Happy 20th, Buffy! And Making It Through March…

Today is the 20th anniversary of the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I didn’t catch a Buffy episode until the end of Season 2, and I was instantly hooked. That when I was (over)working as a Capital One Media Manager in my early twenties. So Buffy was entirely a thing of my adult life, not my teenage life, which was too bad. I mean, I did have Daria during high school (the original MTV version with original music – so much better than the edited/without music episodes you can see now) but it would have been nice to have a dose of kick-ass girl power in those days.

So here’s my poem, from Becoming the Villainess, that was meant to immortalize my version of Buffy, “The Slayer Asks for Time Off.”

I’m thinking there’s a segue-way here about survival and weariness, what with Buffy and Joan of Arc and  what this year so far has felt all about. The worst winter in the Northwest in history? Check. The government’s extreme chaos? Check. Health stuff? Yep, I’ve been sick in one way or another almost every day since the year started. Today there was a brief window of grayish sunlight. I took a walk at a nearby winery where there was no hint of spring yet – the vines had no visible greenery, no flowers, the ducks (wood ducks, mergansers, buffleheads, Canadian geese, etc) were huddled together against the wind. As I was walking along a path, a whorl of wind picked up around me, raising leaves – that I previously hadn’t even seen on the ground – up into the air around me, along with a cacophonous murder of crows. It was like a magical moment when a teen witch discovers her powers, except it was just me, and the weird wind.

It’s a struggle, sometimes, to feel like the heroine of your own life. It feels like there is only more evil to confront, more tasks that seem insurmountable, more problems to figure. When the weather and the news and your body conspire against you to make you miserable, we are required to look beyond the moment, beyond the cold wind and the crowds, to a future where flowers and abundance and health and happiness seem possible again. Most of us are required, sometimes, to fight battles that no one else will ever understand or know about. We feel alone. We feel helpless or overwhelmed. When it feels like we have nothing, we still have ourselves, the mysterious power of hope and even sometimes love. Our resources are larger than our enemies imagine. We must become our own magic.