Isabel Bowser

This Joy

I am exploding outward in all directions. There is no place big enough to contain this Joy. This Joy is pleasure. This Joy is not always happy but it is strong. It is enough. It is overflowing into movement and muscles climbing into chaos as my mouth opens wide to let breath out and spirits in. Teeth bared and eyes closed, this Joy is dirty. This Joy is enormous and wild. This Joy doesn’t speak in words but screams in throats and spits out angel eyes looking up and down. This Joy is inescapable. It relies on nothing except itself. Fed every second on its own innards, slurping up redness to reuse the source. A full circle keeps me here. Right here in this Joy. This Joy is beyond me, encompassed in transformative agony and clear senses. I am everywhere all at once and I have not named you. This Joy goes before me. This Joy comes after me. I cannot see or hear this Joy unless I see it in my eyes, hear it in my voice. This Joy speaks through me. I am possessed of this Joy.

I would look out from this head
and whisper this given name into my own ear
but the truth is I am gone. 
Already and always.

And still I dance.
So that alone is the unknown, isn't it.

Already gone, we keep dancing.

Jostling

A certain amount of jostling Is necessary 

To be shaken up, Rummaged a bit 

Is good for the soul 

The right jostle 

Will loosen stiff things 

And soften you into a different shape 

That way you can tell new stories 

Utterly contradictory to the old ones 

If you were to be steady and unmoved 

You would lose sensation 

Your appendages would fall asleep 

Stuck with pins and needles 

A good shake is all you need sometimes 

To remind you of your responsibility

Romulus and Remus 

She felt heavy. 

Sloop, plop, shiver. 

She felt light. 

They slipped out of her encased in a single sack of slime and blood. They were still one body with two minds emerging. Two sets of eyes, two bundles unraveling into their first separation. This misty white sack fell onto the night sky where it glowed round and full for a long time before it opened. The one becoming two stretched and heaved against that sack until it split. Romulus and Remus tumbled out. 

She licked them clean. 

A cord of flesh connected Romulus to her. A cord of the same stuff joined Remus to her. She chewed them free but for days afterwards they would trip over their imaginary tethers. 

She watched them play. 

Romulus and Remus were connected by their own cord. They couldn’t see it but it smelled of honey and sap. They would often forget who was who and which was what. Are you me? Am I you? They slept with their noses touching and dreamt of Moon-Egg Twins emerging from a Wolf Mother with an eclipse in her eyes. 

Sometimes in their dreams they were back in their slimy bundle. Back to One. The Moon-Egg Twins would wake with a start and feel a weightlessness dangerous in creatures so young. The type of lightness that comes with the knowledge of death. They wished for a tether to hold them to the earth so they wouldn’t drift into the beyond. 

Her eyes flashed in the darkness. 

Romulus and Remus grew into creatures larger than that sack they had come out of. The tether that connected them felt longer. Romulus ran for miles over rock and earth. Remus wandered in circles treading gently. 

Romulus felt a warmth building up in them and they began to bleed heat and ocean every 28 days. Remus grew cooler from the belly to the nose and slipped into dark caves to sleep in stillness. 

Over time Romulus tamped down a steady path from East to West and back again. Remus walked in spirals and webs, never stepping in the same place twice. 

She sat and waited. 

After a considerable stretch of eternity Remus caught a familiar smell on the wind. Honey and sap. They followed the smell to the hollow basin of sky they had been born in. Remus looked up and saw Romulus sniffing at the breeze, their eyes closed in wonder. The Moon-Egg Twins sat in that basin together and fell asleep with their noses touching. 

She devoured them. 

They settled in her eyes, tucked in sockets of earth and sea. Hot sand and deep water.

The Importance of Naming Your Shadow 

There is a part of us that is acquainted with death. A part of us that revels in dark nonexistence and is comforted by nothingness. A part of us that thrives as a counterpoint to all of our squishy, wet, fleshy, emotional, passionate animal aliveness. This part of us I call our Shadow. Or our Death. Or Friend. I knew my Shadow was there once I named her. And once I named her she began to follow me everywhere. A comfort in solitude and a reminder of my purpose. 

My Shadow. Her name is Indigo. She is Blue because I am Red. She is cold because I am warm. She is night and I am day. She holds all my most impetuous selves with tenderness and love. And she care-takes of my honorable qualities and pushes them out into the world. She speaks a language of no-thing-ness even as I am so very enamored of the tastes and smells of this overflowing world. She brings me calmness when I am overtaken by dread. I fear the rush of time that will lead inevitably to death. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with a fierce jolt, racked with a panic that the moment I die will someday be the moment I am in and inescapable. But Indigo is there. She sinks into my back and suffuses me with cold as cold as the unending night sky. She is not afraid of being gone because she already is. To have a guide in the underworld is a birthright of every creature. Your Shadow is your guide. 

I strive to live a life one step in front of my Death. If we can plunge full speed into our lives with joy and purpose, our Death is our dearest Friend. They tag along behind and support us when we lean back. They even propel us forward into our journey. If we lead in front of our Shadow, we are living a courageous life. But sometimes our fear gets the better of us and we shrink behind the spectral frame of our Friend and seek protection from them. This is a tendency we all must fight because it creates the very thing we are terrified of. If we allow fear of Death to lead us, we will crawl, cowering in skittish resignation toward the inevitable infinite. In doing so we waste the very parts of us that make us alive. The short lives we are gifted through amoral benevolence are only as precious as their glow. We glow bright when we risk safety for compassion and when we dance freely with our eyes closed and trust we will catch ourselves when we fall. 

To befriend our Death, to give her a name and know where she stands, this takes resolve. It takes internal seeking and unconditional love. Toxic ego is alleviated or dissipated in our communion with Shadow. She finds joy in meaninglessness yet never condones futility or nihilism. She honors our deepest solitude and still grants us the comfort of wordless company. She is a piece of the more-than-human expansiveness we will all eventually dive into and from which we all curiously climbed out of.   

A Short Essay on the Magic of Objects 

On the day I went to the Shepparton Art Museum, I couldn’t keep from crying. I looked to my right and saw a woman standing with her back to me on a low, white plinth. She was old with silver hair in a bun at the nape of her neck. She wore a white silk dress that reached all the way to the floor. 

I held my breath for a moment and my silence became intentional. Was this a performance? In another instant I began to doubt. Was she a sculpture? I slowly walked closer and around to face her. I registered that she was a likeness to reality but not of this world. Made of some intricate materials, but not of flesh. Her eyes were closed and she held a newborn baby to her breast. The baby had fuzzy black hair that wisped across their scalp. I stood there and waited for her to open her eyes. 

I watched her imperceptible breathing. I started to feel heat gather in my throat and eyes. Tears formed and a few of them fell. She was the Mother Goddess and the Death Crone. White is the color of death and the color of newness and birth. The baby was both and she was both. There was a beginning there, and an end. They were one being together. I waited for her to open her eyes. 

I was reminded of my Nana’s body embalmed and made unreal, lying in her casket. I could see her breathe as well. I knew she wasn’t there. I knew she was in that tree I sat in when I heard she would die. She was in me when I dreamt she was a mystic who didn’t need the medicine anymore. So what was it I saw breathing in her body? Was it a body or an image of a body? I wonder if we can even tell the difference. 

The woman in the museum was never alive but she spoke to me of the before, the during, and the after of life. I am beginning to understand the magic in the things that we construct. The creatures we create out of wood, cloth, paper, or clay. They are divine and they are a body embalmed. Of the real as much as the pretend. Of the now as much as the afterward. 

Sometimes museums become temples and the silence of composure and propriety becomes the silence of speechless worship. No words to express, so I say nothing. No way to embrace, so I stay still. I keep my distance. I am changed and grateful for it. I think I understand.