Twilight beckons outside the adobe’s screened-in windows. The disappearing sun streaks the evening sky with lavender and tangerine hues. Doves coo goodnight. A lone car rumbles along the adjacent neighborhood street, the cracked-pavement and pebbled earth noisily sounding its solitary trek.
The street’s tumbleweed condition makes for bumpy driving and cautious walking, but I toss it up to the old West Texas charm that is Marfa.
I’m thinking about that road. The road out of Marfa and to the stars.
The crescent moon winks and extends an invitation. She rises to illuminate a path I could take.
(Infinite options, even and especially in this tiny town in the middle of West Texas plains.)
Lounging on white pillows, I keep rescanning the same paragraph. I could stay, rest and replenish from the seven-hour drive and be freshly energized for exploring tomorrow, but I’ve already been lured away from this comfortable set-up.
A sudden restlessness for the lone stretch of road to the plains, the mountains, the stars propels a vision forward – a vision that brings the rush of night air through my hair. And in the streams of wind, I listen - enticed by a voice that belongs to the moon and to me.
The new moon synchronizes with my maiden phase. The outer reflects the inner, the inner the outer. The maiden is the huntress Diana, questing and adventuring and in for the thrill of the journey. There’s a journey I could choose, a path I could drive, and one that will include the grin of the September moon and the periwinkle expanse of plains and mountains.
Go.
Go and gaze at the stars.
Not through the screen, not by waiting for tomorrow (for tomorrow may hold another energy that may need to be honored), but by acting on the creative impulse of the NOW.
I fling aside the plush pillows and slip on my sandals. I flick on the front porch light, mindful that I did make a promise to my Airbnb hostess to turn off lights after 11pm to help birds migrate and retrace wing-patterns back home. I’ll be back before then, I decide, and I might need a light to signal my adobe in the blanketing night engulfing the alley.
I take off into the darkness to go and awe at the spectacular bloom of the stars.
I leave my on-the-road playlist off and let the quiet of a Friday night in Marfa cascade through the rolled-down windows. And the quiet of Marfa is far from an eerie silence, it’s a stillness that feels like the peace that can be delivered after a long exhalation. It’s a silence that vibrates with life-force, and the quality of the quiet is what led me to here – a grounded serenity I practice inwardly fortifying.
The earlier vision shapes into my reality. I drive out of town and into the immediate landscape that initiates instantly full and complete breaths. The ease in my breathing confirms that I’m on aligned course, and clearly communicates the embodied resonance I experience in West Texas, a resonance that pulls me back here, again and again.
My soul loves the earth here. And this love expresses itself through exuberant embodiment. The soles of my feet tingle. My eyes widen like the gaze of a lover who wants to take it all in. Every movement becomes an ecstatic prayer – to clear the disbelief and replace it with the awe that I am here.
Because Marfa is spectacularly far, but it’s not in the middle of nowhere, a self-correction I made in my thinking to soothe my nerves as I made the pilgrimage. Marfa is a somewhere, an iconic somewhere with magic, mystery, and mischief-making art, and a somewhere that strengthens an embodied-soul connection with myself.
While Marfa is an eclectic hodgepodge of internationally famous art galleries, mom-and-pop burrito pit-stops, Brooklynites who drive beat-up trucks (that when parked out front of humble adobes could be mistaken for art installations) and real-life cowboys, I’m drawn to the invisible current activating heightened and steadied aliveness and to the earthly stillness that is deeply grounding and transcendent.
I keep taking this road back to Marfa because of a curiosity to explore this inner terrain of resonance and magnetism, but also because there’s a clear-water knowing of what Marfa offers - more of a realigning than a finding, that heals and frees.
And the road includes a pivotal pause at the Marfa Mystery Lights lookout. Inexplicable orbs of light have been dancing across the plains outside of town for centuries. Tonight, families, tourists, couples, and a few stargazing dogs gather to hopefully catch a wink from these benign beings.
I saw the mystery lights on my birthday, a few years ago. A blue light twinkled happy solar return to me.
And while I treasure the birthday gift, I don’t need to see the lights to confirm that there’s a playful sacredness present here.
I dangle my legs over the lookout wall, sitting in between two sets of flirting couples, whose milky conversations are hushed and giggly, which I imagine is how those mystery lights are acting: lightheartedly debating about whether to make a glowing appearance for spectators and skeptics tonight.
The new moon, however, is here. And she is so wonderfully enough for me.
A few years ago, my younger self would have been searching for the lights, seeking the horizon for a sign to grasp. My maiden self in her early 20s would be reaching and attempting to justify what she felt in the depths of her heart to be true and real with a concrete clue in the outer.
But I know that I can trust what I feel in my heart now. This is the true road I travel, a road of remembrance.
Under that new moon, I am both crone and maiden, ancient and young.
A new moon represents the maiden from worldly wise fairytales. She begins her journey out into the world only to learn or re-remember, like our 20th century maiden Dorothy, that home is within. Our challenges in that outer quest renew and embolden our capacity to trust ourselves, to act out of the power that comes from being aligned with our deep humanity and elevated divinity.
The new moon in Marfa is an encouraging smile.
Go and adventure with the heart-replenished knowing that you are already whole and complete, and in fact, that’s what the best adventures remind us of – our own reexperiencing of the magnificent life-force that is us.
Trust yourself enough to respond to the calls that are simply calling more of you here – to this form, to this human being journey, to the road that reaffirms liberation and wants all your magnificence present and here.