There are seasons, Pagani, that fill me with words, brimming like a full cup, threatening to spill over into the sacred day.  And then there are seasons that leave me breathless, wordless, shining and buzzing full of something rich and sweet, unnameable and perfect.  Solstice is one of these latter seasons, when words lie fallow beneath snow and buttery sun, and I struggle to articulate the incandescent images of this long night and brief, exquisite day: beeswax candles, evergreens.  Bright paper, music.  Bread.  Fire.

The human animal, fillling the winter nights with stories, with voices, with color.  The ancient numen, breath of god, intimate wonder, dancing in snowy footprints, in the wet streets, in the yellow windows and the faraway.  The Queen of the White Bees tapping at the glass.  Cloves.  Sleep.  Down through the dark to the smallest point, the winter moment.

Dawn – the gray ghost, a flock of blackbirds wings away in the iron morning.  The expectant hush, the Land holds its breath, the Mama trembles.

The sun cracks over the horizon.

Marked with bells and drums, saffron and light, the sun comes up in streamers and amber singing, throwing its yellow scarves of air over the seamless field, white and interrupted only by the deep, long, blue and hollow shadows of sentinel trees.  You feel it, beloveds, the crisp flood of icy joy, the trumpets blazing Beyond the Fields We Know, the Master in the Woods rejoicing, his pack of white dogs with their breath steaming in the sharp new day, the high holy winter ascends.

The blessed sun returns, the light in the teeth of darkness!  The lamp of the world!  Its heart aflame, our closest star, our beloved!

Blessings, blessings, friends!  To you, doveys, a Midwinter filled with warmth and delight, the unconquerable sun, the shadow and the glory, blazing.  That this day the Mama place her blessing hand on yours, and rock you with her beauty.  That the beloved sun unfurl its jeweled armfuls of Great Cosmos Dancing down upon you, and that you grok the secret shining in its heart.  Annunciation, celebration, glory, this coming forth by day,this hallelujah, this amazement, this solar miracle, this wheeling of stars and planet, this marvel.  This.  This.  This.

Grok Earth!  Grok Sun!  Pray without ceasing!

Taken from Poetry Chaikana Blog:

Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?

by Mary Oliver

Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches of other lives –
tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey, hanging
from the branches of the young locust trees, in early morning, feel like?

Do you think this world was only an entertainment for you?

Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides
with perfect courtesy, to let you in!
Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass!
Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over the dark acorn of your heart!

I climb, I backtrack.
I float.
I ramble my way home.

— from West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems, by Mary Oliver

Hey!  Guess what?  The Pagani went to the Parliament of World Religions!

If you’ve been within spitting distance of the Pagan internets for the past three weeks, then you know all about it.* And hey, not a single semantic dust-up in the entire process!  Huzzah!

Oh wait.

I know, I know, Pagani.  There’s a kerfuffle afoot.  I have actually been kind of paying attention, I swear.  I just….well….frankly, I’m having trouble mustering any indignation.  Or…any…opinions on the matter even.  And why is that?  Well, maybe it’s because I’ve been going through my own identity crisis…by nature a self-absorbed affair.  Or maybe it’s because I’m not feeling particularly pedantic.  Stop the presses – I’m normally up for all kinds of semantics.  Something might be wrong with me.

But really, if you wanna twist my arm about it, I do get that it’s a mighty important kerfuffle on some levels.  And the fact is that I generally agree that some redefinition is in order.  I mean, in my mind, it’s become more than a little apparent that Wiccans and traditional witches and Asatruar and Hellenes and Feraferians and Druids and Canaanites and the Kemetic Orthodoxy and Reclaiming and Thelemites and Chaotes and Church of the Subgenius and nondenominational eclectics and what have yous (not to mention African Diasporic Religionists, Satanists, Indigenous peoples, some Gnostics, and all manner of folks who may or may not be identified as under the Pagan umbrella depending on who you ask) are doing some radically different things.  What do they all have in common?  Sometimes it seems like very little.  Not all are polytheist, not all are earth-centered, not all acknowledge a divine Feminine, and certainly not all share the same political sensibility or ethical system.  The eco-feminist neo-ancient dada mindfuck + radical anarcho-gnostic christian mysticism + land-based witchcraft + dionysian ecstasis + folk magic + poetrypoetrypoetry whatever-mashup-extravaganza (a shorter name may be: a living earth-based syncretism) that I might pursue in my religious life is pretty much guaranteed to make some of the Pagani’s hair turn white and prompt them to claw at their faces in insane horror…for different reasons, even.  The things that I find universal (and I do find some things to be so), are SO universal that frankly, they aren’t exclusively Pagan at all. Things like Love and Beauty and Earth/Body and Food and Relationship.  These universalisms are useful, especially when thinking about how one wants to live one’s unique religiosity in authentic relationship with a dynamic world, but there’s no reason to think that just because a Feraferian, a Thelemite and a member of the Kemetic Orthodoxy all eat, that their religions are the same, or even have anything really much in common, at least not so much so that it makes any sense to lump them together under the same flawed rubric.  I do take umbrage with the notion that we ought to adopt the term “indigenous,” which, as Chas Clifton pointed out in one of the many long discussions on The Wild Hunt, has deeply political ramifications, but that’s a very scaly kettle of fish I’m not willing to dive into right now.  Point is, I get that it’s messy, and I get that our identities and labels are not perfect (or even useful in lots of ways).  And I think there is worth in the semantic wrastling.

But also….well….you know friends Pagani, mostly I’m interested in people living authentic lives.  I identify with the Pagani, whatever that *means,* because, well, I guess it’s still convenient.  Because my friends do, and we all are living in a general agreement that mostly we’re pursuing something similar in some way.  I call it Paganism because I associate Paganism, since the first moment the word blossomed in my brain, with two things:  Magic, and the Earth.  The Mama is paramount to me, and She always will be.  Bar none.  The Glorious End.  Amen amen.  And Magic is just a fancy word for the Beauty we swim in like many colored and bespangled fishes, and therefore I remain who I remain, hit up with the same adhesive sticker that says “Hello, My Name is PAGAN,” despite the semantics and despite any creative (and probably unrecognizable to most Christians) Christologies to which I adhere.   Because it is out of Magic/Beauty, and out of the Earth, that spring all my notions about authentic community, a devotional life of meaning and depth, a sense of justice that arises out of deep Mama truths of conviction, and a commitment to radical, sensual theologies that view all beings as inherently valuable and possessing Spirit.

But mostly, I want those things in that last sentence there, and if I have to call myself a Cayenne Pepper or a Teapot in order to get them, well I’m almost willing to do it.  Culture.  Community.  Resistance.  People having dinner around a good table.  People singing.  People laughing and shouting.  Birds.  Moths.  Elk.  Fire.  Mountain.  Wind.  Words are beautiful fingers but they are not always the moon.  To see the moon, go out into the freezing night and look up.  To see yourself, look at your hands.  To see religion, look at your neighbor.

Work.  This is all there truly is.  The Work.  Relationship.  Genesis.

Dawn.

*ETA: You know what….reading over this, I realized that this post could be read as dismissive of the Pagani’s visit to the Parliament, and for that I sincerely apologize.  That was definitely NOT my intent.  I am thrilled that so many were able to go and represent our faith traditions at this incredibly important interfaith event, and that there was important work done at this event is unquestionable…I think our communities will be parsing the details of the Parliament for a long time…I’m still not completely up to speed on all the information that has been shared online so far.  This post is in response to a single debate in the blogosphere.

What the soul does for the body, the poet does for her people.
-Gabriela Mistral

Pagani.  The snow falls and the wind sacks the naked trees.  It is only the beginning, and already I can feel my bones creak as I trundle like an overburdened buffalo through the streets of the pretty-wild urban midwest.  My intrepid spouse wisely directs me towards the vitamin aisle, where I stock up on D, pebbles of light.  In the winter, I often think of Demeter, lying on the hard frozen ground, her best beloved, her own body, pressing her glorious, tear-streaked cheek against the dirt, wishing and praying until there was nothing left but bone.  I make my way in the kitchen, baking out my restlessness and transforming it into warmth, sunlight.  Crocuses seem so far away that I cannot even imagine spring, so I make Saint Lucia buns and braided breads and pick my way through recipes for pain au levain and wonder at yeast.  Really, really, really.  There is so much wonder, there is so much beauty.  Even in the terrible wind there is this epic amazement, like the crazy world is laughing.

Last night before bed I started to read a wonderful book on interfaith relationship.  My recent wrestlings have invaded my thoughts for weeks now, but something in the book’s candor and simplicity soothed me.  I looked around the room – its flotsam and jetsam, its altars and precious things.  I am convinced we own too much stuff, but for that moment, it was all beautiful…the mess.  The veil of struggle fell some away, and I breathed.  I thought about truth.  I thought about poetry.  I thought about poetry so much that I had trouble falling asleep.  But I did sleep, and in that dreaming some little stone and glass wall inside me broke, and I woke up shining.

Last week, I stumbled upon the poetry of Gabriela Mistral.  I was already familiar with her in some capacity: the first Latin American to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the first woman poet to do so as well….and it was she who told a young Pablo Neruda to keep writing, but, like many things, it wasn’t until now that her work struck me hard and fast in the chest and quickened my breath.  Those moments where you knew but you didn’t Know, and something familiar lies in wait for you to be ready to receive it?  That was one of those moments.

Poetry!  An ancient hymn to Inanna, fragments by Sappho (oh Leda and her egg the color of hyacinths…..marry me, Sappho!), a gorgeous passage by Alan Watts regarding the rite of communion, a few poems by Mirabai.  Words, carefully chosen and glorious, rise out of the lamplit books and hover, gilded, in the air.  Spirits and angels prick the sheets with their sharp fingers.  The room is washed with honey.  This is its power.

But yes, I repeat myself.  Beauty beauty beauty, poetry, Mama, bread, Beloved, wonder, death, god.  I know that.  I think this is because revelations fade so quickly and have need of refreshment.  Clocks and currency – civilization strives to make us forget, and does a bang up job it seems.  I forget the reality of things – I forget that life is enormous and can be grand.  So the Word (god/poetry/breath/dream/living water/night jewel/sparrow/cradle/shadow/radiant wanderer/god) extends a hand, a grace, to my cheek at night and reminds me – here at the apex of winter, down down down towards the seething, the longest night, the Wild Hunt’s shattering ride…I catalog what I think may be true, what eddies in the lines of that Hand against my sleeping brow:

Everything is alive.  Everything has a name, and a will, and a spirit.  And everything dies, which makes everything precious.  Even you.  Even me.

Beauty is the first and best thing there is.  And poetry is the language of god.

Religion – to have compassion at its core.  Religion – to push its believers to give, to live authentically, to be in relationship, to see the Other with open hearts, to hurl oneself against injustice.  Religion – to heal.  To challenge.  To bind the tongue to the Real, to radical generosity, to honesty, to the kind of ethical vetting that puts mirrors of truth up to the faces of sleeping angels and shows them their demon skins (or vice versa).  Gritty, difficult, wonderful.

And, also and just now, that Identity does mean something, but not as much as we think it does, or maybe just differently so.  If I call myself of the Pagani, or if I call myself a follower of Christ, or if I call myself a Christo-Pagan or an anarchomystic or a Mediterranean syncretist or a member of the dvoeverie….ultimately, it doesn’t matter much.  I love the Mama.  I love the Beloved.  I shout and laugh in community, several of them.  So it is.  I will of course get mired in the fun sandtrap of label-making again, because we are a Naming and Storytelling people, and it is the way we live in the world, and I don’t happen to believe that this is a bad thing, and of course there are political angles to consider that are important… but for now, oh this moment right now, with no future and no past and only my nose cold and my fingers warm, I am happy to be sitting by an evergreen tree at midwinter, smelling its smells and loving its lights.  I have a cat, and she likes her chin scratched.  And snow, that dreadful, delightful bane, is a physical enchantment over the sidewalk and the grate….walking home in it, tasting it on my tongue and feeling my face frozen and happy…inside me there is a little hearthfire burning.  Long, long, that shape, that lavender sky, that wild song of light.

I’m on a meditative kick, beloveds.  Winter it seems has robbed me of clarity or purpose.  This post, the last post….I’m not sure they’re saying anything right different from each other….or anything new…or anything at all.  Maybe I should zip it and let things be things until my brain is ready to shake a different tailfeather.  I think the dragon in my brain longs for sleep, mirroring its bigger sister, that Lovely Beast curled up in the heart of the land, dozing out big dreams of sassy coats and cozy hats, and voices ricocheting off of winter brick in the city – people laughing in spite of the freeze.  The adaptability of the gorgeous.

Now my charms are all o’erthrown,
And what strength I have’s mine own….

Etcetera, etcetera…in the storm and in the midnight, friends.

Best beloveds!  I have been away from the blogosphere the past week or so….battening down the hatches, watching the white bees in the lamplight.  The solstice comes.  I’ve many a buzz in my brain – contemplating saffron buns (little suns, filling the apartment with their honey-hay sweetness), the decoration of trees with little sparkling lights, feast foods, travels, work to be done before rest.  And all the little aggravating badgers of life popping up seemingly miraculously all right in the beginning of December, those cackling mischief-makers in the shadows knowing this is the worst possible time for a root canal.

I find pockets of love and new songs in the gloaming anyhow.  Dinners with glowing, amazing people, the new sun rising in their faces, bursting with brainy, creative life.  I am blessed.  But the season of misrule plunders on, full of horror and bliss and difficult things, and I wait with breathless anticipation for the shattering slice of day to crackle over the dark hill on Solstice Day.  I am a woman 33 years old, and angel-wrestling is my work.  This time of year is no exception.  I have been in the wool of it, friends.

Plain fact is, it is in this time of year you can find me at church.  It’s a crusty, churchy season – bread and wine and candlelyte n’ all.  Snow on a stone building, the light through the stained glass….beauty is as beauty does, and I’ve a healthy dose of respect for creches and a season that delights in the birth of light-seeds, no matter their names.

This year though, more so than ever, I find myself enjoying the conversation with new Christian friends, emergent and interesting, fermenting their own revolution around tables and in coffeeshops, and I am thinking heavily about my own relationship to this religion…this wildly diverse group of both friends and enemies (for make no mistake – there are those among the ranks of Christian-identity that are my enemies…..Christ may entreat me to love them, and maybe on some deep, equalizing, cells and skin level I do, and out of my belief in hospitality I will feed them when they are hungry….but it is not possible for me to ignore that they stand against me and those I love and the things I believe are true and good, and I will not call them friend when they are simply not so).  You might have noticed that I have an ongoing relationship with that oft misheard and ineffable fellow Jesus, the people who follow him, and the religion that grew in the passage of his footprints (whether he’d give it his debateably Divine-or-Human-or-HumanoDivine stamp of approval or not).  I don’t yet know what all that means for me, but I can tell you true, Pagani, there are things I like.  Compassion, radical justice, forgiveness, community, love, sacrament.  Can and do we do these things?  Certainly.  Could we do them better?  Most definitely.  Do Christians get them right all the time?  Certainly not.  But the conversation, duckies….the conversation.  I think, and I will boldly say, here in this season of lights and human traffic, that both the followers of Christ and the firefly-shod Pagani have much to say to me, if not to each other (and I think they do).

Naturally, I gravitate towards those crunchy, complicated and dynamic groups within the Christian umbrella that are in love with Jesus’ radical temperament – his bold as brass calling out of moneylenders in the temple, his thumbing his nose at empire.  Ironic, isn’t it, that in his name, empires were then built and expanded over entire continents?  Deliver unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, he said.  To which I wonder – what *is* Caesar’s?  If empire and civilization are the owners of oppression and suffering, then happily I give these up to them.  In fact, I cheerfully submit that I am happy to see them take these to their graves.  The sooner the better.  But I digress.

There is much to dislike still in the history halls and the contemporary corridors of Christian theology, praxis, and institution, sure.  And where is the Mama in all of that mess – not many places I’ve seen, and come hell or high water I will not under any circumstance be leaving Her wing.  And I’ve no inclination to turn my back on my Beloved, or invite a narrow orthodoxy into my home.  I’ve no inclination to swallow whole any idea.  And I’ve no real purpose to this post, I think.  I guess I’m just a hot mess, beloveds, as ever; full of rumination, shaking out my scarf covered in a heavy, wet snow, listening to sweet Solstice music on one hand and fiery, lefty sermons on the other, balancing on this uncomfortable ledge.  Might could fall one way.  Might could fall the other.  Might could stay here for the rest of my life.

Not so bad I suppose….especially if there are saffron buns and eggnog.  Maybe the point is, warmth in the winter, and the blessing of friends, and the fire of conversation.  The nights are long and seemingly endless, and there is smoke and wet in them, and they sing.

Grok earth, friends Pagani.  Pray without ceasing.

Hey hey friends Pagani!  How’s you?  I’m right dandy, thank you – after all, I’m making pie.  And raspberry cream cheese braided bread.  Yowza!

Right…I said I’d present something coherent this time, didn’t I?  Well, that was silly of me.  It’s nigh misrule, darlings – what was I thinking?  The winter is a cumin’ in, and the poor wren sings – time for nonsense and non-time stories instead of treatises.  Stories get told in winter, and fire and laughter and friends is the ticket.  It’s as maybe that the mood will strike me to get ranty again sometime soon….but not today.  Today, I wanna talk a bit about a friend of mine.

This year, I made acquaintance with someone who comes to me when life is ridiculous.  As you can imagine, then, he’s here with me a lot.  He wears a tattered old overcoat.  He rolls smoke in his fingers.  He laughs and the world dances.  I will not speak his crazy name, because you know it already.  After all, you’ve already met.  Remember?

Down in the muddy bank, he played spoons while you slept and dreamed of spring.  He sat with you at a fire in May and sang rain songs.  He was there when you dreamed of hidden treasure in the dovecote.  He is writing limericks with your name in them.  Right now.  We’ll call him Old Coat.  It suits him.

Get it?  Suits him!

Old Coat arrived on my doorstep this morning after a couple months of being away.  My life had gotten too sane for him, I guess (I mean, I didn’t think it had….but he’s the connoisseur of barking mad, not moi).  That sort of thing bores him.  But I had spent the evening before with hands a-fire writing poetry, and like a rat to garbage, voila! he appears (colorful, don’t you think?  Well, my poetry may be garbage, and Old Coat may be a rat, but let’s just take all that on the metaphorical level for now, ‘kay?).  He’s not the Muse, mind, he just likes the madness in the process.

Process:  Catalyst.  Pentecost.  Write.  Despair.  Edit.  Despair.  Edit.  Read out loud.  Despair.  Edit.  Read out loud.  Laugh.  Make Tea.

Edit.

Edit again.

Stop and pray: “There but for the grace of God goes this poem…for it is finished!”

Wait three weeks.

Edit.

Point is – it’s not really a process with an end.

Hey…have you seen this?  Well, if you haven’t, you should.  And if you have, watch it again.  Anyone who creates or performs (and that’s…..everybody) should see this, repeatedly.  Olé to you, beloveds!  Set a trap for a wandering poem-monster thundering across the landscape.  Show up, nod to your genius, and get to work.  But see, the thing for me is, after the genius fills you with awe, sometimes you’re plain old all burned up, and that’s when Old Coat shows up to dance in your ashes.  Luckily, he has a knack for broken things….yep, he’s a fixer.  When you’re plum worn out from dreaming and sick with ecstasy, and the sack of your body is tired, Old Coat plays flute for you from the treetops.  It’s a trade – he gets to hoot and holler, doin’ the two-step in your crazy, and you get to let go of the fire for a minute and eat yer frozen blueberries.  Let him tell the story, and you listen.  He’s good at it, Old Coat is…he is The Storyteller, after all.

So for this new winter, friends, creeping close and kindling in you star-fire and all the gifts of prophecy in the dark, I wish you a visit from Old Coat, master and friend, tricky and wise, to eat your food and tell you stories that make your sides hurt with laughing…cuz all us serious human artist-animals, sometimes we need the break.

Grok Story, best beloveds.

Olé!

…..Oh, right.  Thanksgiving.  Well, y’all might know how I feel about that already, and this year is no different, excepting that I’ve decided to relegate it to this tiny, dismissive footnote.  So I’ll just say: food, friends, family?  Lovely and good.  Give thanks, eat food, love people.  But do it everyday, because Thanksgiving Day, friends, is a sham.  A shame and a sham.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grok thy gods, Pagani.  Pray without ceasing.

Cold flower heads are raining over my heart.
Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked.

-Pablo Neruda, The Song of Despair

Friends.  The light in the morning.  Have you seen it?  Each day I wake up, and it is there – the bleeding humility of it, its sharp and delicate nature.  It is a microscope, a sweet knife, and a reminder.  It says, “Yes, the darkness occludes, and is my friend and companion.  Some things are best in the dark.  But I will show you the sea at seven in the morning, or six.  And this will tell you new things.  Each time.”

The beauty of everything is the First Thing Always, and best.  God?  Merely a word for the beauty that sits tucked and burning in the heart of every tiniest breath and cell.  A billion worlds may exist inside the crease of an onion skin or the wrinkle of a walnut, and I will believe that each one is born whole and seamless from the Potential that is Beauty that is the perfect First, the Zero, the ineffable out of which comes….moss, carrion, the human heart, iron, tupelo honey, time and willows…the morning light, and the exquisite mechanics of the eye that perceives it.

Yet it is also in these mornings when I am most wracked by doubt about myself, and about the world.  I have too much time and silence to myself not to begin to think about the rough parts of the larger diamond of life.  People kill and maim, the earth suffers.  People suffer.  I avoid the news now on a consistent basis, and have never regretted that choice.  The larger points come to me through friends and various channels – I feel no need to seek out the minutiae of torture and destruction to feel informed.  Still, I cannot avoid it all, and the litany of grief seems louder in the mornings, when the day is new and fragile and could so easily be broken.  Hunger is everywhere, and fear, and the gentleman on the corner where I get coffee tells me his story – how he’s lost his room, how the days are getting colder.  The sparrow’s conundrum seems keener than ever.  And every day again I have no good or best answer for it, and I ask for forgiveness for the ways in which I fail and am culpable.

I pray for the road to become the river Lethe, but it does not.  Its gray movement is an old friend, but even still, it is not enough.

So I count on two things in the morning.  Music, and the morning light.

Music is religion.  Spirit, the wind, the sound of water, shout.  Music is religion and I don’t know a single person who wouldn’t agree when it came down to brass tacks.  And poetry, matched to music and drawn forth by a human voice trained like an instrument, a bell, a trumpet…well, coupled with the morning light and the rush of birds in the trees, I know of no better church.  To be awakened, set on fire with justice, renewed and dedicated to the Work, to touch the Beauty that we call God and learn how to live out of that meeting place, that’s church.  And church is Music.

Yes.  Yes.

And the morning light shines on me a while,
and I am grateful for many things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More, I was thinking about why, in my experience (*tappity* caveat *tappity*), the Pagani don’t tend to discuss theologies that posit these items with any fervor, seeming to favor worldviews and value systems that laud the rugged individual (I will be the first to say that this may be an impression with no basis in fact and I’d be absolutely willing to change my mind).  What evidence do I have for this?  Well, truthfully, not much that would pass any scientific test… 20+ years of conversation, our noted dearth of any cohesive organized charity organizations/projects, and a seminary education where I suddenly felt vaulted into a culture that talked about this stuff a LOT…so much so that our lack thereof became rather illuminated.  No, I’m not saying that Christians are more virtuous than we are.  I am saying that they talk about compassion, forgiveness, love, agape, charity, feeding people, fellowship, and grace more than I perceive we do, and my fellow seminarians, liberal bleeding-heart radical-Jesus-following folks for the most part, were talking a talk that I liked, and that I think has a place in our own libereal bleeding-heart, radical-earth-based, polytheist, Mama-loving communities (yes, I know Pagans are not all liberals and radicals and tree-huggers and anarchists and communitarians and soup-kitchen volunteers and feminists….yes, I’m aware of this fact…but let’s just say that I’m one of those kinds of folks, and chances might be good that if you dig my blog, you might be at least shakin’ hands with these types, if’n yer not one yerself).  I think there are probably a LOT of reasons for these perceived differences – as ever, it’s complicated…but I suppose I better plow on anyway or I may never sleep again.

So, another good question might be, if what I perceive is even remotely true, where do I think this comes from?  Well, as I mentioned in a previous post, I think this is a hallmark of our American culture in general….radical individualism and all that (I know, I say that a little too often….luckily, a very smart person has made this short film explaining exactly what I mean by it……what actual community might mean to me in opposition to this big individualist demon I keep evoking….’nother time).  I wonder if the gestalt of America isn’t possibly essentially libertarian along these lines, and it’s safe to say that I think extreme capitalist libertarianism/individualism (and its sometimes sidekick, extreme postmodernism/relativism) is a road best left untraveled.  “Looking out for Numero Uno” is, in my most un-humble opinion, simply antithetical to the human endeavor.

Additionally, sometimes I think we Pagani try real hard to distance ourselves from anything that smacks of Abrahamic monotheism.  And while I personally think that this is, first, a kind of silly way to go about establishing an identity/culture/faith system (i.e., an identity based solely on what one is *not* is not a functional identity), and, second, involves a lot of babies being thrown out with a lot of admittedly stinky bathwater, and third, actually impossible….that’s probably yet another post altogether.  Somewhere along the line there, I *was* going to talk about theologies of compassion, gratitude, forgiveness and love.

First, I do understand why we’re so turned off by the vast majority of creamy, extra-bubbly new-agey “spirituality” that touts so-called “compassion” and “gratitude” (and sells lots of scented pillar candles) within a capitalist cultural context so shallow that the words lose all their meaning.  It’s commercial.  It’s false.  It’s insulting.  This kind of pap is usually coming from folks who are also peddling “positive thinking,” a cultural trend that I was recently blazingly thrilled to see one of my favorite thinkers, Barbara Ehrenreich, take to the carpet in her latest book Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (a much much needed and about time too kind of book…I recommend it highly).  After years of being told to have “an attitude of gratitude” in response to personal tragedy*, and to “think positively” in the face of misfortune and suffering (implying of course that your inability to heal miraculously or achieve financial success in the face of overwhelming obstacles is simply the natural and deserved result of being a Negative Nancy….the same bullshit found in The Secret, of which, you’ll recall, I am not overfond), it comes as no surprise that people would look with suspicion at “compassion,” “gratitude,” “kindness” etc., and rightly so…the words themselves seem to have become little more than bumper-sticker fodder.

I also get how some of the prevalent mainstream theologies of our day that do give lip service to the importance of forgiveness and kindness are often borne out of a parent theology that infantilizes people and robs them of personal agency and responsibility.  This kind of “forgiveness” can become either a perpetual excuse for folks who have no plans to change themselves for the better on one side, or a reason to grovel before a choosy, judgmental god, who metes out tiny parcels of mercy seemingly according to his moody whim, and who enjoys watching you squirm in agony, lowly worm that you are, on the other.  Either one of these is unconscionable to me.  Interestingly enough, we might also be told by similar theologies to live up to standards that we don’t even reserve for god.  Feeling obligated to forgive someone when you simply cannot do so is a perfect recipe for self-inflicted mental suffering.  And being told to love all people unconditionally all the time is, frankly, an unreasonably high bar for a bunch of emotional, beautiful, fragile, mortal animals.  But also note that love is different than permissiveness.  Something else to ponder.  Authentic balance (“balance”…another overused word in our times, but somehow still completely elusive) is hard. And out of the exhausted afterglow of theological gymnastics…then what?  Well, mysticism, usually.  To cleave: a word that means both itself and its opposite.  Love that is all encompassing, all forgiving, all consuming, all embracing and unconditional….yet comes with expectations, challenges, and hopes.  Love that demands dedication and personal examination….the same Love that forgives you when you fail.  Remarkable.

What I think I’m trying to say is that I think it is possible to construct a meaningful, authentic, dynamic theology that embraces both personal agency/responsibility, as well as grace, forgiveness, kindness, and love, requiring the flexibility to change given new circumstances and new information, but with an eye towards the richness of tradition.  What does it look like on the ground?  It looks like feeding people and making sacrifices in order to help others and preserve relationship, while still maintaining a healthy level of self-awareness and boundary-integrity.  It looks like making a conscious choice to forgive others for stupid small things, like the person who cut you off in traffic, or the hairdresser who implied that your pre-cut hair resembled a mullet.  It looks like forgiving yourself for mistakes, while also learning from them, and vetting yourself against an evolving code of ethics, personal and communal.  It looks like thinking about each person you encounter as a complex, feeling, thinking creature.  It requires thinking like an actor, an artist, a writer, a storyteller, a ritualist.  Lucky for us, we are all these things, innately.  A politics of compassion and forgiveness and love is a politics of real down and dirty life – beautiful and awful at once…neither the saccharine and shallow Joel Osteen brand of new-age capitalist prosperity pablum, nor flesh-denigrating, Other-hating, agency-robbing, oppressive nonsense.  Like good art, most folks just know it when they see it.  The real.  The real mess.  Forever and ever.  Cookies and milk.  Bread and wine.  Peanut butter in my chocolate and chocolate in my peanut butter.  Amen.

What does this mean?  I’m not sure.  Every time I open my yap, a million other questions spring to mind.  I think a theology/politics of compassion easily arises out of a Pagan worldview – out of a belief in rootedness, in being connected and aware of the planet, in real, working relationships, and a desire to preserve and celebrate Beauty.  And certainly, I see a lot of people living this every day, struggling with the heart of it.  So maybe it’s not really that I believe that Pagans don’t operate out of a theology of compassion, but that we simply don’t articulate it very often.  I’m not sure.

What I am sure about, at least, is that challah tastes good.  Especially with a vanilla glaze.  And that in the first week of November, when the nights are flush with an unexpected warmth so much so that even the stars seem to pulse brighter with a seasonal laughing pre-winter joy, I can feel the innate prophecy of the world’s turning in every snap of leaves beneath my feet.  And that the dawn will make all things new.

*Whatever happened to mourning?  Used to be so important they hired professionals to help out.  Now we’re told to move on, pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, smile, and fake it ’til we make it.  Guh!  Leave me and my ashes and my sackcloth alone.  Mourning, I will now and forever maintain, is important.  Death is holy, and things hurt.  Have a little respect for the gravity of Life.