Saturn's energy

Standing in St. Philip's church yard, explaining why the carved stone skull had its jaw missing and femur bones stuck out of  its nose to a family curious about the display of violence on a memorial for the dead, I saw Alada outside the fence of wrought iron pikes. "Hey Girl," I called. Her mind registered wonder before she recognized the voice or saw the face. She waited until I showed next curio: the skull's head, its eyes missing, ears gone, and nose carved cut passages, a collection of orbs for senses and wings for the flight of transition.

I caught her outside the gate. After booking time at the church on Tuesday to discuss Henry Laurens and his daughter Martha with Jan (she calls Henry "Hank"--an egregious familarity with a man always formal and tidy--a liberty that was unknown by this American freedom fighter and war prisoner who became a treaty maker, councilor, and master neogotiator who was perhaps America's largest broker of Africans for Senegal to Angola. (I call him "Henry Laurens," and have owned two original litographs of this portly French Hugenot born in Charleston, trained in England, his sitting image with wig and stocks hung in the Rotunda's portrait gallery at the US Capitol.)

we went to Kennedy's for Italian coffee, sweetened with pastuerized cream and raw sugar, and bran muffins. Against the backdrop of the handwritten menu highlighted in colored chalk, with a depth of data of human fraility and folly, from Georgia to New York to Beijing and in the shelter of our own hearts, we plunged in and reviewed the charts. We covered tourism, Charleston expatriates, missing friends. Children, and current events, especially the absurb and fanciful.

Why?

How?

the urge to know the inner secrets of time baffled us for the moment. Our thughts were arrested. The strobed moments flash frozen were macabre friezes that filled the atmospheric space along the cloister's walk, leering out between the false comfort of columns to jeer and pronounce the murdered, maimed, missing. We were japed by the strange touches that rested on our ears and eyes. Blinded by the cosmic glimpses.

Finally the conversation in the Toyota on the way to the Dart library turned to Saturn. Ahh. Cleaning, renewing, a master teacher, Saturn makes the case for growth and maturity; Saturn reminds us that structure is necessary. The falls that follow Saturn's transit bring a special care to our next step. The circle is smashed; rings of scattered stones, the brown of blood red, dried.

For some of us, understanding is a rock. I am remembering Khatadin's boulders, it's stepped scree cut and ground by ice, rubbed by a century of foot prints to mark an invisible trial seen only in the light, leading high above, the sky's stairway. Don't slip! Pay attention: Saturn's energy is everywhere.