illumination

Two years ago I spent summer solstice sobbing my eyes out, cursing the long days and short sleepless nights. At the height of the sun’s power, all that was illuminated was the pain of an unexpected break-up. The pie chart of my brain and being was primarily devoted to obsessive thought about my loss, my heart chakra was blown wide open, and I was tender and raw. I was completely miserable.

This summer solstice I once again found myself distracted, preoccupied, and unable to sleep, deep in obsessive thoughts, raw, tender and heart wide open. This solstice, however, I’m happy. Ecstatic, really. Such is the power of love.

And such is the risk of love. My current state can lead directly to the former state. In the last two weeks I’ve devised countless strategies to “slow it down”, trying to keep some cool remove and clinical detachment. I’m a therapist and know too much about both the chemistry of love and the way we can fall for someone to learn yet another hideous lesson about not going for someone who replicates and triggers all of your childhood hurts. Plus, I’ve had my heart broken before. I know the power that good sex has. Good sex opens the heart chakra, each orgasm releasing oxytocin, a chemical which promotes bonding. Good sex makes you feel connected and incredible sex with somebody who makes you laugh, well, damn, that makes you feel like you are falling in love. And what exactly is the difference between the feeling and the fact? Isn’t the fact of falling in love pure feeling?

Looking around my house, every room contains spells and invocations of the very thing I’m trying (quite weakly, I admit) to ward off. The house altar is covered in rose petals; a huge Mexican heart shaped mirror sits above the mantel in the living room. Every piece of art I’ve made is in some way an invocation of love. My bedroom I’ve consciously made an invitation to love and sex , from what is above the doorway to the red lava lamp which is decorated with roses and pearls. My journal with all the wishes I’ve made on the new moon sits near my bed, documenting the movement from wishes for a healed heart to wishes for an open and full one.

So, the night of summer solstice I hardly slept, instead making love with someone who makes me laugh, makes me think, and makes me….you know. She’s as big a personality as I am, with as many friends and as devoted to them as I am to mine. This year, what the solstice sun has illuminated has me wondering once again at the power of magic and the power of love. Can the world really be this bright and wonderful? Can I really risk feeling this way? Can I really risk not feeling this way?

Like the fool card in the tarot, I’m jumping off the cliff and free falling. It’s terrifying, it’s exhilarating, and in many ways, it feels like I have no other choice. I asked for this. And amazingly, miraculously, I seem to have gotten it. Can this really be true?

greening

In the morning, after I’ve fixed myself a cup of coffee, I’ve begun to take it upstairs to my rooftop deck, a place which affords a spacious view of my beloved city. Years ago a friend told me it was too exposed and windy to grow things, and I believed her. What was that about? How many times have I heeded bad advice and stopped some potential garden from blooming? For it’s a veritable garden that now flourishes on my deck, fragrant and lush. Orange and lemon trees, lavender, rosemary, jasmine, sage and rose are spreading their roots and bursting out of the pots I’ve planted them in. I can’t remember the day or circumstance when I decided to follow my own instinct, but it happened a few months back. I started buying plants for the deck and assuming they would survive. They have. In fact, they are thriving. Maybe it has to do with the house being opened up, with walls coming down and energy moving. Maybe some part of me is ready to be fully alive and vibrant and on top of the world. Whatever the case, my rooftop garden suffuses me with pleasure.

On my trip to New York City, the most magical thing I returned with was several jars of rooftop honey from city bees, bought at the flea market across from the Natural History Museum. The very thought of bees traversing that big city, going from rooftop garden to rooftop garden and back to their rooftop hives, makes me hopeful for the future. Buzzing, fragrance and honey amidst the concrete and traffic, this is the kind of sweet greening this world needs.

Years ago my coven and our partners bought an old commune 2 ½ hours above the city. It was and is part of a big land association formed back in the early 1970’s during the “back to the land” movement. I’m lucky to have it, and it continues to inspire fantasies of “living off the land” when and if it gets too hard to live in the city. Being a child of the 60’s and 70’s, that fantasy is deeply etched in my psyche, carrying with it a kind of righteousness that by living in the country I’d be more environmentally attuned and closer to nature.

Lately I’ve begun to question this. If we all moved back to the land, there’d be no wild. Few can afford any amount of land in the country, which is why the movement to go back to the land stayed a movement of privilege. Cities just may be the most earth friendly ways for us to organize ourselves, especially if we populate our rooftops with gardens and bees. Fruit trees lining the streets might be a good idea as well. For us humans, wrestling with how to live more sustainably on this earth probably means figuring out to how to live in urban areas full of verdant gardens.

As I sat on my deck this morning, I thought about the community garden in Los Angeles that is fighting for its life. Fourteen acres located in an industrial district, it has 360 plots and feeds as much and more. There’s currently a fight, not unlike the early battles for People’s Park in Berkeley so many years back, to keep this garden from being demolished. The stories emerging, brought back from activist friends of mine, are the kinds that inspire hope of a real revolution of compassion. I have a feeling that the gardens will survive, and that the gardeners will come out of this having become a family with a wide circle of friends, all having seeded a vision of cities all over ripe with patches of vegetables and fruit.

A brilliant green hummingbird hovered on my deck this morning, drawn to the colors and scents of my rooftop garden. There’s magic in creating gardens, in planting the spell of a seed, of encasing roots in new dirt, of watering and tending green life. I have my place in the country, but right here and now, I feel hope is in the green of cities. My roots are here.

six six six

In these strange and wild times there is much talk of the apocalypse and Armageddon. With climate change, terrorism, and the threat of nuclear catastrophe, there are countless ways we are expecting something cataclysmic to occur. More than a year or so ago, I had one of those discussions with friends where you predict the day or time that the big change will occur. Somewhere in that discussion, somebody seized on the idea that we soon would land on the date of 666, the number of the beast, of evil, of all that we fear.

Today was that day, and given that discussion, along with the aggressive advertising campaign for the remake of The Omen, part of me has been emotionally preparing for something monumental to occur on this day. Although I’m no believer in the bible’s prophecies, as a witch I give great credence to people's beliefs painting the palette of reality. Awhile back, I figured that June 6^th, 2006 would be a day which packed some kind of punch.

This morning as I brewed my coffee, I realized we’d finally arrived at the date of 6/6/06, and it just so happened to be my son’s last day as a student at The San Francisco School. He started in pre-school and today finished his last day of the eighth grade. For the past eleven years I’ve been driving him the same route to school. This ride today would be our last.

Some changes aren’t cataclysmic. Some creep up on you and surprise you with their sheer ordinariness. Every second of that short drive today I was acutely aware of, every piece of scenery taken note of. When we started doing this drive, my son was in a car seat in the back. Today he was in the passenger seat, and taller than I by many inches. We’d play the Lion King on the way to school when he began. Today he was plugged into the rap music I hate. This morning he’d have none of my sentimentality about this change, yet I know we both were thinking about it as the pavement rolled behind us.

All day today I thought about time, and how quickly it goes, and about doing things for the last time. I thought about last nights spent in rooms I would never occupy again, and about making love with past partners when I knew it was the last time. Each second of that ride today I asked my body to remember it, to record it fully in the senses. My son and I are moving on, we are changing. Nothing will ever be the same.

Today, the sixth day of the sixth month of two thousand and six is a day I will not forget. Sometimes it is the small changes which are the largest.