Exploring the basement beneath the chapel we uncover an older alter carved with abstract faces and arcane runes tucked in a vaulted alcove directly beneath the new. Unbidden, a dark and hungry god arises, an ancient incarnation demanding a sacrifice.
We offer it our preconceptions, expectations of a life unlived. From the darkness a vision of clarity emerges as images from a dream.
The walls, the trebuchet, our soldiers in their bright mail, the dark army arrayed against us, the lambs in our folds, the goats in their pens, each waiting to be slaughtered to sustain the next attack, allies and enemies, each possess a grace, all merely follow some inner compass, some voice that they alone can hear.
There is beauty in that simplicity, in that order, that understanding. Even as they clash, dying like a prayer on the lips of an uncertain priest forced to confront firsthand the atrocities of war, that is, prematurely, they embody a connectedness. In their struggle to be free of one another they remain linked, inseparable as sides of a coin. Slice one from the other and you end up with two, each blank face ready to be imprinted with a new darkness to balance its light, a new demon to embrace the angel from which it struggles to be free.
These are the threads that bind us to this life, that hold us to one another. When we close our eyes, they strip their clothes and frolic, chasing each other like nymphs and satyrs through an enchanted wood on Beltane, collapsing in giggling exhaustion to breed the empathy that allows us to die neither naked nor hungry though certainly alone, always alone, embarking on an eremitic journey even in the company of friends. Empathy that makes this life less solitary, less poor, our existence less nasty and brutish, each moment sliding toward infinity as we focus on it exclusively. In that way, less short.
We place our sacrifice on the alter to divide between false mothers. Siamese twins linked by a complex knot we would rather slice through to examine its entrails than spend the months or years to untangle, uncreating it in the process.
Even as we raise the knife, we hope some unseen voice will stay our hand and spare our aberrant child.
© 2007 Edward P. Morgan III
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For the people who don’t know, I consider myself a Daoist. One of the central themes of Daoism is the balance between yin and yang, which represent male and female, light and darkness, heaven and earth. As Alan Watts explained it in one of his talks on Daoism, you can’t separate one from another any more than you can separate the sides of a coin. If you cut a coin in half along its edge, each new disk still has two distinct faces. The thought being that just like short and tall define one another, you can’t know good times without bad.
The other central theme of Daoism is that all life is interconnected. You can’t completely separate an animal from its environment. Even a domestic cat has to eat. That food comes from somewhere. So the cat is connected to the rest of the world by its food, if not by its owner or its interactions. Even from inside a house or on the porch, every cat has an essential cat-ness that connects it to the rest world.
For me, there was a peace in the thought that we were connected to the birds and squirrels we saw in the yard each day. If they didn’t seem to care what was going on, why should we? They seemed to say that no matter what happened, it would all be ok. Life would go on. That was comforting to us in a way.
Just this week I saw a quote from Zen_Habits on Twitter that said, “Survival isn't strength, smarts, or speed; it's the ability to adapt to change.” There is a lot of truth in that. We get stuck on our preconceptions of what our life should look like and forget that all life is change. Sometimes, that change is good. But adapting to any change is almost always hard. We have to sacrifice our preconceptions to accept where we are. It’s only from there that we can decide how to get to where we want to be.
Beltane, also known as May Day, is a Celtic holiday celebrated on May 1. The ancient Celts celebrated it as the first day of summer. They used bonfires to purify the both people and cattle. In some traditions it is also marked with a fertility festival.
Picture notes: This is a picture of one of the chapels in the south transept of Valle Crucis Abbey in Wales. Where it used to be covered, it is now open to elements. The bricked up archway once led to the sacristy. The stone to the left is the base of the alter. That’s what seemed fitting about this shot.
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