Stargazer
I feel as if my well is dry. I send a bucket down to fill and it comes up filled with sand. Dust and debris blown in from the desert of mind. I get nothing from this place, only cracked lips and a longing for better times. I am parched, but there is nothing to quench my thirst. I am baking in the sun and see only temporary shade, drifting clouds over the dunes promising rain that never comes. The sand stretches on past the horizon in each direction. Dunes shifting with the wind, the land itself has me trapped and lost. I see no landmarks. No oases. No distant mountain to guide me. The stars at night are foreign and seem to shift like the dunes.
But I can learn the sky. The darkness may be stifling but the stars cannot be shifting. The heavens are the compass of my ancestors. I don’t recognise their shapes. The forms of the gods of this land, looking over me at night. That doesn’t mean they aren’t there or that they’re uncaring, malicious. I haven’t looked for them, so how could they show me the way? Perhaps they’re wary as I am of bringing in a new being. Of new ways.
This desert, as hostile as it seems with its sweltering days of endless sun and dunes, its dark nights that chill to the bones, hasn’t killed me yet. I thirst and I wander, but it sustains me somehow. I eat nothing, because there is nothing to eat. I drink nothing, because there is no water to be found. But I continue on. Is this punishment or mercy? I live, do I not? How? An intangible force. An energy within me struggles on despite the hardships this place brings. It feeds on something else, something not of the land. An energy suffuses these dunes, this harsh sun, that frigid moon, those distant stars, each fleeting and wispy cloud. If I could sense it - if I could let it guide me - where would it take me to? What would it let me see? Who could I be if I knew the truth of this place? Are these dunes I walk on, sand slipping, or is it a roiling ocean, each dune a wave? Life teeming beneath, pulsing with the energy of the wind, and I walk atop it with the blessings of the stars. They hold me aloft, they keep me from drowning, because I am not just a lonely, sad soul, cast out from the world. I am wanted. I am loved and kept safe by forces I cannot see.
The ocean is no more welcoming than the desert. Were I swimming I would drown. Were it storming I would be buffeted by waves. That I do neither, it makes clear the powers granted to shield me from harm. If I’ve been gifted this way, granted leave to walk on water like the gods of old, then I will use their gift. I will find land somewhere, an island home to rest, a place of bounty to nourish me, of shade to protect me from the harsh sun, with skies that bring rain clouds and winds that bring the sweet scent of life.
I don’t know where that island is, but I know I must find it. I will learn the stars that watch over me. I will find and follow their celestial trails. They’re there, I know it, they always have been. I only need to recognise them. The scent of the trail to direct me, the shape of their constellations that mark the path, the sound of the song to assure me I am walking true.
I must feel the vibrations of the universe, and it begins by letting them in.
