Peace and the Celtic Spirit: Excerpts from a Journal

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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.

Day Nine — The World Become Small

...then I went back up to my room, kneeled next to my bed to look out the skylight — and felt this overwhelming sense of closure and peace, and a thrill at the thought of going home. I knew things were finally coming to an end.

~*~

The morning was foggy and damp, with low clouds clustering and rolling along over the mountains across the water. Every once in a while, a parting in the clouds would open and the opposite shore would be bathed with a golden misty light in a small area, as if the land were glowing all golden and green among the dark and the mists.

A rainbow. We stood there in silence for a few minutes, watching the broad ribbon of light and color thicken and take on, imperceptibly, a brighter presence among the dim gray clouds, above the dark, choppy waters. J. leaned over to me and quoted again that Bible verse, Isaiah 45:3, "And I will give you the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that you may know that it is I, the Lord, which call you by your name..." When she said this, I suddenly felt overwhelmed and almost began to cry. The rainbow continued to grow brighter and brighter, and I took several photographs hoping at least one would come out. Then J. said how it was funny, from here the land over there looked awash in so many colors, but they couldn't see that themselves — all they knew was that they were standing in the light.

Sunrise on an Autumn Morning

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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 —

Madeline, Praying (a short story of quiet and mystery)

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A hand injury has cruelly kept me from the keyboard for the past week, and in the interest of healing I am still taking the typing very slow and easy. So that my lovely, loyal readers won't feel abandoned, however, I offer you something from the stockpile. The following is a short story I wrote seven or eight years ago, way back in college, before coming whole-heartedly to the Druid path, during a time of grappling with (dis)enchantment, death and mystery. Oddly enough, it features a girl named Madeline (more cynical and angry at Spirit than I ever was), and a hint of flowers. I thought it would be an enjoyable follow-up to last week's guest post. Reading it now, I can only remember hints and shadows of what I was trying to grasp as I wrote it. But I hope you enjoy it, despite its uncertainty.

Madeline, Praying

Entering the abandoned church, she felt as if she were entering the glen of a deep forest. Etched stained glass windows filtered light like entwined branches arching out from the thick columns, trunks of stone. Normally so hard, so brittle, the glass just like any glass, fragile and easily shattered, splintered by a brick or baseball. The marble and granite unmovable, chiseled perhaps, but otherwise worn only by time stretching into future eons of unwritten histories. Yet as she entered the church, she felt as if she were entering something alive, something breathing, momentarily transformed from brittle, breakable, into something delicately living, moving with the breeze, shifting colors of sunlight through branches of trees, seemingly so still and yet growing, always reaching, imperceptibly, in all directions for the sustenance of warmth, of earth and sun, of water, air and light with which the world of this stale chapel was suddenly transfused.

Pagan Parenting: Presence and Void, and Other Rude Things

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An interesting topic came up over dinner this evening with the kids, and though at the time my mouth was full of spinach and gala apple salad, and the conversation quickly moved on to hide-and-seek and other things, I wanted to make a note here of some of my own passing thoughts. For I think that in many ways, we still live with the lessons of our own childhoods and, especially for women, these lessons have not always been the healthiest, physically, emotionally or spiritually. There are a great many things that, looking back, I wish someone had told me when I was a young girl, about how the world works and why people do what they do and think the way they think. And one of those things I wish someone would have told me is: sometimes it's okay to avoid a person, even if it's rude.

To remove oneself from unpleasant or unhealthy company is only one of many rude things frowned upon in women (yes, even today), but it's one that vibrates a sympathetic chord deep in the quiet center of my being, and I find myself desperately wanting to explain to my partner's two oldest daughters that it is, in fact, definitely and completely okay to avoid a person, especially if that person is mean, manipulative or expects you to think and behave in certain ways that you do not, in your heart of hearts, agree with or feel to be right. These girls are on the verge of preadolescence, and the thought that they might grow up thinking that women are expected to always be accommodating and easy-going in whatever company, without thought to their own personal boundaries, needs or self-respect... well, it bothers me. This is basic stuff, of the "say no to drugs/peer-pressure/bridge-jumping" variety. And yet, as I've mentioned here before, they have been raised thus far in a decidedly extroverted and in some ways very gender-traditional household (despite their mother being a self-proclaimed witch), which has left them with the impression that to decline social interaction is, especially in females, the height of rudeness. As both a feminist and an introvert, I feel the need to speak up and represent, for the sake of all my fellow kindly recluses.

Of course, it's a complicated matter. While avoiding a person can sometimes be the wisest and healthiest thing to do, it is different from merely avoiding confrontation, which is also something highly prized in women. It's important to understand how these two things differ. Avoiding oneself physically from a conflict can in some cases be the most radical kind of confrontation: the very "presence" of one's absence can provoke and challenge, especially at times when one is expected to be present (or at least go through the motions of presence). There are times when showing up and merely "walking through the part" — this kind of false presence of pretending social niceties — is the real avoidance, and what is sacrificed is not only self-respect and honesty, but the sacredness of real presence, and the meaningfulness of real absence.

And this is where the Pagan spiritual life comes to play an important role for me, though there are echoes of Buddhism here as well. For the Pagan parent embraces both the light and the dark of the natural world, the day and the night, the bright sunshine filtering in and filling every space, and the emptiness of the night's void gaping between the faraway stars. The void is not something to fear or shrink from, but has its own role to play in the dance of harmony and balance. And so too does avoidance, which once meant not just to escape or evade, but to withdraw, clear out or empty oneself. It is this same process of emptying oneself that gives us the precious space of solitude and the sacred capacity for connection, through which we can learn to open to our capacity to imagine, and to relate to others. Through ritual and trance, such as that of the shaman, it gives way to what we call "shapeshifting" and journeying through the Otherworlds. But this ability to seek solitude and empty oneself is also a source of stability and strength that can enable us to be kind and loving towards others as well.

In our solitude, we enter more completely into our own presence, we begin to know it better and experience its fullness and power. And we learn that our presence is something precious that we can choose (or choose not) to share with others. It is not something to be frittered away uncaringly or lived only half-heartedly, it is not something that can be demanded or expected, it is never obligatory or compulsory: it is a gift. When we realize this, not only do we appreciate ourselves more and protect more fiercely that sparkling individuality that gives our presence its uniqueness and meaning, but we also come to see that our being present — fully and truly and whole-heartedly present — can be a gift of loving-kindness and transformative connection that we give to others. We are less inclined to take it for granted, but likewise we are all the more capable of giving it knowingly, even to those who we think might not appreciate it, because we understand the real nature of the giving. But all this rests on our ability to give it freely, to choose to give our presence to others; or, through our absence, to demonstrate the withdrawal of our support for unhealthy conditions or to point to or illustrate an absence that we already feel is lurking beneath the surface of acceptability and politeness.

The Pagan life is chock-full of many rude things. Playing in the mud, laughing during religious ceremonies, going braless or barefoot or unshaven or skyclad, dancing in the firelight to the beating of drums, bragging, boasting, flouting, flirting, fucking, eating and drinking and wandering wild in the woods under waling moonlit winds, so many rude and naughty and socially frowned-upon things. Let us not confuse what is rude with what is cruel, or callous, or stupid, or wrong. Let us be rude to the utmost of our love, and seek silence, and sing, and be joyous and honest and present and free.

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.)

Avatar & Eywa: Looking at Deity, Pantheism and Justice

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Carl McColman, over at the Website of Unknowing, recently wrote a brilliant and thought-provoking review of the film, Avatar, and I for one find it refreshing to see a Catholic who can think deeply about spiritual themes in the film without a knee-jerk reaction against pantheism and Pagan undertones. On the other hand, his analysis of the film as an inspiring blending of Christian and Pagan theological insight, in which Christianity brings a sense of personal grace and redemptive justice to the earthy but impersonal spirit-web of Eywa-consciousness possessed by the natives, is one that I think overstates the overt role that Christianity plays in the film, and ignores the flaws in the film's portrayal of pantheism.

At the same time, his review replays the kind of thinking that early Christian theologians used when seeking converts from indigenous pagan faiths two millennia ago, playing up the apparent lack of justice and personal deliverance in pantheist/animist religions that supposedly offered an individual no spiritual aid or redemption when confronted with suffering and sin. This isn't surprising, since McColman himself was a practicing Pagan for a while before converting to Catholicism and working deeply in the lay monastic tradition of the Church; he would be intimately familiar with the struggle to find justice and personal meaningfulness (i.e. salvation) in a Pagan context, and more honest than most Pagans probably are about how great that struggle can be at times. This is an argument still used in the Catholic Church today to explain why pantheism is inherently inadequate as a spiritual tradition, and even dangerous as it undermines faith in a personal, omnipotent God who both dispenses justice and offers personal salvation through faith.

Having seen the movie myself, twice, over the holidays, I've been planning on writing some kind of response anyway, but McColman's review prompted a comment that grew, and grew, and grew, until I found I had written something far too long to be Comment #12 on his blog. So here is the (somewhat rambling) response provoked by his musings. Please visit his post and read his wonderful take on the film which, even if I disagree with its focus at times, is still incredibly intelligent, creative and syncretic.

Carl, I find your insights thought-provoking, and it's refreshing to see a Catholic diving into the spiritual implications of the movie without immediately putting up defenses against pantheism, but I think I agree with Emily (a previous commenter) that, if there is any Christianity in the film at all, it's incredibly understated and I don't think it holds as prominent a place as you give it. In fact, what struck me about Grace Augustine (the head scientist of the avatar program on Pandora) as the "wisdom-holder" of the humans was just how secular and scientific she was. She was the kind of character that, despite her name, I could easily imagine laughing off the idea of any sort of God (she "doesn't believe in fairy tales," either), and indeed when studying the biological interconnection among the trees and animals, she dismisses the idea that it is anything other than materialist in nature (rather than some nonmaterial "Pagan voodoo"). Seeing this materialism, along with her chain-smoking, as just a way in which she's a "sinner" needing to be redeemed is reading a very Christian interpretation of the movie. The idea of grace as spiritual relationship is not a uniquely Christian concept; and for all we know, the reference to Augustine may be intended to invoke not inherent Christianity, but the sense of determinism or lack of free will, something found often in materialism and, perhaps, an appropriate philosophical point to contemplate when we consider the nature of avatars as empty bodies to be used by some outside controlling force. All in all, I was more surprised by the lack of Christianity, and so I feel your review overstates its importance.

And perhaps that's not entirely unfair, considering it was written and produced in, by and for a predominantly Christian culture that certainly takes particular concepts for granted. For instance, the "connection" between Na'vi and animal is not one of mutual communion (as you might expect in a truly pantheistic spiritual tradition), but of domination, so that the beast itself (whose eyes dilate as though drugged) becomes an avatar for the thinking, self-aware and (implicitly) superior humanoid beings. When Eywa sends these animals in attack against foreign invaders, it's obvious that She is acting not as an ecological body (the way Gaia is conceived here on planet Earth), but as a directing mind (this is made explicit when Grace compares the trees' connections to the neurons in a human brain). But I think this, rather than being a blending of Christian and Pagan perspectives, is just a failure of a mainstream monotheistic culture (accustomed to the Cartesian duality between mind and body) to truly grasp and accurately portray real Pagan pantheism.

Seeking representations of real pantheism in the movie, Eywa's responsiveness as a self-aware ecological body is present throughout (though I suspect mostly by accident) and does not need to subsume or incorporate Grace (and her Christian/sky-people concept of justice) to act justly. When Jake-as-avatar must fend for himself his first night in the jungle, for instance, he is surrounded by vicious six-legged glowing hyena-like predators. Few would consider the hyenas killing Jake as an act of justice, and yet it's clear that Neytiri views their deaths as a kind of injustice for which grief, not thanks, are in order. It seemed to me, watching this scene, to be the most accurate portrayal of pantheistic attitude in the film. Here, the predators act in a manner akin to the white blood cells of the body, recognizing a foreign invader and defending the "body" of the jungle by attacking and consuming it in order to integrate it. (Notice the hyenas don't bother the natives, who are a part of the balanced ecosystem; this might be mere naive Noble Savage idealism, if not for the nifty neuron-tendrils that all the animals possess, implying that they are all potentially tapped into an awareness that functions as a single whole.) This is a kind of justice that relies on integrating opposing forces and seeking and maintaining a living balance, which is different from the punitive/reparative justice commonly found in Christianity and practically inherent in the notion of salvation. The final battle in which Eywa sends Her animals out to defeat the human's raping machinery is actually a departure from the pantheistic portrayal of Eywa up until that point, though I suspect the film-makers knew quite well that it is a more exciting climax than a body slowly fighting off disease, not to mention more intuitively comprehensible and more palatable to a Western, largely-monotheistic audience.

But I admit, by the end of the movie even I wanted Eywa to respond, to participate in some meaningful way in the defense of Pandora. After all, if Eywa is something real in any meaningful sense, She must be capable of response, capable of making some kind of difference in the lives of the suffering, threatened Na'vi. After all, it is clear by the end that to defend the balance of life must also mean to protect that life, all life, from slowly being extinguished all-together by human mining operations. Yet the animals Eywa sends into battle are not like the Huorns, the trees of the forests of Fangorn (in Lord of the Rings), who move spontaneously and mysteriously as free agents to reclaim land that has been cleared and reassert a natural balance. The kind of earth-response in Avatar is, well, remote-controlled, and I see this as a flaw, not as a hopeful message about the fruitful blending of Christian and Pagan traditions to the benefit of both. Surely such blending is possible, and Avatar may inspire some movie-goers to seek in themselves the connections of spirit that can make such blending a meaningful and authentic reality. But the film itself is not yet an example of this, and I think on the whole we as a culture have a long way to go.

UPDATE: 31 December 2009 Carl was kind enough to post a reply to my reply on his own blog, "Pandora, Ken Wilber and William Blake" and I have since replied in the comments section of that post. However, for those of you following along, I am sharing it here as well. I hope it sums up some points that I left unspoken or only implied in the above review (I'm particularly proud of the penultimate paragraph, if I do say so myself!).

Carl, Thanks for such a lengthy and detailed reply! We've quite a conversation going on, and I'm sorry for not having the chance to get back to it until now!

I wanted to clear up one thing right away that I think may have been lost in my post and so led to some confusion in your reply. I was not saying that there was something inherently wrong with monotheism, or that Cameron should have toned down the monotheistic assumptions in the film in general (these, like I said, were hardly avoidable, and in any case probably necessary to be palatable to an American audience). What concerns me is the portrayal of the Na'vi culture--a literally alien culture, the very definition of Other-ness, and also fairly obviously meant to represent various native/tribal religions on this planet--in ways that were inaccurate. Avatar is not a "Neopagan's dream," for there is very little actual, accurate pantheism in it anywhere (and of course nowhere is there any suggestion of gasp! polytheism, or even an ecology of spirits and other nonmaterial beings). Indeed, the Na'vi culture is in many ways a poor caricature, an example of what most Westerns think shamanic, indigenous, earth-centered spiritualities are like. Here we have not the interesting blending of two unique perspectives, but the dominant monotheistic culture projecting an "Other" outward in distorted and inaccurate ways. As I mentioned in my own post, what little honest-to-goodness pantheism there is in the movie looks accidental, just the haphazard result of trying to portray the Na'vi as strange and the planet Pandora as wild; and for that reason it is incoherent and full of contradictions.

The hyenas' death is an excellent example. If the hyenas are acting in keeping with the sacred balance in their function as predators that both protect from and consume/integrate foreign elements, then why did the seeds of the Sacred Tree stop Neytiri from killing Jake, and why did Neytiri decide to save him? The question of why natural forces and individuals within nature sometimes work in tension with or even in seeming contradiction to one another (whether in an ecosystem, or an individual organism) is a Mystery-capital-M in pantheistic spirituality, one that a person can spend her whole life grappling with and feeling her way through as a way of seeking towards truth and balance. But in Avatar, it's a contradiction grasped just barely enough to be a joke, to bely a secret attraction between characters and expose the funny backwardness of Na'vi thinking when called out by a straight-shooting-averge-Joe-kinda-guy like Jake.

The ready submission of animals to the Na'vi (which I still believe, though admittedly on very subtle clues throughout the film, to be another intentional invocation of the avatar-as-empty-shell leitmotif) is another example of Cameron making a drastic misstep. Here we are meant to believe that the Na'vi have some sacred connection to the animals, sensual and even affectionate in nature, yet the animals offer no unique personalities of their own during the process of mind-meeting-mind. In actual shamanic traditions throughout the world, animals are most definitely conceived of as possessing unique and in no way inferior spirits. In fact, illness and pain even within the body itself are often experienced or conceived of as powerful monsters, insects or beasts that must be battled and overcome through ritual and inner journey work; all the more so animals and beings beyond the body that participate in a complex landscape of spirit. The idea of creative, loving communion with such beings may be more Neopagan than ancient pagan in flavor, true, but the basic conception of these creatures as separate and independent, putting up resistance and seeking their own wills apart from those of "superior" humans, is found within both, and is not reflected at all in Cameron's portrayal of the Na'vi spirituality.

My concern is that while monotheistic assumptions persist even among characters who are explicitly atheist, even in a plot that hinges largely on secular science and the savior-like role of technology... pantheism is not simply left out of the equation, but portrayed in ways that are, in fact, mostly monotheistic as well. So what we get is a comfortable, familiar-feeling "Pantheism(TM)" stepping in to save the day when traditional monotheistic religions have begun to taste stale, unbelievable or irrelevant, bringing a breath of fresh exotic air and a warm-fuzzy reminder that life is connected and sacred (something the mystic threads of the monotheistic traditions know very well already). The truth is, the challenges, paradoxes and mysteries of pantheism are as deep, puzzling and ultimately fulfilling as any monotheism, and to reduce them to a sidekick of Western postmodernity is saddening, and not the least bit frustrating. Especially when most reviewers, including yourself, mistake Cameron's portrayal as somehow a Pagan "dream" come true. I am all for interfaith dialogue and the fruitful integration and living-together of different traditions. But before we begin our blending, I think it is utterly important that we strive to understand what those differences actually are, and accept no pale caricatures in their place. Otherwise, what we are doing is not integrating, but imposing. While a rose is a rose is a rose, to look at another spiritual tradition through rose-colored glasses, paint a rose-colored picture and then try to pass it off as the real thing is just not something I willing to settle for.

Should Cameron have done better? He was trying to make a Box Office Smash, nothing deeper than that. Should reviewers and critics of the movie point out the flaws and inaccuracies, lest they pass into our culture as "common knowledge" taken for granted? Yes, most definitely.

Fear and Thanksgiving in Lancaster County

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Driving to my parents' house through central Pennsylvania, we passed a billboard that read, "Without Coal, Most Cities Would Be Dark." In an alternate universe, I turned to Jeff and asked him to pull over. I popped the trunk, rummaged for my anti-propaganda protest gear, and scurried up the sign's scaffolding through the chill, foggy night. In an alternate universe, as we pulled away again, we left behind a sign that now blazed in bright white graffiti lettering the addition: "And We Could See the Stars."

But in this universe, we drove on without stopping. Four hours in a car with no radio. Just the two of us, the kitten in his carrier in the backseat, and the humming silence of tires on pavement. Long road trips always make me think about the future. Maybe it's the metaphor of traveling, rumbling through the dark towards that ever-receding horizon....

Growing up in the rather-well-off suburbs of Lancaster county, my family would often drive the two hours west to visit family living in the heart of Coal Country, PA. There was the highway known locally as the "Road to Nowhere" because the town it had once led to had dwindled away with the collapse of the coal industry. There was the ghost town of Centralia, whose underground coal fire has been burning since 1962, releasing toxic fumes into the surrounding landscape, and could go on burning for another century yet. And there was my grandmother's old house, tiny and dirty, where she managed to raise six children despite her poverty, the house where she lived alone and slowly losing her mind to poorly-medicated bipolar disorder until she died more than a decade ago. This is where my father grew up, who was raised partly by the local Catholic Church community that provided clothing and food when his family had little else to survive on. A local church community that was so far out in the boondocks that none of the higher-ups could be bothered to enforce strict conformity to doctrine. So my dad grew up believing all that nonsense about love-thy-neighbor and service to the poor, but never learned, like a proper church-going lad, to fear homosexuals or kill abortion doctors. My father never learned the lesson of inventing enemies. Cold and hunger were too real, poverty too obvious, and the relationship of an individual to the community was, in a very real sense, my father's literal source of salvation.

But all this is the past, the history of my family, the history of my father. Traveling as a child to visit our relatives still living in central Pennsylvania hadn't been about returning to "where my family came from." It had been about gathering for Christmas or Independence Day parties, getting together for birthdays or to meet the newest puppy adopted into the family. As a child, traveling was about anticipating what next fun thing was about to happen, seeing how the cousins had grown up while we were parted, or trying the new cakes or cookies my aunt had been experimenting with baking. And the drive home was the classic quiet, slightly-bumpy ride in the backseat, half-asleep, gazing up at the stars while my parents listened to soft rock on the radio and shadows of silos, barns and rolling farmland rushed by along the horizon.

Now when I drive through the dark, making the four hour trip between Pittsburgh and Lancaster, I think about the future. And usually, the conversation turns to politics. And I wonder if the kids will grow up in a world where it's possible for them to live ethically without sacrificing basic needs. Will they be able to eat good food that came from a local farm that didn't use petrochemical pesticides and genetically-modified seeds? Will they be able to earn a living doing something that doesn't fundamentally compromise simple principles like "don't exploit the impoverished," or "don't bombard the public with billions of dollars of marketing in order to brainwash them into buying your product," or even just "try to make the world a better place"? Will they be able to live in a world where war isn't inevitable at every drop of a hat or a pin or a tower or a word? (The second-oldest is reading Zinn's A Young People's History of the United States; when I asked her how she was liking it, she shrugged and pursed her lips, saying, "There's a lot of war..." And there I was, brought back to myself, realizing that I had been experiencing something close to glee until then, a kind of excitement or pleasure at the idea that we were helping her be strong and knowledgeable, that we were "fighting the system" and showing her that America is not the world's Savior and we do not always do the right thing. But what we are doing, really, is asking her to confront the fact that, yes, there is a lot of war, and violence, and greed, and senseless hate in the world. "Yes, but there is a lot of goodness, too. And courage, and compassion, and beauty.")

During our trip this time, Jeff and I talked about how we don't know what is going to happen. Nobody knows. Before 1989, everyone knew the Cold War and the USSR would go on forever. Just after the first World War, the Great War, everyone knew there would never again be such a devastating conflict, and yet in 1910 everyone knew there could never even be such a huge, continent-wide war in the first place, or if there was Britain would find it an easy victory. Now, actions no longer seem to have consequences. We have been at war with Iraq for more than six years; we have been living in a post-9/11 world for almost a decade. Is it just going to go on like this forever? Every year, the same tug-o-war to convince people that the earth is dying, that we're killing each other needlessly with both poverty and guns? Every year, the same worry, the same hopes, the same sense of uncertainty? Is it just going to continue? It couldn't possibly.... but can you conceive of an end, can you really believe that suddenly one day, we'll all wake up and come to our senses? Sometimes I really don't like my country.

And yet, I love this land, this landscape I grew up in. I love the family I have here, although they're scattered and imperfect. I love the rolling hills and fields and the random awful farm smells wafting across the highway that let me know I'm headed home again. There is a lot of goodness and beauty and love in the world, too. Very small moments of meaningful brilliance are going on all the time. For instance, Friday afternoon, after a typical wearing day at work and a late lunch, Jeff and I returned to the car to discover a tiny stray kitten hiding behind the front wheel. After more than an hour of gentle coaxing and tempting with smells of hot clam chowder, after strangers passing by sometimes indifferent and sometimes all too eager to help in loud, clumsy ways that only terrified the poor creature--the four guys who had parked behind us returned to their car and were more than happy to help. On their hands and knees, these young men who could have been college football players or barroom brawlers were cooing and whispering and reaching gently, with all the tenderness in the world. Finally, they managed to herd the startled animal out from under the car onto the sidewalk, where I caught it up in a sweatshirt and scooped it into my arms, cradling it against me. Trembling and terrified for only a moment, it soon began to purr in the warm dark safety, and peak its tiny head out to gaze at me curiously. So now, there is a tiny black kitten as part of my family, a brave, playful, cuddly little boy named Cu Gwyn.

And although the car ride was devoted mostly to politics and worry about the future, there was Cu Gwyn in his carrier in the backseat, curled up in his blankets, his ears twitching to the rising and falling of our voices. "Cu Gwyn" is Irish, and translates roughly as "white dog." In part, our choice in naming the kitten was ironic, stemming from a nerdy sense of humor and a suggestion by a friend who had just adopted a small white dog herself (whom she proposed to name Cath Dubh, or "black cat"). But the white hounds of Irish myth are also creatures of the Otherworld, guardians of the gateway between realms, hounds with glistening white fur and red ears, who hunt the great stag through the wild forests. And the stag is a solar symbol, an animal of the sun, of light and enlightenment. So I name our new kitten Cu Gwyn, in honor of that hope that we all hunt for our children (biological, adopted, or abandoned to hide beneath cars in the gutter), the little bit of light like stars in a night sky, like the little bit of white wisps of fur showing through the black. And in hopes that, like the man tossing starfish back into the ocean after a terrible night of storm, even if I cannot save the world... I can make a difference to this one.

Comfortable with Crazy: The Dis-ease of Trusting Truth

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"Certitude is seized by some minds, not because there is any philosophical justification for it, but because such minds have an emotional need for certitude."

- Robert Anton Wilson

I am not postmodern when it comes to my view of truth. I believe, as Fox Mulder did, that the Truth is, in fact, out there. Somewhere. I also tend to believe that "in here" and "out there" aren't as starkly distinguished as many people think, and so I spend a lot of time looking for truth within my own heart and mind, within my own body and bones and the concrete senses that used to inspire me to write teenage poetry about iced-over duck ponds and the spinning shadows cast by ceiling fans on hot summer afternoons. I trust in the world, in reality, and in my relationship with reality. That relationship, like most relationships, includes a lot of give and take and mutual influence, and it demands respect. The world is real. And, unlike that narcissist control-freak ex you've been avoiding for a year, I know full well that the world will go on without me. I believe in truth and reality, but I am not so arrogant as to think that I know them definitively.

So when I read a post like the one written recently by Sean Carroll (my cherished punching-bag stand-in for Scientific Atheist Fundamentalists everywhere), I find it hard to work myself into a sympathetic state of outrage and disgust over the ignorance of Creationists and their grabs for intellectual legitimacy in the media. Truth will work its own way out. You might say I have a kind of evolutionary approach to truth, in fact. A "natural selection" of ideas, in which clearly false or ultimately unsustainable, unsupported notions of pure fantasy will collapse under their own weight and reality will, once again, reassert itself. It always has. The world does not need us to believe in it in order to exist (though our belief in the world may be necessary if we are to go on existing, or living in any meaningful way).

Carroll divides the world into two kinds of people: Sensible People (who can be either friends, or worthy opponents in debate), and Crazy People (who are, at best, embarrassing allies, and at worst, crackpots). The Crazy People, Carroll suggests, should never be given even the appearance of legitimacy or credibility, should not be engaged with in debate. (One wonders why, then, he even bothers to keep a blog.) They can occasionally be mocked, in moderation, as a natural and healthy outlet for the frustrations of Sensible People, but that's as much attention as they deserve. In short, Crazy People should be isolated. Kept away from us (it's always an "us") Sensible People. And this attitude works well, if you believe that insanity and sensibility are absolute and exclusive characteristics. If you believe that truth and reality rely on the relative sanity of their believers for their meaning and value, then this perspective is just fine.

The problem with the view that Some People Are Just Crazy, of course, is its corollary, Those People Aren't Us. The certainty that Sensible People have the monopoly on truth, that they always know what's really going on around here and can safely make decisions not only for themselves but for the Crazy People, without input from the latter... that kind of certainty gets us into trouble. Trouble like the holocaust and global warming. That kind of certainty obscures all kinds of old habits--habits steeped in denial and disconnection, habits with their own special kind of insanity--habits that plenty of Sensible People stick to even despite all scientific evidence that a lifestyle of consumption is fatally unsustainable, despite all appeals to the bravery of compassion and loving kindness for fellow beings.

Last week, a man walked into a fitness club in my city and opened fire. Four women were killed and eight more badly wounded before the man, desperate, lonely and steady-eyed, turned the gun on himself. In his blog--in which he'd written detailed plans for the event and recorded his deepening frustrations at being unable to connect with women despite following lots of dating advice--he wrote that his pastor had thoroughly convinced him that "you can commit mass murder then still go to heaven."

Reality reasserts itself. Sometimes in painful, devastating ways. There is chaos in this beautiful world. The question is, how do we respond?

Some of us respond by locking down, by devoting ourselves all the more rigidly and strenuously to the certainty of our sensibleness and the danger of others' lack of sense. When we find ourselves confronted with sorrow, stress and insecurity, we tighten our grips and we try to increase our control of the situation. With the world divided into Sensible People and Crazy People, salvation can only come from the Sensible ones--they shoulder all the responsibility, they must carry that weight all on their own. When things go wrong, the Sensible People step in to fix it, to fix the mistakes others have made, to fix those Others, too, if they can.

This is the disease of Truth, of the one right way. This is why people like Carroll spend much of their time trying to control who gets to speak, why they expend energy censoring and shutting down debate when it doesn't seem to play in the favor of what is true and correct. And it's why the people they're trying to shut up--the Crazies, the fundamentalists and creationists and right-wingers--do the very same thing. Carroll would probably say the fundamentalists try to monopolize or shut down debate because they know, deep down, that in honest, open debate they would lose. But why should truth--the really real Truth--need such fanatic defenders as Carroll? Why isolate the Crazies? Isn't truth strong enough to withstand their insanity, maybe even rub off on them a little with time and exposure? It's almost as though Carroll is just a bit scared--maybe, way deep down--that Craziness rubs off, that Sensibility isn't as impenetrable a stronghold as he'd like.

What is the definition of "crazy" after all? How do we determine who is nuts and who isn't? Society has traditionally defined insanity as the condition of being unable to function adequately in the world--to feed ourselves, clothe ourselves, relate to others, do the simple things necessary for survival. And yet billions of religious individuals the world over, even including quite a few creationists, continue to eat just fine, raise children, hold down jobs. So what if they believe the universe was made whole-cloth six thousand years ago? They're quite likely wrong, of course, and holding a wrong belief may sometimes be a symptom of some underlying problem, or a cause for any number of unraveling negative consequences. But being wrong about the world is not, in itself, insane. Especially when those trying to correct you so clearly hate and fear you, and so can hardly be expected to have your best interests in mind.

The world, I have found, continues to exist regardless of my sanity. I have gone through times of depression and suicidal contemplations, times when neuroses and anxieties threatened to overwhelm me. I have had moments of profound clarity and connection, too, when I glimpse shifting patterns that seem to ease my way. Yet the world persists, in its messy beauty, giving birth to dancing stars while others die to dust. Almost as though my sanity didn't matter one way or another. This is the dis-ease of truth: the essential discomfort of knowing that your own strivings to live ethically, peacefully and rationally do not guarantee a safe and rational world to live in, and the humility of learning that your own missteps into irrationality and senselessness cannot overthrow the basic functionality and goodness of the world.

It is also an immense comfort. Knowing that we each have chaos and craziness within ourselves frees us from our need to control others with such a tight grip, it gives us permission to relax and reconnect for a moment, to give the larger wisdom of the world a chance to lift us clear of the fray. Indeed, there may be times when the Sensible People are marching calmly and rationally towards destruction, when we need to seek the chaos and creativity of our deep selves. Sometimes, doing what is good and ethical may seem a bit crazy, may seem futile or pointless; sometimes the way through a bad situation is obscure and beyond reasoning. Craziness offers us the gift of intuitive, creative engagement, fluidity and flexibility. It opens up our crazy pink hearts to tenderness and sorrow and allows these things to run their course without channeling them into systems of tension and pressure and stress.

This past Saturday, one of my best friends got married. The wedding was beautiful, a simple and hastily-planned ceremony and reception nestled among the sheltering maple trees and holly bushes of her new mother-in-law's backyard. Paper lanterns hung suspended among baskets of flowers and twinkling strings of lights twined the dark branches where fireflies, too, drifted lazily in the summer night heat. As the ceremony began, a few drops of rain began to fall. Watching my friend's lovely upturned face--her eyes shining with joy and tears--I remembered the murders from a few days earlier, I thought of the unwieldy institutions of consumption, denial and repression pervasive in our culture that can sometimes make us feel alienated and alone, I thought of how both the bride and groom had divorced parents and how half of all marriages these days end that way... I thought, you'd have to be crazy to want to get married, to believe in happily-ever-after and lifelong love. And my heart filled with happiness and gratitude.

Later, my boyfriend and I sat together at one of the tables left empty by everyone else who had sought shelter from the rain under the large white canopy. He'd forgotten his dress shoes and wore sandals with his slacks, and a purple tie that matched my dress. I sipped from the half-dozen abandoned champaign glasses, by now watered down by the weather, each reflecting the candlelight in a million different glimmerings of raindrops along their smooth curves and spiraling stems. Rain speckled our warm shoulders and smudged our eyeglasses, and we laughed each time the elderly usher came over to us, smiling kindly and almost knowingly, offering us wine, fruit and cake. Then, we would bend our heads together, my beloved and I, and murmur crazy words of gratitude and praise--for the night, for each other, for the lovely newly-wedded couple, for the children tottering around among the folding chairs, for the minister and his wife dancing slowly in the grass in front of the DJ's table... for all the craziness and love in the lovely, crazy world.

Finding Your Center: A Meditation on Movement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.