The last balmy night before summer would undeniably reach here, I looked out back through my screened security door onto the narrow border of my compound, knowing the enjoyment of a few moments before bedtime, and said aloud:
No stars
Through the screen
Bats tonight
Bats fascinate me. They are mysterious—being rarely visible, unlike my daily bird and squirrel friends. Looping close to the screen, a hand’s breadth from my face, they alternated this flight pattern with larger, more distant loops, disappearing behind a tall and narrow, thickly-leafed ashok tree that hid them temporarily from my curious viewing. Multiple times they passed as I maintained my position, unmoving so as not to disturb them. The medicine card[1] meaning of bat is rebirth. “I’m in a rebirth,” I spoke within, receiving this message from a guide of a higher vibrational source from which I cannot create but can receive. I stood in surrender to this newly announced change, intuitive about relationships, in this case, being with bats.
Then temperatures climbed. One hundred-and-six degrees registered on my porch in the shade, and ninety-two on my kitchen window ledge five feet away. Rather than goats bunched and grazing in small clusters, the herds became more widely spread over larger areas of the surrounding fields. Herders sought to discover feeding sources among the gradually shortening grass blades becoming ever drier.
Coping by wearing lighter–weight clothing, I covered the windows with brown cloth that I had been told by the seller was the most effective for blocking light. This is my tenth summer here. In “conquering” the challenges, I have discovered quiet at the prayer building when I am seated alone within and a feeling of seclusion when I am on the hilltop. At home this summer, like the others, fans droned in minimal awareness. New this summer was an air cooler that I literally saw as “life-saving.” Its lyrical name, Sonata, suggested the comfort I would experience, as from the feeling of pleasure I experience when listening to a few pieces of classical music I can stream through my phone. With daily and nightly fillings of my cooler, I breathed more easily, and no longer awoke in the middle of the night with my mouth so dry I couldn’t close my lips.
In adapting to the heat, imagination played its role. I fell asleep and awoke to short prayers and images of places from my past or ones desired for my future. Almost always there was a view of water, out there beyond where my steps parted tall grasses and my feet felt the sand below—toes shaping the sand into low depressions—small launch pads from where the ball and arch rose in an arc until … my heels landed, pressing in their shape. Overlaying these trusted movements, my awareness expanded to add flowers—wild, wind-swooping, petaled-arcs of pale tans or colorful crayons. A breeze lifted my hair in directional changes as I turned my head to the right, then the left. Tucking back my hair—then not caring, letting it mask my face, feeling unmistakably free—I accepted. Home.
My realization is, “What we may long for but cannot own or visit may come to us in a different form through our human capacity to imagine.”
1. Jamie Sams and David Carson, Medicine Cards: The Discovery of Power Through The Ways of Animals,
(Rochester, Vermont: Bear & Company, 1988).