‘Your life is meant to confront everything that holds you captive’ Rumi.

I’m feeding the hand tree. I leave at nighttime and swallow the dark that hits my teeth. I am wearing my favourite things. All of them. Some of them I’ll even keep. I tread barefoot gently on the soil. If I can imagine I can float, then I float in the earth. Weightless and silent I am a picture frame. I am surrounded by yellow and have pocket full of scissors in case someone needs a little. It’s my protection, it’s my forcefield, it’s my personal mundi. I stand with my weapons in the middle of a rainbow with nothing to defend. I could follow a star. I could follow you. I could wait inside a temple with a checkerboard floor and elaborate stained glass windows that colour my mind with the costs and benefits, or I could sleep soundly in a tent with a sun in my belly and fall in love with angels and green all over again. Chasing the sorrow and letting it past. Once I curled up sad indigo blue in a corner and fade purple to the background and although bright and light averred me move, I stayed still as the world woke up around me.

‘I was dead, I became alive’ Rumi.

I go to feed the hand tree. It is night and the solar system circles the sun, like electrons circle the nucleus, like willy wagtails circle my head. Ignore the symbols, the signs, the secret messages written in the clouds. No magick silly rabbit.

The tree stump holds his ashes. The tree stump is an altar. Maybe I could float away on a cup of tea and a prayer. The infinite universe floats above my head, strawberries, roses and lilies adorn his feet. The weaver of dreams will weave a red dragonfly called trust as flowers bow down in his presence. I would extend an olive branch, but his eye is fixed on the horizon, and he has enough to carry. I could draw a line, but the colours bleed through. We are miniature suns, capable of burning without scorching our skin, light travels between synapses, blood travels up our bones. We circle ourselves orange and green against the cobalt blue sky.

‘Lovers accept drowning’ Rumi.

Deleuze saw a freedom in madness like they measure the cost in Albedo. The ratio of radiosity to the irradiance received by a blink of the eye. We measure the cost of madness by the lightness of our dreams. I’m thinking about going to feed the hand tree. An ancient testament to punishment and moral law. When the hand tree falls in the forest it will make no sound, but nor will it block the flow, the call and response, the call to go backwards to re enchant.

Oedipus is not an internal urge distorted and measured, but the price paid when a child is kept from his parents’ truth. A failure to go backwards. A failure to re enchant.

The French gypsies worship the servant to Mary as the true Goddess. I worship the servants, the slaves, the light pouring out from the cracks.

Jesus was just a homeless man until a woman washed his feet.

Don’t speak of love until the word becomes safe in your mouth. I could never swallow your kindness, but your cruelty I drunk. We keep the names in our mouths until it becomes safe to speak to them. Some will remain in the darkness, whispered like revolutions from the corner. The sacred songs that were kept from men, will never be spoken in front of him. I sing a sirens song, the kind that could draw a moth to a flame. My wings are spread carefully dried and pinned to the earth. My wings are the night sky as the sun rises. Can you measure the light? The cost of the brightness in feeding the hand tree.