Composting with Ursula Leguin

"I do what the poet Gary Snyder calls "composting" — You let everything you do/learn/think/read/feel sink down inside yourself and stay in the dark, and then (years later maybe) something entirely new grows up out of that rich darkness. This takes patience."

Ursula K. Leguin

As an artist, I've been feeling dull as a brick lately, in contrast to the influx of inspiration that came to me from my trip to England this summer.  Well, being knee deep in renovation and repair of my home, and family responsibilities, can do that. Should I get depressed about the contrast, the seeming loss at present of those elevated insights and just plain sights?  It's harvest time now, almost Mabon, and I'll gather apples in grateful celebration among the (construction) debris.  Composting.......composting the house at the moment.  What I experienced this past summer will surface, in time, it's voice isn't lost.

I love the biological magic, and poetic metaphor of Composting.  There's the  Great Round every time I take my left overs to the compost pile - everything gets transformed, broken down and remake, rots and gets seeded again, including me.  When I was younger the so-called dry periods were almost unbearable.....I had to be in full creative intensity all the time, or there was something wrong, I didn't measure up.  Gratefully, I can say I'm glad that has been replaced with patience, and a tiny bit of wisdom I've gathered over the years, knowing that my creativity is part of the Round as much as anyone, or anything, else.  While my art "composts" along with the rest of me,  I reflect on a few more good words from my favorite writer, Ursula Leguin:  

"Writing is my craft. I honor it deeply. To have a craft, to be able to work at it, is to be honored by it."

"One of my favorite things the poet Shelley said is, "The great instrument of moral good is the imagination."

"And while I'm quoting quotes, Socrates remarked, "The misuse of language induces evil in the soul." That's a good one to remember when listening to a politician or reading an advertisement."

And of course I can't resist bringing in the Black Madonna when I reflect on the Great Round of the Sacred Compost Pile, because I see Her magic there in the rich, teeming, transforming soil every time.   I've shared it before, but I never get tired of the  overlay, the mythic "songlines", that trace the ancient pilgrimages to the Black Madonnas of Europe (which are still going on).  One of the most ancient, and significant, was the famous journey that concluded at the Cathedral of Santiago at Compostella,  the endpoint of "The Camino", the traditional pilgrimage still made by thousands today across Spain.

Pilgrimage routes to Compostela

It's believed that the earliest pilgrimages were made to the "Black Madonna of Compostella", a very ancient effigy. Compostella comes from the same root word as "compost". Compost is the fertile soil created from rotting organic matter, the "Black Matter". The alchemical soup to which everything living returns, and is continually resurrected by the processes of nature into new life, new form. Matrix/Creatrix. Matter. Mater. Mother.

"From this compost -- life and light will emerge. When the pilgrims came to the Cathedral at Compostella they were being 'composted' in a sense. After emergence from the dark confines of the cathedral and the spirit -- they were ready to flower, they were ready to return home with their spirits lightened."

~~ Jay Weidner

Workshop at the Kripalu Institute

Life can make you bitter, life can turn you cold

It seems I've spent most of my own  just trying to crack the code

But if I die tomorrow may the last words that I know
Be praises, praises for the world

Some predict the rapture where we all will leave this place
The chosen ones will pack their bags for somewhere out in space
But the holiest words I've ever read or thought or sung or prayed
Were praises, praises for the world

by Jennifer Berezon

VIDEO:  https://jenniferberezan.com/praises-for-the-world-video

Just completed the three day workshop for women I taught at the Kripalu Institute here in the beautiful Berkshires - its second year, and the class this year was twice the size of the previous.

Challenging to organize a "guerrilla art studio" overnight in a hall that was built to practice yoga in, but somehow I always manage, if I don't mind patting myself on the back. Like the previous year, I leave feeling enormous gratitude to the Institute, to those who participated, and the Goddess, whose presence has been felt throughout the experience. Frankly, whenever I do this, I always leave awed by the collective vision that arises.

Speaking of little miracles - all the music I brought was by the Bay Area singer and composer JENNIFER BEREZON, whose “She Carries Me” I have used to open several ritual performance events. Last year I purchased “Returning” for the group, a collective piece that she created in the ancient Temple at Malta. When I arrived on Saturday, I learned that she was here, had been teaching a workshop, and was to give a concert! Here by the way is a video of a huge Concert she gave with others called PRAISES FOR THE WORLD


It was beautiful, and so good to hear her in person after all these years. And the following day the class met in the room she and her group had just vacated! I was able to buy a dvd of “Praises for the World”, the concert/ritual she organized in Oakland that includes some 50 musicians, dancers, poets, spiritual leaders, and activists for the earth (including Joanna Macy and Alice Walker) It was an extra gift to be able to share it with my class.

I love to teach! I wait for some of the writings, and photos of masks, from the participants.

One of the participants in the workshop is going to Spain this summer, to spend a month walking the Camino. The Camino is the ancient pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela, a 10th century Romanesque and Gothic cathedral that houses a black madonna, as well as (and most significant to most pilgrims I suppose) the supposed bones of St. James, a Christian martyr of the middle ages.

I'm fascinated with the Black Madonna, myself, and quote Jay Weidner's comments about the Great Dark Mother, and "composting". He writes:

"There was once a vast pilgrimage that took place in Europe. Pilgrims made their way towards the town of Compostela in Spain, where an ancient effigy of the BLACK MADONNA is housed. The word Compostela comes from the same root word as compost. COMPOST is the living, black material that is made from rotting fruits, grains and other organic matter. From this compost -- life and light will emerge. When the pilgrims came to the Cathedral at Compostela they were being 'composted' in a sense. After emergence from the dark confines of the cathedral and the spirit -- they were ready to flower, they were ready to return home with their spirits lightened."

Speaking with the woman who is on her way to this extraordinary adventure, the hair on my arm (actually, both of our arms) rose, and I thought of my own longing to make a pilgrimage. Maybe, I'll walk the Camino! Certainly I've been writing about Pilgrimage, and the "composting" process enough in the past 6 months........how strange, provident, and magical, to meet someone who is doing it literally. Back in November I wrote,

"I think the pace of our lives has taken away the time needed, the cyclical time reflected in all organic systems...........to "compost". To fall apart, re-turn into the dark, re-form, be re-formed by the organic, collective forces we are woven into in the cycles of the planet, and our souls."

Exploring the metaphor, to me, the beautiful idea of the "Camino", the "road to Compostela" embodies the pilgrimage to the Black Madonna, spiritually, perhaps a journey to ward the formless dark of the deep rich earth and the grace of re-birth as I enter my 6th decade.

Reflections on Pace, Progress, and Hecate

Thought Woman Weaving the World into Being  (2007)

"They move too fast to see more than the surface glitter of a life too swift to be real. They are assailed by too many new things ever to find the depths in the old before it has gone by. The rush of life past them they call "progress", though it is too rapid for them to move with it. Man remains the same, baffled and astonished, with a heap of new things around him but gone before he knows them. Men may live many sorts of lives, and this they call "opportunity", and believe opportunity good without ever examining any one of those lives to know if it is good. "

           ........"Lord Dorn", from ISLANDIA, a novel by Austin Tappan Wright, 1942

The above quote lit up the page I was reading, and I felt moved enough to forsake my electric blanket, and come to the computer to copy it on my blog.

It's 4:00 am, I'm reading the book DANCING AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD - Thoughts on Words, Women and Places, by Ursula Kroeber Leguin. I have a cold or virus, and a recent conversation with my friend Barbara of San Francisco, about the dark, and menopause, and the crone Goddess Hecate, Guide through the Underworld, lie in bed with me, not entirely comfortable companions.

Now what does this comment have to do with Hecate, and my personal journey through the month of November, the month of endings, celebration of the dead, composting of the year, leaves, souls? What does this have to do with the Saturnine retreat from just about everything, including my own creative process, that I've been going through ever since I returned to Tucson from my summer Fellowship in Michigan? Well, a lot. 

I see a long and winding spiral developing here, and I'm going to follow it down and around, imagining in my mind the thoughts, threads and connections similar to brown leaves, blowing across a dark November pavement, forming some winterborne chrysalis, a pattern not yet under the snow, but soon, very soon it will be. Not to be revealed or read until the snow (which has not yet fallen) thaws in life's spring resurgence.

I love the quote above, from a popular 1940's Utopian novel, because its character, Lord Dorn, says it so well. Personally, I can't keep up anymore. I find myself retreating from the continual "stimulation" , hiding out, needing to get as far away sometimes into the wilderness as I can. 

What I feel a loss of is "depth experience".  As our world accelerates, we find it harder and harder, I believe, to touch things. To touch the depths and nuances of the stories of our lives, to touch each other, to relish and taste what we have within the onslaught of "more, and more" - to touch the Earth and the layers of lives that preceded us (although we carry them within). I think the pace of our lives has taken away the time needed, the cyclical time reflected in all organic systems...........to "compost". To rot, fall apart, re-turn into the dark, re-form, be re-formed by the organic, collective forces we are woven into in the cycles of the planet, and the mysterious turns of our souls.

"In Western traditions" author Jay Weidner writes, "there was once a vast pilgrimage that took place in Europe. Pilgrims made their way towards the town of Compostella in Spain, where an ancient effigy of the BLACK MADONNA is housed. The word Compostella comes from the same root word as compost. COMPOST is the living, black material that is made from rotting fruits, grains and other organic matter. From this compost -- life and light will emerge. When the pilgrims came to the Cathedral at Compostella they were being 'composted' in a sense. After emergence from the dark confines of the cathedral and the spirit -- they were ready to flower, they were ready to return home with their spirits lightened."

Many Roman gardens used to have a special shrine devoted to the morose god, Saturn. A place, it was understood, one went to be alone, to brood, perhaps to grieve. As I get older, and my personal energy reserves are more concentrated and precious, I have come to believe that giving meloncholy its due, discovering what the gifts of depression are, taking time to experience the depths revealed in Saturn's solitary corner of the garden - is essential to nourishing, indeed sustaining, our spirits. Just as Romans understood the need to have a shadow-dappled seat dedicated to Saturn in the gardens of their lives, I think a seat devoted to Hecate, goddess of the underworld, in a contemporary garden, might be similar in design and purpose.

So who is Hecate? She's the crone aspect of the triple Earth Mother Demeter/ Persephone/ Hecate. Like Saturn, she is old. An old woman, past menopause, past many life passages, well aquainted with various portals that separate these seeming doors. A Gatekeeper, and a light bearer. She is part of the whole that is the Goddess, and she is within each of us.

"In us is also a dark angel (Hekate was also called "angelos") - a consciousness (she was also called "Phosphoros") that shines in the dark and witnesses such events because it is already aware of them a priori.........Part of us is not dragged down but always lives there, as Hekate is partly an underworld Goddess."

The Dream and the Underworld, James Hillman ***

As Barbara pointed out (vehemently enough to demand I write it down, but after all, she did invoke and perform Hecate in 2001.....) - Hecate is the patroness of women (and men) who are no longer producing hormones. What are hormones? Well, from Gaia's point of view, they're very potent drugs that induce us to want to reproduce, and thus carry on the evolutionary experiment, braving the painful and even sometimes lethal consequences of childbearing. When estrogen is gone, as I've heard so many women say, many of life's illusions seem to peel away. Veils that have muffled all kinds of personal illusions, beliefs, and ideals fall away ..........and there you are. Revealed. Clarified. Pissed off that you've wasted so damn much of your precious time and energy on such nonsense, such dramas, such theatre, outraged and shamed that you were so stupid, immature, brainwashed........human.

You begin to see the storylines more deeply, the threads that weave the plot. Just recently, for example, I've painfully re-experienced many moments in my mother's marriage to my father, understood at last how trapped she felt, how he enjoyed humiliating her, and how she felt she had to call enduring his emotional cruelty "love" in order to emotionally survive. I see, of course, that I've carried on some of the same story in my own life, the same blinds. Time to "fall apart" has helped me to find compassion for my mother, and myself.  "Falling apart" is often "Re-assembling".

Occasionally, you also notice you are wise in your genuine, candid, and almost perfect Ignorance.
Maybe Hecate, in her mask and role as an old woman, standing so close to the final portals of this world, moving freely into the veiled realms - may be said to represent the SOUL aspect of self. "Part of us is not dragged down, but already lives there........." as Dr. Hillman said.

  

 Already lives there": the gestalt, the storyteller as well as the story. Looking at the yin/yang symbol I wear on a ring, I remind myself that somehow the various parts of my being are, like the dark teardrop and the white teardrop, in flux and co-creation. This weaving of story is not only enlightenment, it is also "endarkenment", the self that waits, is circular, un-named, yin. That "already lives there."

But one does not converse with Hecate, and gain the benefits of Her guidance, without stopping, listening. Perhaps she will not come at all, until we "fall apart", can't go any farther, run out of gas, slow the pace, fall off the treadmill. Thus, the necessary time to grieve, to be revealed, to make the pilgrimage to Compostella.  Then one may see Her, poised, with her candle or her torch, at the doorway. She won't let you get away with anything - she'll illuminate it all, as you begin that journey. She will not make an appearance during commercial breaks, or at any "convenient time". I don't believe you'll find her in a day spa, and I don't even believe she has patience with Prozac or things that blunt the descent.

Hecate dwells in the Caverns, she dwells in the Depths.  But She is also the Guide, the Guide to the ascent of Persephone.  And who is Persephone?  She's the innocent girl who must make both the descent and ascent in order to mature, to become, like the tale of Sumarian Innana before her, a Queen.

* Le Guin, Ursula K. DANCING AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD: THOUGHTS ON WORDS, WOMEN, PLACES. New York: Grove Press, [1989].  

** Weidner, Jay  http://jayweidner.com/

*** Hillman, James  The Dream and the Underworld,  New York:  Harper & Row (1979)