Preparing to Greet the Goddess by Dorothy Walters for National Poetry Month

Preparing to Greet the Goddess by Dorothy Walters

Do not think of her
unless you are prepared
to be driven to your limits,
to rush forth from yourself
like a ritual bowl overflowing
with sacramental wine.

Do not summon her image
unless you are ready to be blinded,
to stand in the flash
of a center exploding,
yourself shattering into the landscape,
wavering bits of bark and water.

Do not speak her name
until you have said good-bye
to all your familiar trinkets --
your mirrors, your bracelets,
your childhood adorations --
From now on you are nothing,
a ghost sighing at the window,
a voice singing under water.

Getting what I wished for...

Yesterday my boss comes in, closing the door behind himself, and tells me he's just given his two weeks notice. That and the project is only funded through the end of June, with politics mucking up any hope of getting more funds. I did know about the June deadline but didn't realize how hard a deadline it was. I'd figured we'd get new funding.

So I'll be job hunting real soon. Maybe I'll find something in the same company and maybe I won't. Yesterday I was shifting between freaking and doing the happy dance. I've been fed up with my career for quite a while now, but with health issues I'm not ready to give up having insurance. Which brings me to the question, why can't I have been born in a civilized country?

Today I'm more with the freaking but also with the planning and trying to work out my life. I really want to go back to school to learn to write well and had been hoping I could eventually find a part-time job, in my field, but today I got on monster.com and pretty much found out that the part-time job is a pipe dream. OK, there's a local college, not that great but at least it's something, where I can take night classes. I was thinking of going for a BS in English but then I saw how many non-writing classes, courses having nothing to do with English, I'd have to take for the degree. Now I'm wondering if I can just take the classes I want without working toward a degree, which definitely meets my goal.

As you can imagine, I've been feeling pretty down today. Two things have helped with that. First, I was watching Firefly where they have the line “When you can't run no more, you crawl, and when you can't crawl, you find someone to carry you.” And I realized, Hell, I'm not even down to crawling yet! I'm still working on how I'm gonna run.

Secondly, I'm reading Lit Gal's Guidelines, which for some reason is just like coming home. Totally what I needed today.