Hollowed Out

I wasn't going to write today, because along with perhaps many millions of other people, I am feeling hollowed out. It's the realization that what we are watching feels like what I have experienced in so many situations in life, being told you just aren't worth anything, that your life has no value, that your interests and talents are worthless. And no matter how hard I have tried for decades to hold the faith, to know in my heart that I have "worth", what appears to be happening before our eyes is some kind of mondo bizarro truth serum, proving that the construct we live in did not, itself, move forward through history to become more inclusive and welcoming. It simply may not be capable of it. It grew out of a hierarchical world, with certain men at the top and the rest of us below, and a rubber band keeps snapping it back into that place.

So I've been uncharacteristically down, depressed. As much as I actively see and feel the return of the Goddess to our world, I still feel almost as stymied as I did six months ago, before returning east. I cannot intuit exactly where I belong in the midst of this tumult, much less how to get there. Still not quite seeing or meeting my kindred spirits, or feeling the strong, positive certainty that usually leads me to forward movement.

Having said that, there was a really neat moment just now, symbolic of so much. If you had asked me from the ages of 6-50, I would have probably said that I "am" one of the choristers in the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, and that singing choral evensong in those choir stalls represents my home. If you had asked me from 50-65 how that had changed, I might have said that in spirit, I had evolved into more of a member of the Tallis Scholars, singing a wide range of Renaissance and newer music, but outside the actual cathedral milieu. Just now, I realize I have morphed again. "My" choir is Voces8, and the video best representing who I am now is the one where they are singing "The Saddest Noise" in Grand Teton National Park. Never mind whether they did or didn't actually tape the music on the mountainside, it's the juxtaposition that counts...gorgeous, clear, bell-like choral tones in the wilderness. Recently, someone suggested I sing music of evensong to the trees and birds, and I've done it a few times. It feels a little odd, but wonderful. My actual new dream, at 69, is to be part of an elite choir singing choral evensong outside, in the English countryside or in the ruins of an ancient abbey. I want to hear the stones and the whole landscape singing with us.

And if, in this hollowed out world of ours, this is a "worthless" dream, so be it.

PS: Near the end of the pandemic, I heard Voces8 in Duluth, and it was so unbelievably thrilling, I don't have words for it. The entire audience was masked to the hilt, but once the music started, we were free. And if I am not mistaken, they sang "The Saddest Noise".

 

So big

I had drafted a new post but let it sit for a day, as I sometimes do, and by this morning it seemed completely wrong.

Everything that's happening now is so big, and then, taken together with other big things, is even bigger still. It is all completely overwhelming, and completely and hopelessly old paradigm. Unfortunately that means the old paradigm fear-based solutions or responses are also unlikely to work. In an odd way, this is encouraging to me, as it underscores my belief that Goddess and Love energies are in the ascendant, and everything on earth not in alignment with Love is rising to the surface to dissipate into their "native nothingness" (a phrase evidently used in Christian Science (which I have never explored) and Florence Scovel Shinn (whose books I have read and resonate with). But being a witness to current events, hey, living on this planet at all at this time, will be extremely painful for all of us. There will probably be no exceptions to this. I wrote on and off for a long time about "softish landings", and for many of us, that will be the best case scenario...that by focusing on Love and the things we find beautiful and hopeful, we align with what's coming, not what is hurting us now. That may snatch some of us to relative safety from the most potentially painful crash landings.

In a time like this, it's hard to focus on what we want, and yet crucial. What do I really want? Health care, or good health? An end to war, or people actively loving one another? Money, or a rich, beautiful life? A job, or perfect self-expression for someone with my unique gifts?

And what does the Goddess want? What does Mother Earth want? That we gently release the construct that has precipitated all these crises. That we understand we are one with the most brilliant stars in the sky. That we take a Love perspective into account before we do anything new from this point on. At the very least, that this be our intention from the moment we wake up in the morning. I'm "preaching to the converted", I know. The handful of you who read this are probably already doing some of this. And we will have to watch in horror as others go on a completely opposite path. But in the end, Love will be all. Nature will do what She needs to do, and beauty will find its way into the holes and crevices of the dying paradigm. New growth will birth out of the darkness.

Rabbit, rabbit

Years ago, I picked up the habit (when I remember) of saying "rabbit, rabbit" early on the first day of the month. I didn't even really know why it was done -- I see that it's an old superstition to bring good luck. Interestingly, if I recall correctly, in my old Medicine Cards (Carson and Sams), rabbit represented "fear". So maybe we all may need good luck getting through what is ahead, the manifestation of some of our worst possible fears. 

I guess I go back to "the thing speaking for itself", and trusting our guts. Yes, we are seeing what we are seeing. It's that bad, it's that self-evident. The good thing about all diplomacy and convention being stripped away is that you see the truth.

Is what we are seeing "the way of the Goddess"? No. About its 180 degree opposite. I'm going to start new months from now on saying, "Goddess, Goddess", because we need Her now more than we need so-called luck.

Goddess Words 39: Gifting

This seems like a good moment for another Goddess word. For any new readers, I made a list about 20 years ago called "The Words of the Goddess", but did nothing further with it until a few years ago, when I decided to present them one-by-one in this blog. These are not definitive discussions! I'm just mulling over what the words mean to me now, why I associate them with the Goddess, and other tangents. I think of them as building blocks, perhaps helping lay the foundation for a future, more Goddess-centered, culture.

One of the most interesting things is the fact that I used "gift" in verb form...I gather that this is still a point of contention among wordies. But "gifting" seems to be subtly different from "giving" -- to me it indicates a higher level of thought on the part of the giver, and perhaps that the gift is more personal, more intrinsically valuable, more heartfelt.

This word is appropriate in the context of the Goddess because of the biggest gift of all -- our earth home, a gift given to us and the whole universe from a place of love. We are privileged to be living on one of the few livable planets. The air we breathe is a gift. The heating of the sun is a gift. The tides and cycles of the moon are gifts. The land and its resources are gifts. And yet we have exploited so much of it, not used it thoughtfully or thankfully. 

More and more, I think about the "energy" of things, and the energy of gifting starts in the heart of the giver. The best gifts are made by hand, baked from scratch, or bought with the specific interests and passions of the receiver in mind. These gifts are love-generated, not about a good deal. A good gift happens when the giver cares for the receiver. This is true "gifting". When you make a batch of cookies, and you ring a doorbell of a new neighbor, and they open the door, there is a warm, loving connection in both directions. I personally believe that a future economy (if there needs to be such a thing at all) will be based on giving. There is a completely different, openhearted energy to giving than there is to selling, or even bartering...

The Goddess has given us so much -- for free. Nature doesn't engage in buying and selling. If Mother Earth had asked us to "pay" for all Her riches over the years, humans would be even more hopelessly indebted to Her than we already are. 

On a day when many people will be choosing not to spend money, perhaps all of us can instead give one truly generous gift to someone in our life -- we can regift, bake, cook a stew, shovel a sidewalk, or help a senior. At the very least, we can try to be like the Great Mother, and "gift" from our hearts. 

 

 

Res ipsa loquitur, again

Back in May of 2018, I first used this wonderful Latin phrase, and in a slightly different context, but it seems to become more and more relevant with every passing day. It's just that different things are "speaking for themselves". Enough is being said in so many other places, that I guess I will continue to tell odds and ends of my own story, in the theory that my story is all I have to offer the world at this pivotal moment.

In the 1980's when I was living in Manhattan and working at Time Magazine, I studied at Parsons School of Design at night. I had hoped to work toward a degree in graphic design, so that there would be some practical application to my (post-English church music) art career, but it just wasn't in me to deal with advertising and other commercial functions. In the end, I majored in Illustration, and over the years I tried on and off to make at least a little bit of money from a variety of art and art teaching endeavors, but my heart wasn't in it. Life lesson: it usually doesn't work to replace your primary life passion with another less passionate endeavor, and do it wholeheartedly.

In a portraiture class, the teacher had noticed that I was trying too hard to draw my classmate's face in minute detail, and she asked me to take off my glasses. I am so completely nearsighted, I balked at doing this, but she insisted. Of course, even being only about four or five feet away, I could now barely see the other woman's face, just the basic shapes and major areas of darkness and light. Yet this was literally almost a new way of seeing, and helped my sketch look three-dimensional in a way it hadn't been. For the rest of the class, I used my glasses only part of the time, and the resulting drawing was more balanced and satisfying than it would have been otherwise. So I think there is another life lesson in this!

One evening after this, I decided to walk all the way from midtown down to the Village without my glasses on, to see if I could do it, and to see how it changed my experience of being in the city. It was extremely hard. I mean, I was young and not really in danger of tripping, falling on a curb, or walking into people. That part of the journey was navigable. But what was unnerving was the inability to see people's faces clearly, or their body language at a distance. I guess I had become very dependent on scanning the sidewalks to see if I was in any danger...and with that form of radar taken away from me, I was, to say the least, somewhat nervous. I couldn't tell if people looked friendly or not. Once I got to the school, I was relieved to put my glasses back on and go to class -- perhaps never considering (as I have just now as I am reliving the experience) what the day-to-day life of a completely sightless person must be. Once again, my gratitude to my eyes knows no bounds.

This is a time when we will need to rely on, and trust, all our senses. Things may be "speaking" to us in different ways, and we need to "listen".

A Patchwork Quilt

Every once in a while, I marvel that I haven't yet used a particular title for a blog post, and this is one that shocks me somewhat! It's too good not to have used. All our lives are like a patchwork quilt, but mine more than most!

I am not a traditional quilter, using fabric. When the pandemic started, I began to create small knitted "quilts", more like lap robes, to give various friends. I wanted to gift them with a measure of comfort, and in some of these situations I think it did help, and that the blankets are still being used. Some acquaintances started giving me old used balls of cotton, wool, and acrylic yarns, so most of the little blankets have been patchwork even in that regard -- materially "mutts". It's an ongoing project, since I have barely scratched the surface of my list of friends. And inconveniently, I've started to find that knitting bothers one of my shoulders...darn.

This weekend was a life patchwork, including several concerts, a movie (well, actually, five Oscar shorts), and a church service (that in the end wasn't very appealing). I am being pushed -- and pushing myself -- to do some kinds of things that aren't in my wheelhouse, simply because unless I am to end up really out in a shack in the wilderness, I need to see if I can find kindred spirits, somewhere. It's interesting that when you are so spiritual, the obvious answer would be church, and yet I've reached the point I just about cannot stand church services, or worse, the coffee hours afterwards. (I think I could stand attending choral evensong in England, closing my ears to some of the readings, but that's about it.) Just about everything rubs me the wrong way, from lingering traditional God talk, to the new thing of having hymns projected onto screens, to sitting quietly for sermons, readings or meditations, to being talked "to". And in the context of the Goddess, I really don't think that She wants worship, just our attention and respect. At the moment, the only "church" I can tolerate is communing with my hawk, looking at the sunset, writing here in my blog, and things like cooking, baking and yes, knitting. But so far, those things haven't yet gotten me any closer to a permanent home for my old age. 

What a life, and what a time. At least, looking outwards, I can see clearly where not to find kindred spirits.

Becalmed

When it has been outrageously windy for days on end, to wake up to dead calm is quite unsettling. I've grown tired of the constant noise, and yet its disappearance feels like yet another foundation being pulled out from under us. Maybe if the wind is no longer roaring, then "it" has all been a figment of our overheated imaginations and stability (however illusionary, temporary or unsustainable) has returned. It only takes a brief glance at news online to realize that this isn't the case. Still, I welcome the sudden calm.

I guess that's the opening to another story, one that I don't think I've ever told you. I am not entirely sure when this happened, perhaps 50 years ago.

I was out sailing in a small Sunfish with my youngest brother. Lake Champlain had had, for an hour or so, perfect light winds for such a sailboat, and we had gone down to Split Rock and over to Vermont, and were back near the shoreline south of Essex when the wind suddenly died. We were becalmed, a word that should be used more frequently than in a sailing context! I mean, completely becalmed. We didn't have far to go, and it might have been possible to use the tiller to push the rudder back and forth to gain forward momentum, but for a few minutes we just sat in the water. I was looking at the beautiful sunset over the New York shoreline. We may have been chatting about nothing, or looking for faint evidence of wind, as you do.

All of a sudden, some kind of live being rose out of the water, creating an enormous wave. It had a smallish head and an arc-shaped back -- it didn't leave the water entirely, but created a half-moon shaped watery image that was there one minute, gone the next. I guess I shrieked and pointed it out to my brother, who I know at least saw the telltale ripples in the water. At that moment in history, there had been relatively little scuttlebutt about "Champ" (or Champy), Lake Champlain's version of the Loch Ness monster, although I'd heard of sightings. But I had recently seen a TV special about Nessie, and I immediately assumed that a lake monster is what I had just seen. My brother pooh-poohed me, and indeed, several times over the years when I brought up the story, he insisted that I was wrong, either that he hadn't seen anything at all, or perhaps a fish. And of course, at this late date, I can't know for sure what I saw, although I'm in much better company, as in recent decades, sightings have been taken far more seriously, even by scientists.

But I think there are two bigger metaphorical points here. First of all, had it been windy, Champy and his or her "wake" would have been invisible to two young sailors paying all of their attention to the breeze, coming about, and avoiding getting too close to shore. It was the calm of the usually wavy lake that made this being's momentary leap above water visible. The second is the lifelong problem I have had, not being believed about many things I say, from the most seemingly fanciful ("I've just seen a monster") to the most profound ("I've seen the future and I know what is coming"). Yes, it started in my family, but it has continued on into most situations I have been in -- thankfully, not all. While I think it has something to do with being female, I don't think that is the whole story. Humanity has limited itself to only a few ways of knowing, and anyone who breaks free and finds other ways of seeing or sensing may be left unheard. And in that situation, it is hard to continue to believe in oneself. 

Thankfully, I still believe I saw Champy, and I still believe most of my other observations, whether the "lake" is wavy or whether it is becalmed.