What Can I Offer? The Shell.

On one of the bookshelves in my bedroom there's an abalone shell. It serves as a vessel to hold the smudging herbs (like sage, sweetgrass, cedar, or tobacco) while they burn for prayer or ceremony. Practically, it has natural heat resistance making it good for holding burning materials. Aesthetically, it's iridescent, with a beautiful sacred interior. Spiritually, the shell represents the water element, complementing the earth (herbs), fire (flame), and air (smoke). The shell is a gift from the ocean, connecting ceremony to the natural world.

My Dad had one, I'm pretty sure he used it as an ashtray. The one I have was gifted to me from an ex she got at a renaissance fair. I'm not sure which is more profane.

When I write here to you, tonight, as I have been for over a dozen weeks now, I think: what can *I* offer? Writing and storytelling are sacred medicine, no different than sage or sweetgrass, just a different substrate. But I falter in grasping the tangible use of my writing, right now.

I hope I've been giving you something worthwhile over these past few months, as I continue to somehow figure out something new to say. Since I've begun writing full-time, I've been spending a lot of time in this bedroom, igniting herbs in the shell while I keep track of meditation minutes with my Apple Watch.

Let me try to share medicine with you, reader.

***

The best worst time to be alive is now. When magpies still raid garbage bins at dawn, when strangers hold doors for strangers, when we fucking try. The cynic can keep his sophisticated despair. Give me the holy fool's courage to believe in tomorrow. Give me the strength to love this broken world not despite its cracks, but because each fissure is space where light sneaks in. I want to make medicine from morning dew and parkade puddles, want to heal everything I touch.

I tell myself I'm doing enough. That I'm still good at practising non-attachment, still vegan, still Mahayana properly. The magpies in the back lane know better. There's so many of these birds here in Calgary. Squawking tricksters with iridescent tails. Picking through my garbage, finding the truth in black plastic bags beneath my carefully constructed stories. I am hungry, I am human, I am here. The magpies know our sacred texts are just letters to what we've lost. I am my discarded principles. Coping mechanisms for the sober. Love poems disguised as theory. The birds know my secrets, watch me try to smudge away desire. The magpies build nests with pages from my journals, insulating with words I can’t write. I tell myself that, well, at least there's always next season's migration pattern.

Matches scratch the universe into being. Smoke curls in cursive. In the light morning, when I've been awake since midnight, I light the sage bundle.