branches up, roots down

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 S...

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...

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 ...

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 close...

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 .

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...