Mornings Spent With the Sun
Festivity (2019)
By Yoojin Shin
By Lilia Skelhorn
Before I choose to open my eyes, there is anticipation between worlds, between waking and not, before the big reveal, and I think this: “I hope I wake up to a world where the sun is there, and the dreams I want to take with me are laid out for me beside my head.”
Saturday
One morning, I woke up with a worry in my heart. An orange and brown tingling that I tried to breathe away. It was about money.
I still wanted to sleep, but the heaviness weighed too uncomfortably on my morning body.
I opened my eyes, hoping they would find something more worthwhile to focus on. They found the evergreen tips in the sky bobbing and swooshing around like they were hair in water. They found chickadee birds and grey sky. They found the art on the window sill that I stayed up till past midnight to get out of me. But the worry was there and I felt on the verge of coughing.
I looked into the brown papers on the sill covered with pink and creamed women thrashed around in pastels. One was an Indian princess, with a corn snake caressing her cheek and bright orange soul flowers in her fingers. She has what she needs, I thought, she’s not worried. She’s in color and power and the moon is standing behind her as an ally. I closed my eyes, breathing it down, trying to comfort the anxiety ghost in my solar plexus. And in a crackle of earth brown that I saw when I stood behind my lids—I spun to a side of my mind that was putting on a show—I stopped to watch the performance on the dark stage, and saw visions of bright orange and plum sarees, headdresses, snakes, and rough-handed singing women throwing big gold coins at my feet. I saw them piling flowers and spices and herbs and coins in piles into a gleaming river and pushing it off into my world. I was hit in the face with big fat shiny coins and laughed at by toothless ladies. They were my mothers and my friends. I squished my cheeks and rubbed my eyes and smiled, something deep in my heart smiled too and the round little burning weight dropped a few inches down into my gut, it was like a little angry sun. More women showed their faces, my great aunts and great grandmothers: ancestors I still felt like I had to make peace with—but who all came nonetheless. Now Ukraine and Ireland spoke in color, throwing coins and things onto the river that would flow to me. They gathered and released the treasures into the air and toward me like young girls playing in leaves, laughing hard in their bellies. I tried to recognize wisps of my cheekbones and smile in the women I came from, but the vision was too blurry. I took the angry sun out of my gut into my translucent hands and looked at it.
I belong to them. I said. I don’t belong to you.
I gave it back to the morning—it dissolved.
Then I got up to make breakfast.
Sunday
Last night, I dreamt I walked through a curtain of marigold garlands. I dreamt about walking shoeless in the dirty snow. About drawing strange faeries with mosquito skulls in dark pencil, and haggling a trade at a market with my mum for a good pair of haircutting scissors with the offering of a great blue bowl that she somehow pulled out of her small purse. Even the salesman in the dream laughed at how she plunked it down on the stand before us all.
All of it was full of color, and I woke up with my body buzzing with warmth. I stayed still, still wanting to be intimate with the images I had just been a part of. The black green trees outside my window bobbed and swayed, and I listened to the wild crashing sounds of wind against the yard. And that’s all I did for a while, desperately wanting to feel connected to the world past the window, for the first time in what felt like a long time.
I stroked my own hair, and stared past the glass. I started to create a character in my mind, a wild sort of black-blue face moving things around in the sky, a wind kind of woman, and a story that could be told about her, maybe a story I could tell.
This character I began to imagine could be something that called people home when they, like me, felt taken away or distracted by the media, for people who felt a confused sense of priority in a world in need of their action—for people who felt drifted from the magic and simplicity of where they came from.
The story Blue Black blew to me through the window:
There was the clucking and the boonking, and I saw it;
Blue Black standing in the sky!
Cluck cluck shuck boonk
Cluck Cluck suck woosh
She said:
“Nothing has you more than the eye of the sun!”
I wasn’t sure what that meant right then, then the sky did a strange thing, there was a thin curtain of grey blue across the strong light of the sun, and although it stormed, alas, the bright man still made it, and I felt a belonging, a spotlight, I very much felt seen by that light poking through.
“Dance in my way and you will remember.” Blue Black drew my spirit out the window.
“You give this place not enough credit…”
“The force of the wind will knock you down, the energy radiating from this earth will heal you;
open up your feet,
do not cover your head.
The herbs and roots will heal you from what your brothers have tried to poison you with.”
Blue Black, creased, joyful leather woman big big big in the sky, shaking up the world with her use of air.
A look of humor on her nature-withered face, the world is dusted, cleansed, washed. She can break towers, and shut down the cellular lines, send trees plummeting into foam houses.
My mind thought, “Look at this wild world Blue Black lives in, I really haven’t been here for a while. I’ve felt so separated from this land…” and just then I began to feel angry about it. Blue Black clucked and cawed like a crow;
“Nothing can take you away from this earth silly girl!”
Cluck
“—touch us with kindness and you will be connected, look in the mirror, or into the water and you will be connected, eat a grain of dirt, look to the sky, all is a reflection, and fragment, a vision of what you are, and that is earth, do not let your mind convince you untrue things.” She said it simply.
The cold wakes us up, she laughs at those it bitters, the chickadees know, and the robins, and the sparrows, and the jays, and the crows’ wings are tested in the currents of air. It’s funny, it’s so funny. They know what she’s doing, air is home and they know it well in all its moods, and they sing with the loud world. So loud it drowns out horns and sirens. You can hear the bone chimes, and leaves crashing together like thousands and millions of tiny symbols. The clouds run so fast that the sun joins fully for a moment in the white cold. The hummingbird zips with joy at the sight of him, nectar in the dust, she flies and inspires us, sits and watches when she’s tired.
The Blue Black tilts our head back and washes our hair. The hard gusts cleanse the residue. Her withered hands are experienced against the threads of wind currents, and the pruning of rough sticks, and with loving aggression; she ties and twists our strands, combing and braiding us into knots and laughing at our shock of cold and such vast invisible force. The best place to wash are the tips of the mountains, or near the shores where Blue Black can see you better, as her large knees fall making shadows on the underbrush.
Cluck cluck woosh crash bong chirp buzz clonk
No nothing can take you away from this, dance my way and you will remember.
I will unravel you.
And I unravelled.
She calls us
with a woosh hush hahhhhhhhhhh.
Care for her in your mind, the way you would for anything you loved.
It is important to remember that such things live.
Monday
Today, before I opened my eyes, I knew I would see the sky before the sun made his full appearance in it. It was the time when maybe only one or two of the four roommates would be awake, the house was silent and cold, and the windows were so wet that I couldn’t see past them. I washed away sleep and put in earrings, pulled on the too big brown wool coat and stepped out into the world.
I caused a riot with the ducks in the yard when I passed them, and it made me laugh. Even by the time I got to the gate they were still yelling at me for startling them.
My path to work is beside the coast line, and by the time I get to the bus stop, he’s there, hanging over the water. I welcome him with a raised face, and I purposely wear mirrors on my ears so when he looks at me, he can see me shining back. In the space between myself and the horizon there is this grand togetherness—this is not a feeling that I can explain. Right then at the bus stop, my soul is all of a sudden in front of me, running about the shore, thrilled by the cold waves and the hard air and the warm light. And as if I wasn’t right there with my uncontained soul—my body and mind absorbing everything it was doing out near the shore—it still called for my attention.
Lilia!
Look!
Just look at what is waiting for us when we wake up!
I thought then. When did I carve my well deep enough to feel something as great as this? Even when I have seen the world so dark that I believed the sun had died?
I looked into the blinding light and thought.
This was what I was fighting for—the joy that can be felt on this earth.
The sun.
The trust between the light and the dark.
The preciousness of the mornings.
Lilia Skelhorn grew up in the great lake regions of Ontario with a deep sense of belonging and solidarity to the natural world, and in the different landscapes of the West Coast, she discovered these senses again as a woman. She is a visual artist and creatrix of many sorts based in Salt Spring Island, currently working to build her artistic career under her small umbrella company “Müthermouth.” She tries to document her vast love for the planet in her writings and art, and if not obvious through her works, admits she has romantic feelings towards the sun.
