Posts Tagged ‘transformation’

This last weekend did not go as I had originally planned.  It began well enough, with a Friday evening on the shore, watching kites, birds, sailboats and passing couples in love.  It began with sunlight splendor on the water, and plans for meeting women for a party.  But then, the unintended took over.  Friday night I tossed is a sweat-soaked bed in pain because those soft evening breezes on the beach chilled my damaged and titanium-clipped neck.  Soon, the muscle spasms spread to mid and lower back.  Saturday morning I despaired and sent my “Not coming, busy writhing.” note to friends.

I was exhausted and ate and went back to bed, still hurting.  Lying down eased the pain and I slept.  I had wild and wonderful dreams.  I woke feeling energized, if still recognizing the need to move carefully and less than usual.  I got out my bead box.  I am not the craftiest person on earth and feel artistically impaired most of the time.  But a friend’s daughter had a birthday and money being tight, I was determined to create something worthy without going broke.

I found beautiful strands of peacock colored freshwater pearls in my little chest of shiny delights.  Never used because the drill holes in these pearls were so tiny my needles wouldn’t pass, on impulse I picked up the nylon beading cord and found it went through the holes with no needle!  Soon, I had a beautiful pearl necklace lying before me—and by happy coincidence made of the birthstone of June.

I couldn’t stop with the birthday necklace.  I took tiny loose seed beads and made a necklace to hold a jet and crystal bee given to me by a beloved teenager…it looks like silvery nectar with bits of pollen and evokes the hive to this one-time-beekeeper.  Then I made a necklace of smoked quartz rounds, long owned and never used….they feel like little wheels of change against my throat! The color evokes every sabbat fire every burned here….this Smoke of Many Fires necklet is a magic thing.

When my back twinges, I rest, I nap, I eat.  I use a prayer strand recently made at our women’s circle; I realize how perfectly these beads could be merged with candle magic.  I am feeling a strange bliss rising over the pain in my back.  And Saturday night I dream of my Gods, I hear the pipes and bells that connote Herne for me and wake before dawn on Sunday with an image of Him coming as Lover, wrapped in barbed wire that will pierce me and pain me.  But that wave of bliss overrides it all, and for the first time in my long life of chronic pain, I realize I am not fighting the pain.

I rise, I make a new prayer bead strand for use in many justice issues.  Its beads are brown and red-orange and the pendant is a tiger-striped glass heart.  My back still aches, but I feel NEW.  I run my hands over my own face, neck, skin feeling tangibly different and I marvel at the transformation that came in the night like dreams, but stayed into daylight.  And then I know something I have not said to myself before.

Pain is not my stopping point.  Pain is my starting point.  Pain is not my enemy; it is the lover that reveals ignored places in myself.  It is not my ruler, nor need I conquer it.  It sits beside me on my life’s duet and half the beauty of my life springs from that source.  It is the brier to my rose.  It blunts my thorns like I softened the edges of thorns on my rose-cane wand and makes manageable the sharpness that is me.

Tiger-hearted prayer beads….made out of pain and bliss, for calming the savage beast inside and releasing the battle to be won.