This is a reblog from last year, and I’m sharing again because there was a climate-crisis-related Anthesteria poem in the post that you may enjoy. Of course, this year is snowier — but the climate crisis is here all the same.
As a follow-up to what I said at the end about feeling sick last year in the post, that chest congestion and 101-degree fever ended up being at two-week ordeal with Influenza B in which I couldn’t breathe and honestly questioned whether or not I was dying, but was told over the phone that I probably wasn’t. It took me over a month to bounce back from it after I got better (the fatigue lingered the longest), and I actually had to go into the doctor to get an inhaler because I couldn’t exert myself without coughing. It was so good to get back to praying at my shrine after I felt better again, and it’s moments of extreme sickness in which one really starts to hone in on what matters. For months afterward, it made me extremely angry with myself when I felt like I wasn’t living up to a sense of urgency and behaving productively because life felt so fleeting, and I need to finish so many things.
This year, I took Tuesday and Wednesday off because they correspond to most of the Anthesteria, and I’m going to pray, study, and be generally quiescent.
Montsechia vidalii. (2017, March 18). Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository. Retrieved 23:24, February 5, 2020. Cropped photo. This is one of the world’s oldest flowering plant fossils. Changes There is no snow this Anthesteria,no struggling walk in half-darkness,only the old decay of late-fall leaves,flocks of black birds fleeing skyward,the air too sticky, the grass yet […]
Happy Anthesteria 2020 (699.3) — KALLISTI
KALLISTI 