Water on Water's the Way: Blog Action Day 2010

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When it occurred to me that the animals are swimming
around in the water in the oceans in our bodies.
And another had been found, another ocean on the planet,
given that our blood is just like the Atlantic.

- Modest Mouse, "3rd Planet"


Everybody knows we're mostly water. But I remember the kind of mystic revelation that hit me the first time I read that scene in J.D. Salinger's short story "Teddy" where the ten-year-old describes watching his little sister drinking milk, how he suddenly saw that she was God and the milk was God, and "all she was doing was pouring God into God." David Suzuki echoes this startling but simple truth when he writes in his book, The Sacred Balance, that "we are intimately fused to our surroundings and the notion of separateness or isolation is an illusion." Our physical being weaves us intimately into the world of air, water, soil and sun, and as Suzuki says, "these four 'sacred elements' are created, cleansed and renewed by the web of life itself."

When we eat, we participate with Spirit and the gods in a dance of growth, death, decay and rebirth, as even our waste returns eventually to the land to nourish and enrich the soil from which our food grows. Plants transform the energy gifted to them by the sun into forms that can be absorbed and exchanged, and when we work, we release that energy again through the efforts of our hands, legs, mouths and minds to shape the world. Our breath is the breath of our ancestors, but also of the atmosphere and the weather, the winds and storms that encircle the planet and rustle the leaves of the tree just outside the window. And when we drink of those waters that well up from the earth, blessed, guarded and sustained by the gods and goddesses of the oceans and the holy springs and the caves of the underworld, all we are doing is pouring god into god.

Peace and the Celtic Spirit: Excerpts from a Journal (6)

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In August 2010, just past the waxing quarter moon, I attended a retreat on Celtic spirituality and peacemaking in Northern Ireland. The hosts of the retreat asked us to respect the safe and sacred space created by the community, and refrain from attributing direct quotes to any of the attendants or speakers. With that in mind, the following are excerpts from the journal I kept.

Day Six — The Wise Man in the Woods

It's about 10 PM, and our day of silence has technically begun. Which means I may actually have half a second to write and complete my thoughts.

~*~

We came to a bird lookout-hut, a small wooden hut with horizontal slits all along its walls giving a view of the shoreline of the lake. The weather was rainy and gray — my hair was damp and matted down from the walk there — wind whipping the blue-gray waters of the lake into whitecaps. Absolutely gorgeous.

My First Pagan Festival: Orion Foxwood, Charisma and Self-Esteem

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Admittedly, I didn't recognize most of the names listed as presenters at EarthSpirit's Feast of Lights, but then I am more widely read in Druidry than in Paganism more generally, and my tastes tend towards the academic and non-Pagan in any case. But one person I was looking forward to seeing at the festival was Orion Foxwood, whose books (Tree of Enchantment and The Feary Teachings) had left me feeling intrigued but a bit perplexed. It was hard to put my finger on exactly why his writings weren't "clicking" for me, but certainly his emphasis on the Ancestors as the gateway to Faery Seership had left me feeling if not intimidated then at least unsure about how to step into the process.^[1] And so I was hoping that being able to attend at least one of Orion's talks in person might perhaps give me some insight into his teachings, knowing the Tree by its fruits, so to speak.

It seems that, despite my preliminary investigations into Faery Seership, reading through Orion's two books and even getting in touch with folks who had attended workshops with him or worked with him in the past, at no point did anyone bother to mention that he was, well, flamboyantly gay. Though in retrospect, I suppose describing him as "a wonderful man" might have been a polite hint. And that he is: quite wonderful, an energetic and engaging person who is quick to laugh and eager to compliment, and who obviously loves his work a great deal. Still, attending his talk "Lifting the Spelle of Forgetfulness" (which did not include any reminder, sadly, on how to spell "spell"), I was struck by just how much his homosexuality, blended with his Appalachian accent and two-toned-goatee, cleaned-up hippie look, became part of his teaching not just in style but in substance. He careened through his talk with a certain enthusiastic charisma that rested in part on his ability to turn at once from serious spiritual insight to distracted frivolity at the briefest mention of sushi or the mere suggestion of a bad pun on "faery wife."

Having read two books full of Rivers of Blood, ancient wounds needing redemption, and beings of all kinds of mischievous, startling, mystical and intimidating natures, I suppose I was expecting someone a bit... heavier, more serious, more reticent, more grounded in the dark earth. Instead, Orion was dazzling, almost dizzying (and practically the incarnation of coffee). And suddenly those things I read in his books didn't seem so strange or difficult, the way he talked about them. His words might speak, as though in passing, of wading through rivers of blood lapping up to your knees, but his charisma told you it was all a metaphor, that it was, in fact, all about you. You are a wonderful person, a lovable person, and you have Sacredness in you. Redemption? You can do it, you can redeem all those past generations; in fact, that's why you're here, and you're here because you're wonderful, and you are wonderful simply by dint of existing.

And I'm not saying there isn't truth in this, that there isn't real soul-deep insight in his quick quips about finding one's path or facing one's shadow. But I was interested in Faery Seership because (and this is me admitting something that might be a bit embarrassing) I was interested in faeries, not because I needed a boost to my self-esteem. The message that we are all, deep down, worthy and beautiful people is an important message. But it's not one that I particularly need to hear, at least not anymore. And maybe in some ways this just means that I have done the work of centering and grounding myself, walking into the shadows and coming out whole, even if I did not undertake that work using the metaphors and practices of Faery Seership. But, as Cat pointed out a few times during our visit, there comes a point after which being "healed" is not enough, because if that's all your spirituality has to offer then either you'll soon lose interest, or you'll soon discover that you're always feeling broken and wounded and in need of healing.^[2]

All of these reflections lead me to something about the role of charisma in the Pagan community, but I'm not quite sure what precisely that is. I'm reminded of the book I'm currently reading, The Serpent and the Goddess by Mary Condren, in which she speaks of patriarchal religious institutions passing on through ordination into the priesthood the kind of spiritual leadership and power that individuals once had to earn on their own through charisma, i.e. being valuable to the community. Wikipedia has this to say about charisma: it is kind of divine or divinely-inspired gift,

a trait found in persons whose personalities are characterized by a personal charm and magnetism (attractiveness), along with innate and powerfully sophisticated abilities of interpersonal communication and persuasion. One who is charismatic is said to be capable of using their personal being, rather than just speech or logic alone, to interface with other human beings in a personal and direct manner, and effectively communicate an argument or concept to them.

Now if charisma is a kind of living or embodied communication that moves beyond the merely rational (and is not, presumably, merely charming rhetoric), then I'm all for it, and I can understand why a person of charisma might serve the needs of a community engaged in the process of finding a new, trans-/nonrational way of leading an embodied and earth-centered spiritual life. If we think of charisma in this way, then perhaps Orion actually is speaking to those needs that many in the Pagan community find to be most vital and pressing (there were an awful lot of people there who were earnestly taking notes). Walking a new and often misunderstood path, it's not surprising that plenty of us suffer from even more uncertainty about our worthiness than does the general population (which is itself riddled with low self-esteem and fear drummed up by advertisers hoping to create insecure and gullible consumers). But now I'm just indulging in a bit of couch-psychology.

One last observation on Orion's talk, which would become a running theme throughout the festival: group-led ritual, discussion and presentation is, all charisma aside, an art form in itself. It can be poorly done. And while Orion's talk was engaging enough, the group exercises in breath and energy-work that he led us through at the end of the workshop left me feeling like I'd been forced to stand too close to someone with particularly bad halitosis. Imagine standing in a room with twenty to thirty other people, mostly strangers, who are being instructed to "breathe out all of your tension and anxiety" and breathe in fountains of intense energy from the sun above and the deep earth below. All that ickiness and all those issues, vented into the space between bodies being charged up with heat and energy: the effect was like baking rotting garbage in an oven. Rather than leaving me feeling refreshed with a balanced sense of center, it gave me the overwhelming urge to go bury my face in snow and breathe the fresh, clean, frigid air outdoors (I had to settle for a cup of cold water). So... note to future self (and the selves reading along): I wouldn't recommend that kind of work except in grounded, small-group settings.

^[1] My family life has been pretty well defined by an absence of ancestors, to no apparent detriment, my mother's side of the family having basically cut off contact with us after I was born and my father's parents (both now dead) having struggled with alcoholism and mental illness all their lives. Orion's word of caution against inviting unhealthy presences into our lives seemed reason enough not to pursue reconnecting with these various patterns of dysfunctional relationship, most of which I feel I have fairly well come to terms with in my own way. Plus, I'm not really a gregarious people-person even with the living.
^[2] I suspect that this is why all the really interesting Christian mystics talk not so much about salvation, but about love. Love is, after all, an on-going process and practice that you can't ever really outgrow. Salvation without love is like a revolution without dancing.

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!

Musings on News(ings): Nature's Salvation

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Note the clever ambiguity of the title to this blog post, my second in half-cocked summarizing and semi-ranting about major topics in the blogosphere of late. What's she going on about this time? you may ask, not at all impressed. Well... The two big, glaring, angrily-harumphing topics circling the same central issue of global warming and the nonsense going on at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, of course! The role of skepticism and the trustworthiness of the scientific community; and the extent to which environmentalism is "religious" and/or dangerously "pagan."

Where to begin? Surfing from link to link this morning over four-cheese soufflé and a hot chocolate, I came across this article by Jonathan Abrams about his conversion from AGW-denier to true believer, and how this was not a scientific or even a rational conversion, but really a change of heart. It seems that among the scientific rationalists and new atheists, especially those of libertarian and right-wing persuasion, there is some dissension in the ranks about exactly what role skepticism should play, and just how far we should push such skepticism when it risks undermining common sense and the consensus of the intellectual (read: scientific) community.

My impression, from reading only a few select blogs mind you, is that the question of skepticism is one that hits very near the heart of New Atheist belief. They debate its relative merits and applications with a seriousness and intensity that rivals religious debates over scriptural literalism and transubstantiation, with global warming (and the embarrassment of "Climategate") sparking new fervor as scientists are revealed to be human and the world to be, well, complicated. If I didn't know better, I might think I was reading in these "skeptical of skepticism" debates the panicked musings of folks undergoing a spiritual Dark Night of the Soul. But that can't be the case; these are atheists after all, and everyone knows atheists are purely rational beings completely without any need for a "soul"! (Of course, not everyone debating global warming is an atheist; but I've noticed a heightened sense of vulnerability from these folks in particular, and my heart goes out to them.)

In the end, I am of the firm but probably unpopular opinion that all this controversy over the facts of global warming is misdirected energy. We have scientists working around the clock and around the world to compile complicated graphs and statistical models, some of which may very well be botched or inaccurate, all to convince us of a single basic and obvious truth: don't shit in the bed. Whether or not the planet is actually, literally burning up under our destructive stupidity is really beside the point. What is painfully obvious is that we have complicated systems of waste disposal removal redistribution to obscure the consequences of our consumer-driven plastic-packaged lifestyles. Even if the planet can survive our belligerence and abuse, I for one don't want to live in a world where a continent of trash swirls in the Pacific and people "would rather drive fancy cars than breathe clean air or look at the stars," even if that world isn't a single centigrade warmer.

Which is why I laugh with a kind of horror when the Pope objects to "'absolutizing nature' or considering it more important than the human person," because it may end up "abolishing the distinctiveness and superior role of human beings." I have some news for the Pope (as if any good Catholic didn't already know this): human beings are small, selfish, stupid creatures capable of great ugliness. Anyone who thinks that people are the best and most superior thing about this world just hasn't been paying attention. And I say this as a lover of humanity, really; this is one of those "I can call my dog ugly, but if you call my dog ugly we're going to have a problem" scenarios. I have said many times in this blog that I do believe in and celebrate humanity's uniqueness as a species, though I could not conscientiously describe that uniqueness as "superior," let alone the most important (surely the role played by cyanobacteria in creating an oxidizing rather than reducing atmosphere billions of years ago was fundamentally vital to absolutely all forms of life on this planet, for instance). It is true that, in order to learn how to be good human beings, it is not always wise to emulate the wolf or the spider or the sunflower or the kangaroo rat, but that is not the same thing as saying we are separate from Nature-capital-N and have nothing to learn. I think sometimes we make pretty crappy human beings.

I'm getting bogged down in my own messy rhetoric. My point, to put it simply, is that it does not serve us to set up a false dichotomy between humanity and nature (or, what we really mean to say, the rest of nature). We are a part of nature, and while we may be unique within it, it would be as much a mistake to imagine ourselves exempt from its laws and limitations as it is to idealize a less rational, more "animal-mind" way of living. We cannot forfeit our humanity, and any environmentalism that would ask us to reject our uniqueness would be as misguided as one that demanded trees stop behaving like trees, and lions lay down with lambs. But neither can we afford to fall into self-worship and imagine ourselves separate and above the natural world, who is our mother and sustainer (and seems to have no qualms pulling out the big guns of consequence and causality when we step over the line).

Does this constitute a religion or religious belief? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say: yes. It is, anyway, fundamental to my religion. I can see that now especially when I contrast it to the Pope's stated views, which seem utterly ridiculous and even a bit unhealthy (and which, it is important to remember, do not represent the extremist/fundamentalist worldview, but express a general belief held by or at least expected of the world's one billion Catholics, among others). Believe me, I was a bit surprised myself. I certainly don't remember thinking, during my Catholic childhood, that man was essentially and existentially superior to nature. Yet back then, the Pope's assertion wouldn't have phased me or seemed so completely wrong-headed, yet now I'm taken aback at how obtuse the position sounds. Perhaps this is the kind of belief so embedded in our culture that we simply can't acknowledge it or look it squarely in the eye and demand that it account for itself, not until we have shifted to a new worldview that places the earth at the heart of our being.

After all, in some ways the debate about what to do about global warming still takes humanity's superiority and exceptionality as its central tenant. We made this problem, and by God, only we have the power and knowledge to fix it! But it seems to me that the very first thing we have to do, regardless of everything else, is stop doing harm. Plans to cover the oceans with cooling hurricane-thwarting devices or taking other drastic and short-sighted measures to wrench temperatures back in the "right" direction are doomed to well-meaning but uninformed failure. In any case, a world economy based on our presupposed right to consume without limit could never support such action (unless the World Saving Technology could be properly patented and would make a lot of important people rich) — which is why the Climate Conference in Copenhagen amounts to only so much waffling and mutual fear-mongering.

Because if it's fair to characterize environmentalism as a kind of spiritual commitment (one might even use the word "faith"), then we must also remember the long-unspoken religion of consumer capitalism against which it struggles. In the face of our own arrogance, I can't hold out much hope that we will somehow be the saviors of the world. Instead, all I can do is seek humility, and do every single little thing I can to step out of the cycle of harm and abuse and ignorance and greed that spins and spins off in every direction. As for the rest, I can only sigh deeply in my grief and say to myself, Let go, and let Gaia. If humanity's salvation as a species doesn't lie in the hands of our Mother, then at least I can go out singing and dancing and making love in the grass under her arched blue skies.

Goddess in the Details (in three parts): Three

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Goddess-Present

I wonder about our ability to bring deity along with us, especially when a great deal of our modern lives are overrun with hyper movement, distraction and dislocation. For the past few months now, I have been working to build a relationship with Brigid, the Celtic triple goddess of fire, of poetry, healing and smithcraft. Sometimes, I feel as though she is very present in my life, a kind of voice whispering in my ear. Other times, I seriously doubt how a goddess of the British Isles could have made it across the Atlantic and arrived here in any familiar form. Yet how could I possibly connect with the gods and spirits of this land as the indigenous peoples of hundreds of years ago knew and connected with them? So am I to be godless, after all? Brigid cannot remain for me merely an abstraction inherited from my ancestors, nor an imaginary friend I can talk to when I'm feeling especially "spiritual." A real relationship with her means that I discover her unexpectedly in the world, that I see her in moments of grace and epiphany and comfort and recovery. I do not want to manufacture experiences of the divine.

And so, with the extreme discomfort and anxiety of this trip, I found myself feeling cut off and, frankly, weak. The cynical voice of Mother Culture kept prattling on in the back of my head about how I should have a thicker skin, how my disorientation was not in fact a symptom of how well-grounded I was in the local landscape of my own beloved city of steel and hills and three rivers, but merely evidence that I was coddled and overly sensitive, inflexible, that my life was just, well, small. Here I was, feeling like an ignorant native jerked out of her element. And what could my writing, my voice, my ideas and my heart — what relevance could any of these things have for others on the other side of the world, or even next door, if my life was miniscule and limited this way? If not even a goddess can make it across the water, what can I do? My body rebelled against the plastic and chemicals that suddenly seemed to be everywhere when what I wanted most was the feel of sycamore bark under my fingers, and a little space to breathe. I belong to my city, and to the larger landscape of Pennsylvania; I am rooted there and move with comfortable ease and confidence. I know how to live, and live well, which is something more than many people can say. But this was a wholly different world, encased in advertisements and bought with the willful ignorance of imaginary capital, and I didn't understand it, couldn't touch down to something real, couldn't discern the laws of physics I was meant to obey. I had opinions, about politics and class and consumerism and environmentalism, about spirit and breath and connection — but suddenly they seemed irrelevant, even laughable. And what good is knowing how to live, if you don't know how others should live?

But that's the wrong question to be asking, of course, because there is no one right way to live. There is only living, fully present in the here-now, in touch with what is real. All of these thoughts were confused and only half-articulated in my mind, mixed up with images of opulence and science fiction utopias rattling around next to steampunk and bad historical-fantasy romances and Vonnegut's metaphor of artists like canaries plunged into the dark of claustrophobic mine shafts. I was distracted by surfaces. And so it was through surfaces that Brigid, goddess of fire and water, exalted highness of the sourceless spring and the ashless flame, slipped in and opened my eyes. I watched the puddles gather on the ugly tan roof, watched the glimmer of sunset on the surface of the water, and I knew again the goddess in the details, the spirit of small things weaving their connections over the whole world, sustaining life through their simplicity and presence. Within the cacophony of the World Song, I heard again the healing resonance of those same few simple notes turning over into melody.

Yet it wasn't Brigid making herself known. There was no higher layer of spiritual awareness, no voice whispering, it's me, dear, listen up.... There was only the rain, and the flickering spotlights, and the steam of their meeting. But something happened for me. And because I know, intellectually, that Brigid is a goddess of fire and water, as well as of poetry and healing, those things which I so desperately need — I make the choice to give her this experience, to see in this experience the work of her presence. It's as if some great being were moving through the world, almost too huge to pay any mind to my little noises and existential crises, so great as to be indifferent the way we are indifferent to the bacteria in our lower intestines, but not unkind. A mighty goddess who works in the smallest things, the simplest movements of water and light. Here She was, moving and being just as she is, and I was only some small creature happening to reach out to touch the hem of her green mantle as she passed by, touched almost as if by accident by the wholeness of her beauty.

Am I okay with this? Impersonal but still feeling blessed, not called by name but touched nonetheless... yes, I think I am. So, though perhaps she won't know it, though it's possible even that she is only a name, an idea, that I am giving to something real — I give her this experience of mine as a kind of offering, in gratitude. Maybe next time she will turn her eyes my way.

Goddess in the Details (in three parts): Two

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Light on the Water

It's funny, the similarity between the feeling of disorientation, and disgust. Almost as though we weren't designed for this, and deep in our churning bowels we know it.

I kept thinking, all through the flight, and in the fully-automatic bathrooms in the airports (rough single-ply paper, spare no expense) notched into the walls between shining, yelling shops, and racing up escalators and down hallways to rush through the cold double-doors to catch our connection, and even crammed into the close backseat of the carpool ride to the hotel, with its lobby full of billiards and bar stools and trendy striped chaise lounges and the smell of chlorine — the whole time, I kept thinking not that I was disoriented or dislocated, spun around and ungrounded, but that I was sick of it all. Everything seemed glittering and false, great monuments to our ignorance and selfishness, grown men and women playing dress-up, playing house, playing doctor and cocktail party, playing with their expensive toys so polished they could see their faces reflected in their shimmering surfaces.

I felt like the savage of a Brave New World, like a native from the backwards blue planet brought up to marvel at the Starship Enterprise. I thought about how those natives never vomited or choked in the sterilized air, never staggered under the false gravity, how their disapproval was always so cerebral and embarrassing. Never embodied, never visceral, never the physical being revolting against the abuse of contrived artificial environments, begging, pleading for the touch of dirt, the smell of wind and real sunlight. But by the time we'd arrived, checked-in and made it up to our hotel room, it was getting dark and had started to rain. The magnificent view promised us from our seventh floor windows turned out to be an ugly tan roof and, beyond it, the bare gray cinderblocks and exposed iron cables of a building nearby still under construction. Below, you could just see the blaring orange curve of a sign with a black silhouette of a coyote on it and neon-turquoise words that read "Howl At The Moon," though you couldn't see the moon.

Left alone in the room, I tried to fight down the nausea and headache that were still moving restless under my skin. I sat cross-legged on the purple-vinyl padded bench at the end of the bed, and focused on my breath. But the noise kept coming, the noise of another city, the noise of traffic seven stories below, the noise of the elevator down the hall, and the grinding of the AC/heat unit tucked in the corner that kicked on as the sun went down. And the tightness in my chest remained, wrapped tense so that long after the pressure from the air around me had released, my body felt pulled and pressed into shape, confined. So I began to sing. I sang my awen, not chanting, but letting the vowels linger and expand, finding their way from note to note. I felt the vibration of the word in my throat, felt it shake its way down into my chest and deeper. The chords were coming loose inside me, unwinding, unraveling. I reached out into the room with my imagination, feeling my way, eyes still closed — but it was still just a hotel room, sterile and empty above the quantum foam of strangers constantly coming and going. Still, I felt better, the harsh edges softened, the queazy, tense feeling ebbing.

I went to the desk and looked out the window for a time, out into downtown Charlotte as it grew darker. Far away I noticed I could see a broad street where rush-hour traffic was growling slowly down a rain-soaked road, streetlights gleaming off of everything. On the ugly tan roof, raindrops rippled through shallow puddles in a steady rhythm. I noticed the upturned spotlights that were rigged up along the roof's edge, tilted to illuminate the upper stories of the hotel. Every once in a while, a drop of rain would fall onto a hot, exposed bulb and sizzle — steam drifted upward in the light, and the shadows would dance a little in ribbons reaching up the wall. Everywhere in the world, water moves like water, rain falls like rain, and the mirrored light of neon or sunset or fire licks over the curled edges of distortion like a lover familiar with the same old song. The last thread of tension in me unwound, its loose end flung out full of grace into the dark rainy night, making contact with that vision of light reflected in moving water. I touched back down.

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.

The Speed of Blood

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I'd been avoiding looking at my arm since they put the needle in. Hanging over the side of the bed, it felt alien, cold and creaking, almost mechanical--the needle pinched, white strips of tape strapped plastic tubes snaking along the inside of my elbow, and even without looking I had felt them drawing out the blood, like fluid ice creeping slowly upward from my fingertips. The absence, like cold water, water in my veins, water on the inside. I didn't turn my head.

I joked with the nurse, a pleasant, practical man named Andrew, about my blue spiraling tattoo wrapping the same arm. A little IV needle was nothing compared to four hours under the artist's razored, buzzing brush. But somehow, it was worse. Someone had told me once tribal peoples never closed the circle of an armband tattoo, always left a space between, for fear that it would cut the life force off and the limb would die. My own tattoo was like a Celtic torc, an interweaving, twisting semicircle of color that curled up at each end, leaving the underside of my upper arm pale and bare, unmarked.

Andrew leaned over my half-deadened arm and slipped a second needle into the IV's side valve, squeezing a half-mililiter dose of "Vitamin D" painkiller into my veins. Within seconds, a wave of nausea swept over me, a swelling tide that climbed up the back of my throat and subsided in a rippling flush of heat down through the rest of my body. "This stuff can make you pretty groggy," he warned, "and I've only given you half the normal dose, since you're not used to it." I smiled weakly at him. With the piercing of a single, long needle my body was laid exposed to the world, a wound leaking life force, a door wedged open through which any hot wind or rising flood could force its way inside. A threshold violated. The scraping, skin-deep stinging of the tattoo artist's craft was nothing compared to this.

Something happens to me when I get into a dangerous situation.

The time I was pulled a mile out to sea by a riptide, I gently tread water for half an hour waiting for the lifeguard to reach me, watching my body with interest as my limbs grew heavy and sore with the effort. Once, I tripped on a loose bit of carpet and fell down a flight of stairs, a tumbling mass of bones and flesh smacking together against the hard edges of steps and hand-railing; at the bottom, I lay crumpled and unmoving for a moment, calmly observing my breathing and the curious sensation of pain. When I was younger, I dug patiently into the layers of skin on my upper calf with a pair of dull tweezers, seeking out the black, squirming body of a tick that had burrowed there. In a theater, I stepped between an older woman and the tall man who was threatening her with an angry voice and clenched fists.

When I find myself in situations of potential bodily harm, everything else falls away; I find myself there, with an odd feeling of discovery and even curiosity. Sometimes I catch myself musing, What an interesting sensation this is.

Are such experiences evidence of a basic duality between the body and the spirit? It would make sense to believe that in those times of danger, some Higher Self responds, taking over with a centered calm and guiding the actions of the body--a Higher Self that is otherwise only tangential to the everyday self dwelling within my material form like a snail in her shell or a captain in her ship. Perhaps the body is the vehicle of the soul. Or the Higher Self like some kite that the soul is flying, shivering on the end of a string much closer to the heavens, able to give lift and strength, to run lightning down the line, and eventually the soul will kick off the body like a pair of worn-out sneakers and drift away into the Abyss trailing its colored ribbons behind.

Anonymous nurses had helped me onto the narrow, plastic tray of the CT machine and rigged me up to another time-release IV drip before retreating behind a wall I couldn't see. They spoke to me over an intercom as the machine churned into life and the tray jolted, guiding my prone body back and forth through a round portal labeled with a sign warning, Do Not Look Directly Into Laser. I closed my eyes. "Now we're going to inject the contrast solution--you may feel flushed, or the urge to relieve yourself. You may even feel as though you've had an accident, but you haven't. All right?" I managed a "yes" and breathed deeply once or twice, seeking the still center of my being as I do in meditation. The part of myself that draws back as observer braced and murmured, I know my body better than that, I know what it feels like, we'll just see....

No bing sounded, no light flicked on or off--but in a moment, thin hot liquid was trickling down my arm, on the inside of my skin, and pooling in my chest cavity where it sloshed in rhythm with my shallow respiration. In another moment, the warm watery sensation had seeped into my gut, where it met the preparatory chemicals I'd drunk with water an hour earlier and spread with unexpected quickness through my abdomen, down through my thighs and lower legs. This was not "feeling flushed"--this was something alien speeding through the crevices in between muscle and bone, something uneasy riding in my own familiar blood.

I found myself wondering, "Is this how fast blood moves? Is there a viscous, dark ocean pouring through my body all the time?"

I did not feel the urge to urinate--not a pressure on the bladder--but a building panicked wish to wash the stuff out of me, to release it with the warmth soaking the place where my butt and lower back rested on the cold plastic tray. I sought the smooth river stone sunk in the pool of stars that I had seen glistening so often in my centering prayers for peace, I reached to ground in that stone, in my own real body--and I quieted the wish. I breathed in, then out, as the computerized voice of the CT machine instructed. Then, the scan was over, and the same anonymous nurses were helping me back into the wheelchair, careening through the bright polished halls back to the ER, Room 7, where my boyfriend and Andrew were waiting.

This is not the view I hold, of spirit held tremulously to the body by a bit of string. The duality is just fundamentally dissatisfying to me. Not because I deny the validity of experiences like that of a Higher Self and the purely spiritual planes it seems to imply, but because those experiences have almost always been, at least in my case, fleeting. Yet so much else in this world, and in my own life, prompts me to understand matter and spirit as intimately interconnected, so tangled up and intermingled that you just cannot sift through and separate one from another.

In my ordinary life, if it weren't for these strange experiences of transcendence, I might be a pure animist. When I feel the wind caress my skin and it seems to me to be living and animate, filled with purpose and awareness--I cannot divide that sense of Presence from the wind itself. I can't separate the presence of the ocean from the reality of its waves, salted and slamming against the rocks, or the spirit of fire or sunlight from the physical heat and shifting illumination and shadows they create. Sometimes, the ocean's presence seems to follow me into dream when I am home again in my landlocked state. Sometimes the sunlight lingers in memory even during long winter nights. But it seems to me that it is not the spirit of these things at all, not in the way we commonly think of spirit or soul as something that just happens to be living here for the moment.

When I feel this Presence of ocean miles from its shore, what is it I feel? A familiar memory belonging to and arising in my own material form, I think, the knowledge that my body has within itself of the concrete, sensory details of the world. My body remembers. And because my body remembers, it reaches out for connection with these things even when they are absent. If there is a Presence, a god or goddess of the sea, it arises from the body of the ocean as my sense of self and spirit arises from my own body. (Perhaps it, too, can reach out towards me, and I can feel that stretching entering in.) The physical memory my body has of the ocean or the sunlight re-creates them in their fullness and power, manifests their presence again. And that is where their spirit exists: not hovering half-bored like a slick film over the material world, but in the places where our two bodies meet, and respond, and remember.

I'd been home from the hospital for two days, and in those two days I'd barely been able to drink. Food was out of the question. There seemed to be a vast whirlpool churning in my stomach, and any solid thing thrown in rebounded against its walls, reverberating and tipping like some nightmarish flotsam until my reflexes took over and vomited it up again. Drinking only added to this inner maelstrom, so that it threatened to overflow and drown me--even in sleep, it raged. I had been eating only sporadically for a day or two before my trip to the ER, and by eight o'clock on the second night after my visit I couldn't sit up in bed. In another hour, it would be time for another dose of antibiotics. The thought sickened me, and I began to suspect it was the medication, and not the infection, causing my nausea.

I was weak with dehydration. Jeff finished the chapter of the book he had been reading aloud and stopped, looking at me with concern. I could barely raise my hand to gesture at him. "We're setting the timer to go off every seven minutes," he said decidedly. "Every seven minutes, you're going to take a sip of gatorade. Just one sip--do you think you can hold that much down?" I nodded. My heart was pounding in my chest and my body felt pressed to the bed with a dry heat. It was as if a heavy hand of stone lay on my breastbone, though when I shifted it seemed to me that it must be the weight of my bones themselves that my body no longer had strength to support. "If you can't finish this whole bottle by midnight, I'm taking you back to the emergency room." Memories of the piercing needles and humming plastic machines worked into my hot, aching mind. I lifted the full, cool bottle shakily and took the first sip.

A few hours later, I was able to sit up in the bed and hold down not just some gatorade, but a mouthful or two of vegetable broth Jeff had heated on the stove downstairs. My last dose of antibiotics had been over twelve hours ago. The side-effects seemed to be subsiding, but the thought of taking my next dose brought me almost to tears with frustration and fear that the nausea would wash over me again. I couldn't bare the boiling, swirling motions of the chemicals making a desert of my body. I decided to stop the medication.

It's been almost two weeks since the start of all this. For all I know, the infection is completely gone, but the new antibiotics my doctor prescribed at the follow-up appointment leave me feeling dizzy, weak and with a disconcerting tightness of breath for several hours after each dose. Sometimes, I think I can't remember what good health even feels like. I cannot read my body anymore--I feel cut off and alone, uncertain what sensations to respond to and which to let pass as side-effects or passing urges. It has taken me all day to write this, a few paragraphs at a time interrupted by hours of lying in bed, trying to read or sleep, mostly feeling too warm or too chilled, rough and uncomfortable. And now, I'm angry.

The body is not a mere machine, the spirit not a ghost working the gearshift and pressing the right buttons. I have had only limited experience with modern medicine, having been blessed with good health for much of my life. But these last two weeks have only reinforced my opinion that there is something unbalanced--something crude and insensitive, something unhealthy--about the way modern medicine is practiced. Don't get me wrong--the nurses and doctors were all quite competent and kind. But it is the practice--the attitude of fixing the body in pieces and parts, treating first one symptom then another, relieving first the real pain and then prescribing something else to counteract the side-effects of treatment... this whole process itself, I have a problem with.

I respond to immediate danger with a kind of leap-up in perspective, but constant illness wears my spirit down as it wears on the body. The Higher Self isn't missing, it arises from the physical and depends on it as a foundation, as a root in the world. That is why I am not a pure animist; I believe in panentheism. Spirit infuses but transcends the material world, a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Words for breath and life force--the moving essence shared among all of us--evoke spirit in almost every language. And so there are times when I invoke that transcendence, that Higher Self I have sometimes met in danger and distress. I take a deep breath, and reach up--and I touch the memory of health and power and wholeness I've known before.

I'm angry as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore. The anger lifts me above my fatigue and discomfort and--after two long weeks--I begin to feel my body again, feel it thrilling to life in touch with the earth, longing for sunlight, thirsty for the ocean, aching for the smell of bark and fresh grass in the fields. I will make my own way back to health and balance, listening carefully to the promptings of my grounding in the world--because I know what these things are, my spirit knows, my body remembers.