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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunrise on an Autumn Morning

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Keeping the Days: Meditation in Autumnal Woods

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On a beautiful autumn day just before Samhain, I headed deep into the woods that border our neighborhood
for some meditation among the trees, rocks, wind and sunlight.




Music by Pamela Bruner, "The Surrender" from Circle of the Soul

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

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

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

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

Memorial Day, Motherland and Blood Sacrifice

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

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

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.

The April Fool

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I was waiting for the right time to share this, but today is such an amazingly beautiful day — warm and sunny here outside Phipps Conservatory, with the miniature daffodils in bloom and a single red tulip already spilling open among the green beds, and inside the agave plant in the cactus room (Jeff's favorite room in the Conservatory) is in bloom for the first and only time its whole life, sending up a flower-topped stalk forty feet into the air, so high they've had to remove a pane of glass from the greenhouse ceiling... aw, hell, I decided, I'll just blurt it out! Jeff and I are getting married!

In fact, we're getting married next month! I know, I know, you Pagans out there might point out that traditionally Beltane (or May Day) was considered a day of ill-omen on which to be married, associated as it is with rather more ephemeral and (gasp!) even illicit love affairs and heady-passionate tumbles in the dewy grasses. But you know... we're tired of waiting! For the past week, Jeff's youngest daughter, age five, talked about little more than her mother's up-coming June wedding to her next husband, and how pretty and expensive the dresses would be, and dropping incredibly casual hints to us, such as, "When are you and Daddy going to get married? You love each other enough, don't you?"

I guess Jeff took his daughter's hints to heart, because this morning I rolled groggily out of bed to find him already downstairs, preparing a luscious raw vegan breakfast (complete with a few lit tealights blessed by my Kildare-flame candle and a few twigs of blooming, bright yellow forsythia from the backyard in an adorably tiny glass vase on the table) and, before I was even fully awake, he was down on one knee. To be fair, he's spent a lot of time on his knees lately, having broken his foot about a month ago and finding crawling around the house easier than using the too-short crutches to hobble around on (he's gotten to know the cat better this way, too)... but this time it was, you know, the big Down On One Knee, the real deal. Apparently, he'd been saving up for a ring for the past month or so, but he's always been terrible at keeping secrets and, anyway, neither of us knew my ring size. So as of this morning, I wear proudly on my finger the white, ratcheted band of one of those plastic ring sizers they send you free in the mail.

And after enjoying a delicious berry breakfast, we got to talking about what comes next, and well, we started to wonder... why wait? We can hop down to the County Register or whoever and get a marriage license and, after a quick informal ceremony, be done with the whole thing. None of this big white dress and half a dozen bridesmaids and $500 wedding cake nonsense. Anyway, we're Pagans, which means we can chuck half the wedding traditions right out the window to begin with as being stuck in an anti-feminist and archaic form of purity-obsessed Christianity.

Can we plan a wedding in a month? Who knows! But one thing we can be sure of is that come Beltane, we'll be on our way to husband-and-wife-hood regardless of whether the florist can scrounge up enough calla lilies or the photographer knows how to highlight our new matching hubby-and-wifey tattoos (I'm thinking a single tiger lily in a heart with each other's names emblazoned across, maybe on the bicep, or the forearm?).

And the best part is, for only $15,000 or so venue fee, we can hold the ceremony in Phipps Conservatory itself, among the blossoms and foliage we have come to love so well! It's a dream come true! But one thing's for sure: April is bound to be a crazy month for two fools in love!

My First Pagan Festival: Doing Paganism

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The world is gray and white and shades of brown, and every inch of me is screaming for spring, restless and aching and urging me to quit, to give it all up, to leave my stupid job and drive south, to keep driving until snow and dark are left behind, to keep driving and burning and thrashing through night until the sun comes up and I'm surrounded by palm trees and blue skies and wide, warm oceans rocking, rocking. But of course, I can't. So instead, I light a homemade candle in a dented, old tin can. I set it out on the front stoop, nestled in the three inches of snow, and I let it burn. And evening settles and the snow continues to drift down from low clouds to cover everything — but that single wild flame is still clawing its way up out of that tin can, bright against the dull, wet brick, melting a tiny circle from around its hot metal sides. Whenever I begin to feel trapped and unfocused, I step outside and spend a moment squinting through the white-darkening cold that falls and bites against my skin, squinting at that candle, and feeling a little bit of triumph.

And I think of my cat, born in late September and abandoned in the gutter, seeking shelter under our car where we found him and brought him home as a tiny, half-starved stray. For him, the world has only ever gotten colder, and darker. I cuddle him in my arms as we look out the window together, and I tell him, "It will get green again — greener than you know. It will be so green, so warm and colorful and lush, and there will be birds for you to watch, and bugs to chase. You have no idea, kitty! You've never known a spring!" He just blinks at me with his cat eyes, and I have to put him down and slip on my shoes and step outside again to look at the candle, burning like a beacon, and tell myself, yes, it will come... it will...

It's been slightly more than a week since I attended the Feast of Lights, and oddly enough, all those ideas and topics jostling around in my head, vying for a good airing, have settled back down into relative calm, smothered by the snow. Which may be an interesting observation in itself: on my own, my spiritual life is about doing Paganism, engaging in embodied spiritual living; around other Pagans (at least in large group settings such as at a festival), my spiritual life becomes about being Pagan, and what exactly that means.

This is not entirely a bad thing, really. One thing I noticed immediately, despite my worries about being too "normal" (in my plain navy-blue long-sleeved shirt and sensible shoes) was that I felt comfortable, at ease and intensely interested in everything going on. These talks about interfaith work and establishing workable definitions that remain inclusive without becoming so vague as to be useless, these discussions of "mainstreaming Paganism" and "Paganizing the mainstream" and what such processes might mean... they were always too short for the subjects they wanted to explore, and they left the voices in my head yammering to have their say, to speak to old assumptions about the nature of community, and language, and archetypes, and political upheaval.

But what impressed me most was the first session that Jeff and I attended that Friday evening, a round-table discussion on sustainable living. Just a few of us in the room, skipping immediately to the question of work, to questions of activity and efficacy, sharing stories about what we did and why. No need to qualify or cite years of expertise, or quibble over definitions. We were not merely Pagans mulling over notions of self-identity, we were more than that, somehow, simply by allowing ourselves to be just folks, trying to live better. Yet we were Pagans, too, no merit badges required. After brief introductions, one moderator led us in a moment of quiet breathing and centering — and for the first time, I knew what it felt like to be a part of a community where no one looked askance at such a suggestion or rolled their eyes or shifted uncomfortably. The same was true when, after an intense discussion of sustainability options (which left me singing the praises of poverty and fungi, bless them both), we circled around a tight cluster of chairs, humming a simple tune I cannot now remember, and then settled down to breathe, hold hands and light that flame within each of us that would guide us in our choices. Nothing fancy, no pretensions — we were practicing the simple: breath, intention, togetherness and flame.

And, as appropriate to a weekend of beginnings and bookends it seems, the final session we attended was equally impressive, an amazing concert and sing-along led by the group Northern Harmony, whose eerie, soaring and guttural vocals sent shivers slipping up and down my spine as they set my soul to wandering. The experience was intense, and set me in mind of the other large-scale festival I have attended with some regularity for the past fifteen years: the Dodge Poetry Festival.

At the Dodge Poetry Festival, there were some panel discussions about the craft of poetry, what it means to be a poet, what the life of a poet is like; and there were some workshops on technique, exercises to experiment with and new approaches to try. But by and large, what makes up the Dodge Festival is folks doing poetry, getting up there on stage and giving voice and life to their work, performing their art in all its power and polished form. The debates about what counts as "real poetry" are left in the dust of this kind of living engagement with the work, and you always know that "something" is there, that poetry is alive and well, when it moves you to dancing, laughing, sighing and silence.

This is what I want from Paganism, and from Pagan festivals: this doing and being with each other, without constant navel-gazing and comparing notes. Knowing ourselves is essential, of course, and it was immensely satisfying to sit and listen to ideas being bandied and concerns being raised. But I also want that community of doing, so that I am not always doing the doing alone. I want to be able to set aside our differences long enough to do the work together, to practice and share that engagement, even if we each go home with our own impressions and interpretations of what just happened. I want our rituals to be full of songs that send shivers down my spine, not just the latest drumming technique imperfectly practiced. I want little candles lit and flickering despite the falling snow outside. And I know it will take a long time to get there, and there is much work to be done in the meantime, each on his or her own. But for now the questions of self- and community-identity that had been stirred up in the muddy waters of last week have all but faded away again, and what I want is to ground myself again in practice, in doing my Druidry as deeply as I can. So that when the opportunity comes to practice with others, I can do my part to make the whole thing move.

My First Pagan Festival: Orion Foxwood, Charisma and Self-Esteem

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Admittedly, I didn't recognize most of the names listed as presenters at EarthSpirit's Feast of Lights, but then I am more widely read in Druidry than in Paganism more generally, and my tastes tend towards the academic and non-Pagan in any case. But one person I was looking forward to seeing at the festival was Orion Foxwood, whose books (Tree of Enchantment and The Feary Teachings) had left me feeling intrigued but a bit perplexed. It was hard to put my finger on exactly why his writings weren't "clicking" for me, but certainly his emphasis on the Ancestors as the gateway to Faery Seership had left me feeling if not intimidated then at least unsure about how to step into the process.^[1] And so I was hoping that being able to attend at least one of Orion's talks in person might perhaps give me some insight into his teachings, knowing the Tree by its fruits, so to speak.

It seems that, despite my preliminary investigations into Faery Seership, reading through Orion's two books and even getting in touch with folks who had attended workshops with him or worked with him in the past, at no point did anyone bother to mention that he was, well, flamboyantly gay. Though in retrospect, I suppose describing him as "a wonderful man" might have been a polite hint. And that he is: quite wonderful, an energetic and engaging person who is quick to laugh and eager to compliment, and who obviously loves his work a great deal. Still, attending his talk "Lifting the Spelle of Forgetfulness" (which did not include any reminder, sadly, on how to spell "spell"), I was struck by just how much his homosexuality, blended with his Appalachian accent and two-toned-goatee, cleaned-up hippie look, became part of his teaching not just in style but in substance. He careened through his talk with a certain enthusiastic charisma that rested in part on his ability to turn at once from serious spiritual insight to distracted frivolity at the briefest mention of sushi or the mere suggestion of a bad pun on "faery wife."

Having read two books full of Rivers of Blood, ancient wounds needing redemption, and beings of all kinds of mischievous, startling, mystical and intimidating natures, I suppose I was expecting someone a bit... heavier, more serious, more reticent, more grounded in the dark earth. Instead, Orion was dazzling, almost dizzying (and practically the incarnation of coffee). And suddenly those things I read in his books didn't seem so strange or difficult, the way he talked about them. His words might speak, as though in passing, of wading through rivers of blood lapping up to your knees, but his charisma told you it was all a metaphor, that it was, in fact, all about you. You are a wonderful person, a lovable person, and you have Sacredness in you. Redemption? You can do it, you can redeem all those past generations; in fact, that's why you're here, and you're here because you're wonderful, and you are wonderful simply by dint of existing.

And I'm not saying there isn't truth in this, that there isn't real soul-deep insight in his quick quips about finding one's path or facing one's shadow. But I was interested in Faery Seership because (and this is me admitting something that might be a bit embarrassing) I was interested in faeries, not because I needed a boost to my self-esteem. The message that we are all, deep down, worthy and beautiful people is an important message. But it's not one that I particularly need to hear, at least not anymore. And maybe in some ways this just means that I have done the work of centering and grounding myself, walking into the shadows and coming out whole, even if I did not undertake that work using the metaphors and practices of Faery Seership. But, as Cat pointed out a few times during our visit, there comes a point after which being "healed" is not enough, because if that's all your spirituality has to offer then either you'll soon lose interest, or you'll soon discover that you're always feeling broken and wounded and in need of healing.^[2]

All of these reflections lead me to something about the role of charisma in the Pagan community, but I'm not quite sure what precisely that is. I'm reminded of the book I'm currently reading, The Serpent and the Goddess by Mary Condren, in which she speaks of patriarchal religious institutions passing on through ordination into the priesthood the kind of spiritual leadership and power that individuals once had to earn on their own through charisma, i.e. being valuable to the community. Wikipedia has this to say about charisma: it is kind of divine or divinely-inspired gift,

a trait found in persons whose personalities are characterized by a personal charm and magnetism (attractiveness), along with innate and powerfully sophisticated abilities of interpersonal communication and persuasion. One who is charismatic is said to be capable of using their personal being, rather than just speech or logic alone, to interface with other human beings in a personal and direct manner, and effectively communicate an argument or concept to them.

Now if charisma is a kind of living or embodied communication that moves beyond the merely rational (and is not, presumably, merely charming rhetoric), then I'm all for it, and I can understand why a person of charisma might serve the needs of a community engaged in the process of finding a new, trans-/nonrational way of leading an embodied and earth-centered spiritual life. If we think of charisma in this way, then perhaps Orion actually is speaking to those needs that many in the Pagan community find to be most vital and pressing (there were an awful lot of people there who were earnestly taking notes). Walking a new and often misunderstood path, it's not surprising that plenty of us suffer from even more uncertainty about our worthiness than does the general population (which is itself riddled with low self-esteem and fear drummed up by advertisers hoping to create insecure and gullible consumers). But now I'm just indulging in a bit of couch-psychology.

One last observation on Orion's talk, which would become a running theme throughout the festival: group-led ritual, discussion and presentation is, all charisma aside, an art form in itself. It can be poorly done. And while Orion's talk was engaging enough, the group exercises in breath and energy-work that he led us through at the end of the workshop left me feeling like I'd been forced to stand too close to someone with particularly bad halitosis. Imagine standing in a room with twenty to thirty other people, mostly strangers, who are being instructed to "breathe out all of your tension and anxiety" and breathe in fountains of intense energy from the sun above and the deep earth below. All that ickiness and all those issues, vented into the space between bodies being charged up with heat and energy: the effect was like baking rotting garbage in an oven. Rather than leaving me feeling refreshed with a balanced sense of center, it gave me the overwhelming urge to go bury my face in snow and breathe the fresh, clean, frigid air outdoors (I had to settle for a cup of cold water). So... note to future self (and the selves reading along): I wouldn't recommend that kind of work except in grounded, small-group settings.

^[1] My family life has been pretty well defined by an absence of ancestors, to no apparent detriment, my mother's side of the family having basically cut off contact with us after I was born and my father's parents (both now dead) having struggled with alcoholism and mental illness all their lives. Orion's word of caution against inviting unhealthy presences into our lives seemed reason enough not to pursue reconnecting with these various patterns of dysfunctional relationship, most of which I feel I have fairly well come to terms with in my own way. Plus, I'm not really a gregarious people-person even with the living.
^[2] I suspect that this is why all the really interesting Christian mystics talk not so much about salvation, but about love. Love is, after all, an on-going process and practice that you can't ever really outgrow. Salvation without love is like a revolution without dancing.

My First Pagan Festival: Gathering Thoughts in the Storm

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I am left with so much to process and ponder after this past weekend when Jeff and I, invited by Cat Chapin-Bishop and her husband Peter Bishop (of Quaker Pagan Reflections), attended the Feast of Lights festival hosted annually by EarthSpirit. I fear this blog is about to devolve into just so much stream-of-consciousness journal rambling despite my best efforts to write with some coherence and perspective; and yet, these are thoughts I want to capture before they slip away into the dark waters of memory. Meanwhile, the snow is coming down thick and sugary outside, drifting and piling up on top of the two feet that we found blanketing our lovely city upon return, and I can already feel the cabin fever of February setting in as usual, making me anxious with a thousand intentions and scheming (and how could I be hungry again when I just had lunch?). So bear with me.

Before braving this post, I wrote a ridiculously long and dull account of the Sequence of Events™ for my personal journal, to help organize my thoughts and give me some sense of having already begun (a blank page at this point being the most intimidating thing). But it occurs to me that, in my account of the weekend, I left out one telling detail about my visit with my brother for the two days before. Thursday night, as Jeff and I settled down to sleep on the first of what would become several futons over the next few days, I thought about The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe that the three of us (plus my brother's two kittens) had just finished watching. The story is a familiar one, though the film just is not as impressive or old-feeling as Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings; instead, it has a freshly minted, shiny and clean quality to it, so that it's hard to imagine the "deep magic" that calls for Aslan's life being much older than some of my newer pairs of shoes. Yet the story of sacrifice and renewal, the humiliation and glorious return, that Aslan enacts in the film are moving and beautiful, and not just because he is a beautiful, sun-drenched and shining animal in his own right (though, as they always remind us, he is not a tame lion).

So as I drifted off to sleep, here I was wondering once again if, below these layers of freshly-minted, shiny and clean beauties and joys of Paganism, there wasn't perhaps still something old and familiar in me that smacked of Christianity, dirty and ugly and sad and so heart-piercingly sublime. I long for something ancient and deep-down earthy as soil and stone, yet there is so much in modern Paganism that glimmers and jangles of a New Age, and from the stories I've heard about Pagan festivals, I was braced for the silly and the embarrassingly over-eager. Yet later, as we began our drive north the following morning, I sat with the story of Jesus as the Only Way, and thinking about the institutions of patriarchy and politics that have grown up around what was really a very simple idea. And it seemed that my rational mind couldn't really believe in such things anymore, that what in C.S. Lewis's enchanted imagination had been old and beautiful and true was, in reality, so much rot and shabby props for greedy, grizzled men in funny hats, and that while this was not the heart of Christianity by a long shot, I knew full well that only Mama Earth can pull off "ancient" with any kind of grace. When we human animals cling too long to something, we get fearful and gross, which is worse, certainly, than being too new and bouncy to have had a chance to deepen. Though sometimes, it feels, not by much.

So this was the state of mind I was in as we picked our way across the intervening states, climbing northward towards Jeff's old town where not a year ago he had been living and longing with his big, gooey heart for some ridiculous young woman in Pittsburgh. Though only half-aware of it, there was trepidation as well as excitement in my thoughts about the coming weekend. I had no expectations of "coming home," and perhaps the truth was closer to this: that I was going to this festival not so much to participate, but to observe, to watch what "Pagans in their natural habitat" were like, what they did and how, and to discover how I maybe one day could say something meaningful to them, if not ever become completely at home as an unabashed and un-conflicted Pagan of my own.

I won't tell you the long story of how I was wrong. But I was. And happily. By the end of the Feast of Lights, I knew that here was a community of folks just as conflicted and uncertain and in love with the possibilities of deepening as I was. And while I did not feel that sense of "coming home" so often described, I was finally able to relinquish the unacknowledged worry that being Pagan would ask me to leave the home in Spirit that I have already begun to build.

Looking back, the story of this weekend is bookended by two appropriate events. The first, this visit with my brother in the brightly-lit basement apartment he only moved into a month ago, still so new a home that the bathroom cabinets are all mostly empty and the shelves only sparsely filled. And the second, a trip on our last night in Massachusetts to see the old farmhouse owned by Jeff's family, so rundown and filled with memories that every spare inch of space is cluttered and his great grandmother's ashes are buried under the front stoop, while behind the house there stretch forty acres of old forest that no human has walked in a hundred years. The new, and the old, and the ancient of the Earth. Things are moving, things are coalescing, coming together. I won't bother to articulate them now, but I want to know that, years from now, I will remember.

Meanwhile, I'll jot down a few more posts focusing on particular thoughts and observations about the festival itself. I won't write about them in chronological order because, well, that's just not good story telling this time around. I think, once I've finished, I'll revisit this post and include a list for easy linking and referencing. Meanwhile, stay tuned, I'm sure to be saying some controversial things in the posts to come.

Song, Three Realms and a Feast of Lights

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My partner, Jeff, and I are in Massachusetts this week to visit friends and attend Feast of Lights, which will be my very first Pagan festival! I'll have updates and thoughts when I return, but for now, please check out the following recent publications, and enjoy!

This month's Song of a Daily Druid column over at PaganPages.org features thoughts on Imbolc and how we can ride our frustration and cabin fever this coming month by "priming the pump" with simple daily practice and a sense of sardonic humor:

What we conceived on the darkest night, now begins to quicken within us, and we feel the inner pangs and hungers stirred by this change. Our bodies begin to awaken a little more, yearning to be outside despite the need for heavy coats and thick gloves. Mornings seem to come sooner, with a tantalizing freshness despite the overcast gray skies and the browns of mud and matted grass beneath the soggy snow. Though February begins with a burst of eager energy ready to delve into the spring season, true warmth remains a long way off.

Also, the spring issue of Sky Earth Sea is out and waiting! Here's a bit from editor Paige Varner about the SES over the past year and the future of the journal:

Winter rains have turned the star wheel,
Springtime is upon us.

So begins one verse in Chant for the Seasons by Rev. Mark Belletini. This year in the Atlanta area, we have most definitely felt the winter rains – far more than in a typical year for us. And yet, I am having trouble accepting that springtime is, indeed upon us. As I write, Imbolc is a mere week away. This Imbolc marks a full turn around the wheel for Sky, Earth, Sea: A Journal of Practical Spirituality. As I reflect on the past year, and my own journey with this journal, I realize just how much my own spiritual practice has been influenced by the materials that our wonderful writers, poets, and artists have submitted. Last Spring’s “Zen Like an Oak” by James Donaldson encouraged me to look at a natural area with which I was already familiar (Georgia’s Stone Mountain) through fresh eyes. In the summer, Anna Adesanya’s photos in “Being Still” fed my need for beauty, and her accompanying article helped me look at my own fears around creative processes. Poetry from the Fall issue still lingers in my mind. And in the months since our Winter issue, Alison Shaffer’s “Peace of the Three Realms” meditation has become a daily staple in my own practice. I can already feel myself being affected by this issue, as well. Jeff Lilly’s “On Fear” has given me much to ponder about my own fears and relationships. Hannah Thompson’s poetry has given me a fresh and moving perspective on community and ceremonial work. Alison Shaffer’s review of Susan Greenwood’s The Anthropology of Magic not only encourages me to check out the book, but stands alone as a valuable commentary on practicing magic. Truly, I have been enriched through working with this journal. May you continue to find here material that enriches, comforts, nourishes, and even challenges you on your own path.

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.)

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.

A Ha'penny Will Do: A Pagan Perspective on Christmas

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The noise of the internet is in my head today as I sit down to my computer. Already afternoon — where did the morning go? All fog and rain here in the hilly Steel City, and no snow yet this year except for that brief slushy mix drifting from the sky on Black Friday, as if in response to some pre-planned Xmas Shopping marketing ploy. December already, and the full moon, a full Fire Friend moon last night. Fire Friend, high cloud-webbed shining rock in the sky on the drive home, echoing the tasteful evergreen wreaths wrapped with strings of tiny star-like lights and topped with red bows on the windows of the house next door. I joked with Jeff about putting one of those cheap plastic candelabras in the downstairs window of his apartment. In a Jewish neighborhood that decks itself out in huge wooden lawn menorahs and fills the grocery store aisles with blue and silver Hanukkah decorations every year, would anybody even second guess which holy day we were celebrating?

Christmas is coming. Amidst the noise in my brain this afternoon, that song wends its way through. "Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat...." It's strange, but Christmas is one of those holidays that make me feel the most Pagan. Maybe it's all the greenery brought in from outside, the whole-hearted unabashed singing and celebrating and decorating, especially with the simple old-fashioned trimmings of ribbon and candles and holly and bits of shining tinsel. During the Christmas season, my parents' house itself becomes a kind of walk-in shrine to Yuletide Cheer, and I've inherited my fair share of holiday decorations that find themselves strewn about my apartment each year, a simple nativity scene still taking a privileged place atop the armoire in the living room. The green and red and ribbon and fire and shiny things, all this raging against the dying of the light, is all very Christmas-y to me, though. Alban Arthan, the solstice, remains distinctly quiet, reflective and dark, the new-born sun like a small, cold seed of potential light still to be planted, hidden away, unripe and unready. Yet it seems more obvious than ever that both of these are necessary, both moods relevant and revelatory each in their own ways.

This year, my decorations will be migrating over to Jeff's place where, for the first time, I will be sharing Christmas with children as a kind of parent-figure in my own right. Children who still don't know Santa Claus isn't real (despite the oldest being eleven and having only just found out the Tooth Fairy has been mommy all along). The "story" we're sticking to, in case this is the year they ask, is that Santa is real, because he is the spirit of generosity and gift-giving that we invite into our lives and into our hearts, to help guide us in choosing the perfect gift for our loved ones. It's the same story my parents explained to me the year I playfully, but knowingly, asked my father for Santa's phone number because I needed to call him and update my wish list, and my father in turn dutifully dictated our own home phone number as I dialed, a mischievous look on his face. And if this weren't also a bit of a lie — if we weren't more carefully guided by marketing and game-theory parenting — it would be a very nice story, a lot nicer than just acknowledging that we lie to our children every year. But I find that I can't be all too concerned with whether or not the kids believe in Santa Claus (though I worry sometimes that the longer their disillusionment takes, the more fundamentally disturbing it will be for them in the end). Instead, I have found myself ruminating on Christianity and the story of Christ, and how to share this with the children in a meaningful way as a Pagan "parent."

Honestly, I find that I'm having a bit of an identity crisis over the Christmas holiday this year. Not so much the kind that leaves me wondering who I am — I know who I am — but the kind where I find myself asking, "Who the f' are all of you, anyway?" Christmas is still the one time a year when I attend church with my family, though I no longer participate in the sacrament of Communion out of respect for the Catholic Church's own sense of community-identity boundaries and sacred mysteries. Every year, midnight on Christmas Eve (or, I guess technically, Christmas morning) finds me sitting meditatively in one of the long, polished-wooden pews of my old church, smiling familiarly at the faces I recognize, noting the muted creams, greens and golds of the church's Christmas decorations, neither gaudy nor solstice-seasonal, that always seemed so oddly out of touch with everything except the building's own particular sense of style.

Midnight Mass is presided over every year by a priest now well into his eighties, who is one of the wiser and kinder spiritual leaders I've known in my life, and who speaks gently and deliberately each prayer and blessing. Whereas once I thought his long pauses and slow pacing were signs of senility finally setting in, work with regular meditation in my private life has in recent years opened up these moments of quiet, in the darkest hour of the longest night, to reveal the spaciousness of absence and Mystery. From the warm lights and bustling family noises of a cheery home edged with expectation and excitement, each year we venture out into the windy darkness of winter midnight, starlight scattered across shorn-down fields rolling out to the horizon in all directions, to sit for a time in dimly-lit tranquility, singing old, familiar songs in keys nobody can comfortably reach. And when the wizened priest stands at the altar and recites the Proclamation of Christmas — "Today, the twenty-fifth day of the month of December, countless ages after the creation of the world..." — to the building crescendo of the organ piling chord upon chord, culminating in the announcement that Jesus is born, today, this day, in the present tense, while the organ shakes the building to its rafters, every year I feel that strange and knowing thrill. The thrill of mystery, where garish light-filled celebration collides with darkness and fragility and the silence of the rumbling, trembling pipes of music suddenly cutting out.

And I find myself wondering, this year especially, what does all this have to do with Christianity?

Now, I think many Christians would themselves say that this is it, this is really the heart of Christianity when all's said and done. This moment of creation and beauty and light within the gently howling darkness. Yet so many things get tacked on, added and amended, huge socio-political institutions growing up around simple, powerful truths, institutions that expect assent to certain formulae and doctrines, that draw conclusions about heaven, hell, salvation and revelation. I no longer believe the story of Jesus as exclusive spiritual truth, let alone as literal historical fact. Yet I believe in the story in a way that anchors it deeply in my bones, regardless of what religious community I belong to; I believe in the truths this story tells. I have not left those truths behind; they were in many ways the very thing that led me to Druidry, that left me dissatisfied with Christianity as an organized religion. These truths have never disappeared from my life, and yet I am as sure of them today — as sure of their mystery and power and gentleness and goodness — as I am sure that in every way that counts, I'm no longer a Christian. Not really.

But that leaves me with a question. Because the solstice season is a season of noisy celebration and fire-lighting and gift-giving, as much as it is a time of death and darkness and the suffering struggle of rebirth in the biting, barren cold. And the story of Christ being born is, all theology and doctrine aside, the story of the birth of the world, weak and squirming and covered in glop, the on-going singing of the World Song, ever-new and always renewing, today, this very day, in the present tense. So the question I'm left with is: how do I share this aspect of the solstice, Alban Arthan, with children never raised with a theology of god-become-man, not even familiar with the story, with the bizarre notion that Utter Godness is within each of us? And how do I tell them the story without getting bogged down with the language of doctrine and interfaith politics? Never mind that Santa Claus isn't real, how do I teach them the things that are?

Because one thing you can certainly say for Christians is, they've got focus. The birth of a sun-child on the winter solstice is all the more powerful when that babe of light is the unique Revelation of Spirit, the whole Divine shebang condensed down into this singular, fragile form. This is, in some ways, poetry heightened to the nth degree: not only the use of particulars to speak of universals, but the exclusive worshipful focus on a single Particular as the whole of the Universe. The Hindu bhakti yogic discipline of love and devotion to one particular deity has nothing on this. And the mild Pagan focus on Mabon, or Sol Invictus, or whatever other solar deity... well, feels a bit lacking in comparison, just another god among a whole slew of gods and goddesses to choose from, if you please. Besides which, the gods of Pagan polytheism sometimes feel so heroic and larger-than-life that the utter mystery of vulnerability and weakness gets left in the mythic-metaphorical dust.

Whereas, take Mary, whose only superpower was having not had sex yet. As the story goes, this young woman, living in poverty, sustained in her livelihood largely by family and community ties and betrothed to a man she loved deeply, is confronted by God — friggin' God, you guys — and given the choice to bear a holy son destined, after only a few short years on the planet, for degradation, suffering and death. Aside from the destiny of the child, to be an unmarried woman and pregnant at this time risked personal shame and community rejection, jeopardizing the future of her marriage and permanent ostracism from the social ties on which she depended. And the Universe itself basically asked her permission, this nobody, this fragile little human thing, and in full knowledge, knowing what risk she faced and the suffering it would bring, confronting the overwhelming injustice of it, and her own smallness and impotence in stopping it... she said yes. No goddess with nothing really to lose. Just an ordinary woman, who gave birth to a god as wrinkled and spongy and smelly as any infant.

There is something important in this, something that I wonder sometimes might be missing from today's Paganism still deepening and finding its sea-legs. There is, in the Christmas story, something about confronting the reality of darkness and suffering, not with shouting and singing and leaping bonfires in defiance, nor with acquiescence, silent obedience or willful denial... but with quiet, unflinching affirmation, the affirmation of empowerment, courage and strength, the life-giving, meaning-making affirmation of creation. A recent comment from a reader of this blog spoke of the "gentle respect" for suffering and difficulty that lurks sometimes in my writings here. For me, sorrow, loneliness and grief go hand-in-hand with joy, connection and love in this life we live together, in this song we all are singing. In a very real way, I could not devalue or deny these things without sacrificing the fullness and complexity of beauty and life, without substituting a shallower, simpler version of mere contentedness and safety in their place. This is a truth of my Druidry, my Paganism — the balance, the intricate interweaving of darkness and suffering with illumination and ecstasy. The liminal space between, within which nothing is precisely delineated and separate.

And so, this is the space I find myself in again as Christmas approaches. Wondering, wandering in a liminal space that is not precisely Pagan, nor exactly Christian. Asking myself how to teach children that realizing their own inner Santa Claus is infinitely more challenging than believing in some unlikely literal jolly-old-elf, and infinitely more rewarding. Asking myself where I belong, where we all belong, and how we belong to each other. Asking myself how I can tell the stories of my ancestors, pagan and Christian alike, to the children of my partner, who do not really share those ancestors with me, at least not by blood. What can I say that will be meaningful and relevant for them, that will share with them the "spirit of the season" that I have come to know and love and value? What will I say when they come singing, a penny for my thoughts?

Well, like the song says, if you haven't got a penny, maybe a ha'penny will do. And if you haven't got a ha'penny... may the gods bless you.

Why We Need Love and Gratitude Despite Chaos and War

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The world was spinning. Where was the law? There was the barricade. Who was it protecting from what? The city was run by a madman and his shadowy chums, so where was the law?

Coppers liked to say that people shouldn't take the law into their own hands, and they thought they knew what they meant. But they were thinking about peaceful times, and men who went around to sort out a neighbor with a club because his dog had crapped once too often on their doorstep. But at times like these, who did the law belong to? If it shouldn't be in the hands of the people, where the hell should it be? People who knew better? Then you got Winder and his pals, and how good was that?

What was supposed to happen next? Oh yes, he had a badge, but it wasn't his, not really... and he'd got orders, but they were the wrong ones... and he'd got enemies, for all the wrong reasons... and maybe there was no future. It didn't exist anymore. There was nothing real, no solid point on which to stand, just Sam Vimes where he had no right to be...

It was as if his body, trying to devote as many resources as possible to untangling the spinning thoughts, was drawing those resources from the rest of Vimes. His vision darkened, his knees felt weak.

There was nothing but bewildered despair.

And a lot of explosions.

~~~

There were a lot of explosions. The firecrackers bounced all over the street. Tambourines thudded, a horn blared a chord unknown in nature, and a line of monks danced and danced and twirled around the corner, all chanting at the top of their voices.

Vimes, sagging to his knees, was aware of dozens of sandaled feet gyrating past, and grubby robes flying. Rust was yelling something at the dancers who grinned and waved their hands in the air.

Something square and silvery landed in the dirt.

And the monks were gone, dancing into an alleyway, yelling and spinning and banging their gongs...

Vimes reached down and picked up the silver rectangle.

He stared at the thing in his hand. It was a cigar case, slim and slightly curved.

He fumbled it open and read: To Sam with love from your Sybil.

The world moved. Vimes still felt like a drifting ship. But at the end of the tether there was now the tug of the anchor, pulling the ship around so that it faced the current.

- from Terry Pratchett's Night Watch

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.

Writing the Right Rite: Lessons of Experience

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Although I've been slowly cultivating a personal practice of meditation and ritual as a solitary Druid for several years now, until last week I'd only ever participated in exactly one Pagan group rite — and then, not even as a Pagan myself, but as an academic, observing and collecting data via field research. But last week, in honor of the founding of Sycamore Circle, Jeff and I celebrated our first "group" ritual — an intimate Samhain rite in the backyard.

I'd never written a group ritual before; in fact, I'd never really bothered to write down the rituals I usually did for holy days and other magical work. For the most part, I utilized the basic outline provided by AODA to open the grove — declaring peace to the four quarters, welcoming the energies of the four directions, and reciting the Gorsedd Prayer (also called the "Bond of Druids") — performing the opening from memory and then proceeding to improvise whatever central work I'd intended, often lighting candles and reading poetry, followed by personal meditation and pouring libations. I disliked the AODA's closing of the ritual; the mythological references to Arthur and Excalibur didn't speak very strongly to me, and I found the closing unbalanced and too abrupt, without the appropriate thanking of the directional energies or the necessary time needed to ground back into ordinary mundane consciousness. So eventually, I began supplementing the AODA outline, adding a circle casting with the three elements (calas, gwyar and nwyfre), and repeating, in reverse, a simplified form of the invocations at the close of each ritual. Still, the core substance of each rite, between these two formal bookends of movement and speech, remained fairly quiet and internal. No elaborate gestures, prayers or chants, and only occasionally some overt use of tools to charge or direct energy. For the most part, my personal rituals were a way of creating a nemeton, or spiritual sanctuary, that was within the physical world but also set apart from mundane space-time, a consecrated place in which I could sit in meditation and do inner work with heightened psychological and spiritual potency.

This worked well for me as a basis for private ritual activity, but because so much of the activity was internal and unspoken, I knew it wouldn't serve for group work. Group ritual must, it seems to me, be about acting out the spiritual life together in community, particularly in a way that is aesthetic and powerful. Guided meditations might play some role, to heighten emotional connection and focus attention, but the primary activity of group ritual must be external, visible for all participants to witness together — like a play, dance or musical performance. I knew it would be a challenge to write out as physical acts the kind of meditative work that I usually engaged with in solitary rites. Where I might effectively imagine myself at once in a beautiful inner grove standing before a flowing stream or a flickering bonfire, now I would have to find ways to represent and invoke these experiences with physical objects immediately present in the real, external circle — objects with which all participants could safely interact in ways that were still moving and meaningful. A bowl of water had to become more than just a bowl of water; an altar had to be a place of aesthetic focus and not just a storage place for tools.

It took me about a week and a half to come up with and write out the small group Samhain ritual that Jeff and I ended up performing. The writing itself was an intense experience. There were times when I found myself inadvertently composing in rhyming couplets or stumbling upon phrases that seemed absolutely lovely, simple and satisfyingly concise. Other times, I went back to the same brief prayers and chants over and over, rearranging single words or copy-pasting whole parts of the rite into different orders, struggling to realize some sense of aesthetic balance. Eventually, the rite as a whole began to come into focus; when I could not remove or revise anything more without some adverse effect to the flow and sense of balance, I knew I was finally finished. For a time, I was quite honestly a bit enamored with the ritual I had composed on paper. I would open the file at random to read through it during the day, tweaking or just turning the words over in my mind and imagining the actions and gestures of the presiding priest or priestess. I set about organizing the main roles into a form that could be effectively performed by only two people, and then sent it along to Jeff to begin memorizing.

Jeff has very little experience with writing and performing ritual. The word "none" comes to mind, actually, although this isn't strictly true as he has attended a few small rituals with Hopman's Order of White Oak. Still, as he himself admitted, few rituals had really moved him or meant much to him, perhaps because he was usually more distracted with herding and helping children through the rites. I had not anticipated the effect lack of experience would have on our performance; I thought to myself, well, all the "stage directions" are right there in the script, and the chants are easy enough to memorize with a bit of practice. But on the day that we'd planned to hold the rite, Jeff became increasingly nervous, struggling to remember the order of the prayers, chants and blessings, and lacking the confidence to improvise those invocations and actions he could not remember. I began to realize that, without a solid understanding of the theory behind the rite, it could all seem kind of random and befuddling. I worked to coach him during the last few hours before we began, explaining some of the structure and printing out two decorative scrolls for invocations to Cernunnos and the four directions. In the end, his nervousness and my own feeling of uncertainty kept both of us distracted from really experiencing the ritual as powerfully as I had hoped.

Of course, I failed to anticipate other things as well. In the past, I had performed most of my personal rites indoors, and what few outdoor rituals I'd engaged in had been informal and simple, rarely involving more than a bit of lit incense or, maybe, a candle held close during sitting meditation. Now blessed with a backyard and understanding neighbors, I was excited to be able to perform a formal outdoor rite for the first time. I eagerly incorporated the sprinkling of herbs and water to trace a literal circle upon the ground (already outlined in tiny pumpkins and gourds) to open the grove, and during the one part of the rite I included a dramatic lighting of a cauldron fire in the center of the altar, to symbolize the fire of life springing up and persisting through the dark winter days. What I hadn't anticipated... was wind. It didn't even feel all that windy that night. But, while setting up the altar and decorating it with pressed leaves the children and I had collected earlier that week, the breeze soon swept every single one to the ground, leaving the altar sadly bare. Later, as I sprinkled water around the circle, my fingers quickly became numb, and then painful, with the cold damp.

And best of all — the cauldron refused to light. At first. After Jeff had broken circle to slip inside for matches (after the lighter clicked and clicked without a spark to catch), it took five attempts before the rubbing alcohol in the tiny cauldron finally suffused with a hot blue flame that spread and anchored itself firmly in the dark iron pot. But even then — there was still the wind. And though I'd had practice burning alcohol in this same cauldron before, never had I stood on a windy night, watching the flames leaping dangerously sideways towards the bowl of dried herbs and the mortar full of ground incense, expecting at any moment for the whole thing to go up in flames. Jeff and I stood "in quiet meditation," as the script read, waiting for the flames to eventually die down as a signal to end the rite... but our gasps belied the reality: tension and worry. There was relief, more than anything else, when one final gust of wind blew the fire clean out and I quickly slapped the lid back on and began the ritual closing (thanking Cernunnos, sardonically, for blessing us with his wild presence).

Jeff insists that this whole experience was entirely appropriate, and it is true that we had sufficient water and blankets to stamp out a fire in case of emergency, but still I would have preferred a safer wildness, or a less dangerous symbolic center for the rite. On the other hand, it certainly proves that, no matter how many books on ritual theory you read, nothing compares to attempting the thing in real life and learning just how powerful even a light breeze can be, or just how dark it is, even in a city, before the full moon rises over the horizon. The experience also brings home to me the utmost importance of working up to formal ritual, beginning at the beginning with a thorough understanding of the theory and an established comfort level with the basic structure. As much as I loved writing a full-blown formal ritual to celebrate one of the most important holy days of the Druidic calendar, I have decided to revise my approach in the future, and develop a course of study to gradually introduce elements of ritual to the inexperienced. Jeff has agreed to be my guinea pig for this experiment, and periodically I hope to share these developments and learning experiences for others to read and try on their own.

Meanwhile, dear readers, I would love to hear about some of your experiences with ritual — both private and public, solitary and group. What disaster stories do you have? What lessons have you learned the hard way, and what potential pitfalls have you learned to avoid? How did you learn to write and perform effective ritual, and how might you go about teaching others?