December 20, 2010
Full Moon (eclipsed)
What is it that happens when the full moon (scheduled far in advance) December night is in total eclipse across our continent? Can we say that moonlight has happened at all, when the earth overshadows her own moon?
Will you sleep through it, since all will be in darkness?
Is this the night when the Winter Ghosts appear in the lunar?
And those nagging ghosts within—what to do about them?
“… I put it down on paper and then the ghost does not ache so much.”
-Elizabeth Bennett, American author, born December 20, 1954.
Do you write? Keep a journal? Are you old enough by now
to exorcise your numerous ghosts
by writing them onto the page and then out of existence?
Or do you draw or paint them?
And so give them form, perhaps even color,
before sending them to wherever suffering goes.
Try this little exercise: with paper and pencil handy,
close your eyes, settle your breath, if you can—
ghosts sometimes live wrapped on the breath.
Then feel, see, experience the ghost of a painful memory.
Ah, there it is! Capture it and let it be gone.
“…paying attention to current experience stops the stories that create and recreate suffering.”
-Sylvia Boorstein, Buddhist teacher, in The Wisdom of Discomfort.
From Miss Winterfinch
