Floating Lanterns and Zozobra

I’ve written almost all my life, beginning with an opera libretto (!) when I was four or five, and trying almost everything in turn. The pages have accumulated in dark drawers, mostly unseen by anyone but me. They grow weighty—especially during moves.

It’s time, I’ve decided, instead of hoarding them to start letting the pieces go—let them lift weightlessly into the ether like the fire lanterns, Thailand’s Kome Loy, that grace ceremonies for fresh new beginnings; or the new flying farolitos that amazed us old, earthbound Santa Feans when we first saw them a few Christmases ago, burning above us in the frost-touched night, nearer than stars, while we were out walking on Christmas Eve among the grounded lines of lighted bags following unpaved drives, multi-level pueblo rooftops, and the curve of high adobe walls around a compound of dwellings or galleries or inward-looking patios on Canyon Road, Acequia Madre, or my own first street, Abeyta.

In Thailand it’s believed that by sending off these lanterns one is sending off bad luck into the air. Before the lantern lifts, one prays to have one’s sins and bad karma carried by it far away, into the absolving vastness of the sky.

FLOATING LANTERNS





In Santa Fe, a ceremony with similar intent has just taken place. Every year there at the end of summer, the beginning of fall and school and shorter, darker days, the start of fiesta, comes the burning of Zozobra, Old Man Gloom—and with him, all the troubles of another year.

Zozobra is a massive scowling paper effigy, with thrashing arms and head, whose moans and groans as sheets of sparks and flame and smoke come at him from all sides become an urgent roar of outrage as the fire takes him and the crowd’s jubilant cheers join the flurry of fireworks set off by the combustion of their cares.

THE BURNING OF ZOZOBRA (2008)





I hope setting my words alight in this blog and our new cooperative creative writing blog, Green Scooter, will lighten me and mine (more on clutter soon!) and light the way into a place of momentary grace and new beginnings, like the floating lanterns lifting, lifting, until free from earthly gravity.