PROOF OF GOD! …and other tragedies.

The first sketch is my rendering of remembering finding an info sheet in the loft area of the geodesic dome that was the living room of my childhood home, it was just a sheet of paper that was in an old trunk of my parent’s old things. The picture was of two nuclear reactors and the mere sight of them terrified me, even though I didn’t know what they were.

(Of course, I remind myself…an intense survey of a small section of sky is not a new idea of mine. In the house on 7th Avenue in Portland, ten years ago, the closets were like small rooms, each of different dimensions and they each had a small diamond-shaped window. The closet in the green room was the perfect size for a twin mattress and I would lay in there and the window was like a little portal. I wanted then to take a picture out of that window, from the same perspective, every day…but, then I didn’t…for all the reasons that people don’t carry through with ideas…)

Well, this summer I went to the Basilica a couple of times because isn’t that what you are supposed to do when you feel as if some old sorrow is rising in you, go to pray? So, I went and it really is a beautiful and sacred space with lots of places to kneel and many faces old and familiar, gathered in colored glass and the floor is old stone, the ceiling arched and everything symbolic.

I went to try to feel something akin to clarity and I studied the faces and I sat and thought and the sadness was electric and, because I am a mother, I went to pray at the Virgin Mary and as I stood to leave, I caught sight of Fatima and I didn’t know who she was – other than a small statue…but, I stayed by her for almost an hour and I felt better, but no less compelled to look at clouds, when I left.

In early September, when realized that I didn’t really even care if people thought I was crazy, that I was pretty sure there was plenty of mention of clouds in old theology and that it simply was not possible to have a ring of golden moon low on the horizon in the East/Northeast sky at 2:30 am…well, I wrote to St. Paul’s in Rome and I asked them to please consider how any of it was possible…and, of course, they didn’t even respond. I guess people think I am lying or trying to do…something?

Well, the night I saw the moon too bright and too low and in the wrong place in the sky…I called my mom to tell her to get out of bed and go look at the moon, that it was low in the Eastern sky. She went outside, but couldn’t see it (they live in a small cove, at the base of old hills) – “Well, couldn’t you go get in your car and drive or something?”

She wouldn’t. She just told me she was glad that I was enjoying the moon.

I didn’t call her to tell her because I was enjoying it, I called her because it simply was not possible and I am sick of sitting alone with impossibility.