From the stars, on a mountain, with the bears, my beads…and paint.
Circles and Cycles
I belong to a feral rosary group on Facebook called The Way of the Rose. That’s also the title of their book which I highly recommend. Below is a piece I wrote for the group:
Happy new year! Or happy 11th day after the solstice which is a bigger deal in my family.
If you lived in my mind you’d literally see time as shapes around you. I have synesthesia which comes in many forms. Simply put, a glitch in the connections in my brain, in many brains. You can look it up to see if you relate because I didn’t know I was not “normal” until way into my adulthood. I see time as multiple shapes that create one big orb.
I move around this orb. It doesn’t move around me, as if I were the sun so I find myself in different places in space as the year goes around. I don’t know about you but I always seem to pivot around certain events in the year.
As a child my birthday was a pretty important pivot point. As a young adult a soul dog of mine died on July 8th. The general feeling of that time of year, long days, busy birds chattering, warm humid air would alert me that the day she died was nearby.
After my Dad died unexpectedly on a December 29th my days circled around that horrible date. For several years my entire existence rotated sadly around that day as a sort of dark hub in my universe.
At 58 I’ve accumulated enough of those dates that center my world and they’re scattered around that orb enough that it’s all just become a circle again. Time passes so fast now, these dates speed around and around.
As the heart-wrenching dates are less important simply because of their number, the cycles in the natural world around me have become more important. I think watching climate change is so hard because I used to be able to rely on the land’s events to keep me steady. Mid summer of Vermont starts at about 4am, when the birds are still busy with their family-making work, that’s when my soul-dog died. That day, the start of July was hot and humid. It might be chilly here now. My son’s birthday, which 18 years ago meant I was on the highway every single day on the way to the NICU, the leaves speeding by in New England’s classic maple colors, fire-yellow, orange, red. This year, our leaves shifted straight out of green into muted browns. The snow we revel in at the holidays, this year was a literal flood, the second 100 year flood this year, water galore. If I can’t rely on the land around me to mark my circles around the sun, I will have to give Her my angst and my body’s seasonal confusion.
Making rosaries, praying rosaries, or simply just carrying them in my pocket gives me ease. Round and round I go, sometimes counting and sometimes just a pleading string of Hail Mary Hail Mary Hail Mary. That’s really all I need. We have the seasons of these novenas, my many heart’s desires, the miracles that She brings, those are my rocks nowadays. Nothing else abides by the rules anymore. Vermont has the wrong birds, the weather is wrong, but She is with me and I am thankful.