Episode 03: SABRINA

I dreamt I wrote a letter to the moon and explained our situation—we who are born of winter and carry a layer of frost, we who are small, whose dreams are crystals spilt across the snow.

We are awake in the time of illness.

In the alley below my window, I hear a Jewish mystic speaking of belief. He is saying that we are all part of one thing, the selfsame substance since time immemorial, until the One Great Trauma – too great to be entrusted to our clumsy minds and so remembered only in dreams and shadows and half-whispers —broke us into small bits, left us crawling to each other in perpetuity, in desperation, searching for the pieces that make us whole. Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Is our divine task one of gathering and assembling? Is this why the mystic is saying you cannot kill even the smallest ant because the ant is you, you are one and the selfsame holy substance. Is this how the sacred is contained within every single shard? Can you hear me? I am asking because I have no religion, no way of being, no way of living that is organized as sacred. (except maybe my dreams, which I think are trying to tell me something) But maybe I could perform small acts that spoke of belief? What do you think? Maybe if I put the broken shards back together, my grandmother’s teacup will be revealed. Maybe we would find a bridge or the words of Shakespeare, or maybe my mother would come back. Maybe there is no such thing as losing, maybe everything comes back in the end.

Are you still there?

 I am not religious, but I live amongst the most devout of all believers. They are worshippers of the old ways and, if you don’t mind, I have one question about their system.

The women are cooking a meal, the smell of the meal is coming up through the pipes, the sweet smell of cake is wafting into the bathroom through the sink, through the shower.  It is coming up through the drain in the kitchen. The essence of women always coming through underground systems, infiltrating, penetrating. From the alleys, the men are wrapped in silver-trimmed shawls singing indecipherable words that turn into song that rises on the wind back up to their God. So, my question is, which is more sacred, scent or song?

At the beginning of the dream, I am living in the house my mother built. There is a girl, young, like a teenager, and she is wild – all dirty with bare feet and uncontrollable; she does whatever she wants and is dangerous this way. She is not supposed to be out. Someone has to put this girl away or she will destroy things. It is not safe when she is there. But then I am walking on a path in the woods with a single long string of thoughts

I too am unknowing.

I walk on the mountain.

I pull tarot cards

I feed my children.

I become ill.

I rage at the system.

I wonder at the signs

I try again each day

I search for the right words

I devour time

I sleep through important meetings

I waste things precious and sacred and the day passes into another and I do it again.

But then – when I come to the end of the string I am emerging from the woods and I see the wild girl, standing in the snow, and I am not afraid. She looks at me as if looking in a mirror. We are wild and we are not afraid.