Venus and The White Rose

Isis,

There comes a moment, not always loud, not always scheduled, when one must decide against the party.

Not because the party is wrong,

but because something within you is beginning to remember what it means to be whole.

On Thursday evening, I chose that moment.

I declined the noise not out of judgment, but as a quiet act of alignment. I chose to be who I am, not the image of myself others might adore or dismiss, but the reflection of something older than time. I chose to be a reflection of God.

I met Katherine, whose tent was near mine. A woman sober not by trend, but by fire. One who followed her own signs out of the party and into shelter, treading towards order through the waters of chaos. And I, honoring that sacred turn inward, invited her to join me at sunset by the water’s edge, where reflections speak louder than music.

I asked about her path. She asked me if I meant her path on Earth, or at the festival.

I said, “Let’s go with Earth.”

And in that question was everything.

She said she didn’t believe in fixed paths. That life was like drops of water falling into a puddle: natural, symmetrical, divine, until the mind stirs it with selfish will, disrupting the stillness, distorting the waves.

I listened. Then I spoke.

Water, I told her, is the womb of creation.

The first mirror.

The first memory.

And still, the deepest teacher.

She shared her story, not with drama but with grace: a former addict, dealer, a prisoner of the past turned now. Her sobriety was not absence, but arrival. In prison, she found presence. On the other side of ruin, in the stillness of solitude, she found herself sitting between her soul and Aphrodite. That’s what she said. Her soul on the right, Aphrodite on the left.

Waiting, I smiled.

Suddenly, the past came to sit beside us in flesh. A man named Maxwell, who came to the festival to sell drugs, sat to her right by the water. No words were needed. His presence spoke. And in a moment of strange poetry, he offered us ketamine.

We declined.

But the invitation was divine.

For in him, I said, sits the version of you. The old Katherine. The one you battled. The one who, in truth, never left… but also, was never really there.

And on your left, I told her, sits Aphrodite.

The witness of beauty. The one who knows both dark and light are needed for any masterpiece.

So there we were: the past, the present, the eternal feminine.

The old self, the now self, and the soul that has always been.

Maxwell drifted. We stayed.

She cried. I asked her: “What did the old you need?”

She said: “Confidence. Release.”

But she saw it now, what she had taken for freedom was escape.

The new her was here.

She said the old her makes her feel like an imposter in her own presence. I paused recognizing this echo within myself. The one who denied his true identity, finally able to exhale into his creation.

I handed her a paper. I said, “Draw.”

She drew. I held silence.

She said, “Let’s burn it.”

We formed an X out of sticks. Two lines crossing, like timelines meeting.

Then we burned the drawings and cast them into the water.

A fire offering to the mirror.

I told her, “I have the perfect poem. I just don’t know what it is.”

And then I remembered:

“Love’s Lament”

A poem I had written, with an image of fire in water.

And there, at the water’s edge,

with fire still flickering on the surface,

I recited it.

The next day, I entered ceremony. A ceremony “lamenting the version of love” from the essence of Venus (Aphrodite). The Roses returned the call from the previous night.

And I watched as the patriarchy, in symbol and song, was buried beneath the white rose. Venus did not shout. She didn't dance in 2 like the others thought. She returned as 1. She witnessed.

Not a ritual of doctrine, but a ceremony of presence.

Where the masculine didn't yield to the feminine, it offered its life. It vowed devotion. It remembered sanctity not through power, but through presence.

And now I write you,

not as a man with teachings,

but as a flame that once danced on water, now speaking as the ash that has dissolved into its own memory.

To say this:

It was never “them.” It was always your own flame, caught in its reflection, reaching for itself.

When the world hands you a relic, an echo of your former self wrapped in flesh,

offering you the very drug you once mistook for freedom,

do not run.

Bow.

Not in fear. In reverence.

Not to the past, but to the you who survived it.

And whisper to the now:

"Thank you. I remember."

And if the water weeps, let it.
It is only the mirror washing clean
what you are now ready to see.

—Love.