Keeping the Days: Meditation in Autumnal Woods

Share

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

The Three Elements of Druidic Ritual

Share

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

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

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

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

Song of the World: Some Things We Know

Share

Firstly (and bestly, I think): below is an amazing video from the World Science Festival, held in New York City last month. The clip comes from a lecture on "Notes & Neurons: In Search of a Common Chorus," and in it, the famous a cappella singer Bobby McFerrin demonstrates just how ingrained music is in our bodies and brains by leading the entire audience in a spontaneous sing-along.



I doubt the rest of this post can compare to just how cool that was.

Maybe it's just me, but group experiences of music have always moved me powerfully. This clip reminds me of the many times I've been blessed to be part of spontaneous rounds and sing-alongs (these always seem to happen especially at family holiday reunions and on long bus rides to high school marching band competitions). But in particular, I remember the high school football game I once attended, when the student singing the national anthem to open the game was so nervous that she stumbled and faltered no less than three times on the words "what so proudly we hailed" and had to begin the first verse again. On the third time, without any hesitation, everyone in the entire stadium raised their voices to meet hers and carried the song through, the collective murmur of hundreds softening the harsh tinny notes screeching from the loudspeakers, lifting the melody gently into the autumn evening sky as though on a just-visible cloud of exhaled breaths. I'm not patriotic--but I love people, and their spontaneous basic goodness, and the memory still brings a tear of gratitude and pride to my eyes.

So I can believe that, to some extent, music--literal music--is hardwired into our brains. But I think there's something more to it than that. In Druidry, there is this idea that everything has a Song, and that the world, too, has a song. The Song of the World is something like a Divine or True Will, I suppose, and we join with it our own voices, the music of our bodies humming, pumping blood, inhaling and exhaling, neurons and nerves buzzing and vibrating. The air we move through shifts around us with every stride, and our laughing and crying shape it, too, creating leitmotifs, bridges and bass lines. When we sing and move and live in harmony with the World Song, our own songs are amplified, modulated and carried along--our lives become beautiful, our hearts become soft and permeable, our minds become nimble and familiar with the patterns of how things dance.

This idea--that we each have a song, a soul-song, and that everything, the landscape and the gods and the world itself, has a soul-song as well--underlies a kind of lovely animism that permeates everything, everywhere, and fills it utterly with life and movement. It bestows a special sacredness to space, to limits and the separation of necessary absence through which limited, finite beings move. The Song of the World offers us a way to understand our unity and community without sacrificing our individuality and uniqueness, our creativity and our freedom. For all of these reasons, the Song of the World is an absolutely fundamental aspect of my Druidry, that shapes a great deal of my spiritual practice as well as my theological and ethical ponderings.

The Song of the World is so essential to my Druidry--and yet, I can't remember where on earth I heard of it. It must have been in one of the many Druidry 101 books in my perky little collection, or maybe in some article I read online, or in some email message group or discussion forum. One thing's for sure, though: the World Song isn't mentioned in my historical books on the ancient Celts, or in my books on Celtic mythology, or in my books about the archeology and iconography of Celtic religious art and ritual objects. (In fact, the only Celtic-ish reference I can find to the phrase are two poems in the Book of Taliesin, neither of which mention the soul-song as an animistic/pantheistic theological principle.) Recently, I began reading Ronald Hutton's newest book, Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain; no word about the Song of the World on any of its almost five-hundred pages, as far as I can tell. But Hutton's writing brings home, as it always does, just how shaky our historical-fact footing is when we try to talk about Druidry and Druids at all.

This drives some people up a wall. Sometimes that wall is plastered with fantasy novel-like posters of flowing hair and horned staves and huge oaks and bonfires and magical chants and such. Other times, it's a wall studded all over with personal equivalents of the Ninety-Five Theses, carefully nailed into place, complete with footnotes and academic citations in MLA formatting. Cynical scholarly types especially like to equate accurate facts with intellectual depth, and accuse those with a relaxed attitude towards the former of being totally lacking in the latter. On the other side of the argument are people who grasp on to any remotely "Druidic" peculiarity--the Ogham, the Coligny Calendar, the white robes and golden sickle--and make their spiritual lives about Druidry, instead of living and practicing as Druids. Each old text is parsed and analyzed for either ancient Celtic or Medieval Christian influences, each new archeological find subject alternately to skepticism and acclaim, scrutiny and hope. For some people, it is incredibly important to prove whether or not the Druids of old were real, or really what we believe.

But to me, Druidry--and indeed, any spiritual life in all its many forms and paths--is about learning to be present, in the blessed here-now. As I struggle to live authentically and deeply with my self and the Divine, I just can't find the relevance of nit-picking to pieces bits of historical data. It doesn't tell me anything more about people--or about myself, or the gods, or the world--than I already know by being present in the here-now, attending and listening carefully. What it tells me is that, the bigger the picture and the finer the focus, the more uncertain "facts" become, with every scholar, then as now, contributing their own ideas, visions and inspiration as well as their own assumptions, prejudices and ignorance. But this isn't history at all! It's not confined to our understanding of the past, it's what each of us do in the here and now as well, as we struggle to think about our world and engage with it.

Cynics watch the video at the beginning of this post, and say with a smirk, "Well that is amazing--look how clever, look how well trained we are." They assume that all this spontaneous singing is just so much automation, a kind of brainwashing following paths laid down ages ago in our mammalian minds. They wink at each other about the persistence of the past, its apparent dominance. But I see something else. I see the present, full of singing. I see a single man who, without instruction, without a single word, can coax a whole auditorium into song just by humming a few notes, hopping around on stage and waving his arms. I see attention and response, liveliness--I can practically feel the amusement and engagement as the audience follows along, tries to guess what note will be next, listening to his body as it leaps and turns, listening to his voice as it plays off theirs.

We are not puppets wound up and constricted, pulled one way or another by the strings of history. We are so full of the present, so full of imagination and creativity in this very moment that not only can we shape our future, but our past as well. Our engagement reaches back as well as forward. The past is something we share, like a language or a story, not something we're bound by. The present is spacious and full of absence, full of uncertainty. Through that uncertainty, we move, we vibrate, we make music with our bones and the old bones of our ancestors. Why should we always be trying to dig our way back into the dense strata of historical fact, settle down inside it like a cocoon or a coffin? As though certainty about the past could protect us from having to be creative and responsive in the present...

Maybe there were no Druids at all, back then. Maybe until now, they existed only in imagination, amorphous and fluctuating . But there is something--an idea, a story, a familiar pattern of notes to make a scale--that shapes us today. I used to be called "Catholic" and "Christian", because that was the name for our family religion as my parents gave it to me. Then, I was called "Pagan" by readers of this blog, long before I had even relinquished the first. But "Druid" is the name I chose; Druid is what I name myself. I sing a melody to myself that seems to drift in from the mists of history, and the melody is Druidry, here, in this very present that we're living together. I am the song I'm singing, I create it from familiar notes in familiar patterns that I draw, prompted by dancing and encouragement, from the depths of my being. And the song goes something like: Were there real Druids in the murky landscapes of far away and long ago? If they weren't real then, they sure are now. I am that; that's how I know...

Finding Your Center: A Meditation on Movement

Share

"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.

In Perfect Love & Perfect Jenga!

Share

You might not suspect it at first, but Druidry asks us to give up a lot.

I certainly didn't expect it when I first began exploring the Craft and aspects of nature spirituality back in college. At the time, I looked on the spiritual work embraced by Paganism as a release and an expansion of my artistic and creative work (which I had, in any case, always pursued "for the sake of the Divine"). I wanted to move beyond mere words and the music of poetry; I wanted the tools to transform my life itself, body and heart, spirit and mind, into an engaged, living work of art. The personal ritual, magic, meditation and prayer of Druidry offered me these tools.

I should have seen the inevitable coming. I was writing short stories as early as freshman year about the sculptor of Winged Victory chiseling away at all that was not goddess. I'd had intimate relations with poetry as long as I could remember, and had learned the tension and beauty of limits, those perfectly crafted lines and stanzas, the concise brute force of a few words juxtaposed. All that is not infinite has its limits, this is not a bad thing. It's nature. Limitation is so often descried, equated with restriction and censorship; but limit is only the daughter of form, that's all.

Druidry is, in part, about learning our own limits, celebrating our form and seeking out our boundaries, the edges of our sacred space, our nemeton. Without a sense of the beauty that resides in the liminal, along the edges of finite things, how can we know real intimacy, the lingering thrill of allowing others in or reaching out tentatively beyond ourselves? Music has form, song has limits--it has scale and progression, it has shape and movement. When we sing together, our voices in tune, our bodies are vessels sharing a vibration in the most literal sense. We move together, we share an imperceptible boundary that buzzes and blurs. Without limits, movement is impossible (where would we be moving to, and how could we be growing?). Druidry teaches us to sing our soul's song--to put the world to sleep for three nights, or provoke it into weeping or laughter--and to sing our spirit in harmony, with an attentive ear to the weaving, echoing melodies of the world. Love, too, has its form, and therefore its limits, though limit and condition are not synonymous.

Love--whether the "perfect love" of the Wiccan Rede or the "unconditional love" of Christian mysticism--asks us to give up a lot. If we love nature, the environment, the ecosystems of our world, we learn to move in sympathy with them, to find and feel a center and gravity other than our own. If we sing with the trees and the earth, it becomes more difficult for us to callously waste and destroy--we share an edge, we feel the limits and needs of nature rubbing up against our own, we overlap, and we flinch as destruction "over there" sends ripples of regret and anguish reaching all the way to the "here" of our own deepest beings. In love, limits are not "conditions" of restriction or rejection. They do not deny certain kinds of love to certain kinds of beings, nor do they negate or denigrate the self that loves. Instead, the natural limits of love--love as an activity, as a process of creation, as movement and form--make liminal experiences of intimacy and trust possible, and render meaningful our urge towards response-ability. In this sense, even as imperfect creatures living in a less-than-ideal world, we have access to the infinite potential of condition-less love, capable in every moment of responding uniquely to each infinitely unique being.

But our edges blur, the shore shifts between every tide and tiny snails take up residence in our crevices and unseemly dark places. Love asks us to give up a lot, including our assumptions about what we, as isolated individuals, need to survive and how justified we are in taking it.

Maslow has his (in)famous "Hierarchy of Needs," a pyramid built on survival, security, support, and respect. We human beings need food, water, shelter, air, sleep--we require basic physical conditions to be met, just to stay alive. And once we have these things? We want to know they will be there tomorrow, as well, and indefinitely into the future, or at least for a good long while. When our physical bodies feel sated and safe, the pattern repeats again on a socio-psychological level: we need to feel as though we belong, to a family and a community, and that our emotional and intellectual selves will find nourishment here; and then we need to feel respected, productive and accomplished so that this support won't suddenly be withdrawn and denied to us later. Only after all of these things do we come to consider what Maslow calls "self-actualization": creativity, imagination, contemplation and ethical activity. If we're lucky. Some of us never get there. Why? Because this is, after all, a pyramid--the higher we want to go, the larger the base. The more productive and respected we want to be, the more community ties we must maintain, and so the more security and basic material needs that must be met. Some of us will spend lifetimes building out our base, putting one block next to another on the first two or three tiers, until we have a man-made plateau that stretches wide around us on all sides.

Meanwhile, the snails are at their work, love wearing us down, smoothing away everything that isn't goddess or god. Love, and Druidry, ask us to give up a lot. To give up willful or careless harm; to give up eating meat, if our bodies can take it (which most of them can); to give up excessive consumption and energy waste; sometimes to give up the support and acceptance of a family or community that cannot understand our spirituality; in short, to give up many of the things that we've come to assume are fundamental to our survival. The "higher" we try to go, the more we seem to find the blocks of our life knocked out from under us. The work comes to seem less like the building of a Great Pyramid in a desert, and more like a precarious game of Jenga! in which our balance is our sanity, our spirit and our survival. How can we do it? How can we find it within ourselves to take the risk, to give up our assumptions and confront our fears?

Have you ever played Jenga!? I hope so, it's fun-for-the-whole-family, as they say. The strategy of Jenga! is essentially this: move slowly, calmly, and with trust. Test each block, push it gently with the soft tip of your finger--some will be stubborn and load-bearing, but others will slide free easily, as if by magic. Not only this, but as the tower grows higher, its weight will shift and some of those blocks that seemed impossible to move before may suddenly cease to be so important. In Ali's "Jenga! of Needs," the spiritual life is much the same--we move cautiously, with baby-steps, giving up what we can afford and, with each surrender, we also build, we reach further, higher, deeper. Where we find frightening emptiness, we seek new centers of gravity, the edges of others we love. We weave them intimately into our lives and allow them to lend us balance and strength. Furthermore: we create. We have no set number of blocks, we carve out our own, we not only build but we grow, and our own growth provides us with ever-new materials out of which to craft our life. Eventually, perhaps, some of us might grow to become like those mystics and saints, living high in the mountains on tea and yogic discipline, or deep in a monastery subsisting on prayer and consecrated bread. For some, love will knock us off our feet, and we will suddenly find ourselves able to fly.

But for now, baby steps: movement, limit, form, celebration and imagination, creativity and praise... in perfect love and perfect trust.

Celebrate Spring!

Share

Happy Belteinne, everybody!

Understanding Shorn't.

Share

"What part of shorn't don't you understand?"

- Michael, 'The Office'

That line is from this past week's episode of The Office (414: Chair Model), and I still think it has to be one of the best lines ever. (Right up there with, "You can't fire me, I don't work in this van!"). Kevin and Andy are in Michael's office, trying to persuade him to help them out with a problem, and his response is, "Wish I could, but I can't. Well, can, but won't. Should, maybe, but... shorn't." When they continue to object, he cuts them off with, "What part of shorn't don't you understand?" Which is great on so many levels. Because, firstly, 'shorn't' isn't a real word, so in a strict sense there's no reason for them to understand it. But then, it's clear enough from context what it means that it still communicates his point quite effectively. (Later he suggests that they take on the task of doing something about their problem themselves, and when Andy declares, "We won't let you down!" Michael mutters, "Well, you can't, because I don't care.") Over the course of the episode, we find out that Kevin has recently gone through a very bad break-up (which puts his over-reaction to the problem in perspective, as we can all relate to how little nuisances can be the last straw during rough emotional times), and so his little triumph at the end is also a moment of self-mastery, finally seeing something go right that he helped to bring about. Michael's refusal to fix the problem is, then, in some ways (and completely accidentally on his part, of course) the means by which he actually helps Kevin on multiple levels, rather than just the single most obvious one.

Which brings me (in a lame, indirect way) to this idea of self-restraint. I was just now going over a conversation in my head that I had with Brian the other day at work. I mentioned to him that I tend to think less of men who make off-hand remarks about attractive women strangers they see, especially in that particular way guys make comments to other guys (like they're children at the zoo telling their friends how cool the orangutan looks). Brian objected that it's better at least to be honest. From that point on in the conversation, nothing I said could sway him. Civility, consideration for women as equals not objects, emphasizing personality over looks... all of this he reduced to various forms of dishonesty. At one point he asked me, "Don't you think you're attractive?" To which I replied, yes, but don't you see how that's utterly beside the point? It is precisely because I am attractive enough to have received or overheard such comments--while also being a woman of substance and self-confidence--that I know it's not really flattering or likely to lead anywhere. Again, he objected that I was expecting men to be dishonest about what are "only natural" reactions.

So just now I was reviewing that conversation in my head, trying to figure out how I could have articulated myself clearly to get my point across. Because, of course, I am not for dishonesty or mere pretenses to politeness. I'm also not necessarily for repression of natural biological urges or reactions--I believe in celebrating the body and its physicality and sensuality. But people seem to forget that the brain is also a part of biology, and that much that we assume is "instinct" is actually closer to cultural conditioning (think Pavlov-meets-MTV, now men are trained to salivate at the sight of only very particular versions of beauty and to declare these versions alone "naturally" attractive, while missing out on the myriad other ways beauty presents itself). So surely, breaking down this conversation into the dichotomy of honesty versus dishonesty was not helpful in illuminating these complex aspects.

Then, just now, I hit on a good metaphor. As usual, the metaphor is: art. More specifically, a man playing the piano. I was trying to imagine a way of explaining this idea of self-restraint as akin to the space or silence that surrounds a work of art, the aesthetic frame which, in the very act of "limiting" an art object, actually heightens and thus expands the work of art itself.

I think of one's life and one's self as works of art. Because I believe in reincarnation, I have often wondered what the relationship is between the "Deep Self" and the personality of a given incarnation and its particular body. The way I came to understand it is that we are given these bodies and these circumstances in time and space as "raw materials" as such, to work with and shape into vessels of spiritual experience (in a very similar way that an artist or creator works with materials to create vessels ("art objects") of aesthetic experience ("works of art"); for me, aesthetics and spirituality are very closely connected, which probably explains my love of Druidry's bardic mysteries). So working to better myself, to center myself, to attend and listen and learn, to grow, to become, to express, to shape and work with myself physically, emotionally, mentally, socially, intellectually, spiritually, etc. are all part of the process of being a living "work of art." While the self might be like, say, a sculpture that, over the course of a lifetime, is honed and polished from a rough block of marble (or, perhaps, built up and molded out of clay)--the actual life itself is like a dance or a musical performance. It is an on-going process, extended through time, that cannot be understood or summed up in a single static moment, in the same way that a dance or a song must be experienced through time as song or dance. These two ideas blend together, so that the process of the self becoming a Work is itself a Work--the sculptor dances his molding, sings his chiseling. If you follow.

So, if this is how I have come to imagine the act of living in general, how might I put this honesty/dishonesty question into a similar context? My answer is: think of a man at a piano. Now, one day this man may see a beautiful woman walk by the window of the studio where he practices... perhaps so beautiful in every way that he is moved to ecstasies of emotion, and cannot help but want to express this emotion, this adoration and joy. That is, after all, the nature of ecstasy--a going-outward of the self, a transport or rapture (from Old French, meaning to be carried away). So this man turns to the piano, and begins banging away at it. Bang! bang! bang!, elbows on the keys, fists, palms, fingers flying! He moves with utter abandon, and his movement is honest, certainly--but it doesn't amount to much. Why? Because he is not practiced, he has no self-mastery, no self-restraint. So the beautiful woman hears this noise coming from the studio, and shakes her head, wondering who would abuse such a fine instrument in such a way? She has no sympathy for the man and his adoration, because for all his honesty he has never learned the art of real communication. In the end, it is just as easy to bang away at a piano when one is indifferent, as it is to bang away in jubilation.

Maybe, lucky for him, the man in our story realizes his mistake. And so, he devotes himself to hours of practice a day. Whether the woman is present to inspire his joy or not, he works away at teaching himself to play the piano--playing boring scales and chord progressions, learning to play the works of others. He trains his fingers to move together with skill and dexterity, he learns to read music and to understand the complex patterns that form its fundamental structure, its backbone. Sometimes, he concentrates so intently on his practice that he loses all sense of passing time and his surroundings. Sometimes, even, the beautiful woman will walk by while he is bent at his work and even stop to listen a moment, pausing to wonder if this is the same man who was banging away before--and he is too intent on his practicing to even look up and notice she is there! Meanwhile, she sometimes smiles to herself, musing that he seems to be improving, and perhaps marveling at his dedication. If the first part of our story was about people who mistake bluntness--saying whatever thought happens to pop into their head--for truly honest communication, this part of our story is about learning to practice. Practice what? Learning to practice loving-kindness. It is important to understand that the man's self-restraint, his self-control at forcing himself through dull exercises and such even when he does not feel particularly moved to play--this restraint is not an end, but a means. It is a natural aspect of the practice, but not its goal. The goal is to become better at playing the piano. This is a metaphor for practicing loving-kindness even to those people who do not seem to inspire it in us immediately or naturally: "loving one's enemies" and recognizing the godhood of strangers as well as of friends, of the ugly and the distasteful as well as of the attractive and the appealing. It takes effort, it takes practice, it takes self-mastery.

But back to our piano-man and his beloved. Perhaps one day he is taking a break from his practice--he is leaning back at the piano, resting his hands, not really focusing on anything--just day-dreaming for the moment. When, all of the sudden (for the first time in months, he thinks) here comes the woman he loves! She has grown used to his intent practicing, and even likes it a bit, so maybe she slows down her pace a bit hoping to catch him at it again, never expecting him to realize that she's there. In that moment of her hesitation, our piano-man suddenly feels a burst of joy and hope again, just like the very first time he saw her--and so, once again, he begins to play his heart out on the beautiful instrument. But this time, something is different. He has self-mastery. He has spent long hours learning how to effectively communicate, to utilize every nuance and potential the piano has to offer. Far from the unskilled banging of his first attempt, his playing now is breathtakingly beautiful, joyous, expressive--he closes his eyes, leans into the instrument, running his fingers passionately over the keys. And the woman stops, amazed and bewildered. And understanding blossoms between them.

This is real honesty. Effective communication requires us not only to know ourselves and what we think and feel, but to know when to keep silent and when to speak, when to reach out to others and when to keep still and listen. It demands that we not only say what we mean, but have an awareness of how we are received, for if others are always misunderstanding us, then our attempts at honesty are pointless. Self-restraint is the "frame," the apparent limitation which, in fact, is what frees us. Without learning to overcome ourselves, to master our selves and wield those selves as instruments, we will never really appreciate the depths and the heights that those selves and their connections can reach. Through his restraint and his effort, our piano-man was able to communicate his adoration more clearly and intensely than he ever could have just by letting loose a torrent of unshaped emotional outbursts. Likewise, the man who knows when not to comment on beauty, who practices looking for beauty and meaning in all people and not only those to whom he feels a "natural" attraction, and who has the intensity to turn inward and distance himself from all beauty for the sake of his self-overcoming--that is the man I trust to be most honest with me, most capable of honesty, and most appreciative of its potential power.

Self-restraint is not the rejection of freedom, nor a denial of connection, but a path towards their very realization. Without it, all our attempted honesty is only passing noise.

And so, bringing this full circle, I've decided to nominate the word shorn't as having this definition: exercising self-restraint for the sake of becoming free. It is not the willfulness of "won't," nor the moralizing of "shouldn't." It's something else entirely

Dance Trance Revolution

Share

Remember how I had promised to write a few more poetic posts for the up-coming spring, instead of nit-picky obnoxious posts? Here's the thing about plans: uh....

This is not going to be an interesting or relevant (let alone poetic) post either. I'm coming down from a dance high.

Yesterday I spent twelve hours with a very good friend of mine, Jen, talking and talking about everything under the sun (and moon, by the time we were done). We met "around noonish" for lunch, then restaurant-hopped from Sam's to the place where I work to Starbucks (sadly, but it was next to the laundromat, and Jen had to do laundry and pack for her spring break trip that she left on this morning); we finally parted ways just after midnight. I have to say, it felt like one of those magical days when everything just clicked into place. Sometimes, so often surrounded by people who ignore me, don't understand me or make me slightly uncomfortable, I forget how absolutely freeing and refreshing it is to get into a groove with someone who knows and cares about you, and to have that groove last all day. Sometimes when this happens, I slip into a slightly manic stage--I've noticed this especially after long periods of relative restraint and stagnation, it's as if the energy has hit a block and backed up along the synapses until suddenly it all comes bursting out at once in a kind of noisy chaos. It's easy to feel ungrounded and a bit fizzy when this happens, and the best way to avoid it, I guess, is to try to keep the energy flowing smoothly rather than letting it build up behind a block.

Am I making any sense? One result of my long day yesterday was that it ran me almost dry for today, which happens to be gorgeous, sunny and warm. I'm not usually a very social person, and being around anyone, even a good friend, for so long and maintaining the kind of intense, animated discussion we were having--well, it exhausts me. When I got home last night, I realized my throat was tight and sore from talking, and that night I dreamed first of my right foot being torn into three pieces (which I had to staple back together and then have a healer wrap in gauze and numbweed) and then of being chased for miles by a slick, beautiful greyhound (that would be my gut-bunny dreaming, I guess). So all day today, instead of feeling ready and able to sit down in front of the computer and work, I've felt rather worn and bombarded by sunlight. Rather than center and focus in, all I want to do is splay (v. to spread out, expand, extend; to flare). Bumbling away the hours into mid-afternoon, I decided finally to walk to the grocery store and pick up some supplies. On my way home, listening to my iPod, I began to feel that internal beat that I love about punk rock music...

Which led to a two-hour dance-a-thon in my living room. Whew! Let me just tell you, I am a horrible dancer. Don't be deceived. I couldn't appear graceful on the dancefloor if my life depended on it. Which is why it's been so long since I really just danced for any extended period of time, especially without any self-consciousness at all (or running into the furniture because I was a little drunk). Sure, once in a while, I'll put on some music and dance for a song or two just to ground some excess vibes, but usually that's about it. Today, though, I really got into it. If I were feeling more poetic or focused now, I could wax philosophical about the experience, but the truth is, I'm still buzzing. I've heard of other Pagans talking about the dance trance, the rhythm of movement and breath (especially in, say, a drum circle or ritual setting); even my OBOD gwersu recommend using dance as a method of shamanic journeying or preparation for the celebration of the holy days in the yearly cycle. But I've never really tried it. Kind of like chanting, I just wasn't sure I "got" the point of it, or the knack of it for that matter.

As of today, that's definitely changed, and we'll certainly see about incorporating dance into future celebrations and rituals. This was in no way formal ritual or trance work, and the music wasn't always conducive to spiritual contemplation (being mostly angry punk music about rejected love and disillusionment), but I could definitely see the potential in the future for "dancing my worship." There were moments when gesture, movement, form--all seemed to meld and melt, and my upraised arms or stamping feet were not just willed actions of the body, but communicative experiences of Spirit itself. I think I'm going to work with that, see what unfolds, see where it might lead...

But for now, I have to go close my windows, because it's actually much chillier in here than I thought when I was working up a sweat.