branches up, roots down

Biting Back By Patricia Smith Children do not grow up As much as they grow away. My son’s eyes are stones, flat, brown, fireless, with no visible openings in or out. His voice, when he cares to try it on, hovers one-note in that killing place where even the blues fidget. Tight syllables, half spoken, half spat, greet me with the warmth of glint-tipped arrows. The air around him hurts my chest, grows too cold to nourish, and he stares past me to the open door of his room, anxious for my patented stumbled restreat. My fingers used to brush bit of the world From his kinked hair, but he moved beyond that mother shine to whispered “fucks” on the telephone, to the sweet mysteries of scalloped buttons dotting the maps of young girls, to the warped, frustrating truths of algebra, to anything but me. Ancient, annoying apparatus, I have unfortunately retained the ability to warm meat, to open cans, to clean clothing t...

As Brigid approaches, I take the poetry books off the bookshelves and strew them around the house. The house altar gets its fair share, and there’s a stack of books in arm’s reach from every vantage point in the living room. On my bedside table I keep my current favorites. As Reya points out, poetry IS that place between forge and well, the exhale and the inhale, giving word to the exquisite and horrifying beauty that is life. At my office, I always have a stack of poetry books next to my chair, with Mary Oliver and Rumi being the constants. Sometimes, the best therapeutic intervention is a poem. For the past year or so, I’ve found myself returning again and again to Mary Oliver’s Blackwater Woods. Yesterday, I returned for another visit. In Blackwater Woods Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light, are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment, the long tapers of cattails a...

I often find myself teaching clients how to use their breath as a fundamental meditational/magical tool. Bringing attention to their breath, I ask them to let what they need to take in and what they need to let go of come into focus. I then guide them to feel as they breathe how we are constantly taking in and constantly letting go, noticing how the place between can often equal the breathes themselves. I’m acutely aware that I’m in a time where what I’m letting go of seems to directly equal what’s coming in, and thankfully, there’s times when that place between the letting go and taking in comes sharply into focus as well. Brigid (or Imbolc or Candlemas) is a cross-quarter pagan holiday, the place between winter solstice and the equinox. This Brigid, between the sharp grief of what’s been lost, and the almost dizzying gifts flowing in, I’m taking some time to celebrate that place between....and marveling once again on the power of three....the inhale, the exhale, the place betwee...

Yesterday evening I came home from my son’s basketball game to find one of my goddess daughters (I’m rich in goddess daughters!) and her friend up in my ritual room. The ritual room is up in the attic, adjacent to my art studio. It was in the stepping into these rooms some 12 years ago that I knew I had to buy this house. Many psychically attuned cohorts have felt the ritual room to be a magical portal, and I’ve gotten accustomed to my role as some kind of psychic bouncer, having learned the hard way that the room needs to be cleaned and cleared out on a regular basis. Spirits seem to like to party down in the room, and left unchecked, the energy can be quite rave like. Plenty of initiations, both Reclaiming and Feri, have been done in this room, and the last four have been a blend of both, which the spirits seem to be particularly amenable to. If not amenable, they speak up, most notably with fire. This room has taught me a lot about asking permission, and listening to seemingly inani...

This weekend was devoted to the magic of linking. It’s been close to a year that I’ve been blogging. On Friday I set the intention to come thru the weekend with my blog having links to other blogs. As I worked towards it (and it was work!) I pondered on the power of it, the complexity of the interconnectiveness. How incredible that out here in cyberspace old friends and cohorts are finding each other and building another kind of intimacy and connection! With every old connection, new ones are made as well. This blogging is creating its own ecosystem between the worlds, full of stories, with new pages nurtured by their connections to older ones, with each link creating a new pattern. Hiking with Naomi on Saturday, we marveled at the infinite variety in nature, the variety even in the color green. This time period, when you can sense the spring straining to be sprung, elicits such a feeling of possibility. Walking thru the San Anselmo watershed, we trained our eyes to look for ...

I walked out of my office tonight to a downfall of rain. I turned my face up to it, relishing the freshness of it, the feel of it. Seconds later, a young woman with a huge umbrella came up to me and said something I couldn’t quite understand. My guess is she was saying it clearly, but it was so surprising, I couldn’t quickly comprehend it. She was offering to share her umbrella with me, to walk me down the street. When my brain started working, and I could take this all in, she told me she wasn’t crazy, just waiting for the bus, and as long as she was waiting, she figured she’d be of service. Plus, she said, she needed some good karma coming her way. I was loving the rain, remembering my life as an Oregonian, where rain was such a fact of life that umbrellas were eschewed and wetness embraced. Nevertheless, I joined her under the umbrella, knowing that such kindness shouldn’t be refused. We came to the end of the block just as the bus appeared a few blocks down, rounding the hi...

It’s Martin Luther King’s birthday. I spent the evening at a Youth Speaks Poetry Slam. Youth Speaks is a remarkable organization that’s mobilized young people to write poetry. My goddess daughter Hazel is in it, and my young friend Susanna, who in 9 th grade took an elements of magic class from me and rapidly became extended family. It’s an amazing group of kids from both privilege and poverty, bonded in their belief in the power of the spoken word, and you can feel the magic as soon as the first kid gets up. Poems about MLK, about first love, about striving to be “cool”, about being of mixed race, about being queer, about purely being, all had a place here. “Clap it up!” was yelled after each poet, all getting a loud round of applause, all praised for their bravery and their story. The guy who started this is one of those heroes of the Aquarian age, not taking center stage, but passing the power and glory all around. I was in tears less than a minute into it. It was a...