Weavers................

"Weavers" (2014)

 

Stories are not abstractions from life but how we engage with it.  We make stories and those stories make us human.  We awaken into stories as we awaken into language, which is there before and after us.  The question is not so much "What do I learn from stories" as "What stories do I want to live?"   Insofar as I'm non-dual with my narratives, that question is just as much, 

"What stories want to come to life through me?"

David R. Loy, "The World is Made of Stories" 

Sometimes I become overwhelmed with the events of the world, and have to refuse to watch the news, even the worthy information that colleagues send me.  At such a crucial time in the evolution of humanity,  such a long awaited and brief window, the old and ugly stories of war, of greed, of old patriarchal tribal war gods endlessly demanding blood and supremacy, and endless consumer economies that can lead only to collapse........... and both leading to the end of hope.   No, you can't live with that.  So I stop, and walk into the garden, and remember the stories that are sacred, the myths that renew and sustain.  

  

It seems to me that we are every day planting and weaving the World Stories as tell our own stories in so many ways.  And, whether we realize it or not, we are doing so in collaboration with many others.  As  the generative  incubation of  winter quietly approaches, may we remember how important our task really is, how little time we really have:  to  plant seeds for the future that ever grow,  ever green, into  stories of the Sacred Earth and our true community with All Beings. 

"Midwives" (2014)

400,000 Strong Marching for Climate in N.Y.C.!

  

Think about it - 400,000 people marching through the canyons of New York City, one of the worlds great centers of commerce, marching for a Global Civilization to save our planet from climate devastation.  This is reality, not a novel.

These, as Paul Simon sang, are the Days of Miracles and Wonders.  Truly, a historical event.

Thanks to Joyce for this! 

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025566043

Mabon! And The Circle Has No End

 

I want to wish the Blessings of Mabon, The Autumn Equinox, the Second Harvest Festival to all my friends.  An auspicious, a sacred day, and I remember well when I lived back East and celebrated with honey mead and fallen apples, gathered  brilliant red on the brilliant green grass.

Being a person from the dry west, I found it miraculous, amazing, this overwhelming generosity of  Gaia.  Given and given.  I remember in 1990 my friend Rose organized an event in NYC around the Equinox, and I brought a basket of apples I had found  on the ground.  I felt moved to share them, telling the audience  my sense of how sacred that was, these apples,  how important to remember. 

And at the end of the evening I was touched when those tough, sophisticated  New Yorkers took every single one. I sometimes think that was one of the best things I've ever done as a Priestess. 

This morning I woke up singing "The Circle Has No End".  It's not exactly a Mabon Song, but I wanted to share it today, as the Circle Turns.

Raising a glass of cider to all!

http://youtu.be/hPGSw1tKwGw

More travels on the Coast..........

Just to be with the Pacific Ocean, north and south.  The strange knarled trees right out of Tolkien that line the edge of the world at Casper.  I notice that I always seem to find them as entranceways to somewhere else, perhaps some strange door to the world of Faery............

When I emerged to the overlook of Jughandle Beach, I was just in time to see a wedding in progress, just in time, in fact, to snap "the kiss".

This solitary  tree, clinging so tenatiously to the edge of the cliff, is an old friend of mine.

And here is South, way south of Casper, at La Jolla down by San Diego.  I am eternally fascinated by pelicans, graceless birds on land, but when they fly they are as precise and elegant as any air show imaginable.  Might like to come back as a pelican next lifetime, living above the ocean and fishing when I'm not preening my wings.  Seems very pleasurable.

Not to mention the seals, basking in the sun when they're not barking at each other.  Swimming dogs, fascinating to watch them play with each other in the water.

And schools of brightly colored  rainbow kayaks, ignored by the bored looking pelicans.

It's been so healing to be on the ocean, to visit Mother Ocean.  Thank you and great praise, Yemaya.

One last hibiscus...........................

Venus Synchronicities.........

I'm still here in California. And strangely, I seem to be in the middle of a Syncronicity Cluster based on the Goddess of Love, Aphrodite/Venus.  I think, when this kind of thing keeps going on, one must pay attention.  

"Venus" by Lorraine Capparell 

I received a notice from artist Lorraine Capparell  about her beautiful sculpture Venus.  Oddly, I used another of her sculptures to illustrate the previous entry. 

I received a day later an order for an Aphrodite mask.  And a notice about a Circle Work workshop with Jalaja Bonheim, who wrote Aphrodite's Daughters, a wonderful book I revisited a few weeks ago when visiting my friend Joanne, who had it on her kitchen table because she is doing research with the book. (I also posted about her a month or so back)

 Then I received a notice about an Aphrodite Workshop occurring this coming weekend, sponsored by two women I know from Reclaiming - one is an acquaintance, Laurie Lovecraft (an appropriate name for a priestess of the Goddess of Love).  I'm tempted to brave the truly horrendous L.A. traffic to attend - Laurie and Tami's description of working with the heart to open the path to creativity, and to create beauty.......is  just the healing affirmation I may need.

And how terribly wounded Aphrodite is in our world.  As I write this, I reflect on how, a few days ago, I was lying on the bed in a motel room, flipping through the TV channels.  There were no less than 5 programs within that hour about young women, girlfriends,  wives  and an exotic dancer murdered by men.  A stranger from another culture would think that raping and killing young women was the national sport. 

In fact, now that I think about it, the need to destroy Aphrodite in every way is at the very heart of patriarchal culture.  Because a culture that values love, beauty, and Eros............is a culture that would not be able to make war, or guns, because it would be a culture with great reverence for life.

Here is a poem I wrote for Aphrodite in 1999:

APHRODITE IN BROOKLYN

Please allow me to take off my shoes,

this faux marble pose 

this modern, pragmatic mask.

Permit me my ruin.

Let us not consider this therapy

  or revolution

do not ask me to give you space

let us not discuss those who came before

and those who might follow.

Let us not talk of past lives.

I have fallen on hard times.

If you come to my temple

  just

let me make for you an ocean.

Half seen in the darkness

your body, a mystery

true, tangible, radiant,

lined with the rings of your life.

You are beautiful,

beautiful to be a man.

Darling, even in this era, I will not believe

that love is disposable,

that sex is safe

that lovers are trains, rolling past each other

to some certain station 

  I remember,

  I almost remember my river source

My skin forms the word anew,

  yes,

  enter me

  as if you were coming home

Telling the World With the Stories We Tell

"Story Teller"  by Lorraine Capparell

Lately I've felt at a loss for words.  So I felt like pulling up some worthy words by a few people I admire about how to manage life, art, and creating reality.  Spider Woman in Pueblo traditions is also called "Thought Woman", because she makes the world with the stories she tells about the world.   So do we...........

  

Spider and Cross, prehistoric Mississippian Culture ornament

"God needs us as much as we need God.  We need God because we are God's stories.  God needs us because we are God's way to make new kinds of stories."

David R. Loy, "The World is Made of Stories" 

 People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons.  From within. ”

― Ursula K. Le Guin

"Progress might have been alright once upon a time, but it has gone on for too long."

---Ogden Nash

"Stories are not abstractions from life but how we engage with it.  We make stories and those stories make us human.  We awaken into stories as we awaken into language, which is there before and after us.  The question is not so much "What do I learn from stories" as "What stories do I want to live?"   Insofar as I'm non-dual with my narratives, that question is just as much, 

"What stories want to come to life through me?"

David R. Loy, "The World is Made of Stories" 

"As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.”

― Ursula K. Le Guin

"Our job was not to just re-tell the ancient  myths, but to re-invent them for today.  Artists are the myth makers."

Katherine Josten, The Global Art Project

 
"With every passing hour our solar system comes 43 thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in the Constellation of Hercules. And still there are some misfits who continue to insist that there is no such thing as progress."

---Ransom K. Ferm

"What's a day without a good rationalization?"

---Fred (Bartender at the Crystal Korner Bar, Madison, Wisconsin)

Crop Circle, Wiltshire,England, 2009

What Did You Do?

It's 3:23 in the morning,
and I'm awake
because my great, great, grandchildren
 won't -let -me -sleep.
My great, great, grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do, while the planet was plundered?
what did you do, when the earth was unravelling?
surely you did something when the seasons started failing
as the mammals, reptiles, and birds were all dying?
did you fill the streets with protest when democracy was stolen?
what did you do
once
you
knew

Drew Dellinger

I suppose, because my brother's funeral is immanent, that explains the kind of universal grief I feel on this trip.  And it is shocking to see the drought in Califorina.  Grief  sits in my chest, and follows me up the road, the unwelcome rider.  In my experience,  grief is something we need to say hello to, something you have to open the door to, offer a cup of tea, and listen to the stories Grief has to tell.  One way or another, Grief needs to be grieved out until our hearts break open in the places they need to break open, and we can emotionally "breath" again, have responsive hearts.  I don't mean make a permanent place for grief, to make a state religion of it like Queen Victoria did for her lost Albert.........but I do not believe it is possible to go forward without allowing loss its place.

 I find I am not so much grieving for my brother, but for the loss of so much, the strange experience of not having a family anymore (which is something many elders have to come to terms with),   so many people I've known.  I return to familiar places, expecting to find somehow my former self, and she is gone, not there.   And most of all, I grieve and pray for every precious being, pristine ocean, seaweed, the pink ladies that come up every August, rain or dry, giving us so much generous grace.  Thirsty little deer, seeking a drink at a diminished lake.  The grey fox slipping into the compost pile.  Redwoods, each one  a cathedral, reaching into the sky.  Bees.  Blackberries, growing beside the road.

Drew Dellinger

A very Old Ocean Poem............

I found this poem I wrote when I was just 18.  I'm surprised at how it still rings true for me.  

 

OCEAN PIECE

Think of this song

this song in you

     what is it?

What is this music you are,

     think of this song in you

standing at the mouth

     mouth of the ocean at dark

into the darkness this song

     the ocean makes

this song 

it passes you, through you

it is not your own

you are a part of it

Travels on the Coast (2)

I am tired, I confess.  I am also, apparently, a homing pidgion.  

Driving north from San Diego, I was depressed by the terrible dryness of inland California, the drought evident everywhere. In fact, the right word would be sorrow, and a low, humming, underlying terror.  This is global warming, surely, this devestation of my homeland, this terrible drought.  So much is changing now.  

I didn’t want to complicate my state of mind by traffic in the Bay Area, so I attempted to bypass the whole mess in San Jose, only to become confused, and find myself headed straight for Berkeley during rush hour.  Naturally, I had to get off and get a coffee at Café Med on Telegraph.

Telegraph looked seedy and depressed, the Med was much as I remembered it, but dirtier, and yet, not the same at all because 40 years is a really long time.  All my friends are memories sitting at those marbletop tables, and memories, in the end, are poor companions.  Does anyone remember People’s Park, or Moe of Moe’s Books, or  the street artists of Telegraph?  I saw my first husband, Paul, sitting vividly in my imagination at the table at the top of the stairs with his camera bag, and his dogeared  notebook………but who knows where, or who, he is now.  This becomes a metaphysical exercise if I think about it too long...........
I left to begin the ordeal of nearly 2 hours trying to get out of the Bay Area.  

At last I found myself in Vallejo, and headed toward Napa, the Wine Country reviving my spirit, and found myself, homing pidgin again, on the road to Middletown and Harbin Hot Springs.  Lots of memories there as well, the Ancient Ways Gathering in the valley campground, and dreams, even a very  prophetic dream*  I had in 1999.  For all it’s being crowded,   it’s still a healing place, a place that would be favored by Sulis, Goddess of the waters and of the fires..

Walking heavily in my bathing suit, a little lame from a decade ago injury, short of breath, I try to remember the lithe woman I was 20  years ago.  I  suppose the many nudists here look at me in my bathing suit  (with a skirt yet) like a dinosaur emerging from the 1950’s.  Fine with me, in my old age, I like both bathing suits and nightgowns.   

The waters worked their magic, and I had the little heart shaped  pool to myself all morning (fear of old ladies in bathing suits with skirts?)  Hey, wish it would work  in parking lots as well.   I hope I am becoming, as Clarissa Pinkola Estes termed it, “a dangerous old woman”. Yes!  

I floated on my back, allowing the water to take me where it will.  And with a view of the sky, tree tops, birds and bees above me, just as the previous night I saw a vast ceiling of stars glittering between dark branches, so I floated away a stress and sadness.  As I let go of “direction”, the currents floated me around the pool, , occasionally bumping into the sides, different views, sometimes returning to the same sky view but with a different slant of sunlight, a different bird, a new cloud making itself.  Until finally I came to  stillness in the center of the pool.  

And somehow, I felt that my question, “what do I do now?”  had been answered.  If indeed I had a question.  Or perhaps the question and the answer both occurred in the process of floating.  Let go, the Circle is always there, the truth is viewed from all sides, and ultimately, we all return to the Center.  Trust.

I am a great devotee of hot springs, of the generous Numina who keep the hot waters for all of us.  I don’t dream much anymore, but  I did  dream last night.  Hotsprings, I have noticed, are great places for dreaming,.  I was buying a green dress, and it had a beautiful, layered, billowing skirt down to the ankles.  I felt that I “couldn’t pass it up” as it was “only $45.00”.  But I wasn’t sure I could fit into it, it would need some adjustment, and I hadn’t had a chance to try it on before I woke up.  A good color, the color of healing, of  the Fey, of  the green growing Earth, a good dress to try on now.