Tag: high priestess

The Secret Keeper

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems

After the Fool studies under the tutelage of the magician or medium, they begin an apprenticeship in lore and knowledge and wisdom with the High Priestess. I’m trying to unthread some of these roles from the gender binary, so for now, I am calling this person the Secret Keeper. On any spiritual path, there are stages and steps in the journey toward wisdom and maturity, and the Secret Keeper represents that careful opening up of understanding as the Fool absorbs new things.

Why might it be important for the Fool to absorb knowledge and teaching slowly and carefully rather than dashing immediately into the inner sanctum? I think of the people I watch on the national scene, celebrity preachers who, heady with the sense of power they feel with their shallow understandings of biblical “truths,” begin to preach a gospel of prosperity or nationalism, people who develop immature and twisted ideas of purity based on rule-based dogma, and then try to pass off pat and glib salesmanship as faith. A surface glance at a holy text or a shallow absorption of a spiritual principle will not help the Fool to deepen and grow, and in order to face the coming challenges, the Fool needs to go deep.

To use the churchy word, the Fool needs discipleship, the careful study and application of spiritual disciplines, in order to be grounded in the power learned at the Medium’s knee, and the knowledge offered by the Secret Keeper.

What are your spiritual disciplines? Here are some of mine:
1. I love the Search for Beauty, or as Mary Oliver puts it: “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”
2. I find Gratitude Lists to be really helpful, especially when I find myself cycling into complaining and despair.
3. Writing poetry. Writing in general.
4. Trying to envision everyone as a beloved child of Godde or the Universe. I don’t do this lightly, and I would never require it of anyone else. In situations where I am trying to understand someone who hurts other people, I try to meditate on the fact that they, too, are beloved. It’s not about forgiveness or about tolerating injustice or evil, just about not losing sight of the other’s essential humanity.
5. Meditation with images, like a piece of art or a photograph or a tarot card.

Gratitude List:
1. Blue grosbeak
2. Cardinal
3. Goldfinch
4. The green flowery smell of mid-May
5. Always something new to learn.
May we walk in Beauty!

“A witch ought never to be frightened in the darkest forest, Granny Weatherwax had once told her, because she should be sure in her soul that the most terrifying thing in the forest was her.” —Terry Pratchett

“Oh, God, make me a hollow reed, from which the pith of self hath been blown so that I may become as a clear channel through which Thy Love may flow to others. I have left behind me impatience and discontent. I will chafe no more at my lot. I commit myself wholly into thy hands, for thou are my Guide in the desert, the Teacher of my ignorance, the Physician of my sickness.” —attributed to Abdu’l-Bahá

“Truth is an agile cat. It has more than nine lives.” —Joy Harjo

Silence
by Hafiz

A day of Silence
can be a pilgrimage in itself.
A day of Silence
can help you listen
to the Soul play
in marvelous lute and drum.
Is not most talking
a crazed defense of a crumbling fort?
I thought we came her
to surrender in Silence,
to yield to Light and Happiness,
to Dance within
in celebration of Love’s Victory!

A Truth Once Known

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems, Poetry Prompts

I fear this may be a little disjointed, perhaps two poems in one. I wanted to bring in some of the symbols of the priestesses who offer me challenge and invitation: Mary Magdalene, Eve, Hildegard of Bingen, Marie Laveau.


Meeting the High Priestess

How do you enter? How will you come?
Will you pass through the gates in perfect love and perfect trust?
Will you push back the veil of your own free will?
Do you have clean hands and a pure heart?

Contemplate roundness: circle and arc and sphere.
She holds out the apple, the egg and the skull,
the pregnant belly of the moon,
the round face of the grail,
the spiraling ends of the scroll,
the coiling round of the python.

Speak your Truth, and enter, and the Mysteries will be revealed.
Will the Truth set you free, or will it bind you,
with your dawning knowledge, to responsibility?

For ignorance is no longer bliss,
and a Truth once known
cannot be unknown again.

TOMORROW’S PROMPT: The Fool, still heady with the mysteries of today, will meet the Emperor tomorrow. Will he be a challenger or an ally? Or both, perhaps. The Emperor makes the laws, sets the boundaries, holds you accountable. He can be willful and demanding, tyrannical when he is unevolved. But when he is truly doing his work, he creates a balance and a structure within which the Fool can experience a sense of safety. He’s the Apollo to your Dionysus, the Roman to your Greek, the outline to your ramble. What poem will you make of him or his laws and boundaries?

Gratitude List:
1. Dead nettle. Have I mentioned dead nettles lately? Fields of purple glisten in the morning dew.
2. Glory clouds on the way home from work, sunrays streaming down. Clouds. All Clouds.
3. Fried egg on toast.
4. Sun on rain-wet leaves in the woods.
5. A pair of Canada geese have chosen to make the pond their home for now. They have created an artful nest at the edge of the pond, and Mama is sitting on it.

May we walk in Beauty!

Seeking Mystery

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Uncategorized


The Mysteries of Mary Magdalene, painted by Andrea Solario, Piero do Cosimo, Domenico Fetti

I have been pondering the first and last lines of my Magician poem all day, and thought I might try to make something patterned and structured and rhymed, but the day has gotten away from me, and free verse is easier for the riff. It means that I do not often try my hand at more challenging forms during April and November, because I am caught up in the dailiness of school and grading. I’ll have to give myself some formal poem assignments for the summer.

Listen to the wisdom of the sage.
“What is language, but a kind of magic?
Here am I, in my own organism, my tower of Self,
and you there in your own lonely keep,
and how shall we bridge the gap between us
but by language? These webs of sound
we string together, we cast them through sky,
drawing out threads of meaning,
as with a wand, fiery threads of sense.

“We build this bridge on air,
scratch symbols on a page with feathers,
and stories flow like water between us,
borne on gossamer strands
of word on word on word.
We manage and tend our loneliness
by weaving cloths of language.
How can we find each other in the shadow
but for the flow of speech we offer
and the magic of these words upon the page?

TOMORROW’S PROMPT (April 4):
Today the Fool met the Magician, a mentor who taught her something of the nature of illusion and magic, of her power to work with the elements of earth and air and water and fire. Tomorrow, she will meet another mentor: The High Priestess, who will invite her to learn of the Mysteries. Perhaps this is Mary Magdalene, contemplating the skull, or offering the grail, or reading her book. The priestess is the keeper of the doorway of the most sacred of the mysteries, and so she is a challenger as well as a mentor. The Fool must prove herself before she enters the realm of the priestess. Tomorrow’s poem will be about Mystery.

Gratitude List:
1. Refried Beans. Such a basic comfort food. Add salsa, hot sauce, and a little sour cream, and it’s a delightful bean porridge for a chilly night.
2. Feedback. Sometimes it just nice to know what other people think. Not to validate, but to get a sense of whether people perceive me as I perceive myself.
3. Thoughtful guidelines for living more deliberately and authentically with our technology. That was a good chapel this morning.
4. How language links us.
5. Seeking wonder and awe. Preserving the mystery.

May we walk in Beauty!