my thoughts upon arriving home, the feeling like I was tying up the loose ends of a life that had ended. But in the intervening days I've been pulled back into that life and its voluminous demands. I lost myself for about 40-ish days, just about the time of the Wilderness Journey. 

But seeing that wonder in the still dark, early morning sky - a rising waning crescent moon and the Morning Star, who rises in the deepest part of the night to herald the coming dawn, calls me back to myself and illuminates the movements in my own soul. Calls me back to the work of tying up the loose ends of a life that is ended. 

I left it in the desert and picked up a new one.

Beauty in the Night: Meditations in the Dark Time of the Year. I don't know if this will be a series, but if there is one in me, this is what I am drawn to thinking about and writing about these days.