Attributes

Wanting to be with my mother.
Peanut butter. Chocolate. Eggnog.
I am not going back to Bruxelle this year.
Hanging laundry. Baking. Quilts.
I am going to be in love again someday.
Reading. I want to be a writer.
Horses. Smoking joints outside.
The things I am learning are my real life– now and permanent.

I look at myself in the mirror. I am the same. My hair is very long. I recognize my father in my face.
Two days ago, I found one of the rabbits, dead, in the chicken run. Headless. No blood, nothing but a pelt. I picked it up in an enormous black garbage bag the same way I put the feather quilts into their cotton covers– inside out, by the corners.
I cried all morning.

Today, I rode the three-year-old golden Quim deep into the valley, following Carina on big black slender Romeo, the dogs following to romp in the meadows. I watched Carina and decided that I like her– her peculiar determinism, her hair long like mine, her patience and her need to control. She always call her husband “mon Berte.” She is very intelligent. She has built a world around herself. Like me, she is the Nine of Pentacles, the Lady in the Walled Garden.

I followed her through pastures littered with wild crocus, pasture with rows of neatly cultivated lavender. Through arboretums of young fruit-bearing trees, their slender brances surrounding us in a veil of yellow light. Looking up to the mountains at a brisk trop, I felt their immensity, the sheer strength of their presence, and it dizzied me until I spun.

I love to look down at my centaur-shadow when I ride, to think– this is me. The mirror and the shadow– I am a Gemini trying to come face-to-face with th epart of myself that I cannot recognize when I see it.

I hope that my friend sends prayer flags from New York. I hope that ll the peopl eI love are filled with love themselves, the way I am when I think of them, the way I was today riding in the valley so full of smiling that I could feel the tears pressing against the inside of my face.

Today I recieved the blessing of the informal, when Carina leaned out the thrid-story window of her bedroom and called to me where I was playing Neil Young song on the guitar out on the terrace. She invited me to saddle Romeo for her if I wanted to ride new paths, and in my enthusiastic response I had to hastily correct myself back into the formal voice, which she excused– “tu peux dire tu.” It’s a relief, I am proud. She also brought me pink quilts. I almost feel as if I’m courting her favor, but i do very much want to please her and I am happy to recieve confirmation.

Cold chai and Lovely Bones, I am so pleased to stay up late and read. Midnight. I can do this because I’m not obliged to to anything tomorrow– another day of repose. Surely I’ll begin by sleeping until noon.

Because I am not going to Bruxelle now, I will go to Grasse and I will go to Paris. I have four weeks (almost) to travel. I will have Christmas in Georgia and I will have a slice of NYC and Philadelphia, then I will go to California. I want to do yoga teacher-training because it will open me spiritually, not because it will open a career. But the money follows the love, and it will happen there, too.
In one year, I will be back in school.
The mirror, the shadow, and the circle surrounding the zero.

Today the doorbell rang and I was the only one in the house. I came down in my long silk skirt stained now with olive oil, hair loose under my mother’s turquoise bandanna. A woman with long thick grey hair, wanting to buy produce. Within three minutes we were talking about Shamanism (in French.) I could feel something in her and she frightened me because what I felt was also something I can recognize in myself.
Turning back to the cool dark of the tiled foyer the English word came into my head– witch. Now I think of a full moon two Februaries ago, in a wooden-walled apartment on 4th street filled with women, where my gypsies from Paris lived that winter. Witches.
My dad saw it in me the morning in my apartmen tin Paris, the same way he saw it in his mother from his hinding place at the thop of the stairs as a little boy.

I can list the things that I love but it is not a list of my true attributes. Horses, long hair, and classical guitar picking are there, just like turquoise and chai and milk, and weed and fetish figure and the Tarot and the scent of figs– it’s all there, but those things are results, not causes, and I see that now.
I spent a long time construcking and deconstructing myself, and some considerable energy destructing. I am here, I exist, there is a reflection in the mirror and a centaur-shadow on the field when I ride.