Greetings, beloveds, from the astonishing grace of the not-so-wild midwest in the throes of the tender lip of autumn. It’s amazing how quickly the oppressive thoughts of late summer evaporate as the world opens and shines holy like a morning glory in mid-September. I am half rock n’ roll and half gregorian chant as I stare down the long, golden road of fall – noticing as I drive the long dusty farm roads to various appointments, how the corn turns a rusty shade of red and blushes new as a peach at sunset. How the rain comes cold and sweet like a lemon. How the creeks lap at the grass and wax blue as the best evening sky.
And here I sit in the breathless perfection of creeping spectacular death – the tending to the sleeping bed of the Mama before her long, ancient nap – and….well, it’s hard to stay irritated when the world is just so freakin’ gorgeous.
I’ve been thinking about a recent conversation I had with a friend regarding an interesting split between the person who writes these blog entries and the much angrier person that interacts with the world on a daily basis. I do wonder if it makes me a hypocrite – writing love letters to the world, to my communities, to the Mama – when so often the world, any given community, and even the Mama, well, pisses me right off. And yet – there is nothing inauthentic about either of these women, she who waxes lyrical about the exquisite perfection of living rich on a gorgeous planet, who loves the world, who revels in her crazyass Pagani peeps… and the other woman, who is furious with the stink of the shit human beings dump out on the planet, who is overwhelmingly aggravated by the myriad silliness that can be so readily perpetuated by the same Pagani she loves, and who, quite frankly, could live without the entire month of July and be perfectly happy weather-wise (blasphemous stuff from a Mama-worshippin’ lady such as myself). I am them both. I am them together. I may think I love one more than the other at times, but I don’t. Each is keeping me alive.
I have spent a lot of time with Angry Woman – feeding her and nourishing her, and giving her many outlets in which to express herself. They’re readily available after all – I mean she just has more opportunity. Civilization…how shall we say…blows. For many years, the part of me that trembled in a holy joy and fire at the opening of a September rose or the sight of a fox kit under a baby maple in the spring was more or less a secret. And then, in August a couple of years ago, my intrepid spouse and I took a rare, precious road trip to the Pacific Coast that broke the silence of the Woman that Sings and Celebrates.
We drove to Mendocino, California, the Misty Avalon of the West, shrouded in fog and set on cliffs, and we camped up that blissful, memory-less coast to Portland, Oregon. In Ukiah, CA, where I purchased a small felt witch-doll that peeks out from behind a jar full of odds and ends on my altar as I type this, I found a copy of Rob Brezsny’s Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia – and Holy Shit! The Woman that Sings and Celebrates spent a week giggling up the coast and barking at seals. Rob Breszny was just the right blend of authentic bedrock, righteous silliness, kickass philosophy and SARKesque* buoyancy that I needed in that moment to make me realize that there was a part of me that needed nourishment. That I would die if she didn’t begin to speak in some way or another. So I spent some time with that. And then I started a blog, to give the Woman that Sings and Celebrates an opportunity to make known all the things that she thinks are groovy and kickass while at the same time keeping a firm grasp on Angry Woman’s necessary radical pushing. It’s a bit of a balancing act…one that I fail at more than I succeed. Mostly it’s an experiment in finding out where my authenticity lies. Where the real Good News is.
I’ve been spending a lot of time in the haunted and empty Desert of my prayer country these few weeks, exhausted and sometimes sick, grumpy and irritated. The Mama knows that though I may call out in delight to my beloved Pagani, there are an equal number of times that my beloved Pagani make me want to stab myself in the eye with a fork. No matter how many times my heart feels like it will shatter from some daily miracle – the fat Monarch butterflies doing the merengue with the bumblebees in the Michaelmas daisies – there are the times when the compost just reeks and looks fucking gross. For all my love, there are the same amount of times that I feel like I want to throw the whole moldy burrito of the human world out with the garbage where it belongs.
But for the asters. Have you seen them? My gods – the asters.
And then the weather comes in all shot through with flamenco and cloves and oranges, and I lose the ability to speak for a while for want of describing it. And I read:
I read the end of Ephesians 5 as an example of what happens when you discover a metaphor so elusive you know it must be true. As you elaborate, and try to explain, you begin to stumble over words and their meanings. The literal takes hold, the unity and the beauty flee. Finally you have to say, I don’t know what it means; here it is.
-Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk
Oh yes. Oh my yes. And then I think, in the face of such astonishing mysteries and such gorgeous poetry, buried even under all that shit:
How can I keep from singing?
I don’t know. But here it is anyway.
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P.S. So, and where’s that bit on the gods of the Pagani I’ve been trying to write for weeks now? Well….I’m thinkin’ it’s just not happening any time soon. Some of my thoughts on the matter can be found in this post…
*Oh, I’m not the biggest fan of SARK, you know…no matter how cheerful the Woman who Sings and Celebrates gets, SARK is always lightyears away in some kind of frenetic Rainbow Happy Zone I will never see (vestigial traces of my goth days I’m sure) – but I still gotta love a woman who talks about vibrators in that stars-n-flowers font of hers, and who wants people to kick some colorful, creative ass.
