Halcyon Days
The original fall from fantasy is incarnation.
If I were to bottle up this past December for you, I would ask for a bigger bottle. Make it the size of a boat, waging against stormy seas as it goes to meet the oracle – there was too much time that sat still and spiraled into itself and my little lizard brain is processing everything that happened. Don’t even get me started on trying to recall the past year. That’s for a book – and I might have to ask for a bigger size of that, too, as we ride out the rain.
This time of year is always leaving me whispering, “favorite favorite favorite.” I love the longer nights, stretches of time that continue to extend by my revenge bedtime-ing. It is 1am, I am wired and well-steeped in a rabbit hole that I have no desire to abandon for my dreams (well, isn’t that such a metaphor).
My dreams, which I have started to see as a separate life running alongside this one. An internal dimension to this waking life that somehow runs parallel alongside it.
“Have you ever heard of parallel lines theory?” My trainer asks me.
“No,” I tell him as my gaze is fixed on the wall before me, this new shoulder muscle trying to feel its way to the forefront of engagement. “Tell me.”
I am living in a parallel plane to the woman I am in my dreams – unsure if I’ll ever cross paths even though I cross the threshold into her every night. A skin I wear each time I lose consciousness. I wonder if she ever gets to visit this skin, or if she lives simmering beneath the surface of me. I wish we could meet for a cup of cacao (we can).
On a recent visit to my grandparents house, I sat with them at their kitchen table. My grandma and I pick different seats during these visits. There’s a comfort in these musical chairs, in the entire home being freeze framed the same since my childhood. Except there’s always a new puzzle spread out on the wood table and my grandma and I are always picking different seats. My grandpa sits in the same armchair, off to the side and somehow still holding the center of the room.
“I gave up on fantasy a long time ago,” my grandma tells me. “And I came to see how sweet reality really could be.”
I still have not yet found the sweetness of reality, after my fall from fantasy. (Saturn in Pisces whipped the delusions right out of me).
My grandpa, from the corner of the room which is somehow still the center, chimes in about how sweet fantasy is and the harsh drop of it when compared to reality.
Through this lens of caricature clarity, I see the both of them now – my grandpa, out on the porch, daydreaming the day away as he watches clouds, sky forming something out of nothing. My grandma in the inside patio, tending to her succulent’s new roots and monstera clippings. Repotting and repurposing what is already there. Making something out of nothing.
As their granddaughter, I hope to be the point where their parallel lines of fantasy and reality come to meet. I feel properly slapped in the face by my own naivety, and yet seeing my grandpa at his sharp and ripe age of 85 still believing in the power of dreaming stirs something in me. Seeing my grandma rooted in her quiet devotion to reality also stirs something in me.
One of my late-night-revenge-bedtime-slightly-manic-rabbit-holes I went on this past fall was on the fixed star Alcyone – a star crossed love story. Alcyone and her husband, Ceyx, were madly in love, a love that called attention even to the gods. The lovers, feeling larger than life, called themselves Zeus and Hera, which caught Zeus attention and eventual rage. Alcyone’s husband went to sea to consult an oracle, and was killed in a storm casted by Zeus. Alcyone was sent a prophetic dream by dream-god Morpheus confirming his death. In her despair, Alcyone went to the edge of the sea where she discovered Ceyx’s dead body. Grieving, she threw herself in the roiling waves to take her own life and join her lover in death.
Can you imagine grieving by the stormy sea? It seems almost like the only appropriate place to throw your grief. It seems only appropriate to leave yourself out to die at the edge of the sea, in an attempt to quench your own inner storm. Have you ever tried to feel your grief when life marches around you as regularly programmed? It’s torture – to have your inner and outer experience so damned different. Parallel lines, unmeeting and only able to draw a bridge when you lay yourself to sleep each night and can finally become undone in the dark.
Anyways, both Alcyone and her husband died. Zeus took pity on them and turned them both to halcyons so they could continue some kind of life together, unbound by mortality. Furthering Zeus’ gesture of kindness, the god stopped the storm for 14 days, returning calm to sky and sea, so Alcyone as a bird could lay her eggs in peace. Called the halcyon days, this time of year represented the Winter Solstice for the Greeks – a reminder that even amongst the coldest days and longest nights, there could be peace, answered prayers, and maybe even a chance to lay new eggs. To give hope for future life.
Parallel lines, meeting again.
Current definitions of halcyon days add a tinge of nostalgia to it – the good old days. When Alcyone and Ceyx were in their human bodies, at the peak of their love story before tragedy hit.
I asked an astrology teacher earlier this spring, when talking about another Greek tragedy, “but I just don’t understand why the story ended that way. Why did it have to end as a tragedy?”
There was a pause before she continued, thickened by the blanket of night surrounding us. Gently proceeding, “because in real life, there will always be tragedies. The myths simply reflect this.”
Again, there it is – my stubborn instinct for fantasy. In its hand, the gentle prodding to take my grandma’s advice, to find the sweetness that actually does exist once you accept reality.
I’m not sure if I’m dreaming of a halcyon future. At least I know now that it does not, and never was meant to, exist as a permanent state. For I know now that the realization of reality comes much harder when it involves a fall from fantasy. For I see now that we get these little nuggets of peaceful waters amongst the raging storms – as Zeus intended.
My waking self and my dream self must meet for a cup of cacao. Sit and allow two parallel lines to cross, two different dimensions to dissolve into each other. Two skins to be worn at once.
For the unity of the One must be split into Two. The original fall from fantasy is incarnation. The question is how to land in my body without further fragmenting.
At least there is calm in the center of the storm.
Gracias, te amo
Victoria Renee