Spring Poetry Blogging

Emily Dickinson


A little madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown —
Who ponders this tremendous scene —
This whole Experiment of Green —
As if it were his own!

Photo by the blogger. If you copy, please link back.

Retrograde Mercury -- Just Saying

NYT: A cloud of ash from an Icelandic volcano shut down much of air travel to and from Northern Europe for a third straight day as a massive transportation gridlock spread around the world. Actual evidence of the ash was being detected in Britain, where air travel was likely to remain shut down until Monday.

Scientists were uncertain when the ash, reported to be drifting at altitudes commonly used by civilian jetliners, would dissipate.

Liminal

Who can say how one Goddess or God chooses a person or how one person chooses a Goddess or a God? I've long been a devotee of Hecate, and she's confirmed for me that I'm "her girl." I don't think that it's entirely (hah!) a rational process, nor one that can be explained "logically."

But I do know that a huge part of the attraction that I feel for Hecate is due to the fact that she's the Goddess of liminal spaces (crossroads). Wiki says: Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold"). The liminal state is characterized by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy. One's sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation. Liminality is a period of transition where normal limits to thought, self-understanding, and behavior are relaxed - a situation which can lead to new perspectives. In my own limited experience, liminality is necessary for magic (aka, change in accordance with will) to happen. Liminality is not always, or even generally, comfortable. Ambiguity and indeterminacy can feel a lot more scary than good, a lot more uncomfortable than supportive. And, yet, even with my Moon in Taurus, I head like a salmon upstream for that liminality. Like Rumi, who says: I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.
Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
What a bargain, let's buy it, I run to Hecate, all aware that the security that I've created at great price will likely dissipate at her crossroads.

Who can say how much of it is due to this extreme winter (which was due, at least in part, to global climate change) and how much of it is due to global climate change, but the micro-eco-system here in my tiny bit of Earth in Northern Virginia, is in the middle of a liminal shift. We're about a week-and-a-half to two weeks ahead of where we should "normally" be. This is generally true all over Columbia's district. It's always been the weekend of Beltane when I'm out sweeping strands of oak semen off of my deck, but I'm doing that now, a good two weeks before Beltane. It's generally Beltane when my lilacs bloom, but they'll be in full bloom on Tuesday or Wednesday of next week, and that's only due to a late cold spell; otherwise, they'd bloom this weekend. I could go on and on.

It was the early "gardeners" (generally women), trying to grow food, rather than lilacs, who paid so much attention to the seasons and determined what we gardeners consider "normal." Now, we're gardening in liminal times. Landscape Guy tells me that he no longer believes the "zones" established by the U.S. Department of Agriculture; they've shifted due to global climate change, although admitting that would commit our government to admitting that global climate change is real. He grows things in his yard that "should" only grow down in the Carolinas.

I don't know any other answer than to pay attention. I sit out in my bit of Earth, watch, listen, communicate, and pay attention. I listen to the birds who are courting and nesting a few weeks early, I shift into the v slow attention span of the trees and hear what they are saying, what their roots are doing, the direction in which their new sprouts are growing. I work v hard to be the "witch of this space," which is how I announce myself to the Elements when I cast a circle. If I am to be the witch of this space, then I am the witch of a liminal, shifting, disoriented space. SomeWitch has to do this. It's my job because I live here.

What's your job?

Picture found here.

Reiki

This evening after dinner, as he was getting tired, G/Son complained that his arm hurt. Nothing had happened, he was just tired and having, IMHO, a bit of a growing pain and, as much as anything, he wanted some attention. I said, "Show me where it hurts," and, when he did, I said, "Can Nonna give it a bit of reiki?" He nodded, and, so, I did. In a minute he moved his arm to show me that it was better and said, "Why is that 'reiki'?" I said, "Well, that's just what we call it: 'reiki'." G/Son remembered an animated movie we'd watched, where a mouse checked a bird's broken wing and held her hands out over the wing in the same way that I held my hands out over G/Son's arm. And he said, "Remember when Cornflower did reiki on the sparrow's broken wing?" and I said, "Yes, that's right. I do remember that." And then we went on to something else, about Superman and Green Lantern and Iron Man. Damn, I love that kid.

Picture found here.

Hecate

When I read Tarot, I'm a big believer in paying attention to the card that "jumps out." You know, the card that somehow, improbably, falls off the top of the deck after the Querant has carefully cut the deck and dealt the required cards. The card that sticks to the bottom of another card and only shows up when you begin to turn the cards over to read them. That card. Heck, if there's a clearer way for the Universe to say: "OK, now pay attention," I don't know exactly what it is. (Well, I do, but I don't know any other way for the Universe to say this that doesn't generally involve pain, loss, a kick in the pants.)

So, when a book falls off of one of my bookshelves, all unasked, I pay attention to that, as well. It's tricky for books to fall off of my bookshelves, which have glass doors that, you know, tend to prevent "falling off." But when I open a bookshelf to get one book, and another "jumps out," I pay attention. Now, one of the earliest, truest, and most important magics that I ever did, all unknowing, as a young pentacostal catholic who would have been horrified at the term bibliomancy, was to open a book, read the top of the page, and take it to heart. To womb. To life. And that has made all the difference.

I'm not as young as I was, not all all pentacostal or catholic, nor am I at all horrified by any form of divination that does not involve live sacrifice. But I'm still often amazed at what bibliomancy can teach me. Ellen Cannon Reed's The Heart of Wicca, which I haven't opened or thought of in years, hopped merrily off of my bookshelf and onto my floor, open to the section where Ellen discusses the importance to her practice of relationship with divinity, particularly in its more personal and specific forms, and sent me an important message.

And I intend to pay attention.

Hecate, Guardian of the Crossroads

Lend me your dagger to cut away the unnecessary to find my true power
Lend me your rope to hold fast to that which I still need
Lend me your torch to illuminate the shadows
Gift me with the sacred key to unlock the mysteries of life
Show me my choices and give me the insight and strength
to always choose the right path

To which particular deity do you pay attention? Why? What have you lately heard?

Picture found here.

At The End Of All Desire

Sunday Dance Blogging

Sunday Poetry Blogging

The Worship of Nature by John Greenleaf Whittier

The harp at Nature's advent strung
Has never ceased to play;
The song the stars of morning sung
Has never died away.

And prayer is made, and praise is given,
By all things near and far;
The ocean looketh up to heaven,
And mirrors every star.

Its waves are kneeling on the strand,
As kneels the human knee,
Their white locks bowing to the sand,
The priesthood of the sea!

They pour their glittering treasures forth,
Their gifts of pearl they bring,
And all the listening hills of earth
Take up the song they sing.

The green earth sends its incense up
From many a mountain shrine;
From folded leaf and dewy cup
She pours her sacred wine.

The mists above the morning rills
Rise white as wings of prayer;
The altar-curtains of the hills
Are sunset's purple air.

The winds with hymns of praise are loud,
Or low with sobs of pain, --
The thunder-organ of the cloud,
The dropping tears of rain.

With drooping head and branches crossed
The twilight forest grieves,
Or speaks with tongues of Pentecost
From all its sunlit leaves.

The blue sky is the temple's arch,
Its transept earth and air,
The music of its starry march
The chorus of a prayer.

So Nature keeps the reverent frame
With which her years began,
And all her signs and voices shame
The prayerless heart of man.

Picture found here.

Mice

More S. J. Tucker here.

Good Question

Surrounded By Beauty

You've probably already seen the amazing pictures in this article, which seems to have been all over the internet lately. If not, you've got to see them.

I've been thinking about the pictures for the past few days and realizing that what I like most about them is that they show that the world really is the way that I think that the world really is: far, far, far more magical and enchanting and wondrous than we normally take the time to realize. But there they are, all the time, in your yard, every evening: exotic and beautiful creatures, stranger than any science fiction alien, and covered in jewels! Every night. Tonight. Tomorrow night. The night after that one that you'll spend slumped in front of the tv being sold cans of beer and drugs and cars. And the night after that one that you'll spend making mystical love to your lover, that you'll always remember as "that April night when we made love and the breeze blew the curtains and the tiny, tiny sliver of a Moon showed me the curve of my lover's neck and I knew that I was loved and that our ritual to the Goddess was so, so deep."

And who's to say that they're "just" asleep? Who's to say that they don't know how dazzlingly lovely the water makes them? That they don't co-create the beauty with the water, working every night to make a more awe-inspiring work of art? I don't know; maybe they're just asleep. Maybe it's even more magical that something that special can happen when the creature's all unaware of it. Do they wake up and go, "Hey, I'm soaked?" Or, in a drought, do they wake up and say, "Damn. I didn't get hardly wet at all last night."

I don't know. I just know that the magic's all around, there really are fairies and every kind of other amazing and even unknown life forces dancing all around us. And all that's required of us is the task required of every Witch: pay attention.

I drove home from work today along Spout Run, with high banks on either side covered in trees and plants that are all that amazing Spring green that only lasts for a few days. And the sun was almost just overhead and every single leaf was not just Spring green, but incandescently green. It was like suddenly being inside the green heart of the World. And all I could think is that this forest has been doing that -- that amazing thing of creating, with the Sun, a visible experience of the heart of green -- for centuries. Over and over. I'm 54, and it's the first time that I've been there and been "awake" at the right time. But it happens every Spring. And I drove the rest of the way home remembering the Rumi poem: Don't go back to sleep.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep.

~Essential Rumi
by Coleman Barks

Picture found here.

The Work Of A Witch

Thorn: Some began to wail at the white line that marks the boundary between one world and another, between the place where we could stand and the place where we could not. People began wailing, and crying. The drumbeat started and I had to cross. I had to stand upon that land and offer what healing I could muster. I had to walk upon the stones and sand of ancient seabed where I had not stood for a decade of years.

As soon as I stepped across that line, I began weeping. The land rose up and met my feet, surrounding me with recognition: I had come. I had come. I had come.

Once inside the holding pen, I hung a string of paper cranes to fly in the harsh wind, and then walked as far as I could and looked out upon the desert, sending wings of energy and light up into sky and down to earth. Spreading these wings, I let healing roll out from me. The land drank. I could do little, but as we always do, I did my best with what I had. The wind held my body upright, I moved with it, as though riding on the ocean, or dancing with a firm and strong beloved wrapped around my back. I was home… for I was with my Mother, who is everywhere and no place. I was standing on the earth.

Some days, it's big work, like Thorn sending wings of energy and light up into the sky and down into the Earth of a weapon-scarred desert. Letting the healing roll out from her body, the raw instrument and tool of a Witch, the living, fleshy opening between magic and the world, between above and below, between the "magic" and the "mundane" (which are one). The land drinks and, as Thorn says, we do the best that we can with what we have.

Some days, it's little work. Being thankful and kind to all the people with whom we interact, sending the energy of our sex acts out to the still-winter-harmed trees in our yards, doing little magics to support friends in new jobs, family members looking for work, a president seeking a new SCOTUS justice, being open to the incredible magic all around us. Grounding.

But it's all the work of a Witch. Someone once said, and it drew me to this religion like a magnet, A Witch takes responsibility. And that, in the end, is all that we can do. We can use our magic and our intellect and our bodies and we can take responsibility. We can open our wet, fleshy, amazing bodies to magic and we can move it between the Worlds. And what we do between them, affects them all. It's a big job. But someWitch has to do it.

Rain

April 8th: First Naked Happy Dancing in a Summer Rainstorm of the Year. At least a month and a half earlier than normal.

Feast Of The Red Dragon: You Should Go!

What are you doing on Saturday that's more important?

The Red Dragon Feast is an annual magical feast and fundraiser for
healing blood-borne disease. Donations benefit community building and
a local charity committed to healing blood borne disease.

The event takes place in three phases: 1. drumming, dancing and
ritual; 2. feasting and toasting; and 3. a silent and live auction.
We focus our intent by wearing red clothes, eating red food, and
toasting with red drink.

All Hail the Red Dragon!
All Hail the Life Giving Blood

Date: Saturday, April 10, 2010
Time: 2:00pm - 5:00pm
Location: Renaissance Hall, Westminster Presbyterian Church
Street: 400 I St. S.W.
City: Washington, DC
Donation: $13.00
Contact: Eldritch@EldritchVentures.org

The Trustees of the Ecumenicon Fellowship have given the 2010
Infinity Award for "Group Public Service" to the DC Radical Faeries.
"As the sponsors of the Red Dragon Feast for blood-borne diseases, by
this alone you all deserve an award. We also recognize the work of
the DC Radical Faeries as active facilitators in the early years of
the Pagan Leadership Conference; energetic ritualists at several
Pagan Pride Festivals; and wonderful participants in the DC Pride
Interfaith Services." Representatives of the DC Radical Faeries
received this award on behalf of the DC Radical Faeries as a whole.
The Infinity Awards were presented at an awards banquet in Rockwood
Manor, in Potomac, MD on Friday, March 26, 2010. Eldritch, Aero,
Tigre, Scorch and Chanel were present to receive this honor.
Congratulations Everyone!

Picture found here.

May The Goddess Guard Her. May She Find Her Way To The Summerlands. May Her Friends And Family Know Peace.

Wilman Mankiller passed away earlier today. CNN reports:

CNN) -- Wilma Mankiller, the first woman to lead the Cherokee native American tribe, died Tuesday after a battle with pancreatic cancer, Cherokee leaders announced Tuesday. She was 64.
Mankiller served 10 years as principal chief of the Cherokee, the second-largest U.S. tribe, and became its first freely elected leader in 1987. President Clinton awarded her the Medal of Freedom, the highest U.S. civilian honor, in 1998.

"Our personal and national hearts are heavy with sorrow and sadness with the passing this morning of Wilma Mankiller," said Chad Smith, her successor as chief of the Oklahoma-based tribe. "We feel overwhelmed and lost when we realize she has left us, but we should reflect on what legacy she leaves us. We are better people and a stronger tribal nation because of her example of Cherokee leadership, statesmanship, humility, grace, determination and decisiveness."

The CNN report is typical in that it calls Chief Mankiller "the first woman to lead the Cherokee native American tribe". I believe those reports should say, "the first recorded woman to lead the Cherokee nation," but I take their meaning. Wikipedia notes that: Mankiller is sometimes incorrectly referred to as the first woman chief of a Native American tribe. In the 20th century, Alice Brown Davis became Principal Chief of the Seminole Tribe of Oklahoma in 1922 and Mildred Cleghorn became the Chairperson of the Fort Sill Apache Tribe in 1976.

In earlier times, a number of women led their tribes.


She once explained that, I've run into more discrimination as a woman than as an Indian.

When I was young and needed some strong female leaders to look up to, Chief Mankiller was one of the women I found to focus on. Back then, the patriarchy made a lot of jokes about her name. She showed a lot of grace under pressure.

Thank you, Chief.

Picture found here.

In The End, Enough

Every day, no matter what else happens, I drive by the Potomac River and we talk to each other. Every day, no matter what else happens, the weeds along the ramp to the T.R. Bridge are growing and leafing out and pulling energy from the soil. Every day, no matter what else happens, I come home, I sit on my rock, and I converse with the trees and plants here, on my bit of Earth.

And, in the end, that is, indeed, enough.

May it be so for you.

Easter 1916 By W.B. Yeats

I

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

II

That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse.
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vain-glorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

III

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter, seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute change.
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim;
And a horse plashes within it
Where long-legged moor-hens dive
And hens to moor-cocks call.
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.

IV

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death.
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead.
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse --
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Picture found here.

Are You A Native Of Your Landbase?

Joanna's written a post that's quite full of what I've been mulling about over the past few months. Isn't it amazing how this happens so often in the blogosphere? You should read the whole thing; here are a few of my favorite excerpts:


Loren Cruden speaks of this challenge of finding the balance between place and ancestry: “If you are from a race or culture that isn’t Native American, you can still feel a soul connection to the spirit and form of this land. What seems to be emerging in North America is a path derived from the same spirit of place that the Natives tuned to, but that expresses itself through a marriage of ancestry and place. . . . Ancestry gives form and continuity to spiritual practice; place gives immediacy and manifestation to power.”

But there is another, more important reason for becoming native to your place: the earth needs it. David Landis Barrett writes, “[The earth] needs people who live in a native way, who consider themselves people of the land. European-Americans have been so destructive to this continent and its indigenous peoples in large part because we have rejected the notion that we are native to the earth. We have insisted on our transcendence and so devastation has followed in our path. To seek a new sense of nativeness — a slow and stumbling process to be sure — is one of the ways we can begin to live well with the earth and all its peoples.”

How then, as non-indigenous peoples, do we become native to the land where we live?

. . .

Or as Gary Snyder says, “[I]f you know what is taught by the plants and weather, you are in on the gossip and can truly feel more at home.”

These days I am learning to be “in on the gossip” of my Place — I watch as the Steller’s jays squabble over the sunflower seeds I set out for them and notice the towhees and juncos quietly await their turn at the feeder. I know where the chickaree (Douglas squirrel) hides her stash of seeds and nuts in the autumn, and what part of the woods holds the most luscious mushrooms. I know the slough where the great blue heron lives and when the tree frogs will begin their chorus in the spring. I know where to harvest wild onions in the summer and where to find nettles in the earliest days of spring. I know how far north the sun sets at midsummer, and how low in the sky it rides at noon in midwinter.

This, then, is how we become native to the land: by loving her well, first of all. By observing, being aware, studying, and participating in the life cycle of the land instead of dominating it. We do this by keeping nature journals, by gardening with native plants, by sitting so still the birds forget we’re there. We do it in ways too numerous to list or count.

Being native is not something that we are, it’s something that we do. We are, if we so choose, always in the process of becoming native to the land.

The notion of local gossip ties in with something that I've been thinking about these last few days. What's happening in my world, what's really important to me, but what I can't really discuss with anyone because, well, you know, NO ONE CARES, is that the fox scat from a week ago has completely melted and disappeared into the ground. The butterbur flowers, which are odd in the extreme, have opened up and spread way out. The male cardinal has almost completely seduced the female cardinal and the baby squirrels have begun to peak out of the nest in the crape myrtle tree. The weeds that I worry about on the on-ramp to the Teddy Roosevelt bridge have mostly, but not all, sprung up from this season's snow and begun to leaf out. When the wind blows the branches of the cherry trees on my block, it mostly blows to the East, and the big flock of robins that overwintered here has now gone even farther North.

Where do you "live"? Are you a native of that place? How does that change what you do, how does it change your spiritual practice, how does it change who you are? If not, why not? If not now, when? If it hasn't, are you truly Pagan?



Picture found here.

My New Name For A Blog

What Sia Said.

Gardening

And, so, after a brutal winter, a glorious spring. My neighbors' deciduous magnolia is having a once in every decade bloom, and the perfect scent keeps wafting over to me as I plant herbs, clean up sticks and debris, work on the container gardens.

Years ago, when I lived in an apartment with a sunless balcony, container gardening was all that I could do and I did as much of it as I could. Son and DiL still laugh about the time that I got them to drive DiL's tiny del Sol convertible out to a garden center to buy tons of topsoil. But when I moved from the apartment to my little cottage, I swore that I was through with container gardening, forever. Real Earth, real dirt, real soil for me!

Of course, it was only a few seasons before I began to eye empty space on the deck and think, "Well, mint's actually better grown in containers so it can't take over the whole yard . . . ." And, so, here I am, with a yard of my own all planted in lilacs and gardenias and wisteria and lilies and herbs, and, still, doing container gardening, as well. And today was "Clean up the container gardens and get things planted day." The really good thing, IMHO, about container gardening is that you can accomplish a lot in a short time, can get that amazing feeling of having "wreaked order" on a finite bit of the universe, and all for not too much effort. I've got peppermint, spearmint, and chocolate mint already going gangbusters. I'm about to put in a lemon pot, with lemon grass, lemon balm, and lemon mint all together. I've got violas (psychedelic and Bowle's black, both edible) planted, and some white four-o-clocks just for fun and in memory of my Grandma, who loved to grow them.

The picture above (taken by the author; if you copy, please link back) shows fiddleheads from the ferns in the woodland garden. My mom used to watch for these, pick them, and saute them in a bit of butter. (Warning, some ferns are now considered carcinogenic,) I'm more eager for the ferns to fill out, so I don't pick them, but once in a while I find fiddleheads at the farmers' market and I do pay an outrageous amount for them in memory of my mom, who never met a weed or wild plant she didn't like to eat.

How does your garden (in the words of the nursery rhyme) grow? What parts of your garden harken back to other members of your family?