The Pulse of Samhain

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There must have been an autumn when I was a child... But those days I remember as being full of the smell of sharpened pencils and graphite shavings, the rustle of notebook pages, the glint of bent spiral bindings and — sometimes — at the bus stop, a glimpse of horizon between the houses and the whispering golden pear trees, a full moon setting pale opposite the rising sun.

This morning, I glance out the window between sips of mint tea. The vines cascading down the garage have flushed to copper and rust, fading back into the old red brick. The sky is overcast, but the sun is low and spills in shifting rays over the tall grasses of the backyard, coming and going, light and dim again as it sinks. A neighborhood cat prowls, its black body slipping through the weeds that bend and shift in soft browns almost like wheat. The silent overhanging trees are limp with mottled yellows and golds.

Somewhere, a cloud changes. Suddenly the scene is awash in early morning sunlight, illuminated, every leaf translucent like a moving, living fountain of stained glass against the low, dull sky. The cat pauses, a dark shimmering shape stilled in a shaft of light, its ears and tail twitching. I can almost see the tips of its whiskers shining. Then, it hunches down again, head low, its form one long line of shadow slinking off.

Samhaim slips in. The dead among us rustle like dying leaves, or notebook pages.

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

Keeping the Days: Fire and Flame

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Autumn Water Lilies
Phipps Conservatory, Pittsburgh, PA

Water on Water's the Way: Blog Action Day 2010

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When it occurred to me that the animals are swimming
around in the water in the oceans in our bodies.
And another had been found, another ocean on the planet,
given that our blood is just like the Atlantic.

- Modest Mouse, "3rd Planet"


Everybody knows we're mostly water. But I remember the kind of mystic revelation that hit me the first time I read that scene in J.D. Salinger's short story "Teddy" where the ten-year-old describes watching his little sister drinking milk, how he suddenly saw that she was God and the milk was God, and "all she was doing was pouring God into God." David Suzuki echoes this startling but simple truth when he writes in his book, The Sacred Balance, that "we are intimately fused to our surroundings and the notion of separateness or isolation is an illusion." Our physical being weaves us intimately into the world of air, water, soil and sun, and as Suzuki says, "these four 'sacred elements' are created, cleansed and renewed by the web of life itself."

When we eat, we participate with Spirit and the gods in a dance of growth, death, decay and rebirth, as even our waste returns eventually to the land to nourish and enrich the soil from which our food grows. Plants transform the energy gifted to them by the sun into forms that can be absorbed and exchanged, and when we work, we release that energy again through the efforts of our hands, legs, mouths and minds to shape the world. Our breath is the breath of our ancestors, but also of the atmosphere and the weather, the winds and storms that encircle the planet and rustle the leaves of the tree just outside the window. And when we drink of those waters that well up from the earth, blessed, guarded and sustained by the gods and goddesses of the oceans and the holy springs and the caves of the underworld, all we are doing is pouring god into god.

Ruby Sara :: To Pray in Color

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

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

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

Lughnasadh: Burning In, Burning Out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoroughly Thurled

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reader Feedback Request...

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It seems for the moment my writing fervor has died down a bit. Spring fever is kicking into overdrive as temperatures dropped back into the teens over this past week and the sun persists in mocking me, knocking coldly, brightly against my tightly-closed and wind-rattled apartment windows. How I miss day-dreaming and hillwalking! It's hard to fight the body's urge to rush from one warm place to another, to numb the need to be out with music and DVDs and books.... I miss my warm days in the park, long hours watching the dogs and the ducks and the people, allowing my mind to wander. If attending classes all through high school and college was good for anything, it was good for enforced day-dreaming time. Gazing out those uniform panes of glass while the lecture rolled, letting classroom debate spark ideas and jotted margin notes while I slumped in my seat shuffling my restless legs back and forth. Those were the days... Now, it seems i've grown too skilled at keeping myself occupied. You have to, when your day-job dominates your short-term memory center with drink orders and the "usual" of a dozen or more regulars swinging by for breakfast each morning; and your time-off demands carpe diem commitment to self-directed study and learning and writing. I can't believe I'm even saying this, but I almost miss my days of institutional learning. Ah, to be a student again, a real student, somebody else's student... and to have nothing more required of me than to sit and think and day-dream for a while.

But why I'm really writing now is to ask you a favor. Yes, I mean you, my wonderful loyal readers. At the moment, I'm making an honest, nose-to-the-grind-stone effort to put together a book manuscript for publication, a collection of essays on spirituality and the Druid path, much like the kinds of posts here. So, I'd like to ask you a question or two, receive some feedback to help me out as I think about where such a collection might go, how it might hang together, what it might include. Of course, I love you all already, so I can't blackmail or bribe you into responding. But it would warm my heart and itch my brain to hear from you. After all, why even bother to write a book except to speak to readers out there about the things we care about?

So. Without further ado...

(a) What have been your favorite posts in this blog over the past almost-two years, and why? Which posts might you like to see included and/or expanded in a print format?

(b) What would you like to see more of? If you picked up a "book by Ali" in the bookstore and flipped through its table of contents, what kinds of things would you really be hoping to find, what subjects or styles would just thrill you to the bone to read and to share with others?

See, that's it. Just two little questions. Not so bad! And I promise to adore each of you even more than I do now, as difficult as that might seem, and to take you to the candy store for your pick of penny candy when we're done. Meanwhile, I'm still working on a post or two about polytheism and approaches to deity, so those will be up eventually. That, at least, is a promise I can keep.

Poems by Wendell Berry

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The Cold

How exactly good it is
to know myself
in the solitude of winter,

my body containing its own
warmth, divided from all
by the cold; and to go

separate and sure
among the trees cleanly
divided, thinking of you

perfect too in your solitude,
your life withdrawn into
your own keeping

--to be clear, poised
in perfect self-suspension
toward you, as though frozen.

And having known fully the
goodness of that, it will be
good also to melt.






Earth and Fire

In this woman the earth speaks.
Her words open in me, cells of light
flashing in my body, and make a song
that I follow toward her out of my need.
The pain I have given her I wear
like another skin, tender, the air
around me flashing with thorns.
And yet such joy as I have given her
sings in me and is part of her song.
The winds of her knees shake me
like a flame. I have risen up from her,
time and again, a new man.






February 2, 1968

In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter,
war spreading, families dying, the world in danger,
I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.






To Know the Dark

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

Memories of Winter.

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It's snowing outside again.

Earlier this autumn someone, I think my father, told me they were predicting a snowy winter this year. Because I don't drive, I never developed the automatic dislike of snow that many people seem to have. To me, snow still means a Lancaster county winter from my childhood: two-hour school delays, matching scarves and knit hats, plastic trash can lids transformed into make-shift sleds, the creek down the block from my parents' house freezing over, the crunch of boots on packed-down ice crystals, the thin shovel-scraped paths struggling over uneven sidewalks. It means vast landscapes of farm lands and scraggly wooded hills frosted over as if by a fine dust, as if finally left alone to settle into a good old silence.

Winter in college seems hardly memorable, except for the long, cold walks to the grocery store, rain trickling and pooling overtop the dangerous icy surface of walkways where afternoon sun had turned snow to slush and evening shadows had refrozen it into hard, slippery terrain. Though I remember walking to the bridge once and watching the snow--huge flakes hovering in air just above freezing, almost like soft down shook free from an old blanket--disappear into the dark, shimmering, moving waters of the river fifty feet below. And the time I went to Hunsberger Woods alone, snow several inches thick on the ground already and still falling, the sky low, layered and gray, suddenly broken by hundreds of geese crisscrossing in v-shaped flocks in every direction at once, the noise of their wings and harsh calls echoing confused in the quiet and, just as suddenly, gone again. I stood there staring up with the vertigo of watching snow fall towards me from an invisible height, feeling like the bare limbs of the trees everywhere had just exploded into feathers and beaks, feeling like a god had just slipped by above me.

Winter here... has always been tough. Several years ago, something painful happened to me at the end of October, and since then autumn has always slunk by, dulled and fractured by memories of grief and anxiety, dropping off without color or passion into a dull, slinking winter season. The first year, back when I still had television, I spent the darkest days of the year barely out of my pajamas (except when forced to go to work), curled up under blankets watching reruns of X-Files. On Imbolc, I went into the woods in Schenley Park and lit a small blue candle in the snow, sat with it as it guttered and smoked and rekindled and guttered again each time the wind turned. I was embarrassed, afraid of being caught by some jogger or a woman walking her dog. I was still new to Druidry then, still feeling exotic and strange. But no one was out, and I sat on the stone footbridge listening to the water of the stream shiver along under stiff dead leaves and frozen underbrush.

This year may be different. Usually, I'm so eager to leave autumn behind I fling myself headlong into the Christmas season, decorating my apartment with all the old ornaments and garlands inherited from my mother, lighting dozens of candles and enjoying the Christmas music on the radio. This year, fall was almost a relief. I didn't write much in this blog about it, finding it hard to put into words, but for the first time in years, autumn seemed to have color again, and shape and life to it. I dreamt often of brilliant mountainsides spattered with the reds, oranges and yellows of foliage. My dreams were suffused with autumn. I noticed the subtle shifts as the season moved which I had never noticed before. The blushing rouge at the beginning, like wounds or lips opening up here and there among the worn summer green, just beginning to spread from tree to tree. The quaking yellows and golds at the height of the season, the whole woods cut through by low, bright sunlight and seeming to glow, the limbs of trees dark like veins starting to show through a papery sky, reflected in the surface of half-hidden streams gliding through layers of yellow leaves that had already fallen. And then, even towards the end, how beautiful and subtle the browns became, some deep like wet bark, some light and feathery like sheaves of wheat or rustling like straw, the ochre, russet, everything in sepia tones. There was a stand of sycamores outside the library in Oakland that everyday seemed to have life, each day different, moods that shifted and changed. Sometimes they were bright against the backdrop of concrete buildings and city skyline, sometimes faded and gentle, hardly distinguishable, but quiet and present. I can't tell you how these sycamores alone seemed to be, for the first time, so real to me, so very much alive.

I find myself, now, uninterested in making myself "feel Christmasy." A week ago, I walked home from work through a light snow, glancing up past the top of an evergreen at a tiny winter sun obscured by clouds. And what I felt was not a surge of "Christmas spirit" or "Yuletide cheer." Instead, I was struck by a sense of fragile, frigid rebirth, the sun gasping for breath in the cold and working its way back towards the warmth still lurking, sleeping in the earth--for the first time, I felt the coming of the solstice, Alban Arthan, "the light of winter." It was not the gaudy reds and greens, the tinsel and bells, the singing or crackling fire, it was not Christmas. It was something so much quieter, darker, farther away--yet everywhere, fine dust on the trees and frost inching up the window.

It was winter, a hush and lightness moving slowly through the deep.

Considering Samhain.

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The following are excerpts from a few letters I've written to my cousin, after he emailed me asking what kinds of holy days or "feast days" my religion held around this time of year. He'd heard a mention on an NPR program about "the veil between the worlds" becoming thin during these darkening autumn days and wanted to know if my spirituality incorporated this idea at all. This is some of what I wrote back in response (after explaining, as briefly as I could, the basic structure and history of the eight-festival "Wheel of the Year" celebrated by many modern Pagans).

Most Celtic-based Pagan spiritualities (including Druidry and some Witchcraft) acknowledge Samhain (Halloween) as the Celtic New Year and the most holy day on the calendar. It is a Fire Festival and is very closely connected agriculturally with the "late/last harvest," which was the harvest of the very last fruits of the season (such as apples, gourds, etc.) and the slaughter of a good percentage of livestock in order to thin the herd for the coming winter. Thus, the festival is heavily associated with
blood and death, the coming of cold and darkness and increasing scarcity as winter comes on--but it's also a time of gathering and celebration, lighting the fire and feasting in spite of the cold. Like most Druidic things, it carries in it a bit of a paradox. This tension is probably where the idea of a "thin veil between worlds" comes from. Animal sacrifice has been used in almost all religious traditions at one time or another as a way of "parting the veil" that separates the mundane and the sacred realms (even Christianity, which is based on a blood sacrifice to reconcile the profane with the sacred), so it's understandable that during a time when animals were being slaughtered out of practical necessity (to make sure they didn't have so many animals to feed over the winter that they became sickly or a burden on the family), the death and subsequent consuming of red meat became associated with communication with the Underworld. That's where you get a lot of the "Day of the Dead" stuff around this time of year, as well as the practice of honoring ancestors or loved ones who have died. Most of the secular Halloween traditions comes from this pagan association with death (also natural considering the dying off occurring in the natural world), and it actually influenced the Catholic Church to adopt November 1 and 2 as All Souls and All Saints Days to commemorate the dead within the Christian tradition.

To be honest, this time of year has never been anything particularly special to me. Everyone has their favorite holy day, I guess, and I think mine is actually Imbolc/Candlemas, probably because it was the first holy day I officially celebrated as a not-quite-Catholic-anymore. Samhain has a bit of mischief and darkness to it, which I think appeals to many Pagans, who tend to be rebellious, fun, independent folks. It's also the easiest to celebrate in public as part of the secular celebration of Halloween, which for people who have to practice their Paganism in solitary, without a community to have parties and rituals with, helps a little bit. Back in high school, one of my best friend's birthdays was just a few days before Halloween, so she always loved the holiday and really got into the whole costume parties and ghosts and hauntings and such. Then later, in college, after 9/11, it always seemed to me that it was really the fall equinox that had the strongest association with death, grief and loss for me, and this persisted until only a year or so ago when my political angst finally seemed to settle into something solid and workable. Meanwhile, my break up with R. just happened to occur on Halloween several years ago, and ever since, to be perfectly honest, the month of October in general has been hellish for me, usually accompanied by major bouts of depression and regret, so that I tended to try to just ignore autumn altogether until I could make it through to Thanksgiving and the Holiday Season (and then, only a month and a bit until Imbolc!). While I was doing my year of formal study with AODA, I performed personal rituals to mark each of the days (small ceremonies involving candles, incense, meditation, nothing spectacular or strange--well, unless you count candles, incense and meditation as strange)... Then I kind of fell out of the habit.

But then last year, by the time Samhain rolled around, it had been only a few months since my friend F. had died. I was still grieving a little, though coping, and I decided to actually use my personal Samhain ritual for some prayer work specifically focused on "talking" to and honoring the memory of F. (though my beliefs about what exactly happens to a soul after death are still a little shaky, I think maybe for a short period of time at least there could be some coherence and retention of individual awareness and even personality.... maybe). In any case, the experience was startling and I even had the pungent sensation of smelling his familiar smell for just a second (a combination of deodorant and hair gel, plus the overlapping smell of grease from work). Whether this was some "communication" or whatever, I have no idea, but afterwards I did begin to feel, for the first time, like a rift had been healed or something had slipped back into place and relaxed a muscle that had been tense so long I'd ceased to consciously notice it. I found I could accept his death more understandingly than I had before. I've never given much credence to ghost stories and such, mostly because I don't think that's really how it works, though I can believe there are energy patterns left "impressed" into physical objects or places that kind of echo through time. Around this time of year, I do always get the craving to indulge in some good ghost story-telling, and I end up rereading some E.A. Poe and watching shows like "Ghost Hunters" or "Real Hauntings" or whatever those shows on the Discovery/History Channels are called. So who knows, really?

This year, I've been trying to keep up my spirits through October (and it's been working pretty well), and I've also worked more at decorating my altar for the season. Each day on my walks to and from work, I keep my eyes open for autumn leaves to bring inside and place around my altar; and once or twice I've gone on long walks through the local park to pick wildflowers that are still in bloom and just appreciate nature and the shifting, overlapping seasons as the weather gets colder. The other day, I had one of those great walks where all the colors just seemed so saturated and intense, as sun slit down through low, dark clouds and wind shook leaves from high up in the canopy. I love moments like those, when you almost can't believe how beautiful the world is. I very much like Druidry because it's so much about getting out there in nature and opening yourself up to the energies around you, revving up your intuition and imaginative faculties until you can almost see the spirits of air and color dancing through the landscape, and the trees seem to have unique personality and soul, and even rocks and streams take on a kind of liveliness. It's not all reading books and studying theology and listening to preaching. You just go out and try to feel the world with your heart and mind, you just try to be open to it and what it's sending your way, to feel the rhythm of it. In Druidry there's an idea that everything, every "soul", has a song, and all of these songs work to create harmonies and melodies that actually "sing" the world into being and guide its course. So you go outside and sit in the chill and the dim light and watch the leaves fall and try to listen to the song of things. And there is darkness and discord, too, it's not all light and happy and peaceful and such (though Druidry does focus strongly on peace, as well as on truth, and poetry). It's hard to describe exactly--you just kind of have to trust the process and also trust the basic exercises in meditation and visualization, even though they can seem repetitive and overly-structured and boring at first. It's like teaching your spiritual "ear" how to hear the music.

I was going to say more about the "thin veil," but once again I feel like this letter is already too long. Simply put, the Celtic worldview holds that there are basically "three worlds" (this is horribly simplified and dumbed down, mind you): the Otherworld, the Underworld and the everyday mundane world that we live in. The Otherworld is not necessarily a "heaven" up in the sky, though it is associated, like I said in my last letter, with solar and stellar energies, air and electricity. Really, the Otherworld is seen as existing in the same space as the regular world, but kind of overlapped or slightly off, like a dimensional shift or something (to put it in sci-fi terms). It is ever-present and interpenetrates our own, and people with "the Sight" can see it and the beings that live on that plane kind of moving and existing all around us. The same is true of the Underworld, except that instead of being solar/stellar energies, the Underworld focuses on earthy energies. There is a myth about a "star" being falling to earth and impregnating it/her, giving birth to creatures whose "center of gravity" is not the Otherworld, but kind of within the earth itself (the idea that the very center of the earth is another "star" or hot fiery heart, which actually it is!). This is why old burial mounds in Ireland and Wales are associated with some spirit beings, they are said to live "within" the very ground itself, but really this is just another way of saying that, like the Otherworld, the Underworld is all around us and yet "shifted" slightly out of our everyday experience.

So, with that kind of worldview in mind, the cycle of the seasons sometimes help to "shift" various worlds into closer alignment, effectively thinning the veil and allowing experiences from the Other- or Underworld to kind of spill over into our middle existence. The shift that puts our world in closer alignment with the Underworld occurs around Samhain--though really, some people think that it lasts as long as the winter solstice, so that the time between Oct. 31 and Dec. 21/22 is a period of dark "no time" when communication with the Underworld is easiest (I once read a Druid idea of a "Torc of the Year" instead of a Wheel of the Year, illustrating this idea). Our peak alignment with the Otherworld occurs on May 1, Belteinne, and is believed by some to last all the way until the summer solstice ("midsummer," which is why both May Day and Midsummer are closely associated with faeries, even in Shakespearean plays and such).

It is really kind of thrilling if you think about it. Again, you can imagine it in terms of song and music, and the respective melodies of different planes coming into harmony at certain times of the year, allowing for sympathetic vibrations and echoes, the way hitting one note on a piano will cause other notes at various higher and lower octaves to hum slightly. And the idea of much of the ritual found in modern Druidry is to "tune" yourself, to teach you the best way to get yourself open and listening to these vibrations. I always felt like Catholic ritual was rather empty and rote, but really the purpose of ritual in most religions is the same. Just as the way you think and feel will affect how you act, likewise the process happens in reverse, so that by performing certain actions repeatedly (whether it's lighting a candle, sitting in a particular position in order to pray or meditate, or walking a circle and raising your arms to greet the four directions), the pattern of action will come to shape how you think and feel and respond to the world. It's potentially manipulative stuff when you always let other people dictate what those ritual actions should be, but when you actively and consciously engage in creating your own rituals, it's almost like making spontaneous works of art with your own body. The way a painting or song can evoke particular emotions and experiences in a person, you can cultivate spiritual experiences by choosing to act out certain rituals.

Even the most secular people do this almost without thinking about it around this time of year especially. Hollowing out pumpkins (the violence of the knife, the slimy guts inside), putting lit candles inside them and displaying them in windows, dressing up and behaving like monsters, zombies, ghosts, vampires, sitting around telling ghost stories and inadvertently looking for signs of spirits in the dancing pattern of falling leaves--all of these things are socio-spiritual rituals that help us connect to and experience "death" before actually having to die. The death not only of the physical self, but also of the social conventions that bind us and keep us "safe", so that mischief and wildness are also part of the celebration, average conventional women dressing up in promiscuous outfits, teenagers gathering together around Ouija boards and playing at the occult, testing boundaries, experimenting with chaos.

Damn, now that I think about it, I do rather like this time of year. Plus, out of chaos and darkness come new possibilities, imagination and new life. Which is why this is the New Year for the ancient Celts, the time when old things are dying off and making room for new potential.

Though I'm not sure about the whole vampire thing. Don't get me wrong, I like vampires--but the YA Fiction obsession with them lately seems to speak more to the fact that teenagers are treated increasingly as energetic parasites, leeching life off of others without the power or even expectation of ever giving back anything meaningful and substantive of their own--and how these days adolescence seems to stretch into eternity, people obsessed with staying and acting young forever, maintaining a college-party lifestyle well into mid- to late-twenties (or longer!). But that's just me psychoanalyzing society with a touch of personal bitterness. Do you find any of that to be the case? I mean, it seems to me like there must be some distinction between the "classic" conception of the vampire (and its associations with sickness, death, and all the wild passions free of social conventions I was talking about before, etc.) and the new vision of the vampire as a kind of deathless sex god who only bucks convention as far as the typical Hot Topic teenage goth consumer can be expected... Vampires-as-undead versus vampires-as-soulless-consumers.... okay, maybe there's not so much a difference after all.

This letter has gotten ridiculous. So I'll end on a ridiculous note. Last night I dreamt (probably because of writing that letter to you) that I was eating an almost-raw hamburger, when you came up and grabbed it out of my hand, wrapped the whole thing (bun and all) in wide lettuce leaves, then set it on the ground and started smashing it with a baseball bat. Apparently my vegetarian self was feeling bad about speaking so casually about slaughtering livestock for food!

Autumn Altar

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For the time being I've ceased my formal, structured study with Druidry, in order to allow myself to grow a bit more organically along the path for a little while and discover where that leads. (This is one reason I haven't been blogging nearly as much recently.) My bedroom altar has taken on this organic aspect, too, and I find myself often picking up "found objects" on my weekly walks and incorporating them.

I love this process, because it keeps me in touch with the cycles of nature without having to flip through annoying reference books in search of seasonal correspondences decided upon by other people, correspondences that might not even relate to my own immediate landscape or climate anyway. By ignoring such reference sources and relying instead on the things nature offers to me directly, I find myself slowly learning about my own place in the land. If the leaves are already beginning to change in my local area, then gosh darn it, colorful leaves it is. If the chestnuts are falling but the gardens I walk past on my way to work still have roses in bloom, then I can celebrate both. This process reminds me that the change of the seasons isn't broken up into distinct time periods--it's messy and overlapping and intertwined.

With that in mind, my altar has become a bit more "cluttered" and idiosyncratic, rather than sparse and functional the way it used to be. I no longer use it primarily as a functional altar, but perhaps more as a "shrine" to the external physical landscape of the natural world, and the internal landscape of my own psyche and spiritual needs. Decorating with bits of nature brings that earthy scent into my home, but it also keeps me in tune with the natural turn of the seasons. As the flower blossoms dry out, or the leaves slowly brown and wither, or the gourds grow dusty and the shells of nuts begin to splinter, I can tell it's time to give these things back to the natural world to let them decay--and begin looking for new signs of the season to come. This serves as a subtle reminder to allow my own cycles to ebb and flow according to their natural energies, instead of trying to force order and conformity where they will not suit my own changing needs.

Working with my altar this way keeps me grounded in nature, but it also allows me to indulge my natural urge to "gather" beautiful objects that seem to resonate or capture my attention when I'm out walking. I often feel as though these gifts are offerings that the earth places in my path, and it's an important aspect of my spiritual life to feel willing and able to accept them--without getting home, saying, "O, now what am I going to do with all this?" and feeling like I have to just chuck them out before they being to rot and gather dust. A while ago, it occurred to me that the idea of making "offerings" to the gods and to the earth can be a little silly if taken too seriously--after all, what do we have that we have not first been given? I decided that what we have to offer is our intention, our attention, and our love--and incorporating "found objects" into my altar as offerings is my way of acknowledging the many gifts I receive, and transforming them through my intention and imagination into something new that I can give back to the world. Thus, one of the central aspects of my altar is the small blue offering dish. Right now, it holds a few wild local chestnuts I gathered during a walk in the park, a cardinal feather I found in the woods, a few daisy blossoms from a bouquet I bought at the local flower shop, and a striking (and a little out of place) rose petal I found just this afternoon on my way back from lunch, while I was wondering about the persistence and delicacy of love.

Celebrate Spring!

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Happy Belteinne, everybody!

Wonder

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Wonder

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

Winter Ember Days

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The sun has set on the longest night.

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

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

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

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

Practicing the Daily Simple, Part II

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In my last post about practice, I discussed some of the simplest daily ways in which I keep myself grounded and centered. These techniques--with the exception of the most formal form of meditation--can be practiced anywhere, at any time. Over the past year and a half, I've learned to weave them into the fabric of my everyday life, like a thread of silver that every once in a while catches the light and imbues the most ordinary of situations with a bit of enchantment.

These next few practices are more specific. They are less like the daily work of an artist in her craft, than they are like works of art themselves, moments of performance and movement that might be pre-planned or even rehearsed, but which constellate and emerge with intention as particular experiences of creative spiritual activity.


Teahouse Practice

I recently had an article published on WitchVox about this concept of "teahouse practice." This Buddhist concept gets its name from the story of a simple old woman who runs a teahouse on the edge of town. Though she never preaches a word about Buddhism, she embodies the traits of mindfulness and loving-kindness, and townsfolk come regularly to sit her in quiet presence and sip tea, even if they don't realize why, opening themselves to the inspiration of the dharma.

Working as a waitress, I've tried to incorporate this kind of teahouse practice into my interactions. I begin every shift down in the breakroom, taking a few minutes to change into uniform and wash my hands while cleansing and preparing myself mentally for the day. I leave behind whatever anxieties I've been carrying with me, or I find reasons to laugh about them and turn them into amusing stories to share with my coworkers. Cultivating peace and cheerfulness within my own self, I engage customers with intention, performing the somewhat ritualized greeting and serving acts with sincerity and presence. When I wish customers a "nice day" and flash them a smile, I make sure I mean it, always seeking that place within me where I really do wish for happiness for even the rudest of strangers.

The effect this practice has had on my work experience is palpable, with customers as well as coworkers. The diner/family-restaurant where I work is, admittedly, not the most classy or well-managed. Since starting there two years ago, I've climbed my way up to being among the top ten in seniority, simply because so many others have quit out of frustration or financial need. Yet I honestly do look forward to my job most days, I've managed to dance nimbly around melodrama and office politics time after time, and my own sense of inner well-being remains preserved. In the end, I feel grateful to have a job that allows me to interact so directly with people, working in a position of service to provide them with two of their basic needs--food, and company. Teahouse practice transforms the repetitive acts of an industry so often taken for granted, into ever-renewing moments of ritual spiritual work.

Hillwalking

This is the first form of regular spiritual practice that I do entirely for religious purposes, without any "daily grind" aspect--but only because I don't have a dog. If I had a dog, then our daily walks would be the perfect time to practice this particular spiritual work. Instead, I've had to find my own reasons and justifications to go traipsing through the local wooded park, while joggers and dog-walkers pass me on the paths with purpose and necessity in their eyes. The truth is, I am not fulfilling any physical need or family duty in going for long walks in the woods. Sure, it keeps me in shape (though I'm on my feet all day at work, anyway). But really, I go hillwalking because I long to be with nature, to be in nature, and to remember my own nature, before it is too easily usurped and suppressed by television and the internet.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. What exactly is "hillwalking"? It's a practice I first came across in Druidry, particularly in the works of Frank MacEowen, Philip Carr-Gomm and Emma Restall-Orr, although I think over in the UK it's also considered a secular pastime (like hiking, hunting or rock-climbing in the U.S.). In Druidry, hillwalking becomes a kind of movement meditation, in which a person travels through and explores the natural landscape with engaged presence. To hillwalk is to allow the body to interact intuitively and directly with the surrounding natural world, to follow whims and currents within the landscape. To move through the external, physical landscape of the woods, fields and hills as an interactive and revelatory form of exploring the internal landscape of the soul. Like the stillness of traditional meditation, the on-going movement of breath and body in hillwalking helps to blur the boundaries between form, spirit and space, transforming the perception of what was once opaque and solid into that which is fluid, interwoven and sacred.

Some people recommend utilizing this heightened, engaged consciousness to deal with particular problems, both spiritual and mundane. Formulating a question or problem before setting out, a person can "read" various aspects of landscape that they encounter along their path--animals, plants, bodies of water and earth formations, for instance--in the same way they would interpret dream imagery and experiences. Someone struggling with writer's block, for example, might find herself noticing the song of a mockingbird perched above a small pond, and begin to reflect on the relevance this might have for her current situation. I usually forgo this particular method, preferring instead to allow insights to develop organically through an intuitive experience of landscape, allowing whatever emotional or intellectual issues I have to resolve themselves naturally while I concern myself with the physical processes of my moving body.

Occasional Formal Ritual

This form of spiritual practice is probably what most people think of when they hear labels like "witch," "druid" and "pagan" these days--it's the most widely recognized, and yet also the most intimidating and misunderstood aspect of these paths. In my experience, there are a few main ways in which people approach the idea of "ritual" in the modern Pagan tradition. Some enjoy the sensationalized Hollywood versions of spell-casting and Black Masses, the exotic flavor of robes, candles and chanting in a strange tongue. Others are wholly turned off by how "weird" it all seems, confused as to why anyone would need or want such ridiculous and unfamiliar activities to be part of the religious life. For most people in this culture, religion is something passive, a worldview that you hold in the back of your mind and that colors your daily attitudes and behaviors, but which does not manifest overtly in anything more unusual than, perhaps, a weekly social gathering at one's local church. But then, there are those of us who look past the sensationalism and bizarreness of personal ritual, and understand the artistic evocation of beauty and the cultivation of spiritual connection and growth that can occur, and we understand the enchantment and the magic.

When I first started exploring modern witchcraft as a practitioner rather than as a scholar (the change occurred in early 2004, though it seems a lot longer ago!), its main draw for me was not so much its feminism or respect for nature (both of which were included in my liberal Catholic up-bringing) but much more: the chance to incorporate creative, personal ritual into my spiritual practice. Up until that point, my poetry and journal writing were the only forms of active self-expression that my religion included, and even those were frowned upon if they skirted too close to controversy. There have always been those in the Christian tradition who would prefer to keep "religious art" safe and doctrinally correct; but of course, I knew even in high school that trying to put such limits on artistic expression could kill it off quite effectively. Meanwhile, what little ritual that was left within Catholicism was communal and rote, both of which often kept me--a natural bewildered introvert at heart--from entering fully into the work. I longed for the enchantment of quiet solitary moments, lighting candles, burning incense, speaking words of poetry and crafting performances that were beautiful and inspiring (perhaps moreso because no one else was around to watch with critical or bemused eyes). Modern witchcraft seemed to offer this possibility.

I soon discovered, however, that modern witchcraft often has an unfortunate preoccupation with "magick" and spell-casting. Most discussions of ritual focused largely on setting up a sacred space or circle, inside of which the "real work" was done, seeking whatever magickal aims the practitioners desired. Monthly esbats, held on the full and/or new moon, were times to perform divination and various mundane bits of "magick," while the eight festival sabbats of the year were times of communal celebration, with a heavy emphasis on agriculture and often the impressive invocation of nature deities. For someone like myself, less interested in the agricultural than the ecstatic-philosophical spiritual life and with very few insecurities or desires that needed spell-work in order to satisfy, these types of ritual seemed redundant and sometimes even manipulative or selfish. For a long time, I didn't bother about the Craft, I dropped the provocative 'k' from "magick" and contented myself with meditation and simple visualization techniques.

Over the past year and a half, as I've studied the AODA first degree curriculum and worked through the gwersu of the OBOD bardic grade, I've begun to include more and more ritual work into my spiritual practice, though they remain scattered and often spontaneous. I've explored shamanic astral journeying and ritual within my personal "inner grove"; I've practiced techniques such as the AODA Elemental Cross and Sphere of Protection (based on more formal ceremonial magic traditions), as well as nwyfre (life-force) exercises, particularly during seasonal rituals. Most of the time, my personal rituals are simple, minimal and quiet. They're far from the impressive and complicated workings that most people picture when they think of "witchcraft," but they are active and creative nonetheless. Maybe one of these days, I'll go into more detail about the specifics--but for now, this post has gotten long enough, and the cold I'm fighting has suddenly decided to insist I go lay down and suck on a cough drop. When my body objects, I try to listen... Until next time.

Sobriety

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Sometimes I feel like sobriety is extremely undervalued these days.

One should be, I think, sober and fully present. Out of respect.

Is this a weird idea, that it is important to respect the world? I seem to have found myself with an overwhelming sense of the world being very real, a presence--maybe because my sense of "God" has slowly grown and expanded to include and transcend "the world." The Divine is not just some external bearded entity in the sky or the afterlife or located wherever. The world is not "His" gift to us. The world is. I have a relationship with the world, even when I am alone. Even when I am lonely, I am lonely with(in) the world. The world is always present, fully present. To waste time being inebriated seems... ungrateful.

There are so many tiny things going on--and each tiny thing is part of the world, and also the whole world and the way in which the world manifests--and what if you're too stoned to notice? Then your stress and anxiety float in a void of not-world, isolated and seemingly without resolution or perspective or escape. So you smoke more pot to relieve the stress. And you miss out on even more, and so you feel even more "out of it" and can't keep up. You try to escape stress, but you escape into a void in which only the stress is real, or nothing is.

Escape, instead, into the world. Sit outside and listen. There are birds and a wind. There is a field, into which tress slowly migrate over hundreds of years. There is a pond, and then there is not a pond, only a dry bed and rotting wood and toads buried in the mud. There are weeds more beautiful than flowers, and there are also flowers. This has nothing to do with you, and everything to do with you. There are countless tiny things being and becoming and becoming beautiful: and you are one of them. Even when you are stressed, even when you are lonely or tired.

A friend recently wrote about the idea that "Godde doesn't exist yet":

But there is an Arising. The universe and its inhabitants are becoming more conscious, more compassionate, more empathic, with the arising of the universal Mind. As we interact socially with the Universe, we increase its consciousness.

Rilke, in his Letters to a Young Poet, wrote:

As the bees bring in the honey, so do we fetch the sweetest out of everything and build Him. With the trivial even, with the insignificant (if it but happens out of love) we make a start, with work and with rest after it, with a silence or with a small solitary joy, with everything we do alone, without supporters and participants, we begin him.

Who will build the beauty of the world, if we won't? With infinite attention, the world expands, the universe groans and stretches and wakes from sleep. Without attention, respect, love--the world grows anxious and dull, inhospitable, repetitive. What will you do on a Sunday afternoon? The sun is bright, the leaves are creeping towards death like millions of monarch butterflies, the wind moves, or doesn't--and where are you? Hiding inside with the windows shut, squandering your precious attention on smoke and mirrors.

And if you feel your life is too stressful or too boring to withstand sobriety for long, then there it is: change your life. The world is waiting to relieve you, to refresh you. It owes you nothing, but everywhere offers itself up selflessly. Accept it. Welcome in the world. Sobriety is literally the least you can do.

Beltane & the Forgotten Temple

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I didn't have any big-to-do formal ritual planned for today, Beltane, May Day (I like to save those for the solar festivals, and celebrate the fire festivals more spontaneously and organically). So this morning I headed off to the local park (a large, wooded park--the biggest in the city--only a twenty-minute walk from where I live), with the intention of spending several hours, possibly all day in quiet meditation and hiking about in the woods. When I go on walks like these, I usually just let my intuition guide me, and today I was rewarded more than I ever expected!

I've been visiting this park fairly regularly over the past two years, ever since I moved to Pittsburgh, and I've gotten used to there always being people around, walking their dogs, jogging, biking, etc. I was convinced that somewhere in the woods, which is criss-crossed with trails, there must be one or two little groves or clearings where I could sit down and not be interrupted. But, like everything else in the city, all of the trails and paths in the park went somewhere, which meant people were always going from point A to point C, and if I stopped at point B along the way, I could count on there being a steady trickle of people going past me.

Today, I was walking along one such path that skirts a grassy field where people often let their dogs off leash to run after frisbees or other dogs, when it occurred to me that I had never actually walked across the field to the (seemingly) thin bit of woods on the other side. I don't have a dog, so I usually just walk right past this field, but there were no dogs out today because I went at that perfect time when everyone's at their "day jobs." On a whim, I decided to head towards a small bench I could see sitting in the shade of those trees across the way, but when I got to the bench, I realized there was a little path leading into the trees. I decided to follow it, even though I didn't think it led very far. I had gone in about fifty yards or so, twisting and turning along a path that seemed unexpectedly unused, when I came across a tree with a little wooden sign nailed to it which just read: Temple. After that, the path seemed to almost disappear, but I stumbled my way through and, after climbing over a fallen log that was almost too high for me to climb and too big for me to duck under--I came upon a beautiful little clearing! I could well believe that it was a secret temple or grove, though perhaps one that hadn't been used in years.

I sat down on the edge of the grove in a wonderfully soft patch of grass (it seemed like the whole clearing might have once been grassy but, over time, the woods had crept back in and there were now mostly shrubs, fallen branches and tall reeds and weeds, except here and there). It was a beautiful spot and I ended up sitting there in quiet meditation and communion for several hours. It was so peaceful--I couldn't even hear any traffic, just the birds and the chipmunks and the occasional bee or butterfly (yes, it was so quiet, that when a butterfly fluttered by, I could actually hear its wingbeats!). I really feel as if I've discovered a sacred place--and the strange sign, "Temple," just makes me wonder even more if there isn't a local pagan, Wiccan or maybe even Druid group that perhaps uses (or used to use) the site. All I know is that I finally found a path that leads to nowhere, and so only those seeking to get nowhere ever come down it--just me, the robins, the sunlight and the breeze.

In Like a Lion

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If March rolls in like a lion, it has thus far been a meek and frigid lion, but not today. The weather is playing cat-and-mouse with my body and my mood as a mild front moved in overnight, so that I awoke at 4 AM feeling feverish and claustrophobic. I opened all the windows in my bedroom, but could not settle back to rest again. All day the wind has been growling through the still bare branches of the city trees, and the low overcast of dark clouds rolls through the dome of sky, echoing the constant roar of traffic from every direction, so that the world feels dim and agitated, in a constant noisy twilight. When I sit out on my balcony, the air raises goosebumps all along my arms and the nape of my neck--the trees behind my building seem suddenly to be strange, their branches in writhing forms that are at once beautiful, and eerie. When I come inside again, I feel overheated and restless. A headache (due to sleeplessness and what feels like dehydration, despite drinking plenty of water over the course of the night and morning) persists in my temples and my skin feels hot to the touch.

I ride the weather of my body the way I ride the weather of the city.

Today, I drew the Ogham, Duir--the Oak, king of trees, tree of the Druid. Mountfort says that the oak, because it is one of the taller trees, is associated closely with gods of thunder and lightning. You might come across an oak that has been blasted and scarred by a lightning strike, but that endures and lives on nonetheless. Today, it seems the atmosphere of the city is taking a beating--the March lion is stalking the streets, not silent like a sleek lioness hunting her prey, but loud and full of electric power, like a king.

Ah... and finally, it has started to rain.

Today's Ogham: Duir (Oak)
(duration, stability, maturity, nobility)