Dark Goddess of Star Fire: A Meditation

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As the sun passes from water into fire and the moon swells full over the cold, hardening ground of the land, I ready myself for a night of ritual. In preparation for tonight's work, a few days earlier I spent some time in prayer and meditation, seeking the wise company of whatever guides might appear.

It began with a few tenuous notes turning and echoing out across the waters, the keening of the violin striving against its own tension and yearning. I was there, on the same familiar rocky cliff that curved in around a small bay, the dark waters of the ocean stretching out far beneath me. The murmuring wash of waves among the pebbles of the beach below, rocking in rhythm until the music faded again into silence.

Above me, the stars began to slip out into the night, one by one, as though disrobing from the dark veils of the night sky. One by one, they turned and shot a gasp of brilliance blazing out in a spiny halo of light around them, then pulled back again, glistening and humming with a silent energy. I lifted my head to ask them for their wisdom. It seemed as though one beckoned to me, glimmering more brightly than the rest. The vertigo of a wild night sky thrown open from horizon to horizon swept over me as my gravity seemed to shift — and then before me, solid as stone it seemed, a staircase spiraled upwards into the starscape. Step by step I climbed, my feet steady, my eyes on the scattered specks of light. Each step fell thick and heavy as though on stone draped over with the deep, plush fabric of night and darkness and stillness. As I reached the final stair, the star before me stepped close as a woman, dark and brilliant with features that seemed to shift as she turned, as though I gazed into her eyes from across countless light years. She smiled, and lifted her hand to caress my cheek and temple.

Then all at once, her other hand was at my throat, grasping my jaw firmly. With one quick motion she wrenched my face away, palm hard against my forehead, and I felt my spine snap as my body crumpled beneath her hard, cold fingers.

Keeping the Days: Leaves After Rain

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Leaves After Rain
Frick Park, Pittsburgh, PA

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

The Three Elements of Druidic Ritual

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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.

Keeping the Days: Fire and Flame

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Autumn Water Lilies
Phipps Conservatory, Pittsburgh, PA

Dreaming the Blue Sword: A Vision of Nonviolence

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In 2007 the U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution recognizing Mahatma Gandhi's birthday (October 2) as the "International Day of Non-Violence." The resolution highlights "the holistic nature and the continued relevance of the Mahatma's message for our times, indeed for all times to come. It encompasses the rejection of violence against oneself, against others, against other groups, against other societies and against nature."

We were in the dream, deeply, all of us abandoned to the dark and nervous landscape of nightmare.

There were so many of us, all strangers, all lost in what might have been a vast forest of ancient trees, their rough bark twisted with vines, or what might have been a great hall of smooth marble pillars, impassive as gods holding up the infinite ceiling of the night sky. Whatever it was, it was grand and tall and sweeping in every confused direction, and we bumped and stumbled together, low and frightened and half-blind. I was panicked, terrified, my heart pounding in my gut and my ears and in the soles of my feet. And in my hands, slick with sweat and fear, I gripped a sword.

Keeping the Days: Sky and Flame

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Sunset from Cadillac Mountain, Acadia National Park, Maine

Peace and the Celtic Spirit: Excerpts from a Journal (4)

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In August 2010, just past the waxing quarter moon, I attended a retreat on Celtic spirituality and peacemaking in Northern Ireland. The hosts of the retreat asked us to respect the safe and sacred space created by the community, and refrain from attributing direct quotes to any of the attendants or speakers. With that in mind, the following are excerpts from the journal I kept.

Day Four — Poetry, Landscape, Lectio Devina

I sat to pray by the side of the water, and everywhere in the mountains it was morning. I could watch the sun creep down towards the shore, slowly down the sloping hills, down the green, down from the low clouds where they drifted like hardly-held breath.

I sat to pray, and no words came, except the sacred silence, the intake of breath, the slow and gentle rearranging of my body to open and let in just a little more sky. What kind of prayer could I utter after this? When what I wanted most was only to keep moving, to keep shifting in this way, until every part of me was open, and the waters and the clouds and the mountains in their shining came rolling in.

~*~

I wonder if the gods feel this intimacy too, and if, in coming with my ancestors to America, they feel the loss of it as well. Does the land seem larger to them, sprawled out and scaled up — do they miss the smallness of it? That such a small and intimate land could be so full of gods — how could there be enough room? — and yet such a large land have only one.... In some ways it makes no sense.

Keeping the Days: Water and Well

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Long Pond, Acadia National Park, Maine

Keeping the Days: Sky and Flame

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Today's "Keeping the Days" features photographs of bees and beetles, our darling winged friends, taken during my recent family vacation in Acadia National Park in Maine.





bee on a wildflower

Etymology of My Gods, Redux

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While Bob Patrick was writing up his recent guest post on polytheism and divinity, I was busy gathering my thoughts on Bonewits' version of modern American polytheology, and doing a bit of research and etymological digging of my own. Exploring the roots of words like "god," "deity," and "spirit" gave rise to the contemplative-poetic piece posted a few days ago. But I thought it would also be valuable to share — in solid, trustworthy prose — the results of my digging.

Words for the Many, Words for the One

deity

From the Latin deus, "god." Related to the Proto-Indo-European root *dewos-, which gave rise to various words for god, spirit or demon in languages like Latin, Persian, Sanskrit, etc. The PIE form comes from the base *dyeu-, which means "to gleam, to shine," and also gave us words like sky and day. It seems the term "deity," related to the name of Zeus, originally evoked the idea of a being or spirit of light, whether a solar-god or a god of lightning. The word "divine," also from the Latin deus, when used as a verb (as in "to divine the future") originally suggested the ability to see by a supernatural light.

Etymology of My Gods

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

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

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

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

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

Keeping the Days: Earth and Stone

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Asticou Azalea Garden, Mount Desert Island, Maine

Bob Patrick :: Divining Divinity

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On more than one occasion, I have heard the terms “polytheists” and “monotheists” used by people to describe themselves. What fascinates me is the easy way that some modern pagans identify themselves as polytheists with little understanding, it seems, of who created this term and what it implies. I have full sympathy for why modern pagans might not be comfortable using the term “monotheist” to describe themselves. I’m just not sure why they think that “polytheist” is a better alternative.

The word “polytheism” entered English from a Latin word (polytheismus) formed from Greek roots which mean “many gods”. The Latin passed into French as polytheisme. It is first used in English in the early 1600’s. This is important to note: the word comes into our language in Europe at a time when Christianity is at its height of influence, religiously and politically. In short, polytheism was a Christian word, and it was created to help draw distinctions and divisions between those who are not what Christians value — monotheists (also a Christian word). Given that this word was created by Christians to distinguish those who are not like themselves and done so for their own theological, philosophical and culturally specific conversations, I am not at all sure why someone who is not Christian would want to use it. The history and meaning of the word have their starting points in Christianity.

Without presuming to speak definitively for all Christians, I think it important to note that the Christian understanding of the divine includes, among other things, a Creator who is wholly other and separate from the creation (while still able to work through the creation); who is omnipotent and omniscient; and who is One, hence the label “monotheism.” Since Christianity created the term “polytheism” as a term to use to distinguish other religious practitioners from themselves, I think it very important to hold definitions of polytheism at arm’s length and observe how those definitions prevent us from discovering an experience of divinity that such monotheism simply cannot imagine.

Keeping the Days: Water and Well

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Thuya Garden, Mount Desert Island, Maine

Contemplations on Polytheism and Gods of the Land

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There was a lightness of being in my solitary walk to the library this morning, after yesterday's long-rumbling thunderstorms growling out of the dense haze and heat of the city.^[1] For the past two weeks I have been getting up early to hillwalk through the wooded park down the block, and even in the dawn hours everything hung heavy and damp, dark green, sticky, slick with heat, heat, heat. The pond was a low patch of thickening mud, the stream in the ravine a gully of trickling gutter-water between the tree roots. The mulberries from the neighbor's drooping tree were slowly fermenting on the sidewalk, and giving birth whenever someone walked by to a swarm of iridescent flies. This is not exactly unusual for July around here (certainly not as out-of-character as the hotter weather farther north). But the cloudless domed sky fading to muggy gray on the horizons unbroken for so many rainless days became a little disconcerting in a city centered on three rivers and so near a great lake, where the mountains rising to the east back up the westerly winds carrying their rainstorms over the land. We get a lot of rain here in Pittsburgh, but for the past two weeks it seems we've had nothing but hot, thick, hard-to-breate damp — sliced through with burning arrows of sunlight.

So yesterday was a blessing. An early twilight by midafternoon when the storms rolled in, and it was finally cool enough to fall asleep a few hours before midnight for once. For the first time I felt refreshed when waking up this morning, as if I had slept well and without that constant, unidentifiable anxiety that the body seems to absorb and store up from the enforced stillness of long, hot summer days. And the morning is beautiful. During long weeks of constant heat, coolness becomes a kind of abstract in a sun-fogged brain. Jeff and I kept talking about our upcoming vacation in cool, ocean-hedged Acadia National Park, and my trip soon after to Ireland — the misty green lands that my skin and bones remember, like a gift from my ancestors, without ever having been there — but I don't think I could really believe in these things or imagine them with any kind of realism.

Ah, but this morning I can almost taste the very first hint of crisp, cool autumn, sneaking in just after the high, bright peak of the solstice! Walking down the streets of my neighborhood, I had flashbacks to that feeling I used to get during the first weeks of a new semester back in college, when everything was light and fresh and free, with new classes (and, glory be!, new books to devour!) and new faces roaming campus, and a new year ahead. And in all of this, that special kind of solitude, the aloneness of stepping out and away from home, cut loose from routine or rather in the early stages of a new one when it still feels wide and spacious and full of possibility. It was as if heat had become my home, and I thought it would go on being home forever. It is hard to describe, but I could taste it like gentle sunlight — after two weeks I'd almost forgotten that sunlight could feel gentle and smooth, not always burning and oppressive — and light wisps of clouds that go skipping now from horizon to horizon in a cool lake of blue sky, awash in relief. And I am so thankful that my gods, if I have any, are changeable, full of movement and utterly beyond me.

Discovering Druidry

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I have, like others before me, discovered that Blogger now hosts "pages"... and I've finally broken down and decided to play with this feature to see what it has to offer — a longer biography, perhaps, or a list of useful books and resources? Links to popular and interesting past posts, maybe one or two longer essays of general interest? If others have any ideas, please don't hesitate to share! Eventually these pages will appear as links (in a relatively boring format, until I can tweak things) just below the header. For now, please enjoy my first page, Discovering Druidry, which serves as a kind of combination memoir and overview of my personal approach to the threefold, interweaving Druid Path. I have shared it below as a post on its own, but it will also be permanently available here. (Also, I'm honored and excited to see that Philip Carr-Gomm stumbled across it today and quoted it in his blog! Thanks so much, Philip!)

In the beginning, I was a wild child, a woodsy child, a child who could concentrate all of my attention on holding perfectly still so as not to startle the robin in the grass. I could disappear into the tense air of rapt attention, forget my own little body completely as my eyes widened and my breath stilled. Once, the robin's twitching eyes turned towards me, and I thought I heard it whisper... Cheer-up. Cheer-up, calmly, almost with amusement, you know, I can see you.

That was when I was a very little girl. As sometimes happens, eventually I grew up and stopped listening so closely to the world, to the landscape and the wilderness. It would be years before I rediscovered the rapture of stilled breath or the ecstasy, the going-out-ness, of listening closely and attending with reverence to sacred nature. Druidry would restore my sense of connection and intimacy with the natural world; it would open me to new ways of living with creativity and wisdom, playfulness and respect; it would bring me home to myself, to this person dwelling in my own particular body in my own particular place in a vast landscape infused with Spirit. Druidry was a home-coming for me, as so many Pagans and Witches before me have described their own rediscoveries. One day, I would look into the eyes of the world and discover — like some startled scullery maid or the only daughter of a widower out of a fairy tale — my real destiny wearing a strange new face, a face of beauty and dignity, but smiling at me with the same old familiar affection.

But first, I had to learn about poetry.

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

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

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

Deity & Imagination

It was a dark and stormy night.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goddess in the Details (in three parts): Three

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Goddess-Present

I wonder about our ability to bring deity along with us, especially when a great deal of our modern lives are overrun with hyper movement, distraction and dislocation. For the past few months now, I have been working to build a relationship with Brigid, the Celtic triple goddess of fire, of poetry, healing and smithcraft. Sometimes, I feel as though she is very present in my life, a kind of voice whispering in my ear. Other times, I seriously doubt how a goddess of the British Isles could have made it across the Atlantic and arrived here in any familiar form. Yet how could I possibly connect with the gods and spirits of this land as the indigenous peoples of hundreds of years ago knew and connected with them? So am I to be godless, after all? Brigid cannot remain for me merely an abstraction inherited from my ancestors, nor an imaginary friend I can talk to when I'm feeling especially "spiritual." A real relationship with her means that I discover her unexpectedly in the world, that I see her in moments of grace and epiphany and comfort and recovery. I do not want to manufacture experiences of the divine.

And so, with the extreme discomfort and anxiety of this trip, I found myself feeling cut off and, frankly, weak. The cynical voice of Mother Culture kept prattling on in the back of my head about how I should have a thicker skin, how my disorientation was not in fact a symptom of how well-grounded I was in the local landscape of my own beloved city of steel and hills and three rivers, but merely evidence that I was coddled and overly sensitive, inflexible, that my life was just, well, small. Here I was, feeling like an ignorant native jerked out of her element. And what could my writing, my voice, my ideas and my heart — what relevance could any of these things have for others on the other side of the world, or even next door, if my life was miniscule and limited this way? If not even a goddess can make it across the water, what can I do? My body rebelled against the plastic and chemicals that suddenly seemed to be everywhere when what I wanted most was the feel of sycamore bark under my fingers, and a little space to breathe. I belong to my city, and to the larger landscape of Pennsylvania; I am rooted there and move with comfortable ease and confidence. I know how to live, and live well, which is something more than many people can say. But this was a wholly different world, encased in advertisements and bought with the willful ignorance of imaginary capital, and I didn't understand it, couldn't touch down to something real, couldn't discern the laws of physics I was meant to obey. I had opinions, about politics and class and consumerism and environmentalism, about spirit and breath and connection — but suddenly they seemed irrelevant, even laughable. And what good is knowing how to live, if you don't know how others should live?

But that's the wrong question to be asking, of course, because there is no one right way to live. There is only living, fully present in the here-now, in touch with what is real. All of these thoughts were confused and only half-articulated in my mind, mixed up with images of opulence and science fiction utopias rattling around next to steampunk and bad historical-fantasy romances and Vonnegut's metaphor of artists like canaries plunged into the dark of claustrophobic mine shafts. I was distracted by surfaces. And so it was through surfaces that Brigid, goddess of fire and water, exalted highness of the sourceless spring and the ashless flame, slipped in and opened my eyes. I watched the puddles gather on the ugly tan roof, watched the glimmer of sunset on the surface of the water, and I knew again the goddess in the details, the spirit of small things weaving their connections over the whole world, sustaining life through their simplicity and presence. Within the cacophony of the World Song, I heard again the healing resonance of those same few simple notes turning over into melody.

Yet it wasn't Brigid making herself known. There was no higher layer of spiritual awareness, no voice whispering, it's me, dear, listen up.... There was only the rain, and the flickering spotlights, and the steam of their meeting. But something happened for me. And because I know, intellectually, that Brigid is a goddess of fire and water, as well as of poetry and healing, those things which I so desperately need — I make the choice to give her this experience, to see in this experience the work of her presence. It's as if some great being were moving through the world, almost too huge to pay any mind to my little noises and existential crises, so great as to be indifferent the way we are indifferent to the bacteria in our lower intestines, but not unkind. A mighty goddess who works in the smallest things, the simplest movements of water and light. Here She was, moving and being just as she is, and I was only some small creature happening to reach out to touch the hem of her green mantle as she passed by, touched almost as if by accident by the wholeness of her beauty.

Am I okay with this? Impersonal but still feeling blessed, not called by name but touched nonetheless... yes, I think I am. So, though perhaps she won't know it, though it's possible even that she is only a name, an idea, that I am giving to something real — I give her this experience of mine as a kind of offering, in gratitude. Maybe next time she will turn her eyes my way.

Three Humans Walk into a Bar: Language, Labels & Naming Spirit

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The three of us perched on barstools at a small tile-topped table near the emergency exit, sipping our beers and talking about Spirit: a polytheist, a panentheist, and an agnostic. Stop me if you've heard this one.

Pondering Deity

I've been thinking a lot recently about polytheism and deity, prompted in part by Kullervo's post about his "conversion experience" (for lack of a better term), and in part by my own continuing explorations in meditation and daily spiritual practice. I can feel it--part of me is waiting for something to click. And it hasn't happened yet. When I read about others' experiences of deity--the power and beauty and awe that go along with it, the certainty as well as the surprise--and when I talk with Jeff about his own views of the gods and goddesses, I feel as though I might be missing something. But try as I might, I can't seem to wrap my head around these ideas of gods, at least not in anything but a metaphorical sense. Faeries, Shining Ones, elemental beings and spirits of all shapes and sizes striving and thriving together in an "ecology of Spirit" that echoes and gives rise to the physical world--sure, hell yeah. But where do the gods come into it? How do I understand them? I'm still waiting for that part to fall into place.

As a child, and even into my teens and college years, I had experiences of what you might call "personal deity"--the small, intimate kind. Jesus and I were rather close for a while, even though I'd always had a better grasp of the Big Guy, the Transcendent Spirit of Godhead, the Breath and Life that infused everything, everywhere, with love and connection. In her recent post, Cat talks about how she began not with this unifying, unified Spirit that was too big and abstract, but with the little particulars of the world. For me, it was just the opposite--the Spirit moving over the dark face of the waters was something almost tangible to me, as though all these particulars were secretly veiling something else, some deeper essence. I could feel it in the wind and rain, in the bright summer fields, and in the way everyone's shoulders rose and fell together in one rippling intake of breath reciting the Our Father during Mass.

For a while, in fact, I struggled to understand where Jesus came into it at all, besides playing the role of wise teacher and political rebel. But at some point, this role as wise and loving shaman-sage developed into full-blown deity, Jesus the Christ, the Reconciler who brought transcendence and immanence together in a uniquely and fully human form. Jesus was not just embodied Godhood, but conscious, living, breathing, moving, evolving Godhead--change and flux within the perfection of essence, the human becoming as an expression of utter being. And other kinds of mystical language. But the simplest way to put it is, he was the broken-hearted god I met in dream: sitting quietly in an empty corner sipping his beer and watching the careless violence of love and connection bloom and shred to dust under dancing feet... he was the shy bisexual and misunderstood poet-lover shunned by the noise and callousness of the raging house-party, and utterly in love with every drunkard there. He was the one I could turn to when I needed to understand devotion and sacrifice, loneliness and death.

And then, gradually, we just lost touch. Almost without noticing it, I began once again to relate to the world with an immediacy that seemed to have no need for a medium or Reconciler. I went through periods of depression and near suicidal moods (that is, if a heart aching for connection, even if such connection means bodily death and the dissolution back into the universal tides of Spirit, could really be called "suicidal"); yet during these times, the world would not abandon me, would not leave me alone. Its presence--both beautiful and terrible in its indifferent, impersonal, imperfect perfection--bore down on me inescapably, so that I knew I could not merely cease to be even if that was what I wanted. All this time, it was the world-as-sacred, the immanence of what I once would have called Holy Spirit, that lurked in every blink of an eye, moved through every corner of being before I could look away. Transcendent Godhead seemed far away, or rather deep, deep within past the dull, devastatingly holy mechanizations of embodiment. And personal deity seemed about as real and relevant to me as things like "getting a real job" and "establishing good credit." It was something that happened to other people.

Where am I now? Back in February, I felt as though I might be onto something, something having to do with imagination and love and the way they work in tandem to create images of deity. I had some realization--which I can now barely remember--about the way poetry and metaphor led me back and forth between the transcendent Universal and the intimate Particular, and how these same faithful allies could teach me about personal deity in a polytheistic sense, about the role of archetype and personality, guardian and guide, in my understanding of divinity. I was making progress, developing an interesting if not always warm-fuzzy relationship with Caer Ibormeith, the faery swan-maiden of Aengus Og's dreaming, exploring through meditation and prayer ways in which her story of independence, strength, transmutation and love might have lessons to teach me. Perhaps I learned those lessons a bit too well; soon after that, I found myself plunging into a new romantic relationship that fulfilled and sustained parts of me that had been starved and bitter for several years. The need for personal deity once again dropped out of view, as the very real and immediate presence of a fellow human being took precedence.

Labels & Names

Three real and immediate human beings walked into a bar. I might be a masochist, but I can't resist the urge to provoke debate between two dear friends when I know they disagree. I sat nursing my Woodchuck (all right, not exactly a beer, I'll grant you) between Raymond, my old anam-chara, and Jeff, my new kindling flame. You might call Raymond a skeptic, or even an agnostic--if you wanted to sit through a long lecture about how he rejects labels like "god" and "spirituality" and "agnostic" not because he is uncertain or unwilling to commit to certain beliefs about this possible Something else, but because he respects the power of language and would not idly rob that Something of its namelessness. And you might call Jeff a polytheist--as long as you knew about the time his Zen Buddhist mother asked him if he believed the gods were actually real and he replied, with a conspiratorial wink to anatma, "As real as I am." And I sat in the middle, as if some literal-minded playwright had scripted the event, hardly saying anything but listening intently to their conversation.

I might call myself a panentheist--someone who believes in both the immanence and transcendence of divinity--and in fact I have called myself that for many years now... Except that more recently this term has started to sound redundant, as though it were almost too obvious to bother articulating. What else could Spirit be than "the eternal animating force behind the universe, with the universe as nothing more than the manifest part"? I don't exactly like the slightly dismissive sound of "nothing more than"--the vast complexities and mind-blowing, heart-wrenching harmonies of intricate manifestation are nothing to sneeze at--but in a nutshell, there it is: immanent manifestation and transcendent source, the complete package. Still, for me this doesn't resolve the question of the gods. From the panentheistic point of view, it seems to me that everything is God, you might even say that everything is a god in one way or another. But what could this possibly mean for traditional ideas of polytheistic gods like Apollo, Brigid, Cernunnos, Odin? I might feel the deity-aspect of ocean, but it is this ocean here, not some abstracted Manannan mac Lir striding through myth; just as it is this sun and not Apollo; or this woods and not Cernunnos. I struggle to bridge this gap between particulars in the manifest world, and particulars in the realm of transcendent divinity where specific gods and goddesses rule over certain ideals, realms, activities and cultural traits. Isn't the nature of transcendent Spirit precisely that it does not break and fracture into bits and pieces, but resides in a kind of unity of Universality? And yet, I understood Jesus at one time as personal deity--connected to that transcendent Godhead. Was this different, because I imagined or experienced him as "in the world" in a way that these other deities seem not to be? (Am I dancing around the need for idols, perhaps, and places of consecrated space dedicated to the gods and allowing them residence in the manifest world?)

I am losing myself in language once more, it seems, as I try to articulate my own stumbling blocks. Jeff's views of polytheism seem simple and elegant, but at times almost too literal for me to connect with in a deeply meaningful way. I admire the trust that both he and Kullervo express when they speak of taking their experiences of the gods at face value, and yet as someone without such experiences of my own I wonder if I'm missing something, or if I'm just not as good at make-believe. Of course this sounds insulting, but it's not meant to be. There are certain things in which I believe almost as though they were a part of my nature--reincarnation, for instance, and to some extent faeries and elemental beings--and I have wrestled before with the question of why some beliefs, which are no more rational or mature, come naturally while others just don't "click." But even if this struggle cannot help me to appreciate the language of polytheism, in other ways it helps me to understand where my friend Raymond is coming from when he objects to the use of certain words as unhelpful, even bordering on meaningless.

Because if there's one thing I do believe in, it's the power of language--not to label things, but to name them. For me, words are never fatal, killing a thing dead when we speak about it. Indeed, words are powerful--they allow us to think, they provide us with a structure, a grammar and vocabulary of thought. But a word that cannot evoke a meaningful and complex reality is useless to us; it is language which depends on a thriving essential connection to the real world, and not the other way around. When a word--be it "god" or "truth" or whatever--is thrown around too easily or too often misapplied, then yes, something does die: the word itself. A word that cannot speak to experience is dead indeed, empty and disconnected. But we're mistaken if we think that because the word is dead, we have killed the reality with it, or even that we have cut ourselves off from that reality in its uniqueness and intimate presence. The struggle to articulate our experiences can lead us far from the original immediacy as we knew it at first, but working through this divergence eventually brings us back again to a place in which reality can speak on multiple levels at once, both through particulars and through universals, without one denying the other. When we respect the role that language can play, when we respect both its power and its limits, words can become an instrument of connection, freedom and creativity, rather than a barrier or killing blow.

This, I believe, is the difference between naming and labeling, or the difference between limit and restriction, choice and decision, as I've discussed before. I have never allowed labels--even those applied to me against my will by others--to act as a restriction on my freedom to be who I truly am. Quite the opposite, in fact: I have always felt that who I truly am shapes and gives context to whatever words might attach themselves to me. This is the essence of a name. This is why I am and always will be an "Ali," not because my parents knew me before I was even born (they barely know me now!) and somehow picked out the best label for me, but because the arbitrary gift of that name has given me something to work with creatively and deeply, and I have made it my own. Likewise, being "a waitress" has not restricted me or forced me into a role I do not like; instead, I help to define and expand on what it means to be a waitress by accepting the word as a name and working creatively with it. Being "a Druid," I do the same thing, my ideas and experiences adding meaning, context and life to the word, instead of sucking life out of me and rendering my spiritual experiences shallow or silly. When someone seeks to label me, I do not worry too much that I might somehow be lessened in their eyes, for if they reduce me to a label it is not really me they are talking of, and if they acknowledge my own true being then the label itself is transformed and expanded by "my good name," so to speak.

Understanding the limits of language, as well as its power, means that I also relax a bit and develop a sense of light-hearted playfulness. Words are immensely powerful in shaping our thoughts (and our thoughts do, arguably, shape reality in turn), but I am not just my thinking. I am also my poetry, my music and aesthetics, my intuition, my laughter, my crying, my running and walking, my dancing and my sitting quietly in the park. I am my meditation, whether that meditation is discursive explorations of reasoning and free associative logic, or imaginative journeying through inner landscapes, or the zazen practice of sitting still and quieting the monkey mind. For me, language is something that I play with, in the same way a musician might play his instrument, setting aside all the theory and "right" ways of making music, breaking all the rules in order to give his own soul-song a chance to breathe and speak. To be able to play, to act creatively and discover or make new meaning, I need the freedom of allowing myself not to take language so seriously all the time. I need the freedom to say whatever occurs to me, without worrying if it's always precisely and exactly what I mean, to explore what sounds good and what evokes suggestive or provocative images and ideas, even if it doesn't say something "true." This is what allows me to write poems and stories about gods and goddesses that still hold meaning and power for me, even if I do not know what I believe exactly about deity or the truth of others' beliefs. By playing with language and allowing myself to explore, I learn what it is these words mean for me.

Where It Gets Me

It gets me right here. The other night in meditation, I posed the question--to Caer in whatever form she felt like showing up, or to the universe in general, or to my own subconscious--why I don't seem to experience personal deity any more. The answer came back that it was simply because, at some point, I decided I didn't need personal deity anymore, that this focus on mystic transcendence or whathaveyou was more valuable or more real or simply more meaningful to me. But this was a choice I made, based on what I believed about the universe, and not necessarily some revelation of inherent universal truth. It was the name I chose for my own spiritual path, and to some extent I have been working with that name and making it my own ever since. That doesn't mean this approach is any worse than relating to divinity through personal deity or deities....and it's certainly not a matter of whether or not one "needs" gods or God to grow or love or evolve or connect. I don't think gods, or even a conscious connection with what I call Spirit, is necessary for these things. But that doesn't mean, either, that having a spiritual life that includes ideas about Spirit and deity is worse or more damaging, or prevents people from connecting, growing or appreciating reality, anymore than having relationships with family, friends and so on prevents me from realizing the unity and interconnection at the heart of all our uniqueness.

So in the end, I continue to question myself and others about these subjects. Sometimes I'm surprised that I've been worrying this same bone for more than three years now; other times it just amuses me how some things are ingrained no matter what kinds of other revelations we might have. It is not that I feel my spiritual life is somehow lacking or that I'm not making progress. It's that I am curious about these experiences of personal deity as experiences, as things that others have experienced. In a way, I want to see if I can choose differently, choose a new way of approaching Spirit, precisely because then I will know to some extent that I do indeed have the capacity to choose freely and truly as a creative, free individual. If I have such experiences of my own, I will understand the experiences of others better and the language they use to speak about them. Perhaps, if it is true that not everyone can wield the power and limit of language effectively without slaying the reality it means to express, then I might have some other gift to offer, speaking or writing about these ideas and experiences in ways that are meaningful for others and articulate things they themselves have not yet learned to say. I can only ever talk deeply and meaningful about my own experiences, in the end, but I can strive to shape and work with language in ways that illuminate and communicate meaning and truth, rather than obscuring and detracting from it. And if this effort can help to honor and praise Spirit, in whatever form, then that's what I will work at until my bones ache and my tongue and fingertips are sore.