Day 74:
I thought I’d counted everything up very carefully, and that I had more squares than I needed for the cardigan. It looks like I still need 20 or so more. Oh well, I love crocheting granny squares, so no complaints. I’m impatient to finish this project, but I just said a few days ago that I need to learn patience, so here it is. Sachs is happy with my progress.
#The100DayProject@dothe100dayproject#poemaday#NationalPoetryMonth
Over the years of saying the rosary, I have taken up the practice, suggested by Perdita Finn, of considering the three parts of the Hail Mary as invocations to the tripartite aspects of the Goddess as Maiden, Mother, and Crone:
Hello Maiden, full of grace, Love is with thee,
Blessed art thou among women, Wild Mother, and blessed is the force of thy desire, all life.
Holy Grandmother, Queen of the Wild and the Wellspring, pray for us now and in the hour of our Death/Struggle.
Lately, however, I have been pondering the way the Maiden has, for centuries, been packaged as the object of male desire, how the paedophilic trope has been coded into our stories and culture for millennia–think Virgin Mary, Maiden Persephone, Little Red Riding Hood. The Maiden/Virgin who steps onto her path, makes her way in the world, and chooses her own bodily autonomy has been subverted and caged by male desire. Her pinnacle desire, according to the cultural molding, is to be desired. Her goals and plans and ambitions are subverted into submission to the male–she must want what he wants: Herself in gilded cage.
Before the Maiden, however, is the Girl Who Breathes Fire*, the Wild Child, the youngster who believes she can do anything: win, fly, travel through time. She is Pippi Longstocking, not defiant for the sake of defiance, but simply because she has time only for her own wild path. Now I pray:
Hello Fire-Breathing Feral Girl, Love is with thee. . .
(*I borrowed this term from the Nurjahan Boulden, a Tanzanian-American Dancer and Fierce Advocate for Women’s Selfhood)
Wild Girl lives in a garden populated by fantastical creatures, exotic plants–all of it fierce and dangerous, whimsical and friendly, ready for adventure. I’ve decided that I need to reconnect with my Wild Girl as I explore more deeply how the Maiden in my own story fell asleep. Here in the landscape of my personal fairy tale, the Maiden had encountered enough feminist ideas and retained a little of the wildness of the Girl; even so, she became a little intoxicated by the exchange of desire for desirability. Fortunately, she fell in love not with a prince but a kind and gentle farmer, and they made a life together–much safer than the life of a sleeping Maiden awakened into life as a prince-bro’s servant and plaything. Good fortune met me in a shared life with a good man–we have lived outside the realm of the cultural fairy tale as fully as we are able.
Still, no matter how well I’ve escaped the hegemony of the cultural trope, it reaches everywhere, trying always to lull me into the gilded cage, into performing femininity, into questing for desirability rather than desire, for being of service rather than belonging to the reciprocally woven community, for wishing for the slender beauty of youthfulness rather than the fulsome beauty of age.
This morning on Substack, I encountered Sharon Blackie’s latest post, titled “The Fairy Tale Heroine and the Wild Girl Archetype.” I have only read the first little bit because it hit me between the eyes, and I wanted to make sure I wrote some of my ramblings on the matter before reading her analysis. I have been wanting to read her book Hagitude, but now I think I have a whole stack of Sharon Blackie books to read. After my own explorations of what it means to be a shapeshifting woman in midlife, I also want to read her Foxfire, Wolfskin.
As I have stepped over the threshold into my crone season, I have been pondering how all the former seasons of my life continue to be part of the season I am in. I never left the Wild Child behind, or the Maiden. Even now, as I enter a somewhat late-blooming croning, I am Mother to my own young adults, and nurturing growth in my students. The intermediary season of Queen, that perimenopausal period that seemed to last for fifteen years, that season of Becoming more and more myownself, that too continues into this crone season, this shedding of old expectations, this time of settling more deeply into my body. I claim not only sovereignty of my Queenself, and the tenderness of my Motherself, but the self-possession of my Maidenself, and the absolute wildness of my Childself.
Moon Haiku
by Beth Weaver-Kreider
the boat of the moon
riding above the ridgeline
shadows on my road
Gratitude List:
May we walk in Beauty!
Today’s poem.
Your ancestors surround the well
of love unconditional, sending you forth
with the blessing on the unforgotten ones.
Step into the silver light
of the first snow,
tingling with anticipation.
One day is the gentle fall of soft flakes
on dark soil, the next is the wild storm
you must struggle through to survive.
It’s a slog, a long-haul prospect,
a journey through the labyrinth
of caverns, until you reach the light.
There, at the end, you find your tribe,
telling the story by firelight. There will be
laughter, there will be dancing.
Focus your vision on blackthorn
and hagstone, on the faerie bramble
and the wild wild wind.
Wheels of energy radiating strands of color, texture, and sound. Summer evening sun sparkling and twinkling and streaming through ribbons of energy.
Yesterday evening, I went to Don Ziegler’s Energy Wheels Exhibit, a magical and contemplative journey through the energy of the elements, with the spirit of his wife Priscilla, my beloved friend, present in all the twinkling of light, the undulating ribbon, the chimes of the Cosmos.
Don told me to interact with them as I felt led, and so I walked into each one, and took selfies within each wheel.
I began at the Spirit Wheel.
The Wind Wheel’s Ribbons were white, and they reflected into the water of the pool:
I found myself at home in the Earth Wheel:
And the Fire Wheel danced around me as I entered:
Don didn’t stop at the traditional Elements. He’s a plant man–of course Chlorophyll would speak to him.
I can’t seem to get my video of the Cosmos Wheel to load up here. I can’t do justice to Cosmos without the sound. Wires and bits of chain, energetically charged pendants and pieces, a tiny round piece of meteorite that my brother found in Tanzania when we were kids, prisms and crystals and chiming pieces of metal.
I’m fascinated by the way each element affects me in the selfies. Iam reminded that I have all these elements within me. One exercise I have done in groups–writing groups, tarot classes, magic classes–is to ask which element you most closely identify with: Air, Fire, Water, Wind? I find it helpful to explore how our personalities may be more airy or grounded, fiery or flowing. Last night’s installation had me asking a different question: How do all the elements present themselves within me? They are all present (Chlorophyll and Cosmos, too, and Spirit) within each of us.
I’m so grateful to Don for following his intuition and creating this incredible art installation. When one person is true to the vision that comes to them, it inspires others to follow their own visions and dreams and intuitions.
I’ve had a very productive day doing things other than poetry writing! So my poem today is my heart’s desire prayer for the new novena that begins tomorrow with Way of the Rose.
Gratitude List:
May we walk in beauty!
“Never laugh at live dragons.” —J.R.R. Tolkien
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“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” —Aristotle
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“In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.” —Mark Twain
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“The world rests in the night. Trees, mountains, fields, and faces are released from the prison of shape and the burden of exposure. Each thing creeps back into its own nature within the shelter of the dark. Darkness is the ancient womb. Nighttime is womb- time. Our souls come out to play. The darkness absolves everything; the struggle for identity and impression falls away. We rest in the night.” ―John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
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“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” —Aristotle
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“The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.” —Anais Nin
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“Changing the big picture takes time.. and the best thing to do is focus on the things that we can make in our lives if we’re doing all that. That becomes the collage of real change.” —Michelle Obama
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“Adventure is worthwhile in itself.” —Amelia Earhart
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“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” —Lucille Ball
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“Learn how to take criticism seriously but not personally.” —Hillary Clinton
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“Like a great starving beast, my body is quivering, fixed on the scent of light.” —Hafiz
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“Identity is a story carried in the body.” —Sophia Samatar
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“Once every people in the world believed that trees were divine … and that deer, and ravens and foxes, and wolves and bears, and clouds and pools, almost all things under the sun and moon, and the sun and moon, were not less divine …”
—W.B. Yeats
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“The heart is your student, for love is the only way we learn.”
—Rumi
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Poet Joy Harjo, from 2012:
“Visited with my cousin George Coser, Jr yesterday at the kitchen table. He’s a gift. Always something profound among the stories. The sacred lies at the root of the mundane. And every word is a power element. Each word or sound, whether thought, written or spoken grows our path, the path of our generation, the children, grandchildren, the Earth. . . . We become the ancestors. A sense of play gives a lightness of being. So get out there and play—and be kind while you’re at it. To yourself, too.”
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Help me to journey beyond the familiar
and into the unknown.
Give me the faith to leave old ways
and break fresh ground with You.
Christ of the mysteries, I trust You
to be stronger than each storm within me.
I will trust in the darkness and know
that my times, even now, are in Your hand.
Tune my spirit to the music of heaven,
and somehow, make my obedience count for You.
—The Prayer of St. Brendan (attributed to Brendan)
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The Wild Geese
by Wendell Berry
Horseback on Sunday morning,
harvest over, we taste persimmon
and wild grape, sharp sweet
of summer’s end. In time’s maze
over fall fields, we name names
that went west from here, names
that rest on graves. We open
a persimmon seed to find the tree
that stands in promise,
pale, in the seed’s marrow.
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear,
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.
Day three of conjuring daily poems for November.
Conjuring the Self to Center in an Anxious Time
by Beth Weaver-Kreider
Dance the thousand anxious angels of your thoughts
onto the head of a silver pin.
Unclench, and listen to the pin drop,
and the rush of a thousand thousand wings
rising around you like snow geese
lifting from the surface of the lake.
A single feather floats into your lap.
Let it settle into the open bowl of your fingers.
Watch it rise and fall with your breath.
On this breath, you are the chill winter over snowy fields.
On this breath, you are the orange eye of the ember.
On this breath, you are the wild cry of the wandering goose.
On this breath, you are the scent of cinnamon.
On this breath, you are smoke rising.
On this breath, you are a small bird singing in the dawn.
On this breath, you are an angel dancing on the head of a pin.
On this breath, you are nothing.
And on this breath,
you are the web of everything that ever was,
everything that is, and everything
that ever will be.
Gratitude List:
May we walk in Beauty!
“Awake, my dear. Be kind to your sleeping heart. Take it out into the vast fields of light and let it breathe.” —Hafiz
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“Mercy is the willingness to enter into the chaos of another.” —James Keenan
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“The heavens are sweeping us along in a cyclone of stars.” —Teilhard de Chardin
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“Sometimes I hear it talking. The light of the sunflower was one language, but there are others more audible. Once, in the redwood forest, I heard a beat, something like a drum or heart coming from. the ground and trees and wind. That underground current stirred a kind of knowing inside me, a kinship and longing, a dream barely remembered that disappeared back to the body. Another time, there was the booming voice of an ocean storm thundering from far out at sea, telling about what lived in the distance, about the rough water that would arrive, wave after wave revealing the disturbance at center.
Tonight I walk. I am watching the sky. I think of the people who came before me and how they knew the placement of stars in the sky, watched the moving sun long and hard enough to witness how a certain angle of light touched a stone only once a year. Without written records, they knew the gods of every night, the small, fine details of the world around them and of immensity above them.
Walking, I can almost hear the redwoods beating. And the oceans are above me here, rolling clouds, heavy and dark, considering snow. On the dry, red road, I pass the place of the sunflower, that dark and secret location where creation took place. I wonder if it will return this summer, if it will multiply and move up to the other stand of flowers in a territorial struggle.
It’s winter and there is smoke from the fires. The square, lighted windows of houses are fogging over. It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.” —Linda Hogan
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Expose yourself to your deepest fear. After that, you are free.” —Jim Morrison
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Joseph Campbell: “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek.”
Gratitude
May we walk in Beauty!
Mockingbird Chronicles 