Beltane

The garden smells like warm earth. The sky is hot.

I bury the jawbone of a sheep for Beltane, although I do not know why I feel compelled to do so.

I am not a pagan. Neither am I a Christian. I am nothing.

But my body is healing from long months of illness and sometimes it feels as if my heart is breaking in this house. It is the time when people turn to the unfamiliar. Any foothold, any belief. An anchor in the chaos that streams and screams and tips you into fast, deep water the texture of skin.

So raise your hands and dance around a fire, light a candle with love and celebrate the sun and life and growth and it will be okay that your heart hurts and your soul is strange.

You can attach a wish to the charm you bury.

Into dark earth I tip teeth and bone and swear to live a life that's full. For better or worse, for the weird and the wonderful, I made all my choices and found myself in a walled garden, thin and wounded, digging up fresh soil and still breathing.

And I believe in choice.

Possibly from endless hours watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Choice is theme numero uno after all. Choice always clings to you, even when your control is splintered and scattered. Even when your choices are savage or few, they are still yours. There is plenty to be said about Joss Whedon but his show taught me that.

My body feels softened, the heat has stretched me. The dog touches her nose to me and curls her warm body close, miles of tawny fur and bright eyes that see the wilderness in me. I drink a beer and walk barefoot on the slates and wonder about my future.

I am at ground zero.

I was sick for so long and now I am mending. I was barely able to walk, I couldn't get to the moss along the lane, to feel it under my hands; life was a violent fog of pain, coiled around my body as I tried to sleep.

So many mouths told me so many things: bowel disease, then ovarian cysts. I was cut open in abdominal surgery and nothing was as expected. I woke to a room so bright it hurt my eyes, my world painted in pain. They gave me a fentanyl button and my mum held my hand and Yams was shaking in his chair, wild eyed and shutting down. It appears, after all, to be an infection, they told me, dosing me with antibiotics in a hospital room overlooking an apple tree.

Now my body is suturing sliced muscle and sealing the seam of my abdomen, stitches dissolving like bubbles on my tongue. The deep ache weakens as I strengthen, in more ways than one.

Life feels left in tatters. It has broken us, I fear, but I also feel reborn.

The bright skyline and murmuring trees that I can walk in and feel against my skin once more. What a gift.

I worked freelance before. Independent to a fault, some could say. Now I am jobless and I have navigated helplessness in a way that I never believed I could.

Rip it all out, cave in your chest and rebuild.

Hope.

I wish to live a life that's full and I am forever hopeful that I will.

I think that is my super power and it is possibly the only super power I'll ever need.