The Finest Orchestra in the World | Catherine Viel

By Catherine Viel, November 2, 2021

(Golden Age of Gaia)

November 1, 2021

Now the orchestra at once throws down its instruments.
The doors in the house of God tear off their hinges—
I’m the child’s fist drumming its mother’s back,
rock that hits the skull that silences the martyr…
I’m gone, glad, empty, good
riddance…
…the night filled up with crows.
~Deborah Digges, Rough Music



For a moment, I’ll join what is no doubt a large field of writers reminiscing about this time last November.

Covid restrictions were dragging on. A very important election was about to take place. Things were happening and things were going to change, big time.

Last year, I was sure that by November, 2021, everything inimical in our current reality would be only a bad memory.

Instead, the present doesn’t seem to resemble what we’d hoped for, not even a little.

*****



Impossible as it seems, I can’t drum up a lot of worry about it.

I’m not directly affected by a vaccine mandate. I can’t walk into a local public building without wearing a mask, true. And I keep reading that things are going to be very bad, and there’s a shortage of every imaginable necessity looming.

Where is my worry? I check the quadrants of my body. Is it in my big toe? Did it migrate to my right shoulder?

The habit of worry seems to have sheared off from the core of myself, an iceberg calving a big dead chunk off into the vast fathomless ocean.

The ocean doesn’t even notice the addition, but I suspect the iceberg breathes a sigh of relief.

Finally! That one’s been ready to release for a few millennia. I wish it well on its journey, but frankly, good riddance.

*****



I sense that there are a lot of aspects of myself that have just been hanging around waiting for me to notice and then dismiss them.

Collectively, they’re saying that they’ve done what they came for and have no further reason to stick with me. They don’t wish to be unwanted guests but they’re too polite to simply vanish without waiting for me to acknowledge them.

I wonder what monsters might lurk as I poke into the corners of my psyche, rooting out that which no longer belongs.

When I take the broom of awareness and give a good strong sweep, though, what had been frightening monsters turn out to be bits of grey fluff that disintegrate and pull a vanishing act the moment I focus on them.

*****



I feel as if a number of current realities may be priming themselves to vanish. Are they just waiting for enough people to notice them and send them on their way?

Have they been with us so long they feel they’re a part of us, the way every molecule of water feels a part of the mother iceberg?

Perhaps those undesired realities cannot leave until we, the magicians, snap our fingers and command, Vanish!

Just in case that’s so, I’ll find a lovely rowan twig and polish it up just right, and practice waving it with a flourish, the conductor of the finest orchestra in the world.