Looks Good

More info here and, esp., here.

NPR's not-too-enthusiastic review is here. (I am still waiting for NPR to EVER like an even vaguely feminist film.) The film fares better 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.

True

Witches share with mystics from every religious and cultural background a common insight into the nature of reality. The day-to-day world of apparently separate things -- its tasks and worries, its striving, lonely, consciousness -- is an illusion. Like a veil, it covers an infinitely complex, unified, and joyful dance of ever-becoming, ensouled creation.

~Starhawk in Twelve Wild Swans.

Picture found here.

A Witch Takes Responsibility

Wicca is a mystical religious system. . . . Wiccan spirituality . . . requires the practitioner to develop a secure awareness of . . . how choices are connected to consequences. . . . Wicca has autonomy at its core, too. Even in group work[,] each participant is responsible for doing [her] own very [difficult] work to gain understanding and seek appropriate balance in order to be effective. We learn that[,] in Wicca, as in many other spiritual traditions, all the teachers and books and lessons taught by others mean nothing if we don't do our own work and take responsibility for our own progress. Others can't do the work for us and hand us spiritual awakening as something for us to consume. They can show us how they do things [and] talk about the insights they've had, but[,] in the end[,] we must have the realizations ourselves and discover and strengthen our own individual relationships with the Divine and with our inner selves.

~Ben Gruagach in The Wiccan Mystic

Which is a long way to say: And you who seek to know Me, know that the seeking and yearning will avail you not, unless you know the Mystery: for if that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without.

For behold, I have been with you from the beginning, and I am That which is attained at the end of all desire.

Picture found here.

I Am A Stag Of Seven Tines, I Am A Wide Flood On A Plain

Jensen who's never, as far as I know, studied any kind of witchcraft, provides a pretty good description of what happens to mystics, what happens at the beginning of shamanic experiences. The veils are now perceptibly thinner. What do you see when you open yourself?


I see Indians dancing. I see fires. I see days and nights and years of celebrations and mournings. I see people making love. I see the same for all kinds of animals, all kinds of plants. I see them living, dying, loving, hating. I see generation after generation of human, generation after generation of cedar, generation after generation of porcupine, generation after generation of ant, generation after generation of grasses, mosses, generation after generation of fire.

And suddenly I see even more. I see generation after generation of muse, dreamgiver, demon, walking back and forth between worlds. I see geese and martens and wrentits moving between worlds. I see fires moving between worlds. I see humans moving between worlds. I see the living and the dead.

I see all these worlds being renewed by this intercourse, this movement across borders porous and impenetrable and permeable and impermeable and breathing and alive as skin. I see these worlds winding and unwinding, tangling and untangling like the lovers they are, and I see moments in time, too, winding and unwinding, tangling and untangling like the lovers that they are, too. These worlds, moments, they are not one, they are not two. They are lovers, like any other.

Derrick Jensen in Songs of the Dead.

Picture found here.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Tomorrow's the Feast of St. Valentine, and the incomparable Sara Sutterfield Winn pointed me to this wonderful discussion of what love means to Pagans:

I am stuck on the morning light. So much so that I can barely think about aught else. It bleeds all over the wet, dark grass, revealed after a weekend of soaring wind and rain, swaddling February in March’s clothes. The prairie grass that clumps and bends by the roadside lights up like candles in the morning, the tall stems and feathery tips unnamed due to my ignorance, but that I have come to think of as Wing Grass. Poets and biologists may differ over Names, but no matter, it’s the same willowy grace, the soft nimbus haloed behind by the globe of the sun, the roots thrilling in the spongy earth.

The city has its own hard grace, but I do miss the sky. Driving out in the countryside this week, the great vault opened above me, and its vast, empty richness spilled down in huge lungfuls, and I became instantly awash in tears. Love was the message, and the wind in the sky, the blazing of the trees, was the medium.

Love. You know, that’s a tricky subject for a lot of folks, and rightly so.

. . .

Our gods are complex and ten-dimensional! They aren’t simply giant laps we lay our heads on when times get hard - we grapple and wrestle with them, make deals and sacrifices, laugh and clink cups with them, dance and mourn with and for them, and yes, we love them….and sometimes they love us…but Love with a capital “L”? Universal Love? Love, the chemical makeup of organic bedrock…floating there in the dark matter between photons and electrons? Love that pours down from the sky and is swirling around in our cells, motivating the blood through our veins and pumping out of mountain springs, up through black caves made of limestone, out on the wings of the wind, rustling and shouting in leaves and the cry of birds? Eh, wevs.

Well I disagree (and I’m so painfully subtle about it all, I know). I think we can and should speak of Love again as a people - strive to wonder about a Pagan theology of Love - what would this look like? To speak in its language, as the ancient Greeks, who possessed a wide vocabulary of love. Philia, Eros, Agape. The sophisticated, beautiful love that Aphrodite reigned over, the dangerous, ecstatic love of Dionysos. When we engage as Pagani in the discourse of Love, we have a staggeringly rich world from which to pull. To bring Love down from the meaningless aether and work it like clay into the form of embodied theologies, into discourse, into reflection, into the vetting of our ethical beings, into right relationship with the Land. Love is there - love meets us there - we can invoke it with integrity and meaning - it can be something as real to us as our hands.

And then, of course, there’s the sky and the Land burning like roman candles in the midday - paradoxically laying a hand on my forehead and cooling the fever of my mind…forgiving faults…easing pain…and breaking my heart open like a walnut shell, flying into a thousand pieces, weeping stormily and crying out to that divine shade of blue the first thing that rises to my mouth, summoned from the depth of such a feeling… “O I love you. I love you.” Oh there, friends, there. What are we to make of that?

Love…magic…the numinous…the Mama….what’s the difference?

Very little that I can see, beloveds.

Describing mystical experience, of whatever variety -- xian, islamic, buddhist, Pagan -- is almost impossible. (Which is why the Charge of the Goddess says: "And you who seek to know Me, know that the seeking and yearning will avail you not, unless you know the Mystery: for if that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without. For behold, I have been with you from the beginning, and I am That which is attained at the end of desire.")

Rumi managed it and, in the post excerpted above, Ruby Sara does, as well.

Meanwhile, my v creative friend, K. points me to THIS GREAT IDEA FOR VALENTINE'S DAY [concerning] the dreadful incident . . . in which a group of men (associated with the right-wing Hindu group Sri Ram Sena, who oppose violation of "traditional values," especially by Indian women natch) [went] into a pub on a Saturday afternoon and attack[ed] the female patrons.

A group of Indian women have started the awesomely-named Consortium of Pubgoing, Loose and Forward Women and launched a campaign to send pink panties, or chaddis, to Pramod Muthalik, leader of the Sri Ram Sena, in protest of his misogynist horseshit.

[Then, on] Valentine's Day, women across the world are being encouraged to: "Go to a pub wherever you are. From Kabul to Chennai to Guwahati to Singapore to LA women have signed up. It does not matter if you are actually not a pub-goer or not even much of a drinker. Let us raise a toast (it can be juice) to Indian women. Take a photo or video. We will put it together (more on how later) and send this as well to the Sri Ram Sena.".

Picture found here.

Discussing The Undiscussable

Mystical experience, the experience of the mystic, what it is that mystics experience -- that stuff is, almost by definition, idiomatic. It cannot be translated into any standard language, although it is possible that the language of exceptional music, exceptional art, exceptional poetry (over prose), may come close.

My deepest mystical experience -- and this is odd for a mammal, living in the flesh -- is observing bright, late-afternoon sunshine on leaves, grocking photosynthesis and the symphony inherent therein, being in a forest or a garden. Yesterday, I walked through the Brookside Gardens and sucked, as a hungry child suckles a breast, upon the amazing sight of sunlight filtered though deep forest shade. I see Fairies there, but I mean the word "fairie" in a scary and Earth-centered sense. I reminded myself that I can go on living.

On my way out, I sat by a bed of unknown blue flowers with scented leaves that was covered by a lacy and ever-undulating blanket of bees making inter-species love to the flowers. I wish that I knew what those flowers were.

I came home and, this morning, woke up to deep purple morning glories being penetrated, over and over, seriatum, by a fat buzzing bee. And, upon exiting from every flower, backing up, legs over legs, the bee left a scattering of golden pollen. I watched and watched and watched.

I don't know how to describe this. It's idiomatic. The poet Mary Oliver may have come close when she wrote, speaking of a different, native American plant:

And, therefore, let the immeasurable come.
Let the unknowable touch the buckle of my spine.
Let the wind turn in the trees,
and the mystery hidden in the dirt

swing through the air.
How could I look at anything in this world
and tremble, and grip my hands over my heart?
What should I fear?

One morning
in the leafy green ocean
the honeycomb of the corn's beautiful body
is sure to be there.

I watched the bee, about whose people I have been so worried, make love over and over to one deep purple morning glory after another, and all that I could feel, here on the edge of Autumn and the season of hunger and cold, was:

Let the immeasurable come.
Let the unknowable touch the buckle of my spine.
Let the wind turn in the trees,
and the mystery hidden in the dirt

swing through the air.
How could I look at anything in this world
and tremble, and grip my hands over my heart?
What should I fear?

One morning
in late summer,
the bee spread golden pollen
from one flower
all over the deep purple petal
of another.

I find myself content.



May it be so for you.


Photo found here.

Mystical Experience

Carol Christ has more on process philosophy:

Embodied mysticism is felt in the body, for example in eating and drinking or in dancing or making love or in climbing the peach tree--not in negation of the self or the body through ascetic practices. Embedded mysticism seek does not seek to annihilate the self, nor to rise above the world, but to feel the feelings of other individuals in world ever more deeply. Embedded mysticism is the sense of being part of a larger whole that is infused with the presence of the divine. This larger whole includes both human and other than human life. There is no place in embodied embedded mysticism for the notion that the divine exists apart from the physical world and that our goal is to deny the self or physical body in order to connect with immaterial or transcendent divinity. In contrast to philosophies rooted in classical dualisms, process philosophy affirms all bodies and the world as the body of Goddess/God. Because it corrects the theological mistakes that arose from denying the female body through which we are born into the world, process philosophy can provide grounding for a feminist understanding of mysticism.

Go read the whole thing here.

Interestingly, given that her topic is philosophy, she begins her essay doing what Cat Chapin-Bishop urges: talking about the actuality of mystical Pagan experience.

From Six Recognitions Of The Lord By Mary Oliver

3.

I lounge on the grass, that's all. So
simple. Then I lie back until I am
inside the cloud that is just above me
but very high, and shaped like a fish.
Or, perhaps not. Then I enter the place
of not-thinking, not-remembering, not-
wanting. When the blue jay cries out his
riddle, in his carping voice, I return.
But I go back, the threshold is always
near. Over and back, over and back. Then
I rise. Maybe I rub my face as though I
have been asleep. But I have not been
asleep. I have been, as I say, inside
the cloud, or, perhaps, the lily floating
on the water. Then I go back to town
to my own house, my own life, which has
now become brighter and simpler, some-where I have never been before

6.

Every summer the lilies rise
and open their white hands until they almost
cover the black waters of the pond. And I give
thanks but it does not seem like adequate thanks,
it doesn't seem
festive enough or constant enough, nor does the
name of the Lord or the words of thanksgiving come
into it often enough Everywhere I go I am
treated like royalty, which I am not. I thirst and
am given water. My eyes thirst and I am given
the white lilies on the black water. My heart
sings but the apparatus of singing doesn't convey
half what it feels and means. In spring there's hope,
in fall the exquisite, necessary diminishing, in
winter I am as sleepy as any beast in its
leafy cave, but in summer there is
everywhere the luminous sprawl of gifts,
the hospitality of the Lord and my
inadequate answers as I row my beautiful, temporary body
through this water-lily world.

*******************

Substitute "Goddess" or "the Lord and the Lady" for Oliver's "Lords" and this is a v Pagan poem, I think. It confirms for me that mystics do what mystics do and then they seek for some kind of language to translate the cannot-be-translated into words. The words can be xian, Hindu, Buddhist, Kabbalah, Wiccan. It doesn't matter. In the end, it's all just god pouring god into god, as someone once said.