another woman, another well
The Meeting Place. THIRTY-TWO.
The birds sing her their secrets when she settles down, stops bustling, clanging, bartering all that stuff she insists on shuffling through to make a name for herself. To make herself big on the patch of ground where she is. She’s learned and forgotten and remembered again what comes in the quiet beyond the nightmares and frenzies of her youth, those voices that played in her when she was barely eighteen, that were dreaming her alive but too fast, too unsteady to make sense to her then, those voices that came to her on Sunday mornings before the family set off for church and she was bound up in the generational habits that trapped her into a picture frame where she was the spring baby born to a grieving mother and a trapped father and a house with a Holy Word on every nightstand and a promise of eternity if only she would put aside the big wide world and not listen to birds.
The birds sing her their secrets when the stillness overtakes her, when the words stop and other languages, dripping with the syrup of the ages, pour into her their prophecy from long ago that a witness someday will appear, that she will renounce her story, the who-ness by which she was known, make remittance to clear her accounts, empty her well of tears, and in time she will offer the container to the elements — earth, water, air, and fire — and the birds will land there and the deer will visit unafraid and sages will arrive and the space will open and what was confused and caged and distressed will be transcribed, released, and blessed, and a mystic will be born to the singing of birds.
The Meeting Place is a jigsaw of fictional vignettes hosting several female characters destined to cross paths. The pieces work separately as contemplative offerings. The series began with The Meeting Place. ONE. (May 12, 2022)
