"The deeper song"

It isn't very often that I read a phrase in a book, and come to a screeching halt as if I have been hit by lightning. But that happened the day before yesterday. I am reading (or trying to, it's dense!) the Occidental Mythology volume of Joseph Campbell's The Masks of God series (Penguin Books). On page 25 (and I am loosely paraphrasing here), he basically says, despite the monotheistic and Greco-Roman attempts to rise above female and nature-based religions, it was not entirely successful. That a mystery moves beneath these "'higher' systems -- as though speaking silently, to say, 'But do you not hear the deeper song?'"

"The deeper song." These words hit my heart and I burst into tears. If I were to write my autobiography today, this would be the title, although a quick search shows me that other authors have used the phrase, perhaps in different contexts. My brain immediately took me to John Rutter's "What Sweeter Music", and I joined in with King's College, Cambridge choir's performance of the Christmas tune, doing what I have done for 60 years to records, then cassettes, then CDs, and now online -- singing along with the men and boys at King's. Singing, from half a world away, a deeper song? A counterpoint in time and space? It is a deep, resonant longing to be part of a specific family of musicians I couldn't be part of, at least not in this lifetime. And a deep longing to sing and speak in other arenas and be listened to respectfully. There's lot of hurt in me that still needs mending, although opportunities to do just that, I am grateful to say, are happening more often these days.

And of course, to look at the bigger picture, the earth has been singing since time began. The Universe is probably, ultimately, "just" a song, a great aria of love energy sung out into space. The Goddess never stopped singing; we, perhaps, just stopped listening. What deeper song would we hear today, beneath the bombs and the flow of refugees and the slaps on the faces and the rising world temperatures and the persistent spiking of COVID around the world? What is the sweeter music, the sweeter message, the deeper truth, the deeper song? If we stop everything and listen carefully, maybe we'll hear it.

I've been practicing when I water indoor plants. If you stand still afterwards, you can hear the water soaking into the soil. The "deeper song" has many verses, but water soaking into dry soil has to be one of them.

There is an Equation

This has been a two- or three-day stretch unusually rich in learning and new understandings. My teachers have been world events, friends, and online courses, all showing up simultaneously. Winter hibernation seems to be drawing to a close, despite the north country's continued cold and snow squalls.

I alluded previously to the process I am going through, grappling with how to respond to recent international events, given my personal history of consistently trying to be helpful and present for my family. I'm still gnawing away at this, and it is presenting itself as almost literally a mathematical equation. Monster A commits Act X (egregious in its violence or physical and emotional damage to others). This leads directly to Person B (someone with a heart) feeling the need to jump into action, whether to help those who have been hurt, to fight the monster, or to do activities that might model "being human" to the monster. In other words, what is hitting me over the head is how  "good" people in an equation may often end up reacting, not acting autonomously. 

In addition to this, I've broken through a bit of my usual "observer cool" and experienced rage at the world leader who has been the catalyst to an unbearable level of destruction. It's actually been a good thing (rage in this situation is valid!) but quickly all the ties become tangled up and it's hard to know who I am really angry at: my own dad? the capitalist and communist systems? religious and secular traditions? "patriarchy" in general? I see that many people in Europe and even the US are dropping everything to go to the Ukrainian border to help refugees, and I can get very down on myself. What is wrong with me that I cannot feel that same enthusiastic generosity of spirit? Well, what is "wrong" is that I was severely hurt in the past, and need to be absolutely sure that any action I take is from a place of positive love and warmheartedness, not passive-aggressive anger. I need to be impeccable, honest, and courageous at my core, before I take action of any kind. It's possible that this has as much energetic power as handing out meals -- or it may not. But today, that's the situation within me.

I'm not entirely sure what the new equation will look like, when more and more Love-filled people act beautifully and autonomously out of their centers, and as the world's core energy lightens. There may always be monsters. Will they be forced into reactionary mode? Hey, perhaps that is what is happening now...Maybe we are already writing a different equation. 

Spring Storms

Today, gale force winds and snow and rain expected. Last weekend's brief thaw got rid of a lot of snow; brown grass lines the sidewalks, and a few little weeds are showing up green. Life goes on, even after one of the coldest winters on record.

Even for me, this transition from duality to unity/harmony is darned hard. Using my last post's model, most mornings I watch the news, facing in fairly real time the worst that humanity has to offer. I try to meditate on it, come to peaceful terms with it. But there is a part of me that still wants to jump out of my skin with frustration and anger, possibly buy a ticket to Poland and help people at the border. I want, in short, to fix what is clearly wrong. For many people, this will be the right thing to do, and Goddess bless them.

The blessing and curse of my upbringing is having a clear understanding of these kinds of leaders. Deep down they want to upend everyone's lives. They want to hurt and destroy. They want to ruin or at least manipulate people's lives and plans. Their oxygen is attention and "power over", and the more we change our lives in order to fight them, or resist them, or try to fix what they are blowing to smithereens, or even help them, the more satisfied they are. Many of my major life decisions were based on wanting to help my family. Certainly not every decision, but many of them. And when I did do things primarily for myself, I felt guilty. Helping fix a family that didn't believe it was broken was a black hole, and, in the process of doing it, I drained myself almost entirely of life energy. The heroic desire to save is not wrong. It is understandable and at times, beautiful, within the context of the paradigm we've lived in for thousands of years. 

But as we move out of this conflict-based duality phase, many concepts will fall by the wayside, including heroism, salvation, loyalty, and nationalism. We won't need to be heroic, because no-one is being hurt. Leaders won't hold "loyalty" over people's heads, because power will be circular, not vertical; when there are "leaders", they will be people we truly, genuinely love and respect. Etc. At the end of the day, I know my personal role is to try not to react to anything done by a monster, but to model turning completely away from the monstrous and living as if we were already in the New Paradigm. It may take decades for earth to make the transition, but most of me is already there. It's been surreal, but it seems to be what I do best.

Nature continues her own struggle for survival, with early spring tornados, "freakishly" high temperatures at the North and South Poles, out-of-control wildfires. And in the commercial breaks on the news programs I watch, ever-bigger and more technologically-complex cars, appliances and conveniences are advertised. It looks unlikely that I will ever afford these things, but by now I simply cannot imagine wanting them anyway. I cannot imagine not understanding their role in throwing earth out of balance. I cannot imagine why, as a society, we aren't calling a loving "standstill" and humbly asking Mother Earth how to proceed. 

Three Cards

Every day, a new horror. Having had a father who regularly put his own welfare before the needs of family, I guess I shouldn't be surprised by what we are seeing. But when the inhumanity is this shocking and on such a large scale, one feels, oneself, so flattened. So incapable of normalcy. And it is even more shocking to remember that it is not only one person pushing the buttons and pulling the triggers; there are many thousands. Whether they share an indiscriminate bloodlust, or are operating out of fear, we may never know.

Yesterday, I drew three cards, not two, to meditate on. I don't know why, I just felt led to. And I'm still processing them.

The first, from my "Wildwood" deck, is Major Arcana #15, "The Guardian" (in traditional Tarot decks, "The Devil"). In this deck, the illustration is the skeleton of a bear, guarding a dark cave. The emphasis isn't on "evil", but rather the facing of our own fears and our inner darkness (and that of society). Facing hard truths. Moving beyond fear.

The second card, from the "Mystical Shaman Oracle" deck (#52 "Standstill"), shows a figure meditating in lotus position under an arched doorway. Behind him or her, a sunrise or sunset. It is about turning within, and stopping serious action to simply be in the moment. Sort of, allowing the world to whirl around you until you are ready to jump back into it.

The third card is also from "Wildwood": Ten of Vessels (Cups), "Happiness". The possibility of "true and lasting" happiness, arriving at a place of love and safety and joy. 

It's interesting. I see this reading as relevant on two levels. The first is as a suggested way of literally getting through the day in traumatizing times. Aligning as best we can with our own sense of the divine, we look with clear eyes at this conflict, facing our own fears of where it will lead, and what it may mean about ourselves -- both our darkest dark and lightest light. Every day, there is at least the possibility that this war may have a "better" outcome than we can imagine...or a "worse" one. If we can summon up the courage, and spend some moments early in the day in stillness or meditation, we may have the strength to do something later in the day that promotes happiness, joy, fulfillment, and love. We don't have to save the entire world. We might simply contact a sick friend, or water thirsty plants, or open the door to the springlike 38 degree air! Simply "doing no harm" takes a lot of energy in this moment, yet it helps the world immeasurably.

But I also see this as a roadmap, of sorts, for the next few decades. As earth's spiritual and physical energies rise, people not operating on the higher frequency may "wig out". Old paradigms and institutions may simply run out of steam, and the changes may be so substantial that later this century, life as we lived it now will be unrecognizable. If we can literally keep hold of our own inner calm center, and know that we are entering a more love-focused future, these changes will be bearable. Remember, there is ultimately no such thing as "death". All of us chose to be here at this transitional moment, to play an important role, then exit the stage. More than ever, how long we live (on this earth plane, in this lifetime) is less important than how lovingly we live. 

Exile

On Saturday, I burst into tears, and have been feeling quite fragile since then. Obviously, it's about what is happening in Ukraine, but there was a specific catalyst. I have found that I have access to the British "Antiques Roadshow", a program I love, and periodically they do an episode where the back stories of one or two items are researched and explored. In this case, a 1920's-era quilt led to learning more about the life of a young Scottish woman who had been in service at a stately home. Evidently, she fell in love with the house's married chauffeur (or had sex with him under other circumstances. Who knows?) and found herself pregnant. This being 100 years ago, she had to go to a home for wayward women during her pregnancy, then, immediately after the birth, the child was given up for adoption. At that point, this young woman's family being ashamed of her, she was sent to Australia, where she eventually married a farmer in the Outback and lived the rest of her life. But she never lost her homesickness for Scotland. 

The piece of the story that threw me into a state was the fact that it was her father who paid for her passage to Australia. In effect, he renounced her and never wanted to see her again. He sent her into exile half a world away. He had that power.

The story should seem dated, but it doesn't. From small scale (when I lived in the YWCA in Helena, Montana, virtually every woman was there to escape some sort of family, societal, or spousal violence or rejection) to large (one man having the power to send millions of women and children into exile), it seems like the male-female power imbalance is as toxic as ever. 

I cannot help but think about one of my heroines, the feminist theologian Mary Daly, who said it very succinctly in her groundbreaking 1973 book, Beyond God the Father: "...if God is male, then the male is God." I mean, this was published nearly 50 years ago, the year I graduated from high school! Yet it seems no less radical, or obvious, now. When you think the ultimate power of the universe looks like you, you can more easily use your power to do anything you wish. We women can't begin to imagine such power; it's like an impossible dream. Speaking for myself, if I found myself "all-powerful" tomorrow, I would treat the entire city of Duluth to a huge Thanksgiving-style banquet, and then fly to England, buy a tiny cottage home, and live quietly ever after. That's it. 

Amazingly enough, Mary Daly is also from Schenectady. There must be something in the Mohawk River water! She attended Catholic church and schools and went on to teach at Boston College. But (yup!) she was eventually fired from her tenured position. Her post-Christian views did not fit a Catholic college, that's for sure. Being post-Christian/monotheistic in our world is its own form of exile.

It is pretty clear that soon, there will be nothing left of the country that millions of refugees are fleeing. Their hearts and bodies are being ripped from a soil they love. Exile will always be painful, wherever they land, and ripples of pain are moving out across the globe. All because of one man who has no capacity to care about their pain, or the devastation to the earth. Other variations on this kind of dynamic are playing out all over the world. Talk about paradigms that we have totally outgrown.

Trying to get back to Grandma's home

I've spoken of dreams a few times lately, and of how many involve my trying desperately to find something or someone, and being led on a wild goose chase, only to wake up in tears or utterly frustrated, never having success. One subset of this group of dreams is where I realize, with a start, that Grandma (my mother's mother) is still alive and living in Schenectady. I cannot imagine why I haven't visited her recently, and I set out to find her. It ends up being a nearly impossible task, with downtown Schenectady looking like a cross between ancient Athens and midtown Manhattan. This morning I woke up while I was climbing up a ladder in a long line of people heading upwards, but I was nowhere near her apartment.

I wrote about my grandmother in my October 6, 2021 blog ("Grandma"), and you might want to check that out. As we teeter ever closer to a disastrous all-out war, I suppose it is no mystery why I am trying to get back to Grandma's home. She loved me. Being there was safe. I was with someone who was creative, like I am, not destructive. Beauty surrounded me, in the form of art on the walls and books of art on the tables. Homemade cooking was in the oven. 

The realization has come to me that I have never felt particularly safe in the world of men. The lack of safety I have experienced in my life has been subtle, but real. It has felt like a constant pushback, a constant rejection, a constant sense of irrelevancy, constantly being told I am wrong. The fact that I attended private girls' schools from grades 7-12, and then all-women's college (Smith), may have added to this later sensation of cluelessness. Once out in what everyone called "the real world", I simply never understood the dynamics of conflict, competitiveness, anger, and struggle. I quite literally couldn't do it. And forget about literal war, the use of weapons. There seems to be a truism out there that all humans have within them the capacity to kill under certain circumstances, but I wonder if that is simply another lie. I cannot be the only woman on earth who knows that above and beyond a mosquito, she would never kill, period. (There are men who feel this way, too.) Some women could kill, and would especially to protect children, and I don't judge that, but I just need to validate another reality in my own little way. War is not "the" human condition, it is "a" human condition that we choose among other options, or have foisted on us by people who are far more violent than we are, far less human and humane. 

It wouldn't be too surprising if those millions of women and children and elders on the move, escaping terror and horror, have some image of "Grandma's home" in their hearts. A place of safety, love, beauty, welcome, warmth and nurturing. Oh, Goddess, may they arrive safely. May we all.

What would She do?

"What would She do?" That, in essence, seems to be my preoccupation the last few days, and that of many of my friends, even if worded differently. "What should I do?" "What would I do if I were in Ukraine?" "Where is She in all this?"

Oh, gosh. Talk about not feeling up to the task. But I've seen this era coming for decades, so I guess I cannot pull away now. 

Of course, the problem is that She isn't a being in the sky, or a figure deep in a cave, or only embodied by planet Earth or the women of earth. As beautifully illustrated on "Nova" last night (PBS), humans can now ever-more-effectively see into the far corners of the Universe; I believe She is every last galaxy in that Universe, and all the love energy that created those galaxies. She is a power of love and creativity so enormous that humans may never grasp it...and frankly, "She" is beyond gender anyway. It's just that I am a woman. Even in my lifetime, I have been condescendingly told to leave worldly affairs to men and not to worry my pretty little head about anything. Look where a world of such marginalization has brought us!  Right now, I define the divine, loving, creative force as feminine. This war is energetically as far from a mother's Love as is humanly possible, that is for sure.

If (as I and some others believe) Love is the only active force in the universe, then what some call "evil" is really "resistance to love". And resistance to resistance (say, directly entering the conflict, putting sanctions into effect, closing businesses, etc.) creates negative momentum, a growing, hellish deep hole where love cannot be found. Some of my friends have said that if they were there, they would take up weapons and fight, and I would never tell anyone that this is wrong. All of us, male and female, need to dig deep to articulate exactly what we believe and what we must do. I cannot "believe" for others.

So this is just me. I see no energetic overlap between shooting a weapon at another human being and love. Even if it is done in the spirit of, "I love such-and-such people and want to defend them," the act itself is violent non-love. It is inherently a form of resistance to love, as are many of the building blocks of our modern world. So what will the She-in-me do today? I will only do activities that are in the Love "ballpark". I will write, communicate with friends, bake, listen to music, appreciate nature, all those things women have always done from our perches outside the fray...but rather than look at my world as secondary, I will look at it as the only "real" reality (and the mostly-male world of conflict and violence as a resistant, freakish exception). In some small way, I will create the world I would like to live in.

I am holding in the light all the men, women and children exiled and on the road, the dead and dying, the elderly who cannot move and are running out of supplies, and the pregnant women on stretchers. May those women safely give birth to children who live to see a genuinely peace-and-love-filled world. May this be the moment when we realize that our old solutions simply will not work anymore, and we aren't even willing to go through the motions of trying them.

An Old Hymnal

Episcopalians (and former Episcopalians) of a certain age grew up with the Hymnal 1940. It's a miracle I still have mine, the navy blue, battered, hard cover copy my parents gave me on my birthday in 1967. In my immature handwriting, I've signed my name inside the cover in ink.

For reasons it isn't too hard to fathom, the words of a number of the warlike hymns have been coming to me in recent days. Hymns 549 to 570, plus others scattered through the book, are out-and-out conflict-focused. Indeed, some come under the specific "Church Militant" heading in the Topical Index. Seriously. "A Mighty Fortress", "Go forward Christian Soldier", and "Onward Christian Soldiers" are there, of course, but oddly, the lesser lyrics that noodled their way into my brain in the 1960s are resurfacing too: "Wrestle, and fight, and pray"/"Christians up and smite them"/"Fight the fight, maintain the strife"/"Fight the fight, Christian"/"Conquered hath our Leader"/"Sing my tongue the glorious battle, sing the winning of the fray".

Even as an eleven-year-old choir girl, these hymns were problematical. Most of them were sung as a processional or recessional, and I always tried to get into the spirit of the thing, marching behind the crucifer down the aisle. But I didn't think of Jesus then, or now, as "militant". I have no memory of any instances in the Gospels where he bore arms. Much is made of the fact that he upended the tables of traders and money changers in the temple; obviously, he was capable of anger and frustration. But did he actively encourage or take part in military action? No. Would he today? I don't think so. But this moment, I suspect, would be utter torture for him, as it is for any of us whose hearts are breaking at what we are seeing. When you care for other human beings, but know that more war only creates more war, the situation seems hopeless. 

Still, we insist on singing from an old hymnal. There can be no glorious end to the kind of war we are teetering on the edge of. If these kinds of concepts are echoing in the brains of any of our political or military leaders, this is going to be a rough reckoning indeed. In a future "hymnal", there simply will be no songs glorifying conflict...not because it has been dictated from above, but because they are the kinds of songs we as individuals won't want to sing. 

One Little Voice

Up until now, I have felt uncomfortable speaking on behalf of, or for, Mother Earth/The Goddess/the feminine divine. After all, who am I, a "little girl from Schenectady" to do that? Never mind that men all through history have written and spoken for God. In part, it is the very fact that I conceive of the Goddess as a Universe-sized river of love, so much bigger than a single being, that trying to find words to speak for Her can feel impossible. But this current war is, oddly enough, giving me the courage. My one little voice is the heart of the Goddess within me, trying to find expression. 

This war is the kind of end result that will always happen when a paradigm operates without the balancing input of the feminine. This is the proverbial end of the line when you take that train (and I'm using that metaphor both deliberately and apologetically, given all its current and former symbolism). Unmitigated tragedy, violence and horror. Every bomb, every tank, every act of destruction, every family torn apart, every person running for their lives, is a brutal attack on the Goddess.

But (and this is a big "but"), so is every explosion in other contexts, like mining, fracking, oil production. So is the destruction of the rain forest, the creation, use, and disposal of plastic waste, the space waste circling the globe, the creation and use of all weapons, industrial plants, cars, and appliances -- when it has been done without considering the polluting impact on Mother Nature. So is every abuse of women and children, the glorification of violence in entertainment, and an economy that supports most of these horrors and largely ignores people who do less harm. Our life in the "West" is energetically not dissimilar to what we are seeing in one embattled country, in terms of how it pains me, anyway, that light being within me that I believe to be Her. 

I'm one little voice in the wilderness. Right now, on a good day, I have one, two, or three readers. I have no illusions that many people will ever listen to me, although I have always dreamed of being heard. But from now on, I think I may have to write as if there is no tomorrow for human life on earth, which there won't be unless we start to honor (not "worship", honor) Her.

Harmonic Convergence

At the end of the last post, I said that I was about to go to my first concert in at least two years.  What I didn't say, was that it was the British vocal ensemble, VOCES8. 

When I saw a brief TV advertisement about the concert, I could not believe it. VOCES8 in Duluth, Minnesota? At this moment in time, barely out of the pandemic and with war looming? One of the top a cappella groups in the world? Here? I quickly bought two tickets and invited a friend, but frankly, until they walked out on stage, I simply thought that some sort of trickster energy was afoot. But it wasn't. They were here.

I sat on the edge of my seat for nearly two hours straight. In the wake of the last two years (not to mention a challenging lifetime), I was a dry sponge, desperately needing filling. It isn't just that they sing "my" music (Thomas Tallis, Orlando Gibbons, Benjamin Britten) with such astonishing purity of sound, perfect pitch, and sensitivity. It is that the music I didn't expect to like as much was equally powerful, de-lightful, and fulfilling (Monteverdi madrigals and jazzy 60s-era numbers like "Fly Me To the Moon").

Yesterday, I realized that this performance could be said to be a perfect representation of Goddess qualities. Now, I don't know any of the male and female singers, and cannot possibly know if this is what they had in mind. And if this group is like any of the choral groups I have ever been in, there are undoubtedly some interpersonal conflicts, and "issues" around planning and long-term goals. But once they get together to sing, that is their job, to sing. To bring different voices with different qualities and ranges together in a harmonic convergence, a living, beautiful "painting" in sound and time. 

In the end, the type of music being sung isn't the issue, and neither is it the type of chorus. It is the high, love-filled energy quality of the performance or oeuvre, and this can happen in all sorts of musical genres, and in poetry, visual arts, theatre, dance, prose, crafts, and other media. As human endeavors become more conflict-driven (our economy, industries, politics, military, sports, and entertainment), it becomes harder and harder to find true harmony. These institutions create energetic convergences, but rarely harmonic ones. Which makes perfect sense, doesn't it? 

So in this crucial week, I am immensely grateful to VOCES8 for exemplifying the kind of love-and-beauty path that will get us through this dark time. They gave me something I can say an unconditional "yes" to. They embody a glowing, shimmering beauty to believe in as other, darkly contrasting events unfold. 

The Three Lenses

It is a stunning moment. All of us see it through our own lenses, and in my case, I have a strange pair of glasses with three lenses. Perhaps the third one is over my third eye?!

Lens number one: how ultimately hopeless it is to function in a world that has, for too long, dishonored the feminine and the divine feminine. While I am seeing traces of the divine feminine in some of the responses to the war, the invasion itself is pure "not love", not the kind embrace of the Goddess.

Lens number two: how ultimately hopeless the duality construct is. War can only happen when people believe in "the other". War can only happen when people blame others. It can only happen when people think they are greater than others. We in the "West" have to pay attention to the ways we think this ourselves. 

Lastly, lens number three: this is a law of attraction teaching moment. A lot of people hate the idea of the law of attraction, seeing it as "blaming the victim". (Perhaps in this case, seeing it as Ukraine having drawn the invasion to itself.) I understand where they are coming from, but I don't see it that way. On the one hand, it is as simple as the Golden Rule, "do unto others as you would have others do unto you." We are energetic beings, almost like a radio. We send out waves of energy. And the Universe, dearly trying to find unity, sends back the waves that most closely match what we are sending out. Yet there is also complexity, in the sense that layers of time and history enter into it, unprocessed fears and actions from ancestors or other people hundreds of years ago. This is undoubtedly in play in this situation. Until individual people and entire countries or civilizations come to terms with their pasts, and find genuine peace within, the waves of conflicted energy that go out will boomerang back -- sooner or later. 

I think it was Abraham-Hicks who said, in some video or another, that once you are falling out of the airplane, you can't get back into it. You can only try to have a soft landing. And of course the only person we can align with love and harmony is ourself; if we are angry in trying to change and sanction others, anger will circle right back to us. So for today, all I can do is make my personal landscape one of peace. I am attending my first musical concert in over two years, which is a bit unnerving given how much of a hermit I have been. But only music would have drawn me out at this crucial moment.