The Waters of the World Revisited

"We welcome you to Avalon

Thank you for bringing the Waters of your lands.

Together we'll make a great medicine of love."

I'm pulling away for a while from politics to try to recover my balance, and looking back to do that. In  2011 I went on Pilgrimage to Glastonbury, and also presented at the Goddess Conference there.  The ritual process at the Conference, the raising of energy they did, and the profound power of the Sacred Place that is Avalon.........I shall always cherish.   An important ritual for all times and places, reciprocity with the waters and land and the group.   I wanted to touch those waters again.

August, 2011, Glastonbury, U.K.

The Goddess Conference here at Glastonbury ended yesterday with some beautiful rituals, and I find myself feeling at a loss to write it all, but I'll try.  Having done week long ritual cycles in the past, as well as leading a few around the work of the mask, I've experienced the kind of "group mind" or entrainment that happens when one works together in sacred space and "mythic mind".  That sounds pretty lame and academic - forgive me.

Imagine gathering the first day in groups of people who come from different parts of the world - in my case, from the "west".   We have all brought water from our homes, and speaking of this, we pour our water into a vessel, which later will become added to a vessel for all participants. As an opening ceremony, each group approaches the Priestesses of Avalon in a barge, "rowing" to share our waters to the magic isle.  This water will be joined with rituals at the "holy wells of Avalon", the Chalice Well and the White Spring.  Later small vials of this charged, healing, universal "water of the well, water of the world" are given to each of us to carry back, and we will all make a procession with our banners through the streets of Glastonbury to the river (which once was a great lake, the legendary home of the Lady of the Lake) to pour some of this water into the flowing waters.

Quite a wonderful sight, to see so many blue clad, singing women and men gathered waist high in the stream, with our vessels of water, and a woven mermaid!  Then a sharing of fruit, to remind all that the Goddess gives to us the fruits of the Earth, always, to share, and to receive.

The closing ceremony included a "give away" where all present exchanged gifts.  And I leave with my heart open, and my vials of water to share with other waters, and to remember.

You know, I honestly feel rather speechless - moved, changed by this experience, the ceremony, the people, the place.   The work is about the Goddess, and it is collective, and a field opens that is also deeply personal and transformative.  A "mystery".  One sees with mythic eyes, with archetypal vision, and waking life becomes a revelation.  For example,  at the river yesterday, I picked a branch of elderberries, finding them beautiful, and wanting to add them to the "fruits" being shared, but decided it wasn't a good idea.  I wasn't even sure they were edible.  Some seeing me with them in my hand told me that they were very magical, connected to the Crone and the Goddesses of the underworld.  That's why they were called "elderberry".  She also said they made medicine from them, and Elderberry wine.

I carried those darkly beautiful berries all the way back, thinking as I returned (wet) from the river, and pouring our waters into the worlds waters thus, about my soon to be 62nd birthday.  I'll be eligible for early retirement now.  I'm entering old age, and I don't know what it means - it's this cycle of my life now.  Sometimes, to be honest, I feel very sad and lonely in the midst of it all.  Elderberries, bearing elderberries from the river...............  Crone medicine.

When I got to the cafe at the Assembly Hall, gathering for the closing rituals, the cook was saying to someone "Oh, someone left a nice bottle of elderberry wine here last night.  Potent stuff.  "(!) 

I was amazed. since I was standing there with the same berries in my hand - so I asked her if I could try it!

And so I sat, waiting for the "gifting ceremony", with a nice glass of (like she said, potent stuff!) elderberry wine in my hand, feeling awed, and as if, on top if it all, I had some very magical "medicine" that had just been gifted to me, even before the "gifting ceremony" had begun.  Elderberry wine.  Healing tonic....... gifts of the crone goddess, potency.

It works that way. The huge generosity of world, and when people come together in love and ritual.........when we forgive, love, and join the waters.........

At the closing ceremony, after the procession to the River Brue,  white veils were drawn as the Priestesses/Facilitators withdrew behind the stage.  The "mists of Avalon" closing on the Mystery..........and we left for our various  homelands, bearing our vials of  "holy-wholly" water.

From the Well of the Lady, the Well of becoming...........the joined Waters of the World.

Speechless.

At the closing of the Conference, the "Waters of the World" were taken to the river, in procession, and given to the river to bear them, with the blessings of all those gathered,  to join the waters of the land and ocean.  

Unknowing................

I have been trying to write lately, but my heart just isn't in it, to be honest.  I've spent a lot of years being a caretaker for my mother and brother, and feel disoriented now, not sure of what is next.  Everything I've been doing mostly concerns, well, being a caretaker in one way or another.  Now in a short time my brother is gone and now my mother.  I am disoriented.


It's been said by many before me, but here I am saying it as well - "what now?"   Which is, from one perspective, a fortunate state of being, that state of "not knowing".   I wish I could put on a backpack (like my friend Zoe at 68 did this past summer) and just go off on a walking pilgrimage, allowing World to open me again and take me much further.   My feet, I know, would lead me where I need to go, each day, each present moment.  Well, maybe that will happen sooner than I think. 

It is difficult to re-invent oneself at 65, but that's what we're continually being called upon to do.  Maybe it's hard at any age, but in ones 60's one senses the precipitation of calcification, and not just in ones bones.   I jolly well know what I have to do -  walk into the future and not the past, be grateful for - well - absolutely everything. 

I think of that quote from Picasso when he was in his 90's.  An interviewer asked him, after such a long and successful career, what he thought was his best work.  He thought for a minute and then responded:  "The next one."

"I, the Song.  I walk here."

......Lakota Poem

En route to L.A. I stopped at a place I've enjoyed over the years, a hot spring campground in the desert west of Phoenix called Tonopah.  I have always revered the healing powers of hot springs,  as all early peoples before me have as well.  Franklin Roosevelt once visited the springs at Tonopah to help his polio.  This visit I learned that they were trying to sell the place, as the land on the other side of the hot springs (a matter of maybe 40 feet) had been sold to a corporation involved with chicken farming, which meant, of course, inevitable pollution of the waters, stink, trucks moving in and out, not to mention the suffering of thousands of caged birds.

How is it possible that I live in a world where people even think of doing such a thing 40 feet from a healing hot spring?  Where beauty, healing, community, not to mention the spirits of place.........have no meaning at all, just destruction and profit?  I can't fathom it.


So......something better than to close with that.  We are never alone, and I just opened yesterday a book that for some reason I hauled along with me, a book I bought at the Native American museum at the Smithsoninan 5 years ago........to the exact quote and page below.  The Author is speaking of the Navajo people.  Spider Woman speaks.................*

".............If you "borrow" (a horse, land, a place) do you inherently bless (it) , or do you impose?  Most communication by white society has seemed more like imposition than blessing. In this light, it is interesting to note that while westerners closely associate communication with "freedom" the Dine associate it with "responsibility" or "accountability".

"If you lie, the gods will know" one elder told me, "so why lie?" .  As we discussed the matter further, she explained that one was responsible to the gods for what was said.  Responsibility and accountability are virtues to be modeled in living and in the arts.

Given this full time responsibility, there is no separation between art and life.  Both bear the responsibility of sustaining a divine rhythm and message.  So art is not made to be enjoyed later, as in a gallery or recording.  Rather the responsibility to be fulfilled,  and to be made divine through art,  is realized  within the act of creation.

In Witherspoon's words, "Beauty is not to be preserved, but to be constantly renewed in one's self and expressed in one's daily life and activities.  To contribute to and be a part of this universal ho'zho' is both man's special blessing and his ultimate destiny." 

**
Cooper, Thomas W., A TIME BEFORE DECEPTION - Truth in Communication, Culture, and Ethics,  Clear Light Publishers, Santa Fe, N.M. (1998), p.148