Why We Need Love and Gratitude Despite Chaos and War

Share

The world was spinning. Where was the law? There was the barricade. Who was it protecting from what? The city was run by a madman and his shadowy chums, so where was the law?

Coppers liked to say that people shouldn't take the law into their own hands, and they thought they knew what they meant. But they were thinking about peaceful times, and men who went around to sort out a neighbor with a club because his dog had crapped once too often on their doorstep. But at times like these, who did the law belong to? If it shouldn't be in the hands of the people, where the hell should it be? People who knew better? Then you got Winder and his pals, and how good was that?

What was supposed to happen next? Oh yes, he had a badge, but it wasn't his, not really... and he'd got orders, but they were the wrong ones... and he'd got enemies, for all the wrong reasons... and maybe there was no future. It didn't exist anymore. There was nothing real, no solid point on which to stand, just Sam Vimes where he had no right to be...

It was as if his body, trying to devote as many resources as possible to untangling the spinning thoughts, was drawing those resources from the rest of Vimes. His vision darkened, his knees felt weak.

There was nothing but bewildered despair.

And a lot of explosions.

~~~

There were a lot of explosions. The firecrackers bounced all over the street. Tambourines thudded, a horn blared a chord unknown in nature, and a line of monks danced and danced and twirled around the corner, all chanting at the top of their voices.

Vimes, sagging to his knees, was aware of dozens of sandaled feet gyrating past, and grubby robes flying. Rust was yelling something at the dancers who grinned and waved their hands in the air.

Something square and silvery landed in the dirt.

And the monks were gone, dancing into an alleyway, yelling and spinning and banging their gongs...

Vimes reached down and picked up the silver rectangle.

He stared at the thing in his hand. It was a cigar case, slim and slightly curved.

He fumbled it open and read: To Sam with love from your Sybil.

The world moved. Vimes still felt like a drifting ship. But at the end of the tether there was now the tug of the anchor, pulling the ship around so that it faced the current.

- from Terry Pratchett's Night Watch

Fear and Thanksgiving in Lancaster County

Share

Driving to my parents' house through central Pennsylvania, we passed a billboard that read, "Without Coal, Most Cities Would Be Dark." In an alternate universe, I turned to Jeff and asked him to pull over. I popped the trunk, rummaged for my anti-propaganda protest gear, and scurried up the sign's scaffolding through the chill, foggy night. In an alternate universe, as we pulled away again, we left behind a sign that now blazed in bright white graffiti lettering the addition: "And We Could See the Stars."

But in this universe, we drove on without stopping. Four hours in a car with no radio. Just the two of us, the kitten in his carrier in the backseat, and the humming silence of tires on pavement. Long road trips always make me think about the future. Maybe it's the metaphor of traveling, rumbling through the dark towards that ever-receding horizon....

Growing up in the rather-well-off suburbs of Lancaster county, my family would often drive the two hours west to visit family living in the heart of Coal Country, PA. There was the highway known locally as the "Road to Nowhere" because the town it had once led to had dwindled away with the collapse of the coal industry. There was the ghost town of Centralia, whose underground coal fire has been burning since 1962, releasing toxic fumes into the surrounding landscape, and could go on burning for another century yet. And there was my grandmother's old house, tiny and dirty, where she managed to raise six children despite her poverty, the house where she lived alone and slowly losing her mind to poorly-medicated bipolar disorder until she died more than a decade ago. This is where my father grew up, who was raised partly by the local Catholic Church community that provided clothing and food when his family had little else to survive on. A local church community that was so far out in the boondocks that none of the higher-ups could be bothered to enforce strict conformity to doctrine. So my dad grew up believing all that nonsense about love-thy-neighbor and service to the poor, but never learned, like a proper church-going lad, to fear homosexuals or kill abortion doctors. My father never learned the lesson of inventing enemies. Cold and hunger were too real, poverty too obvious, and the relationship of an individual to the community was, in a very real sense, my father's literal source of salvation.

But all this is the past, the history of my family, the history of my father. Traveling as a child to visit our relatives still living in central Pennsylvania hadn't been about returning to "where my family came from." It had been about gathering for Christmas or Independence Day parties, getting together for birthdays or to meet the newest puppy adopted into the family. As a child, traveling was about anticipating what next fun thing was about to happen, seeing how the cousins had grown up while we were parted, or trying the new cakes or cookies my aunt had been experimenting with baking. And the drive home was the classic quiet, slightly-bumpy ride in the backseat, half-asleep, gazing up at the stars while my parents listened to soft rock on the radio and shadows of silos, barns and rolling farmland rushed by along the horizon.

Now when I drive through the dark, making the four hour trip between Pittsburgh and Lancaster, I think about the future. And usually, the conversation turns to politics. And I wonder if the kids will grow up in a world where it's possible for them to live ethically without sacrificing basic needs. Will they be able to eat good food that came from a local farm that didn't use petrochemical pesticides and genetically-modified seeds? Will they be able to earn a living doing something that doesn't fundamentally compromise simple principles like "don't exploit the impoverished," or "don't bombard the public with billions of dollars of marketing in order to brainwash them into buying your product," or even just "try to make the world a better place"? Will they be able to live in a world where war isn't inevitable at every drop of a hat or a pin or a tower or a word? (The second-oldest is reading Zinn's A Young People's History of the United States; when I asked her how she was liking it, she shrugged and pursed her lips, saying, "There's a lot of war..." And there I was, brought back to myself, realizing that I had been experiencing something close to glee until then, a kind of excitement or pleasure at the idea that we were helping her be strong and knowledgeable, that we were "fighting the system" and showing her that America is not the world's Savior and we do not always do the right thing. But what we are doing, really, is asking her to confront the fact that, yes, there is a lot of war, and violence, and greed, and senseless hate in the world. "Yes, but there is a lot of goodness, too. And courage, and compassion, and beauty.")

During our trip this time, Jeff and I talked about how we don't know what is going to happen. Nobody knows. Before 1989, everyone knew the Cold War and the USSR would go on forever. Just after the first World War, the Great War, everyone knew there would never again be such a devastating conflict, and yet in 1910 everyone knew there could never even be such a huge, continent-wide war in the first place, or if there was Britain would find it an easy victory. Now, actions no longer seem to have consequences. We have been at war with Iraq for more than six years; we have been living in a post-9/11 world for almost a decade. Is it just going to go on like this forever? Every year, the same tug-o-war to convince people that the earth is dying, that we're killing each other needlessly with both poverty and guns? Every year, the same worry, the same hopes, the same sense of uncertainty? Is it just going to continue? It couldn't possibly.... but can you conceive of an end, can you really believe that suddenly one day, we'll all wake up and come to our senses? Sometimes I really don't like my country.

And yet, I love this land, this landscape I grew up in. I love the family I have here, although they're scattered and imperfect. I love the rolling hills and fields and the random awful farm smells wafting across the highway that let me know I'm headed home again. There is a lot of goodness and beauty and love in the world, too. Very small moments of meaningful brilliance are going on all the time. For instance, Friday afternoon, after a typical wearing day at work and a late lunch, Jeff and I returned to the car to discover a tiny stray kitten hiding behind the front wheel. After more than an hour of gentle coaxing and tempting with smells of hot clam chowder, after strangers passing by sometimes indifferent and sometimes all too eager to help in loud, clumsy ways that only terrified the poor creature--the four guys who had parked behind us returned to their car and were more than happy to help. On their hands and knees, these young men who could have been college football players or barroom brawlers were cooing and whispering and reaching gently, with all the tenderness in the world. Finally, they managed to herd the startled animal out from under the car onto the sidewalk, where I caught it up in a sweatshirt and scooped it into my arms, cradling it against me. Trembling and terrified for only a moment, it soon began to purr in the warm dark safety, and peak its tiny head out to gaze at me curiously. So now, there is a tiny black kitten as part of my family, a brave, playful, cuddly little boy named Cu Gwyn.

And although the car ride was devoted mostly to politics and worry about the future, there was Cu Gwyn in his carrier in the backseat, curled up in his blankets, his ears twitching to the rising and falling of our voices. "Cu Gwyn" is Irish, and translates roughly as "white dog." In part, our choice in naming the kitten was ironic, stemming from a nerdy sense of humor and a suggestion by a friend who had just adopted a small white dog herself (whom she proposed to name Cath Dubh, or "black cat"). But the white hounds of Irish myth are also creatures of the Otherworld, guardians of the gateway between realms, hounds with glistening white fur and red ears, who hunt the great stag through the wild forests. And the stag is a solar symbol, an animal of the sun, of light and enlightenment. So I name our new kitten Cu Gwyn, in honor of that hope that we all hunt for our children (biological, adopted, or abandoned to hide beneath cars in the gutter), the little bit of light like stars in a night sky, like the little bit of white wisps of fur showing through the black. And in hopes that, like the man tossing starfish back into the ocean after a terrible night of storm, even if I cannot save the world... I can make a difference to this one.

Sky Earth Sea: Better Than Coffee!! (and other bits of interest)

Share

Hey there, dear readers! Shameless plug to follow, for those of you looking for some new high-quality reading material on Druidry and Paganism... Check out the latest issue of Sky Earth Sea: A Journal of Practical Spirituality. Not just for Druids and Pagans, this journal has something for anyone and everyone interested in spiritual practice and looking for ideas and guidance on how to incorporate Spirit into everyday life.

I'm particularly proud of my two contributions to this issue, if you don't mind me saying so. (So proud, in fact, that I'm planning on sending my dad a copy of the issue, just to show him once again that Druids aren't crazy tree-hugging hippies... or, okay, we're not just tree-huggers, anyway!)

"The Peaceful Warrior: Pagan Pacifism Without Excuse" is an article exploring the necessity of nonviolence to counter the rampant systemic violence of our modern consumer-culture world, and takes a careful look at the mythology and iconography of the ancient Celtic past to discover themes that help to guide our search for fearlessness and courage. How can a violent, tribal past be relevant today? What roles do vulnerability and individuality play in fearlessness? How can we step up to become "peaceful warriors" in our own lives? This article presents some potential answers to such questions.

"Peace of the Three Realms: A Daily Meditation" is a step-by-step guide through one of my favorite daily practices, a series of interwoven meditations based around the Druid Prayer for Peace. Using such techniques as daily prayer and visualization, we can each begin to embrace a new worldview, a new story about the role we have to play in creating peace in the real world.

This issue also features lots of interesting articles on other forms of meditation, including a few how-to guides to get you started. On top of that, enjoy great poetry and beautiful seasonal artwork! Visit their website and check it out! (You can subscribe electronically for a very modest price, barely more than a cup of coffee; or, if you're not sure, register to download an earlier issue for absolutely free and see what you think!)

Also, on a more somber note, take some time to read my recent guest post over at Druid Journal: On Grief and Connection: A Response to the Fort Hood Deaths. While Jeff’s last post illustrated very well the kind of divisive rhetoric utilized in most political speeches these days, language that takes for granted an implicit superiority of American citizens and soldiery, and that rejects understanding, compassion and forgiveness for fear that such things will lead to acceptance of and complicity in violence (that is, those forms of violence deemed unacceptable by the State). His post, by reversing the target of this rhetoric, raised a lot of hackles and provoked a lot of feedback, through comments and email, about the basic immorality of justifying violence and excusing killers. Now, with his gracious permission, I try my hand at rewriting Obama’s speech, not by reversing its aim, but by turning the rhetoric itself on its head, and speaking in terms of inclusion rather than exclusion, connection instead division. This is the speech I wish Obama had given, though for reasons that will become obvious, it is not one I ever expect any political leader in this country to give. 

Elements of Peace: What Any of Us Can Do

Share

I suppose everyone has been talking recently about the shooting at Fort Hood. It's been difficult for me to wrap my head around. I remember a time, eight years ago when the towers fell, everyone seemed full of rage and fear and thoughts of revenge, and all I could muster was a devastating sadness, a sadness that sank deeply into my bones, a sorrow like liquid in the marrow. Now, I see around me, on the news, in the paper, online, people grieving, mourning, moaning with that same sorrow, the washing tides of grief — and all I can feel is anger. Anger and frustration at having carried such sadness alone for so long, only to see it spewed forth in cathartic forms of patriotism, twisted to serve the purposes of war and control.

I could spend hours deconstructing the language of isolation, the mythologies of exceptionalism and cold-heartedness at the root of these misdirected efforts to grieve. But it would be only so much talk, like trying to describe a sunset to the blind, and I am tired, and running short on words. What can I say that would make any difference? I have spent my life writing, it seems, and sometimes it feels paltry and ineffectual, self-indulgent at best. Can words open up the heart? Can mere words step between two enemies at war and throw open their arms in command and invitation? Can words save a life? And I don't mean metaphorically, in some warm-fuzzy white-light chicken-soup-for-the-soul kind of way. What comfort can words be to a dying woman watching her blood seep away, or a man who lies in his hospital bed knowing that if he ever recovers it will only be to face the vengeful cruelty lurking hungrily under the guise of "justice"? How can words change the world, except for the worse? Justice, freedom, honor, sacrifice — when have I ever seen these words serve any but the powerful and the strong? There are those who live justly, who live their peace and love in the everyday world, the world beyond words, the world of touch and smell and sunlight and sorrow. And there are those who only talk about it. And do they talk. What can I do with my words that can overcome that? What can any of us do?

So I've found myself recently plunging into making, plunging my hands into boxes of beads, counting out stones in my palm, twirling thin wire between my fingertips and looping it back and forth, gently, carefully. This is my catharsis; not moralizing or justifying or preaching to the grieving choir. For the past week, I've been coping with crafts. I have been weaving sets of prayer beads, each delicate stone representing one of the three Druidic elements — nwyfre, gwyar, calas; wind, water, stone; breath, blood, bone — or the inspiration of Awen, the life of Spirit, spiraling and deep. The work demands my concentration, a steady eye and a steady hand, and silence. And for a time, these small, intimate, precious things are the only things in the world to me. They are the world, the three realms of earth, sea and sky, woven together with the invisible threads of — of what? I might say love, or peace, or even something like harmony or Song. But the truth is, these are prayer beads, and they are woven together, and bound to each other, with words.

Peace has been at the center of my spiritual life for so long, I'm not even sure I can think of what it means to be "spiritual" without it. And we need peace these days, we need it desperately. It was this need that led me to write the two pieces that appeared in the most recent issue of Sky Earth Sea: A Journal of Practical Spirituality: an essay on "peaceful warriorship," and a description of my personal use of the "Druid Prayer for Peace" as a daily meditation. In the wake of recent events — and the on-going political wars and environmental destruction that continues seemingly unchecked — a few thousand words read by only a handful of people seemed worse than useless. But even in my cynicism and frustration, the prayer still meant something to me, something powerful, something more than mere words. And I wanted to create it again, to make it into something tangible, something I could hold between my hands, something I could give to another not just metaphorically, but physically. And so, I began sorting and beading and weaving.

And as I worked, I thought about my best friend, a musician of incredible talent, who had sent me a letter recently about his own frustrations with his art, and his doubts that music could change the world. What can we do, he asked me, and what right do we have to lecture others when our own efforts seem to be so small and meaningless, our actions so impotent and our intentions always usurped and distorted by systems of violence and fear? And it seemed to me that the answer is, and that it always is: we do what we can. We have to try, we have to allow ourselves that much. Even if our uncertainty shakes us to the soles of our feet, even if our knowledge of the world and its vastness make us feel small and helpless, even if bloated systems of fear and myopic self-interest loom over us, leering and licking their chops — we do what our hearts and minds and hands urge us to do.

And then we have to forgive ourselves. Forgive ourselves for failing, for not being perfect, forgive ourselves for not being able to save the world. Because if we don't give ourselves permission to try anyway, knowing the odds are stacked, certainly no one else will. And there are already enough cynical asses in the world who would rather sit back in comfortable complacency than face the risk that their capacity to care about something might just be greater than their capacity to control it. Because that's the risk we run when we allow ourselves to love, when we open ourselves to something bigger than we are. That's what's at stake: our willingness to connect with something, through compassion and devotion and gratitude and joy, that is not completely under our control. Try as we might, the world is too big for us to control. And yet we participate, at every moment, with every breath, we participate in its creation and its thriving community of life. Peace, I think, is no more or less than coming to understand that creative participation, rooted in freedom and mystery.

So maybe my words might not save the world. I am a writer. All I can do is what any of us can do: be most wholly and fully who I am, and live my peace on a daily basis in the best way I know how. And right now, that means giving away prayer beads. Maybe it's a silly idea, maybe it won't make a difference — but gods and politicians be damned, I just have to try!



So, dear readers, if you are interested in receiving a set of prayer beads, please send me an email at meadowsweet.myrrh@gmail.com, with your name and mailing address (and blog or webpage address, if you have one). At the moment, I have two sets to give away, though I will probably be making more over the next few weeks. During the first week of December, I'll put all the names I receive into a hat and draw a few winners at random, who will receive a set of prayer beads and a copy of the Peace of the Three Realms meditation. All I ask in return is that each of you make a promise: a promise to spend some time over the next year working honestly and whole-heartedly towards peace in whatever way you can, whether it be through prayer, art, politics, or other forms of service, and a promise to give yourself permission to care.

Writing the Right Rite: Lessons of Experience

Share

Although I've been slowly cultivating a personal practice of meditation and ritual as a solitary Druid for several years now, until last week I'd only ever participated in exactly one Pagan group rite — and then, not even as a Pagan myself, but as an academic, observing and collecting data via field research. But last week, in honor of the founding of Sycamore Circle, Jeff and I celebrated our first "group" ritual — an intimate Samhain rite in the backyard.

I'd never written a group ritual before; in fact, I'd never really bothered to write down the rituals I usually did for holy days and other magical work. For the most part, I utilized the basic outline provided by AODA to open the grove — declaring peace to the four quarters, welcoming the energies of the four directions, and reciting the Gorsedd Prayer (also called the "Bond of Druids") — performing the opening from memory and then proceeding to improvise whatever central work I'd intended, often lighting candles and reading poetry, followed by personal meditation and pouring libations. I disliked the AODA's closing of the ritual; the mythological references to Arthur and Excalibur didn't speak very strongly to me, and I found the closing unbalanced and too abrupt, without the appropriate thanking of the directional energies or the necessary time needed to ground back into ordinary mundane consciousness. So eventually, I began supplementing the AODA outline, adding a circle casting with the three elements (calas, gwyar and nwyfre), and repeating, in reverse, a simplified form of the invocations at the close of each ritual. Still, the core substance of each rite, between these two formal bookends of movement and speech, remained fairly quiet and internal. No elaborate gestures, prayers or chants, and only occasionally some overt use of tools to charge or direct energy. For the most part, my personal rituals were a way of creating a nemeton, or spiritual sanctuary, that was within the physical world but also set apart from mundane space-time, a consecrated place in which I could sit in meditation and do inner work with heightened psychological and spiritual potency.

This worked well for me as a basis for private ritual activity, but because so much of the activity was internal and unspoken, I knew it wouldn't serve for group work. Group ritual must, it seems to me, be about acting out the spiritual life together in community, particularly in a way that is aesthetic and powerful. Guided meditations might play some role, to heighten emotional connection and focus attention, but the primary activity of group ritual must be external, visible for all participants to witness together — like a play, dance or musical performance. I knew it would be a challenge to write out as physical acts the kind of meditative work that I usually engaged with in solitary rites. Where I might effectively imagine myself at once in a beautiful inner grove standing before a flowing stream or a flickering bonfire, now I would have to find ways to represent and invoke these experiences with physical objects immediately present in the real, external circle — objects with which all participants could safely interact in ways that were still moving and meaningful. A bowl of water had to become more than just a bowl of water; an altar had to be a place of aesthetic focus and not just a storage place for tools.

It took me about a week and a half to come up with and write out the small group Samhain ritual that Jeff and I ended up performing. The writing itself was an intense experience. There were times when I found myself inadvertently composing in rhyming couplets or stumbling upon phrases that seemed absolutely lovely, simple and satisfyingly concise. Other times, I went back to the same brief prayers and chants over and over, rearranging single words or copy-pasting whole parts of the rite into different orders, struggling to realize some sense of aesthetic balance. Eventually, the rite as a whole began to come into focus; when I could not remove or revise anything more without some adverse effect to the flow and sense of balance, I knew I was finally finished. For a time, I was quite honestly a bit enamored with the ritual I had composed on paper. I would open the file at random to read through it during the day, tweaking or just turning the words over in my mind and imagining the actions and gestures of the presiding priest or priestess. I set about organizing the main roles into a form that could be effectively performed by only two people, and then sent it along to Jeff to begin memorizing.

Jeff has very little experience with writing and performing ritual. The word "none" comes to mind, actually, although this isn't strictly true as he has attended a few small rituals with Hopman's Order of White Oak. Still, as he himself admitted, few rituals had really moved him or meant much to him, perhaps because he was usually more distracted with herding and helping children through the rites. I had not anticipated the effect lack of experience would have on our performance; I thought to myself, well, all the "stage directions" are right there in the script, and the chants are easy enough to memorize with a bit of practice. But on the day that we'd planned to hold the rite, Jeff became increasingly nervous, struggling to remember the order of the prayers, chants and blessings, and lacking the confidence to improvise those invocations and actions he could not remember. I began to realize that, without a solid understanding of the theory behind the rite, it could all seem kind of random and befuddling. I worked to coach him during the last few hours before we began, explaining some of the structure and printing out two decorative scrolls for invocations to Cernunnos and the four directions. In the end, his nervousness and my own feeling of uncertainty kept both of us distracted from really experiencing the ritual as powerfully as I had hoped.

Of course, I failed to anticipate other things as well. In the past, I had performed most of my personal rites indoors, and what few outdoor rituals I'd engaged in had been informal and simple, rarely involving more than a bit of lit incense or, maybe, a candle held close during sitting meditation. Now blessed with a backyard and understanding neighbors, I was excited to be able to perform a formal outdoor rite for the first time. I eagerly incorporated the sprinkling of herbs and water to trace a literal circle upon the ground (already outlined in tiny pumpkins and gourds) to open the grove, and during the one part of the rite I included a dramatic lighting of a cauldron fire in the center of the altar, to symbolize the fire of life springing up and persisting through the dark winter days. What I hadn't anticipated... was wind. It didn't even feel all that windy that night. But, while setting up the altar and decorating it with pressed leaves the children and I had collected earlier that week, the breeze soon swept every single one to the ground, leaving the altar sadly bare. Later, as I sprinkled water around the circle, my fingers quickly became numb, and then painful, with the cold damp.

And best of all — the cauldron refused to light. At first. After Jeff had broken circle to slip inside for matches (after the lighter clicked and clicked without a spark to catch), it took five attempts before the rubbing alcohol in the tiny cauldron finally suffused with a hot blue flame that spread and anchored itself firmly in the dark iron pot. But even then — there was still the wind. And though I'd had practice burning alcohol in this same cauldron before, never had I stood on a windy night, watching the flames leaping dangerously sideways towards the bowl of dried herbs and the mortar full of ground incense, expecting at any moment for the whole thing to go up in flames. Jeff and I stood "in quiet meditation," as the script read, waiting for the flames to eventually die down as a signal to end the rite... but our gasps belied the reality: tension and worry. There was relief, more than anything else, when one final gust of wind blew the fire clean out and I quickly slapped the lid back on and began the ritual closing (thanking Cernunnos, sardonically, for blessing us with his wild presence).

Jeff insists that this whole experience was entirely appropriate, and it is true that we had sufficient water and blankets to stamp out a fire in case of emergency, but still I would have preferred a safer wildness, or a less dangerous symbolic center for the rite. On the other hand, it certainly proves that, no matter how many books on ritual theory you read, nothing compares to attempting the thing in real life and learning just how powerful even a light breeze can be, or just how dark it is, even in a city, before the full moon rises over the horizon. The experience also brings home to me the utmost importance of working up to formal ritual, beginning at the beginning with a thorough understanding of the theory and an established comfort level with the basic structure. As much as I loved writing a full-blown formal ritual to celebrate one of the most important holy days of the Druidic calendar, I have decided to revise my approach in the future, and develop a course of study to gradually introduce elements of ritual to the inexperienced. Jeff has agreed to be my guinea pig for this experiment, and periodically I hope to share these developments and learning experiences for others to read and try on their own.

Meanwhile, dear readers, I would love to hear about some of your experiences with ritual — both private and public, solitary and group. What disaster stories do you have? What lessons have you learned the hard way, and what potential pitfalls have you learned to avoid? How did you learn to write and perform effective ritual, and how might you go about teaching others?

Dona Nobis Pacem

Share

There is no going back. We consent to our own destruction, with the passing of time, with the changing seasons, with the restless intensity of living and breathing. Above the cold concrete and glass of the city skyline, sharp-wedged forms of birds wheel and tip in the dark, blustering sky. I find myself thinking again that it takes an awful lot of courage to live in this world sometimes, knowing that winter is coming, the dark is coming, and death, too, will eventually arrive to claim us. It takes courage to release ourselves, to enter willingly into the wild dance that whirls in this liminal space between life and death, creation and destruction. In my mind, the image of birds crashing through wind currents and swift-driven clouds commingles with the image of the warrior, poised in grace on the edge of chaos. The face of that warrior is not violence, but fearlessness. And the culmination of fearlessness, the height of its realization, is peace.

Five A.M. in the Pinewoods
by Mary Oliver

I'd seen
their hoofprints in the deep
needles and knew
they ended the long night

under the pines, walking
like two mute
and beautiful women toward
the deeper woods, so I

got up in the dark and
went there. They came
slowly down the hill
and looked at me sitting under

the blue trees, shyly
they stepped
closer and stared
from under their thick lashes and even

nibbled some damp
tassels of weeds. This
is not a poem about a dream,
though it could be.

This is a poem about the world
that is ours, or could be.
Finally
one of them— I swear it!—

would have come to my arms.
But the other
stamped sharp hoof in the
pine needles like

the tap of sanity,
and they went off together through
the trees. When I woke
I was alone,

I was thinking:
so this is how you swim inward,
so this is how you flow outward,
so this is how you pray.

November 5, 2009

The Peace Globe Gallery

Song of a Daily Druid

Share

The November issue of Pagan Pages is up, along with my column Song of a Daily Druid. This month's column, "The No-Time Before Beginning," confronts the sometimes less-than-ideal reality of sickness and loneliness during these times of increasing cold and darkness. I found it a bit of a struggle to write this month, struggling with lingering illness of my own, but I hope to return to the themes of poetry, bardic work and the ancestors in next month's column. For now, please enjoy:

We cannot always be rushing full speed ahead.

Druidry teaches us that there are cycles, seasons that turn over and shuffle through one another. At Samhain, summer's end, we enter a time of darkness, before the rebirth of light on the winter solstice. Now is a time of dissolution, and sacrifice. And bad chest colds with persistent, aching cough. Amber and rusted-ruby bleed through the tree leaves along their brittle veins, and I notice how they scab around the torn edges of old holes chewed out by summer insects now sluggish or dead. Outside my window, rain shivers down through the evening fog and clings to every surface, and slips, and falls, and clings again; each leaf wavers limply in the breeze, damp but still shining, ablaze like the sun's going-down. They are so devoted. They mimic her, like the rain; they fall. We are all going down, stepping gently into the dusk, into the coming dark.

Last year, I dreamt often of brilliant mountainsides, spattered with the reds, oranges and yellows of foliage. My dreams were suffused with autumn. I noticed the subtle shifts as the season moved, changes I had never noticed before. The blushing rouge at the beginning, like wounds or lips opening up here and there among the worn summer green, just beginning to spread from tree to tree. The quaking yellows and golds at the height of the season, the whole woods cut through by low, bright sunlight and seeming to glow, the limbs of trees dark like veins starting to show through a papery sky, reflected in the surface of half-hidden streams gliding through layers of yellow leaves that had already fallen. ...

To read more, check out Song of a Daily Druid: The No-Time Before Beginning.

Samhain: Thinning the Veil

Share

No one mourns that the body is dark. I do not mourn that my body, thick with muscle and skin and blood, is dark inside, opaque, layer upon layer of translucent flesh wrapped around hard white bone so densely no light can get in. Is bone white? I have never seen mine. Sometimes I can see, through the thin veils of my skin, that my blood can be a deep blue, even close to the surface, can be purple just a razor-edge from spilling brilliant into red. But inside, all my blood is dark — coming from my heart or going, rounding the lungs or settling into the extremities of my toes and fingertips, red and blue are nothing but potentials in the darkness of my body. My throat, my ears, even the centers of my eyes show that darkness. People look into my eyes, and no one mourns.

This is what happens when we move inside, when we look inside without first dissecting and slicing and splaying the body open on the autopsy table. What we find when we move inside the living body as it really is, not exposing it, but entering in gently. The heart as it really is, dark, hidden in a dark body. And there is a sadness there, in the darkness, a sadness like our obscure working heart beneath the veils of translucence.

The world is so full of color, and brilliance, and motion, and we are so full of pain. We walk around, these dark bodies wrapped in the beauty of color and light. Our skin shimmering, our hair and eyes and fingernails shimmering — and the ache exists here, in us, in these bodies, held within us by this thin veil of physical flesh, wrinkled and wrapped up tight, fold upon fold. Our nerves are dark corridors of pain, our hearts raw with sadness. The world is so gentle and soft, it gives way before us when we move. We walk like celestial beings, made of stardust and sunlight, we tread lightly over the muddy ground and only sometimes do we remember the earth, too, is dark beneath us, beneath her green and lovely veils. Only sometimes do we turn our minds inwards into the earth, where the dark is moving, too.

What is that sadness? What can I say about it? It is the sadness of having an inside, and of what remains inside. The sadness of memory, making room to hold within it what has been lost, the place where grief lives, and injustice, and fear. And the sadness, too, of hope, and helplessness. In countries where the women are not allowed to dance, it is the slow dancing of suffering to the dark music of blood and dreams. It is where we touch, in the darkness, in each hidden center of our beings — we rub one another raw, finding our way out, groping towards each other through the dark. It is the tender sadness of connection, the ache of opening a small way in. We open our mouths wide, we cry out, we would swallow sunlight if we could — but inside, the dark remains, no light can find its way. We are dense, through and through, and that mystery is sadness, too.

But the veil is thin. Just this flesh, ordinary and marvelous that we walk around every day without a thought to its myriad shining porous cells. And there are times — like these — when we play at the edges of the veil, lifting a hem, worrying the seams between our fingers. We paint white bones and polished skulls on the windows and the doors, we revel in the red of blood and imagine ourselves full of it, brimming with the color of it, the light gleaming off each turn and curve of our veins. We fill ourselves with color — the colors of gore and pus and bone — we place candles behind the eyes of pumpkins emptied of their insides. We bring the light in, deep within, past the folds of the veil, and place it like a sun churning at the center of the earth. The dead are not jailed within memory, but drift free and translucent in the moonlight. Pain and fear — we set these loose, too, release them like stories into the outside world, a world full of color, and brilliance, and motion, and love. We set fire to this dark sadness within our bodies, and we look — past the shadowy masks of obscurity and illusion — we look into each other's eyes. We look, and nobody mourns.