What Women Do on the Full Moon

To Cherish Silence

By Charlene Baldridge

Would my life change if I

listened to all the CDs

that have piled up

these many years?

It seems that in idle moments

I attend and cherish a different

music for the silence and

harmony it affords, as if

sound and its several cacophonies

are one with the stress of

sexual attraction and its

attendant entanglements

even in the key of E flat,

my most salubrious.

F sharp held such terrors,

or was it G? I no longer

remember; the silence in

the Rainbow Cave is deep

and wondrous, plangent

with a language I never learned.

I had no more posted a question about the intense energies of this full moon than I began to hear. Not direct replies, mind you, because most had not seen my question on Facebook. Charlene sent me this poem, along with a note that she was working on another play, a project of she and her recently deceased daughter. Deonne sent a msg about her blogs as I worked with Debora on an e-version of my book, Living On the Spine: A Woman's Life in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Daugher Hope posted a new blog on the health consequences of eating today's GMO wheat

It is a couple of hours before the full moon as a mixture of sleet and snow slams steadily upon roof. 

Sandra writes in response to today's earlier blog: "I am really enjoying this journey back to NM with you.  It's a reminder to me of all the places I want to visit hen I go back.  Don't know how I got so caught up on whatever I was doing there last summer that I didn't even get to hiking up the Italianos Trail.  Your photos are beautiful."  

Emilie writes that she would love to proof the e-version of SPINE as I open a box of my latest book delivered by UPS. 

I talk to Johanna, who wards off high-horse opinions and boredom at an RV camp with a drink of scotch and a Netflix movie.

Celeste struggles with hospital staff in the wake of cutting off both of her breasts in the name of cancer survival.

Everywhere, around the world, women do what women do. I step outside into a torrent of freezing rain, spread my arms and howl to the wolf moon sequestered behind thick clouds. We are trying to save the world, I gasp...  we struggle to survive the world... in our small ways.