And On the Edge, Surrender

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Sometimes the world feels very small.

Why is it that sleeping on the hard-packed sandy ground of the campsite, a waxing crescent moon glimmering through the thin canvas of the tiny old tent half the night, leaves me so limber and light and full of buzzing energy? It must be three or four days since I've had a full night's sleep — still, here we are, lying awake beside each other in the dark a half-hour before the alarm is set to go off, lying so very awake and listening to the first few birds of the morning. I think you smile at me in the darkness, and for a long while we just hold hands. When the alarm finally rings it seems quiet compared to the birds, and we slip from our sleeping bags, rustling and feeling our way as best we can towards our shoes and the zipper of the tent flap — in another minute, the tent is empty and deflated on the ground, and you stuff the last collapsed tent pole into its bag as I load up the car and then busy my hands dragging a brush through my sleep-tangled hair before twining it back into a loose braid again. Everything is darkness and night still. Neither of us can remember what time the sun is supposed to rise, but even the blue shadows of the dawn twilight have barely begun to lengthen and ripen, so I guess we still have time.

The Politics of Clean(s)ing

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From the Pagan celebrations of renewing energies simmering below the surface between Imbolc and Beltane, to the purifying rituals and fasts of the Lenten season leading up to the Easter holiday of rebirth and resurrection, to the secular traditions of "spring cleaning" — it seems the topic of cleansing always pushes its way up through the muck and dirt and caked layers of old dead leaves during this time of year, much like the tulips and daffodils and, I suspect, responding to the same warm sunlight and cool rains.

My usual rituals of spring cleaning have been put on hold this year as I pack up to move from my old apartment into my new home with my partner. The process, a kind of ultimate spring cleaning (except with more cardboard boxes and lots of heavy lifting), has given me a new appreciation for all those past years of intense nook-and-cranny scouring and scrubbing and clearing out the cobwebs of the previous winter. I can immediately tell those places where the cleaning "took," and those hidden corners that I overlooked time and again, now revealed in all their glory of tumbling dust-bunny mountains. And of course, there really is nothing quite like the first deep-cleaning of the new season, with all the windows thrown open and the vernal breeze rich with hyacinths and the first hint of magnolia mingling with the citrus scents of eco-friendly cleaning supplies.

And so, I've been thinking a lot recently about cleaning, and cleansing.^[*] In particular, I've been thinking about the ways in which clean(s)ing puts us into relationship with others, with the landscape and with the Song of the World, or rather, how so often it fails to do just that. I call this the "politics" of clean(s)ing, in the sense that it concerns the how's and why's of living in community, and our responsibilities (and response-abilities) in such relationship.

About the Cleaning-Lady

To illustrate the importance of the "politics of clean(s)ing," I want to focus first on what I consider to be the epitome of an unhealthy relationship, a kind of cleaning dystopia. Now normally there are very few things that would provoke me to unequivocal judgment in this blog; I try to respect others' rights to think, behave and define themselves and their values each on their own, in hopes they will do the same for me, and I would rather engage in mutual discourse than a contest in condemning. But you are about to witness, dear readers, a departure from this general track in the following statement: I know of absolutely no reason (with the exception of those who are physically unable due to age, illness or disability) for anyone to have a housekeeper, ever.

My reasons for such a strong view are manifold, but they have their origins in my up-bringing by a strong feminist mother who also, as it happens, was an incurable pack-rat. The fact is that the title of "housekeeper" is for good reason practically interchangeable with "cleaning-lady" — it is a job still dominated almost entirely by women, almost all of whom are underpaid and overworked. My sense of social justice cringes at the very notion of patronizing and perpetuating such a horrifically sexist and demeaning profession (and I must reject the notion, as I've heard some Libertarians argue in support of prostitution, that by exploiting women who have no better options, we are somehow doing them a favor).

The logic that supports this degrading profession — and believe me, there are few jobs more degrading than cleaning up someone else's waste and filth — is that it would be ridiculous to pay someone a living wage to do work you could very well do for yourself (if you were so inclined, which of course you are not). It is the same logic that exempts severs and wait-staff from minimum wage laws (after all, you could have gotten your own food... though, of course, you didn't). The result is an ugly mess of unhealthy relationships lurking just beneath that gleaming surface that we would like to call "clean."

Consider the following: out-for-hire housekeepers are often paid according to the number of houses they clean, which gives them quite a large incentive to clean a given house as quickly as possible, and move on to the next. As a result, they often focus far more on the appearance of cleanliness than on actual, deep-cleaning itself. And can you blame them? The job of housekeeper rarely comes with job security or benefits, such as health care, and on top of that, you don't get paid if you don't show up. Which also means that housekeepers will often show up to work even when they are injured or ill, which is much more frequent in a job that involves hard physical work and dealing all day with other people's germs. Whether for reasons of speed or because she is feeling less than full of vigorous health, or quite often both, a housekeeper will likely cut every corner she can, wiping down that kitchen counter once with an already-used rag from the bathroom rather than wasting time prepping a clean one and scrubbing to kill all those invisible germs that we can't see anyway. And really, it's not her house, so why should it matter to her? There is, after all, a subversive logic that plays in the heads of the working-class housekeepers and waitresses as well, which is that if the client or customer really cared about the work, they would have done it themselves, and what you're really paid for is the task of keeping up appearances. Every once in a while, you might find that wizened Buddhist woman who treats waiting tables at the local diner like a Teahouse Practice; or the devoted housekeeper who sees the task of cleaning and sterilizing other people's homes as her small homage to Mother Teresa... but such saints are few and far between, and most folks are just fellow human beings struggling to make ends meet.

The sum total of all of this? We invite someone into our home — this place meant to be a family space of comfort and safety, rest and sanctuary and warm memory — and this person brings with her the systemic violence of lingering sexism and injustice and very often poverty; she brings with her the illnesses, frenzied stress and repressed resentment of a demeaning and difficult job; she brings with her all those literal germs from all the other houses she's cleaned that day, not to mention the harsh industrial chemicals that are just as bad for the earth as they are for the human body... and when she leaves, we survey our domain and call it "clean." And yet, how could this be clean? How could this truly be healthy? We have invited in countless violations of kindness, honor and responsibility — we have welcomed in a reality rife with invisible illness and imbalance for the sake of a superficial glimmering appearance, and in the very act of doing so we have relinquished our own responsibilities.

Why Cleansing Matters

In some ways, the argument that if you really cared about the work, you would do it yourself, though often bitter and self-justifying among those who work in the "service industry," has a deeply relevant point. Cleaning puts us into relationship with the places and objects that we clean — but more specifically, it is work that restores our relationship with all those things that we have used up and worn out with our daily living, often taking them for granted or overlooking them as our grime collects and our handling wears. The process of cleaning is our chance to re-attune with these, to demonstrate with our hands and our care, our time and concentration, the gratitude and respect that they are due. During this time we spend cleaning, we become willing attendants to those objects and places that have continually served us, patiently and reliably and without protest. For the Pagan who views all of the embodied, physical world as sacred, cleaning is a sacred act of cleansing, in which we purify our relationships with a space and its dwelling spirits (whether literal or metaphorical) by redressing the imbalances of carelessness and inattention that can so often creep into our lives.

This is the why of cleansing, but the how is also intensely important. The cleansing process puts us in touch and in tune with an object or space so that we can establish a healthy and respectful "working relationship." But as any good ritualist or spellcrafter knows, when we set about the work of clearing away the mirky or harmful energies and the lingering spiritual echoes of a place or object, we also engage in opening ourselves and emptying ourselves. We give ourselves a chance to start fresh with a new sense of freedom grounded in the present, the here-now. Household cleaning tasks are often slow and repetitive — the same sweep of the broom or swish of the mop, the same turn and twist of the dishrag, the same back-and-forth of the scrub brush on the shower tile — and so they can become a kind of embodied meditation similar to that of smudging a sacred circle or cleansing a crystal. They require and help to cultivate self-discipline, gradually quieting the riot of thoughts in the mind and bringing the attention into focus on the most mundane of details.

And so this is why, I think, it is in the spring that we find ourselves so often thinking about cleaning and cleansing. Not only is cleaning a natural and practical way to direct those energies that come bubbling up from beneath the long-frozen ground and pouring down from the ever-higher sun, but it provokes a kind of revery in the mundane. The freshly washed curtains sway in the breeze beside the newly dusted windowsill, on which sits the most mundane and common of things: a few fresh-cut flowers in a vase. And life urges us to stop and smell the flowers, to slow down, to give our attention willingly and reverently to those little things that are tripping and tumbling over themselves in offering, that give of themselves endlessly and utterly fill our lives, a glass that runneth over with the generous fecundity of spring and simple things.

^[*] The two words trace back to the same Proto-Germanic roots meaning "to gleam" or make bright, with cleanse retaining its older spelling and pronunciation and clean, once used only as an adjective, taking over in the common usage. I have noticed that cleansing often tends to evoke a kind of formality and sacredness that cleaning does not, and so I will use these two terms in this way: cleaning being the mundane process, and cleansing being cleaning with that extra bit of umph added in (let's say the "s" stands for "sacred").

Secrets of the Spring

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I am so incredibly bad at keeping secrets.

By which I mean, I'm quite good at it... but usually it requires some kind of sound-proof booth. Nothing gets out. And I mean, nothing. Not a peep.

So think of these past few weeks here at Meadowsweet & Myrrh as a kind of metaphorical sound-proof booth into which I've stepped as exciting potential projects percolate in my brain. Imagine me stepping into this booth and drawing closed the door behind me with that satisfying ssthwumphsshhh... then hunkering down to work at a nice, wide wooden desk, scraps of paper and photographs sprawled everywhere, with scissors and glue and paintbrushes and bits of wire and, yes, gods forbid, perhaps even a little bit of glitter I think. And every once in a while, I'll look up from my intensity and reverie... and what you will see is a pantomime of crazy, as I shout and wave my hands in happy frenzy and maybe sing a little song... while other times, you might witness my little freak-outs of stress and frustration, my paper-cuts and my bottles of glue tipping over and spilling sticky, gooey translucent ick over the gorgeous wooden desktop and pretty much just getting everywhere. Hence the need for sound-proofing. If I hadn't stepped into my little booth, by now you would all be privy to a few really joyous, really cool bits of news... and not a few unsavory tantrums.

Suffice it to say, I hope soon my spontaneous spasms of inspiration will eventually subside into something workable and soon this blog will return to its usual, regularly-updating schedule. But be forewarned, it seems this happens almost every spring: my energy demands that I be out and away from the computer, planning and plotting the next fabulous year in my ever-glowing life of homebody adventure and dancing gratitude. This spring-to-be so far has seen Jeff with a broken foot, my Cu Gwyn drugged up and groggy at the vet after his little snippety-snip, my apartment snapped up by a future tenant with permission from my landlord to begin the process of packing and moving (fat-lotta-help Jeff will be on that one). I have painted rooms, I have rearranged furniture, I have made phone calls and set up careful budget plans. I have (hold your breath!) gotten along exceedingly well with my mother (who, though she might fight like hell with me when it's between the two of us, is also the first one with her claws out and her teeth bared when it's me against the rest of the world).

And all the while, I have been praying and listening and contemplating, and the gods have been near, whispering in the winds and laughing in the branches and slipping along the slowly-melting icicles like late afternoon sunlight. I do not like when I read people's blogs and they say something like, "Sorry for not updating, but life has gotten too busy for Spirit." Rest assured, my lovably languishing readers, it is Spirit that has gotten too busy for me these days, and these past few weeks have been a bottleneck as all the animals and egregores I have made here in my little sound-proof booth have rushed headlong for the open door at once and gotten stuck half-in, half-out, with all their mouths panting open and all their tails wagging.

Ah, but let me not give anything away just yet! Bare with me a little longer as I pretend life is the same old dull and cold of winter and spring hasn't crept up behind me like a poet in dark. Brigid's eyes are smiling into the back of my neck, and I'm bending down to concentrate on the tasks at hand. I have yoga to practice, and bathtubs to wash, and furniture to move, and secrets to keep, and miles to go before I sleep...

Song, Three Realms and a Feast of Lights

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Grace

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I cannot imagine a more perfectly beautiful day than today. As I walked to the local park, my calves tensed and flexed, my toes struggling to relearn how to grip in loose leather sandals, and the breeze sometimes raised ripples of goosebumps across my bare arms, only to drop suddenly and leave my shoulders and neck bare to hot cascading sunlight. I wasn't exactly comfortable, but I was walking and involved in the work of walking. And this was good.

As soon as I spread my checkered blanket in the shaded grass beneath the oak and settled myself down, the world slipped open into midmorning perfection. Or rather, I slipped into that beauty that had been waiting. My muscles warm and relaxed, the trees bristling with new green shot through with the lingering colors of the last blossoms of early spring, and the grass already thick and lush, studded with the yellow of dandelions. The sky, the definition of blue, gathered in around the source of sunlight, home to the white solitary animals of scattered clouds. It was the kind of day that children draw, scribbled shapes in primary colors. I sat in meditation for an hour, seeking the still center of my being, quieting down, working the energy out with ever breath, opening myself up to the wind and sunlight, to the land and the trees, to the dew, clouds and coming rain that circulated together with the waters of my body. And when I was finished, I stretched out, laying warm against the earth, feeling her wide body curving away in all directions as she turned, rising and falling beneath me with every heartbeat.


I have been thinking about grace recently. I have been thinking that what grace really is, is relationship. Relationship with one another, relationship with the harmonies that echo and glide through the Song of the World, relationship with the land, with earth, sea and sky, relationship with Spirit.

And I have been thinking that I don't understand you, not completely. I understand little parts of you, like being familiar with the edge of a wood or the shoreline of an ocean, and I can see a few paths leading in, sometimes I can imagine where they go, only guessing. In the end, I don't really know and I can't always follow. I have been thinking about the toast, "To know him, is to love him." And to love you, is to know you.


In Christianity, grace is a gift from God. One might even say it is the gift from God. The Christian concept of grace is often misunderstood, misrepresented or misapplied, even by Christians. Sometimes, it is something withheld to all but the chosen few, the benediction of favoritism--and if you don't feel moved to agree, then clearly you haven't been chosen. But in the Catholicism of my childhood, "Grace is a participation in the life of God. It introduces us into the intimacy of [communal spiritual] life." (CCC 1997) It is relationship, and the capacity for such relationship, that the Divine gives freely and undeserved, to everyone. Spirit pours itself forth, continuously. Rain falls on both the evil and the good. Try to build a ladder to heaven and you will never make it; only, stand on the highest step and ask, and Spirit will lean close to kiss you deeply. This is grace. Those who have it, have not earned it or built it or won it as reward. They are simply the ones who thought to ask, and to allow Spirit to answer.

This is grace. Those who have it, touch the meaning of movement and stillness, of cultivation and surrender. The world is utterly full of grace, in every pocket of ecology and art. Each season has its grace, each body, ugly, old or tired as it may be. All things are in relationship, all things harbor connection at their core. When Druidry speaks of harmony and balance, the Song of the World, the web of being, this is grace. The emergent fitting-together of life's messiness and tension. The dance and weave, the tides and whirlwinds. The last magnolia blossoms unfurled and weeping in the dark magnificent howling storm. The first bee of spring, the perfect slivery sphere of a dandelion wish, the sunlight and the burn. The ant stumbling across the blanket's immense landscape of fuzzies and folds. Grace is relationship, and Druidry is brimming with it.


So when you explain yourself, your ideas and priorities, I have my own reactions, the places where the edges of your thoughts rub up against mine. But when I sit and think on it a little more, I also sense that place deep within you, the depths of the woods or water, what isn't readily accessible. I come from a similar place within myself, which is probably why we sometimes fight, frustrated at each other for not understanding, accusing each other of not really listening.


I can hardly comprehend my whole self sometimes. Thoughts and ideas rise to the surface every once in a while, looming up out of the depths, and they're familiar, I recognize them as naturally my own. But I cannot hold onto them, or at least, I can't hold onto all of them at once. (Ani says, "You wouldn't try to put the ocean in a paper cup.") Sometimes, I have to work, I have to move even within myself, to remember, to get back to them again. The way I can't hold the whole of a Celtic knotwork pattern in my mind at once, but if I trust in process, following step by step--this notch up, this notch down, this thread over, this thread under--the thing comes into being anyway, whether I can see it coming or not. Water slipping down a mountain side, gravity doing its work, grace and love finding their own way out.

I do not want to be completely understood. I am deep and wide, hungry and restless for the world. I am not one thing or the other, I am the little animal slipping through the grasses, and the grasses, and the missing space between. But I still want to be loved, even if only in small parts, because I think really, that's enough, that's all it takes. We just have to start out loving small parts of people--the little things strangers say in public places, the look of this person or that person walking down the street and how no one else looks or walks quite that way, just little things--and the rest comes of its own accord, following the natural pathways of connection laid down.


What I mean is, I can't comprehend you completely, as I can't comprehend myself. We're just too big for that, you and I. But comprehension is different from caring, from love. Maybe we can love just one small part of something, and love is like the water or the knotwork, following its own path until the all of things connects. We can love just one tiny part of something or someone, just one small part of the world--the color of this one leaf, the shape of that one cloud, the sound of this one bird--and when we love it deeply, when we enter in to that outreaching fluidity of love, suddenly we find ourselves, slipping, connecting to everything else. Gracefully, we draw ourselves into relation, into relationship.

I love you, not completely, but already and in little bits and pieces. That's a start.

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."

& Sleepless Spring

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I am in one of those odd moods tonight, a mood that has grown into an odd compulsion, really--the compulsion not to go to sleep. Perhaps it's only because I spent most of the day (after an important meeting this morning), lounging around the apartment reading and watching the snow fall.

Yes, you read correctly: here in Pittsburgh, it's been snowing all day.

This morning was suffused with a kind of strange quiet joy. As I walked to my appointment, there seemed to be so much light, all things seemed touched with and emanating brightness, and stillness. And yet, the clouds overheard were thick and gray, rolling in layers, and I could not find that place in the sky where the sun's presence carves out a hard blindness into which you can't ever look. I could look anywhere, everywhere, and yet...

O, I'm not articulating myself very well. It's late. But the blossoms on the trees, flush and swollen with recent rains, each petal soft and opened as if lapping at the snow, and the snow like heavy pieces of light broken off from the gray, billowing skyline and scattered, drifting, settling in the nooks and curves of every limb, still mostly bare and so dark and thin. The pear tears, tiny bursting bouquets of white flowers, and the magnolias--goddess of the magnolia!, she bewilders and overwhelms me every April--and the tight little fists of the dogwood blossoms and pursed lips of the crabapple trees, not yet open, pinched shut against the cold and snow. The trees seemed to exude the crystalline white dusting like sap running warm up from warm earth, touching every tip and seeping as though from a thousand eager wounds, while the frigid petals of winter's last precipitation bloomed midair, everywhere, amongst a brightness that brought tears shivering on the edges of my eyes, running one, then another, loose along my cheek, protesting against the wind.

There are too many exuberant words in this description--it was simple, and quiet, god so very quiet. It was not a lapse back into deadening, claustrophobic winter--it was the opposite! As if everything that was not Spring had ceased or shut itself away beneath the brightness shimmering, every blooming thing etched and framed with the perfect emptiness and void of snow, as if to say: this, this here is the season, these green and growing bits, here, the yellows, lavenders and rose, the pussy willow buds holding their breaths until they explode with tufts of pollen... I'm not saying it right. You had to have been there, to be walking in it.

It's not that I feel as though I can't go to sleep--it's more like I have the strong impression that I shouldn't. That I should stay awake, that I should... remain awake. Perhaps forever. Perhaps only for tonight.

I might be in love.

As I was walking, through the piercing brightness of day, I thought about gods, and why we believe in gods who cannot save us, who cannot stoop to tilt the earth back into healthy cycles of warming and revolving, or intervene in war and famine, or perform even the most ordinary of miracles. I thought about gods, and why we bother. But there are mornings--and the nights that follow them--when you can't ask those kinds of questions. They don't make sense. The words are in the right order, the sounds move and you recognize the inflection and the tone--but it is all only so much noise and rhythm in the still. These are the gods that come and go, this is the world as it has always been, holy, infused, en-chanted, wide open like a wound or a dead thing or a cupped palm filling with water and then draining again. Why--the pale curl of the fingers, the white blood cells gathering, the white worms working their way to the surface of the flesh--we work and work at the why, but there's no way of taming a god.

At night, either you believe, or you go to sleep alone. I have slept that way for years, alone with my body, with my whys and cupped hands and busying blood. What will I say next? How will I get from there to here, to where I am tonight? Two months ago, it occurred to me to change, to shift, and I found that I could do it. This is all nonsense. It's late, and I'm not really saying anything. There was a moment I thought I made a movement, a course correction, but now I think that was just a trick of the light. Still, before where there was only myself, not even that, less than even that, now there are hands, dark and solid and warm and not my own, there are magnolia blossoms, deer moving in the hollow, an undoing, a belief in something, a compulsion or longing or wakefulness, and breath, and sleepless spring.

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.

Death in Springtime.

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You may have noticed, dear reader, my recent lack of regular blogging over the past month or so...

No? O, well then you've probably been suffering from the same blessed spring fever that I've come down with (or gone out with, as the case may be). My thoughts lately have been as lazy and amusing as a rabble of cabbage butterflies. Here, for instance, is the half-hearted attempt at a serious contemplation of death and the afterlife. It soon dissolves into chuckling at my own self-reflection.

"Life is cruel. Why should the afterlife be any different?"

- Davey Jones, PotC: DMC

Interesting question.

On the other hand, I'm not inclined to agree with the premise. Maybe I've just been lucky... quite possible. But somehow I don't think that's all it is--at least, I know plenty of people who seem to have better "luck" but don't do nearly as much with it.

I'm more inclined to believe that life is what you make it with the materials you're given (the material world itself--biology, chemistry, physics--as well as society, individuality, community, personality, etc.). And in that sense, why should the afterlife be any different? We're given different media to work with, perhaps, and different skills to utilize, and we're working and creating from a different perspective...

On the other hand, maybe this view is just a way of denying death. If the afterlife is a transition to a new way of being/becoming, then death is no real tragedy. Yet we grieve deeply over the death of loved ones. Is this grief a mistake, a reaction based in our ignorance of what lies "beyond"? Or is it an accurate reflection of the nature of death as a definite end?

Now I feel like I'm writing the opening voiceover for an episode of X-Files or Medium.

Probably a sign that I should stop.

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.

Mud & Mess, Life & Death

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Some thoughts about spring, mud, death, war, grief and necessity.

Perhaps it is only by confronting the pain and horror of destruction that we can see our way to the sublimity of life and creation.

That Is Not Spring

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Two more poems of my own (in honor of the Brigid in Cyberspace Poetry Reading), focusing on the realities of early February here in Western Pennsylvania, where this morning I walked to work past ice-coated and bare, unbudded tree limbs while the local woods hunches down, suspicious of the wind, and shrugs up its only shabby coat of dead, colorless leaves... The days are longer, the lights are lit--but we still have a ways to go.

Unweathered Song

What rock could withstand such air,
the diamond cut and cold of snow on stone?
Yet nestled here and there,
the chickadees note dawn in beak and bone.



Snowfall Warmed in Afternoon Sunlight

Hung muted faery tongues upon the wind,
muscles freed from voice and sense to dance
an unmeasured tune like bells, white glinting bells
strung silent as on unseen strings and tell
the flexing air of winter's long-invisible expanse,
of night, of creaking ponds of ice, and of its end.

screech of dissonant/flowers

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More poetry in honor of the Brigid in Cyberspace Poetry Reading. And who better to celebrate the coming of spring than the (in)famous E.E. Cummings! The first poem is a moving, lyrical ballad, with Cummings' idiosyncratic twist (after all, "since feeling is first/who pays any attention/to the syntax of things/will never wholly kiss you"); the second, a tripping, crude and eager ode to the goddess Spring herself.


if everything happens that can't be done

if everything happens that can't be done
(and anything's righter
than books
could plan)
the stupidest teacher will almost guess
(with a run
skip
around we go yes)
there's nothing as something as one

one hasn't a why or because or although
(and buds know better
than books
don't grow)
one's anything old being everything new
(with a what
which
around we come who)
one's everyanything so

so world is a lead so tree is a bough
(and birds sing sweeter
than books
tell how)
so here is away and so your is a my
(with a down
up
around again fly)
forever was never till now

now I love you and you love me
(and books are shutter
than books
can be)
and deep in the high that does nothing but fall
(with a shout
each
around we go all)
there's somebody calling who's we

we're anything brighter than even the sun
(we're everything greater
than books
might mean)
we're everyanything more than believe
(with a spin
leap
alive we're alive)
we're wonderful one times one



spring omnipotent goddess thou dost

spring omnipotent goddess thou dost
inveigle into crossing sidewalks the
unwary june-bug and the frivolous angleworm
thou dost persuade to serenade his
lady the musical tom-cat,thou stuffest
the parks with overgrown pimply
cavaliers and gumchewing giggly
girls and not content
Spring, with this
thou hangest canary-birds in parlor windows

spring slattern of seasons you
have dirty legs and a muddy
petticoat,drowsy is your
mouth your eyes are sticky
with dreams and you have
a sloppy body
from being brought to bed of crocuses
When you sing in your whiskey-voice
                                                                      the grass
rises on the head of the earth
and all the trees are put on edge

spring,
of the jostle of
thy breasts and the slobber
of your thighs
i am so very
                     glad that the soul inside me Hollers
for thou comest and your hands
are the snow
and thy fingers are the rain,
and i hear
the screech of dissonant
flowers,and most of all
i hear your stepping
                                      freakish feet
                                      feet incorrigible
ragging the world,

Swimming the Sunlight.

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I feel the wake of your coming. The slight swell riding the wind just beyond you, the current of your approach rippling in thick waves of sunlight and storm. We meet before we meet. We move the day, and the day gives way before us.

I walked a good hour through the woods before coming to my sitting rock. The more familiar paths, closest to the park entrance a few blocks from my apartment, are thick with undergrowth and brush. I know my way through them only after weeks of exploring, recalling this fallen log here or the protruding rocks and a tangle of hanging moss that veils that next turn. Now they feel almost too familiar, the closeness of the brush hiding the cars and houses only a few yards away, but not quite masking the noise of the city which still rises above the trees. And so, I moved deeper.

Deeper into the park, the woods opens up again, the paths are fewer and steeper along the northern side of the ravine, and the sound of the small stream at the bottom of the hillside is the only sound except for the occasional airplane overhead or the gently mercurial jingling of a dog collar, the murmur or call of the owner almost musical in the quiet air.

I walked for a good hour through this part of the woods, imagining how different it is from the urban and suburban landscapes I've grown so used to. In the city, all obstacles are opaque--the stark, bricked walls of tall buildings, the tinted glass windows of cars and restaurant windows, the rusted metal and dulled plastic of trash bins and streetsigns--but what seems to be a clear path, is. The streets and alleyways might curve sharply or end abruptly, but as long as you can see where you're going, you can usually get there.

The woods is different--its overlapping and intricate weave of branches and shadow, of stray spiderwebs and the silk or burrs of loose, drifting seeds. I kept to the narrow footpath along one ridge on the south-facing embankment, but my eyes, themselves like seeds released into the warm air, drifted among the trees, far away across the seemingly open spaces that live within the forest, unencumbered by the roots and twigs that would have snagged and snared my body. So strange, I thought, to be in the kind of place where my eyes might travel where my body cannot follow. And for a moment, I felt a wave of vertigo, as you might feel on a high bridge, or when gazing up into the night sky--when obstacles themselves are those things which are invisible, and the urge to step out into space surges from the soles of your feet up along your spine and pools in that center of gravity just above your wayward eyes.

Here is the rock, jutting out precariously into space as the side of the ravine slopes down into the damp belly of the forest below. Here is the rock of my body, heavy with gravity. The fingers of the wind are on my waist, wrapping me with the sounds of birds and the scents of spring blossoms, playing me like a maypole, swaying me like a sapling. Here are my palms, fingers gently spread and holding up the sky--the sunlight collects in the recesses of my body, hot dew seeping into my upturned palms with an aching burn, sliding down my temples, beaded like jewels along my collarbone. Here is the rock of my body, heavy with sunlight. I open my eyes on a world of misted blue, I walk across the open spaces of the afternoon air, where my body cannot follow.

As I walked home, the city blocks felt transformed--the air no longer transparent and taken for granted, the hard obstacles of buildings and moving cars alive and buzzing like fragile hives. With every movement, my sluggish and sun-soaked body seemed to lag behind, and in that brief moment between, spirit rippled forward to meet Spirit and broke gently, like a lapping wave, on the shore of the World.

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)

Vernal Embertide Contemplation.

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'The seasons intimate individually the bliss of Heaven, where there is "the beauty of spring, the brightness of summer, the plenty of autumn, the rest of winter."'

Today I'm treating myself. I'm going to treat myself to good company, even if it's unrequited. Clouds and trees do not love back, the sun and moon do not love back, beautiful strangers do not love back. But I can dwell in love and wait for spring. I will hold intimately the coals of my love for a world who holds me intimately but does not know me well, and I will be warm. I will be warm and wait for spring. I will remember the ember days.

The Vernal or Lenten Embertide remind us of the coming beauty of spring, and our relationship to beauty in the world. It is the tragedy and the blessing of beauty to be complete in itself, to be whole and self-fulfilled. To see beauty, we must often be separate from it, and the beauty that we are intimately a part of may be too large for us to see. Our sense of awe in the presence of beauty is heightened and sharpened by our awareness of distance, by our longing for something with which we are not fully merged. Our longing makes beauty both sweet and ephemeral. Beauty stirs us out of ourselves.

We remember, and on these ember days of the coming spring, we seek solitude and distance. We remember that beauty surrounds us, and we withdraw from busy-ness in order to remind ourselves, to perceive it better. We remember beauty and seek its company--we seek the company of the wind and the trees, of the distant and still-cold sun, of the kind and lovely strangers whom we do not know but who are still connected to us through beauty, love and the Divine within each of us. We remember that we, too, are infinitely beautiful, that within us burns the dark potential of the rose of the soul to bloom suddenly open at the first warm breath of the season. We withdraw from the noisy world and become beautiful, content in our uniqueness, awe-filled in our longing. We remember beauty and, in it, we find the relief of freedom, the song of the breathless skylark in its strong and far-away flight. We hear the beauty of distant music sung not for us but for itself alone, and on these ember days, together we remember.

Today's Ogham: Beth (Birch)
(birth, new beginnings, renewal, change)