Ancestors and Sacred Ambivalence: St. Patrick's Day Reflections

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My ancestors sought the sea as others once sought the desert - that lonely expanse, that drifting horizon, that long voyage to the holy.

I woke up this morning thinking about my ancestors, the Christians who lived in Ireland for hundreds of years before making their way across the ocean to escape famine and disease. They washed up onto these American shores, stumbled their way into the Appalachian Mountains and set to work as coal miners and steelworkers. That is where my father was born and raised, dirt poor, and where much of my family still lives. Every time I travel home to see my parents, I cross those mountains, through the forests and dark valleys and tunnels carved into the rock. The mud and dust of those hills are in my blood, even as the green, soft turf and peat fires of Ireland are in my bones.

Yet there is also deep ambivalence there. The history of coal mining in central Pennsylvania haunts our modern conversations about clean energy and alternative fuels. I see billboards advertising "clean coal" and wince at the lie. And in the same way, I think of the lost history of my pre-Christian ancestors, the stories I will never hear, the art and music I will never know, because of the Christian imperative to evangelize and spread their religion to the ends of the earth.

How are these connected: the abuse of the land, the dangerous work and struggle for livelihood, the dreams and desires of civilization, the silence of the dead, the loneliness of the voyage west across an ocean, unimaginable void dark and churning, dividing the past from the present?

St. Patrick's Day is almost here. Regardless of what others say, I honor the day as a day of sacred ambivalence and the lessons of acceptance and forgiveness. Patrick in the field kneeling on the soft, green turf to pray; Patrick slipping away across the sea to find freedom; Patrick returning to the island where he had been a slave.

If we can't learn these lessons of our ancestors, how can we hope to listen for the stories so much more lost to us than these?

Excerpts from the Qur'an and the Poetry of Rumi

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The most helpful book on the Qur'an that I have ever read is Michael Sells's Approaching the Qur'an: The Early Revelations (with audio CD). In this book, he not only provides subtle translations of the text, a sound introduction to the history and cultural background of Bedouin/Arabic poetry at the time of the Qur'an's writing, and a thorough discussion of the role of recitation and verbal prayer within Islam — he also provides extensive commentary on each sura, exploring some of the many themes and recurring imagery throughout the text. Below are some excerpts from his translations of the earliest suras, along with my own attempts to paraphrase and expand on some of his commentary.



The Small Kindness (107:1-7)

In the Name of God the Compassionate the Caring

Do you see him who calls the reckoning a lie?
He is the one who casts the orphan away
who fails to urge the feeding of one in need
Cursed are those who perform the prayer
unmindful of how they pray
who make of themselves a display
but hold back the small kindness

Naked in the World

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"I reckon we're doing this 'cos we are goin' to die, d'yer see? And 'cos some bloke got to the edge of the world somewhere and saw all them other worlds out there and burst into tears 'cos there was only one lifetime. So much universe, and so little time. And that's not right..."

- Cohen the Barbarian, from The Last Hero, by Terry Pratchett

There is a difference between a hero, and a bully. We all know this, we know it in our bones, in the marrow that makes our blood and the heart that moves it. There is a difference between a warrior, and a grunt-for-hire. Between an act of courage, and an act of arrogance, ignorance or cruelty. And that difference does not lie in nobility, or honor, or wisdom, or even mercy.



Last night, Jeff and I finished reading Terry Pratchett's The Last Hero: A Discworld Fable. With illustrations by the marvelous Paul Kidby, the book is more an homage to the fans of the Discworld novels than anything else. Though my favorite character in all the Disc — Captain Samuel Vimes of the City Watch — sadly did not make an appearance, cameos by Vetinari, Mr. Slant, Ponder Stibbons, the Librarian, Leonard de Quirm, Rincewind, Offler the Crocodile God, a few sad-eyed swamp dragons, and Great A'tuin herself, a giant turtle swimming through the black, starry sea of space carrying the discworld on her back, kept us in giggles for the past several nights. Still, I had been looking forward to some piercing satire and cultural commentary, and for most of the book had to rest satisfied with friendly, conspiratorial winks towards Pratchett fandom instead.

But not last night. In the final pages of the book, Pratchett's genius for story-telling flexed its muscles once again, pulling all the threads of humor, character and destiny tight, weaving a climactic show-down with the gods themselves (and a face-off with the many-eyed Blind Io is not something to sneeze at!). The blurb on the book's dust-jacket sets the mythic tone of the book, introducing the ancient and increasingly decrepit Cohen the Barbarian, who has watched most of his friends die soft and senile of old age, and who is angry, very angry, at the gods. So "the last hero in the world is going to return what the first hero stole" — Cohen intends to bring fire back to the peak of Cori Celesti, right into the halls of Dunmanifestin. And he plans to bring it back with a bang.

Madeline, Praying (a short story of quiet and mystery)

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A hand injury has cruelly kept me from the keyboard for the past week, and in the interest of healing I am still taking the typing very slow and easy. So that my lovely, loyal readers won't feel abandoned, however, I offer you something from the stockpile. The following is a short story I wrote seven or eight years ago, way back in college, before coming whole-heartedly to the Druid path, during a time of grappling with (dis)enchantment, death and mystery. Oddly enough, it features a girl named Madeline (more cynical and angry at Spirit than I ever was), and a hint of flowers. I thought it would be an enjoyable follow-up to last week's guest post. Reading it now, I can only remember hints and shadows of what I was trying to grasp as I wrote it. But I hope you enjoy it, despite its uncertainty.

Madeline, Praying

Entering the abandoned church, she felt as if she were entering the glen of a deep forest. Etched stained glass windows filtered light like entwined branches arching out from the thick columns, trunks of stone. Normally so hard, so brittle, the glass just like any glass, fragile and easily shattered, splintered by a brick or baseball. The marble and granite unmovable, chiseled perhaps, but otherwise worn only by time stretching into future eons of unwritten histories. Yet as she entered the church, she felt as if she were entering something alive, something breathing, momentarily transformed from brittle, breakable, into something delicately living, moving with the breeze, shifting colors of sunlight through branches of trees, seemingly so still and yet growing, always reaching, imperceptibly, in all directions for the sustenance of warmth, of earth and sun, of water, air and light with which the world of this stale chapel was suddenly transfused.

Memorial Day, Motherland and Blood Sacrifice

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It's Memorial Day here in the United States, and I find myself, once again and as usual, deeply ambivalent.

As a Pagan pacifist, as a peace-making Druid, I know that I am not naturally inclined to celebrate holidays of militarism, patriotism and nationalism. This is simple and straight-forward. I find it easier to celebrate the values commemorated on Martin Luther King Day — those of social justice and the sentiments of equality and community, as well as the grief of injustice and of dreams mown down by hate and violence — than the adolescent indulgence in triumphant glorying and loud reveling that occurs each July on Independence Day. Yet unlike these others, Memorial Day leaves me feeling disconcerted and conflicted. All through this holiday weekend, I have read passing comments and thoughtful reflections alike on the True Meaning of Memorial Day, all repeating and revolving around this singular, pervasive notion: that we must "honor the memory of the soldiers who fought and died for us." Honor is such a powerful word, and death such a vital reality. But there is a kind of emptiness, a hollowness echoing within that expression, one that takes for granted what our relationship is to the dead, what our responsibilities are to the living, what honor and memory truly look like, how they function, what they require of us.

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!

Elements of Peace: What Any of Us Can Do

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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.

Samhain: Thinning the Veil

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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.

After Beauty

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Strange, that all of a sudden I remember the poem--the smell of the book it was in, like a palmed cigarette stub sweaty and stale with old smoke, and how worn it was, and loose in its faded jacket--and I don't recall the poem itself.

Just that it was about a girl--I imagine her with oily hair in waves rich with grief that you could dip your fingers in--and perhaps a convenience store, closed for the night with security fluorescents churning in their cluttered hollows, or a living room in an old apartment with the shades drawn, or at least some other dark, crowded place where the noise and hands are hard and constant, tearing the throat out of dirty evening sunlight.

And about how the girl was beautiful because everything else was ugly.

How all the other people were ugly, hunched, bloated, without adequate faces, it seemed, missing teeth or noses, spaces where there should have been eyes or lips to speak with or close solemnly in recognition, in self-possession--but she was beautiful, her hair in perfect dark rivulets down her cheekbones and neck, a painting in oils turning in queazy pools over the surface of the water,

and about how she did not speak, or at least not well or for very long. And the poem ends like that moment

when you stand on a wet cliff, slick black rocks slouching into the ocean, and watch as a gull shifts uneasily in the air, its starved crescent form like a piece of bone scraping against the sky, watch as it seems to see the thick sliver of a fish below, watch as it slams itself into the sharp, ugly water--

because it is that hungry.

Beauty
by Stephen Dobyns

The father gets a bullet in the eye, killing him
instantly. His daughter raises an arm to say stop
and gets shot in the hand. He's a grocer from Baghdad
and at that time lots of Iraqis are moving to Detroit
to open small markets in the ghetto. In a month,
three have been murdered and since it is becoming
old news your editor says only to pick up a photo
unless you can find someone half decent to talk to.

Jammed into the living room are twenty men in black,
weeping, and thirty women wailing and pulling their hair--
something not prepared for by your Episcopal upbringing.
The grocer had already given the black junkie his money
and the junkie was already out the door when he fired,
for no apparent reason, the cops said. The other daughter,
who gives you the picture, has olive skin, great dark eyes
and is so beautiful you force yourself to stare only

at the passport photo in order not to offend her.
The photo shows a young man with a thin face cheerfully
expecting to make his fortune in the black ghetto.
As you listen to the girl, the wailing surrounds you
like bits of flying glass. It was a cousin who was shot
the week before, then a good friend two weeks before that.
Who can understand it? During the riots, he told people
to take what they needed, pay when they were able.

Although the girl has little to do with your story,
she is, in a sense, the entire story. She is young,
beautiful and her father has just been shot. As you
accept the picture, her mother grabs it, presses it
to her lips. The girl gently pries her mother's fingers
from the picture and returns it. Then the sister with
the wounded hand snatches the picture and you want to
unwrap the bandages, touch your fingers to the bullet hole.

Again the girl retrieves the picture, but before she
can give it back, a third woman in black grabs it,
begins kissing it and crushing it to her bosom. You think
of the unflappable photographers on the fourth floor
unfolding the picture and trying to erase the creases,
but when the picture appears in the paper it still bears
the wrinkles of the fat woman's heart, and you feel caught
between the picture grabbing which is comic and the wailing

which is like an animal gnawing your stomach. The girl
touches your arm, asks if anything is wrong, and you say,
no, you only want to get out of there; and once back
at the paper you tell your editor of this room with fifty
screaming people, how they kept snatching the picture.
So he tells you about a kid getting drowned when he was
a reporter, but that's not the point, nor is the screaming,
nor the fact that none of this will appear in a news story

about an Iraqi grocer shot by a black drug addict,
and see, here is his picture as he looked when he first
came to our country eight years ago, so glad to get
out of Baghdad. What could be worse than Baghdad?
The point is in the sixteen-year-old daughter giving back
the picture, asking you to put it in your pocket, then
touching your arm, asking if you are all right and
would you like a glass of water? The point is she hardly

belongs to that room or any reality found in newspapers,
that she's one of the few reasons you get up in the morning,
pursue your life all day and why you soon quit the paper
to find her: beautiful Iraqi girl last seen surrounded by
wailing for the death of her father. For Christ's sake,
those fools at the paper thought you wanted to fuck her,
as if that's all you can do with something beautiful,
as if that's what it mens to govern your life by it.

Angels, Demons & Old Men in Bathrobes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

A Brief Note of Renewal

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There will be one or possibly even two more "Re-Membering Theology" posts before the series is finished (I actually quite like how the series is evolving and sprawling all over the place, incorporating much more than I had first anticipated). But before moving on, I just wanted to mention something that has also been on my mind a great deal recently: the atrocities in Gaza.

What is happening in the Gaza strip--what has been happening, not just for the past two weeks but for the past several decades--is wrong. It is not just wrong, it is monstrous. I cannot even feel my old familiar political angst over the issue. It's too clear-cut for angst. To suggest that the tragedy of the Holocaust and the genocide of Jewish Europeans can somehow excuse and justify a theocratic government (which is what a government is when it forces its democracy to confirm to an ethno-religious identity, as Israel's "Jewish democracy" does by driving out or exterminating the non-Jewish native population)--to suggest that this tragedy can justify such a government terrorizing an entire population... well. That sentence is so packed with anger and pain that I can't even finish it.

We must not confuse anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism (bigotry directed against Palestinians/Arabs, who are also Semitic in descent and religion, is also anti-Semitism, by the way). We must not confuse a denouncement of the Israel government with a rejection of the Jewish people. And we must not stand by and continue to allow the U.S. government to send billions of dollars in military aid to a government involved in its own little genocide. It is clear that the Israeli government does not care about the Palestinian people; it has illegally occupied land, uprooted families and destroyed livelihoods, allowed children to starve and imprisoned adults, and now it is bombarding the population ruthlessly in a pre-planned attack that needed no provocation. (In light of this abusive treatment, is it any wonder that groups like Hamas can find support? If you doubt for a moment that the average American wouldn't turn to such groups under similar circumstances, ask yourself how you justified the overthrow of not one but two foreign governments (Afghanistan and Iraq) in the aftermath of one American building destroyed on a sunny morning by people who weren't even from those countries.)

But as angry and disgusted as I am, I am also filled with hope as this new year dawns. The city of Pittsburgh is suddenly full of protest and debate. Students have gathered--indoors and sometimes in the streets--for the last several days to protest the massacre and show solidarity for Gaza and the Palestinian people. People here are talking, finally. Four or five months ago, I would never have believed that I could not only freely express my disapproval of America's blind support of Israel, but that others around me would be nodding and saying, "Yes, enough's enough." But all around me, people are watching the bodies of emaciated children and dismembered mothers carted out of the Gaza Strip, and they're wondering how long it takes for a child to waste away like that. Surely not twelve days. Certainly a forty percent civilian casualty rate is too high (when the Palestinian death toll is almost a hundred times that of Israelis). People have compared Gaza to an "open-air concentration camp"--and for once, they are not being bullied into silence by politically-correct cries of "Holocaust-denier!" and "never again!" For too long, we've allowed "never again" to mean "well, again, but not to us, to someone else this time." This is not acceptable, and people are finally waking up to that fact.

I feel a similar renewal in the Pagan community, in the wake of deo's podcast ending. Certainly not on the scale (either of tragedy or resulting discussion) as the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, but energizing and hope-filled nonetheless.

Out of hardship and doubt come rebirth and renewal, out of struggle comes community and perspective, and hopefully a fresh new beginning. I'm waiting for spring, in some ways vibrating with anticipation as the sleet slices through the wind outside and the streets and the trees glisten under a slick coating of ice. I am waiting for spring, waiting for the sun to climb, waiting for the warmth, waiting to feel new again. There is a struggle ahead of us. There always is. But there are also moments of gratitude and momentum, of elevation and even awe. Attending a gallery opening last night to raise money to send aid into Gaza, I overheard its organizers speaking, close to tears, about how they were running out of seating and unable to fit everyone in the modestly chosen lounge area. Sometimes it's enough to show up, to be present, to allow our presence and our engagement to manifest our care and our desire to change the world for the better. Afterwards, I walked home through the woods--each shadow highlighted and stark against the layering snow, a full moon glowing faintly among low clouds... It is winter. It is still very much winter.

But I trudge through the snow and the dark. And I didn't cry. I felt, for once, too lucky and too hopeful and too committed to cry.

Considering Samhain.

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The following are excerpts from a few letters I've written to my cousin, after he emailed me asking what kinds of holy days or "feast days" my religion held around this time of year. He'd heard a mention on an NPR program about "the veil between the worlds" becoming thin during these darkening autumn days and wanted to know if my spirituality incorporated this idea at all. This is some of what I wrote back in response (after explaining, as briefly as I could, the basic structure and history of the eight-festival "Wheel of the Year" celebrated by many modern Pagans).

Most Celtic-based Pagan spiritualities (including Druidry and some Witchcraft) acknowledge Samhain (Halloween) as the Celtic New Year and the most holy day on the calendar. It is a Fire Festival and is very closely connected agriculturally with the "late/last harvest," which was the harvest of the very last fruits of the season (such as apples, gourds, etc.) and the slaughter of a good percentage of livestock in order to thin the herd for the coming winter. Thus, the festival is heavily associated with
blood and death, the coming of cold and darkness and increasing scarcity as winter comes on--but it's also a time of gathering and celebration, lighting the fire and feasting in spite of the cold. Like most Druidic things, it carries in it a bit of a paradox. This tension is probably where the idea of a "thin veil between worlds" comes from. Animal sacrifice has been used in almost all religious traditions at one time or another as a way of "parting the veil" that separates the mundane and the sacred realms (even Christianity, which is based on a blood sacrifice to reconcile the profane with the sacred), so it's understandable that during a time when animals were being slaughtered out of practical necessity (to make sure they didn't have so many animals to feed over the winter that they became sickly or a burden on the family), the death and subsequent consuming of red meat became associated with communication with the Underworld. That's where you get a lot of the "Day of the Dead" stuff around this time of year, as well as the practice of honoring ancestors or loved ones who have died. Most of the secular Halloween traditions comes from this pagan association with death (also natural considering the dying off occurring in the natural world), and it actually influenced the Catholic Church to adopt November 1 and 2 as All Souls and All Saints Days to commemorate the dead within the Christian tradition.

To be honest, this time of year has never been anything particularly special to me. Everyone has their favorite holy day, I guess, and I think mine is actually Imbolc/Candlemas, probably because it was the first holy day I officially celebrated as a not-quite-Catholic-anymore. Samhain has a bit of mischief and darkness to it, which I think appeals to many Pagans, who tend to be rebellious, fun, independent folks. It's also the easiest to celebrate in public as part of the secular celebration of Halloween, which for people who have to practice their Paganism in solitary, without a community to have parties and rituals with, helps a little bit. Back in high school, one of my best friend's birthdays was just a few days before Halloween, so she always loved the holiday and really got into the whole costume parties and ghosts and hauntings and such. Then later, in college, after 9/11, it always seemed to me that it was really the fall equinox that had the strongest association with death, grief and loss for me, and this persisted until only a year or so ago when my political angst finally seemed to settle into something solid and workable. Meanwhile, my break up with R. just happened to occur on Halloween several years ago, and ever since, to be perfectly honest, the month of October in general has been hellish for me, usually accompanied by major bouts of depression and regret, so that I tended to try to just ignore autumn altogether until I could make it through to Thanksgiving and the Holiday Season (and then, only a month and a bit until Imbolc!). While I was doing my year of formal study with AODA, I performed personal rituals to mark each of the days (small ceremonies involving candles, incense, meditation, nothing spectacular or strange--well, unless you count candles, incense and meditation as strange)... Then I kind of fell out of the habit.

But then last year, by the time Samhain rolled around, it had been only a few months since my friend F. had died. I was still grieving a little, though coping, and I decided to actually use my personal Samhain ritual for some prayer work specifically focused on "talking" to and honoring the memory of F. (though my beliefs about what exactly happens to a soul after death are still a little shaky, I think maybe for a short period of time at least there could be some coherence and retention of individual awareness and even personality.... maybe). In any case, the experience was startling and I even had the pungent sensation of smelling his familiar smell for just a second (a combination of deodorant and hair gel, plus the overlapping smell of grease from work). Whether this was some "communication" or whatever, I have no idea, but afterwards I did begin to feel, for the first time, like a rift had been healed or something had slipped back into place and relaxed a muscle that had been tense so long I'd ceased to consciously notice it. I found I could accept his death more understandingly than I had before. I've never given much credence to ghost stories and such, mostly because I don't think that's really how it works, though I can believe there are energy patterns left "impressed" into physical objects or places that kind of echo through time. Around this time of year, I do always get the craving to indulge in some good ghost story-telling, and I end up rereading some E.A. Poe and watching shows like "Ghost Hunters" or "Real Hauntings" or whatever those shows on the Discovery/History Channels are called. So who knows, really?

This year, I've been trying to keep up my spirits through October (and it's been working pretty well), and I've also worked more at decorating my altar for the season. Each day on my walks to and from work, I keep my eyes open for autumn leaves to bring inside and place around my altar; and once or twice I've gone on long walks through the local park to pick wildflowers that are still in bloom and just appreciate nature and the shifting, overlapping seasons as the weather gets colder. The other day, I had one of those great walks where all the colors just seemed so saturated and intense, as sun slit down through low, dark clouds and wind shook leaves from high up in the canopy. I love moments like those, when you almost can't believe how beautiful the world is. I very much like Druidry because it's so much about getting out there in nature and opening yourself up to the energies around you, revving up your intuition and imaginative faculties until you can almost see the spirits of air and color dancing through the landscape, and the trees seem to have unique personality and soul, and even rocks and streams take on a kind of liveliness. It's not all reading books and studying theology and listening to preaching. You just go out and try to feel the world with your heart and mind, you just try to be open to it and what it's sending your way, to feel the rhythm of it. In Druidry there's an idea that everything, every "soul", has a song, and all of these songs work to create harmonies and melodies that actually "sing" the world into being and guide its course. So you go outside and sit in the chill and the dim light and watch the leaves fall and try to listen to the song of things. And there is darkness and discord, too, it's not all light and happy and peaceful and such (though Druidry does focus strongly on peace, as well as on truth, and poetry). It's hard to describe exactly--you just kind of have to trust the process and also trust the basic exercises in meditation and visualization, even though they can seem repetitive and overly-structured and boring at first. It's like teaching your spiritual "ear" how to hear the music.

I was going to say more about the "thin veil," but once again I feel like this letter is already too long. Simply put, the Celtic worldview holds that there are basically "three worlds" (this is horribly simplified and dumbed down, mind you): the Otherworld, the Underworld and the everyday mundane world that we live in. The Otherworld is not necessarily a "heaven" up in the sky, though it is associated, like I said in my last letter, with solar and stellar energies, air and electricity. Really, the Otherworld is seen as existing in the same space as the regular world, but kind of overlapped or slightly off, like a dimensional shift or something (to put it in sci-fi terms). It is ever-present and interpenetrates our own, and people with "the Sight" can see it and the beings that live on that plane kind of moving and existing all around us. The same is true of the Underworld, except that instead of being solar/stellar energies, the Underworld focuses on earthy energies. There is a myth about a "star" being falling to earth and impregnating it/her, giving birth to creatures whose "center of gravity" is not the Otherworld, but kind of within the earth itself (the idea that the very center of the earth is another "star" or hot fiery heart, which actually it is!). This is why old burial mounds in Ireland and Wales are associated with some spirit beings, they are said to live "within" the very ground itself, but really this is just another way of saying that, like the Otherworld, the Underworld is all around us and yet "shifted" slightly out of our everyday experience.

So, with that kind of worldview in mind, the cycle of the seasons sometimes help to "shift" various worlds into closer alignment, effectively thinning the veil and allowing experiences from the Other- or Underworld to kind of spill over into our middle existence. The shift that puts our world in closer alignment with the Underworld occurs around Samhain--though really, some people think that it lasts as long as the winter solstice, so that the time between Oct. 31 and Dec. 21/22 is a period of dark "no time" when communication with the Underworld is easiest (I once read a Druid idea of a "Torc of the Year" instead of a Wheel of the Year, illustrating this idea). Our peak alignment with the Otherworld occurs on May 1, Belteinne, and is believed by some to last all the way until the summer solstice ("midsummer," which is why both May Day and Midsummer are closely associated with faeries, even in Shakespearean plays and such).

It is really kind of thrilling if you think about it. Again, you can imagine it in terms of song and music, and the respective melodies of different planes coming into harmony at certain times of the year, allowing for sympathetic vibrations and echoes, the way hitting one note on a piano will cause other notes at various higher and lower octaves to hum slightly. And the idea of much of the ritual found in modern Druidry is to "tune" yourself, to teach you the best way to get yourself open and listening to these vibrations. I always felt like Catholic ritual was rather empty and rote, but really the purpose of ritual in most religions is the same. Just as the way you think and feel will affect how you act, likewise the process happens in reverse, so that by performing certain actions repeatedly (whether it's lighting a candle, sitting in a particular position in order to pray or meditate, or walking a circle and raising your arms to greet the four directions), the pattern of action will come to shape how you think and feel and respond to the world. It's potentially manipulative stuff when you always let other people dictate what those ritual actions should be, but when you actively and consciously engage in creating your own rituals, it's almost like making spontaneous works of art with your own body. The way a painting or song can evoke particular emotions and experiences in a person, you can cultivate spiritual experiences by choosing to act out certain rituals.

Even the most secular people do this almost without thinking about it around this time of year especially. Hollowing out pumpkins (the violence of the knife, the slimy guts inside), putting lit candles inside them and displaying them in windows, dressing up and behaving like monsters, zombies, ghosts, vampires, sitting around telling ghost stories and inadvertently looking for signs of spirits in the dancing pattern of falling leaves--all of these things are socio-spiritual rituals that help us connect to and experience "death" before actually having to die. The death not only of the physical self, but also of the social conventions that bind us and keep us "safe", so that mischief and wildness are also part of the celebration, average conventional women dressing up in promiscuous outfits, teenagers gathering together around Ouija boards and playing at the occult, testing boundaries, experimenting with chaos.

Damn, now that I think about it, I do rather like this time of year. Plus, out of chaos and darkness come new possibilities, imagination and new life. Which is why this is the New Year for the ancient Celts, the time when old things are dying off and making room for new potential.

Though I'm not sure about the whole vampire thing. Don't get me wrong, I like vampires--but the YA Fiction obsession with them lately seems to speak more to the fact that teenagers are treated increasingly as energetic parasites, leeching life off of others without the power or even expectation of ever giving back anything meaningful and substantive of their own--and how these days adolescence seems to stretch into eternity, people obsessed with staying and acting young forever, maintaining a college-party lifestyle well into mid- to late-twenties (or longer!). But that's just me psychoanalyzing society with a touch of personal bitterness. Do you find any of that to be the case? I mean, it seems to me like there must be some distinction between the "classic" conception of the vampire (and its associations with sickness, death, and all the wild passions free of social conventions I was talking about before, etc.) and the new vision of the vampire as a kind of deathless sex god who only bucks convention as far as the typical Hot Topic teenage goth consumer can be expected... Vampires-as-undead versus vampires-as-soulless-consumers.... okay, maybe there's not so much a difference after all.

This letter has gotten ridiculous. So I'll end on a ridiculous note. Last night I dreamt (probably because of writing that letter to you) that I was eating an almost-raw hamburger, when you came up and grabbed it out of my hand, wrapped the whole thing (bun and all) in wide lettuce leaves, then set it on the ground and started smashing it with a baseball bat. Apparently my vegetarian self was feeling bad about speaking so casually about slaughtering livestock for food!

The Beauty Bone

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Okay, you know the funny bone, that weird little spot on your elbow that tingles something awful when you bump it in just the right way? It has something to do with ligaments and joints, and how muscles and bone and flesh come together in a spot that swings and creaks around a few thin, long nerves.

I think I have some sort of internal tragicomic 'beauty bone' that tingles and tears up whenever something--an idea, an image, a word or memory--strikes me in just the right way. This quote by Terry Pratchett, for example:

As they say in Discworld, we are trying to unravel the Mighty Infinite using a language which was designed to tell one another where the fresh fruit was.

The first time I read it, I smiled and chuckled, yes, isn't that so clever and true... Then I read it again--and I started to cry a little.

There it is, do you see it? The Elbow of Spirit swinging on necessity and longing, nerved words of practical need banging up against the rock-hard ineffable. Do you feel the pinch? Fruit, that is hunger, that is Spirit, that is language, that is fruit.

The other day, I went to see the new Chronicles of Narnia film, Prince Caspian. A pleasant fantasy-adventure movie, with beautiful landscapes and daring sword fights, and a little girl named Lucy who's burdened with an overabundance of faith. All in all, an enjoyable movie, even the fearful battles mitigated by a sense of safe familiarity because, in Narnia, nobody dies, not really. But there was a moment, towards the beginning, when Lucy dreams of the birch trees dancing in the forest, their nymphs coalescing in clouds of blossoms drifting on the breeze--and she wakes to find the grove utterly still, the trees just trees again. She pauses by one, leans against the trunk touching the papery bark lightly with her little fingers, and whispers, "Please wake up..."

Perhaps it's that phrase, the please wake up, that has been whispered in movies and books by so many children to so many dead, the still bodies that look to be only sleeping, that move too limply when shaken--maybe that's what hit the beauty bone this time. As the children's movie rolled on, I suddenly remembered another film, a film about actual war in the actual world, and the old man who sighed deeply in the dark theater as if he didn't know I was there. I remembered how, upon leaving the theater as the credits rolled, I saw him coming out of the bathroom, his eyes red from crying, his jaw set against the embarrassment of being caught in the bright sunlight of the street outside.

There it is--the sighing grief in the dark, and its juxtaposition. A sense of vertigo, when cliché breaks open again and there is the void lurking just beneath it, the sense of loss, layer upon layer, all of us having lost something, all of us whispering, pleading, until the please itself becomes a thin membrane of voice and grief that holds us up. There it is again, the particular breaking open, the bodies of the dead, the pale tree, the single pear, the stem and seeds, that which becomes the bones and soft flesh of a god. The muscles and joints, how the world is put together, how it moves, and the currents of longing and hope and helplessness running through it.

Do you feel the pinch?

Death in Springtime.

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You may have noticed, dear reader, my recent lack of regular blogging over the past month or so...

No? O, well then you've probably been suffering from the same blessed spring fever that I've come down with (or gone out with, as the case may be). My thoughts lately have been as lazy and amusing as a rabble of cabbage butterflies. Here, for instance, is the half-hearted attempt at a serious contemplation of death and the afterlife. It soon dissolves into chuckling at my own self-reflection.

"Life is cruel. Why should the afterlife be any different?"

- Davey Jones, PotC: DMC

Interesting question.

On the other hand, I'm not inclined to agree with the premise. Maybe I've just been lucky... quite possible. But somehow I don't think that's all it is--at least, I know plenty of people who seem to have better "luck" but don't do nearly as much with it.

I'm more inclined to believe that life is what you make it with the materials you're given (the material world itself--biology, chemistry, physics--as well as society, individuality, community, personality, etc.). And in that sense, why should the afterlife be any different? We're given different media to work with, perhaps, and different skills to utilize, and we're working and creating from a different perspective...

On the other hand, maybe this view is just a way of denying death. If the afterlife is a transition to a new way of being/becoming, then death is no real tragedy. Yet we grieve deeply over the death of loved ones. Is this grief a mistake, a reaction based in our ignorance of what lies "beyond"? Or is it an accurate reflection of the nature of death as a definite end?

Now I feel like I'm writing the opening voiceover for an episode of X-Files or Medium.

Probably a sign that I should stop.

The Night Song.

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Night has come; now all fountains speak more loudly. And my soul too is a fountain.

Something unstilled, unstillable is within me; it wants to be voiced. A craving for love is within me; it speaks the language of love.

Light am I; ah, that I were night! But this is my loneliness that I am girt with light. Ah, that I were dark and nocturnal! How I would suck at the breasts of light! And even you would I bless, you little sparkling stars and glowworms up there, and be overjoyed with your gifts of light.

But I live in my own light; I drink back into myself the flames that break out of me. I do not know the happiness of those who receive; and I have often dreamed that even stealing must be more blessed than receiving. This is my poverty, that my hand never rests from giving; this is my envy, that I see waiting eyes and the lit-up nights of longing. Oh, wretchedness of all givers! Oh, darkening of my sun! Oh, craving to crave! Oh, ravenous hunger in satiation!

They receive from me, but do I touch their souls? There is a cleft between giving and receiving; and the narrowest cleft is the last to be bridged.

The danger of those who always give is that they lose their sense of shame; and the heart and hand of those who always mete out become callous from always meting out. My eye no longer wells over at the shame of those who beg; my hand has grown too hard for the trembling of filled hands. Where have the tears of my eyes gone and the down of my heart? Oh, the loneliness of all givers! Oh, the taciturnity of all who sine!

Many suns revolve in the void: to all that is dark they speak with their light--to me they are silent. Oh, this is the enmity of the light against what shines: merciless it moves in its orbit. Unjust in its heart against all that shines, cold against suns--thus moves every sun.

The suns fly like a storm in their orbits: that is their coldness.

Oh, it is only you, you dark ones, you nocturnal ones, who create warmth out of that which shines. It is only you who drink milk and refreshment out of the udders of light.

Alas, ice is all around me, my hand is burned by the icy. Alas, thirst is within me that languishes after your thirst.

Night has come: alas, that I must be light! And thirst for the nocturnal! And loneliness!

Night has come; now my craving breaks out of me like a well; to speak I crave.

Night has come; now all fountains speak more loudly. And my soul too is a fountain.

Thus sang Zarathustra.

(Nietzsche, TSZ)

Poem: Always in Autumn

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Always in Autumn

I.
A man sells his small windows and his door,
set in the walls of the small house where he lives;
he sells his oils and bags of grain, his horse
and his dog and his plow, his unborn daughter's
dowry and his only winter cloak; he sells his field and
the low, gnarled olive tree on the hill. The last memory
of the place he leaves is his body illuminated
and dark and illuminated and dark as he walks
past each small window, broken by morning.

II.
A man buries a pearl in a field because its worth
is greater even than his life, and a thief would know it.
He buries the pearl and buys the field.
He builds a small house with small windows and a door.
The winter is long, and frost obscures the grave.
He buys a plow and a dog. He has a wife, and then a child.
Each spring, he works the earth, he sows a bag or two of grain.
At the end of every summer, he walks along the rows of wheat,
and waits for some accident
of autumn harvest to push up the pearl again.

III.
In autumn, I make the right decision,
I steal back the ring
and throw it into the river. The days are
illuminated and dark and illuminated and dark,
and the winter comes on, though the river will not freeze.
My grief, like the river, moves and moves despite the cold.

Unfocused Pieces.

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I'm currently on sabbatical--an enforced period of rest from overuse of the computer and too much pressure (entirely my own fault, admittedly) to read and write at an enormous pace. There is some need to feel useful and self-motivated, to justify my current circumstances as an unemployed writer and a rather timid, exhausted waitress. This need has pushed me to a point of exhaustion lately, especially during a week-long illness mid-September, during which ideas and themes for writing backlogged, creating a kind of bottlenecked writer's block. Now they are grinding their gears and honking their horns, and all the noise in my brain is keeping me from concentrating with my usual furious, unmitigated enthusiasm. Indeed, I find it rather difficult to concentrate much at all on linear thinking at the moment, retreating into the flowing narratives of novels and the visual focus on my new handicrafts project: pencil sketching.

Things continue to happen. I continue to attend and to remember. Life is not lost on me. But I sit down at the computer desk, and the soggy-cotton-ball headache in my brain fogs up the glass with the breath of my thinking--I can't see clearly into the landscape of ideas, hopping from one spot to another with an imagining architect's eye. I don't have the patience. Now is, perhaps, a time for gathering in and hoarding. There will be months of winter in which to recall, from within the darkness, that moment last night when I wandered from room to room in my apartment, seeking to touch the brick bones of the building; or the walk through the park without my glasses, when space was rendered physical, a visual dimension, and distant leaves hung in silhouette against the afternoon sunlight, blurry, glistening, radiating orbs of gold and green; or a thousand other impressions and moments. I'm harvesting them, I am making the effort to anchor myself in the here-now. The brain, like the heart, is a muscle, which must be rested in order to be properly maintained.

With that in mind, here are a few random bits of journaling and letter-writing from over the past week or so, to tide you over, and to promise more to come.


The Vase

After all, there was the vase--I could see it. I could make a line on paper, I could compare this line with the image of the vase. I had eye enough to recognize when they did not match, and yet erase and redraw as I might, I somehow couldn't much improve, I couldn't bring the sketch to reflect the actual image I saw before me. Why not? What fluke of the brain was impeding the hand? This was a matter of seeing, not of doing. I was convinced that if I could "see better" I would be able to draw better. Somehow, I had to figure this out.

Sketching a small, deep blue, hand-painted Brazilian vase had become an exercise in memory and perception. What I perceived (and thus drew immediately, eye to paper) was fragmented, a marriage of ill-matched angles and proportions, a shifting visual mirage where this moment's shadow was tacked onto last moment's curved neck, which sprang precariously from the rounded angles of a base and belly drawn to different moments' scales. But when I gave up, frustrated, and sat back to sketch the damn, simple thing from memory--there it was. The form of it, the completeness of the thing, compressed into a sudden whole by the integrating, effacing processes of recall. Perspective and subtle change forgotten, memory proved the more realistic guide.

Somewhere in my sunconscious, imaginative brain, there exists an artist who knows what she is doing and might, with practice, make passable sketches of, say, birds and trees and things. Apparently, my conscious attempts at art have stalled at the ten-year-old level, unable to make the leap into cubism and the modern, playful but skilful abandonment of perspective. We must investigate this discrepancy further.


A Philosophical Opinion of Pleasure

Perhaps pleasure is a mechanism of the real, to which we should attend with as much seriousness as we attend to questions of morality, purpose, will, art, religion... What is the function of pleasure? And by this, I mean not only physical pleasure--though, perhaps, all pleasure is to some extent physical. Another strangeness. Aesthetic pleasure, utilized carefully to thrill or disgust, excites the faculty of attention. There is a bridge between body and mind, and that bridge is sensation. If we attend carefully to sensation, how can we avoid pleasure? How could we possibly shun it? How could we claim that we do not, to some extent, seek it out?

Pleasure circulates, it corrodes the easy categorical walls that the mind makes. The eyelid, the shoulder, the useless skin of the earlobe--these are not extraneous to the beloved, not ignored by the lover. They are representative of the whole, they communicate to the rest. A lover, dazed in pleasure, makes no distinctions, kisses anything.

We mistake convenience, addiction, lust for pleasure. We've forgotten what real pleasure feels like, the pleasure of health, the thrill of simplicity, balance and the sounding of a single, pure tone in the rising chord of creative coexistence. This is sacred pleasure, that of gratitude and grace.

Listen.


Evening Solitude & Sadness

I tried for a moment to get a view of my sadness, a feel for it, maybe. A shift in perspective. Am I actually sad? Is any of it real, or are these simply useless, irrelevant emotions (and wouldn't that, anyway, be somehow just as awful, to be so subject to such useless, meaningless feelings and for feelings themselves to be useless, meaningless)? I stepped back and saw my sad little self sitting in this dark, empty space of a living room--and I felt: there I am, still sad and lonely and small, inside a great, beautiful night that is so full of grace and potential and quietness. They both exist. I am content and sad at once. Maybe it's selfish to want to be happy, to want relief from always feeling a sneaking loneliness underscoring everything. Maybe everyone feels this way, all the time, and that's how it is--moments of perspective in which the world and life are utterly beautiful, and the surrounding void in which the very same world and life, unchanged, seem superfluous and stupid. But then, I am back to faith--how can love and hope mean anything if this is just how reality is? In what way do they function, what is the purpose? I do not want to deceive myself, I do not want to color everything in with hearts and roses and pretend love will save the day. But how can I live without it? Why should I be expected to? It's all just noise and nonsense otherwise. Can I reject it--a loveless life and a world in which love falters and fails--on principle, even if it means rejecting what actually is? I want to hold both things--love, and the actual world--and cherish both, believe in both. I don't know if that's possible.

I'm afraid I'm going backwards, devolving. I'm afraid I'm losing the way, that I'm worse than I used to be, that I do not love as well or as boldly, and that I can't get it back. Having lunch with a friend, I'm okay and happy and peaceful, except of course that I am becoming an awful person who laughs and has no hope. With a friend, I am not so bothered by my awfulness, my apparent disability. It's only when I'm alone that I can't justify it. I should not let the sadness of my solitude prevent me from being useful to the community of creation. But I feel so weighed down by it. They--the mysterious Other--demand that I be happy on my own, be completed and whole as an isolated being; but if I am, there is no reason to seek the Other in the first place. Which is worse: to feel, painfully, a kind of isolation; or to actually be isolated, so cut off that you no longer even desire connection?

Grief, Dissolved.

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Deep within the still center of my being,
May I find peace.
Silently within the quiet of the Grove,
May I share peace.
Gently within the greater circle of humankind,
May I radiate peace.
Awen.

I am not sad today. I woke up early this morning with a searing throat and the sniffles, but I am not sad. Though the morning grows late, the rain is unstoppable and each room in my apartment remains dark, as if in a kind of unlikely and ever-lasting twilight. I make my green tea, and I am not sad.


My friend, Freddy, died a little over a month ago, of heart failure. He was young, healthy, strong--and one night, his heart gave out.

A week before he died, before I left for my family vacation, he gave me a hug, only to pull back and ask, "Why is your heart beating like that?" A combination of caffeine and nerves at the time had it pounding palpably in my chest. I shrugged and replied, "It always does that."

When I came home, he was dead. For a month, each night I went to bed secretly wondering if my heart would just stop beating as I slept. I wasn't as healthy or as strong as he had been, my heart was out of shape, a bit of caffeine and some stress could set it rocking back and forth beneath my flimsy ribs. Each time it began to beat too hard or too quickly, I began to be afraid for it, frightened by it. Each night, I fell asleep casting one last untrusting eye at the little unnatural jostling within my breast. Why does my heart beat like that, and why does my body take the beating, and for how much longer?


Six years ago, the rain did not pour down into the morning. The rooms were all lit through with the steady eastern slant of sunlight, all the glass windows of the high-rises in New York City blinked back like a thousand bright blue eyes. Students were learning French and chemistry in classrooms across the country, some children were being read to, others reciting their multiplication tables. Their parents were in conference rooms and offices, moving about in a million hallways, sipping plastic-tasting water in a million breakrooms. In the east coast cities, the pigeons and morning doves were out, scratching for crumbs, balanced on the telephone wires and the window ledges of old brick buildings. In the suburbs, squirrels wrestled the first few acorns of autumn from one another, while all the houses lay quietly in a row, block after block. Life was beautiful and teeming and gathering itself in for harvest.

Then death reached in, and ever since, we've been a little suspicious.


But today I am not sad. Which is maybe a little strange. Last year at this time, I spent days oscillating between sobs and moments of quiet frustration and depression. Last year, nothing seemed to last. Now, this year, I know nothing does. But I am not so sad. Last night, I fell asleep reading, without a second thought to my untrustworthy heart, and I woke up listening to the rain, nested between pillows, slowly swallowing, and swallowing again.

But I mark the day. There are some things which put on the cloak of duty, and this is one: to remember. One day, everyone who lived through that day in September six years ago will be dead, even those too young to remember it. Freddy lived through that moment of overwhelming, impossible death--and now he has lived through his own. My heart is still beating, as unlikely as it is, and as long as I am alive, I must remember that I am, that I have been alive while others were dying, that others will live through the moment of my death and come out the other side, come through with a million hearts still beating, the morning doves still swinging on the wires, the oaks still loosing their tiny green acorns into the grass.

This morning, I read the thoughts I wrote last year on this day, as I always do. I want to preserve that movement, from year to year, to set aside and make sacred the memory, and the change. This is what I wrote last year, on the fifth anniversary of September 11, 2001.


The Measure of Grief: On Loss, Suffering and Sacred Confusion

What I feel today is not grief. Regret, an ache of sadness and frustration, a kind of depression, perhaps. Though the local paper told me yesterday that "time fits neatly into pre-9/11 and post-9/11 compartments," I cannot help but think this is wrong, or that it is only true insofar as people have some sense now that life could be different--should be different... and yet we know that, fundamentally, things are the same as they ever were. For five years, we have waited for that shift to be resolved, to feel some new order establish itself. For five years, we have searched for the appropriate memorial, the appropriate response to that moment of grief and unimaginable loss. But what we feel today is not grief. It is, if anything, the dwindling madness of a grief unfelt and unrealized.

I remember the day, five years ago this morning, when grief came swift and beautiful under a bright sky. Think back--you felt this too. What is grief, but that sudden sense of an incomprehensible and overwhelming loss? It is not fear or loneliness or regret, though these things may blend and heighten it. But that day, you felt pure and unmixed grief, grief alone. You might have been young, just a girl with no delusions about what you could have done to stop it, with a naive faith in God's plan for you and no fear of death, with a family and friends who called immediately from the safety of their homes to comfort you and reassure you. You might have been safe and loved and untouched by personal threat or fear--and yet, there it was, that grief so strong and pure that it seemed at times to push you utterly out of yourself. And in that purity of grief, you began to understand.

What is grief, but a loss that cannot be withstood? The hard, quick knowledge that something--some part of the real--is gone, that what was here, present to us just a moment ago, is now absent, withdrawn into the dark flux of the Void. Grief is Reality, shot dead. What it leaves in its place is confusion--yet this confusion is sacred, a holy bewilderment, a place where everything that was once certain and well-defined has been pulled suddenly back into the realm of mere potential, of infinite possibility.

Think back--you felt this, too. While the President still hid in a classroom of children, while the newscasters stuttered and stared in horror, while the phonelines were jammed and the firemen and police and doctors were gathering their strength and forgetting themselves in their immediate heroism--there opened up a chasm of wild possibility and, dare you name it, hope. In the days and weeks to follow, people gathered spontaneously, they lit candles and decorated public places with flowers and ribbons and small works of art. Don't call this the American Spirit, as if to bolster some trite nationalism. This was humanity, pure and stripped bare. This was humanity responding openly and creatively to unfathomable loss, humanity discovering that the core of grief is, in fact, nothing else but love--that we suffer loss because we love creation, and that we embrace grief because it teaches us about God in the beginning, without form or void, moving over the face of the waters.

So quickly, our grief and its sacred chaos, which had opened in us a common glimpse of a world shaped by creativity and connection, closed down again. Usurped by those with a story to sell, yoked to the agenda of American Pride, American Faith, American Power in the face of Evil. Grief--our sense of loss--was shallowed and drained. What had been lost? They told us everything had changed, and yet the story they sold was essentially the same, only louder. When once we had been great, we were now unquestionably the Greatest; when once we'd had foreign enemies who protested our political and cultural influences, we now had an Evil with an irrational hatred of Freedom and a strategy of Terror. Everything was capitalized, but the vocabulary was consistent. What we had lost, they seemed to tell us, was only a matter of perspective, a matter of degree. The structure of the world--which had seemed, on that day, so flimsy and in doubt--remained hopelessly solid beneath our wailing and the pounding of our fists.

Five years. For five years, we have carried with us this denial of our loss, this secret knowledge that there is another story we could have told, another world we could have made out of the ashes and fire of that morning. "Post-9/11" is the name we give to our impotence, our failure to change.

One day, this "post-9/11" depression, this story of choked and aborted potential, will unravel itself... We will again know grief, if only as a slowly creeping self-awareness; we will experience, again, that awe-full and unbearable sense of loss, the ripping away of our understanding of reality. On that day, what will we do? How will we respond? Will we turn fearfully and mindlessly to the old, unsatisfying stories of military might and cultural supremacy? Or will we cherish our grief as the shadow cast by creative love, defending it against the sick insistence that nothing should (or could) ever change?