Synchronicity -- Wherever You Go, There It Is

There's this:

You don’t have to wait until things reach a critical point before you take stock of your life. Make it a habit to regularly sit down, be with yourself and ask yourself what you want, if you are happy with how you spend your time, if your relationships are strong or just a place to gossip. Go on a retreat, take a weekend to write in your journal and read inspiring books. Step away from your life in order to look at it more deeply. To paraphrase Michael Gerber: “Work ON your life, not just IN it.”

TAKE it off.

What are you still settling for in your life, in your surroundings, in your schedule? What’s draining you? What’s not a “hell yes?”

Be ruthless in answering these questions. And then, be ruthless in letting go. Take it off and feel the space that’s created from not settling for excess maybe’s in your life. Make your life one big YES – and live from that place.

How to Heal a Planet: A Give-and-Take Guide by Christine Kane

and, there's this:

And my time is particularly precious right now, because I’m not only writing but also teaching full-time and attempting to finish a doctoral dissertation. And I have a seven-year-old.

To be honest, I think what I did to make time for all those things is cut out the things that wasted time, that didn’t seem worthwhile. But that took looking at life a little differently.

So for example, once upon a time I used to make dinner. I would get home from the university and make dinner, which took about an hour. When we lived in the city, that was easy to do and still left time in the evenings. But here, after my commute, I am far too tired in the evenings. So instead of making dinner, I rely on organic frozen dinners. I know, they’re not homemade, but they’re as healthy as anything I would make myself, and Ophelia gets to try all sorts of things I don’t know how to make. . . . And while they’re cooking in the oven, I can write a blog post.

There are all sorts of other ways in which I decided to simplify my life and make time for what I thought truly mattered. For example, I decided a long time ago never to buy any clothes that required dry-cleaning. . . . All of the dishes and utensils go into the dishwasher, including the silver plate. If silver plate is used every day, it doesn’t need polishing. I have furniture that doesn’t need a lot of care, solid wood pieces. The floor requires sweeping and the rugs must be vacuumed, but this is a small house, relatively easy to keep clean. (It could be both cleaner and neater, but here I’ve decided that I’m not going to feel guilty about spending time writing instead of cleaning. Because after all, everyone who visits tells me how neat my house is. So that’s good enough, right?)

. . .

I should say, too, that there are a lot of things people consider leisure activities that I don’t bother with, partly because to me they’re not all that interesting. Going to movies in theaters, for example. Any sport that involves a ball. (I’ve discussed, haven’t I, my experience with balls? We repel each other, like magnets. Imagine how difficult that made kickball, in elementary school!) Going sailing, just to go sailing rather than getting anywhere. Going to any sort of gym for exercise. (Why? I’d rather go to a dance class.) Going to a spa. (Why? I’d rather learn to spin wool, or fight with a sword, or just about anything.) And I don’t shop, except when I’m going to an old book store, a thrift store, an antiques market. If I’m going to shop, it’s going to be an adventure. (Malls. Why?) That’s a good rule, actually: don’t do anything unless it’s an adventure. The other stuff: what’s the point? (Unless you like doing it, of course, and then you should. But don’t do things just because you feel as though you ought to.)

Not that it’s effortless. There are days when I’m tired, days when I don’t want to write. But I do think that writing is not about having time, but about making time. It’s about priorities. It’s about doing the things that truly matter, and trying to minimize the rest.

Making Time by Theodora Goss

In the end, it all comes down to Mary Oliver's Very Important Question: "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" (I'm not a tattoo girl, but if I ever did get tattoos, one of them would be that question, somewhere like on my forearm where I could see it all the time. (The other would be one of my favorite quotes from Rumi: "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."))

Picture found here.

What Circles So Perfectly

Even Though You Have Broken Your Vows A Thousand Times

Thinking about a get together with some magical women coming up in a few weeks where we'll be discussing, inter alia, our daily practice, I think that the story of my daily practice can be summed up in a poem by Rumi:

Wanderers, worshippers, lovers of leaving!
Even though you have broken your vows a thousand times,
Come! Yet again, come, come.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.

With my Moon in drifty Pisces, my Ascendent in flighty Gemini, and my Moon in lazy Taurus, it's not as if I am ideally aspected for a practice that requires attention, dedication, focus. And, yet, over and over -- often enough to have almost worn a groove in the pine floors of my ritual room -- I lower my old and creaky body to the floor, sit at my low altar, light the candles, light the incense, shake the seed pod rattle. Over and over, until I imagine that they all laugh, as in the LeGuin story, "Oh, it's that one again," I call the Elements, my allies, the 4 Goddesses with whom I work. Over and over, even when it takes long minutes to bring my monkey mind back, back, back, a thousand times, back to the breathing exercises, I remember: Mine is not a caravan of despair.

Do you have a daily practice? What is it? What is it that keeps you coming back? What would get you to return to it?

Picture found here.

Lie Down In That Grass

Via e-mail, a couple of readers have responded with dismay to my post on calendar magic. "That's not magic; that's basic How to Function 101 with some allusions to the elements thrown in!" And, "Liminal spaces are magical spaces, not dead time at the end of the mundane year!"

Which reminds me of one of Hecate's famous Wiccan distinctions: Some people practice witchcraft. And some people are witches. Neither is any better than the other, but there is a difference.

IMHO, Wicca always was, and hopefully always will be, a religion of the people. And as Medusa recently noted to Thorn Coyle, many, if not most, people have a limited need in their lives for connection with the divine. So for many people, Wicca will always be about a tumble in the Spring clover on Beltane, the enjoyment of mead at Mabon, a moment to remember ancestors at Samhein, a spell for a new job or a new love, and the odd connection with "something else" felt almost by random at a full moon or on a beach at sunrise. A good time at a festival. An 8-times-a-year experience. And that's good. That's practicing witchcraft.

Other people have a much stronger need to spend as much of their time as possible living in connection with the Divine, inhabiting their Goddess-selves, walking around aware that it's all just god pouring god into god. My own shorthand for this is "living as a witch." And what I want to do, what I try to write about on this blog, is not so much practicing witchcraft (there are lots of good blogs about that), but living as a witch. I want to explore how to live as a witch every possible moment in this modern world. I don't, no matter how much some part of me may long for it, live in a Ren Faire forest or a Goddess temple or in a cave on an island. I live in a modern urban center, with congested traffic and Starbucks and homeless people on the streets next to the v rich and the v powerful. I work at a large law firm. I get mammograms and colonoscopies in major modern medical centers. I buy my groceries at Whole Foods. My circle does magic to influence political events in the modern world and I spend most of my day -- almost every single day -- on a computer. And I need to know how to live THAT life as a witch, how to dance THAT dance as fully aware as possible of my connection to everything that is, of the fact that I am a manifestation of the Goddess, of the fact that it's all real, it's all metaphor, there's always more.

And, sure, sometimes, I find liminal spaces by fasting, taking a ritual bath in a tub filled with rose petals picked on the dark moon from my own rose bushes, lighting incense in my ritual room, casting a circle deosil with a silver athame whose handle is sealed with a celtic knot made of gold, and traveling along the astral plane to a spot prepared for me both by my own ritual workings and by my Patroness, a serious-eyed Lady with three heads and a large black dog. I go there for a purpose, to change consciousness/reality/myself/the world at will, to work pre-planned magic in a place where all things are in flux and where change is not only possible, but likely. It's hard work, it's exhilarating, it's serious business.

But I don't do that kind of magic every day. Even if I didn't have to get up, put on a suit, and show up on time at work, I couldn't do that kind of working every day. But I still need to live every day as a witch. Sure, I know I'm a witch when I'm wearing ritual robes and burning incense on charged coals inside a circle of spring-green light. But I need to know how to live as a witch when I'm stuck in traffic on the Roosevelt Bridge, when I'm taking a client to lunch at the Palm, when I'd dropping off drycleaning, when I'm firing up my Apple computer to read blogs, when I'm mowing my lawn, when I'm on my iPhone with Son, when I'm calculating whether or not to refinance my home, when I'm trying to talk myself into just five more minutes on the treadmill.

And, thus, for me, the world, the world that we dare to call "mundane," is full of liminal spaces, many of them as yet undiscovered. It's full of serendipity. It's full of elementals and dryads and pixies and Goddesses and genii locii. It's full of metaphor. It's full of magic. Liminal spaces don't only exist upon the astral; adolescence is a liminal space, menopause is a liminal space, pregnancy is a liminal space, being out of a job is a liminal space, living in a country longing for an evil leader to go away and a new inspiring leader to assume his job is a liminal space, every corner that I turn all day, every intersection through which I drive my car is -- you guessed it -- a liminal space. Being aware of the liminality of each of those situations is a big part of what it means, for me, to live as a witch. And looking for ways to use such "mundane" liminality -- figuring out a magical way to use downtime at the end of the secular year -- is probably, IMHO, a more important part of living as a witch than the limited number of times each year when I dress up in ritual robes and do high magic. If I had, Goddess forfend, to give up one or the other, I'd trade my most ecstatic high ritual experiences for a lifetime of everyday magic. So I balance my checkbook with magical intent, I cook and freeze cabbage lentil soup with magical intent, and I organize my calendar with magical intent, and I call upon the elements for aid, and I ground before I pick up my pen.

Rumi said: Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase "each other" doesn't make any sense. That's a liminal space and it doesn't matter where you find it: inside a circle inscribed with the names of seraphim and demons or beneath a full moon on a frosty field or at your desk with your new calendar before you. The important thing is to lie down in that grass.

~Art found here.

The Practice Of Magical Practice

I did magic tonight w an old friend of mine, a woman who used to be in my circle and with whom I still get together once a week, along with others, to do ecstatic dance, eat a common meal, chat.

It felt so good to be standing in the cool air of an Autumn evening, underneath a few bright stars peaking through the clouds, grounding, centering, feeling the way that my animal body becomes, because it is an animal body, a vessel for magic.

I may be wrong; there may be women for whom this comes early and easy, but it seems to me that there is a feeling born only of years of magical practice, that teaches the lesson from the charge of the Goddess: "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."

You can't set out doing magic in order to obtain this feeling, this cellular and organic understanding that you are a vessel for, and an opening into the world of, magic. But at some point -- after half a lifetime of grounding and centering and casting circles and calling the quarters and speaking intentions and chanting and dancing and drumming and visualizing and raising cones and releasing cones and being frustrated and being enchanted and returning daily to your altar, happy, sad, frustrated, disbelieving, coming, as Rumi said, yet again, come, come, even though you have abandoned your vows a thousand times, come, yet again, come, come -- you find the mystery within yourself. And it seems to me, not that I would know, that it's just like what they said about those who experienced the Mysteries of Eleusis: ever after, they had no fear of death. Ever after, you know that you have found within yourself what you could never find without: that which has been with you from the beginning and which is attained at the end of all desire.

And, yet, and here's only one more lovely paradox, you have to get up the next morning and practice again, sit zazen again, ground again, connect again with the mist in the Autumn garden and the squirrels in the trees and the current in the air and the Fifth Sacred Thing. Because what I imagine, not that I would know, is that what they taught at Eleusis was that it's a process, not an end result.

I suppose that I stopped making sense several paragraphs ago. There's a Rumi poem about that, too.

May it be so for you.

Art found here.

Grace

I saw a fox!

This morning, on my drive to work, I passed, as I always do, a stretch of land that's recently been cleared of almost every single bush, branch, and shrub in order to "develop" the area with a bunch of townhouses. Seems an odd thing, to me, to be doing in the midst of a real estate bust, when there are already far more homes for sale than people looking for homes, but, Goddess forefend, there was land, just sitting there with trees and plants growing on it, providing a mini-habitat for wildlife, and we can't have that in the Patriarchal States of America.

As I drove past, a red fox, likely drawn out of her den by our unseasonably warm weather, came tearing out of the plot of denuded land, down the steep slope that's already losing soil and becoming way too steep, and into the road. I slammed on my brakes, believing all the while that I was going to hit her, I was sure to hit her, I couldn't help but hit her. At the last possible moment, she turned, quick as, well, quick as a fox, and dashed back up the hill and out of my sight.

And that's grace. That's how grace happens. Grace comes dashing out at you unexpectedly while you are driving to work and making lists in your head of things that you need to do and half-listening to the weather report and -- bam -- there's grace. Suddenly, you're yanked into the real, real, real world and every cell in your body is alive, including the synapses that only synapse in response to what we'll call, for lack of a better word, divinityeverythingimmanencegaia.

I love foxes. I love all the trickster Gods and Goddesses and every culture that has known Fox has recognized her as an avatar of the trickster Goddess. She's sly and she's tricky and she lives by her wits and, damn, she's just so gorgeous. I used to have a fox who visited my yard in the snow, but I haven't seen her in a few years; suburbanites tend to harm foxes.

In his amazing book, As the World Burns, Derrick Jensen tells the story of a young woman who wants desperately to save the world while holding on to her iPod and car and all the accouterments of modern civilization. She keeps trying to "work" the lists of Ten Things You Can Do to Save the World or Fifty Steps to Fight Global Warming. She inflates her tires and washes her clothes in warm, not hot, water, and walks to the store.

And of course, it's not enough. Finally, she does a very Pagan thing. She asks the plants and animals what she has to do to save the world. And they give her at least fifty answers. The manatee tells her, "Stop treating us as your enemy. We used to be your friends!" The ram tells her, "Remember that the natural world is not your enemy. The natural world is the basis of your life. If you don't have a good relationship with it, you'll die." The tree tells her, "You evolved together with us to be with us. You're part of us. Let go of your destructive culture and you'll remember how to live with us and how to be happy." The fox tells her, "You're here as much for us as we're here for you."

I've been thinking a lot about that, about the notion that, while we may have to give up some material things -- such as cans of soda and unthinking access to electricity -- in order to save the world, we might get back something important in exchange: a relationship with the natural world that would, in the end, be more far more rewarding and make us whole. A relationship that might expose us to more regular, and less terrifying, encounters with, say, the red fox, which is to say with grace, than the one that I had today. And, even that encounter, fraught as it was, left me stopping at moments throughout my day, during conference calls and meetings and while digesting pleadings, and looking out the window and whispering, "A fox. I saw a fox. I saw a fox and I didn't harm her."

It's almost the Dark Moon and I'm an old woman who's spent a lifetime learning law and not how to track a fox. I could wander that plot all night and never find the fox's den. But I'd like to find her, offer her some berries, and apologize to her for the scare that I gave to her. I'd like to thank her for bringing grace right out of the denuded land into my morning. I'll go off to my altar and see if I can do it between the worlds.

Hey! Fox! "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about language, ideas, even the phrase 'each other' doesn't make any sense." Rumi said that, that old fox. He might have been talking about that denuded field on Lee Highway, next to the Whitman Walker labyrinth. He could have been.

Happy Birthday, Rumi!

In comments at Eschaton, Moonbotica reminds me that today is the birthday of my favorite poet, Rumi.

It would take a whole day to post even some of his best poems, but here, in honor of his birthday, are just a few:

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.



THE PHRASING MUST CHANGE

Learn about your inner self from those who know such things,
but don't repeat verbatim what they say.

Zuleikha let everything be the name of Joseph, from celery seed
to aloes wood. She loved him so much she concealed his name
in many different phrases, the inner meanings
known only to her. When she said, The wax is softening
near the fire, she meant, My love is wanting me.
Or if she said, Look, the moon is up or The willow has new leaves
or The branches are trembling or The coriander seeds
have caught fire or The roses are opening
or The king is in a good mood today or Isn't that lucky?
or The furniture needs dusting or
The water carrier is here or It's almost daylight or
These vegetables are perfect or The bread needs more salt
or The clouds seem to be moving against the wind
or My head hurts or My headache's better,
anything she praises, it's Joseph's touch she means,
any complaint, it's his being away.
When she's hungry, it's for him. Thirsty, his name is a sherbet.
Cold, he's a fur. This is what the Friend can do
when one is in such love. Sensual people use the holy names
often, but they don't work for them.
The miracle Jesus did by being the name of God,
Zuleikha felt in the name of Joseph.

When one is united to the core of another, to speak of that
is to breathe the name Hu, empty of self and filled
with love. As the saying goes, The pot drips what is in it.
The saffron spice of connecting, laughter.
The onion smell of separation, crying.
Others have many things and people they love.
This is not the way of Friend and friend.


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!"

Wednesday Rumi Blogging

Some Kiss We Want - Rumi


There is some kiss we want with our whole lives,
the touch of spirit on the body.

Sea water begs the pearl to break its shell.
And the lily, how passionately it needs some wild darling!

At night, I open the window
and ask the moon to come and press its face against mine.
Breathe into me.
Close the language-door and open the love window.
The moon won't use the door, only the window.

Saturday Rumi Blogging

Is it your face that adorns this garden?

Is it your fragrance that intoxicates this garden?

Is it your Spirit that has made this brook a river of wine?

Hundreds have looked for you, and died searching in this garden,

where you hide behind the scenes.

But this pain is not for those who come as lovers.

You are easy to find here.

You are in the breeze and in this river of wine.

~Rumi