June 24- 2nd Entry

Holy Junk
A List for Betsy S. who is my Comrade in the Attic Bedroom

Today I received in the mail a box of holy junk from an old friend I've known since I first moved to this tiny town when I was nineteen. She has moved back home and taken her Mendo magic with her. And now, she has sent back a tincture of moonlight and a powder of earth mixed by the hands of settlers and once-upon-a-time fairies: an alchemical mixture of the very things she took with her and then some: a handful of feathers, a piece of paper her granddaughter has carefully drawn stars and a crescent moon waxing on it, she has added these things to the bundle of medicine. So many friends and relations send me medicine in the oddest shapes and odors and they are all inscribed with instructions that tell me how to take them for the best results. The feathers are the most beautiful pheasant spots and stripes and chevrons. It makes me cry to see their colors and textures of beauty. The thin calligraphy of love drawn on rice paper is a delicate potion, and like most holy things, the six year old has left open doorways to the universe for me to step through and hear the Love-Voice of G-d, Y'shua, the Holy Spirit. The song of the Trinity sung by a six year old girl will astonish my spinal d.n.a. and shake my vertebrae like dice into a form of health I had not conceived of before. Singing the White Bones of the Moon, we call it here. And the stars will make maps that show me how to walk into 'How can you be so close to Narnia and "Step over the crack, don't break yr mother's back." ' The bowl with an oriole in the center will teach me how to fly after they have taken the cancer and left me a pair of wings instead. And a square plate with a Carolina Wren on it, a postage stamp, a flower are all amulets to replace the cells that were eating the delicate flesh of a almost 56 year ols little girl breast. All this God-Magic would be too much to bear if I were not a Daughter in His Temple, ala Isadora Duncan, leaping like the hind over high places and singing the hymn of love. Oh God Yes, let us sing Love, breathe Love, always breathe says Janet and my comrade in the sparse room next door our ceilings so close to the sky that the stars are leaking juice in between the joists ah, star-juice, better than hot chocolate before bed with a drop of honey made from the Queen of Shebas bees.

All this comes with the healing. Learning to forgive old women who when young were bad mothers and shameful people and I don't know who they are now, but my dreams long for their hair to be brushed by my own hand and in the brushing, the tangles of their badness will fall to the floor. In the morning I will sweep it out the back door and burn it in a small pile by the wormwood and the pennyroyal path. There is healing to be reckoned with here. There is a time to be born and a time to die. A time to forgive and a time to condemn. In my illness, which has grown worse partly by its very nature & partly caused by the barbed wire anger I grew up with surrounding me all the time like a cage, I have sought health through mazes in caves with only starlight to guide me. I was messed up by bad genes from in utero listening to my parents' anger at each other & partly by the fear of a young man & a young woman wondering if they should be getting married simply to insert penis into womb just for the feel-good mojo of sex without the Hand of G-d guiding them through the matrimony song of "Til Death Do Us Part". It's an arduous task to stay married. I had no guidance. I didn't know how to stay married. Or let's put it this way, I didn't know how to choose the right man to be married to for the rest of my life. Like mythic folk, I have struggled to roll that rock to the top of the mountain and prop it up so that it may never ever fall down into the pathway of small children again. And Daniel, the lion-killer, was just the one to step up to the maiden and lift her/me into the curve of that thin waxing moon, like a bed and cover me with stardust for a quilt while he wrestles the bad cells from my body with his sheer love of Heroics and regular guys who find pearls in their glass. Its all magic, I tell you. My artist friend who lives in the desert near where my paternal grandmother once lived, is sending a box that will rattle when I shake it and when I open it, the rattles will turn into puffs of smoke and tic-toks of time that break off into the whoosh sound of the River Jordan. If I could, I would send some of the water to a sick man in a town a small ways down the mountain from me and hope it not only heals him from his cancer, but also shows him how the Bird came down in the shape of a Spirit and how the Spirit came down in the shape of a Bird and a Voice opened up the sky and poured Itself into the River to make all water holy in the Name of. I am waiting for another box to be sent by a woman named for a flower

who is related by blood. She has told me on the electronic lines that there is a card, a very nice picture of someone, a very valuable Something, a very beautiful something and a very old, valuable and beautiful something inside her box. I cannot wait to open these boxes of health and yet I must. Today I opened the birdwings box & the moon & the stars & the envelope of Hungarian Bread-seed Poppies from Renee's Garden & Rene's my middle name cuz I took the last "e" off the name & gave it to a small child in a red outfit & a black kerchief tied about her throat as she sat in her mother's lap & that woman used to be the woman who slapped this writer's face frequently. I now wear a red kerchief around my neck to indicate that I have forgiven her the beginning of many years of abuse & hopefully it will be a sign of the beginning of love starting all over again. In the box that the six year old's grandmother sent is a pen holder of great antiquity, a phrase book for Paris where I have been already, but this book is to prove that I shall live on long enough to go again. A small red book written by Violet Biddle called, "Small Gardens & How to Make the Most of Them". Another book written when I was three years old called, "A FRIEND IS SOMEONE WHO LIKES YOU". Another book called, "Chrysalis, Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis by Kim Todd. A map called, "Byrdcliffe Arts Colony: 100 Years of the Art of Living", (I believe this is to insure me I will live on even though it is not sure if I can or cannot have the last major heart surgery & perhaps to re-assure me that I will be a cancer survivor like Ingrid and Carla, and Barbara and so many women have promised me...) A catalog of Fancy Goods made by the Shakers at Sabbath-day Lake in Maine, I believe was put in the box to remind me that I too make simple, but beautiful items both useful and charming. Also in this box is a packet of heirloom seeds (Marrowfat Peas) with instructions, so that I will have something nourishing to eat after I have reconciled myself to the fact that there are many kinds of healing. One kind is of the heart & the other kind is cardiac and another kind is when they have to cut off a body part and then give you poison that almost promises to heal you. but they all need nourishment. At the very bottom of the box is a small booklet carrying ten carved toothpicks which I imagine might be used as props for the tiny peas as they grow from seedlings to larger plants. This is the magic of the planet earth, my second favorite place. I look forward to going to heaven and seeing my Grandma Cutter-Chandler and telling her thank you for teaching me about Jesus. I want to wrap my arms

around my Da and tell him all the love I told him about really really is true and, well, I guess he knows that already because he got to heaven before me. Now I want to tell my mother about the Land of Beulah. & I want to let all these boxes I keep receiving from people like Jerry in Oklahoma, Laura in Portland, Jodi in Colorado and everywhere else in the darn US of A to keep coming so I can send my kind of medicine back to them & rejoice. I have received some of the best medicinal-love boxes from an alchemist in Seattle who has known me since I was a teen and has been a wise shaman and wise Priest with wife as well. I want to tell a woman in Crescent City that she is the perfect Proverbs 31 wife and I don't care what her husband says about it. I want to discover what my name is as I plaster all these bandages on me, since they are all I got from the doctor when I thought I was gonna get the Last Surgery. I want to someday be able to forget all the Things that were done to me as a child now that I have learned how to forgive those who did the things to me. All this holy jun was placed in various boxes by various people and mailed to me because these people want me to get well and continue serving until the Thief comes in the night and steals all the badness away. Amen.