Blood Moon Bardo (Autumn Eclipse)

 

I quietly awoke sweating, alone, hurt.  A hazy scarlet aura, slowly penetrated/illuminated the lonesome western horizon like some unintended tragedy.  In the rich velvety darkness of early dawn solace, I was suspended in some kind of bardo-like state.  This was a certain silence that lay stagnant across the land, flooding early morning windows, sweeping across the manicured grass of suburban backyards, and sprinkling crescent moon prisms across the surface of parked cars and cracked curbs.  A silence that had depth, a void left after darkness swells and dissolves into the shadowy firmament.  Spirits maneuver, just beyond these earthly senses, their thoughts and prayers parting strands of clouds, their breath, frigid, like the north wind, their hands grasping, but never touching, intimacy forever out of reach.  I once followed the path of the shy coyote, it led me through sweeping fields at midnight, under streams of silvery moonlight radiating profiles of stunned ghosts, along shorelines of lakes with surfaces like mirrors, reflecting your innermost thoughts and hidden dreams, the very world that breathes inside of you, but is trapped in flesh.  Under the blood moon, under this magnificent autumn lunar eclipse, I finally break free, drenched in a vermillion afterglow jubilee.  The beauty entangles me, enthralls me, reaches down and pulls me into some kind of transcendental mystical epiphany.