mars goes direct

I’ve been sleeping soundly for the past week, dreaming the kind of dreams that only can be described as sweet.

My rhythm seems to be congruent with the season, and the movement of planets. Fern tells me that Mars went direct last week, and things that have felt stuck, will begin to move. For me, that move was immediate, and my mood found its mirror in the brilliant spring days.

It’s nice to have a good friend who is an astrologer, who tells you when planets go direct, and who also gives you the heads up when a new moon is a particularly auspicious time for making wishes, Fern told me to do things yesterday that I wanted to bring into or maintain in my life.

Check. And then some.

Over coffee and with the magic of skype, I talked to a dear friend in England and we did some planning of Avalonspring. My son had the day off from school and we worked happily together on some details around next year's college. My son helped me garden, and I mindfully planted seeds for things that are delicious and nurturing. I got news that a beloved friend who I haven't seen for 2 years will visit me in April. An unexpected connection was made and my weekend dance card became delightfully full. I worked in my art studio. I challenged my professional association to not bow into the religious right and to stand up against hatred. I put money in the bank and was grateful for the work I do. I went for a walk. I swam for an hour. I got an 80 minute massage. Then, I went out to dinner with a friend who had just finished a book and feasted on good food and even better conversation. I walked home, loving with every step where I live. And, wonderfully, time expanded and the day felt long and spacious. Then I slept and had sweet dreams.

Equinox, here I come!!! From being off kilter for months, I suddenly seem to be coming into some balance. If yesterday planted the seeds of the coming years, then everything is sure to be coming up roses.

And, I am trusting that those roses will be of many colors and all smell divine.

Turn and face the strange. changes.

"We cannot change anything until we accept it.” Carl Jung

I come from a spiritual tradition that believes that magic is the art of changing consciousness at will and that practicing this magic is our sacred duty. I have been in large groups of people more times than I can count, holding hands and doing a spiral dance, chanting “She changes everything she touches, and everything she touches, changes”. She, of course, is the Goddess. She is paradoxical gal, and she knows that the only constant is, yep, change.

In the past months, I’ve been going through changes. Big Ones. And, oh, how I want to use my will to change this!!!! I’ve done countless cleansings, purifications, furniture has been moved, and every closet and drawer organized. I’m that kind of magician. I know how to cast a circle and wave around my athame and/or wand with charged gusto, but I find cleaning my refrigerator just as effective. Incantations, of course, are involved in both.

So, I’ve done my best to meddle, to spell out where I want to get to; that calm (tidy and well organized) beach across this stormy emotional sea. Yet, the sea is still stormy. So, acceptance is the damn issue. And that takes awhile. How I want the winds of change to whip though, followed by fires of transformation, me emerging like Yemaya from the healing waters of this stormy sea, emanating self-love and pearls of wisdom dripping off me from the irritation of this experience! But no, as it turns out, the only way to really endure a stormy sea is to invoke the deep gravity of the earth, accepting the weight of time and doing nothing but enduring.

Everyday in my work I balance the power of silence with the power of the word… when is my job to intervene, engage and spell out change and when is my job to simply be silent and bear witness? The truth is, to be an effective change agent, we have to have both hands holding these different reins, open to changing consciousness at will, and open to doing nothing but accepting what is.

My hands are on these reins. My closets are clean, my pantry organized. Even my taxes are done! And, I’m accepting that my heart is still one big mess and breathing into it and letting it be okay. But, I will still keep cleaning. And muttering incantations. Balance is the issue and thank the Goddess, her time is NOW.

To sleep: perchance to dream: aye, there’s the rub.

Being a therapist, and good friends with not just one, but TWO world-class dream workers, I am well acquainted with the transformative power of dreams. As a woman who has been grieving, I also am too well acquainted with the power of dreams to disturb and disrupt sleep. How many times can a person be run over by a white van, the dream shifting ever so slightly in whether I see it coming, stand firm, run , or get it from behind as I’m happily pulling weeds in a big garden? Apparently a lot, with even little additions like a hose that comes out and sprays boiling water on me, and a sound system blaring salsa music. Understanding the dream hasn’t made it go away, but I am working in dreamtime to get a vehicle of my own that can simply pass the white van and keep going.

I know these white van dreams, and others like them, are part of the process of integrating loss into my being, are normal ways my unconsciousness is trying to make sense of the what makes absolutely no sense to me in my waking life.

But, I have to sleep. Without it, I lose my ability to function. I can’t listen to clients, and truly want to spend my day curled up in bed, with only the bandwidth of attention needed for bad television. Naps just lead to more dreams, and make sleeping even harder at night.

So, I have to sleep. There’s been lots written on good sleep habits, on making your bed a comfortable and inviting place which you only associate with sleep (not hard in my present circumstance), and drinking warm milk or herbal teas before and the art and practice of winding down.

I got these all covered, and still. The truth is if you have a big loss or huge stressor, it perchance and the perchance is high, will come into dreamland with you. And it will wake you up, again and again.

Alcohol doesn’t help, that just makes it worse, as it assures waking in the middle of night, left to toss and turn with only muddied memories of bad dreams and no hope of going back to sleep. I’ve tried varied herbal sleep formulas, and I can’t say any of them kept back the dreams and kept me asleep.

My sense is that the dreams do need to come. And I need my sleep. So, we juggle, dreamland and I, with a triage approach on what will keep me the most functional. I have a nice white and effective jar of sleeping pills that I know if I take regularly I will end up hooked on. So, I use them only when needed, and no more than three times a week. And I am so grateful for them and their power to give uninterrupted sleep.

The night before last , I woke up bone tired, my heart chakra feeling ripped open by the nightmares I’d dreamed. Trying to make it to a car of my own, as the white van headed towards me, I opened the door of what I thought was a VW and it turned out to be made of beautiful tissue paper – like a Japanese kite. Soar, I started to incant, soar!!!! Epithets cames streaming from the white van as it aimed itself at me. I woke, sweating, the feel of torn tissue paper all around my legs, not sure if I was truly broken from the dreamtime.

Last night, I opened my white jar and embraced better living through chemistry. I slept and even dreamed. This time about the salad variety of mache. I dreamed I had a beautiful packet of seeds and was putting them in the garden and suggesting to Andrea and Bryan, who live below me, that we become mache farmers, that I was sure it was going to catch on and be the next gourmet lettuce.

This is the kind of dream that will help me through my day, and the tenderness and irritability of yesterday is gone. Tonight, I’ll do all my good habits and practices and perhaps and perchance, I’ll have sweet dreams. Sandman, bring me some, please? And barring a sweet dream, how about a really nice Jaguar, Rolls, or Benz that I can jump into?

Hera is at home

Sometime around solstice, when I was still in shock from the sleeper wave that destroyed my marriage, my good friend Donald suggested that I work with Hera. Looking around my home, with its rich reds and abundance of peacock feathers, I realized that Hera already had been welcomed here. Today, she really established residency.

I’d taken the day off to spend with one of my newest friends. She turned 60 today and asked me to spend the day with her. How could this offer be refused? I rescheduled or cancelled clients and freed up my calendar to celebrate my friend.

Yesterday it stormed all day. This morning, the sky was still grey and overcast. After doing a tarot reading at her house, we drove valiantly across the Golden Gate Bridge and climbed through the fog up Mount Tam, until we were above the clouds , seemingly alone on the wet and glistening mountain. As we hiked, we alternately viewed swirling fog below us and the beautiful panorama of life which is the San Francisco Bay.

Crows cawed at us and turkey vultures swooped down to check us out. I cried, over and over again, “We are not dead, YET!” Getting older is daunting. I just turned 55, and my friend is a bit in shock about being 60. There's a point when your realize you are no longer middle age, as certainly we probably won't be living until 110 or 120.

After our hike, when we descended the mountain we stopped at her favorite antique shop in Marin, set back amidst beautiful gardens and clerked by an odd assortment of older women. We meandered around the store, her finding some crystal candlesticks discounted by half, me finding some sweet china teacups perfect for holding the dark chocolate pot de crème I love to make.

At the counter, a bust of what seemed to be an ancient Goddess caught my eye. Aphrodite? No, right there on the tag , it said Juno, Goddess of the Heavens. I know who Juno is. She’s just another name for Hera.

So, now Hera, for a very reasonable price, has taken up residence in my home. She is not the Goddess of the Heavens. She is the Goddess of my Home.

She tells me that taking off from work to celebrate a friend’s birthday was exactly the right thing to do. She also reassures me that not every marriage can be saved and that edging into old age really isn't that bad.

Today proved that Hera has my back, that life will continue to unfold and friendships will continue to be made and deepened. I am not dead yet, and probably won’t be for a while. Until I am, I will be celebrating the births of people I love and paying attention to when the Gods make their appearance.

They do, you know. On mountain tops and in cluttered antique stores. The trick is paying attention. Today, I did.

monday night miracles

It’s rare that my teenage son will spend an evening with me going to a movie and dinner, but that small miracle happened tonight. We went to see Shutter Island, which is a movie you can’t say a whole heck of a lot about or you wreck it for people who haven’t seen it. I have some things to say that won’t wreck it, and these are some of the things that my son and I actually talked about over the sushi dinner we had after the show. Yep, we talked and he did not text once. Thank you, Martin Scorcese.

Like the bulk of Scorcese’s films, violence is major theme in Shutter Island. Shutter Island addresses quite brilliantly how twisted we can become when we can't face our own capability for violence. There’s a poignant bit of dialogue after a big storm where the warden of the Shutter Island talks with the protaganist about the violence of nature, surmising that violence is a natural part of the human nature as well as God’s nature. Denying this, only leads to madness.

Four months ago, violence touched our lives. The violence was literally scarring, but what was worse was losing someone we both loved to the madness that incurs when violence has to be disavowed and those you hurt, vilified. Another miracle occurred tonight in Shutter Island being the perfect vehicle for us to discuss trauma, violence, and the power of denial to twist the human psyche.

Now we are home and he’s busy upstairs texting friends and playing music. I’m writing this, grateful for the small miracle of this night, and thinking about the nature of violence and the damage it wreaks, especially when it is denied.

A big storm passed through our lives. It was violent, and sudden, and there continues to be some clean up to do. The conversations that Shutter Island inspired are part of the clean up.

Again, thank you, Martin Scorcese! You've given me a lot to think about.

The call of the wild

I grew up in the hills south of San Jose, which at that time was a city dotted heavily with apricot and plum orchards and fields of garlic and strawberries. At twelve, I spent a summer with my older cousin picking “cots” and cutting them, laying them out on big wooden trays to dry in the sun, making enough money to fund the things my parents wouldn’t, like psychedelic posters.

Spending a weekend at Pantheacon, which happens in a big hotel surrounded by miles of industrial parks and fast food franchises, where in my memory I can see those orchards, is always a bit challenging. Especially because Pcon falls in the time of year those orchards would be blooming - if they still existed.

Driving home, on the brilliantly warm Monday, I found myself doing a little sing song chant about needing more nature in my nature religion and naming all the things I would do that day out in the garden. "Come on in, nature, let the dirt get under my fingernails!", I sang. Yes, sometimes alone in the car I can appear rather crazy.

So, I came home and did those things. I weeded, I turned over soil, I feed my worms and I sat in the garden, just inhaling the beauty of California in February. Dirt was under my fingernails.

Later, I was in my living room, going through seed catalogues, when I heard strange sounds from my back room. My cat was making a weird meow and there were crashing sounds and what turned out to be beating wings against glass. A blue jay had mysteriously gotten in the house though the back door…which is under stairs and not a clear passage way for a bird. Nature was where it should not be. It took a long time, and a refrigerator was moved, things broke, and there were moments I feared I would kill the bird in trying to save it. But I saved it. It finally joined the mate who had been screeching thoughout the entire debacle, and both rested in the blooming plum tree next door.

I laughingly said to friends and family that maybe I’d invoked nature a little too hard on that drive back. Last night, the joke went way too damn far. I picked up what I thought was a flower on a stem that must have fallen out of an old arrangement I’d thrown in the compost a few days before. But it was not a flower. It was not a stem. It was mouse entrails and a tail. The horror.

I am fifty five years old. I’ve done many things in my life. But I have NEVER held mouse entrails and a tail in my bare hands. And it’s been years since my old cats have shown any interest in hunting. There was nothing normal about this occurrence.

The wild has been calling a little too incessantly in the past few days. Nature has been where it is unnatural to be. And the thing is, usually these things happen in threes. I’m just waiting now for the ant invasion.

Costume Box

I spent the weekend at the San Jose Doubletree Hotel with a couple thousand Pagans, going to workshops/rituals, meandering through the giant market concourse, visiting with old and new friends, and moderating a panel on psychotherapy and Paganism. Along with my fellow members of Fool’s Journey, I set up the Pagan Alliance suite as a place for restorative relaxation, complete with rosewater scented footbaths, feet and hand scrubs, spritzers of all kinds, relaxing teas, and cucumber slices for the eyes.

As a child, my mother provided my sisters and I with a creatively stocked costume box. One of my sisters consistently dressed up a princess, the other as a cowgirl. My favorite items were a red Navaho skirt with rose trim, an embroidered Mexican blouse, and a golden paisley scarf, which I tied around my head. Yep, that’s right, I loved to pretend I was a gypsy. Later, as part of the Woodstock Nation, these kinds of costumes became my daily attire. My closet at age 21 closely resembled the costume box of my childhood, stocked with vintage finery spanning several decades.

Remnants of my old aesthetic remain in the silver bracelets I’ve worn since 17, but now my style veers towards simple elegant comfort. I’m a respected psychotherapist, for Goddess sake! Bone jewelry, feathers in the hair, pointy hats, face painting, glitter, capes, bustles or corsets no longer have any appeal to me, although these abound at Pantheacon. Embracing the costume box of childhood continues to be a fundamental Pagan virtue. Sometimes I’ve struggled with this, wishing my chosen spirituality could show a more “mature” face to the world, and give up on the little horns so many wear. It’s just not going to happen. Ever.

But what can you expect from a spiritual community that weds mirth to reverence?

This year, I’m embracing the costume box as sacred. Because, it is. I'm just happy (and proud) that the costume my goddess daughter Lyra plucked out to wear involved an In and Out Burger hat. Now, that's creative!!!

a new beginning

On my fiftieth birthday I began this blog. Sometimes I’ve written regularly, and sometimes there have been long intervals between posts. Never has an interval been quite as long as this one.

I am now fifty-five, the plum blossoms are in full force outside my window, daffodils have sprung up in the pots on my deck, and I am freshly back from Pantheacon. The confluence of these things somehow signal to me that it is time to start writing again.

This is, yet another, new beginning .

My Brigid Offering

Stars

Here in my head, language

keeps making its tiny noises.

How can I hope to be friends

with the hard white stars

whose flaring and hissing are not speech

but a pure radiance?

How can I hope to be friends

with the yawning spaces between them

where nothing, ever, is spoken?

Tonight, at the edge of the field,

I stood very still, and looked up,

and tried to be empty of words.

What joy was it, that almost found me?

What amiable peace?

Then it was over, the wind

roused up in the oak trees behind me

and I fell back, easily

Earth has a hundred thousand pure contraltos -

even the distant night bird

as it talks threat, as it talks love

over the cold, black fields.

Once, deep in the woods,

I found the white skull of a bear

and it was utterly silent -

and once a river otter, in a steel trap,

and it too was utterly silent.

What can we do

but keep on breathing in and out,

modest and willing, and in our places?

Listen, listen, I'm forever saying,

Listen to the river, to the hawk, to the hoof,

to the mockingbird, to the jack-in-the-pulpit -

then I come up with a few words, like a gift.

Even as now.

Even as the darkness has remained the pure deep darkness.

Even as the stars have twirled a little, while I stood here,

looking up,

one hot sentence after another.

Mary Oliver

5th annual Cyberspace Poetry Slam for Brigid

Feel free to copy the following to your blog/facebook/website and spread
the word. Let poetry bless the blogosphere once again!

WHAT: A Bloggers (Silent) Poetry Reading

WHEN: Anytime February 2, 2010

WHERE: Your blog

WHY: To celebrate the Feast of Brigid, aka Groundhog Day

HOW: Select a poem you like - by a favorite poet or one of your own - to
post February 2nd.

RSVP: If you plan to publish, feel free to leave a comment and link on
this post. Last year when the call went out there was more poetry in
cyberspace than I could keep track of. So, link to whoever you hear
about this from and a mighty web of poetry will be spun.


Please pass this invitation on