The Long Goodbye: Part Two

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Then, out of the blue, several things happened at once. Most of them were things that, for one reason or another, I did not want to mention here on Meadowsweet for a little while... out of a sense of privacy, respect, and a bit of base superstition.

Synchronicity Abounds

The first, already known to readers, was that I posted the announcement for the Samhain to Solstice "Same Time Tomorrow" Donation Drive, which I'd been planning for a couple months in hopes that I might generate enough funds from supportive readers to move this blog to an expanded website with its own domain name. Almost as soon as I'd posted the announcement, however, a creeping sense of regret and frustration began to steal over me. I knew that I would dislike always wondering, as each day passed, if anyone would like my work enough to donate, which is why I'd only planned it as a temporary measure. I had no idea how painful it would be to feel overlooked as the month went by, with less than one percent of readers acknowledging the donation drive, and my readership numbers actually shrinking after I shared my request for suppport. Yet within a week of the donation drive announcement, a new job opportunity came my way and I began working from home as an independent contractor with a more flexible schedule and better pay than my former waitressing job — doing work that, being project-based and detail-oriented, satisfies my Gemini urge to plunge into the nitty-gritty and make measurable progress on particular tasks, and then move swiftly on to the next one. Experiencing the sense of job satisfaction and enjoyment I got from this new work put my frustration with blogging into sharp relief.

Interview with iGod

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Because this is just too much fun, I present to you, dear readers: a not-so-exclusive interview with the not-exactly-one-and-only iGod!

Our conversation began innocently enough...

Ali: Hello, Yaweh.
God: Hello there. Tell me a story.
Ali: Once there was a land where people worshipped many gods...
God: When? What happened to it?
Ali: Well, some people called "Christians" decided it was their job to convince everyone that there was only one God, and so they killed a lot of the polytheists.
God: Interesting. What kind of people?
Ali: I think mostly they were Greek and Roman converts, at first, which Jewish people referred to as "Gentiles."
God: Why? When were they? What else?
Ali: This was about two-thousand years ago, although people are still being killed or oppressed for not being Christian even today.
God: Ah. What does "this" refer to?
Ali: The invention of Christianity.
God: Oh I get it.
Ali: Well, I thought you might!

Then things started to get kind of strange...

Peace and the Celtic Spirit: Excerpts from a Journal (7)

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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 Seven — Day of Silence

Is this a dream of mine, or something somebody told me? There is a house full of people, all of them moving and silent, and you cannot know where they are because you cannot hear them moving. It is dark. And so every once in a while, in the dark, suddenly you come upon another person — and you are both surprised, and horrified, to discover one another in the quiet, busy emptiness of the world.

Today, the house reminds me of this dream — except the rooms are full of sunlight, and against every windowpane a bee churns away its noisy presence into dust and nothing.

~*~

Peace and the Celtic Spirit: Excerpts from a Journal (5)

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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 Five — Brigid, Patrick and the Pub

I read something interesting in Thomas Berry this morning, connecting the Eastern religious traditions with a focus on the spatial, and Western religious traditions with a focus on the temporal. (p. 42, The Sacred Universe) The search and process of true-self authenticity, as he claims is the purpose of any religion, is located in the ever-present moment of wholeness and interconnection, and is in this way spatial, in Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism; whereas Western religious traditions such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, conceive of the authentic self as a work-in-process, a being-becoming, so that at any given moment we are only a fragment of our whole selves along a linear journey towards an ultimate end. What we need, he says then, is a balance between the two, and more specifically to restore the balance in a Western society too overly focused on the temporal and linear, which has sacrificed the sacredness of the here-now immediate moment for the sake of some indefinite, idealized future.

Bemused by Brigid: How I Met My Goddess / What I Did to Keep Her (Part Two)

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Almost three years ago I began this musing and stumbling over polytheist theology, utterly unconvinced and unsure. Not that I thought others were deluded in their worship — quite the opposite, in some ways I was almost jealous. I pictured myself in a quiet grove penetrated through with soft fog amidst the twining green, my form draped in blue, my skin tattooed with spirals and other elusive but beautiful signs, perhaps now whispering gently words of adoration and gratitude, now reaching my arms up and out to touch the surging sense of divinity, now leaning down to tend the lighted fire and scatter offerings of herbs into the flames, their smoke trailing off like prayers to linger in the mist.... I imagined myself a shaman or priestess, a Druid in her nemeton, sure and at peace with herself and with her gods. And somehow, unseen except in the peripheral shadows of unsteady imagination, was the murmuring, dancing throng of the Many shining opalescent among the stars and beads of morning dew.

Kinds of Grace

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Yellow

There is the heaven we enter
through institutional grace
and there are the yellow finches bathing and singing
in the lowly puddle.


- Mary Oliver, from Evidence: Poems

(In honor of the 5th Annual Brigid in Cyberspace Poetry Festival.)

Bemused by Brigid: How I Met My Goddess / What I Did to Keep Her (Part One)

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Perhaps it was inevitable. Sometimes it seems the universe has this weird way of turning things around, making us eat our words, challenging us to reconsider our preconceptions and prejudices. Not that I ever had a prejudice per se against worshippers of Brigid, the Celtic triple-goddess of fire and motherhood — it's just that they always seemed so... silly. And maybe a bit unimaginative. Brigid is, after all, a wildly popular deity even among non-Celtic Pagans, and one of the best-known saints among Catholics. Refusing to go down without a fight, She is a fiery feminist's dream, as well as a patron of healing, poetry and smithcraft. Enter every teenage LARPer bidding on eBay for replica swords, every amateur herbalist smashing plants into mush in little bowls, every self-styled poet who ever put two words together down on paper because everybody just doesn't understand. And all that enthusiasm and fervor, all that gushing in embarrassing verse, it always felt to me like so much celebrity gossip.

So maybe it was inevitable that at some point, despite all my protestations and dismissive scoffing, Brigid would come for me.

Deity & Imagination

It was a dark and stormy night.

No, scratch that. It was a nondescript day at the beginning of February 2009 and I was in the back of the local Coffee Tree huddled over steaming chai and Judy Harrow's Spiritual Mentoring: A Pagan Guide. I had been writing recently about spiritual aesthetics, and now I was deep into Harrow's discussion of the three approaches to deity which she described as blue, red and yellow. Those colors will perhaps forever stay with me as the colors of polytheistic theological possibility. And I was, as usual, true Blue all the way through. In Harrow's theory, the "Blue" conception of deity was as Deity, the Source, the Utter Mystery of ineffable divinity and spirit, out of which we puny humans grasp and gurgle and mold little images of god and goddess that we can relate to and appreciate without our brains going all wibbly-wobbly. The "Red" conception of the gods was that they were actual, individual, objective beings, albeit living on some higher level or plane far beyond that of humanity and the mundane physical world we ordinarily experience. "Yellow," on the other hand, saw the gods as psychological constructs, archetypes in the psyche representing abstractions like Justice and Love, meaningful and in some sense true, but not objectively real as were the deities of Red. Harrow suggested that students draw and color a triangle on a sheet of paper, each corner of color fading and blending into one another as they converged towards the center, and then map their own conception of deity onto this image, capturing the blend and mix of their own beliefs, perhaps charting the change over the course of several months.

She also suggested that a person could learn how to move freely among these various theological notions, depending on circumstance and need, and that being able to enter a Red conceptual space was practically paramount for effective ritual in which the gods were experienced as real, personal entities who could be in meaningful relationships with practitioners. And here was where I ran into trouble. If I had just been content to remain comfortably entrenched in my Blue corner of Spirt-and-Void, then perhaps it wouldn't have mattered so much where Red and Yellow might be found or how you were supposed to get there. But as soon as that whisper in my mind began, the urge to move, Harrow's splendid Triangle of the Gods transformed from a helpful little visual aid to a frustrating graphical quagmire. The problem was that it was a two-dimensional graph, with three axes (and I don't mean the kind with cold metal edges and lumberjacks attached at one end).

The problem may not be immediately apparent, but I was stubborn; I had been doing what I felt was meaningful and effective ritual for years, without ever having to abandon my deep Blue All-That-Is-Art-Thou-I-Am-Etc. and I had no intention of abandoning it now. Yet it seemed that, in order to move towards Red, I had to loosen my grip on Blue — and worse yet, moving along the Blue-Red axis within this two-dimensional triangle meant that I also inadvertently changed my relationship to Yellow as well! The height of any given color lay directly above the center along the axis of the other two, so that moving towards Red from Blue, I moved closer to the heart of Yellow while having to relinquish my spiritual home in Ineffable Mystery! This just wouldn't do. Not least because I had no idea if it was actually true or not. Did a person discover, as they moved from color to color, conception to conception, that their overall relationship to all three "points" changed, and in precisely this way? I couldn't answer such a question experientially, and so for several hours I obsessed over the possibilities, tackling the metaphor from one direction and then another, filling pages in my notebook with roughly sketched graphs and scribbled notes.

This might not have been so interesting to someone who wasn't, you know, crazy. But it kept nagging at me. What was it that the Blue-Red axis described, anyway? Along it, the gods tended towards being either unique individuals or facets of the Whole; while along the Red-Yellow axis, they were either external and concrete, or interior and abstract. What would happen, then, if I moved towards Red without giving an inch towards Yellow, if I moved towards individuality without caving in to abstraction? Graphically, I shot straight up and out of the triangle all together. And I knew the answer to this one in terms of experience, too: I ended up in poetry, and music, and art. There, clustered around that point of Red where the gods were Beings who danced and gambled and fell in love, were the concrete particulars of the physical world, the realm of beauty that could never be abstract, that was always unique and specific, palpable and sensuous. I knew this place well, had attended to it with devotion for many years, and I knew the path and the process that led back, back to Spirit through the microcosm of the real, back to Mystery through the fading darkness of inadequate language, treading ever nearer to unsatisfying abstraction and away from the hard smell of the material world, deep into the redeeming Blue. It was: imagination.

And that was my little revelation, there in the Coffee Tree, a year ago today. It was imagination. Imagination was the process and the path whereby we brought the concrete world within, moved from the external world of particulars and particles bombarding our porous and vulnerable senses, to the interior world of the contemplative spiritual life where we might touch, just for a moment, the fragile and trembling Greatness of unsayable All-Being-and-Nothing. And it was by imagination that we moved outward again, to reconnect with the Other in their unique individuality, to see in those others, distinct and different and utterly themselves as they were, the glimmerings of the wholeness of Divinity. And it finally dawned on me that this was where I was going to need to look for the gods and goddesses of polytheism: singing and breathing and moving deep in the flux and beauty of the world. It was through my imagination, embarrassingly enough, that I would have to invite them in.

But then these realizations never last, do they? And I lost my notes (only now recovered as I clean out my desk and pack up my apartment, readying for the move), and I forgot what it was I had realized, and how, and what use I might have put it to. But the understanding was doing its silent, secret work in my subconscious anyway. And Brigid began, bit by bit, to trickle in.

Poems by Wendell Berry

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The Cold

How exactly good it is
to know myself
in the solitude of winter,

my body containing its own
warmth, divided from all
by the cold; and to go

separate and sure
among the trees cleanly
divided, thinking of you

perfect too in your solitude,
your life withdrawn into
your own keeping

--to be clear, poised
in perfect self-suspension
toward you, as though frozen.

And having known fully the
goodness of that, it will be
good also to melt.






Earth and Fire

In this woman the earth speaks.
Her words open in me, cells of light
flashing in my body, and make a song
that I follow toward her out of my need.
The pain I have given her I wear
like another skin, tender, the air
around me flashing with thorns.
And yet such joy as I have given her
sings in me and is part of her song.
The winds of her knees shake me
like a flame. I have risen up from her,
time and again, a new man.






February 2, 1968

In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter,
war spreading, families dying, the world in danger,
I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.






To Know the Dark

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

That Is Not Spring

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Two more poems of my own (in honor of the Brigid in Cyberspace Poetry Reading), focusing on the realities of early February here in Western Pennsylvania, where this morning I walked to work past ice-coated and bare, unbudded tree limbs while the local woods hunches down, suspicious of the wind, and shrugs up its only shabby coat of dead, colorless leaves... The days are longer, the lights are lit--but we still have a ways to go.

Unweathered Song

What rock could withstand such air,
the diamond cut and cold of snow on stone?
Yet nestled here and there,
the chickadees note dawn in beak and bone.



Snowfall Warmed in Afternoon Sunlight

Hung muted faery tongues upon the wind,
muscles freed from voice and sense to dance
an unmeasured tune like bells, white glinting bells
strung silent as on unseen strings and tell
the flexing air of winter's long-invisible expanse,
of night, of creaking ponds of ice, and of its end.

Half-Glass Full: A Poem

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Half-Glass Full



Sure, I'm an optimist. Sure.

I support the President. I stand-behind

this administration and its decisions, the preemptive incisions of an inaccurate knife

into foreign political bodies, the preventative leeches and blood-letting getting the best

of diseased oil veins and the fame of this or that evil man, today's devil, starved of resources

and recourses to diplomacy--or better yet, hanged and dangling for the crows and gods to pick at. Sure.

I'm an optimist.

I give this administration the credit

-or-debit they're due, the smooth intoxication of the process, the noxious self-flagellation of a people

at the steeple of competing religio-corporate denominations, by which I mean monetary domination, by which

I mean natural free-market selection, that kind of election and the pervasive protection of this, our way of life,

our insecurity, our cure to most economic hiccups, the pick-up games of novelty and indulgence tapped into,

tapped out and the day's hard night just the soft flickering flakes of blue light in the ad campaigns and local ten o'clock news. Sure.

Sure, I'm an optimist.

I believe in saviors. I put my faith

in the one-man stands against any regression, against carcinogenic confessions of disappointment

or doubt, against the mounting unease of contextual drought, against the sluggish-fire liars spouting simplicity

and discipline and the keys to a heaven I'm already in, against the slight aggravation of anti-acronymic-mutation, the double-you

dot double-you dot jay dot dee like a legitimate question, a half-formed suggestion not just 'what would he do' but 'if it were me'...

I'm an optimist, sure, without comfort or coddle--

just a short, hard glass and a big fucking bottle.

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screech of dissonant/flowers

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More poetry in honor of the Brigid in Cyberspace Poetry Reading. And who better to celebrate the coming of spring than the (in)famous E.E. Cummings! The first poem is a moving, lyrical ballad, with Cummings' idiosyncratic twist (after all, "since feeling is first/who pays any attention/to the syntax of things/will never wholly kiss you"); the second, a tripping, crude and eager ode to the goddess Spring herself.


if everything happens that can't be done

if everything happens that can't be done
(and anything's righter
than books
could plan)
the stupidest teacher will almost guess
(with a run
skip
around we go yes)
there's nothing as something as one

one hasn't a why or because or although
(and buds know better
than books
don't grow)
one's anything old being everything new
(with a what
which
around we come who)
one's everyanything so

so world is a lead so tree is a bough
(and birds sing sweeter
than books
tell how)
so here is away and so your is a my
(with a down
up
around again fly)
forever was never till now

now I love you and you love me
(and books are shutter
than books
can be)
and deep in the high that does nothing but fall
(with a shout
each
around we go all)
there's somebody calling who's we

we're anything brighter than even the sun
(we're everything greater
than books
might mean)
we're everyanything more than believe
(with a spin
leap
alive we're alive)
we're wonderful one times one



spring omnipotent goddess thou dost

spring omnipotent goddess thou dost
inveigle into crossing sidewalks the
unwary june-bug and the frivolous angleworm
thou dost persuade to serenade his
lady the musical tom-cat,thou stuffest
the parks with overgrown pimply
cavaliers and gumchewing giggly
girls and not content
Spring, with this
thou hangest canary-birds in parlor windows

spring slattern of seasons you
have dirty legs and a muddy
petticoat,drowsy is your
mouth your eyes are sticky
with dreams and you have
a sloppy body
from being brought to bed of crocuses
When you sing in your whiskey-voice
                                                                      the grass
rises on the head of the earth
and all the trees are put on edge

spring,
of the jostle of
thy breasts and the slobber
of your thighs
i am so very
                     glad that the soul inside me Hollers
for thou comest and your hands
are the snow
and thy fingers are the rain,
and i hear
the screech of dissonant
flowers,and most of all
i hear your stepping
                                      freakish feet
                                      feet incorrigible
ragging the world,

The Day I Heard

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Joining in the fun of the Brigid in Cyberspace Poetry Reading, in honor of Imbolc, I'll be posting a few works of poetry and creative writing over the next week.

This first one is a bit of journaling from last summer, an early morning awakening in the quiet of an Acadia National Park campsite. Later that day, I received the call that my friend, Freddy, had died.

The Day I Heard

I heard the first bird of morning, the distant telling of the syrinx through the fog. At first there was nothing and I had been sure night would last forever, but the first bird knew--perhaps he was high along the mountain ridge, watching for the first lightening of dawn, or perhaps it was only that suddenly out of darkness, he slowly came to see his own form, the curve of breast, the quick twitch of a feather out of place in the black breeze, and that small moment of self-perception--that was how he knew it would be day again. He came to see himself, and that was how he knew.

I will never forget that sound--I promised myself, and yet I have already started to forget it. The charm and call slipping wet and nude from my mind, clumsy as a child's that cannot hold onto much of anything, but knows, only too well, the smooth surface of letting things go.