Claiming My Name

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Two years ago today, I met Jeff Lilly in person for the first time, after having known him as an "online friend" for several years.

I wish I could say birds sang, sparks flew and cosmic spheres clicked into perfect harmony. What actually happened was that we were both so nervous and shy, it took several hours of awkward glances and chatting on the futon before we could look each other in the eye without blushing furiously. Still, two years later and we're madly, amazingly, blessedly in love. And six months from today, we'll officially be newly weds. Rock!

Which means... my name is changing. I'd assumed for a long time that if I ever did get married, I'd be keeping my own name. I adore my name, especially my first and middle — Alison Leigh — and as a feminist, the idea of taking my partner's name seemed a bit antiquated, and too much of a hassle.

But Jeff's name is so simple, and sweet, like him, and I find myself honored and excited to be taking it. Family names, like families, come with lots of baggage and ambivalence and history. Jeff's name comes with four step-kids, for a start. It also comes with a whole complicated history and heritage that, stepping into his life as a partner and best friend, I'll now be a part of, too.

But I didn't much like the idea of becoming "Alison Shaffer Lilly." Just didn't jive. And like I said, I love my middle name — after a period of intensely disliking it when I was little, I eventually made peace with its odd spelling and lilting brevity. I learned later on that it was my father who chose that name for me, Leigh, the Gaelic spelling, meaning according to some "meadow or clearing" and according to others "courageous one." Keeping my middle name seemed an appropriate way to honor my father's family and our Irish ancestry, as well as the rolling farmlands and fields of my childhood home in Lancaster County.

So "Alison Leigh Lilly" is who I'll be. In six months, legally.

But I'm impatient. And, let's face it, a bit of a teacher's pet perfectionist. I like reading the books before I take the class, and getting ahead of the ball before it starts rolling. So I've decided, in the spirit of my anniversary with my beloved today, and in honor of my Irish family roots — I'm making the change now.

Yup, starting today I've decided to be "Alison Leigh Lilly." It'll give me some time to practice my signature. I can try on my new name like the pair of shoes you get for your wedding, the ones you're supposed to wear to your dance classes so that come the Big Day they'll be all broken in and you can dance like a demon all night long without getting blisters — except, of course, that we're not taking dance lessons. And I won't be wearing shoes at my wedding.

It's also a practical career matter, and I am if anything a practical career woman. (She said seriously. No, seriously, you guys! Why are you laughing?) Though I've put this blog on semi-hiatus for the past several months, the career opportunities keep rolling my way, and really, I'm sick of worrying about having to send out notices and new bios six months from now when we finally get around to getting hitched. A stitch in time saves nine, they say. So from now on, my "professional" name is transitioning from "Alison Shaffer" to "Alison Leigh Lilly (née Shaffer)" so that, six months from now, I can drop the "née" and get on with my day.

I am totes serious, you guys. So serious that I've made a Facebook page. Yeah. That serious. You should check it out.

In fact, you should hop on over and tell me your stories about how you "claimed your name." And maybe share some advice about how long I can expect the slip-ups and stumblings to last. Because I gotta say, breaking a twenty-seven year old habit may not be easy. I'm going to need all the help I can get. So next time you see me, lend me a hand with a friendly wave and a "Why hello, Alison Leigh Lilly! Lovely day!"

Together, we'll get there.

Ancestors and Sacred Ambivalence: St. Patrick's Day Reflections

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My ancestors sought the sea as others once sought the desert - that lonely expanse, that drifting horizon, that long voyage to the holy.

I woke up this morning thinking about my ancestors, the Christians who lived in Ireland for hundreds of years before making their way across the ocean to escape famine and disease. They washed up onto these American shores, stumbled their way into the Appalachian Mountains and set to work as coal miners and steelworkers. That is where my father was born and raised, dirt poor, and where much of my family still lives. Every time I travel home to see my parents, I cross those mountains, through the forests and dark valleys and tunnels carved into the rock. The mud and dust of those hills are in my blood, even as the green, soft turf and peat fires of Ireland are in my bones.

Yet there is also deep ambivalence there. The history of coal mining in central Pennsylvania haunts our modern conversations about clean energy and alternative fuels. I see billboards advertising "clean coal" and wince at the lie. And in the same way, I think of the lost history of my pre-Christian ancestors, the stories I will never hear, the art and music I will never know, because of the Christian imperative to evangelize and spread their religion to the ends of the earth.

How are these connected: the abuse of the land, the dangerous work and struggle for livelihood, the dreams and desires of civilization, the silence of the dead, the loneliness of the voyage west across an ocean, unimaginable void dark and churning, dividing the past from the present?

St. Patrick's Day is almost here. Regardless of what others say, I honor the day as a day of sacred ambivalence and the lessons of acceptance and forgiveness. Patrick in the field kneeling on the soft, green turf to pray; Patrick slipping away across the sea to find freedom; Patrick returning to the island where he had been a slave.

If we can't learn these lessons of our ancestors, how can we hope to listen for the stories so much more lost to us than these?

This is not a blog post.

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In this time of fluid demographics and long-distance community building, I find myself over and over running up against this single, searing question:

WHY do I want to be a part of [this] community?

Doesn't matter which community it is. The fact is, we have a choice now about which communities we belong to, a choice unlike any our ancestors have faced in the past. With online networking and social media sites, I can choose my friends, contacts, teachers and mentors from all over the world. When once it might have been impossible, or at least semantically meaningless, to "choose" to belong to a religion other than the one of my immediate family and neighbors, today I can choose to be Pagan and to network with others I've never even met in real life. Even within the Pagan community, I can choose to be a Revivalist Druid or a Celtic Reconstructionist, a Witch, a Hellenist or a Heathen. I can choose to be a participant on various online forums, email lists and blogs with almost unending options, and each choice will put me in touch with different people and different community expectations and standards.

So when I make these choices about what communities I'm going to belong to, I find myself more and more running up against that question: why? Why do I want to belong to your community? Is your community supportive, accepting, challenging, grounded, honest, full of humor and curiosity? Or does your community bicker and encourage in-fighting, playing to the lowest common denominator, drumming up melodrama and one-upmanship? What's more important to your community: popularity and huge membership numbers, or authenticity and sincerity in the relationships it nurtures and cultivates? Calculated politeness that just barely passes for "tolerance," or warm hospitality and celebration of diversity?

The Long Goodbye: Part Four

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It seemed I had two choices before me. The Page of Wands, a young, spontaneous and energetic form that could be the very embodiment of the internet as a medium, with its attention-grabbing multimedia and almost endless opportunities for someone to make a name for herself through charisma and laughter. Or the Ten of Pentacles, embodying formality, structure and an engagement with traditional patterns of expression that could lead to the fruitful, prosperous marriage of spirit and form characterized by generosity and exchange. And the third card? The choice that was not a choice?

Making a Clean Break

Last night, I had a dream. One of those dreams so vivid and blunt, it's hard to ignore the message. One of those dreams that just feels like a metaphor, even when you're in it.

I dreamt I was a student in college again, engaged in a class discussion led by a wise old professor. Yet this professor seemed to take particular pleasure in setting me up for embarrassment and frustration. As the discussion progressed, he would often interrupt himself or students as they explained their ideas or expounded on theories, and shoot a question at me. Being a dream, I can't now remember even what the subject was — but I do know that, again and again, I felt the frustration rise as I found myself interrupted, torn out of my focus on the ideas of others as they unfolded — forced instead to stand up to prove myself to these peers, to prove myself worthy of being there to learn. It wasn't enough to attend, to listen intently and consider carefully the concepts being shared. But more frustrating was that, each time this professor interrupted the flow of conversation to challenge me to a verbal duel, he allowed only a sentence out of my mouth before he veered back again, leaving me hanging there dumb, my words decontextualized and my thoughts unfinished. It felt for all the world like a goddamned Twitter feed — one hundred forty characters was all I got.

Until at one point, I finally managed to break out of it. The next question he asked me, I found myself speaking in paragraphs. Whole arguments cascaded out of my mouth in point after point, theories backed up by evidence and examples, counter-arguments considered and deconstructed. The professor seemed impressed, asked another question to prompt me... yet I could feel something slipping. The students around me began to talk over me in their own conversations. Someone behind me snickered. Mid-sentence, the professor interrupted me again, this time to tell me, "Well, at least you've finally demonstrated that you're not a complete idiot, which is a bit of a surprise. Some of your ideas were actually pretty sound. Of course, you're horribly boring, so boring that your dullness itself is offensive and detracts from the values of your ideas no matter what they are. You were more attractive when you weren't saying anything."

The Long Goodbye: Part Two

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

Synchronicity Abounds

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

Same Time Tomorrow: A Meadowsweet Donation Drive

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Click above to donate!

"It's hard to be famous and alive. I just want to play music every day and hear someone say, 'Thanks, that was great, here's some money, same time tomorrow, okay?'"

- Terry Pratchett, from Soul Music

Lovely, beautiful, generous readers.... have you been working out? Seriously, you're looking really good these days, at least ten years younger than you are (you're in your early thirties, right?). Your hair always looks fantastic. And have I mentioned lately how much I enjoy your company? Always so witty and interesting — you must be the joy and envy of all your many friends. Also, I heard that your spouse/offspring/pet did really well in that thing he or she was doing, and I know that you must be so proud — though I bet they have you to thank for all your encouragement and support. You know, speaking of support....

I've been thinking recently, especially after my little crisis back in September, that it's time for a bit of a shake-up around the old blog. I have visions in my head of a truly marvelous semi-magazine layout, with feature articles, more frequent guest posts, an expanded resources page, maybe a poetry and lectio divina column... And, most thrilling of all, a domain name. O so professional.

Of course, I've been blogging here at meadowsweet-myrrh dot blogspot dot com for several years now, fast approaching my three-hundreth post, and the sheer number of pages published here could easily fill a couple sizable books. Meanwhile, the number of you wonderful readers has crept up and up, especially over the last year. Many of you keep coming back because, let's be frank, you are wise and well-read people who recognize good writing when you read it — but more importantly, at least I hope anyway, you can tell when a person has poured her heart and soul into the work she shares, and you are kind and empathetic folks as well as being intelligent and sharp as a tack.

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.

How Many Druids Does It Take to Screw in a Lightbulb?

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Well, I was so busy doing my best to write up an unbiased report on the recent news coming out of the UK about The Druid Network being granted religious charitable status by the Charity Commission — and interviewing lots of folks (including some who are kind of like famous people now, you know, if you're a Druid) about their own thoughts and opinions on the news — and then collecting and organizing all the information I could about US and UK nonprofit law to write up an article on the process of seeking status as a church or religious organization for minority faiths — that I never did get around to writing about what I thought of the whole thing. And now it seems I may have missed the boat, or the wave, or the tide, or whatever water-related metaphor you want to use [insert plug for Blog Action Day 2010 on 15 October here]. But — to twist a trope that's also been making its way around the Pagan blogosphere — I'm a Druid, and I have opinions about stuff.

Of course, I'll be honest, most of those opinions are about other people's opinions. The run-down of my own initial reaction to the news, which I read about first on The Pagan and The Pen goes something like: Hey! That's fantastic! Good for them! Even though I'm not a member of TDN because (a) I don't agree completely with the definition of deity that Emma Restall Orr outlines in her book Living Druidry, and (b) it seems like the Network is mostly focused on the UK more than the US — I still very much respect the organization's leadership and the projects they promote. Plus, their anti-hierarchical anarchic tendencies are pretty cool, and Jeff and I really enjoyed doing the freely-available-on-their-website Perennial Course in Living Druidry over this past year. Maybe this news will help them grow and inspire more people to take a serious look at Druidry and what it can offer as a modern spiritual tradition. Whereupon I forwarded the news and link on to Jason at The Wild Hunt to perhaps be included in the regular "Pagan Community Notes" feature... because at that point, it was of note to our community, but not actual news.

Blog Action Day 2010: Water

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Folks who might be a bit out-of-the-loop (such as yours truly) but still eager to hop on board the Opinions About Social Change Express as it makes its way around the blogosphere next week might want to think about participating in the annual Blog Action Day on Friday, 15 October, when thousands of bloggers will join an international discussion about water.

Yes, that's right: water. From the Blog Action Day website:

Right now, almost a billion people on the planet don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water. That’s one in eight of us who are subject to preventable disease and even death because of something that many of us take for granted.

Access to clean water is not just a human rights issue. It’s an environmental issue. An animal welfare issue. A sustainability issue. Water is a global issue, and it affects all of us.

In previous years, Blog Action Day has focused on issues like climate change, poverty and environmental awareness. I'll be participating once again this year with reflections on water and its role as both element and realm in Druidic spirituality, and how our spiritual relationship with water connects us to the larger questions of social justice and environmental activism.

I encourage others out there in the Pagan blogosphere to join in the conversation a week from today and share their insights, too! Just visit the Blog Action Day 2010 website for more information and to register your blog.

You can also snag this year's Blog Action Day badge, though not as snazzy as last year's it's infinitely more practical and proactive:

Change.org|Start Petition

Interview with Phil Ryder about The Druid Network's Charity Status

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The following is an interview with Phil Ryder, Chair of Trustees for The Druid Network and one of the members most deeply involved in the four-year-long process of applying for religious charity status with the Charity Commission of England and Wales. I want to express again just how grateful I am to Phil for taking the time to answer my questions and give me, and all you readers, a little more insight into the long and difficult journey that TDN has made over the past several years. Congratulations once again to him and all the members of TDN on their success!

For my full coverage of this story, please hop on over to The Wild Hunt and stay tuned for my guest post tomorrow! To read the full text of the Charity Commission decision document, you can download the .pdf or visit The Druid Network's website.


Ali: Thanks so much for taking the time to do this interview, Phil! I know you and everyone at TDN must be very busy these days.

Phil: As you can imagine, I've been flat out trying to deal with the media folk — and on the whole it has been positive, within their limited ability to understand just what we are about. But I think it's important for everyone to understand just what this acceptance means and why TDN did it. I'm not sure we can cover everything in such a limited time — the amount of material we've sent to the CC would fill a very large book and covers everything from the anarchic setup of TDN through to explaining not only Druidry but all nature-based spiritualities and how they are religions. I know many shy away from that term — and I'm not keen either on the terms 'pagan', 'religion' and to some extent 'druid' — but 'religion' simply means to bind one to the sacred, and religions are defined by their identifiable method of doing that....

Oooops — there I go, going off on one! So, yes, fire away and I'll see what I can do to help.

Ali: All right, here we go!

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.

Keeping the Days: Northern Ireland

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Normally these photographs would be entirely my own, but I wanted to take this opportunity to share some beautiful photography by others who also attended the "Celtic Spirituality and Peacemaking" retreat in Rostrevor, County Down, Northern Ireland last month. All of the photographs are copyright and owned by the artists themselves; please do not use or reproduce them.


Around Rostrevor




Church Street, Rostrevor (Amy Kong)

Peace and the Celtic Spirit: Excerpts from a Journal (8)

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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 Eight — The Last Day

It's a little after 4 PM, and we've just returned from our last trip into Belfast. I feel... full. Emotionally, mentally — this past week has been intense, meeting with so many people, processing so many perspectives, and then having so many wonderful conversations in the meantime.

~*~

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

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

Day Seven — Day of Silence

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

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

~*~

Peace and the Celtic Spirit: Excerpts from a Journal (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.

Peace and the Celtic Spirit: Excerpts from a Journal (3)

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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 Three — Telling Our Stories

I find that I very much want to tell my story and that as I rehearse it in my head, new aspects come out, come into focus, in the narrative of my journey towards peacemaking. I want to share this.

Perhaps I want to share this more than I want to listen to others — and I wonder why this is. I'm trying to sit with that and not come down too hard on myself. There is a process of articulation that I am longing for, not even to be heard, but to hear myself telling the story again. Yet I do want to hear the stories of others as well, and as I listen (sometimes through thick accents) I can hear resonating ideas that I have experienced, too. The violence and sense of silent invasion of both illness and Western medicine, for instance. The lessons of dealing with abuse and creating and defending that safe space into which even the violent cannot and will not come. The experiences of war and the implications of being part of the culture of aggression, being implicated and a part of that violence against our own individual will — and how we resist, in all the little ways.

Peace and the Celtic Spirit: Excerpts from a Journal (2)

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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 Two — Learning to Translate

"God is merciful."

~*~

I find a lot of use of Christian language and terms going on, which is not unexpected and not even that bothersome. I understand the sentiment most of the time — and so the challenge for me is going to be, I think, learning how to express the same (or similar) idea "Druidically."

Peace and the Celtic Spirit: Excerpts from a Journal (1)

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In August 2010, just past the waxing quarter moon, a bunch of strangers met for the first time in Rostrevor, a small town in County Down, Northern Ireland, nestled below the Mourne Mountains on the edge of Carlingford Lough that opens out into the sea. From all over the world — from Portland to Hong Kong, from Glasgow to Nashville — they gathered together to learn about peacemaking rooted in the Celtic sense of sacred hospitality and the holiness of the land.

It was my first time traveling alone, and my first journey ever beyond the borders of the United States. For me, the week-long retreat became a kind of pilgrimage, back to the land of my ancestors, and beyond the ninth wave into a place of conversation, connection and new friendships forged.

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 One — The Airport

On the drive out, Jeff and I talked about the distinction between superstition and faith. Decontextualization, it would seem. Faith assumes a certain articulated worldview, a complete or at least coherent theology. Superstition, on the other hand, seems without any larger context — people do things without knowing why or how it works. What does this imply about the anti-theology, anti-intellectualism of the modern Pagan community? Can practice without theology be much more than superstition?

Ali's Summer Vacation: Announcements, Guest Bloggers, New Features, O My!

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Hello, all of you lovely and beautiful readers out there! I hope your summers have been full of smooth sunlight, cool waters and copious green. I know mine sure has! And there's more to come, as I pack up and ready myself for a month-long hiatus from the blogosphere.

During the sweltering dog-days of August, I'll be traveling north to the rocky shoreline cliffs and wooded mountainsides of Acadia National Park in Maine, where I'll spend a week with my family and my partner Jeff, hiking, biking, swimming, reading, wining and dining. Soon after my return, I'll be off again, jet-setter that I am, on my first ever trip abroad to the emerald and mist-strewn coast of Northern Ireland, to attend a week-long retreat on Celtic Spirituality and Radical Activism, led by Gareth Higgins and Carl McColman.

But never fear! Though I'm taking the month of August off to do some sun-soaking and soul-searching, I've been working hard in the meantime to make sure readers here at Meadowsweet & Myrrh have plenty to keep them engaged and entertained.

Cú Chulainn and the Queen of Swords: Reflections on Reason and Nakedness

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One of the ways that I clothe and shelter my nakedness in the world is with my intellect, which always seems to be churning away sometimes even in spite of myself.

Don't get me wrong, I value reason highly as an expression of Spirit in the human animal; it is a wisdom-weaver and pattern-dancer, it is one of the meaning-makers of human experience that can serve to highlight and elevate, to shape and navigate. When used in this way, reason and critical analysis can exercise the mind, stripping it of falsehoods and obscurities and laying it bare to the world in all its complexity and sublimity (and when applied with a devotion that borders on bhakti, reason can be a terrible and awesome thing that shakes the world ruthlessly down to its rattling joints).

But too often, reason can be wielded as a weapon. I find that I do this far more often than I like, and it always leaves me feeling uncomfortable, disturbed from the dwelling-place of naked presence that I am continually seeking in the world. When I feel threatened or misunderstood, I can swing my intellect like a sword, cutting down hesitant, half-formed or poorly-articulated arguments where they stand — without regard for the meanings they are striving towards or the complexities they, too, are trying to navigate. The fight becomes the thing, and I get caught up in the thrill of parry and thrust and the heat of my own mental muscles tensed and flexing as I dodge and turn and feel the bite of my blows striking home.