Today is the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. I'm here at the sunrise - cold into heat, dark into light - the sky, the 6:30 moment - orange sherbet ridge to east, smoky blue smudge to west. I'm here with all my stuff, standing at the brink of paradise with cares, obsessions, inadequacies, complications - my looping mind-stuff. This is it, all I've got.
Well, this stuff gets me here too. It gets me here to be left; it begs me to be left here at the brink moment, to be set down. Enough stuff.
Cold is a place. I used to imagine things were born splatted out of livid, red-hot containers. I now think cold originates, and its intention is what individuates. There's a freezer, a meat locker, where hocks are hung, unseparated, stratified. Then a need, a desire, a will - a tiny but significant burst of icy gut - flings a thing out the door, chipped off the frozen block, born into heat and swirl. This happens with everything, not only life forms.
What is it like in the freezer? Emily Dickinson's assessment:
"Twere better Charity
To leave me in the Atom's tomb -
Merry, and nought, and gay, and numb -
Than this smart Misery."
