Tuesday Poetry Blogging

Since There Is No Escape
~Sara Teasdale

Since there is no escape, since at the end
My body will be utterly destroyed,
This hand I love as I have loved a friend,
This body I tended, wept with and enjoyed;
Since there is no escape even for me
Who love life with a love too sharp to bear:
The scent of orchards in the rain, the sea
And hours alone too still and sure for prayer—
Since darkness waits for me, then all the more
Let me go down as waves sweep to the shore
In pride, and let me sing with my last breath;
In these few hours of light I lift my head;
Life is my lover—I shall leave the dead
If there is any way to baffle death.

Picture found here.

Sixth Annual Brigid Poetry Festival

There are the poems that you love, and then there are the poems that you write into your will. Here's one that I made the nice young lawyer from the white-shoe law firm write into mine:

When Death Comes

~Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measles-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.


Picture found here.

Blessed Samhein to You and Yours.

The longer we are together
the larger death grows around us.
How many we know by now who are dead! We, who were young,
now count the cost of having been.
And yet as we know the dead
we grow familiar with the world.
We, who were young and loved each other
ignorantly now come to know
each other in love, married
by what we have done, as much
as by what we intend. Our hair
turns white with our ripening
as though to fly away in some
coming wind, bearing the seed
of what we know. It was bitter to learn
that we come to death as we come to love,
bitter to face
the just and solving welcome
that death prepares. But that is bitter
only to the ignorant, who pray it will not happen. Having come
the bitter way to better prayer, we have
the sweetness of ripening. How sweet
to know you by the signs of the world!

~Wendell Berry

Picture found here.

Eat, Pray, Love -- But, Then, I Repeat Myself

Aquila ka Hecate explains, much better than I could, what I was trying to say in the post below about how our eating relates to our religion:

I'm not even stretching the truth to make a point when I say that the weed by the roadside, the crumb of granite rolling on the pavement, the motes of illuminated air dancing in the evening streetlights, the very quarks themselves - all partake of this consciousness which builds and destroys, eats and is eaten. I'm part of the process. My body is, and will be, food. It is food right now for milliard mites and bacteria. Any woman who has born a child (and most who have not) are in no doubt that they are food, too.

When I die, I expect to be food for insects and worms and single-celled organisms. I eat animals as well as plants because I do not distinguish between their levels of consciousness - indeed, I feel that distinguishing in such a way may be only what we humans tend to do.

I'll propose two very basic ways to change your own relationship with eating: (1) Stop criticizing others for how they eat/don't eat, what they eat/don't eat, how much they eat/don't eat, etc. When you find yourself about to give voice to judgment (even internally) on this point, take a breath, ground, center, see if you can just be present for a moment with that unnoticed part of yourself that makes you care what someone else puts in their mouth. (2) Begin to practice mindfullness concerning your own food. Simply stopping for a few seconds and sending gratitude to the plant or animal that you are about to consume -- and to the people who harvested, slaughtered, prepared it -- can become a very powerful spiritual practice.

And, of course, there are poems:

Oh my brothers of the wilderness,
My little brothers,
For my necessities
I am about to kill you!
May the Master of Life who made you
In the form of the quarry
That the children may be fed,
Speedily provide you
Another house,
So there may be peace
Between me and thy spirit.

~Mary Austin, in Earth Prayers from Around the World: 365 Prayers, Poems & Invocations for Honoring the Earth, edited by Elizabeth Roberts & Elias Amidon

Picture found here.

John Barleycorn Must Die

I've been thinking about the interview linked below in which Lierre Keith discusses her growing awareness that plants have a form of sentience, volition, and ability to communicate. She recounts how, as a vegan, she didn't want to accept this awareness because it meant that, in order to survive, she had to kill something sentient.*

We have (and Earth knows, I'm not the first to discuss this) such a shadow relationship with Death in Western culture. To a greater extent than at any other time or place in human history, our way of life is built upon and requires massive amounts of death. We spend billions of dollars on redundant weapons, even when we say that we don't have money for schools, or roads, or the green energy programs that might save the planet. We are, pace Mr. Orwell, always at war with someone. We cause the extinction of species after species. We kill forest after river after ocean and shrug it off as just a cost of doing business. We kill off native peoples whenever and wherever they "get in our way" (by which, we mean, "have been living forever in a place that we now want"). Our movies are full of death (preferably accomplished by huge explosions or major car crashes -- nope, no sexual symbolism there) and our children amuse themselves for hours with video games in which the object is to kill other people.

And, yet, Death is the great unmentionable. We have moved the harvesting of the plants we eat and the slaughter of the animals whose flesh we consume out of sight. We send our old people away to die in hospitals or nursing homes. We won't even use the word "death" -- we say that someone "passed on," or "went to their final rest." And we want, rather desperately, as Keith did, to pretend that somehow we can have the life that we have without ever causing any Death.

What happens, though, when we face up to the fact, as Keith did, that everything is alive, that everything is aware, that we must, truly, cause some death in order to live? The Randian response is to shrug, announce that only the strong survive, and to become even more willing to wreak death and destruction. After all, if even picking an apple off a tree involves taking from a sentient being, then why not take the land away from the forest, why not dump chemicals into the Danube? Why not make money selling games to children that teach them that it's fun to blow up other people? Head to McDonalds and have a triple bacon burger!

Another response, though, is to recognize the gift of the slaughtered animal, the harvested corn. That response might require, as Derrick Jensen suggests, that, when we kill a salmon, we become responsible to Salmon. It suggests that animals be raised and slaughtered humanely (to coin a phrase) and with gratitude for their sacrifice. It suggests that we not grow crops in huge monoculture factory farms and that we not drench them in pesticide and petroleum-based fertilizer. It suggests that we spend time in meditation and religious ritual, coming into right relationship with Death, with our planet, our landbase, our food. And if that interferes with the cost of doing business (aka imposing externalities), then it is business that must adjust and sacrifice.

As we head into Samhein, this area of our relationship with Death is one I'd like to see more Pagan groups incorporate into their observations. Our religion, more than any other Western religion, is at least willing to worship the relationship between life and death, as well as to focus upon the interconnectedness of all beings. We could, I think, begin to help our culture to come into a better relationship with reality, which could, in turn, help us to come into a better relationship with our planet and the other beings who share it with us.

How squeamish does Death make you? Do you still believe that you can live on this planet without causing Death? How does the traditional "Rule of Three" both recognize and obscure the truth about the relationship between our lives and death? What, realistically, can you change in order to live in better relationship with Life, Death, Earth, Food? What rituals would help you to do this?


*I am not making any judgments here about what people eat or don't eat. It's interesting to me how our culture considers eating to be such a moral issue; people feel free to judge other people for what they eat, how they eat, how much they eat or don't eat, etc. It's almost impossible to read a newspaper or magazine without finding articles about how one "should" eat and it's almost impossible to mention, say, veganism without starting a war about how people "should" eat. And yet, the deep moral questions behind our food production system go unmentioned. Good sign that there are some shadow issues involved.

Picture found here.

Days Before Mabon, Waxing Moon

No doubt about it today; Summer's coming to a graceful end and Autumn is peaking through the veils, ready to usher in glorious death.

What do we know?

I wonder. To wonder takes time. I walk in the hills behind our home. The leaves have fallen, leaf litter, perfect for the shuffling of towhees. The supple grasses of summer have become knee-high rattles. Ridge winds shake the tiny seedheads like gourds. I hear my grandfather's voice.

All sound requires patience; not just the ability to hear, but the capacity to listen, the awareness of mind to discern a story. A magpie flies toward me and disappears in the oak thicket. He is relentless in his cries. What does he know that I do not? What story is he telling? I love these birds, their long iridescent tail feathers, their undulations in flight. Two more magpies join him. I sit on a flat boulder to rest, pick up two stones and begin striking edges.

What I know in my bones is that I forget to take time to remember what I know. The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy. Daily prayers are delivered on the lips of breaking waves, the whisperings of grasses, the shimmering of leaves. We are animals, living, breathing organisms engaged not only in our own evolution but the evolution of a species that has been gifted with nascence. Nascence--to come into existence; to be born; to bring forth; the process of emerging.

Even in death we are being born. And it takes time.

I think about my grandfather, his desire for voices, to be held as he dies in the comfort of conversation. Even if he rarely contributes to what is being said, his mind finds its own calm. To him this is a form of music that allows him to remember he is not alone in the world. Our evolution is the story of listening.

In the evening by firelight in their caves and rock shelters, the Neanderthals sometimes relaxed to the sound of music after a hard day at the hunt. They took material at hand, a cave bear's thigh bone, and created a flute. With such a simple instrument, these stocky, heavy browed Neanderthals, extinct close relatives of humans, may have given expression to the fears, longings, and joys of their prehistoric lives. (John Noble Wilford, "Playing of Flute May Have Graced Neanderthal Fire," The New York Times)

A bone flutelike object was found at Divje Babe in northwestern Slovenia recently, dated somewhere between forty-three thousand to eighty-two thousand years old. Dr. Ivan Turk, a paleontologist at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences in Ljubjana, believes this is the first musical instrument ever to be associated with Neanderthals. It is a piece of bear femur with four holes in a straight alignment. Researchers say the bone flute may be the oldest known musical instrument.

I wonder about that cave, the fire that flickered and faded on damp walls as someone in the clan played a flute. Were they a family? Neighbors? What were their dreams and inventions? Did they know the long line of human beings that would follow their impulses to survive, even flourish in moments of reverie?

Returning to my grandparents' home, I notice the fifty-foot antenna that rises over the roof. I recall Jack telling us as children how important it was for the antenna to be grounded in the earth, that as long as it was securely placed it could radiate signals into the air all over the world. Transmit and receive. I walk into his dim room and place my hand on my grandfather's leg. Bone. Nothing lost. Overcome by something else. Ways of knowing. My fingers wrap around bone and I feel his life blowing through him.

John H. Tempest, Jr., passed away on December 15, 1996, peacefully at home in the company of family.

~from Listening Days by Terry Tempest Williams

What music is Autumn going to play upon your bones? Are you grounded enough for signals to radiate all over the world?

Picture found here.

Duh.

Surely no one is really surprised?

Park officials had separated Pansy from the other chimpanzees for treatment when she became ill in November 2008. But when her breathing became erratic a few weeks later, the other three chimps were allowed to join her.

In the 10 minutes before she died, the three animals – an elderly female named Blossom, Blossom's adult son Chippy and Pansy's adult daughter Rosie – frequently groomed and caressed Pansy. They crouched in close, and Chippy shook her arm, apparently testing for signs of life.

When they got no reaction, "they appeared to arrive at a collective decision that something had changed, and she was no longer the same as she was beforehand," said lead author James Anderson, who studies primate behavior at the University of Stirling. "It seems they are clearly able to distinguish the difference between being alive and unresponsive."

Soon, both Blossom and Chippy left Pansy's side. Even though it was not her usual sleeping area, Rosie stayed by her mother's corpse almost the entire night, sleeping fitfully.

Sixteen hours after Pansy's death, zookeepers removed the body, with the three chimps watching quietly. For several days afterward, the group was subdued, refusing to make a nest on the platform where Pansy had died. They also demanded more attention from the keepers.

Picture found here.

What She Said

Sensuous during life
do not deny me in death!

Wash me with scent of apple blossom

Annoint me with essence of lilac.

Fill my veins with honeysuckle necatar.

Sprinkle me with perfume of purple violets.

Envelope me in shroud saturated with fragrance of freshly mown meadow hay.

Rest me in moss velvet earth.

Cover me with soil extruding flavor of maple and oak leaves.

Command a white birch to stand guard.

~Lois Wickenhauser, in Earth Prayers From Around the World, edited by Elizabeth Roberts aand Elias Amidon.

Picture found here

Politicize This Death

I am not Paul Wellstone, nor Ted Kennedy. I am not Amanda, nor Atrios, nor watertiger.

I'm an old hedge witch, an invisible older woman, an introvert with a garden. I've done a few good things in my life. I've raised a smart, kind, feminist of a son with the world's most amazing sense of humor, who is, in his own turn, a wonderful and involved father. I've won a case with national importance that helped a lot of ordinary people, and I've worshipped matter on an almost daily basis, as a way of co-creating the Universe. I've shown up and marched to end the war in Viet Nam, the war in Iraq, gun violence, attacks on women's right to choose.

But, like Amanda, and Atrios, and watertiger, I will presume to say: Hells yeah, politicize my death.

I am an organ donor so that, even in death, I can do what I think it's important for all beings to do: engage in positive energy exchanges with other manifestations of the Goddess, turn the wheel, make things better than they were when you showed up. What could make this political junkie happier than a politicization of her death? A lot of my life has been shallow, and I imagine that some of my memorial will be shallow: She adored the snark and could quote Dorothy Parker at length, she wore pretty scarves, she wrote clever briefs, she drank her martinis with two olives and an onion, she wrote v good thank you notes, you never went to her home when you weren't offered warmth and wine, she sure did love the ballet. But I've tried, in my own way, to make things better via the body politic and I would be hurt if that escaped mention at what I hope would be the rather sodden (the witches all know where the older bottles of Krug are kept) party following my trip between the veils. And if it would help, even a little bit, even at all, hell, yeah, politicize my death. If that pisses off some Republican, well, laughter and joy lift the barge that sails to the Summerlands.

Update: As always, Athenae says it best and leaves me more than willing to chew off my left arm to be able to write like that.

The Hands And Throats Of The Goddess

Music-thanatology - "Thanatology" derives from "Thantos," the Greek word for death - has been around in various forms for centuries.

In a white-walled hospital room, pancreatic cancer slowly drained all the life that remained in Carolyn.

There was nothing more to do for this 62-year-old woman - no oxygen or other life support, just a morphine drip to keep her as comfortable as possible.

That, and the ministrations of Jane Franz.

Franz brought her harp to the foot of Carolyn's bed, and started to play, weaving a hypnotic and soothing melody. Occasionally, she paused to adjust to the rhythm of Carolyn's heartbeat and breathing. After 20 minutes, the last notes settled like a benediction over the room.

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

Eva Evdokimova-Gregori, an internationally known ballerina who stood out for the delicacy and eloquent purity of her dancing and stage presence, died on Friday in Manhattan.

Photo found here.

I Was A Bride Married To Amazement

Gus has been posting some very thoughtful stuff about the perceived "need" for Pagan clergy. In general, I agree with him. My brilliant friend S once said to me that religions begin w mystics. Then, a clergy comes along and sucks all the juice out. I think that's about right.

As an old woman, I want to particularly endorse what Gus says about dying and funerals:

What about dying and burial? As we grow in legitimacy, as we are, it will be increasingly possible for a person's coven mates to visit to be present in the final moments of physical life, should he or she so desire. As to burial, the government has a legitimate interest in making sure dead bodies are disposed of safely, and maybe protecting other public values as well. So long as those standards are met, government should have no say whatsoever as to whether we preach, dance, drink ourselves silly, cry, laugh, or what have you at the final services.

I posted a while back about how I'd like to go when I set off in my burning Viking boat, headed for the Isle of Apples in the West:

"The sisters who are with her today have dressed Shekhinah in her ritual robes and surrounded her with rose petals from her garden. It was exactly the way she'd always said she wanted her final moments to be.

Those same sisters are now singing over her body, and soon they will conduct the ritual washing of the body as they prepare her to go back into the arms of the Mother."

Oh, when I die, dress me in the black gown with the hecate trim. Surround me with herbs from my garden. Tell some jokes. You don't need to wash me; my Mother will take me dirty. Drink all my good wine. Scritch my good, grey cat. Turn on all the lights.

I figure the UUs will rent out their space, and my coven can give the law borg the shock of its life (Please. Make them dance the spiral dance!), and I'll go, as Mary Oliver says, saying:

[A]ll my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms

And the lilacs will say, "Hmm, interesting fertilizer. Do I detect a note of Stoli? A hint of rosemary and orange? Quand meme."

Death Is The Mother of Beauty, Mystical

One of the things I love about Wicca is its celebration of death and decay. Wallace Stevens, in his poem Sunday Morning, wrote:

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

(The Collected Poems, 69)

~Reprinted in Gardens, An Essay on the Human Condition by Robert Pogue Harrison

Photo found here.

The Quan Yin Sisterhood

NTodd's talking about this new study, that I love, finding that -- duh -- our happiness is connected to the happiness of those around us.

[H]appiness is contagious -- and . . . people pass on their good cheer even to total strangers.

. . . "Whether you're happy depends not just on your own actions and behaviors and thoughts, but on those of people you don't even know."

I was thinking about how much it amuses me to have confirmed by science what mystics and witches have always known: we are one. It's all just god pouring god into god. That fact explains what's been fundamentally mistaken with so much of what what's been going on in America since the days of Ronald Reagan: the odd notion that I can be happy while others are suffering and homeless, the Gordon Gecko, "greed is good," I've got mine, if I'm off in my McMansion or my Esclade I'll be happy no matter what's going on in your life ethos. And, yet, surprisingly, the people in the McMansion with the steam shower and the granite counters and the wine cellar are often -- unhappy. And we wonder why that is, how that could possibly be.

If happiness is "contagious" what do you think misery is? Only connect.

Then this morning I was listening to this podcast by Thorn Coyle and Medusa. It concerns the very human need to grieve when we are confronted with death. The whole podcast is worth listening to, but beginning at about 49:25, Medusa explains an image that she received during the Loma Prieta earthquake, of the Dead being able to use the tears of the grievers as the River Styx upon which their souls must travel. She says it's difficult for us to "hold the grief of a large number of people passing. . . . It does affect all of us. It is a disturbance in the force, Luke, when a lot of people pass at the same time and it is hard for them to be grieved because there are so many of them . . . . It's important that we hold that and we try and help in that process and I don't know exactly what that looks like, but I'm aware of it." Medusa and Thorn describe how grief can crack us open and give us compassion for the whole world.

And I thought immediately of Quan Yin, the Bodhisattva/Goddess who "hears" the cries of the world. (One of the Goddesses who has visited my dreams, Quan Yin came to me as an incredibly hip older woman with a younger lover/adept when my beautiful DiL was carrying G/Son. Quan Yin, in her house built like an indoor garden, assured me that a child of compassion would be born and then I pulled the tarot card that told me he'd come a bit earlier than the doctors predicted. The universe often laughs both at and with me. I return the favor.) Com-passion -- feeling the passions of others in common with them -- doesn't necessarily mean that we "fix" another's problems. It means that we acknowledge that we have a connection with everyone else, with those who are grieving, and with those, even those now "gone," who need to be grieved. It's so important to hear, to listen, to acknowledge the tears of the whole, entire world. (It's overwhelming work, but it's important work.) I cannot be separate from you. You are not separate from me, not even in your grief. Your happiness will ribbon into my life and light it up and your grief will affect me and season the flavor of my days.

A witch's job is to help to turn the wheel. Each of us finds our own way of putting our shoulder to the wheel. Certainly, not everyone is called to the work of Quan Yin, the work that Medusa has not yet envisioned, but is aware needs doing, the grieving for strangers who pass in numbers so large that they do, in fact, cause a disturbance in the force. And yet, it is work that needs to be done.

As our planet goes through Her death throes, that work is going to need doing with increasing strength and increasing frequency. And someone must grieve for the plants, the species, the planet Her Ownself. Where will we find the professional mourners that Thorn discusses? What would their training look like? How will these doulas of the second birth sustain themselves? How must we all change our practices at Sahmein and the Winter Solstice to do this work?

Tonight, I am v happy. And that, in itself, it turns out according to science, is important work.

It's all real. It's all metaphor. There's always more.

And, speaking of disturbances in the force and large groups who need mourning . . . .

Picture found here.

Two-Year-Old Wisdom

I was estranged from my mother ever since, well, to be honest, ever since the day that I was born. But I was in my thirties when I quit speaking to her, and so, perhaps, her death, when I was in my late, late forties, was less traumatic for me that the death of a parent often is for many adults.

This weekend, as he got sleepy for his nap, G/Son said to me, "I miss my mommy." I said, "Well, Mommy is coming soon to pick you up, and I'm sure that she misses you, too." G/Son asked, "Do you miss your mommy?" Not thinking, and I was driving at the time and calculating if we could get home before G/Son fell asleep in his car seat and whether or not I could put away the groceries before his nap or if I should try to put him down for his nap and THEN put away the groceries, and that's the best excuse that I have, I said, "Well, Nonna's mommy is dead."

That engendered a solid full five minutes -- forever in a two-year-old's world -- of the following dialogue, repeated over and over again:

G/Son: You don' have a mommy?

Nonna: When I was little, like you, I had a mommy. But when I got very old, my mommy got very, very old and she got sick and died. But I have you, and your mommy, and your daddy to love, so I'm not sad.

G/Son: You don' have a mommy?

. . . .

Finally, I said, "Nonna's mommy liked to help poor people and when she got too sick to stay here, she went to the Summerlands. I like to think that she likes the apples and the apple cider."

G/Son: Your mommy died?

Nonna: That's right.

G/Son: Well, Nonna, sometimes, that happens.

Death happens.

In my religion, it's as important as new life emerging in the Spring. I won't, don't want to, refuse to impose my religion on G/Son. Yet, I'd like him to take a more reasonable view of death than do most Americans. And as we head from the longest day of the year, high summer, to Lughnasadh, the first of the harvests, I want to celebrate Death, that great harvest, in my own life and to be honest w/ G/Son about it.

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

Cora Anderson, elder of the Feri Tradition of witchcraft passed over to the Summerlands early this Beltane morning. What a perfect time to slip between the whisper-thin veils. More here.

I Think What I Love The Most Is The Hand-Crocheted Afghan On The Back Of The Chair

This is how a priestess dies. Such grace.

May The Goddess Guard Him. May He Find His Way To The Summerlands. May His Friends And Family Know Peace

Today's LAT reports that:

Andrés Henestrosa Morales, a prolific poet, essayist and journalist whose lyrical writings helped raise the cultural profile of Mexico's indigenous people, particularly the Zapotec Indians of southern Oaxaca state, and whose wide circle of friendships and intellectual partnerships included Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Langston Hughes, died Thursday at his Mexico City home after a months-long battle with pneumonia.

He was 101, the same age attained by his Zapotec mother, who was the subject of one of Henestrosa's two best-known writings, "Retrato de mi madre" (Portrait of My Mother), published in 1940.

His single most influential work, "Los hombres que dispersó la danza" (The Men Scattered by Dance), is a folkloric collection of Zapotec legends and fables that Henestrosa had learned while growing up in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in southern Oaxaca.

If I Should Sleep With A Lady Called Death By e.e. cummings

if I should sleep with a lady called death
get another man with firmer lips
to take your new mouth in his teeth
(hips pumping pleasure into hips).

Seeing how the limp huddling string
of your smile over his body squirms
kissingly, I will bring you every spring
handfuls of little normal worms.

Dress deftly your flesh in stupid stuffs,
phrase the immense weapon of your hair.
Understanding why his eye laughs,
I will bring you every year

something which is worth the whole,
an inch of nothing for your soul.

Dying In The Dark Of The Year

It may be only me, but I think that a huge part of being a witch is confronting, meeting, teasing out, having conversations with, engaging, dancing with, negotiating with, and making love to your Shadows. Reading Jung is, for me, reading religion. My brilliant friend S., before she moved (reluctantly, Goddess, how reluctantly) to California, used to really help me to confront my Shadow. But this time of year is, I think, perfect for -- this time of year demands! -- confronting, engaging, meeting, staring at your Shadow. Right now, the winds are so strong here in Northern Virginia, that they are literally sucking at and pulling at my windows, trying to open them, trying to get inside and make me face what the cold and dark mean to me.

Well, the cold and dark mean to me precisely what I imagine they meant to my Swedish many-times-great Grandmothers: wildness, ecstasy, purity, and, death. I know in my bones that more than a few of my foremothers died due to cold, died trying to fend cold-hunger-crazed wolves from the cave, died coughing and hungry in the long starlit nights, died asleep and bleeding in the deep, dark cold of winter. But I also know in my bones how many of my grandmothers thrilled to those incredibly clear stars on these bone-chilling evenings, how many of my grandmothers laughed wildly skiing, skating, sledding over the frozen snow (solidified emotion), found ecstasy in the Aurora Borealis, danced under the light of the full moon on snow, made love under the long dark skies, conceived brave sons and daughters in the ice cold. That second group of grandmothers came to my aid when I was doing chemo; nothing made me feel better that winter than ice cold air, gulped as if it were, as it, indeed was, a restorative. I gulped it in like a life-giving elixir, the colder, the better.

And, as my v. brilliant friend E. recently remarked to me, "Well, this is the time of year for dying." S.'s beloved father died a few days ago, causing her to re-confront some of her own Shadows. My wonderful friend, R., aka the best cook in the world, called me last night to talk about a mutual friend, a witch, who is facing Death, that Shadow of all Shadows, and worrying herself beyond reason over its possible arrival. Then, we talked about the Day of the Dead ritual that she led this Fall. Thorn is confronting the death of a dearly-beloved cat. And, today, I was confronted at work with a colleague whose parents are dying, will he or nill he.

There are two things that we witches could do a better job of: helping young witches to access their religion and helping old witches to die. Odd, how we've got the middle part more or less figured out, but, the beginnings and the endings, not so much. Vague notions of the Summerlands. Vague notions of reincarnation. Occasionally, a real attempt to help a beloved elder cross over. This is not how a real religion deals with death. Here, in the long winter nights, I am calling for us to do a better job.




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Art found here.