Clearing Moriah

Clearing Moriah

I prepared a clearing with great difficulty. Actually, the idea had come naturally to me. I had a dream in which there was a clearing and I was standing within it. The clouds had opened up, or the earth had cracked beneath me, I do not know which exactly. And I was standing within the light or falling into a crevice. It was bright, not dark, and very, very still. And I do not know if it was me, but it could have been me, or some version of me whom I had yet to meet. I wanted, deeply, to meet her or to join her or just to be near her. 

I woke up and thought to myself, This is Abrahamic. The cataclysmic seemed near. No, the sublime.

So, I went to a field near my house. I marked out a small area using synthetic rope. It need not be large, I thought. Ishmael was small, wasn't he? I set about to removing the vegetation. First I used cleared the brush with a hatchet. Then I cut down the single tree in my clearing and dug out the stump. As the night deepened, I rolled the heavy log with great difficulty to the edge of the clearing.  I got hold of a rake and gathered the debris just as sky slowly yawned with dawn's arrival. I did not know what to do with the debris, so I left it in a pile at the edge of my small clearing.

I stood in the middle of the clearing and waited. At first I closed my eyes, sensing the stillness of the hot air. I took deep breaths and called to the spirit, any spirit, to come. But the ground beneath me was not even quivering. I opened my eyes and looked up - there were no clouds and the sky was a pale blue. The Sun had begun to beat down upon me. I felt it now as I stood, waiting.

I started to feel faint, so I sat down on the tree trunk at the edge of the clearing. I scanned my clearing. It had a radius of approximately thirty feet. 

While I looked around, squinting in the Sun, I realised that I had worked too quickly and carelessly. There were still a few shrubs at along the diameter of my clearing. He did not stop halfway up Moriah, I reprimanded myself. I was annoyed at myself for half-measures. 

I got up slowly, slightly dazed, and retrieved my pruning shears. I bent down over one of the shrubs and began to snip away at its branches. They were hanging low to the ground, as though trampled and frightened. Had I stepped on them? I would have noticed, surely? I wondered if Abraham had stepped on any shrubs on his way to Moriah. 

I saw a thin garter snake, like a lime-green noose slithering from behind the shrub into the wilderness beyond. I still felt weak. My throat was parched. I thought vaguely of Moses' staff and stumbled after the snake, intending to capture it. It will grow bigger in my hands, I thought, it must. It is a cobra behind a mask. I was sweating. I felt my shirt sticking to my back. I pulled at my shirt with one hand, and then looked at my hand. My palm was glistening--almost gleaming--in the Sun. I could not stop looking at it.

Suddenly I remembered the snake again. I thought to myself, I must find it. It is a sign. I looked around for evidence of where the snake was hiding. My head was aching. I walked around my clearing, scanning the ground determinedly. I looked into my clearing and saw something move within, a flash of--lime? white? It was hard to say.

I went back into my clearing and got onto my knees, peering, my pruning shears digging into the freshly-revealed soil. I gripped them tightly. I crawled around my clearing on my hands and knees, at times looking for the cobra, at times inspecting for brush to snip away with my shears. My fingernails were grimy, filled with dirt and muck, as I dug up stray leaves and pieces of green. 

I found a single clump of grass that I had missed clearing in the dark. I grabbed the grassy heads and pulled at them. They did not move. I threw down my shears and held the grass with both my hands. I yanked hard and felt the soil finally give way. The roots yielded all at once, as though they had not yet relented but could no longer hold on. The suddenness and forcefulness of their surrender caused me to roll onto my back with my arms outstretched. I saw the tuft of grass in my fists above my head, the roots dangling like flies' legs. 

I felt the ground trembling under my back, at first slowly then with increasing speed. Without warning, the ground split open and I dropped in, bewildered, looking at the clump of grass and the sky behind it, filled with clouds. When did the clouds come in? I had a chance to wonder, before the ground closed above me and I was surrounded by the dark, suffocating soil.

- MM, September 9th, 2021

(Image from: https://srelherp.uga.edu/snakes/thasir.htm)