I remember years ago, taking out a huge, dark purple book about astrological signs. I am a Scorpio. I read my two pages, searching for myself. Finding myself. The only quality I could not truly relate to was the Scorpio propensity for grudge holding. I actually have the opposite problem; a person could rake me over the coals but if they baked nice chocolate cake the next day and gave it to me, who am I to say they are rotten? And the next, and the next. I read Scorpios are known for long periods of hibernation and great pain from which they spring forth like a butterfly, going through many transformations .. and although I cringed, I knew this was my fate. I have been this way since I can remember, and my writing soars and slides along with this, although less so the better I get and the older and more entrenched my aptitude becomes. I can feel when this great stillness begins, and I have never been able to do anything to stop it. I manage it better now. The quietness begins and I mistake it for depression, and although it might be a sister to depression, it is not the same thing. I am not miserable. I can feel joy, although more rarely. I can feel love. I can feel compassion. I can feel sad. During these times, what I feel most is akin to the quiet observation of an animal in nature who can sit, perfectly still, for hours and hours, watching the trees, lake, grasses, the sky. Like a great wave drawing backward, I am taking with me my children, my husband, my past, my dreams, hopes, fears, daily routines, family, friends, intellect, all of it, into the great dark hand of water. Everything is so quiet. Everything inside of me is still. I am spinning without motion, without feeling my limbs. I listen, watch, hear, feel, but I do not react. I rarely talk to or see friends. Sexual desire wanes. I eat less. Move slower, talk less, think less. I am in daily gratitude for the amazing gift of life. I wait. I observe everything. And deep inside of me, I can feel some enormous gathering, like an intellectual and spiritual treasure trove, that I cannot touch yet. Months go by before the wave gathers from the belly of ocean, and I feel myself returning to the salt spray, shrieks in the air, rocks underneath, the white slice of shell across my ankles and I throw forth every single perception that has accumulated, like vomiting gold medallions across the sand, and write the best things I have ever written.
Repeat.
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