perils, prayers and pearls

I awake after unfitful sleep in a short night shaded by the anxiety of a waiting mother whose child is in the emergency room after a bad tumble from a tree or harsh smack from an automobile.

The first flowing thoughts are not joyfully uplifting. “What supermarkets can I hit to put in applications? Which stores might be hiring for the season?”

I calculate the likely take-home pay after taxes from minimum wage. Colorado state’s minimum wage is approximately $1.30 less than Washington’s, among the nation’s highest. It will be very very difficult to make ends meet and live on.

A new chapter is begun. As of yesterday. Strangely the day of the autumn equinox, when light and shadow are in balance and harmony. Oh the irony for the day was anything but, as unbalanced as can be!

It was the end of something dear and precious to me. Something internal that I can’t put my finger on yet. It was the close of summer, officially, too, and a day marking the slow emergence of darkness.

This is how my life feels but at a clip hastier than the season’s.

Yes, a new chapter is arrived. The questions and concerns have changed in quality and nature but not urgency.

Questions not only of income and employment but shelter. Should I begin now, especially while the weather’s agreeable, preparing for a path of homelessness, to seek and learn the location of the shelters.

And what of my belongings? How and where would I store them? They don’t add up to more than stack in a car, fortunately. Boxes and bags that’ll still require a small sum of money, source untold.

Of course there are many more financial obligations than that.

Yes, the concerns in my mind today are not the concerns of the employed or, dare I add, the hopeful unemployed. These are the perils of Pearl.

The sun hangs in temporal balance. With this new chapter I find a new voice. Or perhaps it is only a voice changed, altered indelibly and through the forces of time, challenges and circumstances bigger than I. Bigger and more powerful.

The morning’s initial heavy anxieties give way to a peculiar calm that descended as the coffee dripped. Yesterday’s plunge delivered a new chapter, like a mother a daughter; I am aware of it and accept it. I desire to express the thoughts and experiences of one proceeding into homelessness, with room for a miracle and final-hour save. From these writings, put bravely into the public, others can, if they choose, gain a glimpse, a taste, an education or an awareness in “live time,” as it unfolds.

How many of us really have that opportunity?

I daresay that I hope that these perils before me, facing me, the hard cold stares of reality with not the slightest touch of compassion or tenderness, come not to the fruition presently promised.

I hope that these perils of this new chapter will abate, be lifted, be eased so that I may breathe.

Death does not frighten me. Karma does and that pretty much keeps me here on the planet for now. Karma is my master, unrelenting and ever reminding that my foibles and actions now do have consequences. Karma is my yang man.

Last night in a bedroom void of light save the glow of a laptop screen,  I was on my knees on the creaky wooden floor padded by a thin polyester rug, tears quieted and quietly streaming down the cheeks and wetting the bed covers, and I prayed.

Not for the first time and not the last but I prayed ardently and so deeply from my terrified frightened self alone in a town where I’ve no friends or support. I prayed possibly for a job, as I often do.

I prayed for something more – and different. In the profound emotionality, I recall not what it was. Or perhaps I just don’t want to say it publicly/to those who do not know me.

The perils of darkness lit, if there is to be light, by only pearls scattered from a broken necklace.

Life: real. now.

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