I Am a Battleground

©Isabel Castaño. www.isabelcastano.com

As the layers of the onion are peeled away, I see more clearly how the battle lies within me. I am a battleground. The battle is in me. I see how I have fought, but did not know or understand my enemy. I see how I have fought, but I did not understand my allies. And, thinking I was alone in the battle, not trusting anyone or anything, I see how I fell prisoner. How I have lived in the stockade, the gulag, fighting just to survive. Knowing, yet lacking even the rudiments of faith, I have been the bewildered one.

Huge swaths of me have been laid waste. There are war-torn lands whose skies roil with the lightning and thunder of gods and angels. I see the smoking, shadowed places whose bleak and hollow landscapes are filled with restless, irritable and discontented demons.  I hear the rise of many voices, the cries of my own humanity and the whispers of the angels and demons.

If I kill off all my demons, will my gods and angels die too?

How can this be that my fleshy existence, my knotted brain, is a place for gods and demons to war?

And on what exotic island does my heart live? Where in that aquamarine, salty sea of me do I see my essence, swimming with leviathans and ghostly creatures of the deep? In what verdant and loamy primordial jungle does my heart throb? In what universe do I hear the steady intelligent hum and the rush of my blood as it flows through the vortex in the holy grail of me?

On what hieroglyphed and radiant stone altar does my soul lie?

I sense the flinty hacking of the devil’s machete searching the jungle of me even as the god’s mighty hurricanes and lightening bolts descend.

I am just a wraith, the breath of god, and flesh offerings tossed upon the winds, scattered on deserts, rising on waves.

Incarnate.

Where am I in this battle? Who am I? How can I accept both wings and horns?

To be alive that both these must exist.

With great effort, I lift the fiery sword of this dreamwork to bring it down again and again on my brain to create an opening. I crawl through the narrow stone tunnel, a wormhole, terrified to leave what I think I know behind.

I am in search of new and strange landscapes in me where all things of heaven and earth must exist.