daily divination

My iPod has turned out to be my daily divinatory tool. Slipping the white earbuds in, with my 700 some songs on shuffle, I take a reading of the first three songs that come up, trusting that they’ll either reflect my inner state, or predict the currents of the day. Right after my birthday, when spirits were running high, and the lusty current was really running through me, Super Freak, by Rick James, came up several times in a week, as well as Wild Wild Life, by the Talking Heads. Sympathy for the Devil got frequent airplay during the weeks when I found myself absurdly engaged in the discussion of “Lucifer – friend or foe?” Believe it or not, just as I was writing this, with my iPod clicked into the stereo – my beloved Leonard Cohen just started in on The Road to Hell.

Today, with triangles still on my mind, my three song reading was an emotional bull’s-eye. Janis belted out “Piece of My Heart”, then Alanis Morisette hissed “You Oughta Know”, followed up by “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” by Culture Club. I laughed out loud during Piece of My Heart, but by Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?, I was sobbing. (right now Buildings and Bridges, by Ani di Franco is playing – I love this world!) As I sobbed, I felt another onion skin like layer being removed from what has held me close on my particular position in triangles. Love is far and away the primary focus of most songs. Of love songs, I would bet at least a third are about some aspect of triangulating. The power of three is mighty.

Something new is about to emerge, I can feel it. As I sobbed, Melissa Ethridge started to sing “I Want to Be In Love”. I don’t remember downloading this song, I don’t even like her or the song. But the iPod spirits feel it’s necessary that I listen to her sing about the mistakes she’s made and invoke the love she now feel she deserves. . It seems like there are countless songs on this iPod that I didn’t have a hand in downloading, but I now trust are now part of the soundtrack of my life. More than once, while I’ve been at the gym, I’ve found myself singing along to “I Like Big Butts”. The Mysterious Ones clearly want me to remember that working out isn’t about size, but about strength.

The longer I am a witch, the closer I pay attention to the richness of each moment, the perfection of each song supposedly randomly playing, the way the multi-verse reaches out to dance with you if you just hold out your dance card.

“Both Sides Now”, by Joni Mitchell, is now playing. Somehow, this seems absolutely perfect.

triangles

Three is such a powerful number magically. The most powerful number, except for maybe nine. which is three times three. Any witch I respect believes in the return of three, the knowledge that what you send out will return to you three times. Everything we do affects us three ways` -physically, emotionally, and spiritually. In Reclaiming Feri, we work on aligning our three souls; our fetch/vital body (or younger self), our human soul (or talking self), and our god self/soul. The tripod, the pyramid, are supposed to be forms involving three points that are strongly stabilizing, that have power. Witches worship a triple goddess, seeing the goddess as having three faces; maiden, mother, and crone. The power of three resonates throughout the Craft.

Why then, are they so problematic in relationships? Today this was on my mind, in my thoughts, percolating as I ruminated about several friends. One of my oldest friends has struggled with triangles all her life, growing up with a father who was constantly having affairs, and then being drawn to them herself. I saw her blow up her life over an ill-advised affair, a shattering that took over a decade to recover from. Now that she’s free of the compulsion to triangulate, she’s watching another family member play this drama out. She’s worried. Another friend, with a similar history, recently has fallen in love with a married man, a man I know and love. Their connection is intense, but potentially disastrous. Another close friend is actively engaged in forgiving the two points of a triangle that devastated her.

Nine years ago I watched a couple I was close to flail when one of them fell in love with someone else. The affair was curtailed, he loved his wife, too, but it’s been a ghost in their relationship ever since. Recently, she told him he could pursue it, he could act on it. It’s too late, our other friend has moved on, but there still between them a deep and mysterious bond. Thinking about this story, I wondered if it would have been better if the triangle had been physically played out, because this triangle has seemed to have the most incredible staying power of those I have known. Or maybe playing it out would have disastrous for all.

Swimming at the gym, gliding thru the water, it occurred to me that with these triangles all around me, it was time to look at the role of triangles in my own life, that triangles are obviously a shape I need to attend to, to look at. Images, memories, and thoughts washed over me with each stroke forward.

I have thought of myself as someone not drawn to triangles. I’ve never been excited by an illicit affair with someone in a committed relationship. I’ve slept with one married man, and his wife knew and gave her consent. I carried on no real affairs or intrigues during my twenty year marriage (although the magical act of sex with an old boyfriend gave me my child). Threes in relationship are associated primarily with the stability of my sisterhood. I have two sisters, and our relationship got me through our childhood. Having someone pick me over someone else is not sexy to me, doesn’t excite me or turn me on in anyway. It’s too reminiscent of childhood, of the way my mother would pick one of us to be special, trying to make the other two feel like shit. We caught on early, and none of us aim to be the special one. None of us have a pattern of triangulating.

Or do we? Or more accurately, do I? As I swam, I had to smile at my illusions. While not ever drawn to the erotic thrill of the triangle, I’ve certainly taken my place on the points. I do triangulate, but I just pick the points that don’t lead to orgasm. For over a year I felt the presence of someone else in my marriage, and was repeatedly told I was crazy. In my last relationship, both of our ex’s were factors in creating energetic triangles. This past year, in the breakup that never seems to end, I’ve apparently been a lively ghost in my ex’s new relationship, and it seems impossible for us to be relationship that doesn’t instantly morph into a triangle. Can there be a short end of the stick in a triangle? If so, that’s the point I tend to find myself on.

Moving from the pool and into the sauna, I thought of the time period in the seventies when I had two lovers, my time of non-monogamy, a time when I actually did three-somes. This was less painful; everything was out in the open, and it being my early twenties, a time of experimentation. Nobody got dreadfully hurt, but it certainly was not something I was able to sustain.

By the time I got to the shower, I began to think that this human tendency to triangulate is one of the great mysteries. Triangulating is somehow connected to the magical qualities of three, it throws us into the intense ability of humans to experience paradox. By triangulating we hit up against both the expansiveness of love and its mirror of contraction. Almost all of the people I love and respect have at one time or another found themselves a part in this configuration. Every point has a lesson in it, a teaching about what it means to be human, of how love can be both weapon and healer.

I’m thinking I’ve learned about everything I need to have from the point I’m most familiar with. I’m hoping that my empathic imagination will serve to understanding the other points, and that moving forward doesn't mean I'll end up falling in love with someone else's partner. And I’m wondering what will be flow thru me on my next visit to the pool. Water really does help me breathe.

i want this world

For Desire

Give me the strongest cheese, the one that stinks best:

and I want the good wine, the swirl in crystal

surrendering the bruised scent of blackberries ,

or cherries, the rich spurt in the back

of the throat, the holding it there before swallowing.

Give me the lover who yanks open the door

of his house and presses me to the wall

in the dim hallway, and keeps me there until I’m drenched

and shaking, whose kisses arrive by the boatload

and begin their delicious diaspora

through the cities and small towns of my body

To hell with the saints, with martyrs

of my childhood meant to instruct me

in the powers of endurance and faith,

to hell with the next world and its pallid angels,

swooning and sighing like Victorian girls.

I want this world. I want to walk into

the ocean and feel it trying to drag me along

like I’m nothing but a broken bit of scratched glass,

and I want to resist it. I want to go

staggering and flailing my way

through the bars and back rooms,

through the gleaming hotels and the weedy

lots of abandoned sunflowers and and the parks

where dogs are left off their leashes

in spite of the signs, where they sniff each

other and roll together in the grass, I want

lie down somewhere and suffer for love until

it nearly kills me, and then I want to get up again

and put on that little balck dress and wait

for you, yes you, to come over here

and get down on your knees and tell me

just how fucking good I look.

Kim Addonizio

Marla’s last words were “I’m alive”. Marla wanted this world. She smiled easily, and I know why so many journalists loved her. She loved life. She partied. She was fun. Even in a war zone. My guess is she had little black dress.

My friend Magda, in response to one of my last posts, said to me, “There’s no apocalypse; there’s just beginnings and endings.” I then asked her how she thought we could best devoke it. “That’s easy! You just keep loving life!”, she replied. The part of my pledge to Brigid to know the difference between what is alive and what is dead is proving to be challenging. The part of my pledge were I vowed to put my energy into what is living is being reinforced, underlined, and highlighted with a cosmic magic marker.

Marla the person is dead, yet her spirit is so alive, so vibrant.. I’m getting clearer that it may not be so important, this distinguishing between what is dead and living, the bigger question is; does it serve life? There are deaths are that are in the service of life. Marla’s is one. And there are lives and choices that serve death. Death is certainly part of life, but to serve life, this is where the best of humanity comes in. The ability to be kind, to be generous, to love, to sacrifice your self interest for the good of the whole; these are essential in serving the life force.

Ten years ago I did a ritual in which I wedded myself to the lusty current of the life force. This was a piece of magic called a Feri initiation. I feel that it changed my DNA. Feri is an ecstatic tradition, and many of its practioners are notoriously unethical.Ethics play no part in the lusty current. Ethics are not a big part of Feri My soul sister Reya and I had a big wake up call this spring, and while she’s been busy letting go, I’ve been busy figuring out how to serve this lusty current with human integrity.

She let go of the current this weekend, passed it on in her last initiatory act, giving the last of it to Henry. It was in service to the life force. She is more vibrant and vital than ever. It was an ending for her, but not a death. Like Dylan says, “you not busy being born is busy dying”. Reya is busy being born. She is alive.

I love the poem above for many reasons. It’s so incredibly Feri. It’s all about the lusty current. But applying my newfound sense of reclaiming feri to it, I’d end it with both of us on our knees.

freedom from slavery

Last night I went to a Seder for the first time in my fifty years. It’s strange that it’s my first. I’ve certainly been invited to many, especially by Starhawk, but something else always happened to intercede. This was the first Seder that Naomi, who was hosting it, was not spending with her family, as her parents are in Israel. It was an all women’s Seder and as the night went on, it turned out that for almost all of us, the dinner involved some kind of first. For several, it was the first time they’d met a witch. Naomi loves my witchiness, and persists in always introducing me as a Wiccan priestess. Finally I've gotten her to add on that I'm also a priestess of Elvis. That always lightens things up.

One of them, the fashion editor I think, said quite evenly; “Witchcraft seems to be really in style right now.” Well, she should know, it being her job and all to keep up on what’s hot and what’s not. So, it’s finally in style, and better than that, it comes in handy in feeling at home in just about any kind of ritual. All of it made sense to me, the bitter herb, the egg, the wine drinking, and of course, the questioning attitude as part of freeing oneself from slavery. I found myself amidst the Jews explaining to the non-Jews what everything meant. One woman asked me; “Are you sure you aren’t Jewish?” “No, just a witch”, I replied.

Springtime is the perfect time to do a ritual about freeing oneself from slavery, to taste the freshness of new growth flavored with the saltiness of tears. As we sat around the table, with the full moon beaming down thru Naomi's wall of windows, I drank in the beauty of my new friends, and the bittersweet flavor of moving forward, of crossing the desert to a new land.

end times

I was coming up the back stairs when the weather turned on a dime. The sunny spring day became overcast and a swirling wind began to whip. As I was climbing the stairs, Lyra, my 17 year old goddess daughter, called out the backdoor “Deborah, is that you? I think today is the Apocalypse!” At that moment, with the sudden shift in the air, and the darkening of the sky, it felt like she was right, that something had begun. I’d had a rollercoaster of a day after a night of bad dreams. I’d mediated a hostile interaction with officemates. I’d worked hard to stay breathing amidst the peculiar nasty intensity of therapists going at each other. I’d had a long conversation with a friend about painful shifts in our friendship circle and magical fallouts. I’d listened to several upsetting messages on my voicemail. I’d worked with two grieving clients. And then, walking to the bank, I broke down sobbing in front of Global Exchange’s window installation which happened to be an altar to Marla. I wouldn’t have been surprised to have the day end with the beginning of the Apocalypse, or a small earthquake.

The Apocalypse. I yelled down to Patti, repeating what Lyra had said, and she, not missing a beat, said; “Well, it is the End Times!” The End Times, the Apocalypse, Armageddon, the Rapture. This story is packing a lot of punch, feeling closer, more possible and probable then ever. My friend Patrick was over thursday night and he told me how he’d been walking thru our neighborhood and turned a corner and was suddenly in the midst of a outdoor revival. A Latino preacher was ranting in front of a painted canvas of San Francisco in flames. The only world Patrick could make out was the word “Homo”. It's not enough that we've called on all sorts of hell with our squandering the earth's resources and polluting the seas, but there are also whole theologies centered around calling down Armegeddon to punish me and my own. (And also bad guys like non-c0rporate or govermental murderers)

Patrick is a longtime activist who several years ago started a group called “Smartmeme”. A meme as I understand it is like an idea, a story, a soundbite, that then affects other ideas. The Apocalypse is a meme. Smartmeme attempts to teach, train, and educate people on strategies to devoke the Apocalypse. Direct action at the point of assumption is one of their provocative memes. Changing consciousness at will is the whole point of Smartmeme. They are some of most skilled magical activists I know, and are involved in a variety of campaigns for social and environmental justice. I’ve heard Patrick often say, “its not the story of the battle, it’s the battle of the story”. They are finely attuned to the stories being spun, and are battling to insert twists and turns that serve the life force.

Patrick told me he’d recently heard there was going to be some big gathering of “elders”, endorsed by the Dalai Lama, funded by Paul Neuman, who all saw something big and terrible coming. The gathering’s purpose is to pass on wisdom to a group of young people. These young people are tapped to survive the terribleness and pass on the wisdom of the earth’s elders into the future. This isn’t confirmed yet, it could be a postmodern myth, but it is a meme of these times. A powerful meme. It’s confusing whether to work furiously on devoking this meme, or to get to it on figuring out how to get my son on the roster of young people who will survive.

Mostly hearing this story, I want to get Christopher Guest involved in it and to create a movie about it in the manner of Best in Show. I know too much about elders and the posturing that goes on in spiritual communities. Any gathering like this will actually be pretty hilarious, and cantankerous. The whole council of elders is a meme that we white people glamorize and romanticize, especially if the elders aren’t white. Imagine the politics of such a gathering! Maybe this will be the gathering that brings on the Apocalypse full force! Magically, it seems rather challenging to call such a gathering together, isn’t it in it’s way an invocation? I’d rather see these elders called together to heartstorm another narrative, create another meme.

Lyra continues to say she feels a shift in the texture of reality, that the Apocalypse has begun. Maybe she’s right. Maybe it began years back, and has been moving in slow motion, a motion which is gradually picking up speed. I find myself sitting with paradox more than ever, calling up the Temperance cup in the tarot. In this cup I hold the Apocalypse, the facing up to that the end times are upon us. In this cup I devoke the Apocalypse, giving it no energy, imagining the future. Holding these two cups at the same time, blending them, holding them as one thought, drinking them in. What a time it is!!!!

the veil thins

I went down to my backyard today and it seems like overnight it’s filled with Beltane energy. The foxgloves and roses are in bloom, and this strange spring now bears the first hint of summer. I cut flowers for my altar, remembering suddenly a Beltane 14 years ago when my heart was in similar state. It was the Beltane after the first war in Iraq, and I was bereft. Years of trying and failing at bearing a child had brought me to grips with grieving that this was not to be. Five years of trying and two miscarriages had taken a toll on my marriage. I was sure he was having an affair, something he denied repeatedly. I still can see her as she walked her bike ahead of us when we took to the streets that January when the bombing started, me knowing in my bones that what should be between he and I was flowing like a river between them. There was no evidence, nothing concrete to base an accusation on, yet I knew.

At the end of April, he was away, doing something for Greenpeace in Australia. I went down to the garden to cut flowers for my altar. My heavy heart lifted when I saw a toad under the foxgloves. A big toad. The first and only toad I have ever seen in San Francisco. Suddenly, I could feel the magic all around me, the potency of nature, the beauty, the incredible possibility. Then my high school boyfriend, my first love, called out of the blue. He was in town. We had lunch on the first of May. I told him my hurts, he smiled that wide smile of his, took my hand, and we ended up in bed. As a pagan, I was rationalizing it as a spiritual act, it being Beltane and all. Somewhere in the heat, he blurted out that he was going to make me pregnant. I pushed that away, feeling he was being uncharacteristically grandiose and dramatic. Two and half weeks later, I knew that the toad, the garden, and the fey had conspired. My old love was on target. A baby was in the works.

That was a hard spring, an even harder summer. I told my husband. Three months later, he finally confessed to the affair. Somehow we stayed together for another 10 years, and my son regards him as his dad. Jay, my first love, is also in Casey’s life, and as Casey says “My dad is my dad, but Jay is my father, not my dad, its different”. And it is. Somehow this all worked out, and we all were blessed by the magic of that Beltane.

My heart sits like a stone in my chest today, so very like my heart of 14 years ago. Why does loss make the heart denser? Like a wave, memories washed over me this morning in the garden, and I time traveled back. There was no toad, but the veil is thinning in the same way, and the same fey spirits are out there in the greenery, taking an interest, perhaps even meddling. I'm ready for something new to be conceived, for something wonderful to be be borne out this strange spring, and for me to follow the lead of the season and to start to LIGHTEN UP! I could feel the possibility of it this morning in the garden, and that old familiar sense that some party is being planned, some fate is being woven, some magic is afoot. Time to buy a new bottle of irish whiskey and up the offerings.

angels

My cell phone rang as I was watching my son’s little league baseball game. His team is called “The Angels”. Their uniforms are red, white, and blue. The day was sunny, the Presidio abundantly green. Ilyse was calling to get another friend’s number, to let her know that one of ours had just been killed in Iraq. When Ilyse said her name, I couldn’t place it, but later, when I saw her picture, I reeled with recognition. A woman I have been at many gatherings, many parties with. Marla Ruzicka, who had worked at Rainforest Action and Global Exchange, who had gone on to start her own organization, CIVIL, which documents civilian casualties in war zones and advocates for their care. Twenty-nine years old, she died outside Baghdad, blown up in a car.

Watching my son play ball, in this beatific setting, I felt my stomach clench, and a sense of unreality descended quickly. A war is going on across the world, people are dying. The Angels were playing ball in their patriotic colors, and someone from my community was just killed. Therapists have a great word for the state I was in – “cognitive dissonance”. As much as I knew, I still couldn’t make sense of it. It was a mindfuck. It still is.

The next few weeks are going to be rough. Ilyse and Fern are crying a lot. We took food around the corner to Elizabeth, one of Marla’s good friends, and other friends gathered. Ilyse was on the phone a lot – the quintessential organizer/activist, working out Marla’s memorial service for the activist community. There’s going to be a lot of media coverage on this one. It’s real story.

Marla was doing what she loved. Everyone is saying this. Her favorite quote was the one by Che about true revolutionaries being guided by love. Elizabeth is worried that she’s confused right now, that she wasn’t ready or prepared to die, that she’ll get stuck somehow. I’m thinking of all those dead civilians whose stories she collected, whose families she interviewed. I’m imagining the civilian dead reaching out to her, lauding her for her work for the living, welcoming her to the other side. She certainly has friends there, as well as here.

Mt. Diablo

When the Spanish sailed into the bay they saw a mighty mountain in the east and decided to go climb it, to see what they could seeof this new land from up on high. So they trekked across the Carquinez Straits to the hills and up and down towards the mountain. It took five days. Then their reactions to the poison oak erupted. They were bedeviled by the itching, turned back, and never climbed the mountain, thus missing the sight of the mighty Central Valley.

Jen told several of us this story as we hiked around Mt. Diablo. I’d heard another story that it was near the mountain that the Spanish had rounded up a bunch of native peoples who escaped so mysteriously in the night that the Spanish thought it was the work of the devil, and cursed the place with the name. Both are good stories, and feeling the energies of the place, I can believe that the elements conspired to confound, confuse, and downright irritate the Spanish invaders. Mt. Diablo is hopping with spirit.

After what seems like months of rainy weekends, today was a glorious spring day, clear and gently warm, perfect for a good hike. And after this strange spring, even I was up for a hike. The wildflowers were out in profusion, the creeks running clear, and the hills resplendently green. I was walking with friends, some old and some new, and there was lots of easy laughter and expressions of awe and wonder as we figured out the various names of the wildflowers, the names that were in our various books and guides.

Blue Dick, blue witch, fairy lanterns, Indian warrior, globe lily, Chinese houses, shooting star, mules-ears. There is power in knowing the names of things. These are the common names, the ones I can remember, the names that are a bit like the “outer-court” names given to the guardians and deities of Feri. The inner names, the ones of mystery – are those that sound like calahootus balancacus or harobedeles myopofencula. Thank goddess for common names. As I walked in the beauty of the day, I thought about how the common names are just names that somebody started to call the plants, ones that made sense to them, like buttercup, or milk maids. So I started to play with imagining the plant introducing itself to me, giving me a name it wanted to be called by. Fire blossom, sea kiss, cotton head, indigo pentacle, the plants readily supplied me with surprisingly good names.

The land here strongly reminded me of the place in the country I grew up, south of San Jose, in the foothills. It wasn’t so much the terrain, although both have a profusion of oaks, but more the feel, the spirit of the place. There was curve in the creek on our property that surely was a settling place for the Ohlone. An Ohlone stone mortar and pestle I discovered and played with as a child is now in my own backyard, one of many found near the creek. Wherever I go, it needs to be outside. It probably was the Miwok who made Mt. Diablo their home, but I’m pretty darn sure by the feel that it indeed was home to many native peoples. It was nice to remember how this feels, to recognize the spirit/feel of it.

So I’m back home, mulling about the power of names, mulling about a place of power being named after the devil, and mulling on growing up in a place so humming with spirit history. No wonder I feel so at home in this house!

tax day

What a week! Today is April 15th. All my clients were on edge today, several talking about how they had procrastinated up until the last minute in paying their taxes. Taxes in the best of circumstances are not a joyful expense, but this year, paying them is especially painful. I, too, have put this off. I woke up today intending to print them out and send them during a break at work. And then the printer would not work. I muttered my incantations to the mechanical devas and went to work. When I got home, the printer was working again, but after spitting out a few pages, it ran out of ink. Even my machines don't want to cooperate with this bloody regime.

the edge

Don't worry about what the world needs.

Ask what makes you come alive and do that.

Because what the world needs are people

who have come alive.

- H. Thurman

This arrived attached to someone’s e-mail on a Feri list I am on. After the last presidential election, as I tried to keep my head afloat in the sea of despair that engulfed so many of us, I sought guidance as to what I should be doing. Looking between the worlds, talking to my allies in all their forms, and listening to my dreams, the phrase “Do what you love” rose from the depths and became a strong refrain.

There was chatter at first, argument and debate. Doing what I love, isn’t that a cop-out, the position of the privileged, a stance of the culture of narcissism that is so indicative of this empire? I grew up wanting to be part of a great revolution. I threw myself into the feminist movement of the 1970’s, the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980’s, and have been committed to magical activism – training activists in the art of magic, thru the nineties and into this new century. I’m a quintessential Aquarian, yearning for the age of Aquarius to kick into high drive. But for the past few years, I haven’t been called to be part of any large actions or so-called mass mobilizations. I've been following my heart and listening to my intuition. This has kept me off the streets and out of jail.

One of the most publicized quotes of the demigod Che is: "At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.” Love. That magical juice that seems to be the stuff of life,the pulse of the multi-verse. This is the bliss to follow, this doing and being guided by what we love. More than ever, tapping into that current feels important to me…and I keep thinking of what Kelly and I had sung at our handfasting in the earnest 1980’s…the Charlie Murphyvsong which centers on this refrain;

There are those who want to set fire to the world.
We are in danger.
There is only time
To work slowly
There is no time not to love.

I learned slowly in that relationship not only about love, but about letting go and loving myself. This past year, as I tend my newly broken heart, I've slowly noticed that doing what I love makes me come more alive, restores and regenerates me. I love my work as a therapist, I love making art, I love making my home a place where friends are comfortable gathering. Coming alive means doing and being what I love. Love is not just about who I open my heart to, but about doing what I love, loving my life, coming to my senses. I'm glad there are people who are loving organizing, who love planning political demos and acts of resistence. My heart is not in it right now, and I have to follow my heart.

Today the sense that following my heart and listening to my intuition is the path I need to be following was reinforced. My heart and intuition guided me in making a phone call that was part of this coming alive, was in the service of life. And I’m thinking about my pledge to Brigid; to know the difference between what is dead and what is living, and to put my energy into the living. I learned today that my phone call assisted Daniel. The tendrils of suicidality were reaching out to him, and my phone call played a part in him reaching out towards life. And I reached out for life by picking up the phone today and hearing this. Some karmic debt was paid, some gear shift in the machinery of life just occurred. A life may have been saved. In the big picture, that life may even have been my own.

There is such a slender edge between life and death. Ghosts and specters reach out, alluring in their way, compelling and dramatic in their unnaturalness. My pledge is making me realize what an edgewalker I have been, how I so intimately know that place between, that thin precipice. Turning my eyes, opening my heart, I lean into life, towards the living. This may eventually lead me to some teargassed street, or once again some crowded holding cell. But for now, I'm coming alive in my work as a therapist, as an artist, loving my home and my cabin in the wilds. Life is good. How sweet it is!

grief arrives

Grief Arrives
In Its Own Time

It doesn't announce itself or knock
on the door of your heart. Suddenly

it's right behind you,
looking with great pity

at the back of your neck
and your shoulders on which

it spends days placing a burden
and lifting it. Grief arrives

in its own sweet time, sweet
because it lets you know that

you are alive, time because
what you are holding becomes

the only day there is: the sun stops
moving, the sky grows utterly quiet

an impossibly blue. Behind the blue
are the stars we can't see and beyond

the stars either dark or light,
both of which are endless.


- Stuart Kestenbaum

One of my most notable magical gifts that I have been blessed with as far back as I can remember, is the gift of the right book, the perfect passage, the sentence I most need to read, finding its way into my hands at the moment I most need to receive it. I opened the Spiral Dance for the first time on plane ride to a funeral twenty-five years ago. In the months before my Feri initiation, book titles would sing to me from shelves, I’d open them to find a tidbit of knowledge that would open up either vistas of understanding or new vistas of questioning to venture down.

Today I opened up The Sun to this poem. Perfection. Grief has been a steady visitor to my therapy room this week, the tissue box is now half empty. This spring has been one of contrasts, warm sunny days followed by hard rains, followed once again by warm sunny days. The rain is washing away a lot, is cleansing. And then the sun comes out, brightly revealing what is tender and new. Well, that’s how it seems to me. This is a hard spring, and my clients are doing deep work, bringing up much from the underworld as Persephone rises.

And I’m no different. It struck me today that the black heart so core to Feri is of no use with grief. And dealing with grief, with loss, with suffering, is one of the flavors that explode on the tongue when I have bitten into what I see as the pomegranate of wisdom. The pomegranate gives me a juicy dark taste that life is sweet, that time is indeed elastic, and oh so relative. Feeling that black heart may help me to cry, to express my animal pain, but I need the green heart of consciousness to feel my place in the family of things, and then the pink heart of compassion to sense the endlessness of light and dark, and to fall in love with it.

Calling Daniel a few days ago, I breathed into all of these, I spoke from my hearts, leaving him a message to hold on. What grief he must be feeling. I imagine those hearts beating in my therapy room. Thump, thump, thump. David, who hung himself last spring, has been in my dreams, my father too. My father has moved on, is out there in the endlessness of the dark and the light, but David is still in a bardo state, that place in-between. I put protection around Daniel – who I can bet is feeling his brother's ghostly turmoil. And now his housemate adds to the haunting. The grief from suicide is such a twisted complex thing. It certainly adds another dense note to the pomegranate’s taste. And as I write that, I realize why I love this poem. I’m grateful. Thank you. Thank you Dad, thank you. Your curse is also a blessing. I know in my bones, hell, in my DNA that life is sweet. And I know also that time when breathed into, and then breathed out, can actually heal. And as Scarlett O’Hara said so beautifully, “Tomorrow is another day.”

Mercury is going direct today. I can feel it.

where's the fire?

Fern had warned me earlier this week that given the eclipse on Friday and the new moon in Aries, that I would a real hothead this weekend, feeling lots of anger and rage. She’s was planning to stay clear of me. She’s seen me angry before, and it is formidable. I’m normally pretty easy going, with excellent antennae for picking up the humor in tense and complicated situations. But when I’m angry, I’m fierce. One good friend says she can see my hair growing when I’m seething. I don’t tend to seethe long before I blow. And then after I blow, usually pretty quickly I can start laughing again. Right now, thinking of when I’ve been hopping mad, makes me laugh. Well, except for some notable and regrettable exceptions.

So, I keep scanning, looking for where some ember of hurt or resentment is smoking towards ignition. There’s plenty of sticks I could be rubbing together, living with the cast of characters that I do provides plenty of fuel, but there’s no smoke as of yet. It’s making me think about anger, and how the scariest kind for me is the kind that is icy, that’s frozen and sharp and hard yet brittle. I feel much more comfortable in the land of fire, of eruptions and explosions, rather than the silent Artic vastness of frigid rage.

So I haven’t been angry yet, but last night went with Ilyse, her mother, and Lyra and saw “The Upside of Anger”, which was fabulous. Joan Allen played the mother of four girls who’s husband has left her, and her anger is mighty. Then I came home and spent time with my friend Dan, who is here for just a few days from Florida. I became close to him in the months surrounding the WTO in Seattle. Of all the activists I have know, Dan excels the best at staying out of the us vs. them paradigm. I remember holding him as he sobbed and lines were being bloodily drawn on the streets of Seattle. What sparks anger and outrage for the majority , seems to drop Dan down into a sea of compassion and it’s companion, sorrow. He also happens to have the best damn sense of humor that I can think of.

So, I haven’t been angry, but I’m thinking about it. Perhaps me exploring the theme of anger at this particular time was written in the stars. Predictions have a funny way of coming true, especially in unexpected ways. Fern says I’ll be fuming this weekend, but instead, I go to movie focused on one woman’s fuming, and spent a lot of time reflecting on anger and rage. Or maybe in few minutes something will happen which will spark an incredible explosion. If so, I’ll hope that it will be one of those deposits in the memory bank that is withdrawn with a hearty laugh.

my guardian angel

I opened up my e-mail this morning to find a post from my guardian angel, who sent along some photos he recently was given of himself as a child and of his parents and their friends dressed up like pirates and gypsies. He remembered the feel of the day and the moments that the photos had been taken, moments that happened decades ago, not thought about in years. He ended the post saying; "Things just come back into your life unexpectedly!"


I call him my guardian angel, because he so many times, in times of confusion and turmoil, has come unexpectedly back into my life, and has the blessed trick of doing so usually right when he’s most needed. He’s never come on a white horse to save or rescue me, but something about his kind voice, weird humor and arms that can enfold one like wings, has always given me comfort. He can always make me smile. We were lovers back when I was in my early twenties and he was in his mid thirties. I was a handful, going through the angry stage of radical feminism, full of contempt for men, and he drove me crazy, not taking any of that façade seriously, seeing something in me that I myself had a hard time recognizing. We had powerful chemistry and his quiet patience and sureness of care for me always intrigued me. That sureness of care was probably what broke us up, that and my need to wildly run from anything which involved my heart being vulnerable after the dominoes of death began to fall, starting with my father’s suicide (I lost three people I loved in less than six months). Even before my father’s suicide, nothing in my family history set me up for what was between us to feel familiar. On spending time with us, my sister remarked; "He’s too nice to you."


His "too niceness" has meant he’s never given up on me, never let go of caring for me, and he still can swoop in and cheer me up at exactly the right moment. He loves the wife and the child that he’s raised with her, and sends me pictures and descriptions of their very different life in small town America. He’s my guardian angel, and instead of shooting him down, which is what my childhood trained me for, I now have the strength of heart to allow this to be, to savor it and relish it, and to welcome him to his place at the feast that is my life. How unexpected!

coming into the light

From my early twenties until the year leading up to my fiftieth, I was acutely aware of the precariousness of the dark of the year. It was on the turn of the wheel at winter solstice that my father chose death over life. Over the years, I have known of others who lost their will to live in the dark of the year, and as a therapist, I operate somewhat like a car alarm on high in regards to those in my practice that battle depression during this time.

I’ve been talking to friends and to my therapist about the first anniversary of the suicide of my ex’s brother last Easter, experiencing another round of grief and feeling in regards to suicide and the loss of my relationship with my ex.

Coming home this week, I got hit with the news that two different men who I care for have both lost someone to suicide. And one of the men is my ex’s younger brother, who I felt so close to during the week following his brother’s death, who stayed closer to me than my ex did during the funeral. My heart goes out to him. All I know at this point is his housemate killed himself on the anniversary of the suicide of Daniel’s brother, Good Friday. What cruelty.

I’ve grappled long and hard with loss at the darkest time of the year. This spring I’m thinking about the pain and despair that can be felt at this time of rebirth, of resurrection, of how coming into the light can be just as excruciating as going down into the dark, how it can be just as deadly, and dangerous. I’m thinking of how hard I tried to repair, restore, resurrect, resuscitate, and finally had to relinquish love for someone I thought I would know my entire life, of how letting go hurts so goddamn much, but sometimes needs to be done in service of life. This last weekend I felt another cord be cut, another loss begun.

So, it is spring, the earth is in bloom, and the light begins to overtake the darkness. I’m learning about loss in the time of the light. I'm learning that life and death exist in both the light and the dark, and over and over again, in both the light and the dark, I continue to choose life. And here's another thing I know, the lightbringer surely does bring some darkness along with his brilliance. He's just that kind of guy.

the simple truth

On Saturday, Reya drove me to Baltimore to visit the American Visionary Art Museum. A friend of hers, after seeing one of my spirit bottles, had told her she needed to take me there. She was right. The name itself was a draw…the word visionary linked so comfortably to the word art. We drove through the storm, the winds howling and the rain pounding, and we arrived at the near empty museum. The moment I saw it, I knew it was a sacred site, a temple I could worship at, being banded in an exquisite mosaic, with a big eye affixed to the outside wall.

We walked in and it was like walking into the museum of our inner lives, like the artists knew our stories and had been commissioned to do works that addressed our dreams and visions. A museum that housed not only the Titanic and Elvis but addressed the power of charging up water, the magic of toasting, that had shrines and altars galore, and had printed up in large letters; “Many creative people observe that their best ideas come to them while taking a shower”, this was a museum that seemed to know us quite intimately. I had to wonder if the installations magically transformed to speak intimately to each group and individual who entered, such was the power of our experience.

“The simple truth known to the brokenhearted, the mystic, and the physicist: what we think solid is not.”

This was the first statement that announced the current installation; Holy H2O, Fluid Universe. With water pouring down from the sky, and our world in major flux due to the heartache of a friend’s choices, nothing could be more, as the Brits say, spot on.

Our journey to the American Visionary Art Museum has inspired me. I’ll be taking the visions I had there to my studio in San Francisco. Going through the museum, I could feel in my bones the wisdom of dumping out the toxic waters of the world that had been collecting for years in the spell my community was doing. Water has to keep breathing to live. It has to move, it has to flow. Like earth, I am mostly water. And I too, must stay fluid.

After the museum, Reya and I ran through the rain to the car, and then sought refreshment near the harbor. Sitting at a table, slightly damp from the storm, eating fresh seafood with the friend I love so dearly, I was overcome with gratitude. Nothing is solid, but oh, so much has been poured out for me in this lifetime.

the best and the worst

My 13 year old son and I flew to Washington, D.C. on Thursday night to visit my dear friend Reya. I had planned to come alone, but she and her housemates made me realize that Casey would be warmly welcomed, and given it was spring break for Casey, what better than to give him a chance to see the nation's capitol!

Casey is in seventh grade, the year that his progressive school apparently feels that kids need to wake up and smell the fascism. He started the year out studying the Roman Empire, with every paper and assignment carrying the lesson of learning from history, and noticing how what happened then is happening in the here and now. That lesson being learned, they now have started studying the holocaust. Visiting Washington brought both of these subjects together, as it clearly headquarters our empire's government, and also is home to the Holocaust Museum.

As a child, I was sexually abused in our family’s bomb shelter. I learned early on that the world was not safe. Casey is having a different childhood. But the world at large has certainly become no safer or saner. He has grown up in a community of visionaries; social and environmental activists, witches who work between the worlds to change things in this world. And although many of us still remain fiercely optimistic, the vision of what is coming in our lifetime is not hopeful. In the last couple of years, if a room full of grown ups has been talking about environmental Armageddon or the inevitable fall of our empire, he will either leave, or actually yell at us to stop. He's told me repeatedly that what he likes about sports is that you basically know what's going to happen, there are defined rules which are followed, there's still some excitement wondering who will win or lose, yet nobody dies. It has a ritual safeness to it, unlike our world.

So, here we come to Washington, the city that so many around the world are aiming their hate at. Casey says it feels jittery. He's right.

After getting the lay of the land, we went to the Holocaust museum on Friday. From the beginning, it is set up to replicate a feeling of disorientation and crowded isolation. We had to work hard not to get separated as we were herded into small elevators. We then were both handed an identification book, each of us given the life/identity of someone who was in the holocaust, which we both could follow as we went through the museum. Reya had warned me about this, and how everyone of the many people she knows who have visited the museum, except one, were given identities which turn out to have died by the time the museum tour is over. And the stories on the identity cards are real. I was a young gypsy woman; Casey was a young Jewish boy. Towards the end of the museum tour, we sat in a little theatre and watched on ongoing film that had survivors talking about their experiences, of what they went through and how they survived. Later I realized the brilliance of the curator in ending the tour with the stories that focused on the strength of the human spirit, the moments when the best of humanity shines through the horror. We both recognized the story of one of our housemate's family friends, who ended up marrying the American soldier who "liberated" her from a camp. Seeing her kind face and hearing her warm voice as she told the story we have heard several times from Ilyse touched us both. It felt like such a small, tender world. We then opened our identification book and read the fate of the life we had followed through the Holocaust. Amazingly and surprisingly, both had survived, both may still be alive.

The world may never have been or ever will be a “safe place”. The struggle between the worst of human traits and the best can probably be found in every culture or time period, but in some cultures and times the worst seems to have gotten the best of almost everybody. Yet, I'm amazed at the power of the best, how it inevitably does seem to get the best of the worst, how love actually is more persistant than hate, although not quite so lethal. I left the museum feeling the woven strands of protection, love, and tenderness that make up the rope that tugs at my heart for my son, that connects me to him on into the future and beyond. I know that given the worst, my son has the best in him. This makes me feel safe. What a trip this is turning out to be.