My Twilight Dreams

*I added this picture purely because it's called Twilight and I love the simplicity and drama of the image. I haven't read the book or seen the movie but now that I've seen this, I might.

Ahhh - I love this time of day in Winter (which it officially is now). The day is emptying of its busyness as people move indoors to end their day and to maybe build a fire or perhaps prepare something warm and yummy for their families. At this time of day I like sit in my gorgeous bush garden just for a few moments as the cool mist starts to creep in. I breathe deeply and watch the sun slipping its heavy golden head below the horizon. It's a time to surrender the day to the Sun God and to welcome the Dark Night Goddess as her slivered moon rises slowly in the West.

Basking in those few moments of lingering gold I wonder how anything could ever be wrong in my world. We are surrounded by such beauty, such diversity and such wonder if we can just sit still enough to see it and, more importantly, let it see us. I am not someone who meditates regularly so these few moments in the twilight of each day are my time to reconnect with all that is most important to me. I can sing chants or simply 'OM' into the shadows while my wee girl chases our black furball around the garden. Poor Belladonna, not much of a chance for peace while the beanie is around but she wears it all well and is (mostly) patient with her rather rough ministrations. I am also not someone who finds it particularly easy to surrender - to anything, wanted or unwanted. I think that I am relatively highly strung by nature and so spend most of my waking unconsious hours clinging on to my life with ever whiter knuckles so again, these twilight times are my way of acknowledging that there is something, some Great Mystery that is so much bigger than me and yet is also a part of me and in which I am learning to trust. I can breathe and sing and let go. Sometimes this time brings me an wonderful sense of peace which I can take into my last activities of the day - preparing a meal for my family, washing up, following the usual bed time rituals with my girl and all the way into sleep. Sometimes it lasts just long enough to prevent me from snapping at my daughter as she paints the kitchen floor with my tenderly prepared soul food. Occasionally, it reminds me to forgo the tiny pleasures of the goggle box and to sit quietly with my Beloved man and read in companiable silence. On even more quiet spirited evenings, this glossy silence allows us to enter into the soul-gazing and generous lovemaking that we hope will result in another little soul being welcomed into our tiny family, to stretch our hearts and to expand our small world. And from these small adventures in my bush garden I am able to remember that I am, to coin a cliche, a spiritual being having a human experience which is, in turn, a reminder to be awake to each moment and to be grateful.

As I sit here in my study, candles burning, incense wafting through the warm air currents created by the ducted heating, I watch with growing love, my hubby and my daughter doing father/daughter stuff in the garden. He throwing her around like a stuffed teddy, she giggling with delight. Both waving up at me from the darkening green and smiling with affection and humour. I am blessed. I know this. The sun is nearly gone now and it is almost too dark in this room to see but I am loath to turn on a light and lose these cosy feelings of connectedness with everything. Electric lights seem to bleach all the atmosphere from a room and I am a creature for whom atmosphere is important. Still, I must go. Like many mothers my culinary expertise is needed in the kitchen and there is a cubed pumpkin with my name on it waiting to be turned into some hearty pumpkin soup.

It is a night for poetry of the spirit so I will leave you with an offering from my Beloved Rumi: Dance with the Bandage Torn Off.

Dance, when you're broken open.
Dance, if you've torn the bandage off.
Dance in the middle of the fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance, when you're perfectly free.

Struck, the dancers hear a tambourine inside them,
as a wave turns to foam on its very top, begin.

Maybe you don't hear that tambourine,
or the trees leaves clapping time.

Close the ears on your head
that listen mostly to lies and cynical jokes.
There are other things to hear and see:
dance-music and a brilliant city
inside the Soul.
God said of Muhammed,
He is an ear.
He was wholly ear and eye,
and we are refreshed and fed by that,
as an infant boy is at his mother's breast.

Good night and may the Goddess of this deep and dark bring you strange and brilliant dreams.