across the universe

You have to burrow down through my astrological chart….Sun in Leo, Cancer rising, Moon in Gemini to get the lava core, five planets in Virgo tucked into the back pocket of the sky. I tell you this because these planets rule my relationship to the Great Mystery. They ground me, turn my eyes to earth, to the plants that need water, the floors that beg to be swept.

When my daughter was young she and I would ask her smart daddy to explain how the earth revolved around the sun, and he would bring out the stick and the orange and the lemon and move them around like a ballet dancer. She and I would hold hands, whisper like bad girls…

Do you understand?

No

Do you?

We smiled, said thank you. But months later one of us would ask another planetary question and out would come the stick and now maybe two oranges and two lemons or a lime if one were on hand.

We’d hold hands. Shit. The stick. The oranges.

Yeah. Don’t ask that again.

It’s not that I am not stunned drunk stupid looking up at the night sky. I am. I tilt my head back until my neck hurts and I make the same ooh aah noises everyone else is making but then I think how nice it would be to have tea ready for everyone when they come inside, necks stiff from craning, and so I conjure the domestic alchemy with water and herb, bee sugar and fire and it is a mystery that something so wonderful, as simple as hot tea should be there, radiant as a universe.

Another mystery: how two people fall into the same black hole together, forsaking all others, agreeing to cleave to each other like uranium or plutonium before the fission before critical mass will rip them apart. How the great mystery of love slowly works its way into their blood, taming the wild, the impatient, the cruel, softening the tongue, easing the pain.

And what of the mystery of love that heals wounds and the other mystery of the broken that lies shattered within a battered chest and how only starlight can enter through the cracks. And what of the mystery of the cosmic dust that flows through openings made by starlight, the mystery that carries the eternal message brought from universes too far away to measure.

Look up, for love has arrived to heal. Look inside for nothing else can mend you. Fall on your knees in the face of the one true mystery of life…the song of the spheres, the dance of the planets as they two-step past each other, the raucous laughter of the gods who travel through space to arrive just in time to heal us with the power of love.