It’s Thursday, April 10, 6 a.m., and the slow haze of pre-dawn is barely oozing through the windows. I click the bedside light on, open a leather-bound journal and listen to the sound of my pen scrawling nothing thoughts across the page. It’s a fascinating activity, this journaling. Ideas appear where we think there are none: “lucid dreaming” I’ve hard it called. If you relax and let it flow, your mind will show you what it’s thinking, what it wants, what it fears. This morning in a matter of a mere fifty words my pen suggests I live.
    I fold the leather back around its pages, pack the journal in a wicker basket—a nest of half-read books—grab a camera and lenses and stroll into the chill of the waking hour of spring in the northern Rocky Mountains. The engine of my truck slices the silence and I ease into the morning, stopping for coffee—black. The truck’s tires lead to a dirt road where potholes are filled with water encrusted in thin layers of ice, which break with my passing weight.
    This avenue of dirt and potholes leads into a snowy canyon of frosted willows and thin blades of grass with slivers of ice, delicate looking hairs standing at attention as if frightened.
    I emerge from the heat of the vehicle into mountain air at a place called Frenchman’s Bend, where evergreens crane over a nearby creek and sagebrush crawls up steep ridges. The cool cuts the wool of my sweater. A shiver crawls up my spine. I feel the hairs on my arms at attention. I imagine they match the slivers of ice on the willows beside the creek.
    My clogged feet plod with purpose to the creek’s edge where small walls of boulders and mud create a pool. Little bubbles bob up from the depths releasing puffs of steam in the chill. I find a flat slab of granite between the pool and the trickle of the creek. I let my clothes fall into a pile and stand for a while . . . feeling. It’s an interesting thing, this consciously deciding to know unpleasant sensations and somehow finding a certain intimacy in such a place. The hairs on my arms are up. Goosebumps speckle my skin. Knees quiver. Shoulders shiver. Breaths are short.
    I tolerate the icy stillness as long as I can, then dip an ankle in the water, a move not unlike that of plunging from the chill of heartache into the comfort of love once more. The transition is harsh, the water scalding, and I recoil into the frigid air where the convulsions of my shiver reign. This quaking is what my body has come to know in these brief minutes of life, and the warmth and safety of the spring are at first more than I can bear. In fact they burn.
    It’s still twilight, and the final glitter of stars is visible through the creeping blue of the morning sky. Sirius, the brightest of heavenly bodies, is most obvious. In Egyptian mythology all cycles of time are derived from the rising of Sirius, and Isis, the Great Mother and goddess of magic and healing, embodied Sirius. Their union was said to spiral and resonate, bringing harmony to the Earth. The union of Sirius and Isis not only set time but shaped matter, manifesting a natural aesthetic form called the Golden Ratio, or Divine Proportion, found in all Isis’ creations.
    As a binary star system, all energies released by Sirius are shaped and conditioned by the perfectly balanced orbits shared by the Sun and Sirius. Astronomers have long noted that the radiation released by Sirius varies greatly. Pressures build as the two stars approach one another, and when that happens the luminosity of Sirius brightens noticeably. For this brief climactic period, fusion reactions occur. As they part, visible light diminishes, and higher frequencies predominate.
    This seasonal cycle of death and rebirth produces the rich panoply of archetypal forces that make up the family of Isis. The curious thing seems to boil down to conspiracy theory. Some astrologists say this pattern of initiation has formed the basis of all schools of mystery through to present day. They say, in fact, that the government buildings of Washington, D.C., laid out by the Brotherhood of the Freemasons, were arranged along the pentagonal harmonic pattern with the Oval Office of the White House at its apex. And the nation’s birthday, July 4, was set to coincide with the annual Sun-Sirius conjunction, the day when the Egyptian sun god, Ra, and Sirius are in unified alignment with Earth.
    I’m still shivering, and whatever Sirius’ story it’s nearly faded completely from view. More determined this time to find escape from the cold I submerge, limb by limb, into the spring with faith it will afford the protection I seek.
    The water embraces me with its sulfur stench and tickling bubbles. The pool is layered, cold on the bottom and hot near the surface. My arms churn to mix the gradient. It evens. I relax.
    There’s a patch of pink coalescing on a cloud to the east, not the most spectacular display I’ve seen but a welcomed one just the same. My mind loosens with my body in the warmth of the morning soak, and I wonder if, like Sirius and the Sun, people can create unifying and dividing polarity. Magnetic and glowing together. Repellant and emitting higher frequencies apart. Or Repellant together. Magnetic apart. All part of the nature of the universe where gravity and orbits and luminosity are more complex and universal than I ever could have considered, or wanted to consider.
    Everything happens for a reason, I think. For a reason. Some things brand us, dig pits in our souls, reshape the terrain of who we are. I try to understand why we must carry these brands forward. Like the pre-dawn shiver, I’ve tried to pause so I can know and understand. Maybe there’s nothing to understand. Maybe it’s nothing more than experiencing and feeling all of life as a present moment. We are nothing if but moment itself.
    It’s feeling the uncomfortable sensation of a naked chill on a secluded riverbank, trying to stick toes into the comfort of the spring, wondering if it’s possible to revisit old springs, comforts known before, pleasures yet to come, unknown things, mysteries—the union, perhaps, of Sirius and Isis.
    The ridge to the north is splashed in soft light, the stripes of remaining snow standing out in contrast with the brown sagebrush that has been revealed by the receding carpet of white. The swaths of snow curve up the mountain’s flank in giant sweeps. Balance, I think.
    The Yin and Yang of life.