I heard blood.  There was an icaros, it was the saddest song I have ever heard in my life.  I never knew I was capable of being so sad.  I tried to sit up, but mostly I wept on the floor.  I saw eagles singing this sad song, but they had no wings, they seemed blind, and half made of stinking earth.  They were clustered in the soil, their sounds turning from red to black, painting an arc of grief above them, this song of decay and blood.  I was crying with them, but there was some kind of weapon in my hand, I don’t know why, I could not wield it so I cried.  I saw my throat opening, my blood vessels spontaneously dissecting, spilling.  I knew myself to be a collection of vesicles, sacs, organs, each one giving up and opening, deflating, emptying, in deference to this song.

I saw mountains, or rather shapes that could not find the courage to be mountains.  There were hills, hills that had given up on being mountains, hills masked in fogs of cowardice, and I saw in their profiles the shapes of the few corpses I have seen in my life, prepared in caskets, the way that the body becomes flat, the complexion flat, the neck and the jaw settles and becomes flat. The life leaves the body, and it becomes flat.  I resolved not to lie down, not to be flat.  Flatness is passivity, passivity is death.  Death is not what we are.

Some tears dilute poison, there was something crystalline in the tears leaking from me now.  I thought of the times I faced tears in the past, my lover crying, a person’s heart turning to water in my hands, shapeless, splashing down at my feet, puddles of tears, impossible to gather or console.  I thought of having to face this before, standing in a crumbling landfill, and I turned from it, thinking of mountains, sharp and tall.  

The shaman says he knows you will want to lie down, but you must “be the buddha, be the warrior”.  The sadness and discomfort was overwhelming, but some of us sat up strong like rocks in the darkness, unmoving, surely touched by grief.  I was not so strong, but I caught myself a few times, pulled myself off the ground to face the boiling in the dark.  I was given a second cup, and I couldn’t keep it down.  I’ve always been able to.  I wasn’t ready for it.

Morning brought happier songs and beauty, as I thought it would.  We all talked for a couple hours.

There was sadness in over half the 28 of us.

Three or more young women saw their fathers die, when their fathers were still alive.  A man from Columbia took what he felt was too much, he said he was punished, a sentient beetle flew down to speak to him.  

My previous experiences have all spoken of courage, but this one was the first to describe it by it’s opposite.