I had an amazing massage yesterday, thanks to my friend Kristin. An intuitive healer, she said she felt the presence of Badger from the get-go of our massage. That made me curious, so I came home and looked up Badger medicine and found this:

Badger carries the energy of Saturn, the great taskmaster who pushes us to set goals of value and then to work like the dickens to make real! The foundation for the future is built in the present moment, through our day to day actions and activities. Both Saturn and Badger ask us what we would like to leave on planet earth once we depart from the physical realm: do we want to look back and see how we have frittered and wasted our time on sitting and waiting for something or someone to make our lives all we know they could have been or do we simply want to get on with things!

Interesting! This totally echoes the final lines of a favorite Mary Oliver poem that I’ve been turning over in recent days:  Tell me? What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

I’ve been feeling this tug in me to find something else to do – beyond writing, or using writing in a new way. I’m at the beginning of the journey to discover what that is. And it’s connected, I think, to needing to finish the journey of the divorce, which technically, hasn’t even begun. No papers filed, that is. It is time to get on with things. To be awake. To not live in fear.

So today’s poem on the Garrison Keillor site spoke to me, too. We save ourselves as we need to — feigning sleep, drinking too much to numb pain that we’re unable to examine fully, even sleeping too much – as I did all winter. But when we’re ready to move on, we must wake up and be fully engaged.

Aperture
by Gary Short
From behind the screen door I watch the cat
in the bunchgrass stalking at dusk.
With the pure attention of religion,
he waits for the skitter of a field mouse,
a shiver in an owl’s dream.

The cat delivers his limp prey
to the chipped gray paint of the porch.
I step outside, not knowing
if I will punish the cat
or accept the mouse.

At the edge of the porch I kneel and see
the map of red capillaries
in the delicate mouse ear.

I lift it by the tail to toss,
but in the blink of a smug cat’s eye
I feel a tug—an escape
back into life.

In the African journals, Livingston tells
of the charging lion that knocked him down.
When he was held in the lion’s mouth,
the human body’s trance-like response
was to go limp in an ecstatic giving up
that saved. To assume death

to stay alive.

A Confederate soldier at Antietam
played dead when his battalion was overrun.
for a moment he thought he was safe,
but to make sure, the Union infantryman
drove a bayonet into each body on the ground.

When I pick up the mouse
and it jerks from terror-induced sleep,
I feel all that fear
in a small heartbeat.

My panicked fingers let go
and the mouse slips into the brush where it may be
safe for awhile. Though the cat
is all tension now and ready
to pounce again. I shut him in the house,
stand on the porch and watch the first stars
burn holes in the sky.
Dark enlarging around me,
the pupil in a cat’s eye.