Spell to Tumble the Tower of Patriarchy by Beth Weaver-Kreider
Say: We take back our agency Say: The daughters will be avenged Say: The predators have become prey Say: We predate the predators and we will rise again Say: We stand with the ancestors, the women who died on your fires the women who drowned in your waters the women you thought you had buried deep in the mouth of the Earth the same Earth who loves us the Earth who holds the dead dearly the women you set swinging in air
Say: Our mouths are filling with fire and we will burn it down Say: The water within us is rising and we will flood and we will flood and we will flood Say: We are a tremor, we are an earthquake, and we will shake down the tower of power and domination
Say: We will blow and blow and blow We are hurricane We are tornado We are the wind that they call “The Witches are Passing”
Say: The rosy fingers of Dawn rise above the new horizon Say: The ancient Goddess is returning Say: The new story is beginning
Gratitude List: 1. russet ocher burnt sienna yellow gold orange chestnut walnut 2. How sunlight in autumn opens a door to another world 3. When the poem just comes 4. ReGenAll’s Climate Summit today, knowing that people are doing the good work 5. Finding time to write May we walk in Beauty!
I know. No posts for weeks, and then two posts in two days. Yesterday, I wrote in my gratitude list about how difficult January is. I should clarify that it’s not entirely spent in a burrito on the couch scrolling through my phone. There is definitely more of that than I wish for myself, but there are also small bursts of energy in the Tunnel of Tired, usually in the context of those strategies I listed. January is definitely not all bad. It’s just a slog.
But now to the point of the post. Here are two items from my journal in the past year:
This is a tarot reading I did for myself on 12/22/22. When you draw the 9 of Cups in a reading, you make a wish. I highlighted mine.This was a month later, 1/23/23, as I was thinking through what would be my heart’s desire petition for the coming 54-day novena. This was one of four.
Usually my wishes and heart’s desires, when I write or speak them with intention, are fairly internal or safe things that I can be pretty sure that I can help create. Wishing to return to Tanzania in such an intentional way (it’s been my constant internal wish/heart’s desire since my last trip 36 years ago) has always felt risky because I didn’t want to deal with the disappointment of not having my wish granted. It was okay as long as it was basically unstated, or stated wistfully, and I knew that it was just a “wish.” Then the disappointment of it not happening would be less intense. But here I was, saying it out loud. Putting it out there. And the novena concluded, and the year began to wane, and I let myself forget my magically spoken wish. Making a trip to Tanzania hasn’t been something I could logistically or financially plan, hard as I looked at it, so I figured that it just still wasn’t time, or that it was unlikely ever to happen.
But last November, my brother and sister-in-law asked me if I might want to accompany them on a trip to Tanzania. They’d made the plans already. I’m getting some help in the financial area. Our tickets are bought. Shots in order. Willing and capable substitute procured for the classroom. In just three weeks, we’re making a dream trip back to the place where we spent our early childhood. My heart’s desire.
I’d forgotten that I had made these clear intentions in written form, and was looking through my journal a couple days ago when I stumbled across them. Feels like a miracle. At the very least, it’s a sparkling synchronicity.
I worded the heart’s desire as a “sacred journey.” This is a good reminder that I don’t go entirely as a tourist or as a home-goer (both of which have problematic edges, and which have been part of my uncertainty about returning), but as a vessel, to receive what is meant for me to receive, to give what is meant for me to give. To find the strands that are woven into this web. To keep my heart open, to allow the jittery excitement to give way to a quiet sense of purpose and intention, receptivity. To delight in everyone and everything.
Gratitude List: 1. Three-day weekend. Breathe in. Breathe out. 2. Anticipating seeing actual flamingos in a few weeks 3. Generosity, how it grows and expands as it is given 4. How the big birds–the hawks and vultures and eagles and crows–catch the wind and whirl above the ridge 5. Puzzles May we walk in Beauty!
“I learned so much from listening to people. And all I knew was, the only thing I had was honesty and openness.” —Audre Lorde
“Your crown has been bought and paid for. Put it on your head and wear it” —Maya Angelou
“If you’re not angry, you’re either a stone, or you’re too sick to be angry. You should be angry. You must not be bitter. Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. It doesn’t do anything to the object of its displeasure. So use that anger, yes. You write it. You paint it. You dance it. You march it. You vote it. You do everything about it. You talk it. Never stop talking it.” —Maya Angelou
“History has never been kind to those who have sided with voter suppression over voters’ rights. And it will be even less kind for those who side with election subversion.” —Joe Biden
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” —Robert Frost
“I am always doing what I cannot do yet in order to learn how to do it.” —Vincent van Gogh
“Have you been to jail for justice? Then you’re a friend of mine.” —Anne Feeney
“Nice people made the best Nazis. My mom grew up next to them. They got along, refused to make waves, looked the other way when things got ugly and focused on happier things than “politics.” They were lovely people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away. You know who weren’t nice people? Resisters.” —Naomi Shulman
“The desire to reach the stars is ambitious. The desire to reach hearts is wise and most possible.” —Maya Angelou
“Begin with something in your range. Then write it as a secret. I’d be paralyzed if I thought I had to write a great novel, and no matter how good I think a book is on one day, I know now that a time will come when I will look upon it as a failure. The gratification has to come from the effort itself. I try not to look back. I approach the work as though, in truth, I’m nothing and the words are everything. Then I write to save my life. If you are a writer, that will be true. Writing has saved my life.” —Louise Erdrich
“Love the earth and sun and animals, Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, Stand up for the stupid and crazy, Devote your income and labor to others… Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book; Dismiss whatever insults your own soul; And your very flesh shall be a great poem.” —Walt Whitman
“In lying to others we end up lying to ourselves. We deny the importance of an event, or a person, and thus deprive ourselves of a part of our lives. Or we use one piece of the past or present to screen out another. Thus we lose faith even within our own lives. “The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire.” —Adrienne Rich
“Art is here to prove, and to help one bear, the fact that all safety is an illusion. In this sense, all artists are divorced from and even necessarily opposed to any system whatever.”—James Baldwin, in “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity.”
I have been doing magic to enhance my focus and intention in these flowing days of wibbly-wobbly summer time, in this larger season of my life which has lost its focus and drive, when I have left so many of my little (and big) dreams lying somewhere along the path. Every summer for the past nine years, I have told myself I would organize my poetry into another book, and September always slides in and I have nothing to show.
Call it fear of failure, or of success. Call it undiagnosed ADHD. Call it setting aside my own needs for the needs of others. Call it laziness and procrastination. Call it addiction to distractions. Call it the overwhelm of having TOO MANY poems to sort through.
Whatever it is, I have stood behind this wall of it for nearly a decade now, and I am ready to move on. This summer something shifted. Here I am in the vestibule of July, and I have two very messy collections of poetry that I am working on. Oh, they’re nothing like ready. I have arranging and editing and cutting to do, and maybe something to add here or there. But I have TWO actual pools of poems headed toward publication. I’m not entirely sure what brought about the change.
Call it the magic spells. Call it the recent 54-day novena in which I told the Mother my heart’s desire was to finish another book. Call it finally crawling out of the psycho-spiritual constraints of existing within a Mennonite institution. Call it the new fire of midlife.
Whatever it is, I am grateful.
Today begins a new 54-day novena with The Way of the Rose, and I don’t mind making public my plea. I am asking for Focus. I have been imagining the Goddess Diana with her bow, focused laser-like on her object. This morning during my prayers I got an image in my head of Artemis at Midlife. I came down from the pear grove and wrote that poem:
Artemis at Midlife
One of her greatest attributes is vibrant youth, like her bow, like her swarm of leggy hounds, like her fierce protection of the wilds and of her own wild autonomy.
She was never supposed to get old. Her eyes have blurred and softened, so now she relies upon her sense of her body in space, her inner eyes, to find the target.
Her weight has settled and gathered in her belly and her thighs, and so she hides no longer in the slender saplings but among the tumbled rocks.
The whip-quick Alani who swirled like mist around her thighs, barking and racing to confront the wayward hunter in the green wood, rest now in grassy hollows
like sleepy bears in the moonlight, raising their heads as the goddess rises to cool herself in the stream after one more inexorable hot flash.
There was a day when she ran fleetly through the forest, leaping from rock to log, and lightly across ravines. No more. Her body has found its home in gravity,
and she wanders quietly, no longer baying the wild stag with hounds, but waiting, silent, under a great oak, for the regal beast to come to her.
Gratitude List: 1. Finding Focus, though with softer vision 2. Breakthrough and Shift 3. The wide-open splendor of a summer’s day 4. Making friendship bracelets with kids 5. The way a poem helps to shape meaning May we walk in Beauty!
“The doors to the world of the wild self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door. If you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the Sky and water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.” —Clarissa Pinkola Estes
“Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.” —Aldo Leopold
“Recognize the invisible hands that guide you, the breath that breathes you, the walls and roof that keep cold from chilling you, the water that magically springs from your taps, the long line of ancestors whose every step made your incarnation possible. You belong to these holy helpers. You have undisputed membership. In your recognition of this wealth, your own life cannot help but become an offering back to that which feeds you.” —Toko-pa Turner
“The very form of our thinking has to be re-formed from “thinking about” to “thinking within,” and Silence is the teacher. . . . Silence is intelligence. . . . As we enter into Silence, we enter into Wisdom. We do not become wise but enter into the objective Wisdom of world processes. Judgment, as the primary mode of our thinking, ceases or is taken up only when needed for our practical life. As we enter into the Wisdom of Silence, we allow ourselves to be taught by the things of the world.” —Robert Sardello
“To disobey in order to take action is the byword of all creative spirits. The history of human progress amounts to a series of Promethean acts. But autonomy is also attained in the daily workings of individual lives by means of many small Promethean disobediences, at once clever, well thought out, and patiently pursued, so subtle at times as to avoid punishment entirely.” —Gaston Bachelard
“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
“I didn’t mean to tell you,” Mrs Whatsit faltered. “I didn’t mean ever to let you know. But, oh, my dears, I did so love being a star!” —Marlene L’Engle
“Some black cats are witches in disguise. Some witches are black cats in disguise.” —Folklore of Wales
“Faith is the willingness to give ourselves over, at times, to things we do not fully understand…the full engagement with this strange and shimmering world.” —Alan Lightman
“The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people, are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities.” —Adrienne Rich
“Lying is done with words, and also with silence.” —Adrienne Rich
“Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted,” for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have a primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.
Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of our experience. Our future depends on the sanity of each of us, and we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other.
[…]
When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.” —Adrienne Rich
Since I began this project of creating a tarot deck cooperatively with an online AI generator, the AI itself has evolved so rapidly, and the creators of the generator itself have added so many new features that within the six months since I began, the initial artwork is beginning to feel clunky and old-fashioned. I realize that the work I did to create it was a helpful process, not only in terms of my ideas about the the inner journey and about the tarot, but also in terms of my sense of the artistic and poetic process of cooperating with an AI. I find myself wanting to begin again. Maybe this process will never have an end product, but will simply be a part of my own inner growth. Perhaps I will end up instead creating an oracle deck with the characters that inhabit my own inner meditations: The Psychopomp, the Witch, The Dreamer-Mother, the Two Elves, The Gnomes of Beautiful Vision and Music, The Companion, The Golden One, Death, The Bees, Eagle, Six Crows, The Dancing Fox, Running Deer, The Golden-Crowned Tree, The Lady of the Labyrinth, The Darkness. . . Or perhaps, even, they will merge in some inexplicable way.
So here, halfway through the Major Arcana of the Tarot, I will finish this series for now, with Justice.
What does Justice mean to you? Is it the blind goddess holding her scales and a sword? I find it really interesting that Cupid and Justice are both portrayed in blindfolds: Love and Justice–an odd cosmic balance there.
Is Justice a balance of vengeance? Eye for eye? You hurt me, so I get to extract my pound of flesh from your stony heart.
Is it about karma? The bad stuff we do will come back to haunt us, so we can all relax, knowing that our enemies will eventually get their cosmic comeuppance? I know karma is a lot more complicated and nuanced than that, but I think we sometimes reduce it to this little dance of joy over cosmic rebalancing, celebrating the downfall of the evil-doer.
I want the people who hurt people to be held accountable. I want the ones who are injured and harmed to be seen and heard and listened to, to receive apology or remuneration or recompense for their injury. I don’t need an eye for an eye, but I need the harm to stop. I need the tools of the narrative to be wrested from the hands of the ones who do the injury and handed to the ones who were injured.
Restorative Justice has become a bit of a catchword in institutions these days, especially church-based institutions. When understood and practiced with depth and skill, it’s a wonderful tool for healing and returning to balance, offering a circle of story-telling, where the injured party can speak of their pain and suffering, and the ones who caused harm listen, and take account of what they have done to cause harm. In the process, they, too, get to speak, to tell their own pieces of the experience. We enter restorative justice circles with a recognition that harm has been done, and that healing is possible, but only if we meet ourselves and each other at deep, deep levels of accountability can we hope to repair the breaches in relationships.
Saying that you practice restorative justice, but doing the work half-heartedly or simply to score social points only causes more harm in the long run. Institutions, clubs, churches, and organizations that claim to do restorative justice work but only implement the process when the most powerful members of the group want to exercise controls over less powerful members of the group is an abuse of power and is the antithesis of restorative justice.
The Justice card holds us to keep high moral and ethical codes that include ourselves as well as others. We hold ourselves to the standards we demand of others. We offer others the grace and mercy we would show ourselves. Sounds a little like the Golden Rule.
Tomorrow is November. I am hoping to do a poem a day for the month.
Gratitude List: 1. My compassionate and tender-hearted and fun-loving colleagues. They made Halloween so special and magical and fun for the kids (while also managing to keep things educational). 2. The turning of the wheel. We step into a new season. We can change, metamorphose, transform. 3. Presence. Accompaniment. Companionship. 4. Cats 5. Golden, golden, golden: light and leaves and hearts. May we walk ever in Beauty!
The wheel turns. The harvest is in. The veil parts. We walk into the dark time. Dream well. Bright Blessings. —Beth WK
“The moon has awoken with the sleep of the sun, the light has been broken; the spell has begun.” —Midgard Morningstar
“A labyrinth is a symbolic journey . . . but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world.” —Rebecca Solnit
“Turn inward: If you’re asking ‘why’, also ask why ‘why’? If your power is to question, also question the questioner in you.” —Shunya
“Everybody is trying to make their journey till death comfortable. In the process they are missing the moments that can open the door to immortality.” —Shunya
“Walk through the veil of the season. Carry your own little light into the dark time. Celebrate the inward spiral.” —Beth WK
I woke up at 5:30 this morning, as I tend to, but then I was able to fall right back to sleep. In the hour and a half that followed I had this dream.
In the dream, I am writing a short story:
Once there was a girl who wanted her writing to be real and alive with emotional impact. So every day before she sat down to write, she would stand at her open window and simply let herself feel. As she let the feelings wash through her, she would weep, great tears falling like rain from her window onto the plants below. Then she would turn from the window, sit down at her table, and write.
One day as she was looking from her window, she noticed that leaves and vines were growing in wild riot below her window. As her feelings began to rise and flow through her, and the tears began to fall, she noticed that where each tear fell, a small plant would begin to grow, whether it fell on brick or wood or other plants. At the point of each tear’s impact, a leaf or sprout would emerge and start to grow.
Her feelings enriched her stories, and they also greened and grew the world around her.
In the dream, I become the girl who is writing. I am trying to help my friends solve a problem, but for each thing I offer to do, they see another problem on the other side. I retreat into myself, and start to wear my hair down over my face like a veil. I stand in corners and alcoves so I can watch people without being seen.
I am burdened with the weight of emotion and pain that has no solution.
It was sort of a relief to wake up and put down the weight of feelings! But although the dream is heavy, and the ending is isolating, I am grateful for the essential message, that feelings have a green and growing reality in the world outside ourselves.
Now I am sitting at my own writing table, looking out to the snowy hill behind the house, and the red-gold glow of the sun is illuminating the trees in the woods, first the tops of the trunks further up the hill, and now the little oak at the edge of the wood is glowing, too. (And then, in a moment, the clouds must have come over the sun, and the wood has gone wintry grey.)
Gratitude List: 1. The way the morning sun sets the woods to glowing. 2. Feelings, even when they are big, especially when they are big. 3. Long sleep and dreams rich with messages. 4. Something got into my kids yesterday. Kid #2 is always re-arranging his room, but yesterday he went big and tried a wildly creative (and mostly successful) configuration. Suddenly Kid #1 was re-arranging his monster computer set-up. I think he may have stayed up most of the night, but this morning, it looks mostly tidy and organized in a way it has never been. Settling into spaces. 5. Yesterday’s crockpot stew–comfort food on a cold wintry day. May we walk in Wisdom!
“Today I am grateful for truth, for narratives that center stories of people who have been cut from the narratives told by the powerful to skew the truth to their own agenda. I am grateful for the weavers and menders and spinners who pick up the torn and tangled threads and get to work to repair the tapestry of our story, holding the lie-mongers to account, and weaving in the threads of truth.” —Mockingbird
“A man is either free, or he is not. There cannot be an apprenticeship for freedom.” —Amiri Baraka
“Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.” ―bell hooks, killing rage: Ending Racism
“Consider whether great changes have not happened deep inside your being in times when you were sad. The only sadnesses that are unhealthy and dangerous are those we carry around in public in order to drown them out. Like illnesses that are treated superficially, they only recede for a while and then break out more severely. Untreated they gather strength inside us and become the rejected, lost, and unlived life that we may die of. If only we could see a little farther than our knowledge reaches and a little beyond the borders of our intuition, we might perhaps bear our sorrows more trustingly than we do our joys. For they are the moments when something new enters us, something unknown. Our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, they take a step back, a stillness arises, and the new thing, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.” —Rainer Maria Rilke
“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible, is music.” —Aldous Huxley
“Listen to the mustn’ts, child. Listen to the don’ts. Listen to the shouldn’ts, the impossibles, the won’ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me… Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.” —Shel Silverstein
Part One: I am sitting on a concrete ledge, like a loading dock, of the garage of my house, looking out over the meadow and the woods beyond.
I hear a cry of frustration and rage: “Aaarrrnnnngh!”
At the edge of the woods, where the neighbors have logs for splitting, a large wolf is dancing around in extreme agitation. It has thrown an ax across the snowy field. Its fur is striped and brindled, mottled. It flips back and forth in its frustration. I know at once that the wolf is a shapeshifter.
I can feel its frustration deep within myself, and I am frightened as it runs up the field toward me.
I search around for something to offer it to help it, to distract it from attacking me.
I find that I am holding an old and tattered pelt of some animal fur. As the wolf paces around the side of the garage and the base of the ledge where I am sitting, I tear a piece of the pelt I am holding and toss it into the snow. It distracts and calms the wolf for a moment. It sniffs the piece of pelt but does not eat it.
Part Two: I am walking down a brick pathway in a park, trying to feel the different rhythmic vibrations of the various bricks. I can sort of sense the patterns of a couple of them. I am trying to remember the poems/incantations for a ceremony to awaken and celebrate the awakening of the powers of a girl child. I am trying to help her to notice the vibrations in the bricks, trying to tell her the bits of incantations that I remember.
I am aware that the child is coming into her power and I am feeling the dissipation of my own.
As I am working with the bricks and incantations, I notice that the girl has found a stump with a large and tangled root system. A woman and a child, their faces painted with stripes of brown and yellow in many different shades, look out at me from the stump. The girl knows they are there and has been listening to them.
Unpacking: I have so many questions. Am I both the Wolf and the One Who Watches? If I am the Watcher, have I given away my own shapeshifting power, my own Wild, in order to protect myself and appease the frustration–ease the loss–of another? What have I done?! I have thoughtlessly torn my pelt. Is it possible to repair? I feel acutely both the loss of my own Wild (the Watcher) and the sense that it’s unbridled and out of control (the Wolf).
And am I both the Child and the Teacher? Again, I feel acutely the loss of my own powers even as I am able to recover a little of my awareness of vibration, my memory of the words of ceremony. I feel a need to prepare the Child, to mentor and teach, but the work has moved beyond me, and she has found her teachers in nature. But I am also the Child. She has met the spirit beings who inhabit the stump and they are teaching her.
Both pieces of my dream seem to be about internal rifts/separations that help me to see the ways I am disconnected from my Wild, from my own personal sense of my power.
Maybe it wasn’t a bad idea to offer part of my pelt to the shapeshifter. Maybe that’s what I need to do, to offer my own inner Wolf the key to her transformation. But I need to tend to my “skin.”
And maybe I don’t need to focus so much on remembering the words and patterns of the ceremony for the Child, but just settle into a space where I can hear the living voices of the beings who surround me. I feel like this is a message to rely less on head knowledge, but to focus on simply perceiving what is around me.
Two nights ago, I dreamed again, as I often do at times of inner change and transformation, that I needed to push my way through a tight and claustrophobic portal in order to enter a new space. In these dreams, I sometimes refuse, or the dream ends as I am trying to find the courage to enter the constricting passage, but in my recent dream, I actually made it through the portal.
I think these dreams are connected. First, the portal, then the reckoning with the state of my own inner awareness.
Gratitude: 1. The way shifting and de-hoarding and organizing makes space for energy to flow more freely and serenely. Clogged energy is either stagnant or frenetic. Unclogged energy flows. 2. I’m getting really eager to dive into the planning process for the coming school year. I relish the shift of this energy from the overwhelm of last spring (of the past three semesters, really) to the excitement of setting the table for the coming academic feast. 3. Mending. Like de-hoarding, mending makes the energy flow. And physical mending causes the heart to turn toward the inner mending as well. 4. A different type of energy, but not unconnected: Feeling my own physical energy returning. It’s been a circuitous journey. But it feels so good when we go walking and I feel the surge of energy and strength in the stride rather than feeling like I am fighting against gravity. 5. Thresholds. Liminal spaces. Betweens.
May we walk in Beauty!
“When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” —Virginia Woolf
“Every person is a living treasure box. Listening holds the key.” —Mollie Marti
“The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.” —Rainer Maria Rilke
“I take care of my own.” —Hushpuppy (Beasts of the Southern Wild)
“You are my own, and I am yours–I think this is what God is saying, or trying to, over the din. We are each other’s. There are many forms of thirst, many kinds of water.” —Anne Lamott
“You can tell people of the need to struggle, but when the powerless start to see that they really can make a difference, nothing can quench the fire.” ―Leymah Gbowee
“You are not Atlas carrying the world on your shoulder. It is good to remember that the planet is carrying you.” ―Vandana Shiva
“To be brave is to behave bravely when your heart is faint. So you can be really brave only when you really ain’t.” —Piet Hein
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” —Upton Sinclair
“You can never go down the drain.” —Mr. Rogers
“Good People, most royal greening verdancy, rooted in the sun, you shine with radiant light.” ―Hildegard of Bingen
“Just living is not enough said the butterfly, one needs sunshine, freedom and a little flower.” ―Hans Christian Anderson
“I have found that the greatest degree of inner tranquility comes from the development of love and compassion. The more we care for the happiness of others, the greater is our own sense of well-being.” ―Dalai Lama
In June, right after school was over, and before I had even completed my grading, I went on silent retreat at the Jesuit Center at Wernersville, probably my last time there, as the Jesuits are selling the building and grounds. I needed that healing time.
In the weeks since, I have been taking stock, clearing out my hoard (fabric, mostly, but more will come), and working on getting healthy.
Here is a little photo essay of my time on retreat:
On the way, I stopped and walked the labyrinth at St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church near Lititz. On the way out of the labyrinth, the word embodiment came to me. That became the focus of my retreat. When I got home, I listened to sonia renee taylor’s The Body is Not an Apology. I liked it so much that I bought my own copy so I can underline bits and read sections to my classes.
My room. First time I have had air conditioning. It was very hot, so I actually spent more time in my room than usual.
I took along a white cloth and some red thread. I have been inspired by several instagrammer embroiderers to begin to create a story cloth, something that’s not specifically functional, but is more of a journal, a dialogue with my inner self. On one of the first days there, I was meditating on something I’d read, a Buddhist idea about the base of the spine being where the three rivers meet. I began to consider what my three rivers are. Along with embodiment, I received creativity, and magic/mysticism. So I began embroidering the flowering hand image I found framed on the wall–for creativity. Then I embroidered a full body–my body–with wings and a crown, to represent embodiment, being alive within this body. And later, I embroidered my stump, the center of my current magical work, representing the inner work and the spiritual connection to the Source of All Life. All three are connected to a center cauldron, which is the place where the three rivers meet. Other images above include some collages I made while meditating, a painting (“You can become all flame,” said the ancient desert abba), and the back of my #alonetogether sweater, which I completed during retreat.
Every year when I am at the monastery, I greet Jesus in the stairwell when I go up and down the stairs. This year, he and the painting of Mary with the sacred heart were especially meaningful as I held my anxieties about my father’s upcoming open-heart surgery (all has gone exceedingly well, and he is now recovering and regaining his strength).
More than almost anything, perhaps, I will miss this grand cathedral beech.
There’s something about being in isolation that makes a person want to bake. I started by trying to make hamburger buns for our first isolation birthday. The practice round was so successful with the kids, that I kept making them, and I played around with the recipe, making spiral rolls and garlic rolls. And then, just like that, I was out of yeast. And Giant was out of yeast. And Sue’s was out of yeast. No one has whole wheat flour either.
I complained on Facebook, and a friend who had just received her mail order of a pound of yeast said she would put some in the mail for me this week. What a tender gesture! I never would have let myself accept such an offer in the Before, but now, Yes, please and thank you. And such a feeling of being cared for.
My sister also ran out of yeast. As she was on a walk the other day, a neighbor who was unloading groceries from the car called out and asked her if she needed paper towels. No, my sister called from a safe distance, but yeast–now that’s a difficult thing to come by. Just a couple days later, her neighbor dropped off yeast at my sister’s door.
The sharing takes on a sacramental edge these days. And yeast. Sharing yeast is sharing something even more elemental than a cup of sugar. No matter how much I research and study what yeast is and how it (they?) does its work, it will always be something mystical, something magical, to me. Bread and wine, the elements of sacrament in more than just the Christian tradition, are both yeast-based. I once heard someone talking about the two kinds of plants–monocotyledons and dicotyledons–and how corn is a monocot and grapes are a dicot, and that the elements of bread and wine bring together those two forms of plants with the magic of yeast and fermentation. And I think I won’t try to wrap that up with a nice essayist’s conclusion. It feels like a mystery that needs to stay quietly behind the veil, hinted at, marveled at, unexplained for now.
While I await the precious gift of yeast from Joan, I have begun to capture my own wild yeasts. They say that the yeast of any place is distinctly OF that place. So these are my Goldfinch Yeasts. Is is a flock? A herd? They’ve been bubbling for days, strong and lively, and today they smell sour and yeasty. Yeast Beings, I greet you.
Capturing Yeast: I’ve done this before, but it’s been years, so I watched some videos and read some tutorials. Here’s the process I’ve been using:
In a wide-mouthed jar, I put 3 Tbsp. of flour and 2 Tbsp. of water. Mixed, covered with a special cotton cloth and rubber band (perhaps any cloth will do), and let stand in a warm place for 12 hours.
After 12 hours, I stirred. Then another 12 hours later, I added another 3 Tbsp. flour and 2 Tbsp. water. The tutorials say five days until yeast is ready for baking. This is the morning of day five for me. Tomorrow, I will find a recipe and bake. Maybe pizza dough for supper, or rolls for the boys to snack on. And some day we’ll find whole wheat flour again. Meanwhile, it’s white bread.
That’s the process. Stir every 12 hours, and feed every 24 hours. Though none of the experts have mentioned it, I suspect it might be helpful to sing to them as you stir, or to speak poetry to them. Greeting them and praising them can’t hurt.
Gratitude List: 1. Yeast 2. People who share yeast 3. Bread and wine 4. Awaiting oriole 5. The promise of a new week.
May we walk in Mystery.
“To light a candle is to cast a shadow…” ―Ursula K. Le Guin
“Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.” ―Claude Monet
“We realize the importance of our voices only when we are silenced.” ―Malala Yousafzai
I called through your door, “The mystics are gathering in the street. Come out!” “Leave me alone. I’m sick.” “I don’t care if you’re dead! Jesus is here, and he wants to resurrect somebody!” ―Jalaludin Rumi
“Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds’ wings.” ―Jalaluddin Rumi
“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.” ―Anaïs Nin
“Everything has boundaries. The same holds true with thought. You shouldn’t fear boundaries, but you should not be afraid of destroying them. That’s what is most important if you want to be free: respect for and exasperation with boundaries.” ―Haruki Murakami
“All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain. If we do not transform our pain, we will transmit it to those around us.” —Richard Rohr
One of the subjects that keeps snagging my poetic attention is the landscape manuscript–how everything around us (not just the landscape) has a “text” that we might understand, if only we could read it. When I’m driving down the road and thinking about a knotty issue I am trying to resolve and I see three crows standing quietly in a winter field, or seven geese suddenly fly overhead in a raggedy V across my view, or something in the way the sun shines on the remaining leaves of that old oak seems to have a message for me–it’s as if there’s a deep text in the world that could be understood if only I knew the letters. And of course the landscape does have messages, and they can be read. It’s what farmers and meteorologists and hikers have done forever. It is what ecologists and environmentalists are doing right now, to save our lives.
And sometimes the visual and aural messages in my environment do seem to align themselves in perfect messages that feel like they’re meant for me, specifically, to read. Again, this is whimsical and playful rather than scientific. And it also captures my attention. I’m not going to make a judgement about whether or not the Holy One Herself, or the Universe, or the faeries, set up yesterday’s little alignment just so my heart could see it, but I will claim the whimsy, say that the synchronicity caught my heart, and then I will use it to construct the next steps of intuitive meaning for the shape my ponderings take in the coming days. I’d rather step into the future making meaning from the rich webs of whimsy and coincidence that surround me than refusing to gather the symbols that dance through my life and live with meaning defined only by the hardest of logic.
I was driving across the Route 30 bridge, listening to the most recent episode of “This Jungian Life” podcast, on the Trickster archetype, because my friend had recommended it to me. I was thinking about the Fool, and how I hoped that this archetype would inform my activism in the coming year, speaking truth through the lies in the way only the Fool can. The theme of the podcast suddenly turned to the way that tricksters throughout history have been challengers of suppression and repression and autocratic rule, how they act as a corrective when a person or a system becomes too rigidly rule-based and oppressive. There was a “click” in my brain at the coincidence of thought and outer message.
At that moment, my eye caught the new Sight and Sound billboard at the end of the bridge—shining purple, it advertised their upcoming production of Queen Esther, and one of my favorite Bible phrases, from the book of Esther, took up the central space in large letters: “FOR SUCH A TIME AS THIS.” Again, an internal click.
As I passed the billboard, a large vulture swooped low above the highway. Click.
Yes, it’s whimsy and intuition, poetry and dreaminess, rather than hard science or pure logic or cold reason. While I need the latter, while I value science and logic and reason as important mental processes, I think a world that makes meaning without the more poetic processes is bereft of the spark of spirit.
And so it is settled, this day before Epiphany. My word, my archetype, my guiding principle, for the coming year is the Fool. Sacred clown. Jester. Trickster. I’ve been considering how the Fool subverts the dominant paradigm (to use an old phrase) to speak the truth behind the lies. In a political milieu swimming in falsehoods, how does the Fool speak truth? Lear’s Fool spoke from deep love and tenderness, was not afraid to speak harsh truths right to the king’s face, and kept repeating the truth from various angles until the truth shone in.
Even the travelers whose arrival we celebrate today and tomorrow, the Wise Ones, the magi, have an element of the Fool. Magi, Mages, Magic, Image, Imagination. The truth they first told Herod was too bald, too open, too dangerous, and so, when they were presented with the deep truth of this Child, they disobeyed the king and fled home a different way, tricking the King. Still, the consequences were grave and terrible for too baldly proclaiming the truth to the king in the first place. This is lesson to be deeply conscious of to whom and how the truth is presented. The Fool must be wise.
So. The Fool. Those black vulture wings are also in my consciousness. And the echidna, a hybrid creature who survives and thrives because it is more than one thing. Those mists and rainbows, veiling and shattering, scattering light. Wading in the water: Do you want to be well? And Aslan’s words to Lucy: “Courage, Dear Heart!”
There is one more thing, a more abstract word rather than an archetype: Orenda. It comes from the Iroquoian language systems, and it refers to the spiritual power that exists in all things, the energy that we transmit between us, that we can access to change the world.
Okay, and there’s one more thing. My friends. Community. Last night’s dreams were a succession of anxiety dreams. In several scenes, I was trying to find Joss, and just couldn’t make contact. In several scenes, I had little fiddly school details to remember and take care of while I was rushing around trying to do other things. In several scenes I was in a car, constantly missing my exit, needing to turn around, but unable to get around another car or to fit my car into the space of the turn-off. Finally, standing on a sidewalk, about to throw my phone on the ground because I couldn’t get it to make a simple call to Joss, a group of my college friends walked up. Nancy took my phone and got it to dial Joss. Gloria put her hand on my shoulder and looked into my eyes, and started to tell me a helpful story. The others gathered around. I could feel everyone’s presence. And I calmed down. Friends. I get by with a little help. . .
What are your messages from the coming year? What words and images coalesce for you? What synchronicities in your inner and outer landscape call to you to listen and follow?
Gratitude List: 1. Friends. How even in my dreams, my beloveds appeared to bring me peace. You. The little connections that are bigger than you know. The way the web of our connections holds us up, and holds the world. 2. The spiritual force within each one of us that enlivens and enlightens and helps us to bring change and goodness into the world. 3. Synchronicity and coincidence and making meaning where it comes. 4. Image and imagination and magic. 5. Being greeted throughout the day by cats.
Gratitude of Resistance Fourteen: The CryptoNaturalist–an account I follow on social media accounts. His name is Jarod K. Anderson, and he has a podcast (I don’t find time to listen to podcasts, but if you do, I think you might want to check him out). Short, wise, pithy epigrammatic notes about the humans occupy in the context of the universe. Here’s a recent example: “We are so quick to invent magic. To purchase magic. To bruise our fingers trying to squeeze magic from concrete and asphalt. What pale imitations we find compared to the poignant wonders we discover when we simply ask questions of our living world and bother to learn the answers.”
Mockingbird Chronicles 