Our Souls, Our Caves--Blog Entry #5

Sunday, March 3, 2013

1:00pm

21˚F

Our body is something like our second cave. Our soul enters it at birth, blind in its choosing, to escape the shatter and rain of our first wombcave. We rush into it without hesitation, without fear of what is inside, of what will be waiting for us. It is dark and damp and the walls are thin at first, but as our soul grows our cave grows and the two become inseparable. They move together, our soul the light, our cave the dark. And when pain drains into our soul, when its watery hand grabs at our light, our cave shakes and drips, howls until the rain breaks. But in death our soul has no choice but to be carried off on the moist limb of a flood, to be separated from our cavebody, to be on its own for the first time in deep water.

"I wanted / to sing to you"

This fifth Sunday is the first time that my body and my soul visit my uncle. They have been traveling together for twenty-three years and are still weary of the rain. I sit under an eastern pine next to his grave and stare at the cooper tinsel stone that weighs on his body like pain, grief, or guilt weighs on the chest, until I think I can see it fall in. Until I think I can see the ground separate. Until I think I can see his cavebody rise up into the blue bowl, into the grand sky where it belongs, where I hope its soul is waiting.

"go home"

The snow is leaving today. I can smell the pungent green of the pines waving goodbye. In the wake of the white, I can taste remnants of spring. They are sweet but stark and bitter in my mouth like the way blueberries taste when they are not quite ready. I toss these fragments of spring around my tongue to remember them in case winter comes back. The air seems thinner and lighter as it tries to push through me as if it has shed its coat for the first time in a long winter.

Deep down I know that my uncle is not here. I know that I am praying and mourning over a soulless body, but maybe I am wrong. Maybe he is here with me, but not in the way I think, not in the body that lays dormant under me. Maybe his soul is next to me, watching over his cavebody. Maybe he is afraid to leave it here in this cemetery with all these other hollow caves, but I do not hope for that.  

What I hope for his soul, for all the souls, is that they have already gone, that they have decided to give their caves to the leaves. That they have entrusted their second dwellings to the pines, to the sky, to the mallard ducks, to all the living that need shelter from the rain. What I hope for these souls is something only nature can give; only nature can offer the protection needed for souls to move on.    

"i am waiting for you there"

As I walk away from what I hope is an empty cave, I can hear the mallard ducks calling after me. I imagine they know I worry about my uncle’s soul and how his body is surviving without its light. I imagine they spoke to him before he left and told him not to worry, told him that his second dwelling was safe. Although I still feel the sharpness of loss, I know the sky has nothing to be sad about today as she stares down from her own blue cave with all those souls lightly flickering inside of her.

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Our Souls, Our Caves--Blog Entry # 5 Inspired By:

“dying”

by Lucille Clifton

i saw a small moon rise

from the breast of a woman

lying in a hospital hall

and I saw that the moon was me

and I saw that the punctured bag

of a woman body was me

and i saw you sad there in the lobby

waiting to visit and I wanted

to sing to you

go home

i am waiting for you there