Each morning as I woke up, I pushed down into my sense of what was, down until I could touch the awareness of her death. When I felt the sharp sting shoot up my coiled snake, when I felt my stomach clench, I would stop and go about the business of the day.

I continued this for two weeks, going deeper and deeper each time, saving up my tears for the darkness before bed, paying heed to my need for muted conversation or mania. And finally, my bare feet touched bottom and I stood in the place where she had once walked, where and when she had once lived.

There was sadness there, but also a stretch of greening. The fields of the otherworld burst with new bloom in the ashen shadow of her struggle. And I ate the fruit of knowing.

I left behind my skin, for what use do I have of it now? And I carved in the stiff cliffside, in clay that softened under my strong fingers, the ledged stairway back to my living self.

As we gathered for New Years in the apartment overlooking the lake, I fell into the arms of women, the women I love. The fireworks lit the Needle like a cheesy 80’s disco explosion. I felt whole. The passage of that western calendar collective ritual, the taste of champagne and the press of lips on my cheeks catalyzed, internalized some final shift. For the days since, I have felt changed, different on a very profound, molecular level.

I can see that I’m on another journey, but not a walkabout this time, not a mission of trauma and healing, something else entirely. I’m not sure what exactly it is, because it chose me. I only know what there is to be known at the moment of footfall. I only know that I have changed.

I’m choosing to take responsibility for what I put into the world. Note this is not the same as taking control. The time has come where I have used up my quota of hiding, the pretense of trying to lead a normal life, the hope that I could blunt myself with substance or sex or fantasy or abuse into a lasting deafness. I’ve made promises I intend to keep, and I have a great deal of work and play to do in order to keep them.

There’s now no time for can’t. I’m bored of can’t.

When I go to sleep each night, I consider it a transition between worlds, a death of a life that lasts one day. I treat my passage, my entry into eight hours of dreaming, not like I’m flipping an on/off switch, but as the movement into a realm that hangs in-between lives. Each morning is a birth. Each day lasts for as long as the waking lasts, wherein is held everything, all the potential for transformation, all the potential for pain, all the hopes and moods and possibility of any life.

I carry through karma, I remember infinite lifetimes before each new birth. I choose not to repeat mistakes, or I choose to heal gaps. But largely, each day is the same day. My responsibility is to allow it to unfold, to take responsibility for the ways in which I affect it’s unfolding. My sleep comes as a place of resetting and renewal, of repurposing.

As I am discovering the ways in which I rob myself of energy, or the ways in which I allow my moods to fall, my momentum to drop to nothing, I am working to end those things or to find ways to sit with them while maintaining a level of awareness and self-power. I can’t do the things I have to do, won’t have the courage or the sheer ability to do them unless I better develop the practice of energy management.

That is the big task at the moment, and the thing that is taking up most of my processing self.

My mood is more somber without the sad aspect of that word, perhaps more directed, or less interested in wearing masks. At the same time, I feel lighter. I’m having ideas and acting on them. I’m quietly tagging the people whom I’d like to work with and I’ve started to proceed along the project list I outlined last month. I feel catalyzed, wholly catalyzed into action by the events in the last days of 2006.

Where this all will lead, I am not sure. It doesn’t matter to me. The only thing that matters now is that I am hearing again, fully hearing. And there is a deep howl that resonates under this winter moon, from a place I know well as home.