Even If We're Just Dancing in the Dark

Lately, I've been incredibly impressed by the blogging NTodd's been doing. It's creative. It's emotional. It's real. It's raw. And, it's revelatory. That's why it's creative, emotional, real, and raw. His recent podcasts will be examples, I think, when they get around to studying podcasting as an artform, of creative and non-derivative (of, for example, radio) podcasts.

I'm amazed, because NTodd and I have fairly similar Myers-Briggs profiles. And they both start with "I" for introvert. One of the things I enjoy about communicating over the internet is the ability to share only as much as I want. To dart behind the curtain any time I choose. To edit myself before presenting myself to the world.

So, when people ask me, as they have recently in e-mails, what my daily spiritual practice looks like, for example, I tend to want to retreat, move to generalities, obfuscate. I'm a nobody, in the Emily Dickinson sense. Why would anyone care what I do? Mostly what I do is do it wrong. And, yet, lately, part of what I'm working on is what I refer to as "inhabiting my life." By that, I think I mean pretty much the same thing that Ram Dass meant when he urged people to "Be Here Now." (Goddess, I am old.) By that, I mean, living in the real moment and not in either the future where I really WILL have gotten things together, (I once heard Christine Northrop talk about how in the he 1980s we all though that, if we could just get the right daytimer or Filofax, we'd really get it all together and it elicited one of those "Oh YES!" responses from me.) or in the past when I completely fucked it up. So, living in the present, here's my attempt to describe my spiritual practice.

Katrina Messenger once looked me dead in the eye and said that if you are not writing down your dreams, you are inhibiting your spiritual growth. So, even though, when I finally admit that I'm awake, I'm usually an hour or so behind where I'd like to be, I take a few minutes to jot down a few evocative phrases so that I'll be able to recall my dreams. Then, I'm off. I generally look up and gasp for air at about noon. Whatever I'm eating, and it can be lobster at the Palm with an interviewee or it can be a scoop of tuna salad and an banana at my desk, I try to stop and thank the dead fish and the dead fruit and vegetables, and the dead tea leaves for giving me life. And, then, I'm off. Somewhere in there, I try to walk on the treadmill, or do ecstatic dance, or, if I'm very lucky, swim. That's part of my spiritual practice. I don't enjoy it, generally, but I do it. My body IS the tool I use to do magic. I need to take care of my tools. I often work 10, 12, 14 hour days. By the time I drag myself home and feed the cat, I'm tired. And hungry. And wishing I'd gotten more done.

And there are times when my spiritual practice, and I am dead serious about this, is to go to sleep. We are, as T. Thorn Coyle has noted, embodied consciousness. We either take care of our bodies, or we don't. But to have a spiritual practice, I have to have a body. And, as I've learned the hard way from night school and the first years of practicing law, I need sleep.

But, if I can stay awake, I sit down, breathe slowly, and ground. Starhawk describes grounding in The Spiral Dance, and, for me, it is the basis of a spiritual practice. When I ground, it's specific. I see specific roots spreading from my orange and yellow chakras into the specific hummusy ground of my yard. I see my roots pulling up specific energy from my Mother, the Earth, and spreading throughout my specific body. I see any cancer cells being recognized by my immune system and destroyed, I see my right brain, which I often underuse, being filled with light. I see the light from the moon flowing through my violet chakara and blending with the energy from the Earth. This can take me a long time and a great deal of concentration.

At this point, I often call the quarters: "Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Come be with me, I'm your daughter." I call Center and I call the Goddess(es), generally Hecate and, recently, Cerridwen. I do an exercise from T. Thorn Coyle's book, Evolutionary Witchcraft, that ends in what she refers to as "feeding the sacred dove," and then, I do some magic.

Lately, I do some magic designed to protect my son, daughter-in-law, and grandchild during the birth. I've adapted a prayer of St. Patrick (that mothefucker), one that Madeline L'Engle, one of my favorite authors, used. It starts, "In Columbia, at this sacred hour . . . " All the rest, the incense, the altar, the athame, the herbs and stones, and sacred flames are just ways to involve my entire being, subconscious, consciousness, and Higher Self in the process, to seduce my entire being into whatever my left brain has decided is needed.

Then, I thank the Goddess(es) and the quarters and go take a bath, blog, read a book, throw in laundry, mow the lawn, sleep.

It's not much. But tonight, and for the next 29 nights, I'm doing it in complete darkness. We'll see if it makes a difference. Tonight, I went to the dark after about a half an hour of ecstatic dance. I found it lovely, peaceful, deep. I realized that, although I've found a place that's very dark, it's still noisy. i can hear my sump pump. I can hear my furncace. I can hear my monkey mind, just below the surface.

Dancing in the dark. Wherever you go, there you are. Are you ever alone in the dark? On purpose?