Ceremony
Rivers of air flow down the slopes of the forest night under the icy chill of the next-to-full moon. It is a night when wolves run and rivers howl, and fingers of air come creeping round corners to touch your neck and shoulders - death's sting is everywhere, for this is the magnificent Ceremony of the closing of the cycle - when life departs freezing bones and rises to the next world. Now it is the bones of the hills that shine out. Rivers of death flow from the north, his beard and hair shining white through the moons, crystal mares' tails whip the sky, and stars shine eerily for a spell. December moon, you are the essence of the frozen North, roaring in our chimneys tongues and swaying our lamps' candles.
While on the hearth dies the glow of cheery embers, charcoal shards brought in from a box used to shelter the blanket-covered chickens' basket - a small bamboo chiquihuite filled with toys and old clothing acts as a barrier to the north wind's ghostly symphony.
Tonight fire raged on the horizon, as in my dream some twenty years ago. It was only a farmer burning his field. But the wind roars like a train in the chimney. Trees are heard shifting and swiftly shivering their dry husks and wild wisps, while dry cars crawl across the highway hours away. A mounrful bus groans across the plain, for this is a night of wild noise and doings.
Terror begins creeping round the world as waves of power and rage begin their mighty clawing. Ripples of violence and war shoot around the world, and earthquakes sound their alarms through the earth's central nervous system. But as seasons of the soil, leaf-pages of our lives, may we be raised in new life's growth to come in the fullness of time. What is our seed count now?
The Ceremony that brings rebirth will come with water. December, 1990 |