Curiosity is the Only Requirement

There is a resistance in my hips that needs unjamming. I feel it at my work desk and mostly sat on buses. When I lie flat on my back, it starts to radiate as though I have swallowed the sun. It is a hot ball of trauma with all the characteristics of a dwarf star. It resides inside me without permission, a chromosphere of toxicity. I want it gone.

I try an old river-working charm built to loosen knots and ease blockages. Mid-November already and as daylight fades, the sky outside goes plum, then it lavenders up. I sit in the rocking chair and I focus on the shape of the knot inside my pelvis and I whisper spell words which represent flow and movement. I say Saritap Pernisokh Ottarim. Saritap Pernisokh Ottarim. Saritap Pernisokh Ottarim. Saritap Pernisokh Ottarim so many times that my tongue tumbles over the consonants and I start to lose sight of where one word ends and the next begins, the metre of the syllables stamping through my cells like some ancient water running south.

Afterwards, I make Kompot, an old Slavic fruit drink. I stir up blood oranges on the edge of spoiling, sweeten with honey and simmer it slowly with low heat and plenty of time. Once the pulp is drained off, the liquid left behind is amniotic, a red light district of a potion. It tastes of the smell of a room after sex, some intimate afterglow.

Weeks pass and it is still there, the sun in my hip. Sunset hurts like a bitch. It is like having summer all year round and no reprieve. It shines on and heats me internally. I wear sunglasses even on dim days. I google how to sell the sun, somatic hip release and the woman who turned into a sun. A friend recommends a full moon immersion and I book myself onto one hoping that lunar energy may yin my sun yang.

The morning that the moon is fattest, I receive an email with instructions to meet the women inside the park on the map’s red X. I leave my car in a street derelict as a blank Scrabble tile and stumble beyond a No Trespassing gate; the woodland and its darkness inking out like trouble. I am all too aware that I play absurd games with risk and safety.

The event facilitator is elfin with a bird-print bum bag. She speaks soothingly in a low, hypnotic tone and offers up facts about the forest as though they are new lovers. Another woman joins us with panic in cowish eyes, a bobble hat sitting skew-whiff on her head. She worries we might not see the moon for the low cloud.

Two more women join us late, intolerably loud with their laughter, the brash of them enough to disrupt a whole ecosystem. I feel angry that they have dared to bring along truffle risotto for their supper in a thermos flask, that they held us all up just to lace their ugly walking boots.

We walk together, not speaking, strangers on the edge of something, we walk for what feels too long and trudging enough to fall into, an uncertainty in our feet as we inch forward on terrain that juts and drops. I make little ellipses on the mud with my pen torch, braille out a path of sorts. The sun in my hip stays behind a clump of clouds. Chill spits of rain fall against my skin before we even reach the fairy ring where we will meditate. My floor length wool coat was a bad choice. I soak up rain like loam.

We lie in glossy wet leaves, goldfish bright, the cold shrinking in to our bones. The elf speaks in hushed, singsong patterns: Listen to the song of the wind in the branches of the trees, as well as the bird calls and the crack of twigs. As your soul expands into the spaciousness of this moment.

The big of the darkness disorientates me and I am confused by how human tree silhouettes look and how the night alters, once my eyes adjust, from blackness to a peachy watercolour not too far away from dawn. Slant rain spatters into my eyes. The sun in my hips curls up and sleeps, its power diluted by the menthol light above. The moon is a wheel of Brie, a Trebor XXX mint. Mourning Moon. Frost Moon. Beaver Moon. I am all moon. I am Luna. I am Selene. I turn phosphorescent. The sun in my hip starts to feel smaller.

We journal in the dark, the paper turning soft. Words are harder to find during mizzle. The women start to confess insecurities, their lost loves, their gone wrongs. Each time one of them speaks, the facilitator thanks them graciously for their thoughts and I think uncharitable things about their losses. We are poured pink tea foraged from hedgerows. Elf tells us rosehip tea has four times more Vitamin C than a single orange. She tells us to only pick berries that give to the touch. She hands tissues to bobble hat and laments how bold she is for surviving abandonment. [The boyfriend left for someone else. She misses his cat. They lived together for nine months.] If I shared my story, here, in the forest with the graves of mulch and sporing funghi and the shield bugs clinging to bark, the women would be too terrified to walk back to their cars.

In the circle, I tell them I am drawn inexorably towards the moon and her silky spell, with her belly out and big, all wide eyed and watching. I tell them that even though we are alone in the woods, we are always under someone’s gaze. I tell them moon dust has a distinct fragrance similiar to gunpowder. They do not warm to me because I refuse to make myself soft or confessional.

Later, I thank the elf and the women, who have bonded exceptionally well due to all of their disclosures. Bobble hat asks me if I want to attend the next winter solstice event. Her heart is an exhibit, a brooch on her lapels. I tell her I will think about it. Driving home in my car, my fingers burn from the cold’s teeth. The sun in my hip sighs; then she turns over, stretches.