Lost & Found

Almost two weeks ago, I received a thoughtful letter from a reader about my previous post, "Lost in Thought." Unlike most comments I receive, which are usually either warmly complimentary or downright argumentative, this letter was a mix of appreciation, unasked-for advice and some mistaken assumptions about the "depth" of my spiritual practiced based on occasional read-throughs of this blog. The following is my response:

D,

Thank you for your letter, and for your honesty. I admit, I did find it difficult at first to accept a compliment which included the implication that I hadn't deserved it 'til now, but I'm sure you meant it kindly, at least, so I've tried to appreciate it in that light. I can relate to your feeling "left cold" by the occasional post of mine you've read in the past. Even my favorite blogs more often leave me with amusing anecdotes, useful information or sparks for later contemplation than with powerful, inspiring reading experiences in themselves; and the gods know not every post of mine is spectacular writing, or even the best thing I've written that day! I think this is probably pretty common, maybe even a natural aspect of the blog as a medium. Every once in a while, if the noise and chatter of the internet happens to be at its ebb and I happen to be in a particularly receptive mood, something will strike me deeply. But usually, my favorite posts are the ones that sneak quietly into the back of my mind and give me something to think about (or argue with!), and I'm grateful that others are out there practicing, thinking, and trying to craft those thoughts and experiences into something they can share.

One thing that did confuse me about your letter is that you seemed to suggest that it was my "colored-pencil landscape" style of writing that you found uninteresting (even shallow)... and yet the post "Lost in Thought" was actually itself written in exactly that style. I sat down and jotted it off in a quick half-hour, hardly rereading it before posting and certainly not struggling with it the way I had been struggling with my previous posts on pacifism, writing and rewriting, revising and rethinking, expanding and deepening and sometimes spiraling out of control on tangents. (I even joked in passing about this fact in the post itself! "Today, I want to write about what it's been like to write...") And yet it was the "Lost in Thought" post, and not the more difficult or complicated posts, that you found most enjoyable and engaging, that moved you enough to write me a letter. You can probably see why I'm getting mixed signals. My only guess is that it's not really the writing style itself, but the subject matter, that made the difference.

I don't think you're alone in this. Almost always, I receive far more feedback when I write something full of complaints or confessing annoyance, anger or difficulty, than when I write in praise of simple beauty or intrigued by some obscure philosophical question. I'm not sure why this is. Perhaps it's because, when I'm feeling angry and inspired, I suddenly become more eloquent or tenacious in cutting through cool-headed intellectual language and flowery description. But I bet it's also something having to do with our social makeup. When others feel anger or fear, it certainly works to the benefit of the group if those negative experiences can be communicated quickly and spark immediate reaction--like a herd of horses suddenly stampeding because one of them heard a twig snap, it's safer just to run than to wait around to confirm the danger. Also, since annoyance, fear, confusion and struggle are all very common human experiences--whereas quiet contemplation and rapt appreciation seem increasingly rare, as well as tending to be solitary--we feel more connected with others when we can commiserate and comfort, or argue and debate. We feel the fire of resistance and tension, or simply the warmth of others' presence, rather than being left out in the cold of solitude where we alone have to do the work of attending and growing.

So of course, it's natural that you would feel engaged by reading about someone else's struggle to deepen intellectually and spiritually, since it's something you yourself have probably also struggled with. The difficulty is familiar to you, it reminds you of yourself, of your own experiences and of what you share with others. You've even run across mythologies and shared cultural references such as "Mythago Wood" that depict and describe the experience, providing a common ground from which understanding can begin. So for that (and for another intriguing fantasy novel series to add to my to-read list!), I'm very glad you found my post meaningful and decided to write to me. Though I've received many positive comments about that particular post, yours in particular has provoked the most contemplation on my end, about my writing style, my relationship with audience, and my processes and goals in my spiritual life.

One thing you've helped me to realize is that writing simply cannot be exhaustive of experience. It was probably a mistake on your part (albeit an understandable and entirely forgivable one!) to assume that just because my writing hasn't seemed all that "deep" to you until now, that must mean I have never had occasion to think deeply about subjects before. True, attempting to write polished and coherent prose for a public audience on a topic that is embedded so deeply in my own psyche is a relatively new experience for me: most of my "deep thinking" until now has taken place entirely in private journals (thousands and thousands of pages, which I have written since the sixth grade), or in conversations with close friends. And while the challenge of writing about a deeply important idea in a way that can sum up twenty years of thinking about and experiencing its implications is not entirely new (some of my contemplations on beauty and aesthetics and how they relate to the spiritual life, for instance, have already appeared in this blog), writing about pacifism specifically was. There are some challenges that, no matter how many times we face them, continue to present new obstacles and test new skills. I've heard many writers talk about how, every time they sit down to write, the terror of the blank page seems as great as the day they first picked up a pen or sat down at a keyboard. But thank the gods for that! How awesome, that there are practices and activities in this world that never cease to lead us to new depths and provide new opportunities for learning and growth! If writing weren't one of them, I would have gotten bored with it a long time ago.

One aspect of writing that I think you might find interesting (and relevant to Paganism and Druidry, I think) is that, over all these years, I have noticed a definite pattern in my writing style according to the season. During the summer months, my urge to be outside in the sun and wind and fields becomes almost overwhelming--I take on new exercise routines and more physical, body-oriented hobbies (like drawing, yoga, hillwalking and guitar). Naturally, the time I spend on writing lessens quite a bit, and when I do write, I tend to spit out quick "colored-pencil landscape" bits and pieces that remind me more of the poetry I used to write in school when time was necessarily divided primarily between class and homework. As the autumn rolls around, I slow down again, sink into deeper contemplation and usually find myself getting caught up in intense debates that I can obsess over for days, even weeks. Plenty of these obsessions end up as blog posts here. Then the pattern repeats itself again as the winter holiday season drops away into the doldrums of February and March (almost every year, I seem to end up writing some kind of "series" of philosophical posts around this time), and with the first warmth of spring in late April and early May, another rush of energy sends my fingers skittering across the keyboard for a couple weeks until it's warm enough outside to distract me from the computer screen.

Blogging has served as a great record of this on-going shift in focus, attention and style in my writing, and so every once in a while I intentionally try to work in a style or on a subject that goes against this natural tendency. Over the past several months, I worked hard to write accessible, musical posts about spiritual practice, not only as a way of engaging readers who were also feeling the twitterpation of spring but to bring home to myself and my readers the truth that grace and beauty are just as "deep" subjects as longing, struggle and suffering. Then in June, I ran diligently against the grain of my own tendency and buckled down to write tough, complicated posts on intellectual and philosophical concepts. I think engaging in this kind of intentional work--work that acknowledges and respects the natural seasons and cycles of one's own mental and emotional landscape, while also learning how to work within them to accomplish willed goals--helps to strengthen weak areas and improve a person's mastery of their art or craft. I suspect this is probably just as true in spiritual practice, and the Pagan or Druid is perhaps one step ahead of other spiritual seekers in having the earth and her seasons at the heart of their spiritual life already.

Of course, your less-than-resoundingly-positive response to some of my posts just goes to show that pushing yourself this way doesn't always mean you'll end up with writing that other people can connect to. And that's the other challenge I'm always striving to meet: how best to communicate with readers in a way that is engaging without being daunting, and which is communicative without being dictatorial. I used to want to try to say everything I possibly could, but more recently I've taken the view of writing as a kind of scattering seeds and hoping that at least a few will find fertile ground. How can I make sure that the seeds I scatter are the best for the job, or that I'm scattering them the best way I can? Some plants release hundreds upon thousands of seeds because only a few will ever take root; others wrap their seeds in deliciously sweet, pulpy flesh in the hopes that birds and other animals will swallow them up and then shit them out again in some new soil far away, surrounded by the warm, stinking fertilizer; still others hardly release any seeds at all and spread mostly through the intimate sprouts of their own root systems creeping slowly but surely along. What kind of "seeds" do I hope to create with my writing? Do some ideas travel better on the wind, and others in the gut? Are some best communicated intimately among friends who share experiences and common roots? It seems to me that most of these questions are things I can only learn from experience, and from feedback from readers such as yourself. Luckily, I still have plenty of time to learn, and lots of people like you willing to take a moment to respond thoughtfully and honestly. For that, I'm very grateful!

--Ali

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Lost In Thought....

The sensation crept up on me slowly over the past week or so. I would sit down somewhere with my laptop, sit down to write, and that creeping, subtle sense of confusion would descend. Or maybe that's not quite it. Maybe I would descend, settling down into the inner landscape of my own mind, looking for the trail of breadcrumbs and blue pebbles left behind from my last writing session. Nothing ever looked the same. Sure enough, the words were there, for the most part where I'd put them, signifying directions and ideas, places I had intended to go. Now where was I? What had I been saying? I would write intensely and slowly until I was tired, until sunset and twilight, and then I would go to bed. And in the morning, I would wake up like a half-dazed sleeper in an unfamiliar place, and ask myself: where was I, now?

Writing isn't usually like this for me, at least not anymore. Writing posts for this blog is usually like a pleasant trip out into the countryside, equipped with a picnic blanket and a set of colored pencils. Find some hill with a panoramic view of sky, green and lovely rolling hills, maybe a stream wending its way to the ocean always inexplicably just beyond the horizon--spread my blanket and pull out my sketchpad. It was all there in front of me, and I sat still and quiet, attending, moving my fingers through the air, moving my pencils in scratches and scribbles across the page. Today, I would say, I want to write about meditation, and I would go sit on a hillside somewhere and watch the subject of meditation slowly coalesce in cloudforms and move in sheepish shadows over the shimmering fields below. Or, today, I want to write about grief and longing, and I would sit by a shallow creak and watch the muddy algae flicker and bend in surrender to the restless redundancy of its current. Or, today, I want to write about what it's been like to write...

In college, I used to build things with my writing. Sometimes what I built was a poem, but more often I was building essays, academic papers, analytical responses. I built with the raw material of class discussion and scholarly citations. This kind of writing was not quite like going out to the countryside to watch the wind and waters move across the earth; it was more like clearing a small patch of flat ground and propping up a shanty out of local stones and fallen branches. Sometimes I liked what I built. Every once in a while, an essay I wrote struck me with a kind of shy impressiveness and I would catch myself thinking, "Look what I made with these ideas, look how I supported this one with that one, how I found the best way to utilize the sharp edge of this argument and the suppleness of that philosophy... and how it all holds together, yes, quite nicely I think." What I made was my own in design, but I was working with what fellow students and teachers, what classes and texts, what others had given me. I learned the craft of engineering an argument.

But this is something else. For the past couple weeks, I've been struggling. There are times when I wonder if I'm not as smart as I used to be, if my brain is out of shape, like a muscle I haven't used all that seriously since I graduated college and left grad school to pursue my own passions. If I had stayed in graduate school, I could have a masters, maybe even a doctorate by now, I could be some wizened professor (or perhaps still unemployed, but with a scholarly publication or two under my belt). I would have a foundation, a network of vetted and institutionally-educated peers, some external confirmation of my work and my progress. Maybe I have been fooling myself, believing that I chose freedom when really I chose laziness and lax standards. Maybe if I were still in school, my brain would be accustomed to endurance and resistance training. Maybe writing these posts about pacifism wouldn't be such a struggle.

But then, maybe that's not quite it. Maybe it's just that I'm descending, settling more deeply into my own thoughts. I don't know what I would build with the ideas of others on pacifism and peace--but I have that creeping sensation that this is not engineering anymore, that I am not really building an argument at all. Instead, each writing session feels like turning again towards the jungle, going out once more into the wild. There are tracks and the thin trails worn by animals in the underbrush of my thoughts, and I step carefully, one foot in front of the other, swinging a stick from side to side to beat the bramble and insects out of my path. Each day I go out into the wilderness of my own mind to see what has been living and growing there, what howls in pain at night, what flowers or fans its feathers in the shifting light of sunset or dawn. How could I not know? How could I be so unfamiliar with my own internal landscape?

I want to pause, to catch my breath--but this is the jungle now, not the pleasant farmland and sunny hills closer to home. I'm on the edge of my own consciousness, pushing forward into the dark where seeds planted in childhood, planted lifetimes ago, have grown up thick and unchecked to obscure the lay of the land, where ideas are skittish and comfortable with camouflage. Something leaps from branch to branch high above in the canopy, and all I catch is a glimpse of brown fur, a long tail, the rustling leaves--I have to move quickly before it's gone.

I can feel it, every time I sit down to write, that urgency, that lack of perspective. I keep moving, feeling my way deeper, hoping to stumble suddenly upon a glade or vast gaping valley where I can stop to look around, to see where I have been and where I might be going. I don't know if my ideas hang together, if the words I have set down here and there to mark my way give trustworthy direction. Sometimes I feel as though I can't even be sure what I'm trying to say, or if what I want to say makes sense at all or rests instead on some secret, shoddy framework that may come skidding and tumbling down with the next heavy rain. This is not a mapping or surveying expedition. This is an excavation; this is a scavenger hunt. This is me, edging half-blind through the inner wilds tracking the ghosts of memory and culture, of Gandhi, King and Christ, catching the scent of reverence on a dense and sluggish wind curling through the limbs of trees as ancient as the heart; this is me, stooping now and then to turn aside a stone or trace the spiral lines of new-grown ferns, collecting samples and cuttings and discarded animal bones to bring back with me for closer study.

Now.... where was I?

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Pagan Values: Relating to the Wild

If you thought my last post ended kind of abruptly, you're right! Plugging away at my discussion of pacifism, defining ideas like violence and destruction in order to talk about Just War theory and environmentalism, I hardly noticed how long and how far afield I'd gone until the clock chimed eight (metaphorically, anyway). It was time to call it a night, and leave the rest for another day. For today, actually.

When I last wrote, I'd set out to find a workable definition of "violence" that would give us some insight into the fundamental principles of pacifism and how they're reflected in the modern environmentalist movement. Opponents of pacifism would like to blur the distinction between destruction and violence and back advocates of creative nonviolence into a corner defending the straw-man view that we can somehow avoid all forms of destruction. Of course we can't, nor would we want to! But luckily, we've seen that this unsubtle approach fails to address how we actually experience the world around us. When we define violence as the rejection, denial or diminishment of the unique and meaningful individuality of being, distinct from destruction as a natural and inevitable aspect of the manifest world, we see that we can strive to avoid violence, against others and against ourselves. Cultivating honorable, reverent relationships and recognizing the utter uniqueness of all beings as meaningfully interconnected is something that we most certainly can accomplish, right here, right now. It also transforms the way we relate to the natural world, and challenges us to reconsider the initial myth of an inherently violent "human nature" at war with each other and its surroundings.

Violence Without Spirit

Our contemporary Western culture suffers from a kind of schizophrenia or sociopathy when it comes to our relationship with the natural world. Exceedingly, almost irrationally anthropocentric, we have come to view almost any check to human well-being, longevity and prolificacy as a kind of malicious rejection of our assumed right to thrive. Under a definition that mistakes all forms of destruction as forms of violence, human beings not only act violently against the wheat field, the deer and the tree; nature itself acts violently against us. The natural force and power of storms and quakes, the inhospitable landscapes of desert, jungle and tundra, even the annual withering and hibernation of winter, all of these become not merely forces of destruction with which we strive, but ways in which the natural world acts out violently. Against this violence, we assert our right to survive, aspiring to tame and control for the benefit of our species.

But reducing destruction and violence to synonyms has another effect: it confuses our perception of indwelling spirit, allowing us to ignore nature as animate and full of divinity whenever it suits us. Only today, when we have employed our knowledge of physics, chemistry, biology and other sciences to subjugate vast realms of the physical world to our needs and desires do we feel secure enough to set aside protected lands and national parks for recreation and aesthetic pleasure. In these places set-apart and roped off, we can open ourselves up to the sacredness of the natural world, we can perceive nature as something with which we might enter into relationship in a meaningful way. But outside of these designated spaces, we slip back into an attitude that treats the natural world as spiritless and empty, something which we can control and use for our own purposes.

The wild tiger is merely an amoral predator mindlessly acting on its base instinct; it can be hunted down, or protected, according to our current sentimentality. When a tiger attacks within the "safe space" of a zoo, however, we perceive it as a being capable, at least in some truncated way, of relationship and so we seek to "punish" it, as though killing the creature might serve as a lesson for other tigers or obtain justice for the victim of the attack. Likewise, we tend to react with horror to those who suggest floods and earthquakes are vengeful acts of an angry god, labeling such views superstitious and ignorant. Yet we respond with apathy or even reluctant acceptance to the pervasive ecological destruction happening around us on a daily basis. We step in to prevent it most passionately only when it mars our "national treasures" or favorite recreational spots. In this way we foster a disconnect between our perception of "wild" nature as senseless and dangerous, and "tame" nature as charming, revitalizing, and sentient only to the extent that it is also relatively safe.

As with many other attitudes of modern culture, we project these assumptions back in time onto societies quite different from our own, and draw odd conclusions. We quite rightly recognize that for most of humanity's existence, the wildness and wilderness of the natural world was a very real and constant danger. Yet we fail to grasp how our ancestors were able to relate to the wild as sentient and radiant with immanent divinity without reducing its force or controlling its power. Instead we assume that ancient peoples, surrounded as they were with danger and challenge, were themselves more prone to violence and less capable, in a milieu of fear and hardship, of developing the mindfulness necessary for peaceful, "civilized" living. The pacifist sees violence as "mindless" because it involves the willful forfeit of mindful choice to respect and honor unique Spirit in all beings. But a mistaken view of human nature as inherently violent attributes that same mindlessness to the complete absence of our ability to choose. The closer we come to nature, in other words (either by looking back in history to when our ancestors lived entrenched in it, or by sloughing off the social assumptions and restrictions that keep us civilized and safe), the closer we come to our own inner mindlessness. When we leave the confines of the zoo, we once again become ruthless predators. Like the natural world itself, we are wild, dangerous and a bit senseless at our core. At our very heart beneath the layers of civilizing influence, implies this view, we lack the capacity to make mindful choices, to relate "face-to-face" with other beings.

Old Stories of the Hunt

As a pacifist who believes that people are not only capable of peaceful, reverent relationship with one another but supremely and deeply suited to such relationship, I don't accept the view that our core is empty of empathy and spirit. Rather, it seems to me that the closer we come to nature--our own and that of the manifest world in which we live--the more capable we become of real connection and understanding. I suspect that our ancestors, living in more intimate contact with wildness and wilderness on a daily basis, were probably less violent than we believe them to be, perhaps even less violent than we ourselves are today. Our modern tendency to sanitize and depersonalize violence with technologies that also allow us to commit horrific acts on a massive scale can fool us into believing we live safe and peaceful lives, but this illusion only lasts as long as we can maintain our ignorance of the real consequences of violence and war.

Among ancient tribal cultures, on the other hand, life-threatening wildness and bodily conflict and destruction were always lurking at the edges of ordinary awareness. Because of this, ancient peoples learned to build relationships of honor and appreciation with the potentially destructive forces and powers of the wilderness, both outside and within themselves. Their stories and myths can show us even today a way of relating to the wild with reverence instead of fear, affirming a mindful relationship with Spirit rather than a senseless battle of instincts. These stories speak to us from a time when human beings remembered, recognized and imagined our roots as deeply entwined in the natural world, when we had only just come into our power as a species capable of cleverness and creativity. A time when we still appreciated these traits in ourselves as an aspect of our own unique individuality within an expansive and inclusive world, and not as qualities that set us apart from and above the world.

From the Cheyenne, for instance, comes the myth of the Great Race, a contest among all creatures to determine who would eat whom. The story goes that long ago, the buffalos, who were huge and strong, used to eat people instead of the other way around. But the people cried out that this was unfair, and so the buffalo proposed there be a race between the four-legged and the two-legged animals to decide the proper relationship among them. The buffalo chose the strongest and fastest of their kind to contend. The people, meanwhile, enlisted the help of the birds of the air who, although only two-legged like the people, outstripped the buffalo on their swift wings. From then on, people hunted buffalo for food, though they would not consume the beard of the buffalo because it was a reminder that once they had been the prey.

Among the Blackfoot, there is another legend about the hunting of buffalo. In this story, no one could induce the buffalo to fall to their deaths over the edge of a cliff, and so the people were slowly starving and wasting away. In the kind of desperation that gives way to jest, one young woman promised that she would marry one of the buffalo, if only they would jump; and soon they were running and tumbling down the cliff, while a great bull, master of the buffalo, came to claim her hand in marriage. The girl's father, outraged and afraid, went on a journey to rescue her and bring her back to her family, but he was soon discovered and trampled to death by the herd. As the girl mourned, the bull pointed out that such was the sadness of the buffalo, too, when they watched their relatives plunge to their deaths in order to feed the people. "But I will pity you," said the bull, "and make you a deal. If you can bring your father back to life, I will let you go, so that you may return to your family." And so the girl found a shard of bone from her father's shattered remains and sang a secret song that restored her father to life. The bull honored his agreement, but said, "Because you have shown that your people have a holy power capable of bringing the dead to life again, we will show you our song and dance. You must remember this dance, so that even though you hunt us and eat us, you will afterwards restore us to life again." This is the story the Blackfoot tell about how the Buffalo Dance began, with its priests dressed in buffalo robes and wearing bulls' heads shuffling along and singing the continuation of life for the massive beasts.

In both these stories, we see a new relationship with the natural world, one that respects its wildness and potential danger without rejecting meaningful relationship. The people who told these stories were buffalo hunters, in relationship with the animal not as domestic stock but as great, untamed creatures perfectly capable, through death or deprivation, of hurting the people who depended on them. It would be easy to say that these legends simply serve, like our modern justifications, to excuse violence as inherent or necessary. From the perspective of Just War theory*, the hunting of animals for food can be considered a form of "just" violence. The needs of the people and the practical benefits of killing outweigh whatever negative consequences the people might suffer, as well as the needs or desires (including the desire to live) that the animals being hunted might have. When an animal has the power and potential to be dangerous and even life-threatening to a human being, the case seems even more obvious; after all, there is no reasoning or other "peaceful" means of reconciling with a senseless animal. Such stories of contest and exchange might amuse or reassure us, but for the most part they're just superstition, overlaying the reality of pragmatic survival.

But what if instead we take these ancient myths at face-value? In Just War theory, the enemy or opponent does not consent to his own destruction, but at the heart of these myths is the awareness of nature, as well as people, as capable of consent and choice. The buffalo himself takes initiative, proposing conditions of equal exchange and just, honorable relationship with human beings. He consents to the terms of the great race or the marriage, accepts the consequences and even, in both stories, demonstrates empathy with human suffering. In the Blackfoot legend, especially, through intermarriage human beings and buffalo come into more intimate understanding, recognizing their common "holy power" to create new life through music and ritual. These stories are not a rejection of "face-to-face" relationship, but a celebration of it. Rather than a prize wrestled from the flesh of unwilling prey, the survival and fruitful life of human beings becomes a gift, in which nature gives of itself by its own consent with the understanding that we, too, will give of ourselves in return. And so, even though the end result is the same (the people still hunt and kill the buffalo in order to survive), a potential act of violence is transformed into an act of mutual empowerment and renewal.

This transformation is what practical pacifism can help us to realize. It puts us in touch with our awareness of relationship, and where there is relationship there is the possibility of generous giving and of gratitude, even in the most difficult, dangerous or destructive circumstances. To hunt a species to extinction dishonors the gift of life that creature has given us, but it also means we rob ourselves of that gift. When we diminish others, we also diminish ourselves. But when we see ourselves as connected to and concerned with the prosperity and protection of others at our most fundamental level, we become more care-full in how we act and react, how we live in and respond to the world around us. We can longer turn a deaf ear or blind eye to others; we learn to listen to them closely, to reach out to them in connection and communication, so that we might know what gifts they offer and how best to honor those gifts in return. At its simplest, pacifism asks us to care for other beings and preserve them from the callousness and diminishment of violence. For when we empower and appreciate others, when we recognize in others the capacity for choice and consensual relationship, we also empower and elevate ourselves and honor our own potential.




*To be fair, Just War theory is rarely if ever actually applied to anything other than literal warfare among humans; however, its implications about the nature of violence and our relationship with potentially destructive forces can be more widely considered and applied.

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Pagan Values: Violence, Destruction & The Difference

Is it really the case, as I claimed earlier, that there is no equivalent to the "just war" theory when it comes to understanding our relationship with the natural world? With a moment's thought we can soon list lots of occasions when an individual or group of people have had to hunt or harvest, plow fields for food or cut down trees for shelter, in order to survive. To say that people are not sometimes "at war" with or struggling against their local environment treads dangerously close to the naive view of nature as benign, beneficent, even tame.

The truth is, the natural world is anything but tame; it is wild, it is the epitome of wildness and wilderness. Forces of the natural world--the ferocity of a wildfire, the upheaval of an earthquake, the very barrenness of a desert or the pummeling pressure of a river's relentless current--can be sources of terrific destruction and obstacles against which we struggle every day. Meanwhile, the "red in tooth and claw" reality of predator and prey certainly seems founded on an inherent relationship between violence and survival. How can we choose to live by principles of pacifism and creative nonviolence in light of this wildness? How can we apply pacifism to environmentalism--let alone to our everyday, social and political lives--when violence appears ubiquitous, especially in the natural world?

Violence in Human/Nature

Really, it has always been the apparent violence of nature as a whole--more than that of humanity alone--that has been the greatest stumbling block for the philosophy of nonviolence. Most arguments against pacifism as an unrealistic ideal only rely partially on the actual history of human violence; after all, there are also many examples in human history of our capacity for empathy, kindness and near-infinite adaptability. Opponents of pacifism more often use nature as the best evidence against its practical realization. Projecting back in time an imagined pure or fundamental "human nature" imbued with all the base self-interest of the animal world and drenched in the blood and strife of continuous struggle against competitors for the scarce resources needed to survive, they argue that people simply cannot overcome an innate tendency towards destruction. The closed system of the earth itself means there is only a finite amount of land, food and other resources to go around. We continually find ourselves in conflict, destroying when there is no more room to create, surviving and thriving at the expense of our rivals and our prey. Even those rare individuals, the argument goes, who can overcome or mitigate violence do so through suppression or denial of their own nature. But this requires extraordinary discipline and strength of will not available to most of us. Pacifism might be an option for the inhumanly committed with unwavering focus, but as a general goal for the average person it just doesn't work.

The flaw in this view is that it takes for granted that destruction is synonymous with violence, and where the former exists the latter must also be present. To kill a neighbor to gain his prosperous fields is, from this perspective, hardly different from the act of eating the harvest of those fields, or hunting down a stag, or chopping down a tree to build shelter. In all these situations, one life is destroyed for the sake of another. We might say that killing a fellow human being is worse because, by some unspoken measure, human beings are better or more important than a stag, a tree or a field of wheat. But this objection relies on a rather flimsy judgment of value. To make a distinction between violence against human beings and violence against non-humans misrepresents our own intuitive relationship with destruction. As soon as we acknowledge that humans are not inherently "better" than the rest of the natural world--something many Pagans find obvious already--we lose what ground we've gained towards a nonviolent philosophy and find ourselves again faced with the overwhelming presence of destruction, and therefore (supposedly) violence in nature and humankind.

Natural Empathy & Our Need for Destruction

The more appropriate and useful distinction that we need to make is, I believe, between mere destruction and violence. That is, between destruction as a natural and inevitable aspect of the manifest world; and violence as an intentional form of destructive dishonor or irreverence towards the unique individuality of being. Not only does this subtle shift circumvent the false dichotomy of humanity-versus-nature, but it reflects the difference between destruction and violence that we experience intuitively and reveals exactly what it is about violence that makes it so damaging and undesirable.

As self-aware social animals, we human beings have developed a natural tendency towards empathy, evident even in early childhood. This ability to connect imaginatively and emotionally with the "other"--not just with other people, but any being that we perceive as animate and aware, from pets, to plants, to landscapes and weather--allows us to function well in supportive communities, but it also means that we feel a visceral discomfort when witnessing others in pain. When cornered by our own urgent needs or fears, however, our capacity for self-consciousness and imagination can come to serve violence rather than empathy, encouraging us to invent convincing justifications for inflicting pain on others. These justifications--self-defense, punishment, deterrence, and preemptive force, to name a few--hold in common a typical diminishment of the "other" into a being less worthy of our empathy, less capable of suffering, against which we can direct destructive force guilt-free.

Sometimes this diminishment portrays the other as a less-than-complete being, not merely an animal but a vicious, repulsive, uncomplicated thing that cannot be trusted to live peacefully and behave civilly, and must therefore be either contained or exterminated. Other times, we diminish the other by viewing it as an abstract destructive power against which we have every right to strive for life. The mugger with the knife looming up out of the dark is as impersonal as the tornado or the virus that threatens us, and we react with a similarly reflexive defense. The criminal condemned to execution is, as Ani DiFranco says, "a symbol, not a human being; that way they can kill [him], and say it's not murder, it's a metaphor." An excellent example of diminishment comes from Jared Diamond's book, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal:

[I]n 1982 one of Australia's leading news magazines, The Bulletin, published a letter by a lady named Patricia Cobern, who denied indignantly that white settlers had exterminated the Tasmanians. In fact, wrote Ms. Cobern, the settlers were peace-loving and of high moral character, while Tasmanians were treacherous, murderous, warlike, filthy, gluttonous, vermin-infested, and disfigured by syphilis. Moreover, they took poor care of their infants, never bathed, and had repulsive marriage customs. They died out because of all those poor health practices, plus a death wish and a lack of religious beliefs. It was just a coincidence that, after thousands of years of existence, they happened to die out during a conflict with the settlers. The only massacres were of settlers by Tasmanians, not vice versa. Besides, the settlers only armed themselves in self-defense, were unfamiliar with guns, and never shot more than forty-one Tasmanians at one time.

Such justifications, listed emphatically one after another, bely the utter absurdity of such attempts at diminishment. As Cobern's explanations grow more and more bizarre and unlikely (the Tasmanians had a "death wish"? the settlers "never shot more than forty-one" at a time?), what becomes obvious is her desperate need to prove that the deaths of the Tasmanians were, one way or another, inevitable.

Choice & Consent

Why this desperate need to prove inevitability? Because destruction really is inevitable, unavoidable. It is, in essence, simply another aspect of creation, that which breaks down before it can build up, making room for the new and letting the old and stale lapse back into the void of potential. We recognize this basic fact at gut-level, so deep is this relationship between destruction and creation, dark and light, winter and spring. Destruction is not always undesirable; sometimes it can even be a welcome relief. And so, what every form of diminishing the other has in common is our need to justify violence by transforming it into a form of destruction.

These justifications would not work so well, or even be necessary, if we did not already understand on an intuitive level that destruction and violence are not the same. We would not need to deny the relevance of empathy and reverence, to deny our own active participation in destruction, if we did not sense on some level that these things make a difference. What we already know is that some deaths, some break-downs, some sources of pain and suffering, are not inevitable. What we already know is that, unlike destruction, violence is always a choice. It is a choice to destroy, to induce pain, to allow our own needs and passions to overshadow those of the other and to force our will upon others without their consent. The word "violence" itself comes from the Latin violentia, which translates as vehemence or impetuosity. Both words suggest the application of force without thought or consideration, without empathy for the suffering it might cause. Related is the verb violare, which gives rise to the English "violate" and means "to treat with violence or irreverence, to dishonor."

When trying to understand a philosophy of pacifism or nonviolence, therefore, we can define the word "violence" broadly, without making the absurd claim that all destruction should or can be avoided. Personally, I define "violence" as: a rejection or denial of the unique and meaningful individuality of a being. Rejecting that another being has a unique and meaningful individual existence independent from our own can lead us to impose our wills or passions on them by force. Such force can be physical and cause physical injury or even death, but it can also be emotional, psychological or even spiritual. In her book Living With Honour, Emma Restall Orr talks about the Welsh and Gealic words for "face," and invokes the notion of "being face-to-face" as at the heart of what honor means in Celtic society. An act of violence against another is an act of dishonor, refusing to come face-to-face, diminishing and disempowering others, alienating and isolating them and denying them relationship with us, denying our interconnection.

We can also act violently towards ourselves; this kind of self-violence is more often emotional or spiritual than physical and so less often acknowledged. But if we remember the definition of violence, then we realize that any time we reject our own individuality as unique and meaningful, any time we deny our capacity for creative engagement with the world, we commit an act of spiritual violence against our own beings. This diminishment of our own being is why we so often seek to justify violence, insisting that it is actually inevitable or necessary destruction in which we had no choice or active participation. When we have the capacity and opportunity to choose, and yet forfeit that choice thoughtlessly, rejecting our capacity to act as a unique individual "face-to-face" with another, we act violently not only against the other, but against ourselves. For every act of violence, both victim and violator become "faceless," both are dishonored and diminished.

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Pagan Values: Go Play Outside!

"Go play outside," my dad would tell us on nice summer days. And my brother and I would go tumbling out the backdoor, ready to climb trees or dance through the sprinkler in the backyard, eager to splash through neighborhood creeks, scale old wooden jungle gyms, or chase after frisbees in the wide meadowy fields nearby. Never mind the scrapes and bruises (and two broken arms in one summer!), the muddy pant cuffs and worn-through knees, the sunburns and bug bites. "Go play outside." What a simple, wonderful command!

And it's one I'm still as eager to follow, as I am to give. Sometimes I think that simple, earnest suggestion, more than anything else, has been the most valuable and meaningful gift Druidry has given me these past several years. The encouragement and the permission to go outside and play; it's something that we need more as adults when so many Serious Important Grown-Up Things seem to demand our time and attention. Just learning to lighten up, be silly, climb a tree or collect pretty stones and weeds in the park, run or dance or skip or throw my arms up towards the sun--I need those things, those moments and opportunities to be child-like and joyful, to revel with complete abandon in the glory of living in a beautiful, messy natural world.

I don't know if other Pagan writers experience this odd whine of feedback ringing in their ears, when one desire comes too close to another, one value rubs up against another.... There are times when I want to fill this blog with that single, concise directive, over and over: Go play outside! You lovely people, for gods' sake, go play outside! Step away from the computer screen, get up from your desk, open a window, unlock the door, step into the beautiful world and breathe deep. But on the other hand: read my stuff! Stay here, listen, let us sit and think quietly and seriously for a while, let us exchange stories and experiences, see what we can learn from one another.

Of course, I want you to read what I write. I want us to communicate, to converse, to share and explore and ruminate together. I love the outdoors, the shorelines and the horizons and the twilights where I can slip into the liminal wildness of nature. But I also love to write. I could spend hours in front of a computer, tweaking and revising and chewing on my lip, working to say what I really want to say. I love the gritty feeling of satisfaction when I manage to write something interesting, substantive, maybe even poetic or inspiring. It's like the grit of dirt that reminds you these vegetables come from your own modest garden. So of course I want you to read what I write. It's a gift, it's why I write, so that I can give what I have written away to whoever is willing to receive. But then.... o, but then. If you're in here reading blog posts instead of going outside to play....

Hear it?! Hear that whine? The harsh ringing of a microphone too close to the speaker....

This week I had the honor, and pleasure, of being a guest writer over at Druid Journal. My post, "Pagan Values: Ecology, Environmentalism & Practical Pacifism", took many hours of struggle, writing and revising, thinking and rethinking, but through that process I discovered and explored some exciting ideas about the nature of creative nonviolence and its parallel in the environmentalist movement. I'll be expanding on some of those thoughts in this blog over the next few weeks, but in the meantime I would love for you to hop on over to check out this first enthusiastic plunge into the subject.

I know, I know, there are so many interesting things to read right now, especially on the subject of Pagan values, virtues and ethics. How can I bring myself to ask you to read yet another article online, when green fields and blue skies and warm summer rains are just waiting to be enjoyed? But I promise, I'll do my best to make my posts worth reading, I'll cram in as much thoughtfulness and controversy and clever turns-of-phrase as I can; if you promise that, once in a while, you'll take a break to just step outside, stretch your arms wide towards the sun and give a great big bear-hug to your favorite tree. Do we have a deal?

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Relationship & Story: Exploring Ethics from a Pagan Perspective

The beginning of June marks the beginning of the first-ever International Pagan Values Blogging Month, and I couldn't be more excited! I also couldn't be busier, as I juggle schedules, arrange for my summer vacation, plan for my up-coming birthday and help my boyfriend move into his new apartment. So, I hope you will forgive me if I kick off this month's posts with a review of two excellent books on "Pagan values" already out there in circulation and well worth reading: Living With Honour: A Pagan Ethics by Emma Restall Orr, and The Other Side of Virtue, by Brendan Myers. Within the next few days, I'll also be guest posting over at Druid Journal on ecology, environmentalism and practical pacifism, as an introduction to a four(ish)-part series on the role of pacifism, violence and warriorhood in Paganism. I'll be updating here again to let you know when that post is up, so be sure to hop on over to check it out! Until then, enjoy the following review, first published in Sky, Earth, Sea: A Journal of Practical Spirituality (Spring 2009).

"The greatest achievement of spirit: the ability to transform nearly anything--even our suffering and tragedy--into art."

- Myers, The Other Side of Virtue

As the Pagan community continues to change and grow, establishing itself as a thriving contemporary spiritual tradition (or more accurately, traditions!), the needs of this diverse and somewhat chaotic community also continue to develop beyond those of first-generation neophytes looking for initiatory experiences and basic how-to guides. One aspect of this evolving need for a deeper, more complex engagement with the Pagan spiritual path--so familiar to those who demand "advanced" Pagan texts that move beyond the typical "Druidry 101," for instance--can be seen in the community's desire to establish its own unique sense of ethics and virtue apart from the divinely mandated good-and-evil dualism of a monotheistic mainstream. From the earliest modern practitioners of Wicca and Druidry, we find examples of moral formulations: the Wiccan Rede, the Law of Threefold Return, and the collection of Druidic triads, to name only a few. And yet many of us can see that these simple codes often leave much to be desired, faltering under pressure or deteriorating into self-justifying rhetoric. Two new texts published recently by O Books, however, rise to the challenge and take on the complex, wild and vital questions of ethical action and virtuous living, seeking new ways of approaching such ancient problems: Living With Honour: A Pagan Ethics, by Emma Restall Orr, and Brenden Myers's text, The Other Side of Virtue: Where our virtues come from, what they really mean, and where they might be taking us.

Both texts center on the idea of relationship, more specifically that between the self and the world (and those in it), as the defining aspect of what we should consider an ethical or virtuous life. Emma Restall Orr sets out in her book, Living With Honour, to provide a clear basis for making practical (or "applied") ethical choices apart from the moral doctrines laid out by monotheistic religions and secular culture, which have tended in recent times to be dualistic and hierarchical. The result is a uniquely Pagan conception of ethics based on the primacy of "honorable relationship," an on-going, active engagement with the world and those living in it, guided by courage, generosity and loyalty. While Restall Orr focuses primarily on how this relationship with the world shapes our everyday choices and behavior in order to form a healthy interconnection with other beings, in Brenden Myers's work The Other Side of Virtue, the author trains his attention on the engaged individual, exploring how a self-aware relationship with Immensities helps each of us to discover, as well as to create, "who we are." For Myers, self-knowledge presents a philosophical "problem," and the work of resolving it cultivates a person's virtue in the form of human excellence. Both authors, however, recognize a core ambivalence about assuming such relationship with the world will always be safely benign, challenging the easy dichotomy between good and evil so common to monotheistic religions. In searching for an alternative ethical foundation, both Myers and Restall Orr evoke Pagan and Druidic notions of creative story-telling as the means by which we might shape our lives with a sense of meaning, beauty and truth.

Emma Restall Orr's text might be considered, for many readers, to be the more practical and down-to-earth of the two. She devotes the first half of this clear-sighted and articulate book to deconstructing common (and commonly misunderstood) terms such as "Pagan," "morality," and "honor", as well as developing a broad understanding of the many schools of thought that have contributed to the study of ethics over the centuries. Leaping over whole philosophical systems in a single bound, she is likely to leave some readers a little giddy with vertigo, but her treatment is invariably sharp and fair, seeking the central tenants and common threads that will be most illuminating without risking oversimplification. Her careful exploration of the multifarious foundations and processes that go into making everyday choices--from emotion and instinct, to reason and the rule of law--prepares the reader for the "applied ethics" of later chapters. Further, her brief description of various Pagan traditions and their unique moral formulations provides a place for the contemplative Pagan reader to find an initial foothold of familiar subject matter, while also clarifying (for Pagan and non-Pagan readers alike) how one can establish and maintain a functional ethical model outside of the doctrines of monotheistic religions and secular humanism. Scattered throughout these sections of analysis and dissection are Restall Orr's characteristic flashes of narrative--dancing in the rain, savoring an apple, reading quietly in the park--which give flavor and moving insight into the potential of engaged ethical living.

These more poetic moments become less common in the second half of Living with Honour, as Restall Orr buckles down to the nitty-gritty and addresses many contemporary social and political issues of our time. Exploring everything from suicide and euthanasia to animal rights and vegetarianism, parenting and romance to ecology and materialism, she applies her ethic of "honorable relationship" with intensity and consistency. Her approach puts the individual's ability to choose freely, no matter how difficult or convoluted the circumstances, at the heart of an ethical life, and eschews any reliance on socially-imposed "morality" or external rule of law. This text does not aim to rewrite the shared assumptions of a Judeo-Christian mainstream, but instead celebrates the anarchistic, pluralistic tendencies of the modern Pagan community as essential to developing a sense of individual responsibility ("response-ability") that relates more directly and receptively to a world that is always complex and in flux. Because of her intensity, however, some of her conclusions may make readers cringe (especially those passages which call for strict veganism or which challenge the usual notions of death); her thorough deconstruction of our potential for careless exploitation is pitiless, daunting, even at times overwhelming. One might wonder how it is ever possible to have enough knowledge or power to be capable of making truly effective ethical choices in the face of a huge and infinitely complicated world.

However, her unfaltering emphasis on personal, responsive relationship softens her own tendency towards moralizing, saving the text from becoming just another example of imposing doctrine. Instead, Restall Orr works tirelessly to remind readers that ethical living must be guided, above all, by an open and ever-changing experience of the world itself, here and now. In the third and final section of her book, she addresses the feelings of fear, impotence, inertia and confusion that often keep us from acting according to our own sense of ethics. As an antidote to such feelings, she suggests a kind of stubborn, loving integrity that seeks for a meaningful, empowering sense of self immersed in an infinitely beautiful world. In these final pages, she tells a story of scared awe and gratitude, in which the choice to act ethically is rarely ever a choice at all, but only the natural response that empathy and integrity evoke in a receptive individual willing to place honorable relationship above pure self-interest or familiar fears.

In some ways, this poetic conclusion to Restall Orr's work leads naturally to the first chapters of Brenden Myers's The Other Side of Virtue, which opens with a warm circle of storytellers gathered around a crackling fire, inviting the reader to join. While Restall Orr finds powerful, ecstatic inspiration above all in the wildness of the natural world, Myers is clearly moved and motivated strongly by the shared life and work of community and locates the beginning of his discussion of virtue in this setting. The first "movement" of the text (which is structured like a song or musical score) plays informally with images and metaphors to be developed more fully later on, asserting aphorisms and even making jokes. Reading along, it is almost impossible not to begin to engage the text directly, chuckling aloud or scribbling notes in the margin, developing a dialogue, a conversation of ideas and possibilities. While Restall Orr prepares the reader to enter into the thick of ethical analysis by first covering the familiar ground of Pagan tradition, Myers uses a different approach to his task of defining virtue: establishing a sense of community that will run through the rest of the book and give landscape and texture to the path it will trace.

In the following three movements, Myers proceeds to examine the historical development of the concept of "virtue," beginning with the tribal culture of Heroic societies, through the developing emphasis on reason in ancient Classical philosophy, following the various permutations over the centuries as they produced humanism, romanticism and contemporary examples, real and fictional, of honorable heroes and great men. Throughout this discussion, Myers includes useful details about the changes in society and politics, as well as myriad quotations from ancient texts, to give context and perspective to the evolving definition of human virtue. His examination of particular thinkers and writers, such as Shakespeare, Machiavelli and Nietzsche, provide stepping stones through history for the reader; however, at times they give the text almost too specific a focus, as though standing in for whole schools of thought without giving the reader enough perspective to see how these trends weave together in a broader theory. Meanwhile, the influence of Judeo-Christian morality and its redefinition of virtue as that of passivity and obedience, so intriguingly mentioned in the book's overture, is left almost entirely unmentioned. Here is one place where Restall Orr's sweeping but sometimes overly broad discussion of philosophical concepts can compliment Myers's more specialized focus and remind the reader of the "bigger picture" that might otherwise be lost in the historical milieu.

If the discussion of virtue's historical development, although very well-researched and highly informative, feels a bit dense or cobbled together at times, the fifth movement of The Other Side is where Myers really hits his stride. In it, he attempts to lay bare the "logical structure" of virtue itself, as he understands it, and the slowly-unfolding weaving together of seemingly disparate ideas from previous sections is by turns masterful, musical and mind-blowing. Here we are confronted in a kind of pure contemplation with some of the "Immensities" (Myers's term) that Restall Orr addresses more directly and practically in the later chapters of her own work: the Earth, Death (or Time), and Other People; as well as some of the responses their presence in our lives can evoke: wonder, integrity, and humanity. For Myers, the issue of relationship--the place of the individual within a community and landscape--comes to the forefront in "threshold" experiences whereby a person's sense of identity and self-knowledge is challenged, shaken to its core and thus transformed by an engagement with something both infinitely knowable and intimately overwhelming.

Unlike Restall Orr, who believes that an open engagement with the world usually renders the "ethical" course of action obvious and natural, Myers suggests that we develop our sense of virtue, or human excellence, precisely in those situations when an Immensity calls our most fundamental assumptions about the self and the world into question--that is, precisely when we are least certain of what we once believed to be obvious. His discussion of how these experiences shape us, however, is remarkably similar to Restall Orr's. He too emphasizes our inherent ability to choose as both a revelatory and creative act, at once revealing ourselves to our own self-awareness and helping to create those very selves. The choices we make are shaped by our sense of story (what sociologists might call, on a larger scale, our mythology, what Druids might call our "song") and the role we see ourselves playing as that story unfolds. There is no guarantee that Fortune will be kind or an Immensity benign--in fact, the potentially transformative nature of threshold experiences might be considered inescapably destructive, even traumatic to some extent. But with a strong sense of story, rather than a reliance on traditional definitions of right and wrong, we both discover and create meaning and beauty in our lives through the choices we pursue at such times.

Of course, the study of ethics and the exploration of virtue are not precisely one and the same. On the one hand, virtue is only one way among many to approach the question of ethics (including relativism, utilitarianism, deontology, etc.); on the other hand, there are certain amoral or nonmoral aspects to our understanding virtue itself (such as beauty, physical skills and even good fortune), so that it is difficult to see one as fitting snugly as a subcategory into the other. It may be a gross simplification to say that virtue concerns the effects of a relationship with an Immense world on the nature and knowledge of the self, while ethics is the study of how this relationship is expressed in our behavior and practical choices in everyday life. Yet it seems these two approaches are essentially the ways in which two remarkable contemporary Druid authors have chosen to explore a subject of vast complexity and vital relevance for every human being today. These two books, published so fortuitously within a few months of each other, should most definitely be read together, and read more than once. The questions they raise and problems they wrestle have continuing importance fundamental to our perception of ourselves and the world we live in with one another. And as our own stories change and evolve over the course of our lives, these texts will continuing to offer fresh new insight and possibilities for meaning, beauty, knowledge and truth.

• Brenden Myers, The Other Side of Virtue: Where our virtues come from, what they really mean, and where they might be taking us, O Books, 2008.


• Emma Restall Orr, Living With Honour: A Pagan Ethics, O Books, 2007.

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Yewberry: A Myth Retold

Now it is the end of autumn, I lay my body down.
          A hush. The hill is still humming with the day's warmth, the sun sinking into the far shore of the lake. For a moment, I can see it, as though with other eyes, submerged, rippling beneath the waters in arcing liquid wings of flame and dusk, flexing, alternating, a thousand of them, wings sprouting from the round, warm body settling into the depths. Then the vision is gone.
          I creep silently along the shore, my bare feet numb and rustling through the long, dried grasses of autumn. The mud is moist and rough on my soles, each step sending echoes of energy sliding up my calves. A thick cushion of warm air lingers among the brittle stalks as if radiating from deeper roots, from the earth itself, untouched by the cooling evening breeze that moves above, circling my knees and waist, wrapping my skirts around me. Already, I can feel the worlds sliding apart, the space between opening. This was a mild day, still, the kind that will come once or twice more before the snows take hold. Winter has a while yet before it's claimed everything, even the steep citadel of noon. But I can feel it coming. The sunlight is low and long against the horizon now, sinking, slipping away; nothing in my power can hold it, nothing will hold it any longer. My body tightens, muscles contracted, but I steady myself and walk on.
          Soon, the place I am seeking comes into view across the peaceful, darkening waters: the stunted crabapple tree on the sloping shore of the small island. The lake gapes away on either side of this unremarkable jut of land, a pair of dragon's jaws poised open in perfect stillness. I turn my gaze upward for a moment, breathing deeply, calming myself to the very center of my being. Still, ripples of vibration run through me, escaping my sturdy sense of gravity. Passing over my skin in pulsing miniature bursts of light, the births of tiny stars that flare and die back into the quiet of my body. The sky rumples like a veil pushed up from the horizon in sensual folds of lazuli blues and smoky lavender, and beneath it night is climbing gently upwards. The tree, too, I can see, folds in on itself with age, slumping to brush the wild grasses with the tips of its old limbs. Most of the fruit has fallen, now, and its leaves are dry and stiff. The breeze brings with it the scent of faint, damp rot subtle within the smell of wet and chill.
          I let my skirts fall, slipping the cotton blouse up over my head. A button snags on a strand of hair, tugging it free from the braid. I could be undressing for a lover; I feel my own body young and alive under my fingers, undoing each clasp, reaching, stretching to uncover myself. I shake myself loose, the clothes collapsed around my feet. For just a moment, wild fear jolts through every joint and muscle, my whole form going rigid and small under the heavy expanse of twilit sky. I am an animal again, naked and soft and pale, ears pressed flat and twitching, every limb tense. I would run, bolt from the sound of panting, that moment I can hear coming, but fear pins me as if to the air itself and I cannot move. I struggle and break, again and again, against the hot terror. I am shaking, shivering with sweat, and without even the presence of mind to move, suddenly I find myself stumbling. My knees hit spongy earth, the heels of my hands sinking beneath my weight into the bent grass, and I am leaning, wild and staring, over the edge of the water.
          Almost as quickly as it began, the terror vanishes. Resolving and dissolving before me, the white face of my body looks up at me from the glassy surface of the lake, watching. Now is the time to do it, she whispers, now, when we are young and alive, when we are full of our own will and our own desire. We must do it, it must be now, tonight. I stumble again to my feet, rubbing my hands against my hips leaving smudges of earth along their curves. I am myself once more, composed and held delicately apart. The animal I am settles down inside me, hot and quivering.
          Before entering the water, I search through the folds of discarded clothes, untying the small pouch from the cloth thong that had secured it. Then, I return to the shore.
          The water, unlike the ground of hills that surround it, holds no lingering heat from the day. A decisive step and I am in, a shuddering gasp escaping my lips, my mind again threatening to loose itself and plunge upwards, fleeing like light and warmth and sun into the cold void of winter and open ceaseless night. I fight for control. Searching out the furry heat where it curls tightly in the dark recesses of my body. I wade through the biting pain, arms spread skyward and back arched, and then I am clambering up onto land again, the island solid beneath me, my chest heaving with hard breath, the corners of my mouth wet with sobs of involuntary tears. But I am through. The old crabapple tree looms over me, twisted and kind against the starscape, and I lie panting, ripped and rendered whole again in my own aching body.


For an hour, perhaps longer, I rest like this, unmoving. My eyes half-open, I watch my breast slowly rising and falling in lazy rhythm. The moon has risen, almost full, over the far hills in the east. Shadows like blue echoes move of their own accord, pass over the undulations of the earth and the flat, glistening surface of the lake that spreads out on all sides around me, studded with reflected stars. Beneath the crabapple tree, my body is growing numb and clumsy, one hand still clenched reflexively around the small pouch. No flint or matches, fire is impossible even if I wanted it, and there is now no way home, no way back to the safety and warmth on the opposite shore.
          After a time, I pull myself up to lean against the trunk of the tree. The exposed skin stretched taut across my spine and shoulder blades rubs against the bark, but I am close to wandering now, and can barely feel the sensation. It must be now, and I am young, and I am so alive... Words stumble through my tiring mind without direction or sense. Undoing the pouch, I tug at the damp fabric, gently.
          Inside, the berries are wet, full and bright; they seem to glow, radiating like perfect red embers in the darkness. One or two are smashed, their juice slick and sticky on the skin of the others and seeping through the fabric. I imagine, with that vertigo again of some other sense, that I can feel it warm and pooling in my open palm, that I can smell the vague metallic smell of blood.
          I raise a berry to my lips and take it tenderly into the deep, warm cave of my mouth. I roll it with my tongue, breaking skin, sucking until I feel the flesh and juice sliding down my throat, cool and burning and stinging sweet. Then, when there is nothing left but the single, unbroken seed, I slip it out between my lips again and set it on a small stone nestled near me in the grass. I do this again, and again, slowly and carefully, until each new berry seems to break open with an unbearable softness, some scarlet slow-motion explosion that rocks my mind gently further and further from the moorings of my physical form.
          When every berry is gone, and the ritual almost done, I reach for the seed-covered stone. With another rock, I grind the seeds until they are shattered and gritty, the meat of their insides exposed. They will not find my body in the morning. My clothes will lay crumpled on the far shore, ghostly pale and stiff with crystal frost. I press and grind the poisonous seeds, and lift the stone to my mouth. They will wonder, perhaps, where I have gone, but they will never find me. Now, it is at the end of autumn, I lay my body down. I run my tongue over the cold, rough stone. Fear and desire well up at once, almost overtaking my quickening heart except for the certainty, the calm knowledge: it is too late. The cold and the poison have already begun their work, have already taken hold. I feel my body slipping, sinking, my mind unwinding into the black dome of endless space. Nothing in my power can keep it now. I see myself, still and pale blue, naked in curves and passed over by the shadows of the shivering tree limbs. The worlds are parting, creaking with the sound of ancient wood, gliding farther as every breath comes more slowly, more shallow than the last, and my soul is reaching, stretching to uncover itself, sliding into the opening space between.

How could I say what happened then? That was another life, another being, darkness and wind and the beating of wings. There had been a need--that was why it was always done, really, this suicide, this little death--a need to put an end to the rules of things, to step out of skin, beyond the confines of gravity. There was, in me, a deep capacity to suffer, and no reason for it. Only the tense need to sink, to follow it down, until even obscurity and pain could have no more power over me than a stiff current of air. And I rode them, sacred winds, I rode them far to the horizon. Flattened, feathered and unfurled against the swift, unflinching line of time and season, I outflew need. It was long since I had forgotten how to desire.
          Want, longing, anticipation were so long forgotten. I had followed my need down into a darkness where even need itself could not hold, but dissolved, guttering like a spent sun, and there I lingered, hovering, a white shadow blotting out the stars. Sometimes the memory of desire passed below me like a twisting ribbon of river through a shrunken landscape, but I was a spirit moving over the waters, pale mist claiming the darkness, ruling over the empty world. For how long? How could I know? What is time without desire to mark it? How could I say what existence then was like? To articulate death to the living, to carry the memory of it over. No, it is impossible to tell.
          I remember a dream, only, a memory of memory. That's all. I moved through dream, through thrumming song, murmuring pain and wind that moved in groans and echoes, the familiarity of formlessness, the arbitrary descent into form, all this I glided on, singing. And the world could not hold me, could not grasp me or keep me still.
          But then, there was a touch. Like a warm, slow breath. And I seemed to hear my name on the wind, the wind that had always been empty and utterly wild. Now, there was shape to it. Air that moved through the body of some new and unknown being, carved out of noise by throat, teeth, parted lips. There was voice, and the voice grasped and held. I snagged. My body stirred.

My body stirs, though I am yet far from it, watching. Pale and wasted, it seems at first only a jumble of bones, the limp corpse of a swan, long neck kinked, pinched off awkwardly between vertebrae, feathers scattered and bedraggled with reddish mud and rain. Wrinkled folds of white and shadow turn in on themselves, a figure smashed and stranded on the shore of the tiny island hunched low in the center of the lake.
          Mist rises from the hard clear water, and barely a breeze disturbs the senseless form of my body where it lies. Someone sighs, exhales. One long pinion shifts under the movement of this warm, slow breath--uncomfortable and stiff, still embedded deep in my cold skin. I can feel it. I can feel it, pulling, twisting with every turn of the air, weightless and hollow like a needle sewn into my flesh. I can feel each one, my body punctuated by hundreds, my body, that soggy vulnerable thing crumpled beneath the twisted dark limbs of the old tree. Another sigh, long, unrelenting, and each quill responds again, piercing hot and sharp in a symphony of pain, all the way to muscle, to numbing bone. A rolling, clenching nausea ripples through me. I moan, my body moans, and we breathe ourselves startled and quick together in one sudden moment.
          It is dawn, or just past, and the light presses everything flat and immediate, robbed of shadow, without depth or color. My eyes barely open, I search blearily the abstract images of morning as they close in around me; the tree branches above me, the clenched pink buds that clot along every twig against a background of low, gray clouds. Every part of me aches with cold, each toe, the arches of my feet, my calves sloppy with disuse, my hipbones peaking like mountain ridges, collapsing into the starved valley of my stomach. My fingers, my brittle wrists suspended at the ends of strange, thin arms, the weight of my own chest pressing down to meet my spine, my throat caved in and retching, rattling with breath. I am sick, sickened of myself, and anger rips through me hot and resentful, disgusted with form, raging to tear open the flimsy walls of my capillaries, the limpid membrane of each shivering cell. But even anger has a body now, and I am weak with it. Too weak to sustain disgust, to feed my own wretchedness. Heat soaks out of my body and into the ground, smelling of urine, as I slip back into the rocking dark of sleep.


I was mistaken. When I awake again, someone has brushed away the last vestige of snow and rotting layer of leaves I had drawn around me as a cloak of feathers in my delirium; someone has cleaned my limbs and face with cool handfuls of water from the lake, rubbed grime and frost away until the skin beneath is flushed and slightly raw. It occurs to me that, yes, after all I'm alive. I am alive.
          My body is still unfamiliar, long and hard in the grass. I test my muscles, the utter ends of each nerve, clenching and relaxing, listening for the twitch of response. Sensation trickles and slides underneath my grayed translucent skin, dark serpentine waters wearing away at an encasing of ice. The world is full of the sound of melting, the pulsing, rhythmic falling and slipping of water into the ground. My throat cracks open like an egg and fluted notes escape, drop, catch a current of air and leave me breathless. Again, someone sighs, who isn't myself.
          He crouches a few yards away, gazing out across the water. Delicate tongues of green reach up and uncurl around his firmly planted feet, new grass and the gathering liquid-pearl buds of snowdrops suspended heavy from the tips of their bent stems. He is worn and sleepless as though from long illness, but the sun is warm on his broad back and bowed head, burrowing long, light fingers into the hair along the nape of his pale neck. Even from here I seem to feel his blood rushing steadily through his veins, murmuring with a deep vitality.
          At first I don't think he sees me, but then he turns. I do not move. Perhaps I still cannot. He comes slowly to lean over me, watching intently, his breath held in suspension, strung up and utterly vulnerable. Behind him, the mid-morning sun burns dense in a wet sky, pouring thickly over his shoulders, seeping into the wispy waves of his hair. Everything smells of verdant earth and the sweetness of blossoms. He brushes a few downy feathers away where they have sprouted again around my collarbone--but no, they are the round, silky petals of the old crabapple tree. He breathes out and they scatter easily from my skin. Will he do anything but exhale? His eyes circle a darkness, each iris pitted and blue, and though mine have been open, I close them again, as if to fool him, or coax him.
          Still, I do not try to move. I wait. Shut against sunlight, I move my thoughts, wandering into each extremity of my awkward body, seeking my edges, liminal where they touch against the world. Then subtly, gradually, so that I hardly know their beginning, his fingers too are tracing my consciousness, breaking open each new nerve, sensation trickling into every corner of my frame as he ventures rough hands, warm and large and solid, along each cusp and cup of my body. I lead them, those quiet hands, with the waking of my mind, shuddering sometimes at their resistance and turning then to follow.
          How long do we go on? They will say for an eternity, a brief moment. For a moment, his lips climb the pale slope of my neck the way a new sun swells and bursts suddenly above the hilltops, then his tongue circling the ruddy altars of my nipples in holy prayer, his mouth drinking in light like milk from my breasts and, through me, from the earth itself beneath us. They will call him a child, a young god, a lover. I fill with shining undulations cresting and spilling over in birdsong. Sunlight pools around us, rolling in giddy tides. He pushes my heart to beat, my lungs to work, he draws the blood down to every end of me, breathing hot on the animal sleeping in me, dark and soft with fur. They will say, when I slip back again into the space between worlds slipping open, he follows me down, cleaving them and clinging one to the other, bringing aching brightness, drawing everything together, pulling my body, breath, pulling us upward into life again.
          They will say, for they will not find us resting where we lay, so this is spring.

This short story was first published in Sky, Earth, Sea: A Journal of Practical Spirituality, Summer 2009.

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Angels, Demons & Old Men in Bathrobes

Walking home from the movie theater just now--beneath the glorious sun filtering down through the overlapping translucent dark-veined jade of a thousand leaves exhaling praise for root, water and earth towards the endless cloudless cerulean sky--I couldn't help but admit to myself that I have a deeper anger with the Catholic Church than I'm usually willing to acknowledge.

What else could explain the tears of relief? Quickly blinked away, of course, but still. When that bomb of antimatter exploded miles above the Vatican, and the walls themselves which men had made, the sculpted columns and stone angels, the repressive brick and dusty mortar, trembled to their very foundations and almost fell.... there were tears of relief in my eyes. I almost cried, watching a Dan Brown movie. Starring Tom Hanks. Of all the ridiculous things!

But this morning started out poorly, when it comes to the Church. The report released yesterday about the thousands of cases of child abuse in Ireland, actively covered up by this corrupt and decrepit institution, was weighing heavily on my heart, as was the continuing controversy about the Frosts mentioned in T. Thorn Coyle's blog recently. What we human beings sometimes do out of a sense of tradition and institutional order. The day was already hot by the time I left my apartment for lunch, and I wanted nothing more than to be somewhere dark and cool for a little while, somewhere where I might find an hour or two of relief from grief and that creeping feeling of helplessness. I walked past the movie theater on my way to the vegan restaurant and noticed they were showing "Angels & Demons," the new film based on Dan Brown's prequel novel to The Da Vinci Code. I decided to catch the 2:50 PM show. Why? Because I'm a fan of Dan Brown and his work? Certainly not. Frankly, I think his writing is irritatingly trite, his plots contrived (seriously, the butler did it? that's your surprise ending?), and his "puzzles" obvious; not to mention his terrible disregard for even basic historical research. (Before you object that "it's just fiction!" let me say this: there is no reason why good, well-written fiction can't also include accurate information about the histories and mythologies it invokes and portrays.) So, why see this new movie, then? F**k the Catholic Church, that's why.

To be fair, the movie was quite passable as entertainment. Happily, I know absolutely nothing about the Illuminati legends the plot centered on, and so I wasn't tortured by the constant interruption of my academic background in comparative religious studies about the rampant inaccuracies and misinformation (as I had been when I read The Da Vinci Code several years ago). I was just another ignorant movie-goer, enjoying a hot afternoon in the air-conditioned theater, munching on my Junior Mints and sipping my Pepsi, indulging myself. Sweeping camera shots of Vatican city and the breath-taking architecture of the chapels and cathedrals dotting the maze of streets had me aching to travel to Europe. To see history. Real history, not the fledgling kind we have here in the United States. Thousands of years of history, thousands of years of humanity thriving and writhing, moving and breathing and living together, building things and tearing them down again, rejecting and incorporating bits and pieces of the past into the ever-evolving mishmash of the present. The setting alone was worth the six dollars. Well, that and Ewan McGregor in a priest's collar.

Still, the ending left me disappointed. (For those of you concerned about spoilers, skip the rest of this paragraph.) I was grateful that the Illuminati threat turned out to be an elaborate ploy of the real antagonist, intentionally playing on the fears of the Catholic Church to throw off suspicion. Yet there was something about the noncommittal twist revelation that left me cold: no, there was no institutional conspiracy, just a single man, one crazy extremist. The Church was flawed but well-intentioned after all, and all those creaky old men in their lace bathrobes and slippers were justified in the end.

But the truth is... those same creaky old men are the ones who, in real life, sit comfortably behind their gold-adorned doors, shuffling papers and blocking investigations into abuse scandals. They are the ones who, when electing a new pope in real life, chose a man known for his theological rigidity more than his ecumenical openness, a man who has gone on to pronounce statements of dismissal and intolerance against several of the world's religions, a man who has retracted and undermined most of the progress made since Vatican II towards more inclusive, feminist language and symbolism within Church writings and ritual. The truth is, it takes no crazy extremist kidnapping cardinals and calling in bomb threats in the name of strengthening the Church; the men who justify child abuse and corruption for the sake of the institution appear mild and innocuous, doddering old men in bathrobes and funny hats. Movies like "Angels & Demons" play on the flash and flair of the single maniac, when the truth is much more subtle, much more insidious.

The funny thing is, for a long time I was the first one to speak up, to defend organized religion and even the Catholic Church itself against my more vehement atheist friends. I understood the metaphor of the garden lattice screen, offering a basic support over which the organic life of the spiritual laity could grow. I appreciated and admired the complex mythologies, art and ritual of organized religion; really, I still do. I tried for a long time to be a "good Catholic" as well as a good follower of Christ, a good Druid, a good person. But the grief and pain of disjoint and contradiction weighed too heavily. How could I remain part of the Church, how could I intentionally choose to be a member of a religion that rejected me, rejected my calling because of my gender, and rejected my basic sense of decency in the name of some greater need for institutional preservation? How could anyone knowingly choose that?

Walking home from the theater, breathing in sunlight and the sighs of trees, I kept thinking that the Catholic Church has so little faith in the God they claim to worship, and so little faith in us. I found myself pleading--with the Church, with myself, with all of us--to trust. Trust. Trust in human beings to preserve that which is good and beautiful and meaningful, trust in Spirit to work its own way out in the hearts and minds of people living their lives with love and kindness and hope. Trust that huge, sprawling, stagnant institutions are not necessary, and never have been, that they cannot protect us and they rarely serve anyone but themselves. The world is so beautiful, messy and wild and utterly full of light, and we all seem to spend so much time trying to build up walls that shield us from that understanding. If only we could find it in ourselves to trust, to let go a little more, to relinquish our need to control and to be certain. If we could admit to our mistakes, our flaws and our abuses, instead of pushing them off on others or striving to conceal them. If we could trust ourselves and each other to be strong enough to face a world untamed by institution and authority, if we could pull down our own idols of power and remember instead our empathy for the disenfranchised, the impoverished and the suffering. If only... if only....

...

My father called just now as I was writing. He is a good person, a loving, gentle man and a supportive father; he's also Catholic, born and raised. I asked him what he thought of these abuses, about the cover-ups and reluctant apologies that come only long after denial and obfuscation have ceased to be an option. He grew quiet, almost bashful, and could only say, sadly, that it was something he had to deal with, that he had worked through his own anger about it, and that it helped to remember it was only a few, not everyone in the Church, not even the vast majority. Then, he put my mother on the phone, who warned me against my "judgmental tone." But this is not judgment--this is my expression of sorrow and anger, and I cannot apologize for it.

What sorrows me deeply is not that the whole of Catholicism is corrupt and misguided. There is so much good there, really, in its mythologies, its rich art and music, in its Mysteries and in the good, kind people who live peacefully and decently in their own ordinary ways. What grieves me is precisely that such abuse and suffering are caused by a few, a few men with power, who then use the goodness and kindness of others as a justification and a shield to hide behind. What confuses me is why, in the face of such corruption, that kind and decent vast majority doesn't rise up in angry protest and denounce and reject and rebuild anew, rather than shuffling their feet and submitting passively to the whims of its leaders. This is the downfall of hierarchy: that nothing will change simply because the majority hopes and prays and wishes for change. This is not a democracy: the laity doesn't get a vote, they do not have a voice. And while there are many ways to respond to and address the corruption of those in power, I cannot see my way to the choice made by so many, to remain silent and sad instead of taking action. I wish I could better understand them, but I have made my choice, the only one I felt I could make in keeping with my conscience: I chose to leave.

And in some ways, I know that inside of me is still an angry child raging against a parent Church that, in a time of most pressing need, turned away and chose the selfishness of self-preservation over the love and acceptance it had always promised. That gave me no choice but to leave, to strike out on my own. The child in me is angry and sniffling back her tears, and squaring her shoulders, and promising to herself that she will be stronger for it, that she will face the world with courage even in her solitude, and grow up to be the kind of woman who will not turn her back on those in need.

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Finding Your Center: A Meditation on Movement

"This is sometimes known as the 'Devil's Chord,'" my guitar instructor says, spreading his fingers claw-like across the frets. "And not because it's a bitch to play. In medieval times composers avoided it; they believed its dissonance made it inherently unstable and inappropriate for truly well-written music."

First finger in the first fret on the thickest string, second finger in the second fret on the second-thickest string, third finger in the third fret....

"But don't worry about what it sounds like," he says as I fumble, strum and grimace. "This is an exercise in changing chords. The point is to learn how to move from the tritone chord, to this"--first finger down to fourth string, second finger to third, third finger to second, fourth to first--"with as little movement as possible."

"That's impossible!" My fingers feel stretched to their limits already, straining just to maintain their current position. Next to me, the instructor cradles his own instrument, hand curled around the smoothly polished rosewood neck. He moves his fingers between chords, back and forth, back and forth, with a relaxed fluidity that makes me frown and laugh at myself.

I'm not sure where all this motivation is coming from recently, but I'm certainly not one to object. I've spent what feels like the last couple years taking one day at a time, passing on plans, moving very slowly, cautiously, through life. Life on my own. A life of solitude and, often, a great deal of quiet. There were times when I might go two or three days in a row without uttering a word, content to spend my days off puttering around my apartment, reading or surfing blog posts online, doodling in my sketch books or walking in the park. Writing sometimes felt like speaking, except without the throat and tongue getting in on the action. Instead of the deep vibration of breath in the body, there was the tapping at the keyboard, quick fingers, "chicken pecking" they called it in tech ed. class back in sixth grade.

But over the past several weeks, I've been doing a lot of talking. Long phone calls with family and old friends, not to mention juggling a relationship that remains long-distance until the beginning of June. Then there are the in-person conversations, the laughter and joking at work, the singing and guitar practice, the running, yoga and twice-daily meditation. That's right--I've been meditating twice a day! In the morning, I set my alarm fifteen minutes earlier than usual, drag myself through my usual routine and then sit quietly in my living room, gazing into the flicker of a small tea light. At night, I make myself some tea or sit with a glass of water, close my eyes and center, align my many bodies, circulate energy and, finally, sip gently and offer libation. The hot liquid of the tea or the cold ripples of clear water trickle down inside of me like rain working its way through cracks in stone. Fire and water, wind and energy. Even moments of relative stillness have their own sort of movement, a pulse, the circulation of blood and breath. The more engaged I become, the more momentum I can feel, urging at the base of my spine, sweeping me along on the soft soles of my feet.

"The key is not in the fingers, but the thumb," my guitar instructor says, smiling patiently. "See how my thumb barely moves at all? It stays anchored against the neck and gives the support that makes the loose movement of the other fingers possible. Don't worry, you're already doing this with most of your chords without even noticing. This is just a warm-up exercise to teach you to pay closer attention..."

I'm fiddling with strings as he speaks, already beginning to get the hang of it. I try a few familiar chords, and what he says is true--I've already been learning to switch from one to another with an economy of movement, my thumb rocking gently as my fingers drape and press over the ribbed metal of the strings. I go slow, watching the pale knuckles of my left hand, tense and release, squeeze and skip, moving in and out of the diabolus in musica.

The more I move, the more I feel as though I can sense that still center deep within myself, the hub around which everything else is turning. Recently, with the encouragement of my boyfriend (who I think really just likes the way I look in sweats, bless him), I've taken up yoga in addition to my weekly running routine. Gliding gently, fluidly, from one form into the next, feeling each pose stretch my limbs (a little farther each day) and warm my skin to perspiring, I notice those places in my body that hold their shape. The delicious natural curve of the spine as I sweep from virabhadrasana into trikonasana and back. The long, hard cord of balance that suddenly pulls taut from the top of my skull all the way to my tailbone, heel and down through the wooden floorboards for that split second when, in vrksasana, I spread my toes, stop wobbling and take my hand off the wall. After two weeks of this practice, sometimes at work I find myself with the distinct sense that I'm floating, that my body is suspended like the hot-blooded gwyar around some calas-like core, and that I'm not really walking at all, but willing myself from one place to another, wafting or sailing along on the intending breath of nwyfer, spirit. Wind, water, stone. Breath, blood, bone.

I find it fascinating how movement can teach us about stillness. Especially slow, deliberate movement done with attention, but even the quick flurry of desperation or panic. For all that time that I spent holding still, quietly waiting, there were times when that center seemed elusive. When I first began meditating off and on back in high school, this was one of the first things I noticed. I could sit very still, close my eyes and, eventually, lose my sense of the body as a bounded thing. I couldn't feel my hands resting on my thighs--all I could feel was the warm sensation of pressure on my thighs, and the warm sensation of support beneath my palms, but the two seemed distanced, unrelated. My mind seemed to unfurl into itself, into a spacious darkness in which the conscious mind always looked remarkably like a tiny, pale lima bean. Holding still, holding my body and thoughts still in meditation, taught me about my perimeter, about boundaries and limits and finitude, and the extent to which these things interpenetrate and become blurred, illusory.

But it is movement that teaches me about my center, about the eye of the storm that is my little living soul. You might think it would be the opposite--that in stillness we retreat to our center and take the time to settle down firmly and comfortably within ourselves; and that movement shows us our boundaries, our extremities, those parts of us that are always bumping into one another and rubbing raw on the external world. And maybe for some people that's how it is. Maybe I've just spent too long holding still, too long nesting in my center and not enough time venturing out to sing the dawn bright. But these days, I'm amazed by how movement and activity, how work, sends shivers of recognition and peace into the silence of my center, like so many pond ripples suggesting the secret, sinking stone.

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Security, Prosperity, Generosity

My dear readers,

Times is hard.

Hopefully you already know Jeff Lilly, at least through his insightful writings over at Druid Journal. Jeff is a fellow member of AODA, a dear friend of mine, and a wonderful human being if ever I knew one. Only a few months ago, 'friends' was all we were, but since mid-March, we have become much more than that to one another.

Life works in mysterious ways. For the past two months, it seems the churning mechanisms of coincidence that spin this Universe of ours have been conspiring to make us happy. Family and social circumstances seemed perfectly in sync, bringing our lives closer together, smoothing the path before us. If I didn't know better, I would have suspected that we were merely madly in love, but it was more than that. Love couldn't explain why his ex-wife's fiancé's parents happen to live only minutes from me, or why his initial choice for a new apartment fell though just when a place became available that was cheaper and in a better location. Love couldn't explain my sudden surge of motivation and energy, or why all my mind-boggling bad luck seemed to be giving way to pleasant surprises and clear sailing... could it?

As sometimes happens, though, the ride has been getting a bit bumpier lately. Still finalizing the paperwork on his divorce and nailing down plans to move the whole family out to Pittsburgh, this morning Jeff received some difficult news about his work situation. His initial reaction--maybe from shock--was all smiles. Mine, on the other hand, was tearful panic and worry. Sometimes, I still believe I'm some kind of a bad luck charm, that whenever I get close to someone, life seems to get messy and more difficult for them. On the other hand, Jeff seemed full of confidence and enthusiasm, rattling off several alternative employment options he could pursue immediately. After a reassuring and mutually supportive phone call, my own anxiety was replaced with resolve. Thorn is right, as we delve more deeply into our Great Work, it's not that we never lose our center, it's that we return to center, we recover our poise and grace, more quickly than we used to.

I love this man. Not just because of his optimism and openness, his kindness and generosity. He has spent a great deal of time these past few months praising my strength and courage, and sometimes, I think, overlooking his own. And so on his behalf I would like to ask you, my dear readers, for your support and encouragement over these next few weeks. Please, keep Jeff in your thoughts and prayers, send him comfort and confidence, whether by energy, deity, spellwork or carrier pigeon. If I know anything about prosperity magic, it's that there is a weaving triad of mutual support at work: security, prosperity, generosity. Generosity is something the Celts were known for: a welcoming, giving spirit. I already know you all possess these in abundance. If, in your daily work, you could light a candle for Jeff, for his family and especially for his children, I know your warmth and positivity will be felt and returned with appreciation and gratitude.

Meanwhile, for those of you with a little extra funds lying around, Jeff does provide some neat services through his website, including beautifully-recorded guided meditations and spiritual name analyses. Please hop on over and check those out, if you're interested; every bit helps! (But don't tell him that I made such a shameless plug for him, okay?)

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