30 July 2020
Dearest Fazal,
Tonight, a waxing gibbous moon is rising above Round Mountain as I write to you.
As kids growing up, we just called it the three-quarter moon. In five more days, we will be honoring the full moon. We call it the Sturgeon Moon according to the Old Farmer’s Almanac.
At first, I thought what a strange naming of a moon after this particular fish, but then I was reminded that this is the longest living freshwater fish having evolved on this planet for some 419 million years. It has been considered by scientists to be “a living fossil” having moved through time almost without change. But recently, a group of scientists from the University of Michigan found the opposite to be true. The sturgeon’s size has in fact evolved significantly over time, making it one of the fastest-evolving fish on Earth. What a perfect name for this August moon—to be blessed by a species that knows how to change, evolve, and grow. I will anticipate its presence.
The day you were born, the moon was a waning crescent. The day I was born it was a waning gibbous. If the moon can pull ocean tides forward and back, creating high tides and low, how might the moon affect our watery bodies?
“I am made and remade continually,” writes Virginia Woolf in The Waves. “I am not one and simple, but complex and many.”
The complexity of patterns, the beauty of sisters Sima and Shahima dressed in flowers, seated on a wooden bench with a quilt of silk behind them, designed with leaves and blossoms—it all feels like a living garden. That you tell me in your delicate script on the back of the photograph that these girls are living in an Afghan refugee village in Nasir Bagh, the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, undoes me. It undoes me because I associate a refugee village with displacement, but these girls convey something more.
What is it?
Moon. Water. Garden. Roots. Heaven and Earth. The power of patterns and cycles.
Full Moon. Crescent Moon. Gibbous Moon, waxing and waning. These sisters are draped in patterns of their own growth. The eldest is looking away, her headscarf torn. Her feet face the camera. The youngest is looking directly at you. Her headscarf resembles an animal skin with stripes, and is tucked behind her ears, then left to cascade over her small hidden shoulders. Her feet are facing right.
The center of gravity for me, Fazal, is located where the sisters are gently holding one another’s hands in the crease where their bodies meet—their fingers touching loosely, lightly—Sima’s fingers cradled in Shahima’s hand. I am reminded of Frida Kahlo’s painting, Las dos Fridas, where two Fridas sit side by side on a bench. They are also holding hands, with the Frida on the viewer’s right cradling the hands of Frida on the left, similarly, as the two sisters. Both Fridas have their hearts exposed; what connects them is a shared vein. The left Frida has had her heart broken the right Frida holds a photograph of her beloved Diego Rivera.
How old does one have to be in order to have a broken heart? If one’s heart does break, adorn yourself with flowers, and find your twin with whom you can share your spilt blood and an inherited pattern of love and loss.
I have never had a sister, but this is how I imagine it would be: shared sorrows and joys; the older sister watchful, wistful; the younger sister curious and brave. I see asperity more than anger in Sima’s eyes and the lines eroded by tears; and worry on Shahima’s face. The hands of the girls’ mother could have hand-stitched the quilt. Would one carry such an heirloom for comfort? Of course, this could be my projection. Brooke’s mother was a hand quilter, she rarely used a sewing machine. In the room where you sleep when you stay with us in desert, her hand-stitched quilt hangs on the west wall. It, too, speaks of textures and patterns made with leaves and flowers and waves. She saw this particular quilt as a window with open shutters looking out on the cycle of seasons—a poem.
Again, Woolf: “And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.”
What if we are merely poems made of patterns meant to be held in place, sometimes read silently, sometimes read out loud, memorized and cherished, to be called upon in times of pleasure and need. And yet each time we return to familiar lines on a face or a page, we find added meaning and depth as we meet the words anew from a place of unexpected growth as a result of the waxing and waning of where we have been.
A refugee camp. These beautiful sisters dressed in flowers, growing in place. Displaced. They are holding each other’s hand in the crease where their bodies meet. One looks away. One looks ahead. They know things we do not. A pattern begins to emerge. Repetition is spiritual. A hand-sewn quilt of blossoms and leaves hangs behind them. Sima and Shahima are seated on a bench.
Divine specificity.
Today is the three-quarter moon. Waxing gibbous. In five more days, the moon will be full. Sturgeon Moon. To continue to evolve and grow. The day you were born, the moon was a waning crescent. The day I was born the moon was a waning gibbous. If the moon can pull the ocean tides forward and back, creating high tides and low, how might the moon affect our watery bodies?
Waxing and waning. Our bodies, a poem unspoken.
In place, displaced,
Terry