Ruby Sara :: To Pray in Color

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

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

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

Etymology of My Gods

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Update: In light of this morning's news, I would like to dedicate this post to Isaac Bonewits and his family. Though I never knew him personally, I find myself deeply saddened by his passing, but also deeply grateful for the vision and influence he had within our community. His thoughts on liturgy and theology have both challenged and inspired me, even when I haven't always agreed with them. American Druidry wouldn't be the same without the energy and devotion he brought to everything he did. I pray we will one day achieve, with joy and grace, that vibrant Pagan community he envisioned and worked for all his life. May your journey beyond the Ninth Wave bring you peace and beauty, Isaac, and may love and blessings comfort your family and friends in their time of grief.

That word for god — the breath, the gleaming — the shining days like great columns bearing up the sky, buttresses, rafters. Beams that in their falling, hold.

I say the names of my deities, I feel the drop of each sound into silence. They gather on the long, bent grasses in the meadow and the field, *dewos-, the many that glisten in the coming dark. Amulets of sky, jewels of the daylight, coalescing in the movement of my breath, the lingering touch of the wind. They draw themselves, wavering, into the weight and gravity of form.

I open the door, and the gods enter the dark interior of my being. The gust, the call, tracing themselves in the dust of the rafters, the shift that shivers down in drifts of gentle gray and grit, mingling particulates stirring in every corner of the sunlight. What is so small and intimate and strange — numen, spirare — the dancing footsteps of spirit in the air, the vital stir of fear, the silent thrill, calling me to courage in the deep spaces of my birth and dying, the liminal between. I am on the threshold, pouring out my breath in quick libations. I am pouring out my soul-song to mingle on the doorsill with the soft noise of their presence.

And She is rising up again, and rising up, she is the exalted queen and lady of all that rises up —

And On the Edge, Surrender

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Sometimes the world feels very small.

Why is it that sleeping on the hard-packed sandy ground of the campsite, a waxing crescent moon glimmering through the thin canvas of the tiny old tent half the night, leaves me so limber and light and full of buzzing energy? It must be three or four days since I've had a full night's sleep — still, here we are, lying awake beside each other in the dark a half-hour before the alarm is set to go off, lying so very awake and listening to the first few birds of the morning. I think you smile at me in the darkness, and for a long while we just hold hands. When the alarm finally rings it seems quiet compared to the birds, and we slip from our sleeping bags, rustling and feeling our way as best we can towards our shoes and the zipper of the tent flap — in another minute, the tent is empty and deflated on the ground, and you stuff the last collapsed tent pole into its bag as I load up the car and then busy my hands dragging a brush through my sleep-tangled hair before twining it back into a loose braid again. Everything is darkness and night still. Neither of us can remember what time the sun is supposed to rise, but even the blue shadows of the dawn twilight have barely begun to lengthen and ripen, so I guess we still have time.

Secrets of the Spring

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I am so incredibly bad at keeping secrets.

By which I mean, I'm quite good at it... but usually it requires some kind of sound-proof booth. Nothing gets out. And I mean, nothing. Not a peep.

So think of these past few weeks here at Meadowsweet & Myrrh as a kind of metaphorical sound-proof booth into which I've stepped as exciting potential projects percolate in my brain. Imagine me stepping into this booth and drawing closed the door behind me with that satisfying ssthwumphsshhh... then hunkering down to work at a nice, wide wooden desk, scraps of paper and photographs sprawled everywhere, with scissors and glue and paintbrushes and bits of wire and, yes, gods forbid, perhaps even a little bit of glitter I think. And every once in a while, I'll look up from my intensity and reverie... and what you will see is a pantomime of crazy, as I shout and wave my hands in happy frenzy and maybe sing a little song... while other times, you might witness my little freak-outs of stress and frustration, my paper-cuts and my bottles of glue tipping over and spilling sticky, gooey translucent ick over the gorgeous wooden desktop and pretty much just getting everywhere. Hence the need for sound-proofing. If I hadn't stepped into my little booth, by now you would all be privy to a few really joyous, really cool bits of news... and not a few unsavory tantrums.

Suffice it to say, I hope soon my spontaneous spasms of inspiration will eventually subside into something workable and soon this blog will return to its usual, regularly-updating schedule. But be forewarned, it seems this happens almost every spring: my energy demands that I be out and away from the computer, planning and plotting the next fabulous year in my ever-glowing life of homebody adventure and dancing gratitude. This spring-to-be so far has seen Jeff with a broken foot, my Cu Gwyn drugged up and groggy at the vet after his little snippety-snip, my apartment snapped up by a future tenant with permission from my landlord to begin the process of packing and moving (fat-lotta-help Jeff will be on that one). I have painted rooms, I have rearranged furniture, I have made phone calls and set up careful budget plans. I have (hold your breath!) gotten along exceedingly well with my mother (who, though she might fight like hell with me when it's between the two of us, is also the first one with her claws out and her teeth bared when it's me against the rest of the world).

And all the while, I have been praying and listening and contemplating, and the gods have been near, whispering in the winds and laughing in the branches and slipping along the slowly-melting icicles like late afternoon sunlight. I do not like when I read people's blogs and they say something like, "Sorry for not updating, but life has gotten too busy for Spirit." Rest assured, my lovably languishing readers, it is Spirit that has gotten too busy for me these days, and these past few weeks have been a bottleneck as all the animals and egregores I have made here in my little sound-proof booth have rushed headlong for the open door at once and gotten stuck half-in, half-out, with all their mouths panting open and all their tails wagging.

Ah, but let me not give anything away just yet! Bare with me a little longer as I pretend life is the same old dull and cold of winter and spring hasn't crept up behind me like a poet in dark. Brigid's eyes are smiling into the back of my neck, and I'm bending down to concentrate on the tasks at hand. I have yoga to practice, and bathtubs to wash, and furniture to move, and secrets to keep, and miles to go before I sleep...

Kinds of Grace

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Yellow

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


- Mary Oliver, from Evidence: Poems

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

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

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

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

Deity & Imagination

It was a dark and stormy night.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Light a Candle to Begin

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for Carl McColman and all those in my life, friend and stranger alike,
who remind me why we light a candle on the darkest night

Christmas eve night, about nine o'clock. Basket slung over one arm and bumping into my hip with every step, I trudge through the snow. The ribbon wound around the basket's slim handle glistens in a hint of milky moonlight, gold thread woven in elaborate patterns through the deep red cloth. In the basket, a red pillar candle and two tapers — scented "seasonal berry" — jostle in a nest of intertwined greens, bits of douglas fir and blue spruce smelling sweetly of bent needles and dried sap; wedged among them, the frankincense sticks, the crystal bowl full of dark sunflower seeds and dried cranberries, the small jar of spring water decorated with silvery snowflake designs and curled bits of blue string. The snow crunches as I feel my way along the un-shoveled path through the park, some of it falling onto the tops of my moccasin-like shoes and slipping down inside to melt against bare skin.

These are 'church shoes', I scold myself, and anyway the path should have been shoveled. But nobody walks the park in winter out here in suburbia, not with the new fenced-in dog park just across the street and the indoor gyms of the community center open for joggers. Still, I should have been more practical. I had to make it back to the house in time to leave for Midnight Mass with the rest of the family, but I would at least have had time to change my shoes. Ahead of me, Jeff walks hunched in his new, superbly warm winter coat and practical, well-treaded shoes. At least there is almost no wind, and all but my toes feel snug and well-padded against the cold night. I switch the basket to my other arm, shoving the opposite hand into my coat pocket. Inside, the tiny box of matches rattles as I turn it around between my fingers.

Think of the world's religions as a kind of landscape. I was born in a city a billion believers strong, a city my family had lived in for several generations. And like most cities, it had its archways and spires and dazzling glass in intricate panes reflecting all shades of the sky, its bustling palatial centers brimming over with the powerful and the connected, and its slums and ghettos and alleyways where the forgotten survived on marrow-deep faith and trembling prayers and broken rules. It had its politicians and its police, its scholars, architects and artists, its beggars, poets, mystics, wanderers, hippies and hipsters, its tourists and its outlying suburbanites who dropped in for some culture on weekends or sat in traffic for the hour-long commute home at the end of a hard day's work.

You don't outgrow this kind of city. You just... grow out of it.

And that's what happened to me. I was born into this city, a city that newcomers are finding their way to all the time, looking for a home in Mystery and Power, looking for the Kingdom and the Glory, striving for belonging, seeking forgiveness and its freedom, hoping for love and maybe, if they're lucky, a little bit of grace. Looking for a home in God. And I grew up here. Exploring the stones and persistent dandelions and old yew trees in the gardens and the cemeteries. Idling in cluttered used book shops that might have been run by kind, contemplative types well suited for the quiet of a monastery or a library. Listening to the songs that rang through the air on the clanging lips of bells as the sun went down. I grew up on the edge of town, where the Irish of the diaspora still remembered the famine and the wars and what good they ever did, and still held a secret enchanted pride in all that was green and mist and hinted of slender deer and shimmering good folk in the woods. I was born into a city hardly knowing how huge and sprawling it really was, more familiar with Saint Francis's weathered stone hands offering perch for the pigeons in the backyard and Mary ribbing Jesus about the wedding wine.

And when I grew up, I went deeper, farther into that city, to understand, to learn about this place, the place where I was born. And when I was a bit older, I went home again, to learn better who I was. I headed for that old familiar family house on the edge of town... but the edges had changed and the land had shifted, though the road names were all the same. Someone had begun placing bricks in rows to block off streets, and hanging signs saying who was in and who was out — or maybe, no, were these the old walls I had clambered over as a child? — the same graffiti, then only so much slithering, bubbling brilliant color, now worming painful accusations and words of isolation, words like heretic, His image and hell? And I clambered over that wall one last time. Following roads to where I knew they must go, roads from which I had watched lone travelers emerging from the fog, roads that were wet with fallen leaves and studded with moss-covered rocks, following roads like the call of my own soul's longing.

This isn't a city you outgrow. I was born here, born knowing all along with the innocent acceptance of a child that I was safe, that I was saved. And I grew up, and I walked with Spirit in my mind and on my lips and in my heart, and when I got to those walls that marked the city limits, I slowed my pace, I read the signs carefully for the first time. And I lingered. And then I walked on.

I walked until I found myself in the wilderness.

Inside the church, folks were gathering, rustling into pews in an effort to be noiseless and respectful. The choir director, a thin woman with cropped black hair and a throat that could throw a pitch toward the rafters as though it were a tow-line to heaven, stood at a lectern off to the left and trilled "Silent Night" to the accompaniment of off-key trumpets. I couldn't repress a wild grin. Nothing much changed here. I recognized some of the altar servers from back when we were all in school together, and the woman who was standing up to the lectern now and droning out the selected reading had been my brother's middle school English teacher, though her long, wild hair was almost all white now, and thinner. "Christian, remember your dignity..." came the somber voice echoing over the hushing and shifting sound of coats being peeled off and folded neatly over the backs of pews. "...life brings us joy with the promise of eternal happiness...." It could be a grammar lesson for all the passion, and careful precision, it had. That was her all over!

Jeff sat beside me on the bench, his eyes flicking across the front of the church, taking in the altar, the huge crucifix hung above it, the candles, the tastefully-lit evergreen trees brought in for the season. Joy beat through me, warm and lapping all the way to my recovering toes. Or maybe it was the frostbite. "Don't clap," I whispered to him teasingly, "when the musicians and the choir stop between songs, you don't clap. There's no clapping in Catholicism, this isn't one of your crazy southern churches." I nudged him in the side through layers of sweater that hid, somewhere beneath them, a very appropriate-looking tie. "And you don't have to do any of the gestures for the prayers if you don't want to. Just stand up and sit down when you see everyone else doing it. But you don't have to kneel. I used to kneel, but I don't anymore. But when everyone is kneeling, sit forward in your seat — and you can lean your hands on the back of the pew in front of you if you want — so that the people behind you have room to kneel. It's polite. And of course you can't go up for communion, you aren't allowed. But when they do the peace-be-with-you part, you shake hands with everyone, but say 'Merry Christmas' instead of 'peace', and you can hug or kiss the people you know, if you want. And watch — after the 'Our Father,' everyone sways a little bit because they're getting tired of standing up and down and kneeling, so they sway just a little bit like they're just slightly off balance and their shoulders all lift at the same time when they breathe between lines, and they don't even notice it..."

He leaned over and whispered in my ear, "Is there going to be any Latin?"

"This is post-Vatican II," I said, "Though the new Pope, What's-his-name, has been rolling back plenty of other things. But no, no Latin. There might be some if we sing 'O Come All Ye Faithful'..."

On the other side of him, my brother leaned over to ask me, "Did you tell him about the people swaying after the 'Our Father'?" I nodded, and we giggled together while our mother shot us a look that told us not to be so jolly, this was Christmas after all.

"What's in that big gold box in front of the little cross-on-a-stick?" Jeff asked me.

"I think the... extra eucharist and wine, for everybody? I don't know. For most of the time I went to church, I was too short to see the altar over the backs of people's heads. And even after that, mostly I kept my head bowed. It was easier to listen that way."

The brass ensemble in the front began a version of "Carol of the Bells" that made me cringe, and I wished very much that it was all right to applaud — they seemed to need the encouragement. I tried to beam a smile wide and warm enough to make it past the slumping shoulders and serious faces, a smile that radiated with a wallop. Sitting there in my mottled green sweater with sleeves short enough to show off my tattoo cascading in a blue, Celtic-knotted wave over my upper arm, my hair hanging in a single thick braid down my back and still smelling a little of incense and "seasonal berry" candles, I turned to look at the faces in the pews around me and caught the eye of the presiding priest, ancient and small in his billowy white and gold robes, sitting on the end of the very last row, looking thoughtful and tired, waiting for the prelude music to end and the midnight mass to begin.

The wilderness tasted of freedom, and freedom tasted of angst and acid rain and silence. And every once in a while, of sunlight, and melting snow, and honeysuckle on the breeze. This was not the triumphant beauty of nature, this was not the garden — this was dark and wild, full of places where you weren't supposed to be out at night, full of the knowledge that you were doing something... wrong. In the road, the corpse of a small soft-gray mouse, crushed and bloody, twitched with the mindless gripping and stinging of two yellow hornets possessed by the hive directive to kill. I was horrified, and I was afraid.

Still, the new moon tipped over the western horizon in a perfect silver sickle, the white slip like a boat sinking with the tide of deepening blue before the slow churning black of night. And in the night, were stars. Stars spilled through space above the canopy of trees, above the broad turning river cutting through the land, above the highest mountain that rose beside the ocean. More stars than I had ever seen, more stars than I could have dreamed, stars that seemed to leap, birthing themselves from the corners of my eyes, flung out in all directions — each place of darkness I looked, stars were surfacing out of night to fill my vision. And I lay on my back, spine pressed unevenly into the rock and felt the gravity of heaven lift me, lift me and my clumsy trembling body, just a fraction, away from fear.

And people, people who don't know, sometimes ask me what does the wilderness give, what does the forest offer? What is out there in the wild that you can't find perfectly well in the teeming, bursting city, this city where you were born? And I know, for I have been there, the city is splendid, full of shouting and music, museums and libraries harboring all the languages of the world, maps of distant galaxies and diagrams of the heart. What can compare to this rich heritage of wisdom and insight blazing brilliant from every street corner?

But in the wilderness, there are forests. In the wild, you can see the stars.

"You might have a convert on your hands," I joked with my father as we all walked back through the church parking lot towards the car. "He's been raving about things that I grew up hearing like the sound of blood in my ears."

"It's all the ritual, the robes and the gold and all the tall candles," Jeff insisted, "Zen Buddhists are so anti-ritual, I didn't have a lot of ritual growing up, I don't 'get' ritual — it was all very impressive. It left an impression, I mean."

"And I liked the sermon," I agreed. "Did you hear him almost say we were all God? 'God became man so that man could... ahem, be like God,'" I exaggerated in a mock-serious voice. "Still, he said we were all Christ to one another, the face of Christ alive in the world. God is forever being born, every day, we are all Mothers of God, Mothers of Spirit. Echoes in that of Eckhart, I think."

"I was impressed that he so much as admitted the Church chose the date for Christmas because of the winter solstice and the renewing of light. You'd never hear anyone admit that in the churches around where I grew up."

"Yes," my father said, sounding conciliatory, "it was an all right homily, I guess."

"I think the Monseigneur is getting a bit old," my mother added. "He seemed to ramble on."

"Well, anyway, I thought it was good." We all scrunched into the car, me crammed between Jeff and my brother in the backseat. "It makes me a bit sad to think for most people 'being Christ to each other' tomorrow just means biting your tongue and being nice to family members even if they annoy you. Wait&mdash!" My brother and I both leaned forward enthusiastically as my father started up the car and my mother switched on the radio. At one in the morning you got all the really bad Christmas songs they wouldn't play during the day. "Shoot, for a second I thought it was going to be 'Dominick, the Italian Christmas Donkey'!"

"This one's better," said my mom, as an androgynous child-voice sang out from the speakers, Mom says a hippo would eat me up, but then Teacher says a hippo is a vegetarian...

For a long time wandering the roads and wild places, I identified as a native of that city that my family still called home. People I met would ask me of my faith, and I would tell them the spiritual place where I was born. Wanderer in the wilderness, a traveler from the city. There was no better name for what I was. Since then, things have changed a little. Perhaps there was some distant reflection of starlight in the corners of my eyes that others thought they recognized; perhaps my hair was a bit disheveled, my shoes muddy, my laugh a hint too wild with the sound of wind and shifting trees. Others began to call me "Pagan" first. Eventually, I stumbled on the open-air stone circles and campfire eisteddfods of Druidry, and found that I could stay awhile without feeling restless and dishonest. Now, when I come home, it is to the sound of Celtic harps and ribbons tied in the branches to catch a blessing from Brigid as her green-and-gold-hemmed mantle flutters by. I settle down to sleep on the edge of that thriving, stubborn little village of Paganism murmuring among the rolling hills. But in the distance, the city glows with memory and a kind of longing sadness on the horizon.

Most of my family still lives in that sprawling city of Catholicism, though the landscape is always shifting under them. Abuse scandals in Ireland, a theologically-strict new Pope weeding out feminism from the women religious in America, preaching against condoms to the mothers and children dying of AIDS in Africa, conservative fundamentalist closing their fingers tightly around fistfuls of sand, bracing against the threatening waves of secular hedonism and individualism and atheist liberals — my parents hunker down on the edge of town, aware of the storm clouds gathering over the opulent skyscrapers of the rich and powerful. They try to imagine the community is holding together, that the world isn't changing around them. But I couldn't have returned to this place as home after I had gone; it was no longer somewhere I wanted to live. Better to risk the dark, wild places of hornets and starlight than to work humbly at a foundation that not only helped to house justice and compassion but held hypocrisy and corruption in their place as well. I followed Spirit into the woods, because Spirit is bigger than the walls that people build.

But the theology of the city is different from the theology of the wild. In the city, laws are descriptions that people have made of the world and the shape of the soul, and Spirit moves through them telling the story of man and how he makes himself, how he saves himself by becoming God with love and mercy and infinite light capable of dissipating the densest dark of ignorance and stubbornness of humanity trying not to see. The city is not a tame place, but its wilderness is man. ("'A crossbow that kills people but leaves buildings standing,' Jeff read from a Pratchett book the other night, and laughed, "O, that's a joke about the neutron bomb!" "The what?" I asked. "The neutron bomb... because the atom bomb was 'too destructive'." "They... made it? It's a real thing?" "Yeah, about twenty years ago, I think... o honey," he said and leaned to hold me as I began to cry.)

In the wild, law is the cold, impersonal Song of What Is beating through both predator and prey, throbbing their hearts in time. It is the truth that love cannot save us from the utter shivering wretched bliss of birth and life and, yes, even love as well. The theology of the wild is fear and fearlessness, blood and root and spiderweb glistening with dew. And Spirit moves and participates in all being, in the terrible power of gods and the weakness and hope of clover. And in the wild, we walk barefoot feeling the tension in our calves, and we accept, and we sing praise and gratitude for the sublime indifferent beauty that leans in close to kiss us in our sleep.

The twigs of green fir and spruce are scattered in a circle and, wedged in the snow, the thick red pillar of the central candle burns steady and clean in the still air. Incense wafts around us. Golden firelight flickers off the ice crystals in the darkness among the towering pines, and for a moment I see glittering on the surface the opalescent blues and greens in a million million tiny flecks that shimmer, too, in the petals of the pure white orchid that sits on the windowsill of my apartment back in Pittsburgh. I take a handful of sunflower seeds and scatter them to the wind, then sprinkle drops of water in libation onto the hard ground. I pass the offerings to Jeff, who does the same, and I wonder what birds will come in the morning to search for what we've left. We all participate this way, in this ancient world.

I reach my senses down to the earth beneath my feet, rocking cold under the layers of snow and ice. I seek the warmth of that burning molten heart, the sun inside, and feel my own blood flowing cool beneath my crisp skin like the first waters of spring melting in the mountains, trickling down and down. I lean to lift my red taper candle from its makeshift holder of mounded snow, holding its flimsy wick over the central candle long enough to catch the flame. Jeff lights his and together we stand, illuminated only by the flickering of this tiny triple fire. I close my eyes. The first syllables of the prayer form on my lips, and by the third line I am not speaking but singing, as deep calls to deep, the words lifting up in my throat, rising and turning — beneath them, I hear Jeff's low tones echoing, supporting, rooting the melody in a whispered chant.

A few blocks away, my parents and brother sit in a warm house, watching "It's a Wonderful Life" on television and getting ready for church. After mass, we will come home again, we'll exchange presents and drink mint tea until four in the morning, then stumble off to bed to sleep until Christmas, waking to my father frying eggs and flipping french toast in the kitchen. This is the neighborhood where I grew up. And for now, we are alone in the park I knew as a child, a park that technically closes at sundown. We are visitors here, and we are doing something wrong, something strange amidst the grid of suburban houses wrapped in Christmas lights and gaudy lawn decorations, something odd and ridiculous out in the freezing cold in impractical shoes.

Yet for the moment, I am empty of fear, and I sing out with a sure voice that rides the tight joy of grateful tears. The Song of What Is thrills through me, stupid and strange and heart-breakingly beautiful. And above us, one by one, the stars creep out to shine.

Lughnasadh: Burning In, Burning Out

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In the small open space of the gallery, I find myself stopped in my tracks by a painting--thin shining layers of oil on canvas--entitled, "Song of the Sun." I remember this, I think ruefully, shrugging my sweater closer around my neck. Chill mist drifts in even now from the harbor, sliding in under the door. The floor boards in the silent gallery creak when I shift my feet. The painting is like a memory of summer, it feels warm and salty to the eyes. Stunted pine trees list out of frame, their dark trunks obscured by moss and rough branches, their roots draping red and raw over the hard corners of granite cliffs that drop in short bursts and end abruptly at the sea. The sunlight is golden and long, casting satisfying shadows to every edge. I feel as though I remember summers like this, watching the sunlight linger on the stone, watching it seep into the deep spaces of tree bark like the godmother of sap and, much later, of autumn. These were days of long views, evenings when the ocean seemed to curve infinitely towards the horizon, when mountains loomed throwing their bulky shadows over lake bottoms. Sunlight got into everything, into muscle and bone, leaves, water and rock--heat and light lurking just beneath the gritty flesh of the world. And you could extend the painting forever beyond its frame, and still never come to the sun itself.

My summer vacation this year was early, damp and ribboned with fog. I spent much of it in small, carefully cultivated gardens and sparse art galleries, rather than hiking the usual rough trails that wound up the granite mountains lurching along the Eastern seaboard of Maine. Each morning, I went out onto the deck of our rental house to wake myself up gently with my own deep breath and a bit of yoga, pressing the heels of my hands into wood planks that were dark and spongy with dew and overnight rain. Each night, I lit a candle and sat in meditation while the bug-repellent scents of lavender and citronella wafted around me, incense smoke indistinguishable from the mist in moonlight beyond my window. The earth was so green, every limb and nook of tree carpeted with moss, every square inch of the forest floor thick with ferns. Everything so silent, so dim and so glistening that they seemed to almost shimmer with an unseen light. I'd almost forgotten.

It's been close to a month now since I got home, and the quietness and smallness of that week has slipped away again. The summer is hot now, and the sun always seems to be breathing hot down my neck like some intruder trying to eat my skin off. Each morning, I have to slather on a coat of spf 50 sunscreen to preserve my spiraling blue tattoos from fading away. I have to tie up my hair so that it doesn't hang limp with sweat plastered between my shoulder blades. I have to seek shade (us pale Irish types do, you know) and remind myself to drink water before I feel thirsty. And meanwhile, it's like the sun is egging me on: I'm in busy-busy-busy mode, taking on projects and cramming the days full of plans and bullet-point lists of things to get done (painting Jeff's apartment, building do-it-yourself furniture, helping my best friend move, organizing shelves and shelves of books, dinners and weddings and movies in the park and rollerblading--and in all of it, hardly time to write a word). "Make hay while the sun shines," the high white-burning hole in the sky whispers to my twitching nerves. And those moments of stillness and solitude, those gentle mornings, have all but burnt up under the intense gaze of dogged days.

I want the harvest, I want autumn to come, finally, I want it to arrive with all the force of an apple breaking open. I want the sun, with all its heat and light, to set with the color of apples, the moist fleshy fruit inside the fragile skin holding that memory of sunlight when the source has ceased to burn.

I think this is the nature of the Divine in its transcendence, its limitlessness. When the mystics talk of union, sometimes they speak of rain plunging forever into the ocean, dissolving, losing definition, uniting perfectly and indistinguishably with the source. But sometimes, they talk of light. Blinding brilliance, burning purification that strips away the skin and bleaches the bones. Sacred fire. The kind that consumes the self, reduces it to dust and ashes. The holy is ruthless; it could utterly devour you. I haven't met with this ruthless burning light in the polytheistic deities I've worked with (at least, not yet), nor did I find it in Christ as a practicing Catholic. But I found it, then, in God as Father, the Godhead, pouring itself relentlessly into every bursting, buzzing atom; and I find it now, as then, in the world, in the landscape and the seasons. When I meet it there, I think I understand a little better the trembling awe of Old Testament psalms, the songs of praise, of triumph so complete it could be heartless.

Sun and sunlight. Their relationship always changing, with every fire festival. At Imbolc, the sun seems small and fragile in a vast shivering dome of air; at Belteinne, we close our eyes in ecstasy and invite the sun inside, into our blood and breath, warm on our tongues while our eyes are closed. But by Lughnasadh, it's been burning in our bodies for months now. It's time we begin to let it go again, or it will burn us out. We need this mitigation, this separation from the sun--the sun is blinding and will make us a desert if we try to cling too long. We cherish memories of sunlight soaking the rocks, dust motes floating in front of a grimy window, long evening twilights dotted with rising fields of fireflies. We love these shafts of sunlight, these bits of light and heat embodied in the world around us. They let us come close to the sun, to the Divine, to the Source, without burning up. I think this may be why the gods I've known have been gentle and loving: they are particulars, immanent and close. They hold within them the light of the Source, as we all do, but they are kind and nurturing with it, restrained, not devastating, not cruel. This is why the apple nourishes us, when the unmitigated sun might burn and eat us to ashes. The world of intimate particulars, of individuality and diversity and limits, refreshes and renews even as it darkens and veils.

And all the while, holiness is burning within us, deep inside the soft earth of our bodies, fueled by our breath, washed with the tides of our sorrows and joys. The harvest is coming, darkness will settle as the apples drop, and soon we'll have the space and quietness to remember that we, like the sun, also shine.

On Grace

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I cannot imagine a more perfectly beautiful day than today. As I walked to the local park, my calves tensed and flexed, my toes struggling to relearn how to grip in loose leather sandals, and the breeze sometimes raised ripples of goosebumps across my bare arms, only to drop suddenly and leave my shoulders and neck bare to hot cascading sunlight. I wasn't exactly comfortable, but I was walking and involved in the work of walking. And this was good.

As soon as I spread my checkered blanket in the shaded grass beneath the oak and settled myself down, the world slipped open into midmorning perfection. Or rather, I slipped into that beauty that had been waiting. My muscles warm and relaxed, the trees bristling with new green shot through with the lingering colors of the last blossoms of early spring, and the grass already thick and lush, studded with the yellow of dandelions. The sky, the definition of blue, gathered in around the source of sunlight, home to the white solitary animals of scattered clouds. It was the kind of day that children draw, scribbled shapes in primary colors. I sat in meditation for an hour, seeking the still center of my being, quieting down, working the energy out with ever breath, opening myself up to the wind and sunlight, to the land and the trees, to the dew, clouds and coming rain that circulated together with the waters of my body. And when I was finished, I stretched out, laying warm against the earth, feeling her wide body curving away in all directions as she turned, rising and falling beneath me with every heartbeat.


I have been thinking about grace recently. I have been thinking that what grace really is, is relationship. Relationship with one another, relationship with the harmonies that echo and glide through the Song of the World, relationship with the land, with earth, sea and sky, relationship with Spirit.

And I have been thinking that I don't understand you, not completely. I understand little parts of you, like being familiar with the edge of a wood or the shoreline of an ocean, and I can see a few paths leading in, sometimes I can imagine where they go, only guessing. In the end, I don't really know and I can't always follow. I have been thinking about the toast, "To know him, is to love him." And to love you, is to know you.


In Christianity, grace is a gift from God. One might even say it is the gift from God. The Christian concept of grace is often misunderstood, misrepresented or misapplied, even by Christians. Sometimes, it is something withheld to all but the chosen few, the benediction of favoritism--and if you don't feel moved to agree, then clearly you haven't been chosen. But in the Catholicism of my childhood, "Grace is a participation in the life of God. It introduces us into the intimacy of [communal spiritual] life." (CCC 1997) It is relationship, and the capacity for such relationship, that the Divine gives freely and undeserved, to everyone. Spirit pours itself forth, continuously. Rain falls on both the evil and the good. Try to build a ladder to heaven and you will never make it; only, stand on the highest step and ask, and Spirit will lean close to kiss you deeply. This is grace. Those who have it, have not earned it or built it or won it as reward. They are simply the ones who thought to ask, and to allow Spirit to answer.

This is grace. Those who have it, touch the meaning of movement and stillness, of cultivation and surrender. The world is utterly full of grace, in every pocket of ecology and art. Each season has its grace, each body, ugly, old or tired as it may be. All things are in relationship, all things harbor connection at their core. When Druidry speaks of harmony and balance, the Song of the World, the web of being, this is grace. The emergent fitting-together of life's messiness and tension. The dance and weave, the tides and whirlwinds. The last magnolia blossoms unfurled and weeping in the dark magnificent howling storm. The first bee of spring, the perfect slivery sphere of a dandelion wish, the sunlight and the burn. The ant stumbling across the blanket's immense landscape of fuzzies and folds. Grace is relationship, and Druidry is brimming with it.


So when you explain yourself, your ideas and priorities, I have my own reactions, the places where the edges of your thoughts rub up against mine. But when I sit and think on it a little more, I also sense that place deep within you, the depths of the woods or water, what isn't readily accessible. I come from a similar place within myself, which is probably why we sometimes fight, frustrated at each other for not understanding, accusing each other of not really listening.


I can hardly comprehend my whole self sometimes. Thoughts and ideas rise to the surface every once in a while, looming up out of the depths, and they're familiar, I recognize them as naturally my own. But I cannot hold onto them, or at least, I can't hold onto all of them at once. (Ani says, "You wouldn't try to put the ocean in a paper cup.") Sometimes, I have to work, I have to move even within myself, to remember, to get back to them again. The way I can't hold the whole of a Celtic knotwork pattern in my mind at once, but if I trust in process, following step by step--this notch up, this notch down, this thread over, this thread under--the thing comes into being anyway, whether I can see it coming or not. Water slipping down a mountain side, gravity doing its work, grace and love finding their own way out.

I do not want to be completely understood. I am deep and wide, hungry and restless for the world. I am not one thing or the other, I am the little animal slipping through the grasses, and the grasses, and the missing space between. But I still want to be loved, even if only in small parts, because I think really, that's enough, that's all it takes. We just have to start out loving small parts of people--the little things strangers say in public places, the look of this person or that person walking down the street and how no one else looks or walks quite that way, just little things--and the rest comes of its own accord, following the natural pathways of connection laid down.


What I mean is, I can't comprehend you completely, as I can't comprehend myself. We're just too big for that, you and I. But comprehension is different from caring, from love. Maybe we can love just one small part of something, and love is like the water or the knotwork, following its own path until the all of things connects. We can love just one tiny part of something or someone, just one small part of the world--the color of this one leaf, the shape of that one cloud, the sound of this one bird--and when we love it deeply, when we enter in to that outreaching fluidity of love, suddenly we find ourselves, slipping, connecting to everything else. Gracefully, we draw ourselves into relation, into relationship.

I love you, not completely, but already and in little bits and pieces. That's a start.

Thoroughly Thurled

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In the dream, my old college professor feeds page after page of the Torah into the scanner, letters scrolling down a nearby computer screen in a kind of river-like matrix, flickering, converting to numbers and back again.

The Hebrew alphabet has no vowels; this is what my boyfriend and I discussed over lunch the day before, sitting in the cafe of the local natural history museum, munching on organic veggie wraps and grilled cheese sandwiches. The linguistics of thought, the shape of consciousness, mind itself, embedded with grammar, running over syntax like water over stone, plunging, eddying and moving on again. Breath, exhalation, that which is sacred and cannot be written. The Hebrew alphabet has no vowels. We asked each other, does that make a difference?

In the dream, the computer script searches for meaningful combinations of letters reconverted according to some obscure theological algorithm, a pulsating crossword-puzzle alive with juxtaposition. Now and then, a word in red slips by amidst the stream of symbols and nonsense text. "A red-letter day," my old professor jokes. Mundane words, articles and adjectives, verbs, nothing that coheres or speaks. One catches my eye, and I peck at the keyboard to check the software for bugs.

"There's something wrong," I answer my professor's raised eyebrow, "It's generating noise, now. 'Thurl,' for instance, isn't a real word."

"Yes it is!" He laughs shortly. In dreams, he's often laughing.

"I've never heard of it. Then what does it mean?"

"It is the time," he says, "in a TV Western pistol duel, between when somebody shouts 'Draw!' and somebody else shoots. Or, it is the time right after afternoon tea, but right before an early dinner." I can tell he's teasing me. I wake up scoffing and grinning.

Down at the park that day, I'm too enthralled by the moving surface of the stream to notice the hem of my dress darkening with muddy water where it drags along the rock's edge. I crouch, bare feet planted on the warm rough stone where it juts out into the middle of the creak, and watch the tangled green locks of algae wriggle in the current beneath webbed reflected sunlight.

"I looked it up," I tell my boyfriend, "and it turns out, it means, 'the hip joint of cattle.'"

"So you got that one wrong!" He dips a big toe into the water, saying, "It's not as cold as I expected--but slippery."

"Well, I don't know. So, the other definitions were, 'an aperture or hole'--or as a verb, 'to cut through, to pierce.' And then there's something to do with mining, 'a communication between two adits.' An adit is the long, horizontal entrance or passage into the mine."

"I still don't see what that has to do with dueling." He straddles rocks, gripping his way from one to another towards where I'm perched over the raw umber rushing water. The stream presses itself through a few cracks in the stone, becoming a small waterfall that churns iridescent and pushes an exhalation of soft-gray bubbles down to brush the bottom of the streambed before rising swiftly back to the surface. From where I sit, I can watch this happening forever, never growing old.

"There's a story--I think it's a Zen parable--about a butcher whose knives never get dull. Everyone thinks he must have some magic about his knives, or a special kind of metal, so that he never needs to sharpen them. One day, his young apprentice gets up the nerve to ask. And he explains, his knives never get dull because he doesn't actually cut through the meat and bone the way a less skillful butcher would. Instead, he finds the thin-spaces-between that already exist in the flesh, and he just slips his knife into them."

"That sounds like it's probably Zen," my boyfriend agrees. I stand to embrace him as he steps cautiously onto the rock where I've been crouching. It's then, straightening up, that I notice for the first time my skirt's hem, damp and heavy dragging along the rock, leaving a dirty streak where it slaps and clings to my pale lower calf. "Don't you feel as though winter is still hanging around?" he asks, looking out over the surrounding swamp. The noisy creak twines through last year's leftover straw-like cattails. The sky above is an aching hue of blue unbroken by clouds. A few overhanging trees have just begun to bud. He holds me close, and I can feel his diaphragm expand and contract, his whole body warm against me as he sighs.

"Maybe a little, but I can't really feel it when you're smothering me like this," I say to provoke him. He pulls away in playful defiance, teases and prods me until I recant.



"I think it was a story about the time between when you breathe in, and when you breathe out," I say, sometime later. "But the 'hip joint of cattle' reminded me of it, and then there are all those obsolete definitions about piercing and apertures, openings, entrance-ways, communications. And--if you think about it, that moment of a duel between the draw and the shot, that thin-space-between when nobody breathes. Or the time between meals, I think that was supposed to be a joke about just how wide that space-between can feel sometimes, when someone is hungering. And then, if Hebrew has no vowels, 'thurl' is just how you'd say 'thrill' without the 'i', thrll. Isn't thrill also a kind of moving through the thin-space-between?"

He looks at me with a mix of incredulity and amazement. "How is it that you can learn vocabulary in your sleep?"

"I'm just that good." I wrinkle my nose at him, which is my way of winking or raising an eyebrow.

"And this morning you were saying you were 'too full of words.'"

"I was--too full of words, my brain was noisy. I couldn't focus. But being out here..."

We're walking home, through the wooded ravine that will lead out of the park back into the cluttered urban neighborhood. The soles of my feet are still recalling the warm solidity of rock beneath them, my toes the quick sliding skin of water. We're still stuck smack in the city, the white-noise grind of traffic reaching us through the trees, but everywhere the birds are following each other, the scrappy chipmunks skittering over roots and the ruts left by bicycle tires in the mud. There are insects again, bees in the underbrush, and I feel as though I have escaped, finally, from some cold pressure that has wrapped my lungs for so long I had ceased to notice it. There is space again, movement in all directions that pull and stretch the landscape into distance, opening it up again. Everywhere, life is opening it up again under a high, bright sky. Birdcalls pierce the breeze, connecting one long, dark tunnel of mind to another.

"Being out here... I'm so full of thurl."

& Sleepless Spring

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I am in one of those odd moods tonight, a mood that has grown into an odd compulsion, really--the compulsion not to go to sleep. Perhaps it's only because I spent most of the day (after an important meeting this morning), lounging around the apartment reading and watching the snow fall.

Yes, you read correctly: here in Pittsburgh, it's been snowing all day.

This morning was suffused with a kind of strange quiet joy. As I walked to my appointment, there seemed to be so much light, all things seemed touched with and emanating brightness, and stillness. And yet, the clouds overheard were thick and gray, rolling in layers, and I could not find that place in the sky where the sun's presence carves out a hard blindness into which you can't ever look. I could look anywhere, everywhere, and yet...

O, I'm not articulating myself very well. It's late. But the blossoms on the trees, flush and swollen with recent rains, each petal soft and opened as if lapping at the snow, and the snow like heavy pieces of light broken off from the gray, billowing skyline and scattered, drifting, settling in the nooks and curves of every limb, still mostly bare and so dark and thin. The pear tears, tiny bursting bouquets of white flowers, and the magnolias--goddess of the magnolia!, she bewilders and overwhelms me every April--and the tight little fists of the dogwood blossoms and pursed lips of the crabapple trees, not yet open, pinched shut against the cold and snow. The trees seemed to exude the crystalline white dusting like sap running warm up from warm earth, touching every tip and seeping as though from a thousand eager wounds, while the frigid petals of winter's last precipitation bloomed midair, everywhere, amongst a brightness that brought tears shivering on the edges of my eyes, running one, then another, loose along my cheek, protesting against the wind.

There are too many exuberant words in this description--it was simple, and quiet, god so very quiet. It was not a lapse back into deadening, claustrophobic winter--it was the opposite! As if everything that was not Spring had ceased or shut itself away beneath the brightness shimmering, every blooming thing etched and framed with the perfect emptiness and void of snow, as if to say: this, this here is the season, these green and growing bits, here, the yellows, lavenders and rose, the pussy willow buds holding their breaths until they explode with tufts of pollen... I'm not saying it right. You had to have been there, to be walking in it.

It's not that I feel as though I can't go to sleep--it's more like I have the strong impression that I shouldn't. That I should stay awake, that I should... remain awake. Perhaps forever. Perhaps only for tonight.

I might be in love.

As I was walking, through the piercing brightness of day, I thought about gods, and why we believe in gods who cannot save us, who cannot stoop to tilt the earth back into healthy cycles of warming and revolving, or intervene in war and famine, or perform even the most ordinary of miracles. I thought about gods, and why we bother. But there are mornings--and the nights that follow them--when you can't ask those kinds of questions. They don't make sense. The words are in the right order, the sounds move and you recognize the inflection and the tone--but it is all only so much noise and rhythm in the still. These are the gods that come and go, this is the world as it has always been, holy, infused, en-chanted, wide open like a wound or a dead thing or a cupped palm filling with water and then draining again. Why--the pale curl of the fingers, the white blood cells gathering, the white worms working their way to the surface of the flesh--we work and work at the why, but there's no way of taming a god.

At night, either you believe, or you go to sleep alone. I have slept that way for years, alone with my body, with my whys and cupped hands and busying blood. What will I say next? How will I get from there to here, to where I am tonight? Two months ago, it occurred to me to change, to shift, and I found that I could do it. This is all nonsense. It's late, and I'm not really saying anything. There was a moment I thought I made a movement, a course correction, but now I think that was just a trick of the light. Still, before where there was only myself, not even that, less than even that, now there are hands, dark and solid and warm and not my own, there are magnolia blossoms, deer moving in the hollow, an undoing, a belief in something, a compulsion or longing or wakefulness, and breath, and sleepless spring.

A Day in the Life, A Fountain in the Grass

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I had the most curious sensation walking home from work today. Let me say first that it was a rough day, generally. We were understaffed, with one manager out sick leaving only one to run the restaurant, and since the weather is gorgeous, we were almost guaranteed to get slammed for brunch--which we did. Since I was one of the stronger servers on the floor, I spent a lot of my day helping other people run their food, get drinks, prep sides, wrap silverware and generally keep the back station and pantry area clean.

I'm not bragging; this is part of my job. I think everyone should have to wait tables at least once in their life, particularly at a family diner like the one I work at, just so they have some appreciation for how much side work servers are expected to juggle, all the while staying cheery and attentive to their customers--it isn't easy, it takes a certain knack. And a certain roll-with-it attitude. As I've said before, sometimes you can get into a groove where it's almost like a dance, and I smile to myself to know how well high school marching band taught me to make back steps and pivot turns with the grace and control to keep my gait smooth and my upper body perfectly steady. So the act of serving itself can be engaging, a kind of secular ritual of attention, care and movement. On good days. But sometimes, it just wears you into the ground, and it's hard not to feel angry or bitter about rude or manipulative customers or (especially) coworkers clearly out to cut every corner possible, regardless of who gets screwed. Usually my coworkers are pleasant and, if not hard-working all the time, at least competent and... adequate. Realy, that's supposed to be a compliment! After all, it is only a crappy waitressing job--I can't expect everyone to seek some kind of philosophical appreciation or esoteric fulfillment from it.

But today, I had a rough day--one of those days when I felt horribly under-appreciated by coworkers and management in general. It happens. Usually I can shrug it off, but I'm exceptionally worn down lately, my nerves a bit raw. I'm only human. So, at the end of my shift, when my clean-up was all but done and I was waiting for my last table to finish their desserts, I stepped outside. There's a little space out back where people go for quick cigarette breaks, but since I don't smoke, I rarely have an excuse to step outside for some fresh air. With this brief respite, though, I decided to go and sit on the stoop in the sun, even if I didn't have a cancer-stick between my fingers to justify the moment. I let the warm sunlight seep into my skin while the fresh breeze dried some of the literal sweat from my brow (not to mention cool my flushed-with-frustration cheeks). In only a few minutes, I felt much better. Almost happy again, or at least able to smile and relax, find my center and a calmer perspective. It's taken me a long time, but I've finally reached that point in my life when contentment is my "idle mode." If nothing is provoking me or proving particularly frustrating, I carry around a secret, private gratitude for life in all its messy glory and numerous manifestations. And it's self-feeding and regenerating, because I have enough self-awareness to know this wasn't always the case--so these days, I'm just grateful to feel so grateful.

So that was that moment, a moment in sunlight (tarred lungs not included). Then I went back inside, finished my work, clocked out and began the walk home. Once back inside, that baseline of gratitude had begun to waver a bit again, and I was very happy to be on my way back to my little apartment (where cookies and milk, not to mention some old Star Trek episodes, were waiting for me: a Treat to Myself). As I walked, I passed one of the old sycamore trees that line the streets of this neighborhood and was reminded of just how much that particular tree's lumpy bark sometimes looks like a grizzled, friendly face peering out at the world, watching all the dogs and neighbors walk by. Then up the block a little ways, I passed the house with the stonewall along the garden's edge, and the one rock slightly out of place that looked sort of like a crouching, spotted toad. These familiar bits of scenery got me thinking about some of the books I've been reading about nature spirits and faeries, recently. Some writers talk about the Fay as those creatures and beings that give enchantment to nature. When you catch a sudden scent of blossoms on the air, this is their greeting to you; when you seem to see a face in bark or stone, they are reaching out to say hello. Yes, it may be in your imagination, but that doesn't mean it isn't also real.

Then, I had the most curious sensation. I missed God. I missed God terribly, felt an incredible loneliness, as though I had lost touch with a really old, dear friend, someone I had lived with for so long and hadn't spoken to in forever. There was a time when such greetings and reachings-out of nature were, to me, always moments of feeling God's presence in the world. I don't mean sensing the Divine, or the sacred Holiness inherent in all things, or the diffusion of Spirit throughout space and time. Nothing so abstract. I mean that, growing up, I felt the personal presence of God. No matter what my philosophies and theologies have been over the many years that I have been studying, thinking and growing, no matter how tame and "safe" I am able to render my language about That Which I Believe In--the fact remains that some of my religious experiences, unmitigated by dogma and uncomplicated by reason, have been experiences of the Person of God.

I couldn't say for sure that this is the Christian God, Jehovah or Yahweh or whoever, and it never struck me as being Christ, not exactly (I've had different experiences with ol' J.C. during that phase in college when I was obsessed with being a "real Christian," whatever that was). All I know for sure is that it was, simply, my God, and He had no other name that I ever knew. But He was present to me, in many different ways. The sunlight warming me or the breeze buffeting me, the ocean waves that seemed to play tag, the bird that once shat on the crown of my head, my third eye, the time I had been complaining about being too well-cared for and not persecuted enough--these were all God being sardonic, or kind, or loving, or playful. There wasn't a god or spirit of the ocean, one for the sky, one for the green grass--no, it was all just Him. I remember that feeling. It came naturally. Perhaps because I grew up in a monotheistic home, this was just the way I was used to interpreting those moments of Presence, but I'm not so sure. After all, wouldn't I have known? There were occasions when something else, some other being or presence made itself clearly felt to me--the comforting "Babysitter" in my room when I woke scared at night, the flocks of beings wedged in among the bodies of family and friends at my grandmother's funeral, the gnomes and invisible critters that lived by the crabapple tree in the park--they were all unique beings with a distinct sense to them. These books I'm reading now, most suggest that children have a natural knack for sensing or seeing such beings, the Fay, the Little People, the spirits of nature. I had that knack, I think. But for me, then there was God, and God was something else, and always there, too.

These days, I don't really know exactly what I believe, and sometimes I'm so busy believing it (or not-quite-believing it) that I don't give myself time to actually experience anything. Experience might bring some clarity. That moment in sunlight when I sat quietly in recovery, that didn't dredge up any loneliness or sense of absence for me--only gratitude and peace. But maybe that's part of it, too: this gratitude and peace, sometimes I feel like they don't go anywhere. They're real enough, but gratitude should move, should reach beyond itself. Gratitude is a gift given back for a gift received, it is a form of connection, of communication. I've learned so much these past several years, widened my understanding of what is possible, the many mythologies and ecologies of Spirit, the range of nonmaterial and material beings that we share the world with--I think maybe I'm no longer sure who is doing the giving. Once upon a time, I had no doubt, and my thanks always went to God. Whoever He Was. I Am. Now, it's clear that my life is just as blessed as ever before, and I have tried so long and put in so much work to become the kind of person who has gratitude at the very base of her being... but I'm no longer sure where such beauty and love come from, and I don't know who to thank.

Sometimes, I think, I miss God because I miss the sense of Someone being on the receiving end of my gratitude. My whole life these days seems to be awash in the unrequited, the unacknowledged. Even when I think about being lonely without God, it seems it's only natural, things have just continued on, and it's not so much that He wasn't ever real, but that we've become different people and fallen out of touch. That's all.

And sometimes it happens that you are friends and then
You are not friends,
And friendship has passed.
And whole days are lost and among them
A fountain empties itself.

And sometimes it happens that you are loved and then
You are not loved,
And love is past.
And whole days are lost and among them
A fountain empties itself into the grass.

- Brian Patten, from "Sometimes It Happens"

Wonder

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Wonder

Her absent god and his empty tomb
amidst the snow and flower-bloom,
the ready earth and garden tilled,
the Gardener smiling, sweet and stilled:
moon-full night and balanced day
have swept even her god away.

Winter Ember Days

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The sun has set on the longest night.

Sitting here in my quiet little living room on the night of the Winter Solstice, Alban Arthuan, I suddenly feel that overwhelming wistfulness of "wanting to go home." This silly old apartment is more my home than any place has been since I was almost too little to remember. I feel very lucky in my life--people come and go, and new people arrive and stir up stress and hope, but somehow I still feel lucky and loved and not so alone. Lonely, though. It's one of those evenings when I really wish I had a cat. I remember my cat--I think maybe she was the same way. No matter how loving and affectionate she could be at times (or tolerant of cuddles in her old age) I think maybe there was a little part of her that was also lonely, always a little lonely after our old dog died. Can an animal have that kind of loneliness?

We spend a lot of energy trying not to be sad these days, trying to avoid the risk of becoming sad. We pursue happiness--after all, that's what this country is built on, isn't it? And when a new insecurity or unforeseen need or desire arises (or someone creates one in us as a way of exercising power over us and earning trust or money from us), we do our best to placate, ameliorate, mitigate.

All I want is to learn to walk through sadness and come out the other side. I want to learn how to live a life that is not hedged in by the fear of sadness or loss. I think I'm getting better at it, at pressing onward, walking through the thick of it, the heavy darkness, dense with grief and the extinction of the grasping ego... but the other side is still lonely. Maybe because so few make it through.

So I'm wistful tonight for the home I left in order to make a new home on the other side of sadness. Maybe this is why birth is really so amazing--that we can make of our very bodies a home for an innocent new being--that, like those physical houses constructed out of sacrificed trees and broken stones, we can build that kind of sanctuary. A warm hearth, a place from which new happiness on this side of loss and hardship can begin again. Even when we have passed through sadness and loneliness, been shaped by them and scarred by them, that we can still become a bridge to the new, to the newly born, to the beginning.

Unfocused Pieces.

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I'm currently on sabbatical--an enforced period of rest from overuse of the computer and too much pressure (entirely my own fault, admittedly) to read and write at an enormous pace. There is some need to feel useful and self-motivated, to justify my current circumstances as an unemployed writer and a rather timid, exhausted waitress. This need has pushed me to a point of exhaustion lately, especially during a week-long illness mid-September, during which ideas and themes for writing backlogged, creating a kind of bottlenecked writer's block. Now they are grinding their gears and honking their horns, and all the noise in my brain is keeping me from concentrating with my usual furious, unmitigated enthusiasm. Indeed, I find it rather difficult to concentrate much at all on linear thinking at the moment, retreating into the flowing narratives of novels and the visual focus on my new handicrafts project: pencil sketching.

Things continue to happen. I continue to attend and to remember. Life is not lost on me. But I sit down at the computer desk, and the soggy-cotton-ball headache in my brain fogs up the glass with the breath of my thinking--I can't see clearly into the landscape of ideas, hopping from one spot to another with an imagining architect's eye. I don't have the patience. Now is, perhaps, a time for gathering in and hoarding. There will be months of winter in which to recall, from within the darkness, that moment last night when I wandered from room to room in my apartment, seeking to touch the brick bones of the building; or the walk through the park without my glasses, when space was rendered physical, a visual dimension, and distant leaves hung in silhouette against the afternoon sunlight, blurry, glistening, radiating orbs of gold and green; or a thousand other impressions and moments. I'm harvesting them, I am making the effort to anchor myself in the here-now. The brain, like the heart, is a muscle, which must be rested in order to be properly maintained.

With that in mind, here are a few random bits of journaling and letter-writing from over the past week or so, to tide you over, and to promise more to come.


The Vase

After all, there was the vase--I could see it. I could make a line on paper, I could compare this line with the image of the vase. I had eye enough to recognize when they did not match, and yet erase and redraw as I might, I somehow couldn't much improve, I couldn't bring the sketch to reflect the actual image I saw before me. Why not? What fluke of the brain was impeding the hand? This was a matter of seeing, not of doing. I was convinced that if I could "see better" I would be able to draw better. Somehow, I had to figure this out.

Sketching a small, deep blue, hand-painted Brazilian vase had become an exercise in memory and perception. What I perceived (and thus drew immediately, eye to paper) was fragmented, a marriage of ill-matched angles and proportions, a shifting visual mirage where this moment's shadow was tacked onto last moment's curved neck, which sprang precariously from the rounded angles of a base and belly drawn to different moments' scales. But when I gave up, frustrated, and sat back to sketch the damn, simple thing from memory--there it was. The form of it, the completeness of the thing, compressed into a sudden whole by the integrating, effacing processes of recall. Perspective and subtle change forgotten, memory proved the more realistic guide.

Somewhere in my sunconscious, imaginative brain, there exists an artist who knows what she is doing and might, with practice, make passable sketches of, say, birds and trees and things. Apparently, my conscious attempts at art have stalled at the ten-year-old level, unable to make the leap into cubism and the modern, playful but skilful abandonment of perspective. We must investigate this discrepancy further.


A Philosophical Opinion of Pleasure

Perhaps pleasure is a mechanism of the real, to which we should attend with as much seriousness as we attend to questions of morality, purpose, will, art, religion... What is the function of pleasure? And by this, I mean not only physical pleasure--though, perhaps, all pleasure is to some extent physical. Another strangeness. Aesthetic pleasure, utilized carefully to thrill or disgust, excites the faculty of attention. There is a bridge between body and mind, and that bridge is sensation. If we attend carefully to sensation, how can we avoid pleasure? How could we possibly shun it? How could we claim that we do not, to some extent, seek it out?

Pleasure circulates, it corrodes the easy categorical walls that the mind makes. The eyelid, the shoulder, the useless skin of the earlobe--these are not extraneous to the beloved, not ignored by the lover. They are representative of the whole, they communicate to the rest. A lover, dazed in pleasure, makes no distinctions, kisses anything.

We mistake convenience, addiction, lust for pleasure. We've forgotten what real pleasure feels like, the pleasure of health, the thrill of simplicity, balance and the sounding of a single, pure tone in the rising chord of creative coexistence. This is sacred pleasure, that of gratitude and grace.

Listen.


Evening Solitude & Sadness

I tried for a moment to get a view of my sadness, a feel for it, maybe. A shift in perspective. Am I actually sad? Is any of it real, or are these simply useless, irrelevant emotions (and wouldn't that, anyway, be somehow just as awful, to be so subject to such useless, meaningless feelings and for feelings themselves to be useless, meaningless)? I stepped back and saw my sad little self sitting in this dark, empty space of a living room--and I felt: there I am, still sad and lonely and small, inside a great, beautiful night that is so full of grace and potential and quietness. They both exist. I am content and sad at once. Maybe it's selfish to want to be happy, to want relief from always feeling a sneaking loneliness underscoring everything. Maybe everyone feels this way, all the time, and that's how it is--moments of perspective in which the world and life are utterly beautiful, and the surrounding void in which the very same world and life, unchanged, seem superfluous and stupid. But then, I am back to faith--how can love and hope mean anything if this is just how reality is? In what way do they function, what is the purpose? I do not want to deceive myself, I do not want to color everything in with hearts and roses and pretend love will save the day. But how can I live without it? Why should I be expected to? It's all just noise and nonsense otherwise. Can I reject it--a loveless life and a world in which love falters and fails--on principle, even if it means rejecting what actually is? I want to hold both things--love, and the actual world--and cherish both, believe in both. I don't know if that's possible.

I'm afraid I'm going backwards, devolving. I'm afraid I'm losing the way, that I'm worse than I used to be, that I do not love as well or as boldly, and that I can't get it back. Having lunch with a friend, I'm okay and happy and peaceful, except of course that I am becoming an awful person who laughs and has no hope. With a friend, I am not so bothered by my awfulness, my apparent disability. It's only when I'm alone that I can't justify it. I should not let the sadness of my solitude prevent me from being useful to the community of creation. But I feel so weighed down by it. They--the mysterious Other--demand that I be happy on my own, be completed and whole as an isolated being; but if I am, there is no reason to seek the Other in the first place. Which is worse: to feel, painfully, a kind of isolation; or to actually be isolated, so cut off that you no longer even desire connection?

Vernal Embertide Contemplation.

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'The seasons intimate individually the bliss of Heaven, where there is "the beauty of spring, the brightness of summer, the plenty of autumn, the rest of winter."'

Today I'm treating myself. I'm going to treat myself to good company, even if it's unrequited. Clouds and trees do not love back, the sun and moon do not love back, beautiful strangers do not love back. But I can dwell in love and wait for spring. I will hold intimately the coals of my love for a world who holds me intimately but does not know me well, and I will be warm. I will be warm and wait for spring. I will remember the ember days.

The Vernal or Lenten Embertide remind us of the coming beauty of spring, and our relationship to beauty in the world. It is the tragedy and the blessing of beauty to be complete in itself, to be whole and self-fulfilled. To see beauty, we must often be separate from it, and the beauty that we are intimately a part of may be too large for us to see. Our sense of awe in the presence of beauty is heightened and sharpened by our awareness of distance, by our longing for something with which we are not fully merged. Our longing makes beauty both sweet and ephemeral. Beauty stirs us out of ourselves.

We remember, and on these ember days of the coming spring, we seek solitude and distance. We remember that beauty surrounds us, and we withdraw from busy-ness in order to remind ourselves, to perceive it better. We remember beauty and seek its company--we seek the company of the wind and the trees, of the distant and still-cold sun, of the kind and lovely strangers whom we do not know but who are still connected to us through beauty, love and the Divine within each of us. We remember that we, too, are infinitely beautiful, that within us burns the dark potential of the rose of the soul to bloom suddenly open at the first warm breath of the season. We withdraw from the noisy world and become beautiful, content in our uniqueness, awe-filled in our longing. We remember beauty and, in it, we find the relief of freedom, the song of the breathless skylark in its strong and far-away flight. We hear the beauty of distant music sung not for us but for itself alone, and on these ember days, together we remember.

Today's Ogham: Beth (Birch)
(birth, new beginnings, renewal, change)