Burial Of A Singing Bowl
Creek Woman lived in a small house surrounded by pine and pine-needle covered ground, golden brown.
"Why do you live alone?"
"I want to be all mine, and mostly silent," she had answered, opening her mouth, something like a smile, without her teeth. On this particular day, her white hair was stringy, the well had seized. She only had the water in the creek, that she carried in a bucket up the hill to the back porch. It had served her for decades, this well, and she had used it sparingly- treating the tap with strange regard.
"So much in the world is explained by an indifference to a dripping sink."
Creek Woman had a porcelain singing bowl that cracked when she let somebody else try it without any sense of the thing, something she wasn't supposed to do. The woman had taken to it aggressively, revealing her tendencies toward exhibitionism, trying to show up the Creek Woman on her own instrument which refused to oblige and cracked beneath the weight of her conceit. She did not understand that Creek Woman took to her bowl softly because she was honoring the power of it, wrapped in reverberations and often weeping, she experienced it's waves not as sound but as her language of gratitude.
"Gratitude changes the size of the earth," she often said.
"The size?"
"Gratitude makes the world seem larger when we share our things and spaces, smaller when we share ourselves."
And she had shared that singing bowl, wanting to share, wanting to feel intimate but limitless, sensing that this woman needed it, and she was correct. Perhaps that was why it had been porcelain instead of a sturdy metal, perhaps this was the lesson of this particular bowl, to introduce fragility, aspects of the transient.
"It has to be buried," she said. And so she was lifting away layers of earth, made swift work of the needles, then struggled with the rocky soil and stringy roots,unobliging tangles of pine, trying to part them like a jungle curtain or the seed apparatus of pumpkin. She probed the earth's workings, plucked a stone like a pearl, and tossed it to the creek where it's ripples quickly approached her on the shore. She imagined them continuing and creeping, like water spreading from a bucket across the ground, rolling into the dirt, siphoned into saturation. She imagined the waves reaching her feet, meeting the hole for her bowl, and settling there- filling it in like the tide makes level the footprints on a shore.
Creek Woman nested her bowl into the earth, then removed it, turning it upside down as a capturing bell, where the waves could reverberate in her absence inside the bowl in the keep of it's dome, the crack set up with a buttress of dirt and it's echoes protected by pine.