Keeping the Days: The Orchid Shamans

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The Orchid Shamans
Phipps Conservatory, Pittsburgh, PA


As the days grow darker and the winds grow bitter here in Pittsburgh, one of my favorite ways of coping is to retreat to the Phipps Conservatory and Greenhouse to meander through their rooms of lush greens and radiant blossoms. The orchid room, especially, always fascinates me. I imagine each orchid could be a shaman from some strange, exotic tribe, wild feathers and fringe and face paint, flinging their arms open to some unheard drumbeat pulsing in the roots. If I were a shaman, I think I'd want to be a shaman of the orchids.

Keeping the Days: Autumn Sepia

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Autumn Sepia
Frick Park, Pittsburgh, PA

Keeping the Days: Leaves After Rain

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Leaves After Rain
Frick Park, Pittsburgh, PA

Keeping the Days: Meditation in Autumnal Woods

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On a beautiful autumn day just before Samhain, I headed deep into the woods that border our neighborhood
for some meditation among the trees, rocks, wind and sunlight.




Music by Pamela Bruner, "The Surrender" from Circle of the Soul

The Three Elements of Druidic Ritual

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The sun has set, and twilight settles dark over the autumn landscape. In another half an hour a harvest moon, swelling but not quite full, will rise over the eastern horizon, but for now the grove is thick with gray mist and half-seen shadows. In the center, a thin white altar cloth drapes a low, square stone; the cloth shifts once in a while, ghostly and almost whispering with the silent breeze that barely moves the trees. The altar itself is decorated with gourds, dried pale aster blossoms and pressed fall leaves collected from the local landscape over the past week, bringing out subtle shades of yellow, orange, russet and deep greens that are, nonetheless, difficult to distinguish in the darkness. A small bowl of incense smolders and smokes, its scent mingling with the damp late-night fog, and in the center of the altar a small lidded cauldron sits waiting, the waters of life inside ready to be ignited. When the time is right.

Suddenly, the strike of a match and a flame flares into life, held delicately between the fingers of a white-robed figure. Opening the cauldron, she tosses the match inside and within seconds a column of fire is dancing and leaping upwards as if out of the very womb of darkness, lapping at the round, black lip of the iron pot. Flickering light illuminates the entire grove, revealing other figures standing poised on the threshold of vision, some dressed in white, others in the colors of the elements or of the autumnal season. As the cauldron fire grows stronger, the center figure raises her arms in a gesture of gratitude and exaltation, and those in the surrounding circle do likewise. Together, all begin to chant the familiar words of prayer, the syllables weaving and repeating, their voices cascading over one another in a rising harmony of sound and vibration. The energy is palpable, flowing through each tongue of fire, grounding in the deep earth and arcing towards the celestial realms — and each participant adds their own energy, opening themselves to the awareness of connection moving and dancing through the grove.

This is the cosmos recreated, the three realms meeting in a center which is everywhere at once.

The chanting prayer drops suddenly to a slow-whispered awen, and the grove falls once more into silence, the only sound that of the flames trembling and sizzling on the altar. Everyone waits expectedly, their skin shivering with energy, for the ritual to continue.

Love What Makes Us Wonder

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Folks, it's been a sniffly, mopey week here chez Ali, as I do my best to sweat and sleep my way to good health in time for my partner's and my up-coming week-long Big Fall Wedding Tour 2010, during which we will be doing things like: driving all over creation, camping on the beach, praising the gods of the threshold, investigating potential vendors and venues for our wedding, and introducing me to my future mother-in-law and other relatives. Not to mention, yesterday a hacker-virus-thing made its way into my gmail, triggering an automatic suspension of my account and officially deleting this blog for an hour or two, sending me into panicked sobs and hysterical blubbering (overly-invested much?) before it was eventually restored, but not before thoroughly nailing into my thick, mucus-filled skull that it's definitely time to begin the long process of transferring this blog to its own official domain name (more on this a bit later in the month). So let's just say I've had a lot on my mind this week.

But all you loyal readers deserve a post before I head off into the great southern roadscape. So I'm going to do my best, despite my head-cold-muddled mind, to give you one.

What I'd like to talk about is mystery.

The subject is prompted most immediately by a post by a fellow who goes by the name of Ravendark over at the blog Atheist Druid, which I stumbled upon a week or so ago thanks to Heather of Say the Trees Have Ears. Both of these writers are well worth keeping your eyes on. I've been reading Heather for a while, enjoying her emphasis on art, science and observation of the natural world which is modulated by a certain humility about her own experiences and uncertainties — something that is quite refreshing when so many other writers out there in the Pagan blogosphere are so full of snark and self-importance (not that I mind a little snark now and then, don't get me wrong). Ravendark's atheist blog, quite a new venture it looks like, has so far been intriguing; I've always enjoyed engaging atheists and agnostics in conversation (which may be why I've dated quite a few of them in my time — that is, when there wasn't a good Zen Buddhist around), and so far Ravendark's musing on deity and organized religion have proved quite interesting. (We'll forgive him for skipping over the niceties with me and instead emailing my partner, Jeff, to commend him for his excellent Druid Journal, which he found through this blog. This is one of the effects of the Druid archetype, I'm afraid: the older man with the beard must surely be the wiser and more experienced Druid than the young woman with the Celtic armband tattoo — even if she has been practicing almost twice as long. But no, I'm not jealous of my fiancé's clout, not at all. I mean, he's like, what?, fifty or something? and his blog has its own domain name, so clearly he must be more qualified, Ali continues her plotting...^[1])

Keeping the Days: Water and Well

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Witch Hole Pond, Acadia National Park, Maine

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

Peace and the Celtic Spirit: Excerpts from a Journal (4)

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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 Four — Poetry, Landscape, Lectio Devina

I sat to pray by the side of the water, and everywhere in the mountains it was morning. I could watch the sun creep down towards the shore, slowly down the sloping hills, down the green, down from the low clouds where they drifted like hardly-held breath.

I sat to pray, and no words came, except the sacred silence, the intake of breath, the slow and gentle rearranging of my body to open and let in just a little more sky. What kind of prayer could I utter after this? When what I wanted most was only to keep moving, to keep shifting in this way, until every part of me was open, and the waters and the clouds and the mountains in their shining came rolling in.

~*~

I wonder if the gods feel this intimacy too, and if, in coming with my ancestors to America, they feel the loss of it as well. Does the land seem larger to them, sprawled out and scaled up — do they miss the smallness of it? That such a small and intimate land could be so full of gods — how could there be enough room? — and yet such a large land have only one.... In some ways it makes no sense.

Keeping the Days: Earth and Stone

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Long Pond, Acadia National Park, Maine

Keeping the Days: Water and Well

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Long Pond, Acadia National Park, Maine

Ruby Sara :: To Pray in Color

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Greetings, friends, from the sweltering streets of the fiercely-wild urban midwest! I am honored to be posting here at Meadowsweet & Myrrh this month — many thanks to Ali for the opportunity!

From where I write this, the land is up to its ears in late summer weather — hot, muggy, days and restless nights. The rise and fall of cicadas and the smell of roasting corn. These days between, when the Beloved has died again for his people (say Hail to that Sweet King of the Raw Feast, Master in the Wheat and the Corn; the Fire in the Whiskey, the Burn in the Blood!) and the orchards settle in for apple season, I anticipate the double-edged lessons of harvest — bread and death, decay and abundance. The days grow ever shorter, but still the Mama overflows — gardens run weedy and rampant with fruit. The tomatoes ripen and swell into a ready red, the rose hips begin to turn, and those who garden anticipate zucchini bread, and zucchini casserole, and zucchini soup, and grilled zucchini, and zucchini conversations, and zucchini jokes... and sacks of zucchini left on doorsteps by anonymous hooligans with green thumbs and dwindling storage space. All hail the mighty zucchini! If we were to create a green saint of determination and fortitude, we might do worse than to nominate this outrageous vegetable/fruit. Zucchini may take over the world yet, haunting our days with its yellows and greens. I love zucchini like I love the summer — the flagrant, saucy ripeness of it, the fiercely mad dancing that goes on and on forever — a whirling, roiling drumbeat of moths and moons, of color and life.

Yes, summer passing slowly into fall is a season of outrageous color. The Mama, giving up her precious ghost, gasps her last in shocking, glorious extravagance — soon the sunset season in red and copper, thrust against a matchless blue sky. Yellow corn, squash and apples. Golden honey, and rain that turns the wind into diamond music. The smell of smoke, even... the colors of harvest not only in those our eyes perceive but our other senses as well. The color of heat, the smell of ripe apples rotting on the open ground, the sound of bees in the field.

Keeping the Days: Sky and Flame

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Today's "Keeping the Days" features photographs of bees and beetles, our darling winged friends, taken during my recent family vacation in Acadia National Park in Maine.





bee on a wildflower

Keeping the Days: Earth and Stone

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Asticou Azalea Garden, Mount Desert Island, Maine

Keeping the Days: Water and Well

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Thuya Garden, Mount Desert Island, Maine

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.

Discovering Druidry

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I have, like others before me, discovered that Blogger now hosts "pages"... and I've finally broken down and decided to play with this feature to see what it has to offer — a longer biography, perhaps, or a list of useful books and resources? Links to popular and interesting past posts, maybe one or two longer essays of general interest? If others have any ideas, please don't hesitate to share! Eventually these pages will appear as links (in a relatively boring format, until I can tweak things) just below the header. For now, please enjoy my first page, Discovering Druidry, which serves as a kind of combination memoir and overview of my personal approach to the threefold, interweaving Druid Path. I have shared it below as a post on its own, but it will also be permanently available here. (Also, I'm honored and excited to see that Philip Carr-Gomm stumbled across it today and quoted it in his blog! Thanks so much, Philip!)

In the beginning, I was a wild child, a woodsy child, a child who could concentrate all of my attention on holding perfectly still so as not to startle the robin in the grass. I could disappear into the tense air of rapt attention, forget my own little body completely as my eyes widened and my breath stilled. Once, the robin's twitching eyes turned towards me, and I thought I heard it whisper... Cheer-up. Cheer-up, calmly, almost with amusement, you know, I can see you.

That was when I was a very little girl. As sometimes happens, eventually I grew up and stopped listening so closely to the world, to the landscape and the wilderness. It would be years before I rediscovered the rapture of stilled breath or the ecstasy, the going-out-ness, of listening closely and attending with reverence to sacred nature. Druidry would restore my sense of connection and intimacy with the natural world; it would open me to new ways of living with creativity and wisdom, playfulness and respect; it would bring me home to myself, to this person dwelling in my own particular body in my own particular place in a vast landscape infused with Spirit. Druidry was a home-coming for me, as so many Pagans and Witches before me have described their own rediscoveries. One day, I would look into the eyes of the world and discover — like some startled scullery maid or the only daughter of a widower out of a fairy tale — my real destiny wearing a strange new face, a face of beauty and dignity, but smiling at me with the same old familiar affection.

But first, I had to learn about poetry.

The Politics of Clean(s)ing

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From the Pagan celebrations of renewing energies simmering below the surface between Imbolc and Beltane, to the purifying rituals and fasts of the Lenten season leading up to the Easter holiday of rebirth and resurrection, to the secular traditions of "spring cleaning" — it seems the topic of cleansing always pushes its way up through the muck and dirt and caked layers of old dead leaves during this time of year, much like the tulips and daffodils and, I suspect, responding to the same warm sunlight and cool rains.

My usual rituals of spring cleaning have been put on hold this year as I pack up to move from my old apartment into my new home with my partner. The process, a kind of ultimate spring cleaning (except with more cardboard boxes and lots of heavy lifting), has given me a new appreciation for all those past years of intense nook-and-cranny scouring and scrubbing and clearing out the cobwebs of the previous winter. I can immediately tell those places where the cleaning "took," and those hidden corners that I overlooked time and again, now revealed in all their glory of tumbling dust-bunny mountains. And of course, there really is nothing quite like the first deep-cleaning of the new season, with all the windows thrown open and the vernal breeze rich with hyacinths and the first hint of magnolia mingling with the citrus scents of eco-friendly cleaning supplies.

And so, I've been thinking a lot recently about cleaning, and cleansing.^[*] In particular, I've been thinking about the ways in which clean(s)ing puts us into relationship with others, with the landscape and with the Song of the World, or rather, how so often it fails to do just that. I call this the "politics" of clean(s)ing, in the sense that it concerns the how's and why's of living in community, and our responsibilities (and response-abilities) in such relationship.

About the Cleaning-Lady

To illustrate the importance of the "politics of clean(s)ing," I want to focus first on what I consider to be the epitome of an unhealthy relationship, a kind of cleaning dystopia. Now normally there are very few things that would provoke me to unequivocal judgment in this blog; I try to respect others' rights to think, behave and define themselves and their values each on their own, in hopes they will do the same for me, and I would rather engage in mutual discourse than a contest in condemning. But you are about to witness, dear readers, a departure from this general track in the following statement: I know of absolutely no reason (with the exception of those who are physically unable due to age, illness or disability) for anyone to have a housekeeper, ever.

My reasons for such a strong view are manifold, but they have their origins in my up-bringing by a strong feminist mother who also, as it happens, was an incurable pack-rat. The fact is that the title of "housekeeper" is for good reason practically interchangeable with "cleaning-lady" — it is a job still dominated almost entirely by women, almost all of whom are underpaid and overworked. My sense of social justice cringes at the very notion of patronizing and perpetuating such a horrifically sexist and demeaning profession (and I must reject the notion, as I've heard some Libertarians argue in support of prostitution, that by exploiting women who have no better options, we are somehow doing them a favor).

The logic that supports this degrading profession — and believe me, there are few jobs more degrading than cleaning up someone else's waste and filth — is that it would be ridiculous to pay someone a living wage to do work you could very well do for yourself (if you were so inclined, which of course you are not). It is the same logic that exempts severs and wait-staff from minimum wage laws (after all, you could have gotten your own food... though, of course, you didn't). The result is an ugly mess of unhealthy relationships lurking just beneath that gleaming surface that we would like to call "clean."

Consider the following: out-for-hire housekeepers are often paid according to the number of houses they clean, which gives them quite a large incentive to clean a given house as quickly as possible, and move on to the next. As a result, they often focus far more on the appearance of cleanliness than on actual, deep-cleaning itself. And can you blame them? The job of housekeeper rarely comes with job security or benefits, such as health care, and on top of that, you don't get paid if you don't show up. Which also means that housekeepers will often show up to work even when they are injured or ill, which is much more frequent in a job that involves hard physical work and dealing all day with other people's germs. Whether for reasons of speed or because she is feeling less than full of vigorous health, or quite often both, a housekeeper will likely cut every corner she can, wiping down that kitchen counter once with an already-used rag from the bathroom rather than wasting time prepping a clean one and scrubbing to kill all those invisible germs that we can't see anyway. And really, it's not her house, so why should it matter to her? There is, after all, a subversive logic that plays in the heads of the working-class housekeepers and waitresses as well, which is that if the client or customer really cared about the work, they would have done it themselves, and what you're really paid for is the task of keeping up appearances. Every once in a while, you might find that wizened Buddhist woman who treats waiting tables at the local diner like a Teahouse Practice; or the devoted housekeeper who sees the task of cleaning and sterilizing other people's homes as her small homage to Mother Teresa... but such saints are few and far between, and most folks are just fellow human beings struggling to make ends meet.

The sum total of all of this? We invite someone into our home — this place meant to be a family space of comfort and safety, rest and sanctuary and warm memory — and this person brings with her the systemic violence of lingering sexism and injustice and very often poverty; she brings with her the illnesses, frenzied stress and repressed resentment of a demeaning and difficult job; she brings with her all those literal germs from all the other houses she's cleaned that day, not to mention the harsh industrial chemicals that are just as bad for the earth as they are for the human body... and when she leaves, we survey our domain and call it "clean." And yet, how could this be clean? How could this truly be healthy? We have invited in countless violations of kindness, honor and responsibility — we have welcomed in a reality rife with invisible illness and imbalance for the sake of a superficial glimmering appearance, and in the very act of doing so we have relinquished our own responsibilities.

Why Cleansing Matters

In some ways, the argument that if you really cared about the work, you would do it yourself, though often bitter and self-justifying among those who work in the "service industry," has a deeply relevant point. Cleaning puts us into relationship with the places and objects that we clean — but more specifically, it is work that restores our relationship with all those things that we have used up and worn out with our daily living, often taking them for granted or overlooking them as our grime collects and our handling wears. The process of cleaning is our chance to re-attune with these, to demonstrate with our hands and our care, our time and concentration, the gratitude and respect that they are due. During this time we spend cleaning, we become willing attendants to those objects and places that have continually served us, patiently and reliably and without protest. For the Pagan who views all of the embodied, physical world as sacred, cleaning is a sacred act of cleansing, in which we purify our relationships with a space and its dwelling spirits (whether literal or metaphorical) by redressing the imbalances of carelessness and inattention that can so often creep into our lives.

This is the why of cleansing, but the how is also intensely important. The cleansing process puts us in touch and in tune with an object or space so that we can establish a healthy and respectful "working relationship." But as any good ritualist or spellcrafter knows, when we set about the work of clearing away the mirky or harmful energies and the lingering spiritual echoes of a place or object, we also engage in opening ourselves and emptying ourselves. We give ourselves a chance to start fresh with a new sense of freedom grounded in the present, the here-now. Household cleaning tasks are often slow and repetitive — the same sweep of the broom or swish of the mop, the same turn and twist of the dishrag, the same back-and-forth of the scrub brush on the shower tile — and so they can become a kind of embodied meditation similar to that of smudging a sacred circle or cleansing a crystal. They require and help to cultivate self-discipline, gradually quieting the riot of thoughts in the mind and bringing the attention into focus on the most mundane of details.

And so this is why, I think, it is in the spring that we find ourselves so often thinking about cleaning and cleansing. Not only is cleaning a natural and practical way to direct those energies that come bubbling up from beneath the long-frozen ground and pouring down from the ever-higher sun, but it provokes a kind of revery in the mundane. The freshly washed curtains sway in the breeze beside the newly dusted windowsill, on which sits the most mundane and common of things: a few fresh-cut flowers in a vase. And life urges us to stop and smell the flowers, to slow down, to give our attention willingly and reverently to those little things that are tripping and tumbling over themselves in offering, that give of themselves endlessly and utterly fill our lives, a glass that runneth over with the generous fecundity of spring and simple things.

^[*] The two words trace back to the same Proto-Germanic roots meaning "to gleam" or make bright, with cleanse retaining its older spelling and pronunciation and clean, once used only as an adjective, taking over in the common usage. I have noticed that cleansing often tends to evoke a kind of formality and sacredness that cleaning does not, and so I will use these two terms in this way: cleaning being the mundane process, and cleansing being cleaning with that extra bit of umph added in (let's say the "s" stands for "sacred").

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.

Aesthetics and the Sacred

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

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