A word I’ve always liked…archives.
So here’s the thingy: In lieu of compiling past posts into a little book, which was my original intention, I’ve decided just to leave all the PG archives up for the time being in perpetuity. This is where they were, so this is where they’ll be. This makes more sense to me.
So these are the official Pagan Godspell Archives. For what it’s worth. To search through the archives, there are a couple of options at the bottom of the page.
Grok Earth, y’all!
Greetings, friends and beloveds, from the STILL EFFING COLD streets of the fiercely wild urban midwest. I’ll admit to you, I’m peeved by this lingering cold here. Of course, I won’t have to put up with it for much longer, which is both a happy and sad thing. I refer to the fact that in just a couple short months, the intrepid spouse and I will be packing up our not-so-meager collection of possessions (oh…books…oh…moving books…oh…oh hell) and heading for the gorgeous mountain country of Tennessee, where I will be pursuing a second masters degree in Storytelling. I am tremendously excited about this news, y’all, yes indeed, but also naturally sad to be leaving the friends I’ve made here. But more about that later.
To the business at hand.
I’ve been busy as a badger these last few weeks and it’s not really getting any less busy. I said I’d be on PG sabbatical until the end of July, and so I shall be, with possibly larger changes then…still to be determined. But deep within the busy-ness, I’ve also been busy a-pondering, and much of those ponderings have to do with who I am and what I do and who I’d like to be…you know, the business of being human. And seeing as how it’s one of my favorite subjects, I’ve been musing rather a lot on the matter of “Paganism,” and my place in it. It should come as no surprise to those reading PG for the last couple years that I’ve been squirrelly with the term, wrestling with its efficacy, attempting to eschew it from my vocabulary, and proffering terms that better suit me. Which is why it’s always interesting to me to see that others have or are asking the same questions, which inevitably cause some kerfuffling. For example, Star Foster at Patheos has made a call for folks to weigh in on the subject based on a post by Drew Jacob about his own rejection of the term for various reasons.
…And I find that I have a couple of thoughts about it, helter-skelter and badger-chewed as they may be. So you know, taking a little sabbatical from a sabbatical can’t be a bad thing. The badgers have promised to at least chew at a slower tempo than normal for a few minutes. Generous creatures.
So…the first thing is that I think the whole conversation represented by the two links above is pretty much precisely why I think the term is a problem. The minute someone claims to either be or not-be pagan, they are asserting a definition for it. A definition which is then *immediately* contradicted by several people at once, saying that the definition is either too limited or too broad, followed very closely by the people asserting that labels are a. silly, b. useless, c. so five-minutes-ago.
Of course, my belief is this: labels are important. They are important because they create communities. In the realm of the individual, labels may not be that important. If, alone, I want to call myself a Psyluminous Kerflammawaffle (and…I think I do), then I get to be the sole arbiter of what defines that term, and it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. But, if I want to use an identifyer that links me to a group of people, that has use. People can band together under that label and work for the rights of that group if the group is well-defined (not fixed or immutable, just well-defined…as in, the majority of people in that group generally agree on the characteristics/stories of that group). I can have a conversation with a person outside the group about our similarities and differences. The group can work together under a common vision/story to organize services and events for the group or to serve others. These identifying labels assist in making that possible. If I didn’t believe labels were important, ultimately all this fusting over whether to remain Pagan or whether the term is useful is admittedly stupid. But, I think it is important. And I think it’s important because I think communities are important. Insert rant about hyper-individualism (where, interestingly, I make an argument for a general Pagan culture in order to criticize it, before I asserted that there wasn’t one, and am now back to believing there is one…ah, the radical pendulum of thinkiness…I think Walt Whitman had something to say about that).
There are real instances where the term “Pagan” certainly qualifies as a useful label. Case in point: Peter Dybing’s recent successful fundraiser for Doctors Without Borders in response to the crisis in Japan. Dybing raised over 30,000 dollars for Japan under the rubric of the “Pagan community,” and those who identified as Pagans donated money to the cause. If Dybing had decided to raise the money without appealing overtly to Pagans, he may not have been able to raise as much as fast, as I think the matter of personal and communal pride in one’s label and community was a factor in that fundraiser, as it is in many other areas where religious and other groups participate in giving and service oriented activities.
I have said before that the term Pagan doesn’t have any meaning. Well, I maintain that to some degree, but partly I was wrong. I think the term does have meaning, insofar as it seems to connote a particular culture (a fringy one), one that uses a particular vocabulary and that possesses a number of cultural signifiers. If you were out strolling through the park, and you noticed a group of say 20 people standing together, with someone drumming nearby, and they were wearing a motley assortment of cloaks, animal skins or antlers, amulets, medieval or viking wear, with a large array of t-shirts (tie-dye, silk screened, some with various pithy religious statements on them) and the like in the mix, you might readily say that they were Pagans. If they were standing in a circle all facing one direction, you’d feel even more sure. And at some point, if you overheard them having a friendly chuckle over the nature of some friend of theirs from an astrological or “totemic animal” perspective, you’d be even MORE sure. Now, it may be that these elements seem derived from various eclectic Wiccan or Wiccanate milieus, and that’s because they are. Frankly, if all of Pagandom could just come together to assert that the term PAGAN meant Wiccan and/or Wiccanate and/or Wiccan-derived culture/religious milieu, then I think that would be fine (a bit redundant, but fine). If we agreed to define ourselves as “earth-centered,” we’d have at least something to really start arguing about. But we don’t assert that. We insist that “Pagan” also covers Druids , non-Wiccan witches of various varieties (being themselves a whole kettle of argumentative fish when it comes to definitions), Kemetics, Hellenics, Celtic Recons, Natib Qadish, Asatru, Thelemites, Renaissance Hermeticism and Qabala and Ceremonialist magic, Chaos magic, etc…not to mention the folks who attend Shinto rites, belong to African Diasporic Traditions like Vodou and Santeria, or worship Hindu deities, etc., or combine or practice 2 or more of any of these. No religious identifier is going to encompass all these disparate faiths. (Some folks insist that we need the umbrella term because we need the numbers in order to battle discrimination. But if that’s the concern, then I think we would do better to drop the label Pagan, assert ourselves within our smaller more defined groupings, and team with others like Hindus and Buddhists and Vodouisants and Santeros and American Indians to work for the religious rights of all “minority” religions in the United States. Then we could stand as Heathens, Wiccans, Earth-Centered whatevers, Druids, combinations thereof, etc., alongside all other religious persons who suffer discrimination, without the confusing baggage of the term Pagan, and work for change with that larger group.)
So I think Pagan does encompass a kind of cultural language and aesthetic, mostly Wiccanate in nature. I think this cultural aesthetic and language is what Drew chose to no longer be associated with (according to my interpretation of his post). And that choice resonates with me, because I too have not felt like I belong in that cultural milieu any longer. My personal pondering regarding my own spiritual journey is not over, and I won’t speak too much to that at the moment. But ultimately, I believe that the term, as it’s come to be used in our communities, is so deeply flawed, so vague, that what use it has is extremely limited and, in my opinion, heading towards obsolescence…unless the vagaries of human linguistic and communal movement deem otherwise, and it becomes redefined in more specific and concrete ways, which is certainly possible.
I don’t know. I just fust and burn and wonder and try to hold myself together as best I can. The badgers have made it mid-shin, friends and beloveds, and I limp away, still pondering, and still praying for sunshine, and the promise of a week of warm days…preferably sometime before midsummer.
Grok earth, friends. Pray without ceasing.
The sun came out today, friends:
I’ve said it before, y’all, but ever since I moved north, the sun has become more my beloved than I ever thought possible. Growing up in Texas and Colorado, the sun was ever present – I never thought we could be parted – and I took him for granted, that great golden light. I yearned for rain and midnight and eventide, and while those things still make the top 10 list of numinous moments of bliss and magical rockin’ awesomeness, the sun coming out in the morning after a week of gray skies is really gunning for that number #1 spot on the charts lately. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the almost unbelievably cold and rainy spring we’ve been experiencing here in the fiercely wild urban midwest. Snow? Really? Mama, I’ve got news for you – Texas needs this rain too…run a little their way, please, and give me a little more time to be washed in morning light.
So this morning I found myself grinning up at the blue blue sky like a madwoman. Sun, yes! Sun, hello! Sun, I missed you! Vitamin D supplements are indeed a miracle for those of us who need it, but you really can’t beat the real thing.
And we know the real thing when we see it. Heat and light lamps may imitate the sun, but we know they are not that blazing awe-striking lamp of heaven to whom the human animal has long given praise. O Chariot, O Charioteer.
The warm and good blessing of the sun on my skin has filled my heart full of light and wind and the sounds of bells…and yet…it’s been a busy season, beloveds, and the busy-ness shows no sign of relenting. Projects abound, and I am thrilled to be involved in each and every one of them. But something has to give, at least for a little bit, and I find that I have fewer and fewer thoughts and words for PG at the moment. So, rather than let it lie fallow and untouched with no explanation, I’d prefer to be purposeful about things, and therefore I will be taking a short hiatus from PG the next couple of months. This will allow me to concentrate on these other good projects as well as cultivate a new host of thoughts for this space, not to mention catch up on some real face-time with the Mama and the Beloved in the musings and meanderings of my own personal spiritual journeying. Setting a beginning and end-point for this mini-sabbatical also prevents me from taking as long a break as last time. I’ve every intention of coming back to PG around July, friends and beloveds. It’s a little dance we do, PG and I – the dance of full and fallow, of rich and bare…our own little set of seasons.
In the meantime, y’all, check out the continuing adventures over at No Unsacred Place (where there have been and will continue to be a veritable feast of fantastic posts), and come say hello if you happen to be at Earth Traditions Oasis (where Terra Mysterium will be offering a wealth of spectacular magical entertainment), or PSG this June (where Johnny and I will be staffing our brand new merchant tent venture, Malleus & Mellifera, and presenting a workshop in conjunction with PSG’s Pagan Leadership Institute). And please continue to spread the word about Scarlet Imprint’s second collection of poetry, to be entitled Mandragora and for which I am and will be accepting submissions until October 31st of this year.
And, of course, stay fiercely, beautifully and awesomely wyrd, friends and beloveds, as you are so wont to do. Say hey to the Beloved Sun. Sing joy.
Grok Earth, y’all. Pray without ceasing.
Greetings, best beloveds, from the silver rain rich streets of the fiercely wild urban midwest! The sky has been slate for days, and alive with thunder. Crocuses and blue scilla have been popping up all over the neighborhood. Is rain in the spring my favorite? I can’t decide. The blustery and expansive rain of summer, thundery and outrageous…that’s hard to beat. The sweet late summer / early fall rains that sweep in and back the turning leaves with shades of blue that can only be described in poetry…I can’t say I don’t love that. But still, these rains…these. When they come blowing in from over Mother Lake, bringing with them a kind of shivery, silvery laughter…a fey stillness, the voice of the Kore…well, it may be that the rains of April and May are my favorites. At least right now. Because it’s April. Ask me again in June. And August. And October. What can I say? The Mama just does a bang-up job of it, this whole weather/planet/life/organic/being thing.
And speaking of the Mama…I’m right proud to announce that I will be a participant in a brand new group blog project brought to you by the Pagan Newswire Collective, entitled No Unsacred Place: Earth and Nature in Pagan Traditions. The PNC has produced several excellent group blogs, and I’m excited to be a part of this newest addition, where I will be joining a panoply of excellent writers and thinkers, including Alison Leigh Lilly o f Meadowsweet and Myrrh, Cat Chapin-Bishop of Quaker Pagan Reflections, and Juniper Jeni of Walking the Hedge, among others. I am really looking forward to reading the work of my fellow bloggers! I will be contributing a monthly column on earth-centered liturgy and ritual in addition to other various posts. I hope you will check out this new exciting project!
It has been a crazy time here at PG headquarters. In addition to our recent Ostara ritual, Johnny and I have been busy getting ready for the upcoming festival season, and have just registered for both Earth Traditions Oasis and Pagan Spirit Gathering, where we hope to present our new workshop on performance in ritual building. Terra Mysterium has a wealth of awesome projects in the works and is also in full swing preparing for Oasis, where we will be presenting a wide range of performances and a new ritual based on the Eleusinian Mysteries. Yes, our friends the Badgers of Life ™ have indeed been chewing at my ankles with what feels like a renewed and enthusiastic vigor. Luckily, they’re cute.
As a matter of fact, the aforementioned Badgers were at fault for the fact that I also missed posting on that most holy of days, All Fools, sacred feast day for my friend and yours, Old Coat. Luckily, Old Coat understands. He is, after all, the King of Laziness and Woolgathering (in addition to his many other Kingly and Princely titles…which,despite the fact that he’s pretty anti-monarchy, he enjoys tremendously), and while it was actually quite a lot of industry on my part that prevented my posting, it would be out of character for Old Coat to fault me for being late to the game. What I’m saying is: Happy All Fools! It may be too late to peddle funny untruths to your friends with impunity, but it’s not too late for storytelling. It’s never, ever too late for that. Isn’t that grand?
Though I don’t think I have a story for you so much today as something of my own personal “This I Believe.” See, it’s spring. A busy spring, yes, but spring. And spring always seems to be the season of experiments for me. Something about newness…you know. So in between the growling of Life Badgers and the bandaging of my ankles, I have also thought a bit about my personal spiritual system, the one I’ve been calling “Rootwater Paganism,” and I thought I’d work out some thoughts about it here for a minute, and collect them in one place.
See…Rootwater Paganism…isn’t a thing.
Well, it kind of is.
Obviously, I’m equivocal about this is. But let’s pretend it *is* a thing, at least for the moment. And let’s say then that that thing is, at the very least, an experiment, and at most, a spiritual road trod upon by pretty much just me, and maybe a small few other people if they choose to define themselves that way.
See, in the grand schemed of self-identification, it has become increasingly challenging to comfortably label myself in response to the question “what is my religion?”
Now, on one hand, I don’t need a name for my spirituality. Especially if it’s only mine and I practice it alone, or even with a small group of people. However, in the last few years, as I’ve mentioned on occasion, Johnny and I have been working together on presenting these large public rituals, and in that time many of the themes and prayers and poems within my personal spirituality have been thus presented publicly…and further, in presenting them this way, I began to see patterns in my own theology that seemed to come together with something that resembles continuity. And of course I’ve been developing my own feelings on earth-centered theologies and whatnot here in this space for several years now.
And then there’s the issue of my taking umbrage with the word “Pagan.” This hasn’t gone away. I maintain that the term “Pagan,” used as a marker for a specific religion, is problematic and misleading. I further believe that even the use of the term as an umbrella category for a whole host of religions is suspect, but that’s a whole wasp’s nest for another day. It remains at least true for me that identifying myself as a “pagan” (whether I capitalize it or not) is essentially meaningless when I consider that doing so tells you pretty much nothing about who/what I worship, how I worship, the ethical system I follow, the books/poems/prayers/scriptures/mythologies/stories I find meaningful, etc. Yes, if you know the term it will tell you something about the general community I probably associate with, as I admit that the term has become connotative at least of a general culture or cultural milieu, and that one might readily point to certain cultural markers, festivals, etc. and call them “pagan.” But as a religious identifier, at least for me, it’s no longer useful. And seeing as how I’m not comfortable identifying as a Wiccan or a Witch, a Druid, a Recon of any variety, a Feraferian, a Ceremonial Magician, a Thelemite, or any number of other religions that fall under our nifty yet oh-so-leaky umbrella, it’s become awkward to me when I start to think about how to jive my developing philosophies regarding this term with the fact that I don’t have a better term for my own practice, at the very least when referencing it in theological ruminations like those on PG.
So. In that ineffable, long and winding silliness that is the could-be-pointless realm of self-identification, I’m currently experimenting with calling my practice “Rootwater Paganism.” Bear with me. I could chuck it tomorrow.
The name comes from a dream I had when I was in college. It was summer semester, and I was taking a class on modern 20th century poets. At the same time, and unrelated to the class, I was reading Gary Snyder’s sublime book The Practice of the Wild. My mind was a whirl of poetry and wilderness (the words “wild” and “wilderness” to this day provoke shivers), and one dark Texas night, I dreamed I was swimming along a river under an enormous full moon. To my right, I saw the riverbank, dark and dreamy, and an enormous tree rising out of it, its roots entangled in mud and riverwater, making moonshadows where I knew night creatures lived, despite my being unable to see them. When I woke, I thought about the beauty of that moment, and about the contrast of strong and implacable roots with the silvery and tricksy malleability of water. And so I choose to call this non-thing “Rootwater,” to highlight that meeting of immutable and mutable…the root and the water. And I choose to use the word “Paganism” to maintain that connection to the cultural community in which I still and probably always will move and have my being.
So let’s say this: Rootwater Paganism is a syncretic, anarcho-mystic, animist/polytheist (with a side of monism), critically earth-centered thing-non-thing that posits embodied theology, sensate epistemology, story-centered liturgical theology, justice-oriented and ecofeminist ethics (with not a little bit of anarchist thought), a praxis steeped in storytelling, poetry, art, ritual and folk magic, and takes inspiration/influence from various witchcrafts, Feraferia, Hellenic Paganism, Cosmic Story/Creation Spirituality, and Protestant and folk Christianity. Principle deities include the Mama, the Beloved, and Old Coat, among others (the Kore, the Flame-Haired Smithwoman, the Lightbringer, the Fierce Sister, the Bone Woman, the Man of Sorrows…), not to mention a panoply of local spirits and powers, such as Mother Lake.
I think the clearest examples of the philosophies and theologies that underpin Rootwater Paganism can be found on PG here:
Earth-Centered: A Theology, Part One
Earth-Centered: A Theology, Part Two
Conundrums and Kerfuffles: Clergy Language and the Pagani
So there you have it. This I believe. Rootwater Paganism in a convoluted, possibly pointless, nonsensical and weirdly glittery nutshell. I’m not sure there was anything here that I haven’t said before…but still, it’s a reference point at least.
Do I think Rootwater Paganism is some kind of super-unique not-thing thing? Lordisa, no. It’s an idiosyncratic variation on an earth-centered theme with its syncretic feet in a few places. Does Rootwater Paganism cover every detail of my personal spirituality and practice? Of course not. Frankly, I’m unsure if any one religion can or even should cover everyone’s personal bases. But it will do for the nonce, as I dance gracelessly but enthusiastically along the grassy swards of this mossy stone we call Earth.
Tomorrow’s nonce? Who knows.
But we are still all here in this nonce, friends and Pagani, and for this nonce, I wish you the joy that falls in the silvery and delicious spring rain, the thrill in every crocus witnessed, the rush in every blush of green green grass.
Grok earth, y’all. Pray without ceasing.
Greetings, best beloveds, from the tumbledown and ramshackle rooms of the fiercely wild urban midwest! There is bread rising on the counter. My world is a mess – the flotsam of recent rituals littering the hall, and the melting outside with its tired freeze but its burgeoning laughter is infiltrating every crack and corner. There is music on the radio, its river beat working seamlessly with the light. The dinner table where I sit is covered with the writerly stuff of reference and inspiration…not to mention a number of vinyl records…the hobby of the intrepid spouse. And to my left, a bucket of tulips and hyacinths in slow decay.
Our Kore ritual on Sunday went well I think – messy, loud and crazy, not unlike ourselves, and now we are left with these spring flowers, almost a week old and beginning to show signs of blowsy age, relaxing into the sweet and papery stage of death.
Today is a day of Spring cleaning – of turning from old projects to new…of fresh sheets and clean kitchens. Moving forward and showing up. But for just a moment, for just this moment, there is the rock and roll of holy mess, spilling over in green veils and old herb crowns, and I find my thoughts turned in meditation to my Beloved, that Leopard, that Vine…that Delicious Fire…that Dionysos.
A friend recently asked me what it meant to be a devotee of Dionysos, and I found myself a little lost for words. It may be that my feelings in relationship to that most illuminating god of liberation and intoxication can only be expressed in poetry.
But I think at least part of that devotion is an appreciation for the messiness of life.
Each season is a study in mess…spring the mess of joy, summer the mess of abundance, autumn the mess of harvest, winter the mess of restlessness and snow. The Mama is not simple, and is perfect only if perfection is understood as the rocking balance dance of terrible and awesome and awful and amazing that makes up the day to day of being a living thing. Flowers grow in compost. Spring follows winter, but winter comes back eventually. Mud gets on shoes and tracks into the house…the same mud that makes roses possible. Grapes are crushed and their juice gets mixed with the yeast in the air that feeds on sweetness and in their riot of joy…fermentation. Intoxication. Bread and wine. I choose to worship this process, this mess, because to ignore it seems the greater risk. Civilization in a way seems to be all about cleaning the mess…ignoring the strange, eschewing the gunk. But the Chaotes are right about this: entropy lives at the heart of the Mama, and while it is human to seek order, to seek the rest and peace in a ceramic bowl, in the single plum tree, in the apple skin…it is also and still human, wholly human, to bear witness to the wet clay that made the bowl, the beautiful wreck and promise in the soil that birthed the plum tree, and the sweet decay of the fruit behind the apple skin. And that’s Dionysos. The wreck, the promise, the decay, the sweetness, the fermentation, the dancing, the imperfect perfection…the mess.
I go to stem the tide of entropy as much as I can. I will wash dishes knowing they will be dirty tomorrow. But this moment…this one. I give thanks in the mess. Life is weird. Wyrd. Amazing.
Grok mess, beloveds. Grok Earth. Pray without ceasing.
Jason at The Wild Hunt recently reported news of the recent firing of a Wiccan employee by the TSA. And while I, like others, believe that this is indeed a case of discrimination, and the MSN article communicates that pretty fairly, and even does a decent job of discussing Wicca…I can’t help but cringe at some of the comments made by Smith herself:
“I was dumbfounded,” Smith said. “I told him, that’s not what Wicca is. We don’t cast spells. That’s not witchcraft. That’s black magic or voodoo or something else.”
Really? Well, color *me* dumbfounded. I had no idea Wiccans didn’t cast spells. Oh wait, that’s because they unquestionably and undeniably DO. So…um…what?
Also – a good rule of thumb when decrying religious discrimination is not to disparage other religions or practices, especially when you don’t understand them yourself. I think it’s safe to say that practitioners of Vodou and other African Diasporic Religions have plenty of their own discrimination to deal with and definitely don’t need the members of other misunderstood religions to dump on them in order to “prove” to the media that they are not religiously motivated by any law, doctrine or teaching to perform arcane acts of diabolical evil on hapless others.
Yes, it certainly is possible that Smith is being egregiously and woefully misquoted (I wasn’t able to watch the video so I am only going by the written material in the article) – and for damn sure that happens and happens often, though in an article that seems fairly hellbent on giving even shakes to Smith’s religion and the situation she’s in, I find it rather more likely that she actually said these things. And if she is not being misquoted, this means that Smith is either seriously uninformed as to the details of her own professed religion, or she is hedging in order to paint Wicca in the best possible light. And both of these bother me, but the latter bothers me the most, as it is a particularly glaring example of something I’ve seen before in interfaith dialogue when it comes to conversations between orthodox and accepted forms of religiosity and the religious Other.
Generalizations and simplifications of religions are bad enough, but they are almost unavoidable in the age of the soundbite. And being careful and thoughtful with one’s words when discussing commonly misconstrued aspects of one’s religion is important – yes. Sugarcoating, on the other hand, can and should be avoided as much as humanly possible. It *is* possible to avoid becoming mired in the swampy complexity of explaining one’s religion while still being honest. Wiccans most assuredly do cast spells, but magic is a vast and complicated subject, and Wicca also posits an ethical system that is applied accordingly. Though of course some of them even cast nasty spells on occasion, despite the Wiccan Rede. And why is this? Because individuals, even those who ostensibly share the same ethical system, make different ethical choices. I shouldn’t have to even mention that this goes for all religions everywhere.
Of course…yes, we’re talking about magic, and the World Outside, no matter how post-enlightenment rational we’re all supposed to be, still harbors a major superstitious squick factor when it comes to spellcraft, with no distinctions made between benign and baneful. Lots of folks get squirrelly if we talk about making a simple herb charm for employment or getting a tarot reading, let alone mentioning the Goetia or even a simple poppet spell (due to decades of Media Hype, poppets really seem to freak people out). So conversations about this aspect of some Pagans’ practice will get sticky because of this cultural unease, absolutely. But that only means that we are required to become at the least versed enough in the subject to portray it candidly and with an eye towards acknowledging the vast diversity in every religion and religious practice. Making weird blanket statements about Wiccans “not casting spells” when anyone can do a two nanosecond Google search and come up with a billion references that disprove them complicates the issue, and buys into the cultural unease that undergirds discrimination against magic-practitioners in the first place.
Of course, Smith shouldn’t have to defend her religion or the practice of magic at all, and it is obvious enough to me that the TSA has plenty to own up to, and I sincerely hope for justice for Smith with her case. And certainly there is more to say about discrimination, spellcraft, ethics and interfaith dialogue that I haven’t addressed. But comments like these do bother me, as I worry that they do little to move us all towards the fair and just treatment of those practicing a religion outside the mainstream.
ETA: I have read comments from others speculating that Smith could have simply misspoke, and meant to say that Wiccans don’t, as a rule, run around casting malicious spells on people. Certainly that could be the case, and I don’t want to be read as accusing her of being deliberately misleading because I don’t really think that’s the case. But the wording did strike me as bizarre, and reminded me of instances of sugarcoating I’d heard in the past. It’s a tricky playground, all this religious identification and explanation, and especially when discrimination comes into play, and then especially especially when the media takes a hand, absolutely.
Hello Friends!
As some of you are aware, Peter Dybing has started this campaign to raise $30,000 for Doctors Without Borders in response to the crisis in Japan, and is very close to this goal.
If you haven’t already, please consider making a donation, and keep the people of Japan in your thoughts and prayers:
http://www.firstgiving.com/fundraiser/Pagan-Community/doctors-without-borders
(Alas, WordPress won’t support the fancy widget for this cause, but the link above will take you to the donation site.)
(Yet another fresh face for Pagan Godspell, in honor of this new and freshly arrived spring! The Kore has come and the hyacinth awakens!)
Blessings of the new spring, beloveds! The morning opened today with thunder, and my heart was full of its rumbling, crusty laughter. Later the sun, minted all new by the rushing season, came burning into our house and washed it with golden light, and later into the darkening evening the clouds rolled in again and lightning and thunder appeared once more – perfect bookends to a delirious spring day. I plan to make blueberry cookies..and frankly, that’s hard to beat. The intrepid spouse and I, along with Johnny Rapture, went out to visit Mother Lake yesterday and witness the rising of the full moon. We didn’t see much, unfortunately, as it was a bit too overcast, but Sister Moon did peek her red and hooded eyes out at us over the Lake at least for a moment, and we were satisfied.
At one point, Johnny began wildly pointing at the corner of a small building in the park. After a few moments, we all saw what he was looking at:
Johnny named him Herbert.
Eventually, Herbert was joined by a family of 6 other raccoons, who lined up along the roof and waited for dusk. Maybe they too were waiting for moonrise in order to give praise. But regardless of our anthropomorphic projections, their mere appearance filled us with joy…the crafty business of the Mama’s children revealed on the cusp of spring.
It’s been not an easy winter, y’all. And nothing is over and the work goes on, but we pause in our doings to look out at the March grass and rejoice in the opening of flowers and the falling of rain, and we are filled with a new strength and the joy that comes with knowing that yes, again, the promise of spring has been and will be fulfilled. Ostara blessings, friends, for the Kore has indeed arrived, with hyacinths at her feet and the blooming of crocuses in her wake, and it is good. Io Kore! Kore Evohe! The People Say Hail!
We here at PG headquarters have been up to our eyeballs with projects. Johnny and I have been working hard on our ritual Kore Evohe: Rites for Spring that we’ll be presenting at Milwaukee’s Ostara 2011 this Sunday, as well as preparing workshops for the upcoming festival season (including PSG, which will be outside Chicago this year), and Terra Mysterium has been busy preparing and rehearsing for a number of projects, not the least of which being our performances at the upcoming Earth Traditions Oasis retreat in June. It is shaping up to be an exciting spring and summer!
My prevailing overwhelmed state in reaction to the world continues, and this combined with all the work above had made for a serious dearth of posts, I know. But hope springs eternal, pagani, and I am encouraged by the appearance of crocuses and dwarf irises where a few days before there was only dark earth. Signs and portents soothe my soul…while searching for a book during our recent monthly pagan potluck here at PG headquarters, I unearthed a favorite CD I had thought lost. The smell of bread and flowers and rain and smoke open doors in my heart. And I have made plans for the rearrangement of altars and the renewal of personal practice – lighting more candles, praying more prayers…and all this keeps me afloat. All this showing up.
So open wide your curtains! Enlarge the place of your tent! Make ready your hearts for Spring, friends! Io Kore!
And always, always…in the rain and in the sun, grok Earth. Grok Earth, and pray without ceasing!
Friends. The world spins on and seems to do so faster than I can keep up with it…a side effect of too much time on the internet, maybe, where information rushes by and kerfuffles rise and fall with astonishing speed. After all, the birds don’t seem any more rushed than usual, busy carrying out their lives according to the Mama’s seamless rhythms. Still, March appeared before I knew what was happening, and I find myself as ever caught suddenly in its wet and breathless rocking between laughter and despair.
See, Tuesday morning was one of those exquisite ones, where even before my daily sacramental cup o’ joe I felt my heart stretch and lift itself up up over the rooftops. It was the sun the sun the sun. The sun had come out of its hiding place and was flooding every asphalt crack and snowmelt corner with its shining. I turned my face to it at every opportunity, to feel that ineffable radiant assurance on my eyelids and knew that the Kore, even now, is racing up the roots of trees and plotting plum flowers and crabapple blossoms. I was drunk with it, the good news of spring unfolding. The next morning, however, I was met with cold rain pooled under eaves and in train stations – gray skies and gloves. The story of March – sun one day and rain the next…and only a fool would assume we’ve seen the last of the snow. Winter fights to keep its grip even as it slips, and Spring comes in, yes it does, though I admit, I want it to move faster. Spring comes so slowly to these northern streets, and so March always seems to me a troubled month – impatient and exhausted one day, full of joy the next. Which leads me to wonder if sometimes I’m not just living a March life, as we all probably are – emotional embodied creatures all moving and whirling and leaping and sighing and making room for one another…dancing, praying, yelling, crying, working.
Of course, this temperamental despairing is not all seasonal sturm and drang. Upheaval, controversy, movement, and conversation just seem to be on the global menu, from the pagani to politics. In the Pagan community, there is of course the ongoing conversation regarding gender, transgender and exclusionary ritual space that has been rocking the pagan blogosphere (for the curious, I think the subject of gender-exclusive space is sticky and complicated, but I think the question of whether transwomen are women is perfectly clear: they are, and I, like others, find the remarks made by Z Budapest and some others to be ignorant, offensive, and outrageous. However, I also think the conversation itself has been enormously important, and I look forward to the continuing conversation in regards to gender in general amongst the pagani), and the embarrassing pagan spotlight-mongering related to the most recent celebrity meltdown. And on the national front, there’s the ongoing situation in Wisconsin and the recent despicable move by Republicans to strip unions of their collective bargaining rights, the continuing existence of Guantanamo, the attacks on Planned Parenthood and a woman’s right to choose, the targeting of Muslims by the government…the list goes on. And I have been just as glued to the world’s unfolding as many others – and I have been full of opinions, yes, but I admit…reluctant to blog about them. And there are a few reasons for that. First, there have been so many others in the blogosphere that have weighed in, in such succinct and fruitful ways, on so many of these topics that I find I haven’t much to add…and I am a proponent in sometimes sitting back and just listening, especially when there is so much to take in. Other reasons involve personal commitments that have had me hard at work in other areas. But also, friends, some of it has to do with a feeling of being purely emotionally whelmed and overwhelmed by the world.
I get overwhelmed easily. It’s not something I love about myself. Others are energized and galvanized by what feels like an ever increasing mountain of work and talk and work and injustice and more work, and I often wish I were one of them. I feel inadequate – meeping in my little corner of the world, writing love poems to the Mama and baking bread. I know, intellectually and physically and spiritually, that poetry is important, yes. That bread is sacred and important. That theology and religion, and dialogue in community is important. I just get overwhelmed. So I’ve been avoiding writing in this space because when I start to think about everything I’ve been reading lately, it all comes in on me at once, like some great seething wave full of sharks, and so I choose instead to work out my rawness in bread dough and liturgical writing.
I lose the good news. I feel like I lose the good news an awful lot. I start to wonder of Rob Breszny is wrong. I know, I know, I know he’s not. I know that the world *is* beautiful, I know it. I feel it. But fuck, y’all…sometimes the bad news just seems nevereffingending.
I wish I could hold on to myself more – be more collected. But I don’t and I’m not. So I have to keep reminding myself. The Mama has to keep reminding me. That there is solace and meaning in ritual and in prayer, that there is peace in grass and rain, yes, even in snow and ice. That there is music and it is good. That there are people fighting truly good fights and believing good things and doing good works. And that there is solace in the Word. And the word is poetry.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you min.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean, blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination.
Calls out to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
-Mary Oliver
I made it my goal this week to memorize this poem. It is arguably my favorite poem of all time (and the competition is fierce). And I have begun to recite it out loud on a daily basis. It is my prayer this spring of upheaval and movement. It forgives and challenges, all in the same breath. And that is what I’m trying to do with myself…pretty much every day. Forgive. Challenge.
We are so beautiful, y’all. We are so amazing. And we are so awful. But I truly believe, really, that we can find our place in the family of things. The Mama turns and the spring comes running. Rain one day, sun the next.
This is my prayer.
Grok Earth, friends. Pray without ceasing.
“Why, life is short, and how many can I help or harm? I have my power at last, but the world is still too heavy for me to move, though my friend Lir might think otherwise.” And he laughed again in his dream, a little sadly.
The unicorn said, “That is true. You are a man, and men can do nothing that makes any difference.” But her voice was strangely slow and burdened. She asked, “Which will you choose?”
The magician laughed for a third time. “Oh , it will be the kind magic, undoubtedly, because you would like it more. I do not think that I will ever see you again, but I will try to do what would please you if you knew…”
-from The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle
Friends and beloveds, the cold has returned to these silver streets in the heart of the fiercely wild urban midwest, but it can’t fool me. My heart holds fast to those few fleeting days when the wind brought snatches of spring song to my ears, and I know it intends to keep that promise. Somewhere, there is a clutch of crocuses opening their deep, purple and white cups, and somewhere a crabapple tree is trembling with anticipation. The intrepid spouse has brought me first tulips, and soon I will make my late February pilgrimage to my favorite city haunt to buy beeswax candles and hyacinths in honor of my Beloved Dionysos, who rushes into my life again every year around this fragile time. Poetry swells in our blood and we are filled with the salt and hum and thrust of spring, that matchless season.
Some time ago, when I read the passage above in my all-time no-question absolute favorite novel for possibly the millionth time, I thought to myself what a wonderful basis for an ethical system this might be. That Schmendrick would choose the kinder magic purely on the fact that the unicorn would like it more. It reminds me a bit of Brendan Myers’ assertion in The Other Side of Virtue regarding the individual’s encounter with Immensities, and how those encounters shape us ethically. In this case, Schmendrick’s Immensity is the Unicorn, and his response to her and the story he lives with her shapes him into a legendary magician and practitioner of “kind magic.”
So it is that we might look at our own Immensities – our own Unicorns – those things which are most wonderful, most beautiful, most numinous, most amazing, most life-changing…the most real things we may have ever known in our secret hearts…and do what would please them if they knew, the kind magics: the writing of poems, the singing of songs. Protest, art. Righteousness, the honeyed anger that reaches for justice. Rescuing cats from trees and healing wounds. Recognizing the Other, recognizing Self as Other. Discovering the genius that lives in the body of the Mama.
Because they would like it more.
Grok Earth, best beloveds. Pray without ceasing.
Greetings, friends and beloveds, from the silver, charcoal and spring-wet streets of the fiercely-wild urban midwest! Things are looking up. A new wind is blowing, and there is snow melt everywhere, seeping into the ground, seeking seeds and telling them stories about light. The empty lots are heavy with flooding. I have crocuses and rich earth and rain on my mind. The conspiracy of spring is afoot.
Inevitably, in this fragile time between winter and spring, when we are treated to precious days of wind and water followed by brief bouts of freeze, my heart too seems to do this sweet and awful dance with the earth, freezing and thawing, sighing and singing. And these tremulous, shattering and mystifying days where that promise on the tongue is capped with silver skies, creating some sacred marriage of brilliant hope and sorrowful stillness, a kind of breathlessness, some holding of secrets…they do bemuse, and whatever good thoughts I may have are quickly lost. In his new book Becoming Animal (which I have almost finished [too many books, too little time] and which has thrown open my heart-mind like a great wide door carved with shadows and crows, and has thoroughly wrenched me into thrilling knots…more on this incredible book later), David Abram talks about these moods of earth, and on days like this one it is easy to see what a bedrock truth that is. I am consumed with the moods of the Mama – the sack of my heart driven to some strange emotion by the flooding of the skin of earth.
So it is that the threads of meaningful discourse pinging around my head as I slosh happily through huge pots of wet earth seem all wound into a tangled ball at the moment, and all I have to report are muddy footnotes…
1. I attended a lecture on honeybees last night. The journey was fraught with human experience – train, sidewalk, grocery, up to the lecture room crowded with bee-friendly folks and jars of honey. The fierce joy of winter’s relenting seemed to rock through people, and I was filled with affection for our complicated, weird selves. We human animals and our relationships – the negotiations with honeybees, our potato harvests, our bread. I thought about the vivid, critical importance of the Real – how the smell of mud rising up through the city makes us all quit our inner turmoil and turn, even for a moment, into the wind, lifting our faces…embodied creatures after all – skin and muscle and feeling. I thought of a sermon I heard once – our blood, full of salt; the sea, full of salt…how this is makes us “the salt of the earth,” – a people connected to each other and to the earth by these miraculous materials from which we are made. Solidarity, honey, and salt.
2. I ran across word of a recent kerfuffle involving Goshen College, a Mennonite liberal arts college in Ohio, and their recent decision involving the national anthem. From what I’ve gathered, for many years Goshen didn’t play the national anthem at sports and other events due to an Anabaptist conviction regarding giving allegiance to God before human rule. However, they have recently changed their policy, and the anthem is now played instrumentally before sporting events. As a result, there have been a number of faculty, staff, alumni and students of Goshen who have protested this decision, and some of their thoughts on the matter can be read here.
I am not a Mennonite, and I’m not going to comment on Goshen College’s decision. But the continuing conversation has sparked some questions for me about allegiance and ritual; the nature of pagan allegiance and my own relationship to nation. As an anarchist I am against kyriarchy, top-down systems, and nation-states. I don’t have all the answers, but I believe in what I see, and I believe in the power of small groups committed to diverse community-based governmental systems, and in the difficult but noble pursuit of consensus decision making. I also believe in ritual, and I believe that ritual is powerful. Ritual, as I’ve said before, is embodied storytelling. That’s what makes it not only important on an aesthetic and celebratory level, but also a matter of survival. So I ask myself what my allegiance to the Mama, and to the creatures that comprise her sacred being, demands of me. What do art and storytelling and community demand of me? And how do the rituals I/we participate in express and communicate those allegiances?
3. I have also been reading On Liturgical Theology by Aidan Kavanaugh – considered a fundamental text in the study of liturgy and a book I highly recommend (for its graceful, impeccably gorgeous prose as well as its deeply thought-provoking ideas). Being focused on the nature of liturgy squarely from a Catholic perspective, certainly I disagree with plenty of the book’s theology, but I am fascinated by his assertion of liturgy as prima theologia, which is a concept I think is worth exploring from a pagan perspective when it comes to public ritual. From my understanding (and this is my interpretation and may be wildly off base), Kavanaugh is asserting that theology, in this case the act of considering/negotiating/analyzing and engaging in authentic relationship with god, happens first and foremost in the act of worship, in my opinion both on a personal individual level and on a communal collective level (I am personally more focused lately on the latter, as, in my opinion (*dance dance*) the pagan cultural gestalt/milieu/egregore tends to focus rather a lot on the individual spiritual journey). The notion that theology is something that all worshiping people do, not just academics and philosophers, and that theology is engaged in worship, where the people come before their god… initiating contact, giving praise and thanks, pondering difficulties, making contracts, receiving grace, feeling awe, wrestling with angels, etc. Any analysis after this critical and seminal experience then is secondary theology – the commentary that springs out of experience. And therefore it is critical that we look at liturgics, worship and ritual deeply as we construct our theologies. It is very possible that this is a severely limited and half-baked understanding, but I am fascinated nonetheless. I plan to explore this more at length in a later post, including thoughts on a slightly different but related assertion of Johnny’s, which springs from our experiences writing and performing rituals over the past couple of years.
4. The intrepid spouse and I have joined a local food share in our neighborhood, and this weekend was our first pickup. We’ve done this in many places, so this is not our first foray into the world of food co-ops and CSAs, but I am continually amazed still every time by the bounty of earth and the ingenuity of human beings in the tumble of food that rolls out onto our kitchen counter, humble and covered with dirt, perhaps on the skinny and wrinkled side (it is still winter, after all), but full of promise. Carrots and onions and apples. An artichoke (the intrepid spouse and I eyeballed the artichoke with apprehension, seeing as how we love artichokes but have never prepared one ourselves, but we are a brave people). Avocados. Ginger root. Yes.
Take. Eat. This is Her body. All this. All this.
—————
Muddy footnotes with no text – seeds in the dirt. The spring will come rolling and rocking over the fields and the plains and into the city. The Mama will laugh and you will not be able to keep from laughing. The birds are making ready. Rhizomes and roots and the veins of trees all whispering with the grass. The wind. They all know something. These delicious secrets.
The conspiracy of spring.
Grok Earth, best beloveds. Pray without ceasing.
p.s. For those in Chicago, don’t forget that I will be teaching a workshop on Spirit & Poetry at Life Force Arts Center starting March 1st!! For more details, and to register, please see this page.
Oh, if my spirit may foretell
Or earlier impart,
It is because I always dwell
With morning in my heart.
from “The Seer” (1897) by George William Russell
Greetings, best beloveds, from the battened down hatches of the fiercely-wild, glacial moonscape urban midwest. Yes, you may have heard, the snowpocalypse doom-train is speeding over us in the form of a massive, razor-toothed blizzard. We here at PG headquarters have been busy the past couple days steeling ourselves for the week – we’re stocked up on potatoes and coffee, and we’ve started to pray to the phlegmatic radiator with renewed vigor. I say Hail to Dame Winter, Mother Darkness and Howling Night! That Ancient, Terrible and Shrieking Lady is having her say, and how.
Still…still…beneath it all, Imbolc rises. More a dream even than a whisper at the moment, but still, beneath the rock the fist of winter yields and the moss begins to breathe. The conspiracy of spring begins to hum. And while the storm rages and the white bees sizzle through the aching air, through it that Most Holy and Beloved Smithwoman walks, with her hair as red as burning coals, leaving behind her the bloom of starlit white flowers and poetry in her footprints…morning in her heart. Hail Bright Prophet!
Snow has always made me think of magic. When I was a child, I was sure that the physical manifestation of raw, untamed magic must at the very least look a lot like the sparkle of snow under lamplight. And while I’m sure that animated moving pictures showing small winged peoples shaking sparkly dust over things had something to do with this, it is a notion that’s stayed with me nonetheless, and in the pursuit of an organic, natural religion steeped in the holy earth, I still feel fairly confident in declaring snow as incarnate magic, real and present – solid and not-solid, ephemeral and yet heavy, both whisper and roar simultaneously. Beauty and terror – a great ghost walking.
Indeed, it should come as no surprise to learn that I am fairly certain that beauty and magic are one and the same.
Of course, I am not a philosopher, so the arcane twistings and turnings of aesthetics are sometimes lost on me, and if I am so bold as to say that magic and aesthetics are one and the same, bear in mind that this is only the barest hint of a personal theory. Certainly I can say that I believe wholeheartedly that aesthetic is critical to the execution of effective magical practice, and that a rite that fails to pay attention to the importance of aesthetics (whether simple or complex), to Deep Beauty, simply fails. The pursuit of beauty is the pursuit of joy, of emotional authenticity.
Yet it is still a difficult beauty rises in the final months of winter, when it seems the snow becomes angry and the wind is unforgiving – Winter grips the earth with Her iron hands and refuses to relent. Those of us who live where the weather comes howling may despair at the unbelievability of the coming spring. Will it ever be light again, will color again bloom in the grass…will the wildflowers that seem a flight of human fiction open again along the roadsides and in the fields. Yes, we forget. A season of fragile faith.
Dover Beach
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; — on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch’d land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægæan, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating to the breath
Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitute, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Yet the Mama is Beautiful. Always. Joyce Kornblatt, in a recent article in Parabola magazine, comments that “beauty and brokenness live in intimate relationship,” that the one not only exists by the other, but in fact exists because of the other, and vice versa. So it is that in addition to that fragile despairing and the ruin of winter, we find hope. The hope for a sky that rains roses.
Roses
by George Eliot
You love the roses – so do I. I wish
The sky would rain down roses, as they rain
From off the shaken bush. Why will it not?
Then all the valley would be pink and white
And soft to tread on. They would fall as light
As feathers, smelling sweet: and it would be
Like sleeping and yet waking, all at once.
The question of course being: would we want that? A valley filled with roses? Or is the sublime vision of such an exquisite event dependent on the fact that roses instead wither and die, that the snow walks, that death comes, that things break…that we break.
Not really a new set of thoughts, I’m aware. But if we’re all so wise to the relationship of brokenness to beauty and of harsh wind to hope, why do we need reminding so often? Every spring I think “I want this forever.” Every fall I struggle against the sweeping dark. I ask questions and receive no answers.
So this is what poetry is for.
Enigmas
by Pablo Neruda
You’ve asked me what the lobster is weaving there with
his golden feet?
I reply, the ocean knows this.
You say, what is the ascidia waiting for in its transparent
bell? What is it waiting for?
I tell you it is waiting for time, like you.
You ask me whom the Macrocystis alga hugs in its arms?
Study, study it, at a certain hour, in a certain sea I know.
You question me about the wicked tusk of the narwhal,
and I reply by describing
how the sea unicorn with the harpoon in it dies.
You enquire about the kingfisher’s feathers,
which tremble in the pure springs of the southern tides?
Or you’ve found in the cards a new question touching on
the crystal architecture
of the sea anemone, and you’ll deal that to me now?
You want to understand the electric nature of the ocean
spines?
The armored stalactite that breaks as it walks?
The hook of the angler fish, the music stretched out
in the deep places like a thread in the water?
I want to tell you the ocean knows this, that life in its
jewel boxes
is endless as the sand, impossible to count, pure,
and among the blood-colored grapes time has made the
petal
hard and shiny, made the jellyfish full of light
and untied its knot, letting its musical threads fall
from a horn of plenty made of infinite mother-of-pearl.
I am nothing but the empty net which has gone on ahead
of human eyes, dead in those darknesses,
of fingers accustomed to the triangle, longitudes
on the timid globe of an orange.
I walked around as you do, investigating
the endless star,
and in my net, during the night, I woke up naked,
the only thing caught, a fish trapped inside the wind.
The intrepid spouse and I will bundle ourselves up sometime in the next day or so and take a short walk through the wind and snow and feel its roughness against our faces. For now, the wind wrecks itself against the glass and the brick, and my world this night is small – the flotsam of my life laid out in tumbles of books, paints, keys, pens…the occasional cult object. I pray in the darkness for the coming sun. We are so amazing. We are so complex. Fragile, remarkable, and strange. Weather and rhythm, jokes and sad songs. All.
I say Hail to that Dark Winter but wish all the same for Spring. I sing the seed beneath the earth, wishing for light.
Whelks
by Mary Oliver
Here are the perfect
fans of the scallops,
quahogs, and weedy mussels
still holding their orange fruit –
and here are the whelks –
whirlwinds,
each the size of a fist,
but always cracked and broken –
clearly they have been traveling
under the sky-blue waves
for a long time.
All my life
I have been restless –
I have felt there is something
more wonderful than gloss –
than wholeness –
than staying at home.
I have not been sure what it is.
But every morning on the wide shore
I pass what is perfect and shining
to look for the whelks, whose edges
have rubbed so long against the world
they have snapped and crumbled –
they have almost vanished,
with the last relinquishing
of their unrepeatable energy,
back into everything else.
When I find one
I hold it in my hand,
I look out over that shaking fire,
I shut my eyes. Not often,
but now and again there’s a moment
when the heart cries aloud:
yes, I am willing to be
that wild darkness,
that long, blue body of light.
——————
May the blessings of Imbolc remain a light in your heart, best beloveds. Grok poetry. Grok light and moss and snow and dreaming. Grok Earth. Grok Earth.
Pray without ceasing.
Greetings, best and brightest beloveds, from the really really really really really cold and also cold…and cold…streets of the fiercely wild urban midwest!
It’s cold, and it’s not getting any warmer the next few days…quite the opposite in fact. But Imbolc is rising, and don’t I need to hear its promise of coming light and melt beneath the rock. In the heart of winter the seed cracks open and breathes, and we will pause in our business to listen for its singing. For right now, though, we’re in the thick of it – cold. And predominantly gray…with occasional savagely lit afternoons, when the sun reveals itself, and blazes fast and bright but bitterly cold on into evening.
Amidst the freeze and the blowing snow, I look out the window of the train as it speeds past the cityscape, and I notice every time some new trick in the concrete – a building with boarded windows shifting in character with the wind and unraveling the story of its years, the cemetery from above dotted with stone and snow, empty tracks winding back between old trees. I think about all the human sorrow those trees have seen. I think about all the love inside that sorrow. Some movement of the light makes the roots of one of the largest trees catch my attention, and I am suddenly flooded with memories of winters in Colorado, as though those same roots, in conspiracy with the slate sky and the snow, are whispering straight into the inner chambers of my heart. Reminding me of when, as a child, I perceived time and space as grand and vasty things – of the seemingly neverending roads and woods and plains of my youth, the secret eternities of evening. The Mama is the keeper of real time, all of it – organic time rolled up in pine needles and the crazy feathery quicksilver eyes of deer. In that remembering and revelation some part of myself knits together…and I say thanks to those roots for the reminder – I say thanks to the train that took me there. I say thanks to the gray sky and the snow. All winter I rock between cursing and blessing the sky, but today its bonelight has been a part of some small mending, and for that I can only offer thanksgiving.
These meditations and mendings have, of course, been manifesting only within the unspoken and unworded relationship between my body, movement, light, sound and dream. And they have remained so unspoken and so unworded. I mean, I have been a whirl and a tumble of thoughts and wonderings this month. Yet, when I go to speak or write, I find myself lately strangely mute – a burning mind and an empty mouth (despite waves of enthusiasm as in my last post, this seems still to be so). I have struggled for weeks with words – fumbling through half-finished blog posts only to discard them, sitting before empty screens and staring at empty paper, marveling at the clean loveliness of a pen but unable to pick it up – the act of articulation seems herculean and behemoth.
What can I tell you? There is smoke rising from the vent in the building across the street – backlit from behind the trees it is the color of late peaches one moment and copper coins the next…unspeakable colors that can only be wrought by the sun itself, lashing the earth with strokes of genius as it sinks into the fields and over the grinding, humming city. Even industry…even industry the Mama can make astonishing simply by turning and breathing and being – wrapped in a shivering mantle of ice.
It’s all I have – this marking of time. So the crows on the fence tell me – so I ask those roads and mountains in my memory to remind me of the sweep of things and forgive my lazy tongue. Just mark time. Just mark time.
I show up. I light candles.
Maybe tomorrow.
Greetings best beloveds from the splintering and freezing light of the fiercely wild urban midwest! Those blissful and brief days spent in the arms of my beloved Texas are plenty over, and we find ourselves back beside the wide and vasty shoulders of Mother Lake. The snow falls in fits and starts, the days are cold and colder yet. Happy New Year! Late!
Imbolc is already nigh, and we here at PG headquarters are up to our eyeballs in work. I’m still a little fuzzy on how it got to be the middle of January. The first couple weeks of the new year I often regard as Life On Pause, as we take a few deep breaths and contemplate the old mixed with new, the season of promise we find ourselves in, the peace of the Solstice/Christmas season still beating in our hearts…this year, however, seems to have gone off like a firecracker; Johnny and I are hard at work on our liturgy in honor of the Flame-Haired Smithwoman that we are excited to present at the upcoming Earth Traditions Winter’s Waning celebration in just a couple small weeks, and there is writing to be done and potlucks to pursue and thoughts to be had and conversations to engage. For a while I quailed at the thought of all this busyness, but the miracle of Vitamin D in heroic doses (supervised by a health professional, yes) I suspect has something to do with this freshly amazed attitude I find myself in all of a sudden. The world seems to teem with potential. I turn over a rock and there’s something to talk about. Forgiveness, “brokenness” in a Pagan vs. Christian context, the phenomenon of altar-building, the new David Abram book and how much it rocks my world, the upcoming Sabbat and the season of hope in which it nests…all things I’m flexing my fingers to tackle. But still, friends, one thing at a time. The winter is still knocking its whispered meditations on my windows, and while it may be a winter of bustle and groove, nonetheless my body tunes to the hush, and I find myself consumed by thoughts once again of simplicity and silence.
Yep, it’s January, and I have once again been thinking on the phenomenon of plain dress/living in a pagan context, spurred by a recent comment on that same wee post I made back in 2007.
To recap, in March of 2007 I posted a very short post about some thoughts I’d had regarding plain living and paganism after reading a book on the subject by Scott Savage. Since then, that single post has received the most hits of any blog post I’ve written, and continues to elicit comments from folks who run across it, usually after entering some variation of “pagan and plain” into Google. A number of fascinating testimonies, conversations and comments have come up there. In January of 2010 I revisited the subject (exactly one year ago today weirdly enough), musing a bit further about whether plain/simple dress could be considered compatible with pagan theologies. In response to that post, a lively discussion ensued in which there was some argument and conversation regarding gender issues, the romaticization and glorification of poverty, the possible cultural appropriation of Amish, Plain Quaker and Mennonite dress, the efficacy of personal choices in regards to ecological activism, etc. At the time, I said I would tackle each of these in individual blog posts. Well, the vagaries of human existence plus my magpie attention span plus the fact that all of these topics are huge and interesting and deserving of much more attention than a single blogger or comment section would ever be able to give…and, well, a year later I still haven’t really done any of that.
However, I continue to come across others on the web who seem to be exploring the same issues. So, as a result then of all of this pondering, and in response to that recent comment on the 2007 post, I decided it might be a good time for the creation of a discussion and networking space for those pagans looking to explore these issues together.
Here is that space. It is my hope that this site will provide a space for those interested in plain dress, simple living and related concerns to come together and explore their thoughts on the subject, whether they are just curious, interested in implementing some aspects of the theology or lifestyle into their own, are already doing so and are looking for others to chat with, or even find the whole idea antithetical to paganism and want to know why those who like it are entertaining such heretical notions. If you are interested then please join us and welcome!
More to come in the new year, friends and best beloveds! In the meantime, I pray snow and bonelight. Slate and winter sparrow. Imbolc rises – the serpent in the land is dreaming. May you walk beneath these cold gray skies singing to the rhythm of your red hearts.
Grok Earth. Pray without ceasing.
Blessings and the pealing of bells, best and brightest beloveds! I’m sure the weather is glacial up there in the fiercely wild urban midwest. As for me, I’m in Texas, land of sweet heart-smoke winters. And I am happy as a robin (who seem to me just as cheerful as clams). Though I’ll be honest – I anticipate a lot of crying this week. Both joy and sorrow. Being back in the landscape of my heart…well, something clenched within me always yields against my better judgment, so that I am all over vulnerable – ripe for breaking and giddy with love. River and oak. The smell of cedars. The rain lashes at the ground in sheets and so I am undone as well, on fire with a longing and a reveling and a pondering. Heart aflame, Sacre Coeur. Loss and reunion anticipating loss. Home.
It’s Christmas Day. And in the spirit of love and tears, of fiery hearts and pondering, I have been thinking of Mary (the Blessed Mother, not the Magdalene…oh, I love her too, but that’s another post perhaps). It is her season, after all.*
Mary has always fascinated me, even as a young girl with no Christian upbringing whatsoever. Growing up in Texas, she was present mostly in images of La Virgen de Guadalupe, that Woman of Precious Stone, Starry Serpent Mother, Liberator, Miraculous and Blessed Lady with a heart so full and encompassing that she turns no one away, ever. An audacious love, that. A difficult love. A heartbreaking love. So I worship and give praise to her in my own way – some Paganism here, some folk Catholicism there – I wear her image and bring her roses. And I pray – rosaries, novenas.
The one in whom all things of this land are made and unmade, and through whom all is made manifest and precious. She is the mother of the land I love, and the land I miss, and the land I dream about. She is the fierce mother of the desert, of bright blooms flowering out of the breathless, fiery earth. And she is the mother of all the earth, too, of stone and water, of dove and lily. She is strength, and anger, and unending, shattering love. The love of a serpent for the ground it moves on. The love of roses for the water that feeds them.
It is almost impossible not to see the echoes of ancient goddesses in Mary’s many faces, and this is one among many reasons why I love her. I love her because she is powerful, because she appears to her people, and because she refuses to go away. I love her because she loves, and her people love her with an ardent devotion that is consuming, passionate, and ever-renewing. I love her because I see Isis in her, and Inanna, and the geography of my heart – cactus and rattlesnake – and Something Even Older Than That. A unparalleled strength. Mother of Light. A woman pregnant with Light. A woman of Memory, giving birth to Promise.
Interestingly, I’ve met more than a few Pagani over the years who possess a love for the Virgin Mary, wearing medals and praying novenas to her, lighting votives, lining their windowsills with seven-day candles in her image. Many, including myself, dislike interpretations of Mary as some kind of meek, mild, unquestioning and submissive vessel for god, so we seek instead to uncover the fierce arms and fists of resistance beneath her mantle. The eyes that say “Hear me,” and “Look up,” and “Do not be afraid,” and “Stand.” The mouth that says “he was my son.” An earthly woman. Woman of Earth.
Obviously, my vision of Mary is highly syncretic and wholly heretical. To me, she is generous and rich with symbol – enormous, multi-faceted, complex and ineffable. She is crowned with stars – the moon beneath her feet, Radiant Queen of Heaven. And she is an earthly woman face to face with a fiery angel, a lily-bearing terror, shower of gold. And she is a mother exhausted from childbirth. And she is a Voice ringing in the hearts of a people livid with justice. I am attracted to her worship also, to be honest, because it is extant. It is rich with the weight of repetition, of billions of people with beads in their hands and her prayers on their tongues. And while I too long for the resurrection of temples and tabernacles in honor of Pagan gods and goddesses, absolutely, my heart is also made glad by the presence of Mary, everywhere. I say hello to her walking past churches, I stand at the iron gates of gardens and ask her help in times of trouble. And I honor the magnetic pull of human to miracle when I see candles overflowing at the feet of rust stains and moss formations bearing the image of woman. I tremble at the image of her Sacred Heart. My heart, my mother. My heart, my mother.
So on this Christmas Day, I give praise and thanks to that most Holy Mother Mary, Queen of Heaven, Mother of Moon and Stars.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Word is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, the rising sun. Holy Mary, Mother of Earth, Queen of Heaven, pray for us your Children, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
Grok Hearts and Lilies, best beloveds. Grok Stars and Miracles. Grok Joy. Grok Earth. Pray without ceasing.
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*Of course I know many say that Christmas is about the infant Jesus. However, in the Christmas story, the infant Jesus is an infant, and as such, while there are prophecies and miracles and gifts abundant all around him, the story doesn’t actually involve him much at all, except as the locus of adoration. In my mind, this is really Mary’s story – and Joseph’s story, and the story of Magi and shepherds and stars, yes, but predominately Hers. To me, Christmas (which I personally celebrate in addition to the Winter Solstice as a pair of related and syncretic holidays) is much less about the Beloved, and much much more about the Mother.
