Curtain Call

December 10, 2007 at 4:59 am (Good News Communique, Meta-blogging)

It’s Good News
when you reject
Things as They Are.
When you lay down the World As it Is,
and you take on the responsibility of shaping your Own Way:
That’s Good News.

Everybody talk about spirituals and they say:
“Oh Lord, Black folks singin’ ’bout going to Heaven”:
No, this lesson is for you tonight: November the 8th, 1980 in All Souls Church:

Lay Down the World
and pick up
My Cross.

And they don’t say it’s Good Times,
they say Good News.

It’s hard times when you decide to make your own way.
You’re gonna catch Hell
if you don’t do it the way they say Do It.

But when you lay down the world and shoulder up your cross, that’s what?

Good News.

-Sweet Honey in the Rock

—————–

Greetings, best beloveds, from the snowy, blustery white fields of the not-so-wild midwest. Come to think of it, this may be the wildest season we have here among the thickets and slopes of the upper midregions of the country. The wind rips through the eaves. Things get dark and strange – the electricity flickers, the animals become wilier, the folks burrow into the backs of their homes and fust and burn like small fires and create miracles wrapped in half-light.

As for me, I’ve been doing an amount of fusting and burning myself.

As I have stated previously, I began this blog as an experiment in balance, in order to feed a hungry part of myself and articulate some thoughts that had been floating around my head for any number of years in the process. And do a little verbal shimmying to boot – shaking a Pagani holy roller tailfeather, relishing the Good News. Towards all those ends, I have considered Pagan Godspell a right success, and I have been the recipient of a number of grand unexpected gifts as well – I’ve gotten to exchange ideas and thoughts with a host of wonderful Pagani, I’ve received words of encouragement and strength that I cherish, and I’ve gotten to feel as though I was part of a thriving online community of bloggers who care about the Mama, delight in the Beauty that Runs like a Holy River through All Things, and love their Gods with all their Hearts’ blood.

But, as so many fleeting gifts from the Mama that hold their beauty in the clutch of their mortality, I have come to the conclusion that the time has come (the Walrus said) to hang it up at Pagan Godspell. My posts have been few and far between of late – I am excited about some new writing ideas and other projects for the future. The winter tugs at the hem of my skirt. The new sun waits behind the hill, and I am putting some things to bed and waking up others.  Some of the material on this blog has been and will be transferred to my web site, most significantly my three lists of recommended books which together make up the Good News Bookshoppe. Come on by if’n yer of a notion.

It was the quote at the beginning of this post, delivered during Sweet Honey in the Rock’s 1980 performance of the African-American spiritual Good News, that inspired much of my thinking when I started Pagan Godspell and it still sends shivers down my spine whenever I hear it. The theology may present itself in words and images I may not necessarily use, but the sentiment grabs a-hold of me anyway. It’s hard times to make your own way – you’re gonna to catch Hell – if you don’t do it the way they say do it. But when you lay down the sewage fed to us by this pervasive worldview of greed and shoulder up the burden of the Holy Hysterical, the Ecovangelical, the Sacred Shout and the Miracle of the Mama, that’s Good News. It’s been a privilege to ferment and bubble along in my little corner of cyberspace for a precious time. I look forward to the sun over the hill. I say thank you.

Grok Earth. Pray without ceasing, friends Pagani.

16 Comments

The Lonely Heath

December 2, 2007 at 4:34 pm (Pagany Musings, Theology)

AS o’er the gloomy heath the Pilgrim strays,
When night’s dark shadows thicken all around,
While nought he hears, save the low moaning sound
Of sweeping winds–at length, far distant rays

Sonnet, “As o’er the gloomy heath the Pilgrim strays” – Susan Evance, 1808

Greetings, Pagani, from pools of light spilled in icy darkness that coats the indigo pockets of the not-so-wild Midwest. The Mama has delivered unto us a visitation of freezing rain that pierced the day and splashed sheets of ice on every blade of grass and naked twig. The crabapple tree with the delicate spring blooms and the hardy fruit in summer has lost every leaf and turns in the moonlight like a piece of precious glass. In the spirit, we are wrapped in blankets and do the majority of our evening work by candlelight and oil lamp, pondering lost arts. Witchcraft and candlelight are married to a dream and the sensuality of real magic – there are no shadows like those made by fire, and there is no craft without shadow. A mystery of fire and ice in the first days of December.

I am thinking of solitude. Not hard, in the thick of a winter storm, to cast one’s thoughts out on the lonely stretches and invite the delicious saturation of emptiness into meditation. The path of the Pagani is one of dancing and hands and delicious conspiracy, conflict and transforming madness and laughing wrapped in the velvety, sandpapery art of community…certainly, we humans with our hot blood and our easily frost-bitten skin are communal creatures, touching and whispering and bickering and loving. But the path of mystic and occult wanderer necessitates Something Else in addition to our mingling breath and our throngs and assemblies. A witch may raise sand with her sisters and brothers in a copse of trees under a blood moon and with them throw her arms out in a shot of blistering, splitting joy on Sabbat Eve… but likewise, she knows that there is a lonely call, a Hand that plucks her thread from the ribbon of her bonds and sets her to wandering on hills and in dry riverbeds, picking stones from the dust and measuring loneliness into a coat of moss.

Of course, one could argue about what it means to be alone. It’s a silly civilized assumption that solitude is predicated solely upon the absence of human life. When I wander in the sweet lost hours over and through the prairie grass, I am never alone. I am watched by a million eyes and my scent is tasted by a thousand tongues. There are languages being spoken all around me, though I’m ignorant of their nuances, and I find that fact lamentable. But this isn’t really what I’m talking about. Just as there is silence and Silence, so there is solitude and Solitude. Alone with the spirits. Alone with the self. Alone with the Stars. Alone with the Gods. Alone with Silence. And the Soul. And the Cobalt Heart of the World.

Ultimately, there is a lot of Work to be done alone. Indeed, it might could be argued that the first duty of a mystic is the marriage to Solitude – to be entered and emptied simultaneously. Whether the Desert or the Sea, there is an Expanse Within, and we are standing in the middle of it. To walk in physical solitude is an exercise of itself – to walk while the core of your heartsblood is infused with the essential liqueur of Holy Solitude is deeper still. All those invisibility spells that get splashed around are hinting at the deeper secret. To melt into the Presence by virtue of solitude is to become the beam of sunlight in the corner of the bookstore where the dusty old tomes on philosophy and theology are kept – that beam of light with the dust motes in it, rapturously spiraling out of the ink between yellow pages and into some other story altogether. There are people on the other side of the bookcase, caught in a bubble of words and breathing the same air, and you are illuminating their book and their hands, and you are Alone in All the World.

Now me, of course, I go back and forth (as I’ve stated numerous times – no miraculously preserved corpse that smells like violets and juniper smoke for me). Solitude can be wholly and unequivocally, knee-jellying and stomach-thunking scary. Vast and bare. The Desert. The Sea. They can cut your heart open and pin it back exposed to all those eyes and tongues faster than you can spit. Naked naked naked. The Silence can undo you as neatly as it stitches you back together. It’s fucking hard for my civ-self to get down with the Big Shocking Lonely. Oh but that Hand still plucks at the hem of my skirt, on nights filled with the splinters of stars and the trees like lacy death. Those delicious kindled moments, I burn with the call to slip through the cracks of the golden hour as it slips into the first blue notes of evening, haunting the tall grass and becoming intimate with the heavy blanket of the wee hours of the morning, when so many other creatures of solitude make their way in the world. And then my heart aches after light and voices…and then the lonely night, and then the busy day…waxing and waning with the rhythm of a walker and a nomad, learning the lesson of balance with each turn of my head and each flicker of my eyelashes.

On this evening of all hard angles and sharpsy freezing bits that will rip you open before they melt, I wish for all People Who Dream an evening of shadow and ice – the Silence and the Solitude. Those brilliant, terrifying companions that wait in the middle of the Presence and dance until you are too enchanted to do anything but Come Home. In the fire of the blessing Desert. In the salt of the blessing Sea.

Grok Earth. Pray without ceasing.

5 Comments