Intermezzo
A full cherry moon inspires present-day Marguerite to reflect on her choices.
Hello! You’ve found Faye’s Wing, a series of multimedia scenes about the creative quest for fulfilment beyond a fixed spiritual identity. It comes out every Wednesday, and features music and visuals from contributing artists. If you are new here, I suggest you start at the beginning and read the story sequentially. You can also check out my project overview for more info, or view the list of scenes you might have missed.
Since serialising gives me the luxury of playing with my narrative structure as I go, allow me this intermezzo, if you will, as I interject my current voice and perspective now and again between scenes.
Tidy-like
I’ve been telling Marguerite’s story as tidily as I can, from start to finish, in minute emotional, textural detail. Sebastian, whom you will meet when I finally get to Ireland, jokes that I go too far, ‘Stop talking about sorting through your sock drawer and feeding your children muesli—sorry, granola, you Americans eat granola, don’t you—no one is interested. Get on with your story!’ I’ve been tweaking words, readjusting tone and cadence, remembering as best I can before things fade.
When I studied naturopathy in my twenties, we were taught to seek the “root of the root of the root cause” of an illness… Perhaps I get carried away, applying that approach to storytelling. Yet how can you know what Marguerite will be leaving behind, if I haven’t set things up for you with background info, and let you experience things from the inside?
But agreed, some of it stems from that boring old chestnut, “getting it right.” And a lot of it, I’m aware, is fear-fuelled procrastination at the thought of reigniting the worldview I left behind. What if the embers of that life are only dormant, and a whisper of smoke, my yearning to belong, draws me back into the Goddess’s fire pit?
Last week, I made myself watch a video of the Teacher, to start unpicking the root of the root of my attraction to her path, and it all came back—her soft voice and conspiratorial smile, the slow, subtle pulsing as she swayed from side to side, expanding on her devotional approach to Tantra. All Tantra schools have an understanding that we live in a dualistic reality. We practise Old School, classical Tantra, not neo-Tantra, or Western Tantra. Our practices are designed to remember our union, oneness, and our nature as the Deity, melted into ultimate reality. Neo-Tantra starts with the body, and is interested in enlivening the body and relationality to reach non-dual bliss, to reach the love, freedom, union, and awareness that we all crave. But the deity often gets stripped out of that; people can start thinking that the love affair is between individuals, whereas in our Kula, we are having a love affair with ultimate reality as the deity.
As she demonstrated the eternal dance of divine desire, a single point of unified being expanding into infinity, her arms rose to the heavens, meandered along an invisible moon-beam matrix, and swooped down again to womb level, as if to scoop up a small child. Smoothing the fabric that covered her crossed legs, she turned to a small statue of Kālī, her beloved deity. A poacher of hearts, her cajoling hands stroked the air around the goddess of time and transformation, creation and death. I saw the Teacher’s mesmerising effect, felt a palpable hook-up to something both otherworldly and tremendously sensual. But in lineage-based, “Indic” Tantra, she continued, we start with our relationship with the deity, because we understand that the deity is ultimate, non-dual reality, and we move that awareness into our body. We’re going to the same place, but coming at it from opposite ends.
I watched her pluck the space that surrounded her. Her fingers seemed to follow the contours of another reality, to be meshing with something simultaneously as vast and unfathomable as the night sky, and as comforting as a familiar body. It’s hard to trust what we can’t see or feel, she said, it’s hard to trust ultimate reality. Her eyes half-shut, now, again her hands fell to hip-level, swan-like, as if drawing the unseen beloved closer in. Even from afar, even now, her gestures summoned the warmth of soil under bare feet as the sun starts to dip. But we can trust the body; we can develop a direct relationship with it.
Our beloved Kālī looks fierce, she said, licking her lips, looking up at the camera now with an air of enticing defiance, but she cuts away anything that keeps us from union. She embodies dedication to love and truth and gives us a direct experience of the divine. She is not just sweetness and light or love and bliss, not just our sweet mother. She also exists in trash and the cremation ground, in tsunamis and affliction, so that we can know Her in awfulness, too. If she only existed in goodness, she wouldn’t be a full reality, she would be partial.
Yes, I thought, all that—the good, the bad, and the ugly. The perfectionist, the good girl, had been greedy and craved wholeness—the human and the divine, an all-consuming, infinite love story with reality. It’s not always pretty, but it’s very real, she laughed coyly, hunching her head into her shoulders.
Tidy-like, seriously? I see the irony in attempting to tidy up anything to do with the goddess of chaos, and will leave until later ruminations about the reasons for my attraction.
As the moon waxed, last week, for those two or three nights before it reached its fullness, sleep eluded me. Though I no longer follow every tithi1 and phase of old sister moon, and though I draw curtains against her influence, she has yet to let go.
(Notice how we’ve gone from caps to lowercase possessives, how we’ve left the realm of dark godliness. Perhaps it’s also time to stop anthropomorphising… It. The moon is an ‘it,’ not a ‘She’ or a ‘she’).
I may well have stopped tracking its rising and setting hours, and no longer squint at its faded woolly contour against a bright morning sky, or at its hypnotic shimmer as the owl hoots, it haunts me. I don’t moon-bathe or gaze adoringly as it beckons. In fact, so removed am I from worshipping and identifying with a celestial body, that its insomnia-causing effects caught me by surprise.
What kept me awake these past three cherry moon nights, then, if advances from the dark moon goddess now leave me cold?
Poignancy, so much poignancy. Beneath my neurotic edits, lingering in this liminal space has served to keep my chicks tucked under my wings just a while longer. Until Covid, I picked homes around schools and term dates, moving in the summer months. Choosing Ireland for myself, to deepen my practices, marked the end of mothering from a shared nest. Sure, I reason, as a single mother, we had plenty of dry runs, with all those Christmases and summers on either side of the Atlantic. And sure, for young men, living with their father was probably a good thing at that point.
But four years down the line, no matter how I package this story, I can’t ignore that, heading for a solitary retreat, I nudged my chicks out of the nest. Even in the context of global madness, my choice strikes me as madder, in the small hours. However much I draw the shutters against the moonlight, what wakes me is a pang—it might have been too soon, I failed my sons by not seeing them all the way through to adulthood.
So… if I linger over a silly conversation or the profile of my last-born as he holds a jambon-beurre after school and scans the waves in silence, it’s because Ben, Luke, and Sacha are about to fade out of the story for a time.
Goddess in the detail, right? Minutiae offer unfettered time together.
Fittingly, the world was at a standstill then, and our last weeks together are padded in a cotton-wool daze. Writing, I get to lift that glass bell, to sit beside my boys and gaze at them in that annoying love-struck way my father used to stare at me when I was a girl. I get to watch them stroll down the promenade with the easy confidence of youth, tall and tan and young and lovely, as the song goes. As a writer, I am able to gloss over all the times they drove me as mad as I probably drove them, à table, while supper got cold.
I haven’t quite stepped into the crucible of the Goddess, her fire has yet to be lit. I linger in an antechamber of memories, a snow globe of hydrangea and sea spray, our pretty world shaken now and then by carefree strolls to the baker’s, our rituals food-related and entirely French, our worship entirely to the beach and its sun-kissed ways.
* * *
I spent last month querying agents. In the process, I’ve had to zero in on my core message and sound confident: “FAYE'S WING chronicles the unravelling of a woman’s spiritual identity in the time of Covid, examining the choices we make when the world goes pear-shaped. It suggests that fulfilment is not always found in external teachings, but that we can explore our spirituality just by being ourselves, through malleable manifestations of self.”
Trust me, I say, Marguerite will make odd choices, but they will make sense. She won’t regret them, and you’ll get a happy, tidy ending. But when a full cherry moon keeps her up at night, four years later, must I keep consolidating that version of the “truth,” or am I allowed to wander down rabbit holes, to question her choices? When do I stop shedding identities and certitudes, how do I reconcile all these lives?
* * *
I do hope that these intermezzi will make for more interactive reading—how do you feel so far about Marguerite’s journey and choices? What about your mad leaps of faith? How do you reconcile your past and present selves?
Lunar day, in Sanskrit.
I love the minutiae, the idle moments, the dwelling. They make it real, and colourful, they make it life. I'm loving the story so far, and I think that the Intermezzi will add even more depth to it. I'm looking forward to the next chapter! X
I love this reflective exploration of the story so far - so poignant and so powerful. It resonates very strongly me as I've been revisiting my own journals recently, dipping in and out at random from the last 20+ years - though it's mostly extremely boring!