Autumn Sepia
Frick Park, Pittsburgh, PA
Showing posts with label autumn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label autumn. Show all posts
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Saturday, October 30, 2010
The Pulse of Samhain
There must have been an autumn when I was a child... But those days I remember as being full of the smell of sharpened pencils and graphite shavings, the rustle of notebook pages, the glint of bent spiral bindings and — sometimes — at the bus stop, a glimpse of horizon between the houses and the whispering golden pear trees, a full moon setting pale opposite the rising sun.
This morning, I glance out the window between sips of mint tea. The vines cascading down the garage have flushed to copper and rust, fading back into the old red brick. The sky is overcast, but the sun is low and spills in shifting rays over the tall grasses of the backyard, coming and going, light and dim again as it sinks. A neighborhood cat prowls, its black body slipping through the weeds that bend and shift in soft browns almost like wheat. The silent overhanging trees are limp with mottled yellows and golds.
Somewhere, a cloud changes. Suddenly the scene is awash in early morning sunlight, illuminated, every leaf translucent like a moving, living fountain of stained glass against the low, dull sky. The cat pauses, a dark shimmering shape stilled in a shaft of light, its ears and tail twitching. I can almost see the tips of its whiskers shining. Then, it hunches down again, head low, its form one long line of shadow slinking off.
Samhaim slips in. The dead among us rustle like dying leaves, or notebook pages.
This morning, I glance out the window between sips of mint tea. The vines cascading down the garage have flushed to copper and rust, fading back into the old red brick. The sky is overcast, but the sun is low and spills in shifting rays over the tall grasses of the backyard, coming and going, light and dim again as it sinks. A neighborhood cat prowls, its black body slipping through the weeds that bend and shift in soft browns almost like wheat. The silent overhanging trees are limp with mottled yellows and golds.
Somewhere, a cloud changes. Suddenly the scene is awash in early morning sunlight, illuminated, every leaf translucent like a moving, living fountain of stained glass against the low, dull sky. The cat pauses, a dark shimmering shape stilled in a shaft of light, its ears and tail twitching. I can almost see the tips of its whiskers shining. Then, it hunches down again, head low, its form one long line of shadow slinking off.Samhaim slips in. The dead among us rustle like dying leaves, or notebook pages.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Monday, October 25, 2010
Keeping the Days: Meditation in Autumnal Woods
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 SoulThursday, October 21, 2010
The Three Elements of Druidic Ritual
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.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Song of a Daily Druid
The November issue of Pagan Pages is up, along with my column Song of a Daily Druid. This month's column, "The No-Time Before Beginning," confronts the sometimes less-than-ideal reality of sickness and loneliness during these times of increasing cold and darkness. I found it a bit of a struggle to write this month, struggling with lingering illness of my own, but I hope to return to the themes of poetry, bardic work and the ancestors in next month's column. For now, please enjoy:We cannot always be rushing full speed ahead.
Druidry teaches us that there are cycles, seasons that turn over and shuffle through one another. At Samhain, summer's end, we enter a time of darkness, before the rebirth of light on the winter solstice. Now is a time of dissolution, and sacrifice. And bad chest colds with persistent, aching cough. Amber and rusted-ruby bleed through the tree leaves along their brittle veins, and I notice how they scab around the torn edges of old holes chewed out by summer insects now sluggish or dead. Outside my window, rain shivers down through the evening fog and clings to every surface, and slips, and falls, and clings again; each leaf wavers limply in the breeze, damp but still shining, ablaze like the sun's going-down. They are so devoted. They mimic her, like the rain; they fall. We are all going down, stepping gently into the dusk, into the coming dark.
Last year, I dreamt often of brilliant mountainsides, spattered with the reds, oranges and yellows of foliage. My dreams were suffused with autumn. I noticed the subtle shifts as the season moved, changes I had never noticed before. The blushing rouge at the beginning, like wounds or lips opening up here and there among the worn summer green, just beginning to spread from tree to tree. The quaking yellows and golds at the height of the season, the whole woods cut through by low, bright sunlight and seeming to glow, the limbs of trees dark like veins starting to show through a papery sky, reflected in the surface of half-hidden streams gliding through layers of yellow leaves that had already fallen. ...
To read more, check out Song of a Daily Druid: The No-Time Before Beginning.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Samhain: Thinning the Veil
No one mourns that the body is dark. I do not mourn that my body, thick with muscle and skin and blood, is dark inside, opaque, layer upon layer of translucent flesh wrapped around hard white bone so densely no light can get in. Is bone white? I have never seen mine. Sometimes I can see, through the thin veils of my skin, that my blood can be a deep blue, even close to the surface, can be purple just a razor-edge from spilling brilliant into red. But inside, all my blood is dark — coming from my heart or going, rounding the lungs or settling into the extremities of my toes and fingertips, red and blue are nothing but potentials in the darkness of my body. My throat, my ears, even the centers of my eyes show that darkness. People look into my eyes, and no one mourns.This is what happens when we move inside, when we look inside without first dissecting and slicing and splaying the body open on the autopsy table. What we find when we move inside the living body as it really is, not exposing it, but entering in gently. The heart as it really is, dark, hidden in a dark body. And there is a sadness there, in the darkness, a sadness like our obscure working heart beneath the veils of translucence.
The world is so full of color, and brilliance, and motion, and we are so full of pain. We walk around, these dark bodies wrapped in the beauty of color and light. Our skin shimmering, our hair and eyes and fingernails shimmering — and the ache exists here, in us, in these bodies, held within us by this thin veil of physical flesh, wrinkled and wrapped up tight, fold upon fold. Our nerves are dark corridors of pain, our hearts raw with sadness. The world is so gentle and soft, it gives way before us when we move. We walk like celestial beings, made of stardust and sunlight, we tread lightly over the muddy ground and only sometimes do we remember the earth, too, is dark beneath us, beneath her green and lovely veils. Only sometimes do we turn our minds inwards into the earth, where the dark is moving, too.
What is that sadness? What can I say about it? It is the sadness of having an inside, and of what remains inside. The sadness of memory, making room to hold within it what has been lost, the place where grief lives, and injustice, and fear. And the sadness, too, of hope, and helplessness. In countries where the women are not allowed to dance, it is the slow dancing of suffering to the dark music of blood and dreams. It is where we touch, in the darkness, in each hidden center of our beings — we rub one another raw, finding our way out, groping towards each other through the dark. It is the tender sadness of connection, the ache of opening a small way in. We open our mouths wide, we cry out, we would swallow sunlight if we could — but inside, the dark remains, no light can find its way. We are dense, through and through, and that mystery is sadness, too.
But the veil is thin. Just this flesh, ordinary and marvelous that we walk around every day without a thought to its myriad shining porous cells. And there are times — like these — when we play at the edges of the veil, lifting a hem, worrying the seams between our fingers. We paint white bones and polished skulls on the windows and the doors, we revel in the red of blood and imagine ourselves full of it, brimming with the color of it, the light gleaming off each turn and curve of our veins. We fill ourselves with color — the colors of gore and pus and bone — we place candles behind the eyes of pumpkins emptied of their insides. We bring the light in, deep within, past the folds of the veil, and place it like a sun churning at the center of the earth. The dead are not jailed within memory, but drift free and translucent in the moonlight. Pain and fear — we set these loose, too, release them like stories into the outside world, a world full of color, and brilliance, and motion, and love. We set fire to this dark sadness within our bodies, and we look — past the shadowy masks of obscurity and illusion — we look into each other's eyes. We look, and nobody mourns.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Sycamore Circle: Visions of the Grove
In a previous post I introduced the new study group, Sycamore Circle, that Jeff and I recently founded for Druids and Pagans in the Pittsburgh area. And then I spent some time waxing philosophic about (read: anxiously worrying over) issues of group politics and member dynamics. If you thought this was a bit premature, considering our "circle" currently has all of two members and two prospectives, well... I can't disagree. But you know me, I can't stay pinned to mere reality when possibility beckons so seductively. So on that note, I wanted to explore a bit about my vision for what I hope Sycamore Circle can become, what it can offer to myself and to others, and how, and why. This isn't the final word on the matter, or even a manifesto for the group--just my personal dreams and hopes. Consider the following a kind of creative exercise, getting a handle on things, exploring options, and articulating potentials with the hope that maybe the Universe is listening and wants to play along.
Autumn is creeping in around the edges once more, gold and russet seeping along the veins of leaves and the sky trembling through moods alternately blustery and bright. Always this time of year brings with it the energies of renewal. Not the renewal of spring, with new life bursting forth from every crevice in the sidewalk, but the renewal that comes from release, letting the fecundity and lushness of summer die back to discover those things which persist, the bare bones of what matters most and the fruits that contain within them what seeds may grow in warmer months from now. I think again how appropriate it is that we get to celebrate Sycamore Circle's founding around this time of year, when the busyness of back-to-school has died down into routine and the coming dark reminds us to value those lights in our lives that will sustain us through the coming winter. I position a few more candles on the mantle and make sure the bowl of apples, the pumpkin cookies and the box of assorted teas is set out so folks can help themselves when we return. Then, I shrug on my thick sweater, wrap the blue scarf close around my neck and head out to join the rest of the group gathering on the front stoop, laughing and chatting and sharing the latest news.
This new moon, it's Jeff's turn to lead the meeting again, and we've been brainstorming guided meditations and discussion topics for the past week in preparation. There are several group members who have been through TDN's Perennial Course in Living Druidry three or four times by now, and have taken their turns leading group discussions and writing rituals as well; but one or two others have joined us in the last year and are still finding their grounding in the local landscape of this City of Steel intersected by three rivers in hilly Western Pennsylvania. As the group of us head to the wooded park nearby for our usual hillwalking, I smile at Jeff's second-oldest daughter, accompanying us for the first time now that she's reached an age when her curiosity in her father's spirituality has blossomed into a personal commitment, and meditation and long discussions don't tire or bore her. Few of Sycamore Circle's members grew up Pagan as she has, but things are changing. One young woman walks more slowly than last year at this time, now carrying a bulging belly and holding to her partner's hand firmly in hers. We'll have to start thinking seriously about planning regular family events pretty soon. But first, there will be a Naming Rite to celebrate, probably before Alban Arthan comes around.
Jeff leads this gaggle of Druids along familiar paths, and I hang towards the back of the troop, listening as conversations fade into silence and each person's attention hones and then expands in the dusky light. Someone near the front lets out a startled gasp when some leaves rustle by the side of the trail, and we each pause for a moment to silently greet the brown, lumpy toad hunkered down in the debris before we walk softly on again. This group practice of contemplative hillwalking has remained one of my favorite parts of the new moon meetings. As the years have passed, together we've watched the landscape dance through its changes during these walks, always repeating and yet never exactly the same, until even the flux and subtle shifts in light and weather feel comforting and home-like. Somewhere a cardinal chirps, not even ruffled by our presence, and I smile to think it might just be some old companion come to say hello.
It took a long time to get to this place, a place of trust and intimacy.The members of the grove, too, have changed with the years--a few joining only for a time before moving on again to follow the promptings of their own unique soul-songs; others remaining, returning month after month, year after year, always growing, searching for a deeper authenticity, a more poignant longing for Spirit along the Druid way. This misty afternoon of the new moon, as we trudge through the woods towards our usual gathering spot on the hill, I'm surrounded by the warm bodies of a dozen or so folks as close to me as family, perhaps even closer. Up ahead, I see one of Sycamore Circle's first members, my anam-chara, soul-friend and student, a young man who began this path full of eager skepticism and humor, so anxious to be counterculture that sometimes the desire drove him away from himself. He has settled gently into a quiet confidence these past years, though with the same warm laugh as ever, and he walks beside his own anam-chara now, mentoring one of our newest members, sharing those long, intense discussions on theology and magic theory, ecology and justice, that I remember the two of us used to have. Sometimes, he still calls me up for coffee and we sit in the local cafe, now more truly soul-friends than mentor-student to one another, sharing stories about our work, or just relaxing and catching up. A small ripple of gratitude runs though me as I think about these bonds interweaving among us all, each member seeking guidance from a mentor, becoming in turn the anam-chara of another. It has taken a long time to build this community, but there is real trust and intimacy here, and so is there honesty, questioning, uncertainty and integrity.Of course, there are always some members who only ever make it to our major holy day rituals, living out their paths mostly in the mundane world of business and education and politics and family. But their enthusiastic presence lends a celebratory air to the solar and fire festivals nonetheless, as we see our modest circle suddenly expand with newcomers and old friends alike coming together to honor and remember our stories and the gods. This afternoon's meeting, beginning as it always does with our hillwalking, will also include some final planning for the Samhain ritual, only a week away by now. Jeff's daughter has been working on a song to perform for the rite, and a few others have perfected their drumming for the guided meditation. Though each of us in turn has the chance to lead ritual or take on one of the more active roles, my own real joy has always been writing the chants and group prayers, or sometimes sharing a poem or two. This year one of the younger members will be leading the Samhain ritual as priestess, but I still look forward to that moment when a chant I wrote from years ago begins to thrum again in the throats of all the participants of the grove, our voice lifting up above the trees, carried on the wind. Ritual as living poetry, enacted stories in honor of Spirit--we have had some dreadful flops, and some hilarious accidents, but the longer we work and pray and practice together, the more moving and powerful even the most familiar rites become.
I bring my mind back to the present moment. The hilltop is in sight, and as the group makes the final climb and begins to lay out blankets for sitting, Jeff pulls the small candle and box of matches from his pocket and stoops to place it on the flat center stone. Without a word, we all settle down in a lop-sided circle around the pale, flickering flame as he begins with some simple breathing and centering exercises. His voice is calm and smooth in the silent afternoon. After a time of quiet meditation, he'll lead the group discussion, inviting thoughts and stories about each person's individual work over the past two weeks, prompting observations of the season's changes, encouraging new members especially to share songs, poems or other works of art or craft they have brought along. By the time dusk has truly fallen, we'll have passed around the thermos of cool spring water, quietly making libations as we whisper our own personal prayers and gratitude to the land. But for now, I close my eyes and breathe deeply and slowly, feeling the lumpy earth beneath me, the breeze carrying the smell of rotting leaves from the surrounding woods. Nearby, sharing this hilltop with us, a sycamore reaches its thick branches upwards, its bark fading from patchwork to skeletal white high among its wide, browning leaves. It rustles and lets a leaf or two fall, twirling their way down under a gray sky. I breathe again, and then again; I keep breathing.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Lughnasadh: Burning In, Burning Out
In the small open space of the gallery, I find myself stopped in my tracks by a painting--thin shining layers of oil on canvas--entitled, "Song of the Sun." I remember this, I think ruefully, shrugging my sweater closer around my neck. Chill mist drifts in even now from the harbor, sliding in under the door. The floor boards in the silent gallery creak when I shift my feet. The painting is like a memory of summer, it feels warm and salty to the eyes. Stunted pine trees list out of frame, their dark trunks obscured by moss and rough branches, their roots draping red and raw over the hard corners of granite cliffs that drop in short bursts and end abruptly at the sea. The sunlight is golden and long, casting satisfying shadows to every edge. I feel as though I remember summers like this, watching the sunlight linger on the stone, watching it seep into the deep spaces of tree bark like the godmother of sap and, much later, of autumn. These were days of long views, evenings when the ocean seemed to curve infinitely towards the horizon, when mountains loomed throwing their bulky shadows over lake bottoms. Sunlight got into everything, into muscle and bone, leaves, water and rock--heat and light lurking just beneath the gritty flesh of the world. And you could extend the painting forever beyond its frame, and still never come to the sun itself.
My summer vacation this year was early, damp and ribboned with fog. I spent much of it in small, carefully cultivated gardens and sparse art galleries, rather than hiking the usual rough trails that wound up the granite mountains lurching along the Eastern seaboard of Maine. Each morning, I went out onto the deck of our rental house to wake myself up gently with my own deep breath and a bit of yoga, pressing the heels of my hands into wood planks that were dark and spongy with dew and overnight rain. Each night, I lit a candle and sat in meditation while the bug-repellent scents of lavender and citronella wafted around me, incense smoke indistinguishable from the mist in moonlight beyond my window. The earth was so green, every limb and nook of tree carpeted with moss, every square inch of the forest floor thick with ferns. Everything so silent, so dim and so glistening that they seemed to almost shimmer with an unseen light. I'd almost forgotten.It's been close to a month now since I got home, and the quietness and smallness of that week has slipped away again. The summer is hot now, and the sun always seems to be breathing hot down my neck like some intruder trying to eat my skin off. Each morning, I have to slather on a coat of spf 50 sunscreen to preserve my spiraling blue tattoos from fading away. I have to tie up my hair so that it doesn't hang limp with sweat plastered between my shoulder blades. I have to seek shade (us pale Irish types do, you know) and remind myself to drink water before I feel thirsty. And meanwhile, it's like the sun is egging me on: I'm in busy-busy-busy mode, taking on projects and cramming the days full of plans and bullet-point lists of things to get done (painting Jeff's apartment, building do-it-yourself furniture, helping my best friend move, organizing shelves and shelves of books, dinners and weddings and movies in the park and rollerblading--and in all of it, hardly time to write a word). "Make hay while the sun shines," the high white-burning hole in the sky whispers to my twitching nerves. And those moments of stillness and solitude, those gentle mornings, have all but burnt up under the intense gaze of dogged days.
I want the harvest, I want autumn to come, finally, I want it to arrive with all the force of an apple breaking open. I want the sun, with all its heat and light, to set with the color of apples, the moist fleshy fruit inside the fragile skin holding that memory of sunlight when the source has ceased to burn.
I think this is the nature of the Divine in its transcendence, its limitlessness. When the mystics talk of union, sometimes they speak of rain plunging forever into the ocean, dissolving, losing definition, uniting perfectly and indistinguishably with the source. But sometimes, they talk of light. Blinding brilliance, burning purification that strips away the skin and bleaches the bones. Sacred fire. The kind that consumes the self, reduces it to dust and ashes. The holy is ruthless; it could utterly devour you. I haven't met with this ruthless burning light in the polytheistic deities I've worked with (at least, not yet), nor did I find it in Christ as a practicing Catholic. But I found it, then, in God as Father, the Godhead, pouring itself relentlessly into every bursting, buzzing atom; and I find it now, as then, in the world, in the landscape and the seasons. When I meet it there, I think I understand a little better the trembling awe of Old Testament psalms, the songs of praise, of triumph so complete it could be heartless.
Sun and sunlight. Their relationship always changing, with every fire festival. At Imbolc, the sun seems small and fragile in a vast shivering dome of air; at Belteinne, we close our eyes in ecstasy and invite the sun inside, into our blood and breath, warm on our tongues while our eyes are closed. But by Lughnasadh, it's been burning in our bodies for months now. It's time we begin to let it go again, or it will burn us out. We need this mitigation, this separation from the sun--the sun is blinding and will make us a desert if we try to cling too long. We cherish memories of sunlight soaking the rocks, dust motes floating in front of a grimy window, long evening twilights dotted with rising fields of fireflies. We love these shafts of sunlight, these bits of light and heat embodied in the world around us. They let us come close to the sun, to the Divine, to the Source, without burning up. I think this may be why the gods I've known have been gentle and loving: they are particulars, immanent and close. They hold within them the light of the Source, as we all do, but they are kind and nurturing with it, restrained, not devastating, not cruel. This is why the apple nourishes us, when the unmitigated sun might burn and eat us to ashes. The world of intimate particulars, of individuality and diversity and limits, refreshes and renews even as it darkens and veils.And all the while, holiness is burning within us, deep inside the soft earth of our bodies, fueled by our breath, washed with the tides of our sorrows and joys. The harvest is coming, darkness will settle as the apples drop, and soon we'll have the space and quietness to remember that we, like the sun, also shine.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Pagan Values: Violence, Destruction & The Difference
Is it really the case, as I claimed earlier, that there is no equivalent to the "just war" theory when it comes to understanding our relationship with the natural world? With a moment's thought we can soon list lots of occasions when an individual or group of people have had to hunt or harvest, plow fields for food or cut down trees for shelter, in order to survive. To say that people are not sometimes "at war" with or struggling against their local environment treads dangerously close to the naive view of nature as benign, beneficent, even tame.The truth is, the natural world is anything but tame; it is wild, it is the epitome of wildness and wilderness. Forces of the natural world--the ferocity of a wildfire, the upheaval of an earthquake, the very barrenness of a desert or the pummeling pressure of a river's relentless current--can be sources of terrific destruction and obstacles against which we struggle every day. Meanwhile, the "red in tooth and claw" reality of predator and prey certainly seems founded on an inherent relationship between violence and survival. How can we choose to live by principles of pacifism and creative nonviolence in light of this wildness? How can we apply pacifism to environmentalism--let alone to our everyday, social and political lives--when violence appears ubiquitous, especially in the natural world?
Violence in Human/Nature
Really, it has always been the apparent violence of nature as a whole--more than that of humanity alone--that has been the greatest stumbling block for the philosophy of nonviolence. Most arguments against pacifism as an unrealistic ideal only rely partially on the actual history of human violence; after all, there are also many examples in human history of our capacity for empathy, kindness and near-infinite adaptability. Opponents of pacifism more often use nature as the best evidence against its practical realization. Projecting back in time an imagined pure or fundamental "human nature" imbued with all the base self-interest of the animal world and drenched in the blood and strife of continuous struggle against competitors for the scarce resources needed to survive, they argue that people simply cannot overcome an innate tendency towards destruction. The closed system of the earth itself means there is only a finite amount of land, food and other resources to go around. We continually find ourselves in conflict, destroying when there is no more room to create, surviving and thriving at the expense of our rivals and our prey. Even those rare individuals, the argument goes, who can overcome or mitigate violence do so through suppression or denial of their own nature. But this requires extraordinary discipline and strength of will not available to most of us. Pacifism might be an option for the inhumanly committed with unwavering focus, but as a general goal for the average person it just doesn't work.The flaw in this view is that it takes for granted that destruction is synonymous with violence, and where the former exists the latter must also be present. To kill a neighbor to gain his prosperous fields is, from this perspective, hardly different from the act of eating the harvest of those fields, or hunting down a stag, or chopping down a tree to build shelter. In all these situations, one life is destroyed for the sake of another. We might say that killing a fellow human being is worse because, by some unspoken measure, human beings are better or more important than a stag, a tree or a field of wheat. But this objection relies on a rather flimsy judgment of value. To make a distinction between violence against human beings and violence against non-humans misrepresents our own intuitive relationship with destruction. As soon as we acknowledge that humans are not inherently "better" than the rest of the natural world--something many Pagans find obvious already--we lose what ground we've gained towards a nonviolent philosophy and find ourselves again faced with the overwhelming presence of destruction, and therefore (supposedly) violence in nature and humankind.
Natural Empathy & Our Need for Destruction
The more appropriate and useful distinction that we need to make is, I believe, between mere destruction and violence. That is, between destruction as a natural and inevitable aspect of the manifest world; and violence as an intentional form of destructive dishonor or irreverence towards the unique individuality of being. Not only does this subtle shift circumvent the false dichotomy of humanity-versus-nature, but it reflects the difference between destruction and violence that we experience intuitively and reveals exactly what it is about violence that makes it so damaging and undesirable.
As self-aware social animals, we human beings have developed a natural tendency towards empathy, evident even in early childhood. This ability to connect imaginatively and emotionally with the "other"--not just with other people, but any being that we perceive as animate and aware, from pets, to plants, to landscapes and weather--allows us to function well in supportive communities, but it also means that we feel a visceral discomfort when witnessing others in pain. When cornered by our own urgent needs or fears, however, our capacity for self-consciousness and imagination can come to serve violence rather than empathy, encouraging us to invent convincing justifications for inflicting pain on others. These justifications--self-defense, punishment, deterrence, and preemptive force, to name a few--hold in common a typical diminishment of the "other" into a being less worthy of our empathy, less capable of suffering, against which we can direct destructive force guilt-free.
Sometimes this diminishment portrays the other as a less-than-complete being, not merely an animal but a vicious, repulsive, uncomplicated thing that cannot be trusted to live peacefully and behave civilly, and must therefore be either contained or exterminated. Other times, we diminish the other by viewing it as an abstract destructive power against which we have every right to strive for life. The mugger with the knife looming up out of the dark is as impersonal as the tornado or the virus that threatens us, and we react with a similarly reflexive defense. The criminal condemned to execution is, as Ani DiFranco says, "a symbol, not a human being; that way they can kill [him], and say it's not murder, it's a metaphor." An excellent example of diminishment comes from Jared Diamond's book, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal:
[I]n 1982 one of Australia's leading news magazines, The Bulletin, published a letter by a lady named Patricia Cobern, who denied indignantly that white settlers had exterminated the Tasmanians. In fact, wrote Ms. Cobern, the settlers were peace-loving and of high moral character, while Tasmanians were treacherous, murderous, warlike, filthy, gluttonous, vermin-infested, and disfigured by syphilis. Moreover, they took poor care of their infants, never bathed, and had repulsive marriage customs. They died out because of all those poor health practices, plus a death wish and a lack of religious beliefs. It was just a coincidence that, after thousands of years of existence, they happened to die out during a conflict with the settlers. The only massacres were of settlers by Tasmanians, not vice versa. Besides, the settlers only armed themselves in self-defense, were unfamiliar with guns, and never shot more than forty-one Tasmanians at one time.Such justifications, listed emphatically one after another, bely the utter absurdity of such attempts at diminishment. As Cobern's explanations grow more and more bizarre and unlikely (the Tasmanians had a "death wish"? the settlers "never shot more than forty-one" at a time?), what becomes obvious is her desperate need to prove that the deaths of the Tasmanians were, one way or another, inevitable.
Choice & Consent
Why this desperate need to prove inevitability? Because destruction really is inevitable, unavoidable. It is, in essence, simply another aspect of creation, that which breaks down before it can build up, making room for the new and letting the old and stale lapse back into the void of potential. We recognize this basic fact at gut-level, so deep is this relationship between destruction and creation, dark and light, winter and spring. Destruction is not always undesirable; sometimes it can even be a welcome relief. And so, what every form of diminishing the other has in common is our need to justify violence by transforming it into a form of destruction.
These justifications would not work so well, or even be necessary, if we did not already understand on an intuitive level that destruction and violence are not the same. We would not need to deny the relevance of empathy and reverence, to deny our own active participation in destruction, if we did not sense on some level that these things make a difference. What we already know is that some deaths, some break-downs, some sources of pain and suffering, are not inevitable. What we already know is that, unlike destruction, violence is always a choice. It is a choice to destroy, to induce pain, to allow our own needs and passions to overshadow those of the other and to force our will upon others without their consent. The word "violence" itself comes from the Latin violentia, which translates as vehemence or impetuosity. Both words suggest the application of force without thought or consideration, without empathy for the suffering it might cause. Related is the verb violare, which gives rise to the English "violate" and means "to treat with violence or irreverence, to dishonor."When trying to understand a philosophy of pacifism or nonviolence, therefore, we can define the word "violence" broadly, without making the absurd claim that all destruction should or can be avoided. Personally, I define "violence" as: a rejection or denial of the unique and meaningful individuality of a being. Rejecting that another being has a unique and meaningful individual existence independent from our own can lead us to impose our wills or passions on them by force. Such force can be physical and cause physical injury or even death, but it can also be emotional, psychological or even spiritual. In her book Living With Honour, Emma Restall Orr talks about the Welsh and Gealic words for "face," and invokes the notion of "being face-to-face" as at the heart of what honor means in Celtic society. An act of violence against another is an act of dishonor, refusing to come face-to-face, diminishing and disempowering others, alienating and isolating them and denying them relationship with us, denying our interconnection.
We can also act violently towards ourselves; this kind of self-violence is more often emotional or spiritual than physical and so less often acknowledged. But if we remember the definition of violence, then we realize that any time we reject our own individuality as unique and meaningful, any time we deny our capacity for creative engagement with the world, we commit an act of spiritual violence against our own beings. This diminishment of our own being is why we so often seek to justify violence, insisting that it is actually inevitable or necessary destruction in which we had no choice or active participation. When we have the capacity and opportunity to choose, and yet forfeit that choice thoughtlessly, rejecting our capacity to act as a unique individual "face-to-face" with another, we act violently not only against the other, but against ourselves. For every act of violence, both victim and violator become "faceless," both are dishonored and diminished.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Memories of Winter.
It's snowing outside again.
Earlier this autumn someone, I think my father, told me they were predicting a snowy winter this year. Because I don't drive, I never developed the automatic dislike of snow that many people seem to have. To me, snow still means a Lancaster county winter from my childhood: two-hour school delays, matching scarves and knit hats, plastic trash can lids transformed into make-shift sleds, the creek down the block from my parents' house freezing over, the crunch of boots on packed-down ice crystals, the thin shovel-scraped paths struggling over uneven sidewalks. It means vast landscapes of farm lands and scraggly wooded hills frosted over as if by a fine dust, as if finally left alone to settle into a good old silence.
Winter in college seems hardly memorable, except for the long, cold walks to the grocery store, rain trickling and pooling overtop the dangerous icy surface of walkways where afternoon sun had turned snow to slush and evening shadows had refrozen it into hard, slippery terrain. Though I remember walking to the bridge once and watching the snow--huge flakes hovering in air just above freezing, almost like soft down shook free from an old blanket--disappear into the dark, shimmering, moving waters of the river fifty feet below. And the time I went to Hunsberger Woods alone, snow several inches thick on the ground already and still falling, the sky low, layered and gray, suddenly broken by hundreds of geese crisscrossing in v-shaped flocks in every direction at once, the noise of their wings and harsh calls echoing confused in the quiet and, just as suddenly, gone again. I stood there staring up with the vertigo of watching snow fall towards me from an invisible height, feeling like the bare limbs of the trees everywhere had just exploded into feathers and beaks, feeling like a god had just slipped by above me.
Winter here... has always been tough. Several years ago, something painful happened to me at the end of October, and since then autumn has always slunk by, dulled and fractured by memories of grief and anxiety, dropping off without color or passion into a dull, slinking winter season. The first year, back when I still had television, I spent the darkest days of the year barely out of my pajamas (except when forced to go to work), curled up under blankets watching reruns of X-Files. On Imbolc, I went into the woods in Schenley Park and lit a small blue candle in the snow, sat with it as it guttered and smoked and rekindled and guttered again each time the wind turned. I was embarrassed, afraid of being caught by some jogger or a woman walking her dog. I was still new to Druidry then, still feeling exotic and strange. But no one was out, and I sat on the stone footbridge listening to the water of the stream shiver along under stiff dead leaves and frozen underbrush.
This year may be different. Usually, I'm so eager to leave autumn behind I fling myself headlong into the Christmas season, decorating my apartment with all the old ornaments and garlands inherited from my mother, lighting dozens of candles and enjoying the Christmas music on the radio. This year, fall was almost a relief. I didn't write much in this blog about it, finding it hard to put into words, but for the first time in years, autumn seemed to have color again, and shape and life to it. I dreamt often of brilliant mountainsides spattered with the reds, oranges and yellows of foliage. My dreams were suffused with autumn. I noticed the subtle shifts as the season moved which I had never noticed before. The blushing rouge at the beginning, like wounds or lips opening up here and there among the worn summer green, just beginning to spread from tree to tree. The quaking yellows and golds at the height of the season, the whole woods cut through by low, bright sunlight and seeming to glow, the limbs of trees dark like veins starting to show through a papery sky, reflected in the surface of half-hidden streams gliding through layers of yellow leaves that had already fallen. And then, even towards the end, how beautiful and subtle the browns became, some deep like wet bark, some light and feathery like sheaves of wheat or rustling like straw, the ochre, russet, everything in sepia tones. There was a stand of sycamores outside the library in Oakland that everyday seemed to have life, each day different, moods that shifted and changed. Sometimes they were bright against the backdrop of concrete buildings and city skyline, sometimes faded and gentle, hardly distinguishable, but quiet and present. I can't tell you how these sycamores alone seemed to be, for the first time, so real to me, so very much alive.
I find myself, now, uninterested in making myself "feel Christmasy." A week ago, I walked home from work through a light snow, glancing up past the top of an evergreen at a tiny winter sun obscured by clouds. And what I felt was not a surge of "Christmas spirit" or "Yuletide cheer." Instead, I was struck by a sense of fragile, frigid rebirth, the sun gasping for breath in the cold and working its way back towards the warmth still lurking, sleeping in the earth--for the first time, I felt the coming of the solstice, Alban Arthan, "the light of winter." It was not the gaudy reds and greens, the tinsel and bells, the singing or crackling fire, it was not Christmas. It was something so much quieter, darker, farther away--yet everywhere, fine dust on the trees and frost inching up the window.
It was winter, a hush and lightness moving slowly through the deep.
Earlier this autumn someone, I think my father, told me they were predicting a snowy winter this year. Because I don't drive, I never developed the automatic dislike of snow that many people seem to have. To me, snow still means a Lancaster county winter from my childhood: two-hour school delays, matching scarves and knit hats, plastic trash can lids transformed into make-shift sleds, the creek down the block from my parents' house freezing over, the crunch of boots on packed-down ice crystals, the thin shovel-scraped paths struggling over uneven sidewalks. It means vast landscapes of farm lands and scraggly wooded hills frosted over as if by a fine dust, as if finally left alone to settle into a good old silence.
Winter in college seems hardly memorable, except for the long, cold walks to the grocery store, rain trickling and pooling overtop the dangerous icy surface of walkways where afternoon sun had turned snow to slush and evening shadows had refrozen it into hard, slippery terrain. Though I remember walking to the bridge once and watching the snow--huge flakes hovering in air just above freezing, almost like soft down shook free from an old blanket--disappear into the dark, shimmering, moving waters of the river fifty feet below. And the time I went to Hunsberger Woods alone, snow several inches thick on the ground already and still falling, the sky low, layered and gray, suddenly broken by hundreds of geese crisscrossing in v-shaped flocks in every direction at once, the noise of their wings and harsh calls echoing confused in the quiet and, just as suddenly, gone again. I stood there staring up with the vertigo of watching snow fall towards me from an invisible height, feeling like the bare limbs of the trees everywhere had just exploded into feathers and beaks, feeling like a god had just slipped by above me.
Winter here... has always been tough. Several years ago, something painful happened to me at the end of October, and since then autumn has always slunk by, dulled and fractured by memories of grief and anxiety, dropping off without color or passion into a dull, slinking winter season. The first year, back when I still had television, I spent the darkest days of the year barely out of my pajamas (except when forced to go to work), curled up under blankets watching reruns of X-Files. On Imbolc, I went into the woods in Schenley Park and lit a small blue candle in the snow, sat with it as it guttered and smoked and rekindled and guttered again each time the wind turned. I was embarrassed, afraid of being caught by some jogger or a woman walking her dog. I was still new to Druidry then, still feeling exotic and strange. But no one was out, and I sat on the stone footbridge listening to the water of the stream shiver along under stiff dead leaves and frozen underbrush.
This year may be different. Usually, I'm so eager to leave autumn behind I fling myself headlong into the Christmas season, decorating my apartment with all the old ornaments and garlands inherited from my mother, lighting dozens of candles and enjoying the Christmas music on the radio. This year, fall was almost a relief. I didn't write much in this blog about it, finding it hard to put into words, but for the first time in years, autumn seemed to have color again, and shape and life to it. I dreamt often of brilliant mountainsides spattered with the reds, oranges and yellows of foliage. My dreams were suffused with autumn. I noticed the subtle shifts as the season moved which I had never noticed before. The blushing rouge at the beginning, like wounds or lips opening up here and there among the worn summer green, just beginning to spread from tree to tree. The quaking yellows and golds at the height of the season, the whole woods cut through by low, bright sunlight and seeming to glow, the limbs of trees dark like veins starting to show through a papery sky, reflected in the surface of half-hidden streams gliding through layers of yellow leaves that had already fallen. And then, even towards the end, how beautiful and subtle the browns became, some deep like wet bark, some light and feathery like sheaves of wheat or rustling like straw, the ochre, russet, everything in sepia tones. There was a stand of sycamores outside the library in Oakland that everyday seemed to have life, each day different, moods that shifted and changed. Sometimes they were bright against the backdrop of concrete buildings and city skyline, sometimes faded and gentle, hardly distinguishable, but quiet and present. I can't tell you how these sycamores alone seemed to be, for the first time, so real to me, so very much alive.I find myself, now, uninterested in making myself "feel Christmasy." A week ago, I walked home from work through a light snow, glancing up past the top of an evergreen at a tiny winter sun obscured by clouds. And what I felt was not a surge of "Christmas spirit" or "Yuletide cheer." Instead, I was struck by a sense of fragile, frigid rebirth, the sun gasping for breath in the cold and working its way back towards the warmth still lurking, sleeping in the earth--for the first time, I felt the coming of the solstice, Alban Arthan, "the light of winter." It was not the gaudy reds and greens, the tinsel and bells, the singing or crackling fire, it was not Christmas. It was something so much quieter, darker, farther away--yet everywhere, fine dust on the trees and frost inching up the window.
It was winter, a hush and lightness moving slowly through the deep.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
I Had a Dream: Presidents Elect & the Green Bird
I got up this morning, woke up from a dream, with the intention of coming here to write it down. So I will. But after that, I'm going to say something that some people might not like. So here goes.
And here's what I have to say: I wish people would stop fucking comparing Obama to Martin Luther King, Jr. Seriously. MLK was a pacifist, a visionary, a grassroots revolutionary, and a great human being. Obama is just an ordinary politician who uses passionate, familiar rhetoric (and who just happens to be black). Which is not to say Obama is a bad person. He just isn't Martin Luther King. I mean, I know all black men look alike to most white people, but get a grip.
And they wonder why us pacifist anarchist types are never satisfied, always striving. People are so eager to hand it all over to the next man with a nice face and pleasing words. But what has Obama done to prove himself worthy of this fluster of ecstatic worship? Nothing yet. He ran for and was elected to President (and in doing so already compromised on a number of his previous commitments which we have all quietly ignored and let slide because it was just so vital that McCain not succeed to the throne).
I hope he becomes worthy, or that at least he does his job well. But I'm just not inclined to worship, or exaltation, or holding my breath until I feel giddy and light-headed. And I'm certainly no prouded to be an American today than those 55 million citizens yesterday who thought their best idea all day was to vote for McCain. Should I be proud merely because I was born here? Should I feel patriotism for a place where an election can be so close and so many people still give in to xenophobia and misinformation? No, I just don't get it. I'm proud to be me, to be who I am and who I strive to become... but as for American--well, like I wrote on my voter registration form (under both "party" and "race"): "No Affiliation."
But don't be mad. Obviously, you all didn't need me anyway.
I had a dream, last night, that Obama won the election. Well, that part's not hard to explain--since he did. So that's where my dream began, in a small public library in a suburban neighborhood where they were cleaning up the polling site for the evening, with CNN on in the background waiting for the results to roll in. And he won. And not only that, but he was there, and when the news that he had won was announced, everyone cheered and they piled Obama into a car, and we began driving. Yes, of course I was in the car. It's my dream. My father was driving, and someone else was in the front seat with him, and they talked animatedly the whole time. I sat in the back seat with Obama, glancing at him once in a while, trying to weigh him up, trying to read his face.We pulled out past the town limits, passing under lots of telephone wires strung in the air. On one there perched a bird--about the size of a duck, a bright brilliant emerald green and with a tail that draped almost three feet long behind it, like a Bird of Paradise. As we drove underneath where it perched, it took to flight and began singing a breathtakingly beautiful song. It flew along with us as we drove down the long, straight road, across the country. Fields and lazy rolling hills stretched out before us on all sides, honest-to-goodness "amber waves of grain" and hillsides of warm patchwork fall foliage. Old broken-down farmhouses, log cabins and shanties passed outside our window, and the Green Bird flew over us, swooping and diving, swinging with everything it had. My father sat in the driver's seat, talking enthusiastically, saying something about how, "Kids can so easily wind up out here, in the country, in the wild--and here, because of the isolation, they can become great, they can discover who they are and become Great Men--or, they can falter and fail, become bitter and angry and hardened and ideological, isolated from others. It all depends. We need to encourage them to become Great, rather than to become small, to face the challenge of isolation and hardship and improve themselves by it, rise to the challenge, rebuild this place, become better..." The other person in the front seat eagerly nodded and agreed and chimed in. Meanwhile, I leaned over to Obama once in a while, who gazed out the window at the landscape not seeming to listen, and asked him a few quiet questions, "What would you have done if you'd lost? How are you feeling? What will you do now?" He mumbled in answer, looking, honestly, exhausted and a little bit terrified. Then he said only, "The land is so beautiful..."
And it was--the clouds overhead were dark and low and menacing, a frightening sky--but sunlight low from the horizon cut across in wide shafts and illuminated the land itself, illuminated everything all around us, the brilliant colors set off even more strikingly against the threatening horizon. I said, "Yes, it is... That's why I love the fall--it's like the whole land is shedding its skin and revealing its pulsing, vibrant underbelly right before--" Obama sighed and leaned his forehead against my shoulder. It jostled, bone against bone, as the car rumbled down the road. "And do you see the Green Bird?" I asked him, as though trying to comfort a child. "Look, can you hear it singing? Do you see the Green Bird? It's been following us ever since we left the city! Isn't it beautiful? There! Look, there it goes, just there!"
He leaned over, searching out the window, squinting into the sun, but couldn't see it flying. He looked tired and sad, and soon closed his eyes and fell asleep as they continued to drive him along.
And here's what I have to say: I wish people would stop fucking comparing Obama to Martin Luther King, Jr. Seriously. MLK was a pacifist, a visionary, a grassroots revolutionary, and a great human being. Obama is just an ordinary politician who uses passionate, familiar rhetoric (and who just happens to be black). Which is not to say Obama is a bad person. He just isn't Martin Luther King. I mean, I know all black men look alike to most white people, but get a grip.
And they wonder why us pacifist anarchist types are never satisfied, always striving. People are so eager to hand it all over to the next man with a nice face and pleasing words. But what has Obama done to prove himself worthy of this fluster of ecstatic worship? Nothing yet. He ran for and was elected to President (and in doing so already compromised on a number of his previous commitments which we have all quietly ignored and let slide because it was just so vital that McCain not succeed to the throne).
I hope he becomes worthy, or that at least he does his job well. But I'm just not inclined to worship, or exaltation, or holding my breath until I feel giddy and light-headed. And I'm certainly no prouded to be an American today than those 55 million citizens yesterday who thought their best idea all day was to vote for McCain. Should I be proud merely because I was born here? Should I feel patriotism for a place where an election can be so close and so many people still give in to xenophobia and misinformation? No, I just don't get it. I'm proud to be me, to be who I am and who I strive to become... but as for American--well, like I wrote on my voter registration form (under both "party" and "race"): "No Affiliation."
But don't be mad. Obviously, you all didn't need me anyway.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Leaves & Lost Marbles: On Voting & True Will
I think I've been able to pinpoint the source of my discomfort and horror over the Presidential Election.
Room to Object
For one thing, I always feel uncomfortable, even suspicious, when everyone seems to agree about something. When the only arguments for not voting are apathy or a sense of helplessness--something is not right. Nihilism is a sure sign that the conversation has ceased to be open and honest and has become a kind of repetitive rhetoric that shuts down any real thought. Most people buy it, and those who don't feel impotent to respond. I mean, come on, we can still have infinitely complex, subtle conversations about killing, lying, stealing, cheating; we can debate the relative justice and necessity of war, the roles of faith and violence, the ambivalence of "God"; we can think of endless ways in which things that seem obviously wrong and harmful might sometimes be justified, and things that seem like obvious goods can sometimes have devastating effects--and now you're telling me that in the face of this overwhelming complexity and diversity of thought and experience, there is not one reasonable, coherent argument for why someone shouldn't vote? Suddenly we all agree on this one thing, when we can barely agree on the definition of "good," "right" or even "life" itself? No, that's just too much to swallow. Something is wrong. Something is being left out, we have a huge blind spot, we've been swept up in rhetoric and ritual and our minds have been left by the wayside somewhere to fend for themselves.
So, first things first, I would like to hear someone give a complex, intelligent, thorough argument for why voting is an absolute, unquestioned good--and to do so without resorting to terms like "civic duty/obligation," or support for one particular candidate, or grand statements about the "lesser of evils." I want to know why voting is an/the essential aspect of citizenry, why it is the best medium for political expression, what benefits it has over the alternatives (and if you can't think of any alternatives other than "not voting," that should be a very obvious warning sign--an argument that cannot conceive of any viable counter-arguments against which to prove itself is probably pretty shaky from the start). I want a reasoned argument, not an appeal to sentiment and the feeling one gets when participating in a successfully managed mass social ritual. In short, I want some perspective, please.
Room to Will
Walking to lunch, I tried to attend to and articulate the thoughts and emotions I was experiencing in regards to the election and my supposed "civic duty" to vote. I was disconcerted mostly because nothing remained at all clear or obvious, and the confusion and obfuscation had a kind of deliberateness, even a malice to it. I had ceased, long ago, to consider voting the sole or even the primary way in which I participated as a responsible citizen in my political community. I feel like I do more on a daily basis, through the ordinary mundane lifestyle choices I make, than any one voter can accomplish by pulling a lever or pushing a button once every couple years. But that didn't mean that voting was something to be purposefully avoided either. I couldn't pin down and define very good reasons for voting, and yet the stress and pressure to do so was palpable and constant. And, most importantly, external.
Now, I'm not sure how many people have a self-awareness so precisely refined that they can tell the difference between external pressure and internal desire. It seems that a great deal of our economics, politics and social relationships are built upon (and even designed to induce) confusion between the two. But I have always spent a great deal of time sifting and sorting, trying to find the root of my longings and opinions, learning my own interior landscape and acting from my own core being. Of course, that being is not cut off from the world, it is not some "pure" and unadulterated essence that never changes... It is shaped by the world around me, by my fluctuating experiences in it and growing knowledge about it. But if I try, as best as I can, to stay true to that internal sense of self and purpose, if I make a habit of resisting any pressure with the slightest smack of conformity-to-the-merely-external, then I trust that even those external pressures which shape and transform me will, in their turn, be shaped and changed by their inclusion in my own inner alchemy. In this way, I can always act with integrity even if I do not always act in isolation (which would be a silly thing to strive for, anyway).
So, the sense of external pressure was a sign for me that I simply had not internalized the necessity of voting--I was not, myself, convinced of its importance. And if this was the case, then I couldn't very well act one way or the other without first understanding my own ambivalence and determining what my own true sense of self--the sense of my own personal nature--required that I do. Believe it or not, this is how I make most of the choices in my life. It's a slow process, lots of groping slowly along in the dark, but then sometimes the natural movement of things must be gradual and subtle. "Through nonaction, all action is accomplished."
So I wanted to quiet myself down, listen to what my True Will was saying. Luckily, my walk to lunch was through the park (I love these times during my week when I can take the long, slow path through the woods), so I had time to listen, to attend. This is what my Will seemed to say:
Room to Dance
This is, of course, a paraphrase of sensation and vague thoughts, but the impression was sure, solid. I felt on the edge of a precipice. If I chose to jump, to jump in to the political system as it has been designed and laid out for us, then I was resigning myself to a life of game-theory and prediction. It would mean abandoning the commitment to choice as creative participation in immediate reality, in favor of decision as abstract analysis and systemic control. As I walked through the woods, a breeze lingered along the tops of some trees and not others, shivering down cascades of golden leaves through shafts of warm sunlight. The sky--the sky was above me, infinite and open. Each leaf danced down the wind, some looping lazily in long sighs and starts, some spiraling quickly in tiny swirls of color. A few caught in branches and bushes, others scattered along the path or blanketing the low stone walls of the crisscrossing footbridges--a hundred leaves, dancing and settling gently with a hushed rustling sound. Each according to its own shape and the shape of the currents that wove through the lattice of slowly undressing tree limbs.
No, of course, it seemed very obvious now. This was nature: creative, direct participation--seasoned and strengthened, in the human condition, with self-awareness and awe--responsiveness and chaos, light and dancing. If politics is going to function, it must learn to function according to the examples set in nature. Instead, watching the falling leaves, I had the distinct impression that the current political system was more like one of those ball-and-pin games you find at the arcade--drop a marble in one of the slots at the top and watch it bounce its way down among a maze of pegs until it lands, hard and determined, in one of the walled-off slots at the bottom. A physicist might be able to calculate the possible paths among the mess of metal pins, trace the trajectories, advise you which slot along the top to choose to best ensure you win the $500 prize at the bottom. Or a statistician, perhaps, could watch enough games to predict with a reasonable amount of certainty the likelihood of each result. But in the end, despite the flashing lights and fabulous prizes, it's just a tiny marble set loose inside a box.
In order for the social ritual of election to be satisfying it must involve an intentional degree of uncertainty and risk, there must be some disjoint between action and result. So it's not that the game is rigged. It's that it is contrived, constructed, manufactured--in short, unreal. The fact that such a contrivance has very real consequences only makes it more dangerous, and more compelling, but in no way more necessary or inevitable. There is absolutely no reason why I should relinquish my immediate, creative responsiveness to my political environment, a freedom in which my actions and their results go through no artificial process of disjoint and abstraction. Should I choose to trade this away freedom for a constrictive pre-ordained role as "voter" pondering which slot to pick, which button to press, based solely on which way I hope the marble will just happen to bounce? I am not a physicist, a statistician, a sociologist, historian or political analyst, and when it comes to politics, I am certainly no gambler.
I am a Druid, a writer, perhaps a bit of an anarchist when you get right down to it. I want to dance my community action, I want to swing and spiral my participation in the ecology of Spirit and existence. What could voting possibly accomplish that cannot be more effectively and creatively done outside the box of marbles and pins, candidates and campaigns? Why let go, why agree to begin at all? What if I have a thousand other plans for these small glass globes--mosaics and mirrors and meditation--what if I want, instead, to learn to juggle?
Room to Object
For one thing, I always feel uncomfortable, even suspicious, when everyone seems to agree about something. When the only arguments for not voting are apathy or a sense of helplessness--something is not right. Nihilism is a sure sign that the conversation has ceased to be open and honest and has become a kind of repetitive rhetoric that shuts down any real thought. Most people buy it, and those who don't feel impotent to respond. I mean, come on, we can still have infinitely complex, subtle conversations about killing, lying, stealing, cheating; we can debate the relative justice and necessity of war, the roles of faith and violence, the ambivalence of "God"; we can think of endless ways in which things that seem obviously wrong and harmful might sometimes be justified, and things that seem like obvious goods can sometimes have devastating effects--and now you're telling me that in the face of this overwhelming complexity and diversity of thought and experience, there is not one reasonable, coherent argument for why someone shouldn't vote? Suddenly we all agree on this one thing, when we can barely agree on the definition of "good," "right" or even "life" itself? No, that's just too much to swallow. Something is wrong. Something is being left out, we have a huge blind spot, we've been swept up in rhetoric and ritual and our minds have been left by the wayside somewhere to fend for themselves.
So, first things first, I would like to hear someone give a complex, intelligent, thorough argument for why voting is an absolute, unquestioned good--and to do so without resorting to terms like "civic duty/obligation," or support for one particular candidate, or grand statements about the "lesser of evils." I want to know why voting is an/the essential aspect of citizenry, why it is the best medium for political expression, what benefits it has over the alternatives (and if you can't think of any alternatives other than "not voting," that should be a very obvious warning sign--an argument that cannot conceive of any viable counter-arguments against which to prove itself is probably pretty shaky from the start). I want a reasoned argument, not an appeal to sentiment and the feeling one gets when participating in a successfully managed mass social ritual. In short, I want some perspective, please.
Room to Will
Walking to lunch, I tried to attend to and articulate the thoughts and emotions I was experiencing in regards to the election and my supposed "civic duty" to vote. I was disconcerted mostly because nothing remained at all clear or obvious, and the confusion and obfuscation had a kind of deliberateness, even a malice to it. I had ceased, long ago, to consider voting the sole or even the primary way in which I participated as a responsible citizen in my political community. I feel like I do more on a daily basis, through the ordinary mundane lifestyle choices I make, than any one voter can accomplish by pulling a lever or pushing a button once every couple years. But that didn't mean that voting was something to be purposefully avoided either. I couldn't pin down and define very good reasons for voting, and yet the stress and pressure to do so was palpable and constant. And, most importantly, external.
Now, I'm not sure how many people have a self-awareness so precisely refined that they can tell the difference between external pressure and internal desire. It seems that a great deal of our economics, politics and social relationships are built upon (and even designed to induce) confusion between the two. But I have always spent a great deal of time sifting and sorting, trying to find the root of my longings and opinions, learning my own interior landscape and acting from my own core being. Of course, that being is not cut off from the world, it is not some "pure" and unadulterated essence that never changes... It is shaped by the world around me, by my fluctuating experiences in it and growing knowledge about it. But if I try, as best as I can, to stay true to that internal sense of self and purpose, if I make a habit of resisting any pressure with the slightest smack of conformity-to-the-merely-external, then I trust that even those external pressures which shape and transform me will, in their turn, be shaped and changed by their inclusion in my own inner alchemy. In this way, I can always act with integrity even if I do not always act in isolation (which would be a silly thing to strive for, anyway).
So, the sense of external pressure was a sign for me that I simply had not internalized the necessity of voting--I was not, myself, convinced of its importance. And if this was the case, then I couldn't very well act one way or the other without first understanding my own ambivalence and determining what my own true sense of self--the sense of my own personal nature--required that I do. Believe it or not, this is how I make most of the choices in my life. It's a slow process, lots of groping slowly along in the dark, but then sometimes the natural movement of things must be gradual and subtle. "Through nonaction, all action is accomplished."So I wanted to quiet myself down, listen to what my True Will was saying. Luckily, my walk to lunch was through the park (I love these times during my week when I can take the long, slow path through the woods), so I had time to listen, to attend. This is what my Will seemed to say:
Just... wait, a little longer, and it will pass. If only--if only there was just some way not to begin, someway to remain free of it. You were born needing food and shelter in a system that had already bought and sold them, and you never had a chance. Think of how hard you have worked to extract yourself from that system of buying and selling the necessities of life, how long the search for alternatives, the constant second-guessing and analysis of who has cultivated and slaughtered your food, who has suffered that you might eat and live. You never had the chance not to begin, and now you find yourself trying to dig your way out of that hole imposed on you from the start. But--the American political system! You were not born, according to its own self-imposed rules--you were not born a political entity. You were denied, that is spared, participation until you turned eighteen. If there is only a way--if you are only sure enough not to start, not to take on the role, not to step into it, not to accept it--if only you make the choice not to begin that way... perhaps you will not have to spend your life trying to wield the clumsy, deadly thing.
If only you refuse the role they've laid out for you, then maybe you can remain free to act with real creativity and power.
Room to Dance
This is, of course, a paraphrase of sensation and vague thoughts, but the impression was sure, solid. I felt on the edge of a precipice. If I chose to jump, to jump in to the political system as it has been designed and laid out for us, then I was resigning myself to a life of game-theory and prediction. It would mean abandoning the commitment to choice as creative participation in immediate reality, in favor of decision as abstract analysis and systemic control. As I walked through the woods, a breeze lingered along the tops of some trees and not others, shivering down cascades of golden leaves through shafts of warm sunlight. The sky--the sky was above me, infinite and open. Each leaf danced down the wind, some looping lazily in long sighs and starts, some spiraling quickly in tiny swirls of color. A few caught in branches and bushes, others scattered along the path or blanketing the low stone walls of the crisscrossing footbridges--a hundred leaves, dancing and settling gently with a hushed rustling sound. Each according to its own shape and the shape of the currents that wove through the lattice of slowly undressing tree limbs.
No, of course, it seemed very obvious now. This was nature: creative, direct participation--seasoned and strengthened, in the human condition, with self-awareness and awe--responsiveness and chaos, light and dancing. If politics is going to function, it must learn to function according to the examples set in nature. Instead, watching the falling leaves, I had the distinct impression that the current political system was more like one of those ball-and-pin games you find at the arcade--drop a marble in one of the slots at the top and watch it bounce its way down among a maze of pegs until it lands, hard and determined, in one of the walled-off slots at the bottom. A physicist might be able to calculate the possible paths among the mess of metal pins, trace the trajectories, advise you which slot along the top to choose to best ensure you win the $500 prize at the bottom. Or a statistician, perhaps, could watch enough games to predict with a reasonable amount of certainty the likelihood of each result. But in the end, despite the flashing lights and fabulous prizes, it's just a tiny marble set loose inside a box.
In order for the social ritual of election to be satisfying it must involve an intentional degree of uncertainty and risk, there must be some disjoint between action and result. So it's not that the game is rigged. It's that it is contrived, constructed, manufactured--in short, unreal. The fact that such a contrivance has very real consequences only makes it more dangerous, and more compelling, but in no way more necessary or inevitable. There is absolutely no reason why I should relinquish my immediate, creative responsiveness to my political environment, a freedom in which my actions and their results go through no artificial process of disjoint and abstraction. Should I choose to trade this away freedom for a constrictive pre-ordained role as "voter" pondering which slot to pick, which button to press, based solely on which way I hope the marble will just happen to bounce? I am not a physicist, a statistician, a sociologist, historian or political analyst, and when it comes to politics, I am certainly no gambler.
I am a Druid, a writer, perhaps a bit of an anarchist when you get right down to it. I want to dance my community action, I want to swing and spiral my participation in the ecology of Spirit and existence. What could voting possibly accomplish that cannot be more effectively and creatively done outside the box of marbles and pins, candidates and campaigns? Why let go, why agree to begin at all? What if I have a thousand other plans for these small glass globes--mosaics and mirrors and meditation--what if I want, instead, to learn to juggle?
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Considering Samhain.
The following are excerpts from a few letters I've written to my cousin, after he emailed me asking what kinds of holy days or "feast days" my religion held around this time of year. He'd heard a mention on an NPR program about "the veil between the worlds" becoming thin during these darkening autumn days and wanted to know if my spirituality incorporated this idea at all. This is some of what I wrote back in response (after explaining, as briefly as I could, the basic structure and history of the eight-festival "Wheel of the Year" celebrated by many modern Pagans).
Most Celtic-based Pagan spiritualities (including Druidry and some Witchcraft) acknowledge Samhain (Halloween) as the Celtic New Year and the most holy day on the calendar. It is a Fire Festival and is very closely connected agriculturally with the "late/last harvest," which was the harvest of the very last fruits of the season (such as apples, gourds, etc.) and the slaughter of a good percentage of livestock in order to thin the herd for the coming winter. Thus, the festival is heavily associated with
blood and death, the coming of cold and darkness and increasing scarcity as winter comes on--but it's also a time of gathering and celebration, lighting the fire and feasting in spite of the cold. Like most Druidic things, it carries in it a bit of a paradox. This tension is probably where the idea of a "thin veil between worlds" comes from. Animal sacrifice has been used in almost all religious traditions at one time or another as a way of "parting the veil" that separates the mundane and the sacred realms (even Christianity, which is based on a blood sacrifice to reconcile the profane with the sacred), so it's understandable that during a time when animals were being slaughtered out of practical necessity (to make sure they didn't have so many animals to feed over the winter that they became sickly or a burden on the family), the death and subsequent consuming of red meat became associated with communication with the Underworld. That's where you get a lot of the "Day of the Dead" stuff around this time of year, as well as the practice of honoring ancestors or loved ones who have died. Most of the secular Halloween traditions comes from this pagan association with death (also natural considering the dying off occurring in the natural world), and it actually influenced the Catholic Church to adopt November 1 and 2 as All Souls and All Saints Days to commemorate the dead within the Christian tradition.
To be honest, this time of year has never been anything particularly special to me. Everyone has their favorite holy day, I guess, and I think mine is actually Imbolc/Candlemas, probably because it was the first holy day I officially celebrated as a not-quite-Catholic-anymore. Samhain has a bit of mischief and darkness to it, which I think appeals to many Pagans, who tend to be rebellious, fun, independent folks. It's also the easiest to celebrate in public as part of the secular celebration of Halloween, which for people who have to practice their Paganism in solitary, without a community to have parties and rituals with, helps a little bit. Back in high school, one of my best friend's birthdays was just a few days before Halloween, so she always loved the holiday and really got into the whole costume parties and ghosts and hauntings and such. Then later, in college, after 9/11, it always seemed to me that it was really the fall equinox that had the strongest association with death, grief and loss for me, and this persisted until only a year or so ago when my political angst finally seemed to settle into something solid and workable. Meanwhile, my break up with R. just happened to occur on Halloween several years ago, and ever since, to be perfectly honest, the month of October in general has been hellish for me, usually accompanied by major bouts of depression and regret, so that I tended to try to just ignore autumn altogether until I could make it through to Thanksgiving and the Holiday Season (and then, only a month and a bit until Imbolc!). While I was doing my year of formal study with AODA, I performed personal rituals to mark each of the days (small ceremonies involving candles, incense, meditation, nothing spectacular or strange--well, unless you count candles, incense and meditation as strange)... Then I kind of fell out of the habit.
But then last year, by the time Samhain rolled around, it had been only a few months since my friend F. had died. I was still grieving a little, though coping, and I decided to actually use my personal Samhain ritual for some prayer work specifically focused on "talking" to and honoring the memory of F. (though my beliefs about what exactly happens to a soul after death are still a little shaky, I think maybe for a short period of time at least there could be some coherence and retention of individual awareness and even personality.... maybe). In any case, the experience was startling and I even had the pungent sensation of smelling his familiar smell for just a second (a combination of deodorant and hair gel, plus the overlapping smell of grease from work). Whether this was some "communication" or whatever, I have no idea, but afterwards I did begin to feel, for the first time, like a rift had been healed or something had slipped back into place and relaxed a muscle that had been tense so long I'd ceased to consciously notice it. I found I could accept his death more understandingly than I had before. I've never given much credence to ghost stories and such, mostly because I don't think that's really how it works, though I can believe there are energy patterns left "impressed" into physical objects or places that kind of echo through time. Around this time of year, I do always get the craving to indulge in some good ghost story-telling, and I end up rereading some E.A. Poe and watching shows like "Ghost Hunters" or "Real Hauntings" or whatever those shows on the Discovery/History Channels are called. So who knows, really?
This year, I've been trying to keep up my spirits through October (and it's been working pretty well), and I've also worked more at decorating my altar for the season. Each day on my walks to and from work, I keep my eyes open for autumn leaves to bring inside and place around my altar; and once or twice I've gone on long walks through the local park to pick wildflowers that are still in bloom and just appreciate nature and the shifting, overlapping seasons as the weather gets colder. The other day, I had one of those great walks where all the colors just seemed so saturated and intense, as sun slit down through low, dark clouds and wind shook leaves from high up in the canopy. I love moments like those, when you almost can't believe how beautiful the world is. I very much like Druidry because it's so much about getting out there in nature and opening yourself up to the energies around you, revving up your intuition and imaginative faculties until you can almost see the spirits of air and color dancing through the landscape, and the trees seem to have unique personality and soul, and even rocks and streams take on a kind of liveliness. It's not all reading books and studying theology and listening to preaching. You just go out and try to feel the world with your heart and mind, you just try to be open to it and what it's sending your way, to feel the rhythm of it. In Druidry there's an idea that everything, every "soul", has a song, and all of these songs work to create harmonies and melodies that actually "sing" the world into being and guide its course. So you go outside and sit in the chill and the dim light and watch the leaves fall and try to listen to the song of things. And there is darkness and discord, too, it's not all light and happy and peaceful and such (though Druidry does focus strongly on peace, as well as on truth, and poetry). It's hard to describe exactly--you just kind of have to trust the process and also trust the basic exercises in meditation and visualization, even though they can seem repetitive and overly-structured and boring at first. It's like teaching your spiritual "ear" how to hear the music.
I was going to say more about the "thin veil," but once again I feel like this letter is already too long. Simply put, the Celtic worldview holds that there are basically "three worlds" (this is horribly simplified and dumbed down, mind you): the Otherworld, the Underworld and the everyday mundane world that we live in. The Otherworld is not necessarily a "heaven" up in the sky, though it is associated, like I said in my last letter, with solar and stellar energies, air and electricity. Really, the Otherworld is seen as existing in the same space as the regular world, but kind of overlapped or slightly off, like a dimensional shift or something (to put it in sci-fi terms). It is ever-present and interpenetrates our own, and people with "the Sight" can see it and the beings that live on that plane kind of moving and existing all around us. The same is true of the Underworld, except that instead of being solar/stellar energies, the Underworld focuses on earthy energies. There is a myth about a "star" being falling to earth and impregnating it/her, giving birth to creatures whose "center of gravity" is not the Otherworld, but kind of within the earth itself (the idea that the very center of the earth is another "star" or hot fiery heart, which actually it is!). This is why old burial mounds in Ireland and Wales are associated with some spirit beings, they are said to live "within" the very ground itself, but really this is just another way of saying that, like the Otherworld, the Underworld is all around us and yet "shifted" slightly out of our everyday experience.
So, with that kind of worldview in mind, the cycle of the seasons sometimes help to "shift" various worlds into closer alignment, effectively thinning the veil and allowing experiences from the Other- or Underworld to kind of spill over into our middle existence. The shift that puts our world in closer alignment with the Underworld occurs around Samhain--though really, some people think that it lasts as long as the winter solstice, so that the time between Oct. 31 and Dec. 21/22 is a period of dark "no time" when communication with the Underworld is easiest (I once read a Druid idea of a "Torc of the Year" instead of a Wheel of the Year, illustrating this idea). Our peak alignment with the Otherworld occurs on May 1, Belteinne, and is believed by some to last all the way until the summer solstice ("midsummer," which is why both May Day and Midsummer are closely associated with faeries, even in Shakespearean plays and such).
It is really kind of thrilling if you think about it. Again, you can imagine it in terms of song and music, and the respective melodies of different planes coming into harmony at certain times of the year, allowing for sympathetic vibrations and echoes, the way hitting one note on a piano will cause other notes at various higher and lower octaves to hum slightly. And the idea of much of the ritual found in modern Druidry is to "tune" yourself, to teach you the best way to get yourself open and listening to these vibrations. I always felt like Catholic ritual was rather empty and rote, but really the purpose of ritual in most religions is the same. Just as the way you think and feel will affect how you act, likewise the process happens in reverse, so that by performing certain actions repeatedly (whether it's lighting a candle, sitting in a particular position in order to pray or meditate, or walking a circle and raising your arms to greet the four directions), the pattern of action will come to shape how you think and feel and respond to the world. It's potentially manipulative stuff when you always let other people dictate what those ritual actions should be, but when you actively and consciously engage in creating your own rituals, it's almost like making spontaneous works of art with your own body. The way a painting or song can evoke particular emotions and experiences in a person, you can cultivate spiritual experiences by choosing to act out certain rituals.
Even the most secular people do this almost without thinking about it around this time of year especially. Hollowing out pumpkins (the violence of the knife, the slimy guts inside), putting lit candles inside them and displaying them in windows, dressing up and behaving like monsters, zombies, ghosts, vampires, sitting around telling ghost stories and inadvertently looking for signs of spirits in the dancing pattern of falling leaves--all of these things are socio-spiritual rituals that help us connect to and experience "death" before actually having to die. The death not only of the physical self, but also of the social conventions that bind us and keep us "safe", so that mischief and wildness are also part of the celebration, average conventional women dressing up in promiscuous outfits, teenagers gathering together around Ouija boards and playing at the occult, testing boundaries, experimenting with chaos.
Damn, now that I think about it, I do rather like this time of year. Plus, out of chaos and darkness come new possibilities, imagination and new life. Which is why this is the New Year for the ancient Celts, the time when old things are dying off and making room for new potential.
Though I'm not sure about the whole vampire thing. Don't get me wrong, I like vampires--but the YA Fiction obsession with them lately seems to speak more to the fact that teenagers are treated increasingly as energetic parasites, leeching life off of others without the power or even expectation of ever giving back anything meaningful and substantive of their own--and how these days adolescence seems to stretch into eternity, people obsessed with staying and acting young forever, maintaining a college-party lifestyle well into mid- to late-twenties (or longer!). But that's just me psychoanalyzing society with a touch of personal bitterness. Do you find any of that to be the case? I mean, it seems to me like there must be some distinction between the "classic" conception of the vampire (and its associations with sickness, death, and all the wild passions free of social conventions I was talking about before, etc.) and the new vision of the vampire as a kind of deathless sex god who only bucks convention as far as the typical Hot Topic teenage goth consumer can be expected... Vampires-as-undead versus vampires-as-soulless-consumers.... okay, maybe there's not so much a difference after all.
This letter has gotten ridiculous. So I'll end on a ridiculous note. Last night I dreamt (probably because of writing that letter to you) that I was eating an almost-raw hamburger, when you came up and grabbed it out of my hand, wrapped the whole thing (bun and all) in wide lettuce leaves, then set it on the ground and started smashing it with a baseball bat. Apparently my vegetarian self was feeling bad about speaking so casually about slaughtering livestock for food!
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Autumn Altar
For the time being I've ceased my formal, structured study with Druidry, in order to allow myself to grow a bit more organically along the path for a little while and discover where that leads. (This is one reason I haven't been blogging nearly as much recently.) My bedroom altar has taken on this organic aspect, too, and I find myself often picking up "found objects" on my weekly walks and incorporating them.
I love this process, because it keeps me in touch with the cycles of nature without having to flip through annoying reference books in search of seasonal correspondences decided upon by other people, correspondences that might not even relate to my own immediate landscape or climate anyway. By ignoring such reference sources and relying instead on the things nature offers to me directly, I find myself slowly learning about my own place in the land. If the leaves are already beginning to change in my local area, then gosh darn it, colorful leaves it is. If the chestnuts are falling but the gardens I walk past on my way to work still have roses in bloom, then I can celebrate both. This process reminds me that the change of the seasons isn't broken up into distinct time periods--it's messy and overlapping and intertwined.
With that in mind, my altar has become a bit more "cluttered" and idiosyncratic, rather than sparse and functional the way it used to be. I no longer use it primarily as a functional altar, but perhaps more as a "shrine" to the external physical landscape of the natural world, and the internal landscape of my own psyche and spiritual needs. Decorating with bits of nature brings that earthy scent into my home, but it also keeps me in tune with the natural turn of the seasons. As the flower blossoms dry out, or the leaves slowly brown and wither, or the gourds grow dusty and the shells of nuts begin to splinter, I can tell it's time to give these things back to the natural world to let them decay--and begin looking for new signs of the season to come. This serves as a subtle reminder to allow my own cycles to ebb and flow according to their natural energies, instead of trying to force order and conformity where they will not suit my own changing needs.
Working with my altar this way keeps me grounded in nature, but it also allows me to indulge my natural urge to "gather" beautiful objects that seem to resonate or capture my attention when I'm out walking. I often feel as though these gifts are offerings that the earth places in my path, and it's an important aspect of my spiritual life to feel willing and able to accept them--without getting home, saying, "O, now what am I going to do with all this?" and feeling like I have to just chuck them out before they being to rot and gather dust. A while ago, it occurred to me that the idea of making "offerings" to the gods and to the earth can be a little silly if taken too seriously--after all, what do we have that we have not first been given? I decided that what we have to offer is our intention, our attention, and our love--and incorporating "found objects" into my altar as offerings is my way of acknowledging the many gifts I receive, and transforming them through my intention and imagination into something new that I can give back to the world. Thus, one of the central aspects of my altar is the small blue offering dish. Right now, it holds a few wild local chestnuts I gathered during a walk in the park, a cardinal feather I found in the woods, a few daisy blossoms from a bouquet I bought at the local flower shop, and a striking (and a little out of place) rose petal I found just this afternoon on my way back from lunch, while I was wondering about the persistence and delicacy of love.
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