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