Wilderness and Yellow Windows

October 26, 2007 at 8:25 pm (Culture War, Pagany Musings, Theology)

The season is on us, beloveds. The sky is bright as a pearl during the day and dark as a cherry stone by night. The frost comes lightly in the mornings and my coat has come unbundled out of the closet in anticipation of each breathless day – the maple has begun to lay down her leaves, shocked with scarlet, and there is a stillness that sits on the branches and waits. There are pumpkins stacked by the roadways and in the markets, and acorn squash on the dinner table. Today the full Apple Harvest Moon glows big and sweet, though due to a late frost this past spring our apples are few and more precious than usual.

I am a jumble of thoughts and wanderings this time of year, and I have been struggling with how to pin some of these thoughts down for an obligatory post about Samhain, which is arguably one of the Holiest days of my religious calendar. It’s been hard this year, I admit. I am weary with the deluge of articles and ridiculousness, with the “ZOMG We Interviewed a Witch!” staple of American Journalism, with the ongoing arguments from all sides about the TRUTH about Samhain (its origins, whether its evil, etc etc ad nauseum), so much so that I can only barely muster any feeling other than a kind of tired irritability, much akin to how I feel after a few days of scratching at the same mosquito bite. Samhain is by far our most visible holiday as a people, and sometimes I feel washed out by those big spotlights pointed at us for an entire month – especially as during this time of year I feel more and more inclined to walk in the early darkness and hide in the hedge, storing up on silence.

So. Sew. Sew buttons. Somewhere around this week, I always seem to come back to it. I always have at least one day of feeling wholly sick of everything before I Remember… before I choose to embody joy in my dealings with the blustery wind and the red maple and the smell of squash baking. And then it comes.  I remember that when all is said and done and folks have worn themselves out from arguing the historical validity of the holiday and whether or not its evil or just fun or spiritually significant, there remains the moss-covered, secret shining truth (truth! yep, I said it) of Samhain in the core of my heart, and within that truth is the fact that this season has always held something precious, gorgeous and mysterious for me, since before I had a name for it. And I have always felt that the veneration of my ancestors is crucial to the practice of my spiritual being. And I am ever in awe of the power of Death. And I am ever grateful for the outstanding and overwhelming explosion of Life that comes through and between and in spite of and because of Death.

When I placed my young hand on that first book so many years ago that spoke so directly and piercingly to the very bedrock of my blood and bones and told me the name of my people and gave me a point of reference for the way that had been stirring in me for years, one of the first things I crowed with delight to discover there in my little room surrounded by the detritus of my 14 years on earth was the fact that my people had a theology, books of rituals/practices/meditations, beautiful stories, a veneration and a deep abiding love, all centered around this gorgeous, delicious time of year. Much of what I learned back then is historically inaccurate – of course I’ve made changes in my understanding of Samhain (and Paganism, of course) since then. But the fact remains – it is a part of what makes us human that we remember and celebrate our beloveds who have died. It is a part of what makes us human that we celebrate the turning of each season and the blessings of our lives. Samhain is a story. A good story. It is the story of those that lived before me and live in my elbows and my back. It is the story of the Mama as she lays down and sighs and sleeps. It is the story of the screaming chaos of winter and the harsh clicking of the Oldest Woman, Owl Woman, who sits in the blackest night and spins out the dealings of our smallness and our bright thread. It is the story of squash. And pumpkins and turnips. And the human gift of telling stories to dance with fear. To look at Death, between Her curtain and His veils, and speak to those we love.

Death is on my mind. The bluntness of it, the reluctant necessity, the beauty and the unfairness. I may light candles for that Dark Lady, Sly Angel, Skull-faced Santisima, but I no more like Death than any other hot and fleshly creature. Death is a wilderness we cannot navigate but only hold in our hearts like a terror – noticing as the leopard leaps how gorgeous it is before it cuts out our throat and eats. It is a really really scary love. I will never master it. I shouldn’t. I will never never tame it. I shouldn’t.

One of my favorite activities is to peer into empty buildings and lost corners after dark. The secret wilderness that pools there is testimony to the power of the wild resurrection of timeless Mystery. When we give up the day, the night refills our bodies with fresh cups of dreams. When we give up clock time, we are refreshed by the radical anarchy of natural time in ritual – that space within a sea of right now. If we can stop the endless grinding frenetic movement of our industrial hyperculture long enough – it wouldn’t be long before the moss and the little things that live in the silent spaces between the grass blades would be singing all their night songs in celebration of Everything We Don’t Know. How terrifying that must be to a civilization bent on order and knowing. In this spirit, this may be why, aside from the deep and vital blessing of holding a day out to give thanks to The Beloved Dead – Those That Come Before and Who Sleep In Our Marrow, I find Samhain to be a holy moment, and knew so before I had a name for it. Samhain is a great Empty even as it is full of voices – a howling stillpoint before anarchy, a salutation to night songs and feral non-time. Samhain is the first invitation to a season of testimony and wild resurrection. Of Mystery and Sleep. Of masks and gifts. Of offering after sacrifice. Of holding ourselves out in the cold night and laughing after we scream. Owl Woman at the back of the cold room rocking in her chair. Laughing her ass off. Scaring the shit out of every breathing thing.

The more I try to hold on to it, the more it slips away, wily and crafty season.

Not that I post enough nowadays so’s you’d notice, but I will be out of the internetoblogosphero for the week, hoping to return with fresh joy and a basket of yellow windows, making ready for snow and watching the geese fly. Many blessings to you, beloveds, as the year turns and the shadows reach out for your toes. Mother Holle is dancing just over the hill.

Grok Earth. Pray without ceasing.

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Pause

October 19, 2007 at 2:14 am (Pagany Musings, Random Thoughts)

Greetings, Pagani, from the wet, emerald green and blustery spectacle of the not-so-wild Midwest. Our autumn has been late, and less colorful than in other years, but the promise of night is still extant – sidling up to the window and scratching at the door, whispering little songs in sibilant languages and speaking frankly about death. The weather is large, and dramatic – enormous clouds boulder and slash across the sky, which often has that gorgeous sheen that builds in the human eye just before weeping, that makes the blue look…saturated with a breathless joy. I stop often to take big gasping breaths of the Mama’s gifts. And sometimes my eyes water with the wind, or the wonder, and then I am the Mama, and my eyes are the sky, and she is me, but bigger then me, and then I grin a lot, and I have an apple.

Other than that, I’m at a loss these wet and grand weeks. Driving in the lightning gray steel evenings through the mind-erasing rain, I make a lot of wishes. It’s wish country here around this time of year. I light some candles on the altar of my ancestors and look into their eyes and dream. I grapple and wrestle. I pray. Sometimes I hear nothing. So I go on wishing.

Sometimes a blog post pops into the middle of the wishing and the praying. But not this week. This week, there is only the beds of weeds, all soaked, and a single dying wasp on the sidewalk. I with my shroud of crabapple leaves and shaking water off of the ragged bottom of my jeans, helping her into the dark between two blades of Oz-green grass and whispering to her a peaceful Return.

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The War on Halloween

October 11, 2007 at 2:47 pm (Culture War, Extremely Silly, Random Thoughts)

AH! It’s that time of year again. The leaves are turning, the pumpkins are blushing orange, and the War on Samhain begins. Let’s begin this year’s festive 3 month long Season of Religious Bickering (running approx. October 1st through December 26th) with a letter.

Dear America,

As a fellow American dedicated to the worship of my beloved gods, I am personally outraged at the lack of respect given to Halloween, the most sacred day of my religious calendar. I am sickened by the continued commercialism assigned to this most holy of days, and I can only imagine that the spirits of my Beloved Ancestors feel the same. I am worried about the escalation of this War on Samhain, and I beg you to remember the Reason for the Season, which is the veneration of our Beloved Dead. It is a disgrace to our heritage and an insult to the multiple, splendid and eternal gods of this Land to ignore and/or cheapen this most noble of holidays with bland “Harvest” festivals (ironically possibly more Pagan than commercial Halloween…) or cheap candy. Every public space should feel free, if not obligated, to display an enormous carved turnip at every turn (boldly and proudly referred to as a Samhain Turnip), and altars to loved ones should festoon the halls of our governmental buildings.

Sincerely,
Gospel Pagan

*This is (mostly) satire. Satire loses something if one has to tell people that it’s satire…but I am not in the mood to delete 40 comments from outraged people who think I’m serious about the governmental buildings comment, etc. Comments from outraged people who recognize that it’s satire but hate satire are okay.

**Also – the word “festoon” is awesome.

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Colonialism Sucks

October 8, 2007 at 7:51 pm (Culture War, Politics)

And so does Columbus Day.

As usual, I am grateful for the journalistic savvy of Jason Pitzl-Waters, who compiled this excellent post on the continued resistance of Indigenous Peoples to this egregious “celebration” of colonialism.

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On Breathing Out My Darkness

October 8, 2007 at 3:14 am (EcoTalk, Pagany Musings, Theology)

It happened in the time of long nights and icy winds: one morning the jasmine flowered in my garden, and the cold air was impregnated with the fragrance, and on that day the plum tree also flowered and the turtles awoke.

It was a mistake and did not last. But thanks to that mistake, the jasmine, the plum tree, and the turtles could believe that some day the winter would end. Me too.

-Eduardo Galeano, Walking Words

It is unseasonably warm for October. I try to walk under the sun and in the heat with an eye towards winter and not think about how my heart constricts with a hollow, empty horror about the potential of Climate Change, but I am often defeated. Last year our winter lasted approximately a month and came dreadfully late. This year, I wonder if we will have winter at all. I saw a film once where it began to snow in the middle of July, and some ridiculous couple grinned and frolicked in the white wet, and I thought – why aren’t they terrified? And then, at the same time I thought – this is good too, to be able to love and laugh in the midst of the end of the world. To know that in the mistake, we can believe that some day the winter will end. So I live my life torn. On one hand, we aren’t near as frightened as we ought to be when it’s 90 degrees in October in the Midwest. And on the other hand, we must struggle to remain human through it, to kiss our loved ones and rock in the dark. Paradoxes and mysteries are the heart of what we are, I guess. There is a seed of light that burns in the darkness and a seed of darkness that burns in the light.

So I find myself thinking about Darkness here in the waning days and in the tumble of my hot nights.

Darkness is necessary. The Pagani go on about this point quite often. And yet, at a group ritual this year I was disturbed to hear the leaders beseech the participants to release their negativities by “breathing out their darkness.” Well, goodness. How civilized. How terrifying.

More and more I miss unknowing. I shield my eyes from the glare of our post-enlightenment obsessions. We pour buckets of light on the world – exposing, investigating, revealing. And we don’t realize that in doing so, we are losing. Horribly. Destroying pockets of mystery, pockets of sweet shade and shadow. Savagely burning the hiding places for things that keep us grounded and sane…

The Sea Serpent’s Daughter: A folktale from Brazil*

In the beginning of the world there was no such thing as Night. The face of the glorious disk of the sun was always full and bright on the land, never rising and never setting, hiding the stars and the moon and washing the world with light. It was in this dawn of the earth that the wise daughter of the Great Sea Serpent happened to fall in love with a man who lived on Land. In time they married, and the daughter went to live with her husband under the sun, as a mortal man could not join her beneath the silent sweetness of the wave.

Though she was happy to be with the one she loved, living under the burning eye of the diamond sun was extremely difficult for one used to the sea’s peace and hush. As the months passed she withered into herself, withdrawn and silent.

“There’s something in my father’s kingdom we call Night,” she told her worried husband. “It’s a soothing darkness, a fabric woven out of heavy shadows under which someone may rest their eyes, where they may sleep, and dream. If only I might have some of this, for I miss the Night and my dreams as I miss no other, and I am so very tired of the light.”

Because he was a good man, and in love, on hearing this the husband rose from his wife’s bedside, ran from their home, and summoned three monkeys, his most trusted attendants. “I have urgent business for you,” he told them. “You must travel to the kingdom of the Great Sea Serpent and tell him that his daughter is in dire need of darkness. Tell him she may die here if she cannot have some slice of night.” And off they ran to the sea.

On hearing this news, the Great Sea Serpent hurried off into the shadows to fill a bag with night, sealed it tight, and gave it to the monkeys. “Remember one thing,” he told them, “Whatever you do, do not open this bag until you reach my daughter.”

This should have been simple enough. But what unraveled the three monkeys were the strange sounds coming from the bag filled with night: the piercing cries of night birds and the drone of insects, a chorus of hoots, hisses and rustling unlike anything they’d ever heard. And finally, the last monkey of the three grew more curious than alarmed, and after much persuading, convinced his friends that they should open the bag to see what could possibly conjure such sounds. And so it was that they broke the Serpent’s seal. And in a moment, the carpet tumble of night rushed out of the bag, full of birds and beetles and bats, and flew gracefully up and away, over the jungle.

Back in the village, the Sea Serpent’s daughter sat under a palm tree, her eyes burning with the dreams she had not dreamed in months. And then, a noise over the trees made her raise her tired eyes to witness the blue cloak of night gathering on the horizon. With a delicious sigh and a sweet laugh, she lay down under the palm and fell into a blissful, perfect sleep.

She awoke in that perfect tender moment of time between darkness and dawn, healthy and filled with joy. As she walked, she spoke to those things that would become the powers of land and time between dusk and morning. She told the rooster it would be his job to keep watch and call out at the approach of day. She spoke to the morning star, giving it her blessing to rule the sky just before dawn. And she whispered to a hundred thousand birds, singing them all the songs to praise and greet the dawn in a hundred thousand tongues.

And she dreamed. And all the world dreamed.

————

I’m not one to be breathin’ out my darkness any more than I’ll be breathin’ out my light. I have read so many treatises by Pagans on the subject of embracing darkness that quite frankly I was more than a little startled to hear the old “darkness = badness” thing trotted out at a gathering of the Pagani. Balance, yes. The dance of balance always. But if anything, at this time in our spiritual history, it is the darkness that we ought to be cultivating in the gardens of our hours, making pockets of space and time in which the small things can creep back in, restore the old wells, rekindle wildernesses, spark the gift of storytelling, and make safe haven for secrets. If anything, we should be breathing darkness into our bodies and making places of rest in our bones.

I am exhausted with light. I may go months without the gift of the truly starry night sky due to the obscene amount of light we pour upwards into the inky vault. I am weary of the great gaping mouths of runaway enlightenment scientism declaring nothing precious, nothing sacred, nothing left alone. Our silly fears will kill us. Darkness can’t be tamed and so it must be erased. Light is order, growth and abundance. Light is savior. Order over chaos, good over evil, light over darkness. No unknowns, no uncertainties, nothing hidden or fearful waiting to leap out from behind the thorny bushes. No mysteries, no chaos.

Without a healthy fear, there is only unhealthy fear, that becomes so overwhelming that we are lost in it. So distorted, we barely recognize ourselves.

Yes, yes, light is important and good. Without it we would die, of course. Oh but darkness, we know, without it we aren’t whole, and we can’t rest. In the wilderness and in the darkness we are full and flesh and glorious. In Dionysus we are mad and full of joy. In darkness we find the wild places, that when tested, come rushing out of the bag like the birds and beasts of nightfall, that are a fundamental part of ourselves, that, though we have historically tried over and over to tame them, are crucial to our being.

It is true that I have a bias towards the night, whom I worship, and the madness of the Lord of Honey and Wine over that Lovely Gent Apollo with the Lyre and the Shining Face. I get that we need both, but I hunger after what we are losing – I am terrified as I watch civilization snuff out darkness wherever it finds it. Where is winter, I wonder as the days grow shorter but no colder. I shiver against the hard light of civilization and pour my love into unreadable corners and unparseable shadows. Holding onto the night. Holding my breath to keep the darkness deep within me, where it makes me whole, and delicious, and full.

*This version has been partially re-written by myself based on a version that I read elsewhere. I don’t recollect where I acquired the original version of this Brazilian folktale, so I can’t cite it. But if you’re looking for a version of the story in children’s book form, I did find The Sea Serpent’s Daughter by Margaret Lippert.

5 Comments

Isis! Isis! Ra Ra Ra!

October 3, 2007 at 6:37 pm (Culture War, Pagany Musings, Theology)

While I was strolling along down the sidewalk the other day, a young woman sitting on the curb said: “THIS lady looks like a Jesus-lover! Hey! Do you love Jesus?”

First off, I’m not entirely sure what it is about me that resembles a “Jesus lover” (or what that entails, really). Certainly she must have missed a few of my tattoos. At any rate, what I resent is being asked deep theological questions when I’m on the move.

DO I love Jesus? I don’t know. Which Jesus? The one who threw a righteous, radical “eff you capitalist bastards!” tantrum in the Temple? The one that liberal Christians like to depict as a hippie love-fest rebel of a guy? Weeeell….that Jesus is just all right with me I guess. Sure. Why not? How’s about that Jesus that other folks depict as a psychotic, obsessively mean person who takes immense pleasure in skipping my demon-worshipping head across a lake of fire? Not so much!

And what do you mean by love Jesus? Does it mean I worship him? Does it mean I worship him to the exclusion of others? Do I have to worship something because I love it? Is to love something automatically to give it praise and thanks -to worship (condition of being worthy, honor, renown)? What is the difference between love and worship? Those be some groovy-ass deep questions, man. I can’t sum them up in thirty seconds. I can’t sum them up in thirty lifetimes.

The thing about Jesus is that he’s more and less than what people seem to make of him. The thing about religion is that it’s kind of….complex.

So how am I supposed to answer that question when I’m half way down the street already?

I’m sure I’m being pissy, but aside from the irritating fact that we live in a culture that privileges one religion so much that people feel comfortable making offhand “rah-rah” statements about their religion on the street at passersby without worrying about any kind of backlash, I have to say that it made me pause for a moment to reflect on how the oft-repeated fact of our hyperdrive, soundbite culture has affected our religious interactions with each other. Passive entertainment and passive culture breeds passive religion? Maybe. Maybe.

Like life, beauty, community, and wholeness, religion is not a sound bite. Religion is not a pep squad cheer. Religion is deep, and complicated, and messy, and strange. There are no fast answers. You can’t sum it up in 30 seconds or less, which is why I’m always flustered when someone asks me “what Paganism is” and expects a commercial-length answer.

You wanna know if I love Jesus? Sit me down – I’ll talk to you for five hours. I’ve got time for that. You wanna yell at me from the curb as I try to go about my business? You’re not seeking dialogue – you’re soliciting a validation of religious privilege and a high-five. And I really don’t have time for that. Funny thing, time.

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