Aesthetics and the Sacred

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Pagan author and philosopher Brendan Myers and his girlfriend Juniper have started a podcast, Standing Stone & Garden Gate, which has so far proved quite interesting to listen to. There turns out to be always at least one bit in each episode that sparks me into either consternation or disagreement.^[1]

In this last episode ("Witchcraft and Penises"), Brendan spends his philosophical segment discussing definitions of "sacred," pointing out a very real problem in how most people understand the word. The etymologies of terms like "sacred" (and even "temple," it turns out) trace back to words with original meanings such as "setting aside," "cutting off" or "binding." There is the notion of separation or distinction inherent in such words, so that something which is "sacred" is distinct from everything else which is not, which is therefore "outside the temple," or profane. Brendan sees in this distinction an implicit hierarchy, in which the sacred is elevated above and beyond the profane. Modern religious movements (and, one assumes, the mystic sects of many religious traditions throughout history) who try to claim that "everything is sacred" may be sincere and sincerely guided by noble intentions, but by insisting that the sacred is not separate or distinct, they rob the word of any real meaning. Though Brendan says it more eloquently, the point he makes is basically the same point you can demonstrate for yourself by repeating a word like flotsam or marvel over and over again until it begins to sound nonsensical. Words that refer to anything whatsoever do not refer to anything in particular. And so, as Bren sums up, "We are led to a conundrum: the sacred has to be privileged somehow, it has to be at least partially hierarchical in order to make sense at all; but at the same time it has to be accessible to anyone, anywhere, at any time, it has to be discoverable in the ordinary."

Fighting Back Fatalism

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Today, I received my first ever request to feature another writer as a guest blogger here on Meadowsweet & Myrrh, as part of a publicity campaign and "virtual book tour" to promote the man's latest publication. The request came via his agent, who thought his work would be "a good fit for the content of this blog." So... on the one hand, I suppose I should feel pleased, that apparently my little slice of the blogosphere is growing up and making her way in the world, enough to garner the attentions of marketers and agents at least. However, I will not be featuring this person or his writing; below is a copy of the letter I sent in reply to his agent explaining why.

Dear N—,

I appreciate your request, but I'm sorry to say that in looking at Mr. X—'s writing, I don't think his ideas or philosophy would be appropriate for my blog. In fact, it worries me that you seem to think so and I can only hope that you did not read my own work very carefully. I am committed to religious tolerance and cultural liberalism, to supporting individual rights and ecumenical dialogue among diverse religions and cultures, and also to an optimism that holds that people are not only capable of finding happiness for themselves but of living in meaningful, peaceful community with one another. A philosophy of "feel good inside no matter what happens outside" simply does not line up with my own philosophy of active, creative engagement with the world, nor with any kind of commitment to social justice, as far as I can tell. I was also disturbed by Mr. X—'s gross mischaracterization of Islam in his most recent blog post, as well as his treat of fellow human beings as "sheeple" to be derided or dismissed. Claiming to have received such notions from a spirit guide cannot excuse their basic indecency.

Granted, I have only scanned through Mr. X—'s blog and I may have misunderstood the real intentions of his writing. If this is so, then I apologize and wish him the best of luck. But I am not interested in featuring Mr. X—'s work in any way whatsoever on my own blog. Thank you.

Sincerely,
Ali

The world is a difficult place to live in. And sometimes, yes, I feel frustrated, depressed and helpless. Just today at lunch, I spent time in conversation with friends about fears of unending war and the slow, painful collapse of this broken system of corporate greed and political war-mongering (a collapse, I feel, we're already beginning to witness). But I strive to stay grounded, and to remind myself always of my very basic faith in people as good and kind and capable of great courage and beauty and love. I can never turn to or condone a self-focused philosophy of seeking inner happiness while the world around me burns. If the world around me is going to burn, then I guess I'll be burning, too, with grief but also with stubborn, stupid hope.

I realize that my posts of late have tended towards the morbid and the frustrated, the worried and the cynical. But I do not want to turn away from these feelings, either by denying their reality or trying to escape them through disconnection and fantasy. Trusting in the harmony of the Song of the World does not negate or banish the pain of our struggles to sing the songs of our own souls. My language is flowery and inadequate, but it's what I have.

Jeff tells me that Haiti's cellphone system is coming back online, and txt messages and voicemails sent during the earthquake two weeks ago are finally getting through. And while there will be those cries for help reaching out too late from the lips of those now dead, there will also be messages of love and last chances to say goodbye.

We are not alone. We have each other.

Amusing Update (31 January 2010):

I must have gotten on some list somewhere. Just received yet another email asking me if I would like to host another guest blogger/interview subject, some guy (who used to feel lost just like me, apparently) who is now a multi-millionaire and has made it his mission to travel the world teaching people to love life by doing crazy-expensive things like paying to be a crewman on the space shuttle. My response:

T—,

Thank you, but no. Apparently you missed my several posts on "voluntary poverty" and commitment to social justice rather than self-involved thrill-seeking. No hard feelings, though. I wish Q—, and yourself, the best of luck with your own philosophies, but I'm happy to keep my blog devoted to the small simplicity of the earth in springtime and the inspiration of thunderstorms and fields of heather blooming.

-Ali

Ode to the Weekend Dad: A Pagan Take on Parenting and Gender

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Earlier this week, before he passed the cold onto me, my partner Jeff was in bed with the sniffles, bundled up in his bathrobe, happy as a clam in flannel. He would blow his nose with a rumbling, gurgling blast that filled the whole house, and smile at me with bleary eyes, and tell me how glad he was to be sick. It was, he said, as if all the stress of the holidays and work and family and bills that he had been carrying around with him for the past month had finally been shrugged off, and his body could relax enough to address those pesky germs that had invaded. Good riddance!, the message of every sneeze. And watching him cuddle into the blanket and nod off to sleep, I thought how unsung his particular kind of heroism is in our culture.

It is popular, I'm sure you've noticed, to portray fathers these days as fat, laughable buffoons tripping through life on the heels of a wife who is way too attractive and intelligent for them and who is constantly patching things up and smoothing things over and nodding sagaciously when the credit that's due never comes.^[*] Check out any family sitcom on television in the past few decades, and ask yourself why Marge stays with Homer, or Lois with Peter, or Lois with Hal, or Debra with Raymond, or Doug with Carrie, or Jill with Tim... or any of the wives who stay with clownish husbands on the numerous family sitcoms that I, admittedly, don't watch for the most part. Of course, once dispossessed of the stabilizing and sensible force of the Marge-d'œveur, the buffoon of a husband becomes something much worse: the embarrassing, bumbling and sometimes criminally negligent single dad. Sometimes the single dad is an endearing and heroic figure — if he loved his wife, who died of cancer or some tragic accident that left him scarred and unwilling to risk falling in love again... that is, until the chipper, compassionate, young heroine comes along — but for the most part, he is shrugged off as mediocre and foolish, undeserving and just maybe incapable of raising the children he helped to father in the first place.

I suspect this cultural trope is thanks, at least in part, to the feminist movement and the revolution to throw off the shackles of patriarchy and reassert the essential grounded practicality and intuitive wisdom of the feminine. And I'm all for that. But I also know that smiling condescendingly at the Weekend Dad because he lets the kids leave the house with mismatched socks or orders out for pizza for dinner every Friday night is about as mature as snickering at the freshman girl wearing last year's style in striped tees. In other words: not very. Rather, it suggests that while we as women (and as a culture) have reached a point where we can balk at overt patriarchy, we have not yet understood that real equality is that of partnership and complexity, not of reducing the men in our lives to one of two stereotypes: ruthless oppressor or (in)sufferable fool. As if, as far as we've come, we haven't quite got the knack of being simply adults, but are stuck in the role of mothering. As if, to quote Pratchett (in Carpe Jugulum), "just because they'd got the label which said 'mother,' everyone else got a tiny part of the label that said 'child'..."

But watching Jeff relaxing into his well-earned rest (after putting in a full day's work despite the blocked-up nose and disorientation), I thought about just how hard Weekend Dads do work, at least the good ones. I may sometimes complain about having to work weekends, putting in long hours on my feet without breaks, dealing with sometimes belligerent, hung-over or senile customers for measly tips, but during the middle of the week, my time is my own (and as a natural introvert trying to kick a writing career off the ground, this suits me just fine). Yet here is a man who works non-stop, seven days a week: not an hour after he's finished his salaried work late Friday afternoon and set his computer aside, he's tackled by four lovely, energetic children who quickly claim every room in the house (except the somewhat messy and sparsely furnished "grown-up's bedroom") with their toys, books, blankets and games. All weekend, while I get to slip away to a job where most of the people I interact with will at least behave like polite adults if I treat them as such, he entertains and instructs and comforts children for whom "important" can mean anything from "Jake beat me in Othello by exactly sixteen points, twice!" to "Jocelyn ran into a tree on her sled!" to "I told Sarah to stop and she wouldn't, so I kicked her!" And this man, this mere "weekend dad," engages with these children with unending patience and love, sifting through the inane and the ridiculous, supporting and encouraging wherever support and encouragement are needed. And then, when he's dropped them back at their mom's house each Sunday night, he buckles down and tries to work in an hour or two of personal writing or meditation before it's back to the quiet, industrious, analytical work of the computational linguist the following morning.

And if sometimes he doesn't notice the color of the kids' socks, or only knows two good, healthy recipes to cook for a family of six in a tiny kitchen with about a square centimeter of counter space, I'm not going to be the one to fault him, or smirk, or think secretly I could do better. After all, I'm certainly no mother myself, and much of the time I think I'm not cut out to be one. When it comes to that, motherhood is no longer the only archetype of mature and self-possessed femininity available to the modern woman, who has the potential to be so much more than merely maiden, mother or crone. The priestess, the witch, the queen, the shaman, the bard, the warrior, the basket-weaver... And if we can liberate women from the archetypes of fertility and servitude, surely it would be strange to expect men to step in and take over those roles, just as it would be misdirected triumph to scoff when they do so ineptly or inadequately.

Perhaps instead we can celebrate the complexities and subtleties of contemporary gender identity and family life, and the mixed blessing of divorce that allows for a redefinition of roles and the redress of relationships that were inclined towards dysfunction or disrespect. Because in the end, matching socks only really matter in a world where socks are the only way a woman can express her competence and care as a mother and wife. But this is, thank the gods, no longer the world we live in. Now we can set aside the trivial, wade through all the social pressures to be good women, and rise to the occasion of being simply good people, who demonstrate our love through attending and sharing, and who put the real needs of others ahead of our own need to appear Large and In Charge.

(And now and then, we can revel in our headcolds and allow others to care for us, and soothe us with hot tea and honey, and assure us that we have been good parents, and partners, and children, and humans.)

^[*] Granted, the fact that these women remain in such dysfunctional relationships belies certain flaws in their own characters, so that usually after Season One the audience has come to appreciate that, despite their constant (and hilarious) mishaps, these couples were made for (and deserve) each other.

Thoughts on Justice, Mercy, Beauty and Choice

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I call him by his real name, despite the numerous nicknames that he's adopted and that people at work are always throwing around — I'm like that, I used to call my preschool friends Christopher, and Jeffery, and Angela. He calls me Mundo: from Alison, to Ali, to Alamundo! like a war cry or something someone yells before leaping out of a plane. And now, it's just Mundo, which means "world" in Spanish, though I'm pretty sure he doesn't know that.

Life is Suffering

Yesterday he told me about the revelation he had while thinking about Schindler's List, about the old woman who was shot in the back of the head for stumbling, about the people who were murdered for no reason at all, the derangement of arbitrary killing. And he realized, he said, that "life is like that — you go through the world thinking there are rules and trying to do the right things, the things that will make a difference — you clean yourself up and quit the drugs and the drinking because everyone tells you it will make your life better and it's the right thing to do..." But the truth is, suffering is arbitrary, and pain so often unjust. You can do everything right, follow all the rules, and still walk through the world struggling and uncertain and alone.

And what's worse: sometimes those people you try to help, try to do right by, are ungrateful or selfish or flawed, sometimes they are puppy-kickers, sometimes they are the bastards holding the guns, sometimes — worst of all — they are innocent and happy and entirely unaware of how much you have given so that they can float through life on a pink fluffy cloud of security and self-assurance. And who are you, anyway? How pink and fluffy is that cloud that follows you around, dumping anxiety and inadequacy and prozac and corporate logos onto your bent head all day? We want to believe in causality and consequence, in the rational function of justice in the world — and yet, there is always something more you could be doing, and what you have done always seems ineffectual and misguided.

Where Is Peace?

I have been thinking about this, too, reading Karen Armstrong's The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions. The long history of the world, it seems, is people losing faith in their gods and heroes, discovering that carefully-prescribed sacrificial rituals cannot always spare them disaster, that reason can lead them as often into irrelevant sophistry as into kenotic paradoxes of silence, that while compassion and kindness and nonviolence are obvious they are also in general very badly done. And in the midst of these contemplations, are the thousands of dead in Haiti, the corpses piled in the streets, and another coworker of mine with a plane ticket in his hand for this Wednesday to go visit his family, a ticket now useless, and nothing but unanswering silence when he tries to call home.

I could say that I am angry at all the rich people in this country for believing so strongly in their ambassador of prosperity, the Almighty Dollar, running their telethons and sending their compassion truncated and stamped in green as impersonal donations, like the epitome of the saying: too little, too late — how I'm cynical that, despite the destruction and arbitrary suffering, despite the cruelty of our Mother who shrugs her shoulders and kills, our faith in finance isn't shaken a bit and we might even, deep down where we cannot admit it, feel a bit relieved that finally here is a way that our gods can step in and save the day on our behalf. (Or perhaps it's the relief that even the fickle, frightening gods of Consumerism and the Market are quelled in the face of tragedy and in that moment we are allowed to demand of them the self-giving of compassion.) I feel it too, there in the dark, urging that this is the right thing to do, that if this isn't justice, at least it's something like it, something close. At least it's better than sitting in my living room, praying, picturing imaginary peace and comfort that may never come. Yet in the small, cluttered office at work, a man sits at the company computer scanning through lists of the dead looking for names he might recognize. And am I supposed to offer him money? Am I supposed to offer him prayer?

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, a day when most people in this country celebrate diversity and the continuing struggle against racism; but for me, it is also a day to celebrate pacifism and compassion, a commitment to nonviolence, a commitment to peace. This is about more than race, or money, or politics. This is about how we respond to suffering.

A Triad of Peace

We are so used to thinking about justice in terms of the blindly swaying scales of right and wrong, reward and punishment, revenge and reparation. We think of mercy as something else, something that turns away from justice for the sake of love and forgiveness. The pacifist, we think, cannot be just, because sometimes justice demands that bad people be punished and hurtful deeds be repaid in kind. We believe the pacifist must be a passive-ist, sitting back and acquiescing, doing nothing instead of responding with just retribution. The merciful person is the one who could act, who could punish or penalize and who would be justified in doing so, but doesn't. And so, we believe, we must choose: justice, or mercy; righteousness, or forgiveness; action, or passivity.

But this is a tension between two opposites, a duality that restricts us, limits our capacity to choose and to live freely and creatively. There are times when "mercy" alone seems weak and impotent, when "justice" unmitigated seems harsh and unfair. Druidic philosophy teaches us to seek the third, not merely a compromise between two opposites but another element entirely, one that can open up the tension of this-or-that, give it a spaciousness — give us room to move.

Three things that make peace: justice, mercy, and beauty.

What is "fair," after all? A thing of beauty, that which has a lightness of being, that which is gentle and warm, rather than hostile or violent. While "justice" comes to us from words meaning "upright" and "pure" — the unbending, the rigid boundaries between sacred and profane. And "mercy," the gift, the kindness bestowed, unearned, undeserved. One forever standing, on forever stooping, both concerned with restoring relationship to what is proper, appropriate, beautiful, fair. When we speak of justice: only the guilty, the violators can right the wrongs they have committed and restore that balance, through repayment or by suffering punishment equal to the suffering they have caused — justice will demand it of them. When we speak of mercy: those with the kindness and compassion restore relationship, through the gift of forgiveness, lifting up the flawed and the weak, guilty as they may be — mercy will overcome them. But how do we respond in times when there is no guilty party to be blamed, when natural forces cause suffering, and mercy appears too much like pity? Where is peace, where is the balance and harmony of right relationship, in such times, and how do we seek it, how do we help to create it? We create beauty.

And beauty is dynamic, it shifts, it moves — it is a balance that changes and responds. It is intimate; it is personal; it whispers. And sometimes, in the face of injustice, in the face of suffering and pain and tragedy which is simply and unremittingly unfair — sometimes the best response, the response that will restore relationship, is to be beautiful to one another. To mix this appeal in with the others: be just, be merciful, and be beautiful. The pacifist knows this, and because she knows this she is never passive, always active, always creative, always in the process of making peace. Even in times of terrible loss and grief and ugliness, when others look for scapegoats to blame or forgive — and finding none, flounder and stall and stumble to a stop — the pacifist knows that peace-making is not only about upholding justice and offering mercy, but about creating beauty, creating a moving balance out of failures and flaws, making harmonious relationship where before there was disconnection and silence.

Choose to be Beautiful

And there will be people who tell you this isn't enough. But then, nothing is. What could possibly be enough? When he comes to me and says, "Mundo, the world is shit" — am I going to tell him he is wrong, that it all works out in the end, that there is a plan, a the big picture, and God is watching us from a distance? I figure you have to start from where you are, you have to face the possibility that he's right, the world is shit, and this is what you have to work with. And then you have to make a choice. Sometimes all you can say is, "Yes, but..."

Yes... but if the world is shit, if it really is, and no number of rules will bring justice, and no amount of mercy will relieve pain, and nothing you do really matters in the end — then what excuse do you have left? Be beautiful, choose to be beautiful anyway. Choose to be the person you want to be, the best of yourself — choose it not because of the rewards or the consequences, not because of what your beauty will do, but for the beauty itself, for the sake of beauty. Choose to make peace, to create works of art, to laugh and tell stories. Choose to sit in the office and listen to the memories that come bubbling up in grief and worry, and in laughter and affection too, of impoverished life in Haiti, the woman waiting with the pregnant belly, the uncle who drinks, the mother who lectures. Choose to shake his hand before he leaves, and laugh together about the cliché of white clasping black, your small pale hand lost in his huge dark one. Choose to sing the songs you don't remember, and dance your beauty, and call each other nicknames.

I don't have any answers. It will never seem good enough, you will always feel like there is something more you should be doing. There will always be aspects of the world that leave you feeling angry and cynical and impotent and sad. There will always be people trying to shut up your beauty in a box and put that box on a scale and calibrate that scale with disaster and prejudice and hatred and all the wrongs of the world, to make sure you're doing your part to compensate, to outweigh them, to even the score. There will always be people for whom beauty is a paltry, small thing hardly worth noticing. Who insist that it is justice which shapes the world, and mercy which saves it, and that beauty is too intimate and inconsequential to make any difference at all.

And yet... and yet... E pur si muove!

Peace-Making, Despair & Resolution

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I will finish my book manuscript.

I will, in fact, begin my book manuscript. And I will finish it. This year.

That is my resolution. And it's a difficult one, because I've been wanting to write this book since... well, since forever, it seems. And yet, there's always something standing behind me, as if looking over my shoulder, throwing a shadow across the page. I might call it fear — fear to turn back to look over the past several years and delve deeply into the frustration and loneliness that brought me to this place, or fear to share this part of me in a form that strangers and, worse yet, family members might freely peruse, giving perhaps only cursory thought to it, not understanding. O yes, there's the old fear of misunderstanding skulking there. But I think the truth is, what I'm really afraid of is what I might ask of others. I'm afraid of asking others to face despair.

Because in some ways, that's the worst of what I might do. There was a moment — a moment that now lingers in my memory like a haunted hillside where no one ever goes anymore and the stone footprints of some forgotten foundation lie half-hidden in the overgrown weeds, outlining where the ancient house once stood — there was that moment. When I rested quietly beneath the crabapple tree and willed my body to dissolve into mud, willed the worms and flies to turn over my flesh into compost, willed the rain to wash the pulpy heart muscle from its cage of bone so that I would be empty, so that I could empty myself finally, once and for all, into the world. That was despair. And it was, in some ways, beautiful. In some ways, like a surrender, a submission to the force of life and spirit that kept this mass of molecules and neural twingeing cohering in form when everything else seemed to have dropped away. God was not there. Love had not saved me; it had only intensified my sense of longing and separation, my impotence. I cannot choose, I am not free. Let me dissolve, let me give myself up to this tragic beautiful mess of hungry nature... so that my love might, somewhere, do somebody some good. Echoes.

First, you have to love something that much, you have to want something like peace (or God) with your entire being — and I don't mean the "rest in peace" kind of escape from responsibility and pain, but the active, squirming interconnection of creation that throbs through everything. You have to want it so much that you would die in order to accomplish it, or just to get out of its way and let it happen. And then, you have to know that it doesn't matter, that it's too big for you, that you are, either way, too small and careless and fragile. Because that is love: love is touching something bigger than you, too big for you to control. If you cannot touch that hugeness and feel your life like a flicker of sardonic laughter on the edge of chaos, then it isn't love. If you do not reach out with all of your ridiculously insignificant being and seek for it knowing full well your ineptitude and failures, it isn't love. It isn't love, if it doesn't drive you to despair.

This is not some teenage-angst love poem. It's not that kind of despair. It's the despair of ecstatic helplessness, the utter out-going of surrender. You cannot live your life this way, and so you don't. You give it up — and yet somehow, it goes on anyway. Even your life doesn't need you. I made a resolution then, too, that I would eat and drink and work to pay for shelter, and I would wait. I would let my life go on, if that's what it insisted on doing. I would stand up from under the crabapple tree and go home, and I would keep the body fed and healthy, I would exercise and think and breathe and meditate and write (because these things were a necessary discipline), and besides that I would simply wait. I knew who would win out in the end, after all; suicide by living well is still suicide. There were days when I thought maybe this was something like what Christ had felt (or Jesus the historical person, if that's all he was, some poor sod who'd had his body broken on account of his for-so-loving the world): wanting, whatever the cost, for my existence to contribute even one minute particular to the overwhelming Divine Loveliness of Being, and more than that, wanting painfully to just Not Screw It Up.

And somewhere in that despair, I found freedom. Not go-kill-some-foreign-jerks-who-object-to-imperial-capitalism-to-protect-our-freedom kind of freedom. Not even freedom the way I'd always thought I had it all along, that freedom of free will, the freedom to think and experience thinking, to be aware and to experience self-awareness. No, I found a freedom that exists within the tension of Perfect Will and Perfect Love, within the paradox of that loneliness of being a being who longs to unite with Being, and that loneliness of being a being who is already and has always been united with Being. And it is because of that freedom that I can believe in peace, in the possibility of pacifism as peace-making, as creativity that weaves a world of beauty and integrity and breathless, messy Spirit.

And so I've been trying for a while now to write a book about peace. My blog posts last June (and recent articles published in Sky Earth Sea) are ways that I have tiptoed around the idea, trying to work up my courage. But the truth is, I do not know a way to peace-making except through real love, and so too through real despair. (The man who invented the peace sign says he wanted to evoke the image of a person holding their hands outstretched in despair, the peasant before the firing squad.) And the idea that I might not be capable of writing a book that can give to someone this necessary love of existence, of being, of Spirit, is hardly terrifying at all compared to the possibility that I just might succeed, even the least little bit, and suddenly find that what I have given is something painful and heart-dissolving and... awful. Can we make peace without experiencing despair? Can we skim the surface and come away mostly unscathed but still better for it and ready with our hands clean and our tongues ready? (Can I even make any kind of sense to people when I'm bogged down by poetry, rhetoric and convoluted sentence structures?)

And then there is the part of me that feels (please, Pagans, forgive the Old Testament reference) like Job after the game is done — a bit of me that is scarred over and will probably always carry a certain amount of resentment and hardness for what I went through, a part that might not ever completely heal or cease mourning for when I thought I was innocent, when I was not yet burned up. There are people who love me deeply now, better than I have ever been loved — but this part of me that used to really believe I deserved it and could revel in such love, that part is slower to respond and may be a permanent cynic. (And so there is also joy, the disbelieving shock of discovering, over and over, that love, too, comes whether you believe in it or not, that like life itself, love doesn't need your faith in order to be real.)

But peace-making isn't about being joyful or feeling good all the time. And if I made a resolution once, I can do it again. So I'm giving myself a year, a year to write the book I'm afraid to write, a year to churn out whatever terrible drivel and agonizing truth might be left over lingering in my skin from that afternoon under the crabapple tree. This year.

This year. I will begin my book manuscript.

And I will finish it.

Light a Candle to Begin

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for Carl McColman and all those in my life, friend and stranger alike,
who remind me why we light a candle on the darkest night

Christmas eve night, about nine o'clock. Basket slung over one arm and bumping into my hip with every step, I trudge through the snow. The ribbon wound around the basket's slim handle glistens in a hint of milky moonlight, gold thread woven in elaborate patterns through the deep red cloth. In the basket, a red pillar candle and two tapers — scented "seasonal berry" — jostle in a nest of intertwined greens, bits of douglas fir and blue spruce smelling sweetly of bent needles and dried sap; wedged among them, the frankincense sticks, the crystal bowl full of dark sunflower seeds and dried cranberries, the small jar of spring water decorated with silvery snowflake designs and curled bits of blue string. The snow crunches as I feel my way along the un-shoveled path through the park, some of it falling onto the tops of my moccasin-like shoes and slipping down inside to melt against bare skin.

These are 'church shoes', I scold myself, and anyway the path should have been shoveled. But nobody walks the park in winter out here in suburbia, not with the new fenced-in dog park just across the street and the indoor gyms of the community center open for joggers. Still, I should have been more practical. I had to make it back to the house in time to leave for Midnight Mass with the rest of the family, but I would at least have had time to change my shoes. Ahead of me, Jeff walks hunched in his new, superbly warm winter coat and practical, well-treaded shoes. At least there is almost no wind, and all but my toes feel snug and well-padded against the cold night. I switch the basket to my other arm, shoving the opposite hand into my coat pocket. Inside, the tiny box of matches rattles as I turn it around between my fingers.

Think of the world's religions as a kind of landscape. I was born in a city a billion believers strong, a city my family had lived in for several generations. And like most cities, it had its archways and spires and dazzling glass in intricate panes reflecting all shades of the sky, its bustling palatial centers brimming over with the powerful and the connected, and its slums and ghettos and alleyways where the forgotten survived on marrow-deep faith and trembling prayers and broken rules. It had its politicians and its police, its scholars, architects and artists, its beggars, poets, mystics, wanderers, hippies and hipsters, its tourists and its outlying suburbanites who dropped in for some culture on weekends or sat in traffic for the hour-long commute home at the end of a hard day's work.

You don't outgrow this kind of city. You just... grow out of it.

And that's what happened to me. I was born into this city, a city that newcomers are finding their way to all the time, looking for a home in Mystery and Power, looking for the Kingdom and the Glory, striving for belonging, seeking forgiveness and its freedom, hoping for love and maybe, if they're lucky, a little bit of grace. Looking for a home in God. And I grew up here. Exploring the stones and persistent dandelions and old yew trees in the gardens and the cemeteries. Idling in cluttered used book shops that might have been run by kind, contemplative types well suited for the quiet of a monastery or a library. Listening to the songs that rang through the air on the clanging lips of bells as the sun went down. I grew up on the edge of town, where the Irish of the diaspora still remembered the famine and the wars and what good they ever did, and still held a secret enchanted pride in all that was green and mist and hinted of slender deer and shimmering good folk in the woods. I was born into a city hardly knowing how huge and sprawling it really was, more familiar with Saint Francis's weathered stone hands offering perch for the pigeons in the backyard and Mary ribbing Jesus about the wedding wine.

And when I grew up, I went deeper, farther into that city, to understand, to learn about this place, the place where I was born. And when I was a bit older, I went home again, to learn better who I was. I headed for that old familiar family house on the edge of town... but the edges had changed and the land had shifted, though the road names were all the same. Someone had begun placing bricks in rows to block off streets, and hanging signs saying who was in and who was out — or maybe, no, were these the old walls I had clambered over as a child? — the same graffiti, then only so much slithering, bubbling brilliant color, now worming painful accusations and words of isolation, words like heretic, His image and hell? And I clambered over that wall one last time. Following roads to where I knew they must go, roads from which I had watched lone travelers emerging from the fog, roads that were wet with fallen leaves and studded with moss-covered rocks, following roads like the call of my own soul's longing.

This isn't a city you outgrow. I was born here, born knowing all along with the innocent acceptance of a child that I was safe, that I was saved. And I grew up, and I walked with Spirit in my mind and on my lips and in my heart, and when I got to those walls that marked the city limits, I slowed my pace, I read the signs carefully for the first time. And I lingered. And then I walked on.

I walked until I found myself in the wilderness.

Inside the church, folks were gathering, rustling into pews in an effort to be noiseless and respectful. The choir director, a thin woman with cropped black hair and a throat that could throw a pitch toward the rafters as though it were a tow-line to heaven, stood at a lectern off to the left and trilled "Silent Night" to the accompaniment of off-key trumpets. I couldn't repress a wild grin. Nothing much changed here. I recognized some of the altar servers from back when we were all in school together, and the woman who was standing up to the lectern now and droning out the selected reading had been my brother's middle school English teacher, though her long, wild hair was almost all white now, and thinner. "Christian, remember your dignity..." came the somber voice echoing over the hushing and shifting sound of coats being peeled off and folded neatly over the backs of pews. "...life brings us joy with the promise of eternal happiness...." It could be a grammar lesson for all the passion, and careful precision, it had. That was her all over!

Jeff sat beside me on the bench, his eyes flicking across the front of the church, taking in the altar, the huge crucifix hung above it, the candles, the tastefully-lit evergreen trees brought in for the season. Joy beat through me, warm and lapping all the way to my recovering toes. Or maybe it was the frostbite. "Don't clap," I whispered to him teasingly, "when the musicians and the choir stop between songs, you don't clap. There's no clapping in Catholicism, this isn't one of your crazy southern churches." I nudged him in the side through layers of sweater that hid, somewhere beneath them, a very appropriate-looking tie. "And you don't have to do any of the gestures for the prayers if you don't want to. Just stand up and sit down when you see everyone else doing it. But you don't have to kneel. I used to kneel, but I don't anymore. But when everyone is kneeling, sit forward in your seat — and you can lean your hands on the back of the pew in front of you if you want — so that the people behind you have room to kneel. It's polite. And of course you can't go up for communion, you aren't allowed. But when they do the peace-be-with-you part, you shake hands with everyone, but say 'Merry Christmas' instead of 'peace', and you can hug or kiss the people you know, if you want. And watch — after the 'Our Father,' everyone sways a little bit because they're getting tired of standing up and down and kneeling, so they sway just a little bit like they're just slightly off balance and their shoulders all lift at the same time when they breathe between lines, and they don't even notice it..."

He leaned over and whispered in my ear, "Is there going to be any Latin?"

"This is post-Vatican II," I said, "Though the new Pope, What's-his-name, has been rolling back plenty of other things. But no, no Latin. There might be some if we sing 'O Come All Ye Faithful'..."

On the other side of him, my brother leaned over to ask me, "Did you tell him about the people swaying after the 'Our Father'?" I nodded, and we giggled together while our mother shot us a look that told us not to be so jolly, this was Christmas after all.

"What's in that big gold box in front of the little cross-on-a-stick?" Jeff asked me.

"I think the... extra eucharist and wine, for everybody? I don't know. For most of the time I went to church, I was too short to see the altar over the backs of people's heads. And even after that, mostly I kept my head bowed. It was easier to listen that way."

The brass ensemble in the front began a version of "Carol of the Bells" that made me cringe, and I wished very much that it was all right to applaud — they seemed to need the encouragement. I tried to beam a smile wide and warm enough to make it past the slumping shoulders and serious faces, a smile that radiated with a wallop. Sitting there in my mottled green sweater with sleeves short enough to show off my tattoo cascading in a blue, Celtic-knotted wave over my upper arm, my hair hanging in a single thick braid down my back and still smelling a little of incense and "seasonal berry" candles, I turned to look at the faces in the pews around me and caught the eye of the presiding priest, ancient and small in his billowy white and gold robes, sitting on the end of the very last row, looking thoughtful and tired, waiting for the prelude music to end and the midnight mass to begin.

The wilderness tasted of freedom, and freedom tasted of angst and acid rain and silence. And every once in a while, of sunlight, and melting snow, and honeysuckle on the breeze. This was not the triumphant beauty of nature, this was not the garden — this was dark and wild, full of places where you weren't supposed to be out at night, full of the knowledge that you were doing something... wrong. In the road, the corpse of a small soft-gray mouse, crushed and bloody, twitched with the mindless gripping and stinging of two yellow hornets possessed by the hive directive to kill. I was horrified, and I was afraid.

Still, the new moon tipped over the western horizon in a perfect silver sickle, the white slip like a boat sinking with the tide of deepening blue before the slow churning black of night. And in the night, were stars. Stars spilled through space above the canopy of trees, above the broad turning river cutting through the land, above the highest mountain that rose beside the ocean. More stars than I had ever seen, more stars than I could have dreamed, stars that seemed to leap, birthing themselves from the corners of my eyes, flung out in all directions — each place of darkness I looked, stars were surfacing out of night to fill my vision. And I lay on my back, spine pressed unevenly into the rock and felt the gravity of heaven lift me, lift me and my clumsy trembling body, just a fraction, away from fear.

And people, people who don't know, sometimes ask me what does the wilderness give, what does the forest offer? What is out there in the wild that you can't find perfectly well in the teeming, bursting city, this city where you were born? And I know, for I have been there, the city is splendid, full of shouting and music, museums and libraries harboring all the languages of the world, maps of distant galaxies and diagrams of the heart. What can compare to this rich heritage of wisdom and insight blazing brilliant from every street corner?

But in the wilderness, there are forests. In the wild, you can see the stars.

"You might have a convert on your hands," I joked with my father as we all walked back through the church parking lot towards the car. "He's been raving about things that I grew up hearing like the sound of blood in my ears."

"It's all the ritual, the robes and the gold and all the tall candles," Jeff insisted, "Zen Buddhists are so anti-ritual, I didn't have a lot of ritual growing up, I don't 'get' ritual — it was all very impressive. It left an impression, I mean."

"And I liked the sermon," I agreed. "Did you hear him almost say we were all God? 'God became man so that man could... ahem, be like God,'" I exaggerated in a mock-serious voice. "Still, he said we were all Christ to one another, the face of Christ alive in the world. God is forever being born, every day, we are all Mothers of God, Mothers of Spirit. Echoes in that of Eckhart, I think."

"I was impressed that he so much as admitted the Church chose the date for Christmas because of the winter solstice and the renewing of light. You'd never hear anyone admit that in the churches around where I grew up."

"Yes," my father said, sounding conciliatory, "it was an all right homily, I guess."

"I think the Monseigneur is getting a bit old," my mother added. "He seemed to ramble on."

"Well, anyway, I thought it was good." We all scrunched into the car, me crammed between Jeff and my brother in the backseat. "It makes me a bit sad to think for most people 'being Christ to each other' tomorrow just means biting your tongue and being nice to family members even if they annoy you. Wait&mdash!" My brother and I both leaned forward enthusiastically as my father started up the car and my mother switched on the radio. At one in the morning you got all the really bad Christmas songs they wouldn't play during the day. "Shoot, for a second I thought it was going to be 'Dominick, the Italian Christmas Donkey'!"

"This one's better," said my mom, as an androgynous child-voice sang out from the speakers, Mom says a hippo would eat me up, but then Teacher says a hippo is a vegetarian...

For a long time wandering the roads and wild places, I identified as a native of that city that my family still called home. People I met would ask me of my faith, and I would tell them the spiritual place where I was born. Wanderer in the wilderness, a traveler from the city. There was no better name for what I was. Since then, things have changed a little. Perhaps there was some distant reflection of starlight in the corners of my eyes that others thought they recognized; perhaps my hair was a bit disheveled, my shoes muddy, my laugh a hint too wild with the sound of wind and shifting trees. Others began to call me "Pagan" first. Eventually, I stumbled on the open-air stone circles and campfire eisteddfods of Druidry, and found that I could stay awhile without feeling restless and dishonest. Now, when I come home, it is to the sound of Celtic harps and ribbons tied in the branches to catch a blessing from Brigid as her green-and-gold-hemmed mantle flutters by. I settle down to sleep on the edge of that thriving, stubborn little village of Paganism murmuring among the rolling hills. But in the distance, the city glows with memory and a kind of longing sadness on the horizon.

Most of my family still lives in that sprawling city of Catholicism, though the landscape is always shifting under them. Abuse scandals in Ireland, a theologically-strict new Pope weeding out feminism from the women religious in America, preaching against condoms to the mothers and children dying of AIDS in Africa, conservative fundamentalist closing their fingers tightly around fistfuls of sand, bracing against the threatening waves of secular hedonism and individualism and atheist liberals — my parents hunker down on the edge of town, aware of the storm clouds gathering over the opulent skyscrapers of the rich and powerful. They try to imagine the community is holding together, that the world isn't changing around them. But I couldn't have returned to this place as home after I had gone; it was no longer somewhere I wanted to live. Better to risk the dark, wild places of hornets and starlight than to work humbly at a foundation that not only helped to house justice and compassion but held hypocrisy and corruption in their place as well. I followed Spirit into the woods, because Spirit is bigger than the walls that people build.

But the theology of the city is different from the theology of the wild. In the city, laws are descriptions that people have made of the world and the shape of the soul, and Spirit moves through them telling the story of man and how he makes himself, how he saves himself by becoming God with love and mercy and infinite light capable of dissipating the densest dark of ignorance and stubbornness of humanity trying not to see. The city is not a tame place, but its wilderness is man. ("'A crossbow that kills people but leaves buildings standing,' Jeff read from a Pratchett book the other night, and laughed, "O, that's a joke about the neutron bomb!" "The what?" I asked. "The neutron bomb... because the atom bomb was 'too destructive'." "They... made it? It's a real thing?" "Yeah, about twenty years ago, I think... o honey," he said and leaned to hold me as I began to cry.)

In the wild, law is the cold, impersonal Song of What Is beating through both predator and prey, throbbing their hearts in time. It is the truth that love cannot save us from the utter shivering wretched bliss of birth and life and, yes, even love as well. The theology of the wild is fear and fearlessness, blood and root and spiderweb glistening with dew. And Spirit moves and participates in all being, in the terrible power of gods and the weakness and hope of clover. And in the wild, we walk barefoot feeling the tension in our calves, and we accept, and we sing praise and gratitude for the sublime indifferent beauty that leans in close to kiss us in our sleep.

The twigs of green fir and spruce are scattered in a circle and, wedged in the snow, the thick red pillar of the central candle burns steady and clean in the still air. Incense wafts around us. Golden firelight flickers off the ice crystals in the darkness among the towering pines, and for a moment I see glittering on the surface the opalescent blues and greens in a million million tiny flecks that shimmer, too, in the petals of the pure white orchid that sits on the windowsill of my apartment back in Pittsburgh. I take a handful of sunflower seeds and scatter them to the wind, then sprinkle drops of water in libation onto the hard ground. I pass the offerings to Jeff, who does the same, and I wonder what birds will come in the morning to search for what we've left. We all participate this way, in this ancient world.

I reach my senses down to the earth beneath my feet, rocking cold under the layers of snow and ice. I seek the warmth of that burning molten heart, the sun inside, and feel my own blood flowing cool beneath my crisp skin like the first waters of spring melting in the mountains, trickling down and down. I lean to lift my red taper candle from its makeshift holder of mounded snow, holding its flimsy wick over the central candle long enough to catch the flame. Jeff lights his and together we stand, illuminated only by the flickering of this tiny triple fire. I close my eyes. The first syllables of the prayer form on my lips, and by the third line I am not speaking but singing, as deep calls to deep, the words lifting up in my throat, rising and turning — beneath them, I hear Jeff's low tones echoing, supporting, rooting the melody in a whispered chant.

A few blocks away, my parents and brother sit in a warm house, watching "It's a Wonderful Life" on television and getting ready for church. After mass, we will come home again, we'll exchange presents and drink mint tea until four in the morning, then stumble off to bed to sleep until Christmas, waking to my father frying eggs and flipping french toast in the kitchen. This is the neighborhood where I grew up. And for now, we are alone in the park I knew as a child, a park that technically closes at sundown. We are visitors here, and we are doing something wrong, something strange amidst the grid of suburban houses wrapped in Christmas lights and gaudy lawn decorations, something odd and ridiculous out in the freezing cold in impractical shoes.

Yet for the moment, I am empty of fear, and I sing out with a sure voice that rides the tight joy of grateful tears. The Song of What Is thrills through me, stupid and strange and heart-breakingly beautiful. And above us, one by one, the stars creep out to shine.

Song of a Daily Druid: Practicing the Daily Simple

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January's issue of PaganPages is out; this month's Song of a Daily Druid column, Practicing the Daily Simple, tackles the question of what practical daily spiritual living looks like, at least in the life of this practitioner! Following up on last month's column about the elements of ritual, this month I explore three simple techniques that require no ritual whatsoever, but can be employed anywhere, anytime, as a way of incorporating spiritual awareness into everyday, mundane activities. Check it out!

One conviction that has led me so assuredly onto and along the Druid path is the conviction that no amount of philosophizing and debate can make up for a lack of daily, practical work in the spiritual life. It’s easy to forget that any one system can start to seem like the single Truth if you spend too much time within it, and not enough time allowing your body and its natural energies free range to roam. I can hypothesize about the nature of deity, the relationship between free will and destiny, the role of love and grief… and in some ways, this process of writing and thinking is indeed a kind of practical work, too. It does help to clarify, to enlighten, and just as often to frustrate and to reveal the stumbling blocks hiding just beneath the surface. I follow my words like hounds I’ve set loose on the hunt, never quite knowing where they will lead or what scent will send them howling.

But there is other work to do, as well. These simple, daily works are as much a part of my religious practice as the esoteric and exotic, the sacred “set-apart-ness” of much of religious life. I don’t always have the energy — or the time! — to go hunting through poetic imagery and the dense tension of metaphor, weaving my way through the lush undergrowth of belief, identity, paradox and process. Sometimes I have to come home to myself, sometimes I have to clean the hearth and feed the dogs.

......To read more, check out Song of a Daily Druid