Stardust

Yesterday afternoon a bit later than our usual afternoon hour I sat with the Queen to partake in our daily ritual of drinking Bosnian coffee. It ended up a harried day. I had met with various friends and with these casual meetings came talks of dreams and plans - ruminations really, not much of substance. Girl talk I suppose. As interesting as it seemed at the time, I came home so thoroughly exhausted that even though it was later than normal to take coffee I ran to the stove and boiled the water. I put an extra spoonful of ground coffee in the dzezva, thinking it might wake me up. The table set, the fildzans out, the cookies in a tray. I spooned out the toss in each little fildzan, spooned it out into the bottom of the cups, as is the custom,  lit a cigarette and poured the steaming liquid into the tiny bowls of porcelain.

Relax.

Talking and laughing about something, I picked up my cup to drink from the dark, delicious liquid, knowing we would eventually turn over our cups to let the coffee grounds stream down the white of the white porcelain, onto the silver tablet where the magic symbols will sometimes reveal our hearts. I held the cup between my thumb and my index finger because it was hot and as I moved it to my mouth, the cup fell out of my fingers and onto the floor.

Cursing and pushing from the table I bent down to pick up the cup that had  shattered on the floor at my feet. Coffee grounds everywhere including the white table cloth, Queen a tad perturbed but laughing at my clumsiness, I picked up the pieces. The top of the cup and the bottom of the cup split right in half horizontally, in an abnormal way so to make me think bad luck things - I don't know where it comes from, but I can, on occasion,  be superstitious.

Two pieces - the sky and the earth, the head and the body, the soul and the breath. What was I supposed to understand here?

Calm down, girly. Say something like this to yourself : 'Thank you universe'. And a long silence.

There is a lesson here, I say quickly to the Queen, who is a little unsure how to respond.

Fucking lessons. Of course there is a lesson .

So,  the year ends, with the broken crown, the cracked open egg as it were. I had secretly felt it would all along. It culminates in this very vivid and tangible manifestation- this drama of the cup, split in half.   This is my world, exactly as the universe would have it. Opened up and raw. Ready to inspect and reconstitute. Decisions must be made. There is no confusion as to the message.

The bottom of the cup, my soul, cut off from it's true mission.  My feelings splintered from my thoughts -  my common beliefs, no longer in sync with what really is.

I poured myself another cup and drank it. The Queen has the Fool in her cup, {must have migrated over from my cup, I say to myself  as it's my sign, the liminal state - the all and the nothing} and I also spy a fellow with a heart where his groin should be. Lucky.

These in-between days I am 'a casa', inside, in the womb of the bottom of the cup. Back into my very own Garden. A perfect Solstice place to be.

I am Stardust. And I am Golden.