The Pulse of Samhain

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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.

The Three Elements of Druidic Ritual

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Modest Mouse, "3rd Planet"


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

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

Participating in Enchantment: Reflections on Magic

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Susan Greenwood, The Anthropology of Magic.
New York: Berg Publishers Ltd, 2009.
Review by Alison Shaffer

After the flight to Charlotte, North Carolina, two days earlier, I had learned one thing for certain: I was not a natural flyer. My first time in an airplane in more than fifteen years had left me feeling queazy and disoriented, retreating to the quiet sanctuary of my hotel room for the evening as I attempted to ground myself in a new landscape and a new city hundreds of miles from my home in chilly, hilly western Pennsylvania. High-rise buildings, a depressing lack of trees and green park space, people walking around without jackets in early December: I'd spent the trip feeling out of sorts and cut off from my usual sense of place. Now, I sat anxiously in the claustrophobic cabin of the plane, preparing for the flight back to Pittsburgh and worrying that I was in for another nauseating, jolting ride.

Susan Greenwood's latest book, The Anthropology of Magic, was tucked into my carry-on. The text was academic in flavor as well as subject matter, and clearly it had been written with the new student of anthropology, rather than the lay magical practitioner, in mind. A more accurate title for the book might have been "Competing Theories About Magic, And What It Really Is, In Anthropology," though that would have admittedly been far less catchy, and a bit cramped on the spine. The text introduced a good number of scientists and researchers who had spent their long, distinguished careers studying the practice of magic and shamanic techniques in tribal cultures throughout history and all over the world. Some of the names I recognized from my college days studying comparative religions, but even still I had often felt my head swimming as I worked through Greenwood's arguments. I'd spent the past few days reading her intense (and sometimes convoluted) discussions of the myriad competing theories of consciousness, ritual, reason and myth that have been informing and shaping the field of anthropology for the past several generations. While I knew such a book wasn't your typical how-to Magic 101 that many Pagans might enjoy, I also knew that the text held something immensely valuable for those seeking to deepen their understanding of magical work as a spiritual practice. It would take time, and some rigorous intellectual work on the part of the reader, but it would be worth it. As our plane taxied into place on the runway, I took a deep breath and pulled out the book, flipping through the loose pages of notes I'd taken and thinking once again about the nature of magic.

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

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

Day Six — The Wise Man in the Woods

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

~*~

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

Memorial Day, Motherland and Blood Sacrifice

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

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

The Politics of Clean(s)ing

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

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

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

About the Cleaning-Lady

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

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

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

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

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

Why Cleansing Matters

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

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

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

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

Goddess in the Details (in three parts): Three

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Goddess-Present

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

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

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

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

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

Goddess in the Details (in three parts): Two

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Light on the Water

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

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

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

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

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

Goddess in the Details (in three parts): One

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"And too, bearing witness,
like a woman bears a child,
with all her might."
- Ani DiFranco, "grand canyon"

Spin Away, World

The world spun away for a time. I was so worried about getting through airport security — not because I'm a security threat, but because I must have my name on some list somewhere by now, with all the protests and peace vigils and poetry I've got under my belt — that I hadn't spent any time on the idea of actually flying. But I've been so busy looking at the sky lately, the moon huge and low in the twilight month after month, the clouds roiling over gray autumn horizons. I never stopped to think, really, that we would be flying. And then there I was, sleep-deprived and half-jazzed on compensatory caffeine, buckled tightly into my narrow seat in a tiny box of metal and plastic, each uneven crack in the runway's pavement jostling under me.

"Once there was a farm..." the airport billboards read along the moving walkways that we danced and jogged and stepped backwards down for a sense of levity and play. And now, an airport on some of the only flat land in the city, sprawling out in an even-armed cross of shops and bars and shiny things on the wrong side of security gates that moved you so fast through an assembly line of strip-down-and-scan that you were left on the other side — on the inside, now — hastily bundling your coat and bags into your arms, shoes half-on and shuffling off disheveled to look for a place to collect yourself. Instead, on every side were fast food signs smiling neon and drug stores slyly offering to sell you the things you weren't allowed to bring with you. Too much to take in. I admit, there are times when I'm sick with consumer culture. The rows of gunmetal-gray seats of Gate 82 were a relief, and the windows looking out across vast stretches of macadam crisscrossed with worn painted lines. Then, we were boarding, our seats on the Emergency Exit aisle, with only tiny windows to see out of, a view of the wing stretching away from us. And we sat patiently, as we taxied this way and that along the pavement, the rough patches jolting beneath us, the air inside the plane already seeming stale and cramped to my lungs.

But I wasn't nervous, even then. Not really. It felt like an unnecessarily tightly-built bus, was all, and I held my hands clasped in my lap and blinked my tired eyes and waited. We were at the end of the runway, cleared for take-off, and the little plane's engines burned and the noise, the humming and throbbing high-pitched ringing, intensified — and we were screaming down the concrete, faster and faster, but not fast enough, it seemed, how could we possibly go fast enough — and I waited for the lift, for the sense of being lifted....

It never came. What came, instead, was pressure. Enormous, amazing pressure from all directions, a pressure that sped up my heart and my breathing and confused my eyes, which saw nothing change in my surroundings, the sides of the plane, the seats, the ceiling, everything still just where it was, where it had been. But we were screaming, tearing away from the ground by sheer force of humdrum ordinary will, and it seemed for a moment as if the whole blessedly belligerent life-force of the human race was pouring into my head, pounding down through me, so that I was drunk with our arrogance and triumph — we were in the air, we were gods-be-damned flying, and there was nothing above us but sky. And all of us sitting passively in our little cushioned seats, our seatbelts fastened, tray tables and seat backs in their upright and locked positions, like our spines, our minds, our wills, we were all of us right there, plunged into the thrumming, whining ordinary reality of pressurized air thousands of feet up. And nobody else seemed to notice. But my palms were wet with sweat where I gripped the metal armrests, and when Jeff pointed out our tiny oval window, I forced myself to relax before looking, and try to breathe. I whispered a prayer and felt the firm, round stone of peace nestled in my solar plexus. And then, the world spun away.

The wing dipped as the plane turned, and below us was a view of the ground, the land rolling away, all spotted motley browns and ruddy shades of trees and fields in the winter and fog. And, if I had a thought at all, it was only, "That's the land," or maybe "That's the land from above." Then obscured by wisps and thick drifts of clouds lit, beyond comprehension, from behind us. I couldn't have said exactly what it was that caused it — the beauty, perhaps, or the persistence of nature, or just the rushing back of gratitude and humility — but I began to cry.

Song of a Daily Druid

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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.

Samhain: Thinning the Veil

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No one mourns that the body is dark. I do not mourn that my body, thick with muscle and skin and blood, is dark inside, opaque, layer upon layer of translucent flesh wrapped around hard white bone so densely no light can get in. Is bone white? I have never seen mine. Sometimes I can see, through the thin veils of my skin, that my blood can be a deep blue, even close to the surface, can be purple just a razor-edge from spilling brilliant into red. But inside, all my blood is dark — coming from my heart or going, rounding the lungs or settling into the extremities of my toes and fingertips, red and blue are nothing but potentials in the darkness of my body. My throat, my ears, even the centers of my eyes show that darkness. People look into my eyes, and no one mourns.

This is what happens when we move inside, when we look inside without first dissecting and slicing and splaying the body open on the autopsy table. What we find when we move inside the living body as it really is, not exposing it, but entering in gently. The heart as it really is, dark, hidden in a dark body. And there is a sadness there, in the darkness, a sadness like our obscure working heart beneath the veils of translucence.

The world is so full of color, and brilliance, and motion, and we are so full of pain. We walk around, these dark bodies wrapped in the beauty of color and light. Our skin shimmering, our hair and eyes and fingernails shimmering — and the ache exists here, in us, in these bodies, held within us by this thin veil of physical flesh, wrinkled and wrapped up tight, fold upon fold. Our nerves are dark corridors of pain, our hearts raw with sadness. The world is so gentle and soft, it gives way before us when we move. We walk like celestial beings, made of stardust and sunlight, we tread lightly over the muddy ground and only sometimes do we remember the earth, too, is dark beneath us, beneath her green and lovely veils. Only sometimes do we turn our minds inwards into the earth, where the dark is moving, too.

What is that sadness? What can I say about it? It is the sadness of having an inside, and of what remains inside. The sadness of memory, making room to hold within it what has been lost, the place where grief lives, and injustice, and fear. And the sadness, too, of hope, and helplessness. In countries where the women are not allowed to dance, it is the slow dancing of suffering to the dark music of blood and dreams. It is where we touch, in the darkness, in each hidden center of our beings — we rub one another raw, finding our way out, groping towards each other through the dark. It is the tender sadness of connection, the ache of opening a small way in. We open our mouths wide, we cry out, we would swallow sunlight if we could — but inside, the dark remains, no light can find its way. We are dense, through and through, and that mystery is sadness, too.

But the veil is thin. Just this flesh, ordinary and marvelous that we walk around every day without a thought to its myriad shining porous cells. And there are times — like these — when we play at the edges of the veil, lifting a hem, worrying the seams between our fingers. We paint white bones and polished skulls on the windows and the doors, we revel in the red of blood and imagine ourselves full of it, brimming with the color of it, the light gleaming off each turn and curve of our veins. We fill ourselves with color — the colors of gore and pus and bone — we place candles behind the eyes of pumpkins emptied of their insides. We bring the light in, deep within, past the folds of the veil, and place it like a sun churning at the center of the earth. The dead are not jailed within memory, but drift free and translucent in the moonlight. Pain and fear — we set these loose, too, release them like stories into the outside world, a world full of color, and brilliance, and motion, and love. We set fire to this dark sadness within our bodies, and we look — past the shadowy masks of obscurity and illusion — we look into each other's eyes. We look, and nobody mourns.

The Speed of Blood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding Your Center: A Meditation on Movement

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"This is sometimes known as the 'Devil's Chord,'" my guitar instructor says, spreading his fingers claw-like across the frets. "And not because it's a bitch to play. In medieval times composers avoided it; they believed its dissonance made it inherently unstable and inappropriate for truly well-written music."

First finger in the first fret on the thickest string, second finger in the second fret on the second-thickest string, third finger in the third fret....

"But don't worry about what it sounds like," he says as I fumble, strum and grimace. "This is an exercise in changing chords. The point is to learn how to move from the tritone chord, to this"--first finger down to fourth string, second finger to third, third finger to second, fourth to first--"with as little movement as possible."

"That's impossible!" My fingers feel stretched to their limits already, straining just to maintain their current position. Next to me, the instructor cradles his own instrument, hand curled around the smoothly polished rosewood neck. He moves his fingers between chords, back and forth, back and forth, with a relaxed fluidity that makes me frown and laugh at myself.

I'm not sure where all this motivation is coming from recently, but I'm certainly not one to object. I've spent what feels like the last couple years taking one day at a time, passing on plans, moving very slowly, cautiously, through life. Life on my own. A life of solitude and, often, a great deal of quiet. There were times when I might go two or three days in a row without uttering a word, content to spend my days off puttering around my apartment, reading or surfing blog posts online, doodling in my sketch books or walking in the park. Writing sometimes felt like speaking, except without the throat and tongue getting in on the action. Instead of the deep vibration of breath in the body, there was the tapping at the keyboard, quick fingers, "chicken pecking" they called it in tech ed. class back in sixth grade.

But over the past several weeks, I've been doing a lot of talking. Long phone calls with family and old friends, not to mention juggling a relationship that remains long-distance until the beginning of June. Then there are the in-person conversations, the laughter and joking at work, the singing and guitar practice, the running, yoga and twice-daily meditation. That's right--I've been meditating twice a day! In the morning, I set my alarm fifteen minutes earlier than usual, drag myself through my usual routine and then sit quietly in my living room, gazing into the flicker of a small tea light. At night, I make myself some tea or sit with a glass of water, close my eyes and center, align my many bodies, circulate energy and, finally, sip gently and offer libation. The hot liquid of the tea or the cold ripples of clear water trickle down inside of me like rain working its way through cracks in stone. Fire and water, wind and energy. Even moments of relative stillness have their own sort of movement, a pulse, the circulation of blood and breath. The more engaged I become, the more momentum I can feel, urging at the base of my spine, sweeping me along on the soft soles of my feet.

"The key is not in the fingers, but the thumb," my guitar instructor says, smiling patiently. "See how my thumb barely moves at all? It stays anchored against the neck and gives the support that makes the loose movement of the other fingers possible. Don't worry, you're already doing this with most of your chords without even noticing. This is just a warm-up exercise to teach you to pay closer attention..."

I'm fiddling with strings as he speaks, already beginning to get the hang of it. I try a few familiar chords, and what he says is true--I've already been learning to switch from one to another with an economy of movement, my thumb rocking gently as my fingers drape and press over the ribbed metal of the strings. I go slow, watching the pale knuckles of my left hand, tense and release, squeeze and skip, moving in and out of the diabolus in musica.

The more I move, the more I feel as though I can sense that still center deep within myself, the hub around which everything else is turning. Recently, with the encouragement of my boyfriend (who I think really just likes the way I look in sweats, bless him), I've taken up yoga in addition to my weekly running routine. Gliding gently, fluidly, from one form into the next, feeling each pose stretch my limbs (a little farther each day) and warm my skin to perspiring, I notice those places in my body that hold their shape. The delicious natural curve of the spine as I sweep from virabhadrasana into trikonasana and back. The long, hard cord of balance that suddenly pulls taut from the top of my skull all the way to my tailbone, heel and down through the wooden floorboards for that split second when, in vrksasana, I spread my toes, stop wobbling and take my hand off the wall. After two weeks of this practice, sometimes at work I find myself with the distinct sense that I'm floating, that my body is suspended like the hot-blooded gwyar around some calas-like core, and that I'm not really walking at all, but willing myself from one place to another, wafting or sailing along on the intending breath of nwyfer, spirit. Wind, water, stone. Breath, blood, bone.

I find it fascinating how movement can teach us about stillness. Especially slow, deliberate movement done with attention, but even the quick flurry of desperation or panic. For all that time that I spent holding still, quietly waiting, there were times when that center seemed elusive. When I first began meditating off and on back in high school, this was one of the first things I noticed. I could sit very still, close my eyes and, eventually, lose my sense of the body as a bounded thing. I couldn't feel my hands resting on my thighs--all I could feel was the warm sensation of pressure on my thighs, and the warm sensation of support beneath my palms, but the two seemed distanced, unrelated. My mind seemed to unfurl into itself, into a spacious darkness in which the conscious mind always looked remarkably like a tiny, pale lima bean. Holding still, holding my body and thoughts still in meditation, taught me about my perimeter, about boundaries and limits and finitude, and the extent to which these things interpenetrate and become blurred, illusory.

But it is movement that teaches me about my center, about the eye of the storm that is my little living soul. You might think it would be the opposite--that in stillness we retreat to our center and take the time to settle down firmly and comfortably within ourselves; and that movement shows us our boundaries, our extremities, those parts of us that are always bumping into one another and rubbing raw on the external world. And maybe for some people that's how it is. Maybe I've just spent too long holding still, too long nesting in my center and not enough time venturing out to sing the dawn bright. But these days, I'm amazed by how movement and activity, how work, sends shivers of recognition and peace into the silence of my center, like so many pond ripples suggesting the secret, sinking stone.