Pagan Godspell

Greetings, best beloveds, from the gray and waning light of the pretty-wild-urban midwest.  I have not said much these past few weeks, having miles to go before I sleep and all that business…the business of bread and ritual and tables and friends.  But for the moment, there is a silence and a peace in the house.  I’ve a loaf of bread rising in the oven, my first six strand braid.  There is a flute playing somewhere, and the sky threatens rain, or snow, or both.  We slide into the dark, we slide into the dark.  It is only 5 o’clock, and already the night has been assured, through with teetering on the gunmetal brink of evening and dyed hard and fast to darkness.

This starry cloth that coats the sky is a god.  One of mine.  I call her Mother, which is more playful than anything, because she’s more of a crazy Aunt.  Or a dangerous stranger.  She’s a wild woman, and all things have known her, and she has seen all things with her million eyes.  I imagine her as a red-headed skeleton woman, dancing in dreams.  Sometimes she is Winter and sometimes Death, but she is always Night.  And she scares me, she scares me.  The world gets colder and she gets meaner, and her hard lessons are sometimes too much for me, and I wish instead for light.  But I am her daughter nonetheless, as we all are, and I have also seen her, sharp and glorious, smiling with all her terrible teeth, and have loved her fiercely.  As I do.

Yet, it is true that my thoughts about her are muddled.  When pressed I find my tongue reluctant to elaborate.

Come to think of it, this is the way I am on gods in general.  I avoid talking about gods here – their nature, their number, their beings.  And that’s mostly because I simply don’t think I know enough about them to say.  I know enough to know that I’ve only ever come close to describing them through poetry.  I know enough to have ideas, and I know enough to pray.

Also, I have to admit, sometimes I have trouble seeing a god as something that can be so easily pinned down, chatted to, or imagined.  Some folks talk about the gods as though they’re a bunch of invisible people, with the same foibles and strengths.  Some talk about them as though they’re simply archetypes born whole from our human minds.  And you know, hey, maybe they are these things.  Perhaps, perhaps.  As I said, I don’t know.  I have only ideas, and under a darkening sky, these ideas cluster around me like the Wild Hunt, shrieking and rocking me into the landscape where lives only my fierce dreams…and the sea.  The realm of the gods.

Powers.  Unimaginable.  Aether, wind, rock, night, death.  I believe that the gods are these things.  Literally.

I worship Dionysos.  A name for something feral and wild.  My God….madness, intoxication, fermentation, dancing, poetry, blood, freedom, the vine.  His name is as much a fabrication as the images of his face, as the coat he wears in my dreams of him, running through the deep wood, shouts and fire.  But he is real.  And how do I know that?  Because I have been drunk.  Because I have seen madness.  Because I have written poetry, and have danced, and have picked ripe grapes from dark vines.  Because I have blood.  And all those things are him – the rest is storytelling and music and poetry and human invention.  Yet these things too are meaningful, gorgeous, greater than we could imagine.  Because Dionysos is also the Mystery in those things, the wonderment, the vague unease, the terror.  So he is a Power greater than what we can understand, and blissful and awful, and so he is God.

What does this mean?  That I’m an animist in polytheist clothing?  Perhaps.  But then when Travelling, a woman with skin like sand and a voice like thunder tells me to follow a drift of bees west to the mountain, and I see in her the twist of old trees and the heartbeat of rock, and my throat is dry and my knees shake, what then?  Well, I can only laugh.  I laugh.  No theory is certain.  It’s a mystery – it may be the best and first one.  It may be the only answer there truly is.  Who are our gods – of what are they made – where is their being?  It’s a mystery.

Prayer opens, allowing for the possibility that everything is more amazing than it seems.  Allowing for miracles.  For voices in the great wash, and messages in that first breath outside after a snowstorm.  The cascade of dust that falls through sunlight and makes a poem out of the air.  When I pray, I speak to my gods, Force and Tornado though they may truly be, without names or faces, and this Works something inside me.

And all this, half-sense and dream, is why I hesitate to talk about them, these singing shadows, fiddle music, these hornets and summer mountains.  Prayer in the form of poetry, and a feeling like crickets in the evening as the light bleeds over rocks and turns them red as copper wire, or the sound of dead leaves near the frozen river….that rain of fire on the skin.

Something coherent next time, beloveds, I promise.  It takes time to reign in a spirit lost and dancing on a mesa, surrounded by stars.  Bread will help.  It sings from the oven a grounding song.  And thanks, and thanks.  Giving.

Grok thy gods, Pagani.  Pray without ceasing.

Greetings, best beloved Pagani!  The world spins, the dark rushes up, but we are in the midst of some strange blush of September in what should be November’s creeping chill.  70 degrees does not an encroaching winter day make.  Days like this make me nervous and wary, visions of planetary enviro-apocalypse dancing in my head, and at the same time, the blissful animal in my skin is still awful joyful at these few stolen days of t-shirts and unexpected roses.  I have been, as I am so wont to do, baking bread and listening to Peter Gabriel.  You can’t beat a morning like that with a stick as far as I’m concerned.  Fresh rosemary bread and sweet vanilla challah…I’ve mentioned both these in a few recent blog posts, and that’s because I’ve made them before.  And THAT’S because they might be the best things on the Mama’s green and gorgeous body.  Also, I’m exceedingly and nigh excessively proud of my new-found ability to create woven challah rounds, which look like magical breads fresh from a fairy tale basket, and smell as good while baking.

Which has me thinking about all kinds of things, but perhaps most naturally, it has me thinking about food.

See, the other day, while going about the business of being me, I overheard someone assisting a friend in the cultural details of attending a religious gathering.  The most important detail of all?  “Bring food.”  Immediately, I knew that something real and serious and profound was going on.  It resonated with the very bottom of my feets and the marrow of my boneses. More and more, friends, I am beginning to believe that while the heart of the individual’s spiritual path may be the maxim “Know Thyself,” the heart of culture and religion can be very neatly summed up with these two simple words:  Bring food.

My coven in Colorado holds a Dumb Supper every Samhain.  One of our members is, among many things, a brilliant cook, and her gorgeous, wholesome and robust vegan meals often have us swooning in the midst of our respectful Silence.  This year was no exception.  And, as I am every year, I am left nearly in tears at the resonance of this amazing meal.

I am, frankly, consistently amazed at the beauty, profundity, magic, and real, grok-it earthy diving deep and surfacing power of food.  Food alone.  Food sans metaphor.  Just food.  Bread and beans and broccoli.  The emotional power of food choices, the diversity of it, the jaw-dropping amazingness of the fact that you eat the place you live in.  That everything is connected, so intimately, so perfectly.  That at some point, thousands and thousands of years ago, someone looked down to see a saffron crocus, its stigmas a bright, scarlet red against its sweet purple petals, and heard the voice of the crocus, mixed with its heady and amazing smell, teach them all about its creamy yellow dyes, its strangely erotic honey scent, to become a thing so precious that we will still pay an enormous amount of money for these little dried threads, each plucked by hand thousands of miles away.*

Point is, FOOD.  Point may always be food.  And the eating of it in togetherness.  Things happen, and people eat together.  And when people eat together, things happen.  In thinking about the development of culture first and religion second, food may be the first and best place to begin.  Sometimes I wonder if we shouldn’t scrap all this ritualizing (only sometimes…I am, after all, a sucker for ritual) and just get back to basics.  In thinking about what creates community, what creates culture, how religious bodies develop and grow, how groups start, it seems to me that always, the bedrock place to begin is with eating together.  Consistently.  And not just in terms of the haphazard potluck, either (where, I’ll be the first to admit, I used to be the person who brought the chips), but a meal, made perhaps by many hands, but one that has at its heart a sense of harmony.  Picnics outside, meals at tables.  Just eating – passing the butter, sharing the bread.  Eating together breaks down barriers – giving food to the Other makes that Other a Friend.  Feeding others is an act that nourishes both parties simultaneously.

Food.  Music.  Storytelling.  The basics of religion?  What would our religious circles and groups look like if instead of beginning with rituals or spells, we began instead with just eating, singing, and storytelling?  Of course, I think ritual is vital to the unique life of our religion.  But in the interest of cultivating culture, what could be more simple and profound than the breaking of bread?

For the moment, as the days in theory become chill and the wind blows hard along the brick and through the back alleys, stirring ivy and washing smiles over those touched by its gifts, I wish for you, friends, a meal shared and a covenant created.  To grok the perfect and most ancient blessing of food, and to sing through the evening with your heart as full as your belly.

Grok that most glorious and edible Earth.  Pray, feast, and sing without ceasing.

*There is a LOT to be said about the terrible price we pay for global trade – no question.  Coffee, chocolate, cloves and cardamom?  If you were living a purely local life in say, the midwest United States, you’d be fresh out of luck – these items that we take for granted in our lives are precious, and they come with layer upon layer of story and wonder and death. This is a terrible struggle – to hold on to the awareness of civilization’s many, many injustices and staggering global history.  Spices alone are a brilliant reminder.  Their long, complex histories are bloody, wasteful, eco-destructive, devastating, and appalling.  Yet, they continue to compel us – by the bargeload.  And while we have them, if we choose to partake of them, at the very very least we should wholly and mindfully appreciate them for their precious, incredible power…to truly treasure them, their uniqueness, their rare beauty, their humbling and problematic history.  To say a prayer of remembrance, to acknowledge the rare gift of these things in our lives…. a beginning only, but an important one.  What after that?  Working to bring down the destructive worldview, culture and institutions/corporations that perpetuate the horror – yes.  Yes.  But for now, this saffron thread, a treasure.  A wealth.  Don’t allow yourself to forget that the presence of your nutmeg and your cinnamon is a luxury, not a given.

Happy November, beloveds!  I am back in the pretty-crazy-wild urban midwest, working to absorb the lessons of Samhain and struggling with the evening darkness that looms over me each day earlier than before.  This is a testing time, this particular movement in the year’s symphony – last year, freshly planted in urban climes and holed up in my almost completely empty apartment (for various reasons, my intrepid spouse and I were not able to retrieve our belongings from storage for several months), my ankle thoroughly broken and my hobbling about consistently frustrating and exhausting… well I admit, I may have been adversely influenced in my assessment of the winter season here in my new digs.  This year, I am trying again, crying mercy to that most terrible and glorious Mother Night, making offerings and prayers to Her, great laughing redheaded calavera, in hopes She will pull back the heavy curtain of winter once in a while to reveal its blooms and gifts in the shadows and the naked rose canes, in the white bees that swarm in the dusty lavender sky, that I might know both Her faces this time around.

In the meantime, though, I haven’t been sleeping well.  I don’t tell you this to beg sympathy from you, dear friends, but merely as an opening into today’s subject, which in the wee hours gave me something to ponder, the creaky gears in my brain whirling away when they should have been at rest.

In the face of the advent of the world’s freezing…I was thinking about compassion.  And forgiveness.  And kindness.

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