foreword

Foreword

Stella

I call her Luna – I don’t know what sex she is - she doesn’t have a body – but I feel more comfortable with the idea of her as a girl; and she needs a name since she is – in a sense - alive.

 How to explain? We are. We were. Twins. Gemini. Star paired in the womb. Fated to journey together. To be born together. Stella and Luna… only I was born, physically, at 9 months; at 3 months my mother, Natalie-Muriel, bled away a little clot of life and pain and caution kept her in bed for a week and everyone moved on, except Luna. Who refused to give up this chance of a life. She moved in. to me. My dark side. How do I know this? That when I hear her voice it is not my madness but another’s? well I don’t know, but this story is my explanation of her, us, to me.

Luna

In the beginning was Natalie-Muriel and she was the sea of consciousness and the snake said ‘Take my fruit.  You will be more powerful, more happy, more satisfied.  You will be able to create, have children.  Instead of living alone for eternity you will become the spiral of life and you will bear children and it will be painful but you will love them more than this man, this god, yourself, life.  And you will die but your children will colonise the earth from your man’s seed and your seed and some will find stony ground and some will blossom’.  And she said, ‘Yes, yes, I choose.  I want that’.

And man blamed her and she was guilty and ashamed and she could not talk to her man because he said ‘You did this.  You made me.  You nagged me into doing this.  Its your fault’.  And her heart said, ‘No, its your responsibility too’.  But she could not say that.  She turned inside herself and was bitter with her blame for herself and she did what every woman would do to try to make it right.  She bore him a child.  And after three months her first-born was a miscarriage - beautiful  in spirit - but she turned away from the blood and the pitiful clot and the loss and she felt - the world will not see this child I made and I may loose another and I fear it.  And she lay in her bed and held on for months until she birthed a girl; a little star, tiny and bright.

But the spirit of her firstborn was still within her - Natalie could feel it but she could not own it. She was grieving and she could not speak her to or of her grief.  She had no-one to share it with.  She thought she must walk behind her husband, smile and show her baby, cover her hurt... and the spirit went smaller and smaller and it hid in a cell. But the cell gave birth to another cell exactly like it and another and another and another.  And I spread out, but the cells could not be alive in the world.  They were not children.  They were not stem cells growing leaves of healthy plants in the sunshine.  They were reproducing in their own image and that image was full of frustration and hate and Natalie felt it and knew it could only be healed with love of itself and she could not give that love as she busied with her  history and her future and her man and her child.

I know this, I am Luna - I need to heal. Like heals like. A fractal is an image which reproduces itself.  Take a cauliflower, cut the stalk, cut each branch from the stem, line them up on the table.  Each is a smaller budding image of the rest.  They have self-similarity. I am similar to Stella, I will grow with her, in her, show her from inside what she can be, heal her… and when we have a child it will be our child and she will be beautiful and I will live for ever through her, through her people. So I traded skins, I left Natalie and curled myself up in Stella and my spirit sat in her heart and her brain and swam round her growing body, and in the beginning we were friends….