“Magic is afoot, God is alive.”- Buffy Sainte-Marie
Her dreams whisper reassuringly in journals bound in leather, the engraved cover gathering dust in the creases of her ancestors’ knotwork—mythology and aesthetics rendering the heart through time. The company of rocks, feathers, and photos stand astute as altars to memory, lining the halls of nostalgia with flowers, dried and pressed.
A richly painted sunset grows silent in sleeping eyes. As if preparing herself for ritual, she lays the journal on the tiered nightstand—the bond of dreams now past, yet ever present in the great rites of a secret society. Curious shadows drape the night, and words fall from her sleeping lips. Will those words find their place, engraved in the leather-bound journal of her heart?
The delinquent voices sing the praise of night’s great sermon, ushered forth through pens whose ink refuses to run dry. The extravagant want of knowing sits in a curious corner—the holder of shadows and fields of exhausted dreams. I wonder what she writes as she scribes the visions of a reluctant Sage. What great prophecy does the night entail in these pages lined with words? What monsters lie slain at the feet of her gods?
In the high noon of a winter’s day, when light strains through the milky-white shutters and the bustle of waking life dances the dance of routine, the old journal sits. What silent conversations must happen in these churches of dust? Do the rocks tell stories about how they were born of volcano and have lived to witness the Anthropocene? Does the Phoenix silently gather back its dormant flaming feathers? Do the flowers speak of their once-great pageantry, before being pressed and fitted into their eternal form? Does her father escape his photographic prison to share stories of his daughter’s great feats? The totemic dragonfly lamp stands guard atop its utilitarian box-made mountain, draped in cloth and stone-made coasters, ready to sound the alarm of the creator—an ushering of quiet, as not to give their animism away.
The tapping of the pens scribes great scripture, a drum that eternally beats in time with her heart. A calligraphy of the soul, draped in esoteric symbols meant only for her sacred eyes, spans the enormity of dream, nightmare, and waking life. It tethers her to the divine and unravels the great inferno. There must be so much beneath those covers made of leather: seas upon seas of tear-drenched papers, brought from the clouds of grief and sadness, or the suns of joy and peace. The stories of grandbabies and daughters whose hearts are hers, whose blood pumps forth the changing face of family. All these stories, wrapped and tidy, made from the love of a well-lived life. All the stories where the beast is slain with great bravery and skill, as not to disturb her loves from sleep. The holder of the flame, the Phoenix from the ashes: a journal.