This Sunday I couldn't get up from the confessional chair, I couldn't get up from pain, I am the healthiest of the healthiest, only my heart moves too easily through bleeding chests, I don't know how much longer I can do this, people leave piles of suffering in me, piles thrown haphazardly, they stir under my eyelids at night, and after a while I no longer pray for them separately from myself and my own, I pray for everyone at once, completely, I barely got up from the chair to hold the liturgy, and the problem isn't my calves, but the hinges of my old heart,
She heats up the sauerkraut with pork, chopped with a cleaver, she stirs with a wooden spoon and in her eyes glow the fires from the mountains, her whole kin of charcoal makers, of communal exiles, all her dead come rushing in, and on her lips slide words without consonants, some incantations, some vocal spices that pour into old copper pots and jugs, it's a mystery what happens at her hearth, she always chased me away from the fire like a vestal virgin, there are secrets there where a man cannot step without the risk of falling out of love, her world does not function according to the laws of the outside world, without gender equalities and without responsibilities in honest parity, She doesn't cook, She prepares the skeleton of a new day and puts another portion on your plate, nothing sophisticated, everything is simple, life is a fortress with high walls and the gates open only for those who love and forgive, the rest should stay beyond the walls and worm their days as the Lord helps them, her kin of charcoal burners, taken to the mountains three quarters of the year, living in huts with children clinging to their breasts, the women carried in their flower bags a double-edged axe, cross-shaped, striking long into old trees and coldly deciding which one must die as a sacrifice, listening carefully to the voices beneath the bark and marking with a cross the wood that had to fall, moving on with the child clinging, tapping the trees with the cross-bladed axe, an astral stethoscope, listening to the secret breaths of the world, a kin of witches drunk with life, this red-haired woman, walking me in zig-zags and from bottom to top through all the intersections in my chest, this witch woman stirs that sauerkraut again and suddenly, what will the new book be called?
And the title comes to me, it comes to me from confession, the desert paths, you know, when you're on the edge of the sand without horizons and the wind blows before the Word and you walk barefoot, frightened, when HeWhoIsAlwaysBarefoot quickly weaves a path from four footprints, two divine and two earthly, and slips it under your sole, all our steps are counted by God and under each sole there is an unseen path that leads somewhere, you know, my love? You know?
She says nothing, only those fires in Her eyes, smoldering worlds half-extinguished and half-alive, stirred with a wooden spoon in Her mysterious soul.
Add more salt, if you want.
And in the future please bring a prosphora home from church, I'm tired of borrowing from those to whom you distributed it, okay?
Okay.
The Desert Paths.
Fr. Crin-Triandafil Theodorescu