Driving across the causeway through the marsh that connects Tybee Island to Wilmington Island eventually leading to Savannah, I watch a pink moon set. It is full and huge and the light pink color makes the dark craters more pronounced. The bottom barley touches the tree tops of the island and by the time I’ve driven the seven miles it has set completely.
“Dear me,” I said out loud to myself when I first got a glimpse of it rounding the curve just before the Lazaretto Creek bridge.
It put me in a pensive mood. At six a.m. I’m driving to travel to where new work is beginning. I’m excited and have been working for a few weeks now. Last night I had a hard time sleeping because this is the beginning of new things which is always exciting.
Watching the moon set as I drive away from Tybee I can’t help but appreciate the image. Tybee’s been my refuge for the past year as I lived through my “dark night of the soul” to use the words of St. John of the Cross.
Joni Mitchell puts it another way … “all romantics pass this way sometime.”
Rod Steward cuts to the chase … “ain’t love a bitch.”
The setting pink moon marks the ending of this time. It is celebratory and decorated for the occasion letting me know with no uncertainty that those days are no more.
Oh I still have the scars. I look at them and marvel at my survival. I touch my chest when special friends leave because while broken hearts can never be put back together quite the same, they can be put back together. When they do it makes you believe in miracles again. I tap my chest to marvel at love after death.
My mind has been racing with plans.
The past is done.
How in the hell did I get through it?
There are lots that I wouldn’t change for anyone and there are parts that I wouldn’t wish on Satan.
Dark nights of the soul are all about leaving the past I think. Rod’s right … it’s a bitch!
The sky grows baby blue after the pink moon with the dark crater scars drops behind Fran’s thousand shades of green.
The dark night is no more.
It has passed.
The baby blue sky envelopes me.
The sun is rising and I watch the birth of a new day.
I am aware of the birthing of a new me.
I think increasingly about the future. It is baby blue and orange and … some of the past makes its way through … red and black. It’s a diverse place that reaches to cities around the world. It is filled with songs. It has chocolate, is sticky and somehow I think that I’ll be in more hot water then than I’ve ever been before (no small feat!).
But it also remains rooted on an island. The ocean sings me awake and to sleep every day. Fran and the congregation of friends that she has assembled watch over me. Goddess waits for walks to the sad little holy dock. A beloved back deck that may as well have been an emergency room hospital bed throughout the dark nights is now a corporate office.
My I-phone buzzes. The first screw up of the day has occurred. All of the materials that I’d planned to pass out in today may not make it.
It’s ok.
I’ve been through worse.
This baby land blue that I’m driving through just me makes me smile.
I pray the first prayer of the day.
“Let’s go.”
