Shena Driscoll Salvato

BAMBOO MOON

4:25 AM. Biggest full moon of the year. Alone downstairs, sitting on the floor. Design Drawing 3800 09107 HB pencil with gold letters, black paint, dull point, no eraser. Blank white paper. The sudden urge to notice every detail: seeing things in ways I had never seen them before, awareness heightened, senses keen.

A pencil has six sides? How many pencils had I held in my life? How many times have I seen my own hand but how well can I draw it? As the room brightened with the rising sun, the pencil was suddenly dark green, not black. I’ve always paid very close attention to detail, haven’t I? Laughter. Suddenly I felt as if I have not been truly paying attention. I have not been truly giving my life’s energy in exchange for that which presents itself to me. Attention. At tension. It is at the point of tension that the key unlocks the door. Click. I am at the point of tension and am suddenly paying attention. The key. I have been holding the key for a long time now. I have known that it has been in my possession. I have felt its weight. I have traced its curves and straight lines. I also knew the door was there. I have seen its weathered front, I have felt its grooves, I have smelled its grains. But the keyhole? I never even considered that there was a keyhole. How could I possibly open a door with this beautiful key in my possession if I wasn’t searching for the right keyhole? Suddenly it revealed itself. There it was, right in front of me in my sleepy delirium. Its shape clearly revealed only by my myopic sight in those early morning hours. My squinting eyes morphing the perfectly round moon into this living symbol, an invitation. Beams from the year’s strongest full moon shone through it. Rays appeared out of all of the vertices. It was at that moment that I knew that an idea had been conceived. It came to me and through me as it could come to and through no other.

You have had they key for a very long time now.

You have been searching for the right door, but you never looked at the key.

You neglected to see that it wasn’t the right door you needed to look for, but the right keyhole.

Go ahead.

Try your key.

Take the risk.

See if it fits.

Turn it.

When you begin to feel the delicate balance between tension and release,

be ready for the doors to swing open. Because there is not only one door.

There are two.

I happened to be at just the right place in the universe at just the right time in order to see it. There I lay, the bamboo shades over the two tall windows facing the garden, revealing the glowing moon. When I awoke, the moon was perfectly centered. As my mind wandered, the moon shifted into place. Right into the place of a doorknob on the left of what now appeared to be double doors. This symbol was my keyhole revealed with the moon’s light beaming through. The moonbeams so intense that even the birds mistook them for the rising sun.

Tracing My Tension

I awakened in the middle of the night with frustration when my son awoke in his discomfort. He called out for me and wanted to nurse. My older child’s sweet voice called out to her brother, “Mommy is in the other bed. Do you want me to take you to her?” Frustration was replaced by a spontaneous, broad smile. Although my younger child said, “No,” he found his own way and his older sister still followed. There I lay. My first born to my left, my youngest to my right, upside down, head on my right thigh and feet near my face. My husband on the other side of our son. I was immobile. Surrounded with love.

The Awakening

This is how I was roused from my sleep that night. I had gone to bed the last two nights asking for a revelation through a dream. For months I had been having an intense feeling of being ready for something new. A new direction, but I didn’t know where or what that was. No revealing dreams. To my complete surprise, the revelation came as I awoke. Moonlight spilled over me. I felt my heart open. I was flooded with moonbeams and the new direction revealed itself as I began to trust this experience in my sleepy delirium. Trust and patience both came to accompany me on my journey. I was ready to investigate this new path, this gate which was opening before me.

The Path

My thoughts began to spiral, surfing the beams of the moon as I watched, an outsider, to see where they would go. I lay still and held on. I have become very clear about what I do not want. I suddenly realized that I kept trying to link my new ideas to the old paradigm.

The key was uniquely mine and the door looked to be the right one, but I was not looking for the keyhole. The image of the first moon bow I remember seeing over the misty haze of the Central American Cloud Forest years before returned to me. I have been that moon, surrounded by the moon bow of my next phase. I sensed what was next; it was hovering around me so closely and so real that, with outstretched arms, I could have touched it, but my fingers simply passed through. I couldn’t identify it. I didn’t know what it was, what it was made from. I traced the path back to see how I arrived at this place. Suddenly, I awakened to consciousness. It isn’t the moon itself that shines, but the sun’s light on it.