Adrift.

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You wake up in the morning feeling like one of your limbs, which is really your heart, has fallen asleep beneath you and you cannot move it or feel it--it is white and bloodless and numb. As if it no longer belongs to you at all--your little heart throbs like a reflex, and that terrifies you because it moves all on its own, it is still twitching despite all common sense, and the prickling of returning blood begins and for a while there is nothing but pain.

Don't be so melodramatic.

Thank God for thunderstorms. I sat outside on my balcony for most of the day, and when the thunderstorm rolled in, I put my book inside and I stood pressed up against the wall, and the brick kept me warm as the rain just poured down, down and down, and there were tiny bits of hail that bounced off the railing and made the ground momentarily white and all rounded like a basket of marbles, and then even the hail was washed away and melting in the rain. And the sun afterwards... Ah, God, the sun. And once everything was dry, I went and got my book again and I continued reading, but mostly I watched the birds come out again, looking bedraggled and seeming surprised to find me sitting there, so that they would fly right at me and then suddenly veer aside. It feels so nice, to hold perfectly still and watch the birds' surprise. And then, there was a chickadee on the ground below who hopped the way I think infants or curiosity must hop. And a dove who flitted up to the roof of the garage behind my building and began to preen and shook its feathers out with such sudden resolution that I swore I saw a small cloud of dust drift away, and a single little feather of down drifted towards the ground and then was caught in an updraft and swung across the parking lot and all the way to land, gently, on the railing next to where I was sitting. This one little feather from this one little bird. It reminded me of the day I had been feeling ignored by God and had complained to Ray that, if I suffered, and suffered righteously, then maybe people would be more inclined to take my work seriously--and as we sat out on the picnic blanket, one little bird flew through the clear sky and *plop* one little bit of bird shit landed directly on the crown of my head. And I laughed and laughed at how God had his eye on me and his ear on me, how I had asked to be shit on and God had delivered, as if to say, "You think I'm not paying attention? You think I don't have my finger on the button?" And now again, here was the single feather the dove had shaken free, and it had come, seemingly at random and adrift, all the way to where I sat--as if to say, "You think these tiny things are meaningless and helpless upon the currents of chaos? You think there aren't patterns in the wind, invisible things at work?"

How silly we all are. How endearing, small and glorious our offerings, how amusing our surprise.

With supposed ease, and endlessly.

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If it is not too bold, I would like to share here two poems of mine which have recently been published...



Not Just Air : A Literary eJournal
Number Six: The Response Issue

La Belle Dame en Seul and If Once You Have Slept, by Alison Shaffer
(click here)


Today's Ogham: Coll (Hazel)
(wisdom, enlightenment, inspiration)

In Like a Lion

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If March rolls in like a lion, it has thus far been a meek and frigid lion, but not today. The weather is playing cat-and-mouse with my body and my mood as a mild front moved in overnight, so that I awoke at 4 AM feeling feverish and claustrophobic. I opened all the windows in my bedroom, but could not settle back to rest again. All day the wind has been growling through the still bare branches of the city trees, and the low overcast of dark clouds rolls through the dome of sky, echoing the constant roar of traffic from every direction, so that the world feels dim and agitated, in a constant noisy twilight. When I sit out on my balcony, the air raises goosebumps all along my arms and the nape of my neck--the trees behind my building seem suddenly to be strange, their branches in writhing forms that are at once beautiful, and eerie. When I come inside again, I feel overheated and restless. A headache (due to sleeplessness and what feels like dehydration, despite drinking plenty of water over the course of the night and morning) persists in my temples and my skin feels hot to the touch.

I ride the weather of my body the way I ride the weather of the city.

Today, I drew the Ogham, Duir--the Oak, king of trees, tree of the Druid. Mountfort says that the oak, because it is one of the taller trees, is associated closely with gods of thunder and lightning. You might come across an oak that has been blasted and scarred by a lightning strike, but that endures and lives on nonetheless. Today, it seems the atmosphere of the city is taking a beating--the March lion is stalking the streets, not silent like a sleek lioness hunting her prey, but loud and full of electric power, like a king.

Ah... and finally, it has started to rain.

Today's Ogham: Duir (Oak)
(duration, stability, maturity, nobility)

The Last Snow.

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This might be the last snow of winter. All day the season seems to spend itself upon the air, a glinting dust caught in a wind which swallows it, a shimmer caught in the slant of late afternoon sun whose warmth has already overcome it. Winter spends the last of itself in a thin layer across the already greening grass. I scatter a handful of sunflower seeds on my balcony rail, and their tiny black bodies melt the snow beneath them at the slightest touch of their tiny black heat. This might be the last snow.

What is the point of all this planning? What purpose does it serve, to strive and to work? For what? Under the sun, nothing is original--the seeds are all of them small and familiar. To write the book that will open minds. To love a man with a good heart. To give voice and service, gratitude and praise. Every year, people bundled against the fickle mouth of March complain that spring has not come soon enough, that surely now--when the days have almost overtaken the nights, when the birds and the bulbs seem to have such certainty in what is coming--now there must be some relief from the cold. But winter is always too long, spring too hesitant, summer too swift. What if all I strive for, I achieve? What if I write that book--haven't others written such books before me? Haven't I learned from their examples and been inspired by their works? And yet here again, it is cold today, and the snow bites, and I am sad and uncertain. Whatever task I face, even if I should overcome it, there will be another. What is the purpose of such a struggle, when what has been accomplished dwindles to memory and what remains is only the demand for yet another feat of strength, a new moment of sacrifice or humility or acceptance?

The cardinal chirps in the empty bush. She is subtle and faded, hopping among the shriveled berries that have clung to the branches since autumn. Not like her mate--he could be singing of sunrises, of bright and unmitigated romantic passions, or of bloody war. He does not find the red, red rose of love to be trite; he is rich and blazing and self-assured. But she is like a painting which has been partly rubbed away. She is like the blood once it has dried, the wound once it has begun to heal. Only when she flexes a bit and flits to this twig or that one, does the sore sanguine of her underwing show. Perhaps she seems to flinch. Still, she sings. The sun warms the dull brick, and the snow does not stick long to the ground.

I want to choose this, to choose life. Though it is hard, I want to choose it anyway. I want to choose to participate, freely and creatively, in the stubborn play of humanity. I want to love, though nature is indifferent and people misconstrue. I want to be loved, though love cannot save me. I will not despair if sometimes my heart feels small and dark--let the sun lick the hard shell until the snow around me begins to melt, let me be eaten or let me split open. Let it all begin again.

Today's Ogham: nGetal (Broom)
(cleaning, healing, herbal lore)

Vernal Embertide Contemplation.

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'The seasons intimate individually the bliss of Heaven, where there is "the beauty of spring, the brightness of summer, the plenty of autumn, the rest of winter."'

Today I'm treating myself. I'm going to treat myself to good company, even if it's unrequited. Clouds and trees do not love back, the sun and moon do not love back, beautiful strangers do not love back. But I can dwell in love and wait for spring. I will hold intimately the coals of my love for a world who holds me intimately but does not know me well, and I will be warm. I will be warm and wait for spring. I will remember the ember days.

The Vernal or Lenten Embertide remind us of the coming beauty of spring, and our relationship to beauty in the world. It is the tragedy and the blessing of beauty to be complete in itself, to be whole and self-fulfilled. To see beauty, we must often be separate from it, and the beauty that we are intimately a part of may be too large for us to see. Our sense of awe in the presence of beauty is heightened and sharpened by our awareness of distance, by our longing for something with which we are not fully merged. Our longing makes beauty both sweet and ephemeral. Beauty stirs us out of ourselves.

We remember, and on these ember days of the coming spring, we seek solitude and distance. We remember that beauty surrounds us, and we withdraw from busy-ness in order to remind ourselves, to perceive it better. We remember beauty and seek its company--we seek the company of the wind and the trees, of the distant and still-cold sun, of the kind and lovely strangers whom we do not know but who are still connected to us through beauty, love and the Divine within each of us. We remember that we, too, are infinitely beautiful, that within us burns the dark potential of the rose of the soul to bloom suddenly open at the first warm breath of the season. We withdraw from the noisy world and become beautiful, content in our uniqueness, awe-filled in our longing. We remember beauty and, in it, we find the relief of freedom, the song of the breathless skylark in its strong and far-away flight. We hear the beauty of distant music sung not for us but for itself alone, and on these ember days, together we remember.

Today's Ogham: Beth (Birch)
(birth, new beginnings, renewal, change)

The Rune of St. Patrick

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(The Faedh Fiada; or, "The Cry of the Deer.")

At Tara today in this fateful hour
I place all Heaven with its power,
And the sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
And fire with all the strength it hath,
And lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the winds with their swiftness along their path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the earth with its starkness
All these I place,
By God's almighty help and grace,
Between myself and the powers of darkness.

The Meandering Path

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What follows is the last post of my old blog, Pulse Like Water, which I wrote just after committing formally to the Ancient Order of Druids in America first degree program. For various reasons, I stopped writing that blog shortly after I decided to pursue Druidry--one of those reasons was that, until that point, I had always considered my path as solitary more by necessity than by inclination, and often I found myself writing about topics that stemmed from this sense of lost community. I struggled with the term "witch," which I found to be an inadequate label for my blend of Christian roots and beliefs, and my creative, poetic, magical and ritual practices. Since joining AODA, I have discovered a sense of community belonging--and of pride in the abilities and insights of its members--that redefines my own path in ways I hadn't expected. I want to begin to write on spiritual topics again, this time with a better idea of the community of practitioners, idealists, intellectuals, craftsfolk, poets, seers and treehuggers to whom I'm writing.

I thought this post, as well as being a nice discussion of the course of my spiritual path up until this point, would also be a good introduction and a bridge between the old and the new. I hope you enjoy.



It is my experience that people of an open-minded and intellectually curious persuasion go through various stages when approaching the question of world religions and whether or not "all religions lead to God"... As I have written in the past (for example, in my post about my personal process of accepting Christ), I have come to terms with my own relationship with the Divine through the holy person of Christ and, from a broader perspective, the Trinity of Godhead, Christ, and Immanent Presence. I have come to terms with the truth that I can be both essentially Christian and accepting of the inherent value and holiness of all religious paths, even those I do not walk. Coming to this understanding was, like all things, a process. I went through many phases and stages which I often see reflected in those around me who, for their own reasons, on our journeys of their own... I thought, just for the fun of it, I would talk a little about my own journey and the stages along the way.


Just-This

Having been raised Catholic by a man who had grown up the oldest son in a large, poor Catholic family, for a long while, I knew only Catholicism. What I knew of Catholicism was what I had been taught in Sunday school, during Mass, and during gentle talks with my ever-patient and soft-spoken father. This was a stage of innocence, where I was not aware of alternatives and the struggles of difference and sameness that I would confront later on. What I knew was that God was Love, that He was all-loving and all-forgiving, and that He was always present in the same way that "nowhere" was also somehow mysteriously "now-here." I knew that I could feel Him in warm sunlight and taste Him in the wind; that I could hear Him in the disembodied voice of the old man who stood, dressed in funny clothes, at the front of the church while I was still too short to see him through the forest of adults standing in front of me. No one ever warned me not to lose faith, not to stray away from the Church, not to trust those shifty-eyed non-Christians... It was understood that, if God was Love, no reasonable or good person would ever willingly leave that Love behind, and that Love would never abandon them, even when all the rest of the world had. My father told me stories of growing up lower-class and ignored by most of society, finding comfort in the arms of his local Catholic community among people who never plagued him with shame or guilt at growing up poor and imperfect. This was the truth of the Christian faith as I knew it as a little girl--a community of loving friends held together not by fear of what was bad "out there," but by love and kindness towards one another and devotion to a God of Mercy.

This-or-Nothing

It was during this stage that I began to read poetry, and much of the poetry I read came from poets of other religious traditions, some Buddhist, some Muslim, some Hindu... Though the names of different deities struck me as odd sometimes, I took them in stride the way I took references to Zeus and Diana and the legends of Greek heroes in English Romantic poetry--as poetic motifs, not dangerous religious doctrines to be feared or ignored. At the heart of every great poem, I found the awe, beauty and power of the God I had been raised with, the God I had always known wasn't just some old white man watching from the clouds, but was deeply present in the world and in other human beings, just as He had been in Christ. Only slowly did I begin to realize that there were other Christians who believed no value or truth about love and praise could be found in such non-Christian works. I began to understand that, according to these people, even great men and women who had loved deeply, served humbly and praised joyfully were "condemned" because of the names by which they had done so. But did the sunlight and wind have names? Did the moments of God's presence all demand to be called "Jesus"? Weren't there times when, in grief or gratitude, I had called out wordlessly to the nameless Divine Love that pulsed through me like living water? Would I end up in hell for such moments of pure worship, when I forgot to label myself strictly "Christian" and instead opened my soul to the truth that transcended me? Ridiculous! I did not even have to ask. I was young, and I knew they were wrong, these other Christians who thought everyone with a different name or skin color was already damned. I laughed them off, and with it, the Christian label. And so, for many years, I longer to be an angel, to be genderless, ageless and religion-less, to serve my Lovely God purely and without distracting words.

Not-Nothing-But-Everything

Some time later, I came across the writings of Gandhi (here, I give much thanks to my older cousin, who lent me his college text books while I was still putzing around in grade school). For the first time, I was introduced to the idea that "all religions are one" and "all religions lead to God." Enthusiastic for a system of beliefs as all-loving and all-embracing as the Divine itself was, I leapt at this idea, taking it to mean that I was utterly free to be any religion at all, to be simply "religious" without the need to be Christian and (so I still thought) automatically intolerant. In short, I thought this idea meant that all religions were basically the same, and any differences were minor and unimportant. This attitude buoyed me through high school, as I came to terms with the landscape of conservative suburbia and found companionship in the geeks and artists who were often more concerned with their work than what people thought of them. To care about the work I did, as a student and a growing writer myself, as well as a musician, would-be photographer, and hopefully-hopeless-teenage-girl romantic crafting herself into an ideal of her grown-up self--to focus on this work instead of on the realm of beliefs and ideas was to feel free to live and grow naturally. Still I laughed at the idea of a hell where I would burn forever for being the girl God had created and that I, with His guidance, would continue to create.

Everything-and-Every-Thing

Upon entering college, I decided to study Comparative Religions formally. Blessed with a brilliant professor who, having just graduated with his Ph.D. from Harvard, was young enough to be approachable and honest enough to admit his own continuing questions and unending learning and pondering, I confronted for the first time the question, "What is religion, anyway?" I still do not have an answer. Academically, I began to discover how the concept of a "religion" as a thing unto itself had grown out of the Reformation when, for the first time, Western culture faced the notion of having real choices (until then, as with some religious groups still today, the world was divided simply into "believers" and "atheists," in which wise-women, scientists, alchemists, philosophers and superstitious farmers were as likely to be "believers" as not). I confronted the fact that all religions were not fundamentally the same, but often involved vastly different core beliefs which stemmed from and interacted with the anthropological, historical and cultural roots of the tradition. This was true, I learned, even of Christianity--flipping through a textbook of collected works by various Christian theologians, saints and theorists throughout history, I found on one page the denunciation of Reason as the misleading work of the devil, and on the next the familiar love-swoonings of a saint's poetry, and on the next the step-by-step logical proof of God's existence demonstrating reason as the defining gift from God to man. All of these things were, technically, "Christian," and yet they bit and fought amongst themselves across the centuries and throughout the world of changing politics and culture. Not only was my pleasant notion that all religions had a core structure based in Divine reality shattered beneath me, but I even when I turned back to Christianity as my home and root, I discovered that accepting the term "Christian" was really the acceptance of a non-term, a name with no meaning, a word that has meant almost everything in the past and that today has no clear, agreed-upon doctrine amongst its many splintered denominations... For the first time, I found myself afraid of hell. In all this academic rigor, theological nitpicking and fiery condemnation--where was God, and where was the way to Him (or Her)?

In-Every-Thing-Just-This

Then one night, I came back to myself in a dream. In the dream, I wandered a strange party full of strangers, alone and frightened, sobbing that I had lost the Love of my life. And there he was, sitting on the floor near a coffee table in a crowded living room, sipping soda out of a plastic cup and watching television--Christ. And he was young, and everyone ignored him, and he was very lonely, and he loved them all. I sat down beside him and told him my confusion, and he told me the story of realizing he was bisexual (yes, I said it--Jesus told me he was bisexual), and the pain and confusion it caused, the self-doubt that ensued. Surely, the thought of being able to love everyone must somehow be an illusion. How could you love everyone when everyone was so different, sometimes so much that they seemed to lose all common ground? To claim an abstract love for humanity-as-a-whole was just another way of not loving anyone in particular at all, he explained... And so it had been for me, as well--loving an abstract, untouchable God through all-religions left me defenseless and unprepared for the onslaught of difference and separation and ultimately isolation that came with true complexity.

The truth, of course, was just this: I had forgotten the childhood faith of which I had been so sure, when I had known that God was in the rain and the wind and the sunlight as well as in other human beings and in the church. I had known then, but not understood, that God is in the entire world, and yet the entire world is everywhere distinct, different and unique. To know and love God, then, was to know and love the mystery of unity within the mystery of difference. Christ sipped from his soda and nodded. To love your neighbor as yourself did not mean to love only the part of your neighbor which is the same as yourself--it is to love you neighbor in the same way as you love yourself, which is to say as a whole and unique and valuable being, utterly different and yet united in love. And likewise with God--for God is not only the Ideal, but also the Reality, and both the Ideal and the Reality must be loved and valued not for their sameness, but for their complexity, difference and on-going evolution. This was the Mystery of the Trinity, which denies that God is everywhere and always the same and simple while declaring in the same breath that exact truth.

And if every religion is different, and even every believer within each religion traveling different paths in pursuit of different goals, these goals are different and conflicting only insofar as the Divine Itself embraces all contradiction, paradox and mystery. God is Love, and Love is a process, not an end-product. The lesson of Christ is that to be fully human is to be fully divine, and to be fully divine is to be fully human; to be utterly united is to be infinitely unique, to come together in love is to follow a new and wholly different path, for every person loves every other person in a wholly new and unique way, just as each person loves God differently and God, as Love, manifests to and through each moment, each breath and each ray of light in a way utterly unique. Each religion is true to the extent that each is true to itself; each leads to God to the extent that it leads a person both into her own heart and out into the Heart of creation, however those hearts are conceived. Each person finds God to the extent that he finds himself. As a vine supported by but not confined to the structure of the fence... in winter, I may loose a few of my leaves, settle down into quiet contemplation and discover the crosshatches of that fence spell out the structure of Christianity, or perhaps that of Druidry, or perhaps only the ancient and forgotten language written by rain and moss into the barks of old trees. But regardless, the leaves and veins and stems and roots are my own, and as I am true to them, so I am true to Christ, which lives not in the names and doctrines of difference and alienation, but in the thriving diversity and change of uniqueness and love.