This morning, I decided to just dive into the myth that has been calling me, and I spent my writing time working on the story of Inanna/Ishtar, pondering the way her descent into the Underworld mirrors my own inward travels as the year turns cold and dark. I think this one will keep me busy for the rest of the week and beyond.
What symbols of your personal power and wisdom and authority are you prepared to relinquish as you circle downward into the deepest realm of your own inner knowing?
Gratitude List: 1. Myths and stories that frame and guide our own daily journeys 2. Small breaks 3. Seeking the fire within 4. Anticipation 5. Layers and layers of warm clothes
On these November days, instead of writing a daily poem, as I have for most of the past eight Novembers, I am writing short pieces of prose: fiction, meditation, dream. This morning’s piece was simply a telling of last night’s dream:
Combustible
The hillsides are covered with loosely growing trees, not quite close enough to be woods, and yet woods, for all that. Some places are woodsy enough that no sky shows through, though there is space enough between to see through them down the hillside to where the paths curve and separate. To the east, the trees open out toward bare grassy hillside and the smell of the sea. In the shade at the edges of the wood, three tidy white-washed Baba Yaga huts stand on stilts in a sandy courtyard, and further off, beyond the first grassy hill, smoke rises from a little village.
The trees are sinewy and resinous, Mediterannean, not pine—more like laurel, if laurel were thirty feet tall. The trunks are thin and many-branched, but open, and the leaves are mostly at the crowns, letting light filter magically through. All is green and blue and twinkling golden. Though there are no people, there is the sense of people, the presence of people doing people things.
In your head, a soundtrack starts to play, a woman’s voice talking about a sudden and catastrophic event, how one moment one notices the short bursts of steam rising from individual trees, curiously taking in the strange phenomenon, and then, suddenly, the whole wood will combust, not a long-burning, raging conflagration, but a whoosh of fire that’s there one moment, and in the next is gone, leaving bare and charred hillsides. You wonder why there are no signs to warn visitors off the paths. And then you notice the explosive bursts of mist and steam puffing from random trees on the hillside below you. Should you start to get nervous? If the voice is correct, it could happen at any moment. But you are entranced, curious, unable to give yourself to fear. You turn onto a path that leads up the hill toward the Baba Yaga courtyard, intending to explore the little huts, to see if anyone lives there. At the edge of the courtyard a long tube suddenly rises, like a cannon being aimed for a blast, and powerful jet of water bursts into the air, raining down on the little houses, raining down on you, sparkling through the sunlight, wetting the trees. Looking back the way you came, you can see several more of the water cannons discharging their spray through the groves and woods covering the lower hillsides.
You wander through the small village beyond the Baba Yaga houses, where people wander, eating foods from the markets, taking pictures beside the quiet houses, murmuring to each other. You look back over the hillsides where you have been wandering, and the trees have vanished. At the edge of the village, the green grass ends at bare soil. Everything is gone. Despite the water precautions, the woods and pathways are gone. An enormous yellow bulldozer rumbles over the destroyed land.
Gratitude List: 1. Dreams and their messages 2. Many sources of light 3. The lull after the grading storm. There’s so much more to do, but after a weekend of fierce grading, I took a break last night and rested. 4. The line of orange light along the horizon at dawn 5. New England clam chowder when it is made well
Gratitude List: 1. Feeling my wings 2. Grades are ready to submit for Quarter 1. How have we gotten here already? 3. Breath. It’s always there when I need it, and more effective than sugar or coffee for a quick lift. 4. Keeping the resolve 5. The tunnel to Faerie up in the orchard, between the pear and cherry trees.
May we walk in Beauty! Breathe.
Sit in a quiet place, calm and undisturbed. Shift yourself into place. Let your upper body fidget a bit. Shrug and stretch, stretch your spine upwards, making little breathing spaces between all the bone. Sigh. Yawn. Sigh audibly. Settle your bones, making sure your ribcage is straight, your shoulders are restful, your hips are aligned.
Now begin to notice your breath as it enters and leaves the space of your body. Notice where your body rests on the chair, the floor, the earth. As you hold your awareness on your points of contact with earth, begin to draw the breath into your whole body. Breathe not only into your lungs, but into your stomach.
Feel the breath enliven your ribs and your gut. Breathe into the muscles and bones of your arms. Draw it down over your shoulders, swirling down your arms and down to your fingertips. As you breathe out, feel the breath flow out the tips of your fingers.
Draw breath down your spine. Let it flow out the base of your spine. Breathe it into your thighs and down your legs. Wiggle your toes and ankles as the breath fills your feet and trickles out the soles of your feet into the earth.
Breathe. And breathe. And breathe
Now shuffle your upper body once again, like a bird re-adjusting its feathers, and find your way to stillness, letting the breath continue to circulate through you.
Bring your attention to your back. Sit up a little straighter and pull your shoulders back. Can you sense your shoulder blades back there? These are your wingbuds. Breathe into them and out through them. Shift your shoulders as you need to, to maintain your awareness of them.
Feel or imagine them beginning to itch, to swell, to pulse with life. Feel the moment when a small, folded pair of wings bursts through the surface, like the tiny curl of a plant breaking through soil, or a small bird breaking out of an egg. As they grow larger with each breath, notice their color, their texture. Don’t rush to unfold them. Let them develop. Feel them in the space behind you. Roll your shoulders forward. Shrug. Give them space.
Then, when you are ready, on a breath, lift them upward and out. Feel their strength. Feel the way they lift you. Practice opening them and folding them. Notice how they become invisible when you fold them up, how you will be able to go about your normal life with your wings folded against your shoulders and back, and only those who Know will know.
Now when you need them, to give you strength, to help you move from one stuck place to a new open field—when you need to escape—when you need to see something from a distance, to change your perspective—now they will be there for you. All you have to do is to breathe into them, hear them rustle in the space behind you, stretch, and open.
Hear the story of Cassandra: She longed to serve the goddess Athena, to give herself to wisdom and law, to craft and mathematics, to courage and strategy and skill. Athena offered her a life filled with the tools and the skills of her own empowerment, her own scholarship. In Athena’s worship, she could follow the trails of her own curiosity and speak the truths she encountered. Enter Apollo. As patriarchs so often are, he grew jealous of the woman’s devotion to the women’s ways, fearful of truths spoken that issued from sources not under his control. He offered Cassandra music and poetry, promised her the gift of prophecy if only she would serve him instead, a beautiful bird in his golden cage, there to do his bidding and sing his songs instead of her own. Safe. But the safety he promised was his, for her inner knowing, her self-assurance threatened the ego that wanted control of everything. The wisdom of women was mysterious to him, and the mystery disconcerted him and terrified. So he cursed her. Although she refused him, still he gave her the gift of prophecy he had offered, and she would always speak true. Her voice would ring out in the marketplace, telling the story of what was to be. But the curse was this: her voice would not be heeded. As happens in the belly of any patriarchy, the woman’s voice was ignored and discounted. Old wives’ tales! they scoffed. Cassandra is making things up, looking for attention. Pay her no mind. And the fire she saw and spoke of engulfed the city. The mercenaries and looters and kidnappers swarmed the streets as she had foreseen. They broke the ten-year siege, and overthrew the city. Cassandra herself became a pawn of the men in their men’s war, a tool of their scheming. Heed Cassandra, Friends. Listen to her words. Perhaps we can yet rescue her from Apollo’s clutches.
Gratitude List: 1. The Cassandras who will not be silenced, who speak even when threatened, even when they are ignored. 2. Circles of beloveds. 3. Speaking it out loud. Telling the story that itches to get out. 4. The magic of wind and water, fire and air. Everywhere we look, there is magic. 5. Lights at the ends of tunnels.
This month, I am trying to re-arrange some of my daily practice in order to make more space for writing. I have had two books floating about in my brain for some time, but I can never seem to find the time to work on them, so I thought I would give my first morning moments to the process and see what happens. So far, in the last two days, in the moments before I wake up fully, my brain has grasped a piece of dream-flotsam, and wrangled it into an image or phrase which I have used to begin a dreamy piece of super-flash fiction.
Perhaps I’ll be able to fit these into one of the books. Meanwhile, I am following the Dreamcatcher to see what she offers me.
In the past six or eight years, I have missed very few November Poem-A-Day challenges with Poetic Asides blog. This new process feels a little solitary, even lonely. But it feels like I have stepped onto a pathway, in much the same way that my first forays into Poem-A-Day were steps on a poetic pathway.
Here’s another thing: This week, I opened a Bag of Longing to see what was inside. This one was the idea of getting an MFA. It’s been haunting the deep corners of my brain for some time now. I decided to look at it more closely and see what it might look like this week. It’s so easy to get excited about it, but it’s hard to justify adding debt to debt when we have projects on the farm that must be fed money, and when the first of the children has just entered high school and will be exploring college possibilities himself before we can even catch our breath. Shall I close this Bag and stuff it back into a corner before it starts to eat me? Or shall I let the creature inside it out to roam, hoping it can find its own way home?
Gratitude List: 1. The many varieties of orange 2. That bright scarlet leaf on the neighbors’ orange dogwood tree was actually a cardinal 3. One small person humming quietly to himself in the car last night on the way home from trick-or-treating in town 4. November means cats in the bed, and that’s wonderful, as long as they give each other space and don’t start hissing 5. New practices
This is Catherine Witwer (1833-1905), married to Isaac Weaver. My Great-Aunt Elizabeth Nolt Weaver (her granddaughter) said that she cared for women in childbirth (a lay midwife, I think), and then cared for their older children in her own home so the mothers could recover. Aunt Lizzie told me that people called her Mammy.
They lived at the White Hall Mill on Weaverland Road near Union Grove. My Great-Grandfather John W. Weaver was their son, and his son Daniel was my grandfather, who is my father’s father.
All sorts of ancestors, known and unknown, line the spiraling staircases of your DNA, watching, singing, remembering for you. What will you carry forward as you walk through the veil of this season?
Gratitude List: 1. The way the sun slants through colored leaves in this season when we step further into the darkness. 2. Stepping forward. 3. The light we carry inside ourselves. 4. Knowing, as we walk into this tunnel of seasonal darkness, that we will walk out again in a season to come. 5. The bright candle flame of a new idea.
Gratitude List: 1. Fibonacci spirals and the lawfulness of the apparent chaos of the universe. 2. Cycles and seasons. In the middle of challenges, the certainty (at least the hope) that the cycle will shift again to calm. 3. The tang of pesto 4. The people who are afraid, but who stand up for truth and humanity anyway, who don’t let threats or money or power or despair cow them into silence. 5. This reminder from Theodore Parker and MLK: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Gratitude List: 1. The red oak down Ducktown Road 2. All of Ducktown, really. Orange and yellow and every shade of fire. 3. Rice and beans. 4. Edgar Allen Poe and James Earl Jones 5. Listening to audiobooks on the ride to and from school with the carpool. Right now it’s Maggie Stiefvater’s Dream Thieves, part of her Raven Cycle series. Such excellent writing. I remember feeling this sort of delight in the writing of Douglas Adams, Patricia McKillip, Terry Pratchett (for different reasons, but the same sort of excitement about every sentence).
Gratitude List: 1. There’s something to be said for being welcomed into the day by three small furpeople as though one is a long-lost traveler returning home at last. 2. Owls calling through the gloam. 3. I like that word, “gloam,” and “gloaming.” And “crepuscular,” though it sounds a little like a disease. “Dusk” and “dawn,” the grey times of day. The words are pleasant, and suggest the magic present in the liminal moments of the day cycle. 4. The clean white page. Possibility. 5. Onion bagels.
May we walk in Beauty!
Here’s a poem I started working on yesterday. It might still want some revision:
Your Wild Cry by Elizabeth Weaver-Kreider
When the gun of the hunter is trained on your arrow, on the vee in the sky where you strain your wings beneath the belly of cloud, call aloud to your sisters to fly with the wind, to fly true. Tip your wings through the gap between beams of autumn sunlight, shift your shape, shift your seeming. Turn your goose to crow, to wren. Turn into jay, into warbler. Dive down, fly low, change your sky-riven cry to caw, to buzz, to a twittering in the brushy fields.
Don’t let your voice be silenced. Change it. Don’t let your call be deadened. Let it echo through the valleys and hillsides. Take a new voice, more insistent, more urgent, and wilder.
Gratitude List: 1. The satisfying pinkish shine of a well-scrubbed copper-bottomed pot. 2. The clucks and buzzes and twitterings of the people in the bushes on the late migration south. 3. Rain and wind. I love storminess. I remember when Miss Gehman showed us the Olivier version of King Lear in high school Shakespeare class–It was the storm that sold me, the King and his Fool out in the storm. 4. There really are windows everywhere. You just need to know how to look. Sometimes when life is intense, it’s just hard to see them. 5. The urgency of Greta Thunberg and Autumn Peltier and their cohort.
Mockingbird Chronicles 