Image description: Jessica is standing on the right hand side of the frame staring into the sun next to a field of sunflowers late in the afternoon. She has her hair in a low bun and is wearing an indigo vest.
Last week marked three years since I arrived from California to my little house in eastern Pennsylvania. I was out there writing Tarot for Change and a few months into the pandemic I started to feel like Odysseus on Ogygia with Claypso—who was beautiful, no doubt—that moment he realized he wanted one thing, and one thing only: To go home.
“Goddess,” he tells her, “do not be angry with me…I am quite aware that my wife Penelope is nothing like so tall or so beautiful as yourself. She is only a woman, whereas you are an immortal.” It was just how I felt as I prepared to leave the glory and vastness and fashion of the west coast, for my brown-green northeast. “Nevertheless,” he continues, “I want to get home, and can think of nothing else.”
Once my heart was set on leaving, I found an old maybe rained-on and very worn copy of The Odyssey on a neighborhood walk. Which, because of who I am as a person, I took as California’s way of blessing my home-going. Even though Calypso had held Odysseus captive on her island for seven years—which happens to be the same number of years I’d spent in California—she wasn’t at all angry with him for leaving.
In fact she helped him. Gave him all kinds of charms for the road. Roads themselves have muscles too, you know, or as Gaston Bachelard has called them, counter-muscles. She gave him two goat skins: one full of wine, the other water. She gave him a bronze axe with a custom-fit olive-wood handle. Olive like the tone of her skin.
Nope, she wasn’t angry at all he was leaving as she walked him head held high to where the tallest and strongest trees grew. Poplar and Pine and Adlar. He built a boat to sail home with the tools she’d provided. She hauled out the thick linens so he could make sturdy sails.
And because she was in fact divine—and had the power to do such things—she even commanded the wind to blow warm and easy. As he put himself in the way of it, buoyant as ever with a sure heart, the last words she said were of stars. He should keep his gaze up and to the left, “on the Pleiads, on late-setting Boötes, and on the Bear.”