I have been writing. Really! I just haven’t been posting here. This season, I have gotten myself into a little bit of a bind with the artistic disciplines. I’m doing #The100DayProject, making a book a day, and I’m writing a poem a day in April. These are the things that keep my mind alive and questing during the stress of the spring season at school. The quick publish/post for daily poem and book has been Instagram and Substack, and so I will post a catalogue of some of my favorite poems and books here today.
I know this now: It was a dangerous choice to go there in the first place. I was in danger of losing so much, constricting myself into the tiny little boxes required of those who existed in that place.
I went in with my eyes open, knowing of the claustrophobic boxes, how the language pulled toward dogma and creed. I went in with my own language, my own protective wards, kept secret in my pockets. I went, tethered to those who stood outside, who could watch for me, who could pull me back if I got stuck in the tiny places, injured by the sharp corners, the barbed words, and the lack of fresh air to breathe.
I can view my time in that place as a setback, a wrong choice, a misstep. Or I can look at how it changed me and transformed me, how it prepared me for this moment, gave me courage, made me fierce. Although it left me with wounds, it did not take my essential Self from me: I am always new, always a dragon shedding her skin to become fresh and reborn again, but always the same essential me, growing and changing and developing.
I don’t want to give those eight years power by saying I should not have taken that journey, that the breach of Self was too destructive. Because although my ego took its hits, I didn’t lose my Self. And there were gifts in this journey too. The young people who were there with me taught me so much, so much that I bring with me now that I’m out in the outer world again. Those eight years were a necessary phase of my development. They changed me forever in good and powerful ways. They too were initiation, difficult initiation. Not a break in my line of learning, not a backward step–or if a backwards step, only part of the dance.
Anytime we willingly submit to the claustrophobia of a religious institution, we put ourselves in danger of either taking on the rules for ourselves, or of losing some essential confidence and courage and forcefulness as we make ourselves smaller in order to fit inside the boxes. Me, I’m so grateful now for the ones who tethered me while I was in the land of boxes, those who held the lamps for me to see my way out when I reached the point of banishment.
I called myself an exile when I left that place. As though it had ever been my true home. I can laugh now looking back, and see how even though the lines that draw my past (for a couple generations) ran straight through that place, it was never my home. I have always been my home.
And I look back today with gratitude for the expansiveness of the escape, for the fact that I can breathe, and run and explore, and call myself by my real name, and not have to look over my shoulder.
So many sacred journeys happen in three days. My sojourn was eight years. And now three years more have passed and finally I feel the new wings stretching out behind me. I am ready to fly again. Blessed be!
I’m going to finish this visual series on Epiphany or the day after. I realize that daily accountable disciplines keep me working creatively, even (especially) when my energy is low, like now. They tell me that a time comes when you walk through the other side of this stage of Menopause, and the energy returns, and the daily aches are a little less intense. I’m trying to eat and to move my body in ways that help that process along. In the meantime, I’m focusing on getting my work done, and on keeping alive daily disciplines that will feed my creativity.
Soon, the #100DayProject will begin, and I am hoping to join that in order to keep some creative discipline alive. Sometimes I feel like I’m choosing between the words and the crafty creativity, so I’m hatching a project that will use both.
The phrase for today’s image is one of the steps I’m working on in my current novena. I’ve taken it from the Ereshkigal card in The Goddess on Earth Oracle by Lisa Levart.
I took this photo of part of a painting in the dentist’s office. Is it the way in, or the way out?
I usually choose five words or phrases or archetypes or ideas for each novena, for my focus during each decade of the daily rosary. For this novena, I chose five random cards from The Goddess on Earth Oracle, and they flow beautifully from one to the next:
Alligator: Primal Instincts
Ereshkigal: Accept rage and imperfection
Aphrodite: Awaken to Love
Arianrhod: Live Large
Guabancex: Stand in your power
In the center is the Owl: Knowledge, who is also Wisdom and Truth
A new Netflix show that makes me want to walk in the treadmill (’cause that’s when I watch shows)
Layers: colors, clothes, ideas
Challenges: Can you read X number of books in a year? Can you consciously eat your five servings of fruits and veggies in a day? Can you up the amount of time you spend moving your body every day?
My friend Eryn said she found her word for the year through bibliomancy, where you open a book, point your finger to a random spot on the page, and that’s your word.
Excited to try it, I opened my new book that I got for Christmas, Sophie Strand’s Madonna Secret, and pointed to. . .frightened. Nope. Try again. I pointed to. . .denying. Nope again. Third try is the charm, they say: Braver. Now I like that one. It feels process-oriented, not Brave, once and done, a state accomplished. But Braver, as in, “Today I can be a little Braver than I was yesterday.” Every day is just a little Braver than the last.
And it answers those first two words. Frightened? In denial? Be a little Braver. You don’t have to be Brave, just a little Braver than you were before.
It seems my New Year dreams are trying to tell me something about living in the space between wildness and domesticity.
At first, I am rescuing four half feral kittens (who all clearly needed vet visits–one was shaking with a tremor) from a basement in which a sinkhole has opened up. I have to actually pull one falling kitten up out of the hole by its tail. (That feels so awful, but I know in the moment that it is the only thing I can do.) Then I have to carry them through a dark confusing city using a GPS that takes me through a hospital emergency room, to get them to a safe place, where it will be my job to get them medical treatment and to tame them so they don’t get into trouble again.
The second dream fragment I remember, I am walking down a hill in a rural area outside of a small village or town, and my friend who has glorious curly red hair is riding her bike up the hill past me. We are passing beautiful community gardens–not separate plots, but cooperatively farmed and tended gardens, with careful rows, and wooden structures, and even some arbors to protect plants that shouldn’t get direct sun. Without stopping her bike my friend calls out, “Hey! Make sure you check out the black fox kits!”
I look down the rows and into the little spaces created at the ends of the rows, but I cann’t find the kits. But as I am looking down one long row, at the end, I see a beautiful vixen, a gray fox, almost coyote, she is so big. She is blinking in the sun, and I see how tentative and timid she is, clearly staying away from the people working down the rows, and yet this is clearly her place too. So while it isn’t friendly interaction between people and fox, it is coexistence in what appears to be a healthy and symbiotic way.
My spiritual path, my inner work, has focused on me breaking out of the boxes of heterodoxy, exploring the wildlands beyond dogma and creed. This dream feels like it’s asking me to protect the ways in which the wildness seeps back into the gardens.
I’m curious that it was two distinct dreams, but joined by the theme of wildness and domesticity, and kits and kittens. The kittens needed to be handled and tamed, and the fox kits needed to stay safely hidden. Maybe my dreams are about discernment.
This is the sheet where I roll my brayer between prints. I learned some things from my print session today, but in the end, the brayer sheet is more interesting.
Look up Stanley Kunitz’s poem, “Layers.”
I’m getting ready for New Year’s Eve, making all sorts of little magics. . .
Mockingbird Chronicles 