Oddly at Peace

I woke up this morning oddly at peace, with myself and the world. And this held (or perhaps in a way was enhanced by) having pulled the "Crone" card from my "Motherpeace" deck. I don't like the label "crone" any more than I like "hag" (despite Sharon Blackie's excellent book, Hagitude!) As with "non-violence", I wish there were a better term. Maybe simply "wise older woman"? Anyway...

Every time I post, I hope that my essays are food for thought for my handful of readers, and/or that they are indirectly a tidbit of energetic nourishment to the world. Once in a while, though, I recognize a direct link between what I have written and some healing within myself. Since I wrote about homesickness (only a week ago), the subject of England has been noticeably less raw and bittersweet for me. I still feel like a clod of English soil sitting on top of American soil, not really incorporated, not really setting down roots. But the thought that I may have been carrying the homesickness load of my own female ancestors and/or other earlier European women in America -- and perhaps speaking for them -- has released quite a lot of pain. 

And my last two posts have helped me come to peace with something even bigger, the fact that I simply haven't thrived despite extraordinary education and intellect, travel experiences, wonderful friends, a clear sense of purpose, and remarkably positive mental and physical health. Within our current construct, there simply was no energetic overlap or values match. No institution had a job for me to do. No institution "looked like me" or acted like me, and in turn, I couldn't with integrity be anyone other than who I am. At my core, I was always more feminist and Goddess-orientated than I realized, and, that being the case, it truly is a wonder that I am alive at all. I survived. Gratitude on that score brings me a lot of peace today.

The last thing I am at peace with, at least for the moment, is the dire state of the world. All the horrors we are seeing are the product of generations of disrespect toward women and Nature. (It may truly be as simple as that!) And I am at peace with not fighting these developments, because I honestly believe fighting simply leads to more fighting. My job as a "wise older women" is to hold an energy of peace, without and within, and "do" only that which is beautiful, love-filled, and honoring of Nature. I can walk out the door oddly at peace, because I am doing my job, and always was, to the best of my ability. 

The Moral of the Story...

Rather quietly, over the course of the last few months, a major shift has been happening within me. Or perhaps it is better to say that I have finally started to understand the "why's" of what I have experienced for nearly 70 years. Forgive me if I am repeating anything I've said before...realizations come in waves, and I'm trying to ride them!

So yesterday, I did the thing that leaves me overwhelmed and depressed every time -- just for a change of scenery, I went to a different grocery store than usual, one that is enormous. It requires taking a bus I rarely take; sometimes I simply need to get a different vantage point on this small city on a hill, and the huge lake at its feet.

Yet more than ever, and more quickly than ever, I became completely overwhelmed. The size of the place. The fact that with so few exceptions, everything is packaged in plastic or plasticized paper. The fact that in a store that could feed the entire city, perhaps 25 people (apart from me and the staff) were walking around with carts. Wondering how much of this stuff actually gets sold, and how much is disposed of in the end. I was grateful to have about $50 to spend (and these days that buys maybe ten items!), but I felt, as I walked out the door, a huge wave of sickness at the unhealthiness of our entire construct. Our entire way of life.

I think maybe all along, looking at things from a Goddess perspective was at the heart of my inability to function in this modern paradigm, although I wouldn't have been able to articulate it when I was younger. It wasn't just my England thing, or my church music thing, or my artistic thing, or my beauty thing, or even my feminist thing. It wasn't just unease with notions like profit and interest and competition. It wasn't just that my family was a mess. Deep down, since at least the 1990's, I believe I was aligning to values that I now see as more consistent with the divine feminine, beauty and Nature. While "morality" is a very loaded concept, and one that may phase out as we leave our duality landscape, it still may be pertinent to ask, what is "moral" about going so far out of our way to create a way of life that is not environmentally sustainable? What is "moral" about glorifying violence, and putting profits so far above any other consideration? There's a "moral" in almost everything that is happening in our world right now -- both the adjective and the noun -- and it's painful for all of us individually to look at the moral of the story, but necessary. I'm relieved to realize that it was never a case of "if only I could have tweaked this or that"...I was so profoundly out of line with all our institutions that I guess the way my life worked out was inevitable.

The good news being, that as more and more waves of love, beauty and unity enter our earth space, many of us will find our values more widely reflected. We will find something to hang onto, waves we can genuinely "ride" with delight and enthusiasm. Today, I will try to focus on those things as much as it is humanly possible, to balance out yesterday!

For Earth Day

It has been a week of heavy wet snow on the ground and falling from the sky. Gale force winds from the northeast made simple walking nearly impossible. Birds by the thousands seem to be in the neighborhood, having migrated north and come to a screeching halt. They are fluttering around, trying to find small bits of nourishment before heading further north when the weather warms. In the midst of it all, I was driven almost mad by all the references I heard to "fighting climate change". A long hand-written draft of an essay on why we shouldn't be using this phraseology ensued, much of which I have said in earlier posts. 

But in the middle of the night last night, what came to me was more in the form of a "confession". Since that word has a lot of baggage, perhaps "acknowledgement of human responsibility" is better. This is my effort today, perhaps, itself a draft needing constant revision.

To the Goddess/Gaia/Mother Earth/Nature:

On this Earth Day, we are beginning to realize what we have done.

We have put short-term human goals ahead of your needs and our own future needs.

We have put profit and convenience ahead of love.

We have gouged holes into you and scraped your skin raw. We have sent toxins into your air and water, poisoning all life on earth and threatening our own children and grandchildren. We have fought senseless wars, and hurt people, other living beings, and the fragile landscape.

We have valued knowledge and information over wisdom, cleverness over true forward-thinking creativity. 

We have seen life as a "fight", and thus have fought You. We have allowed people with no capacity to love to speak and create for us. We have been afraid of the power of love, and the size of it, extending across all time and space.

Today, may we release the need to fight. May we openly embrace whatever weather events will help You bring earth into a new balance. May we be awed and astonished by Your power, and grateful to be alive to see it. May we not be afraid of anything, especially "death". May we know that love is all there is, and what we are experiencing is love. May we find a way to wrap our minds around such paradoxes!

Thank you for the birds, the spring snow, the winds, the waves, and Your presence all around us. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Homesickness

Anyone who has read this blog for any period of time knows that I have an unusually strong relationship to England. It seems to go beyond my love of the cathedral music tradition and my heritage. It seems to go beyond the frustration of having never found a way to live there, and it is still powerful even though I have arguably come more fully "home" in a spiritual way, to the voice of the divine feminine within.

There's a quality to it all that I can only equate to having stumbled on the "radio station"/wavelength of extreme homesickness, of people all through history, who end up, for whatever reason, away from the place that feels like home...and those whose homes have been completely changed by outsiders. This got me thinking about the experience of European women back in the 1600's and 1700's (when some of my own forebears were leaving England for what is now the New York area). I mean, I keep having to remind myself that women at that time had absolutely no civil, religious, legal, or economic rights. They could not act autonomously. If their father, brother, or young husband came home one day and announced, "We are going to sail to the new world", it's not like the woman could say no. She might grumble, or list a few reasons why it wasn't a good idea. She might even state some of her fears. But if the man who held power over her was determined to make this move, ultimately, she had to go too. And in those days, once you said good-bye to family, friends, and familiar surroundings, you were not likely ever to see them (or even an image of them) again. There were no cameras or video news reports. Attempts to send mail across the Atlantic would have to have been spotty and unreliable. As the ship sailed and the ties were broken, as the energetic roots were pulled out like a tree from the soil, many women's hearts would have been broken too. They could never sail back alone. The "film negative" images of people, the medieval churches, thatched cottages, castles, fields and hedgerows must have been in front of their eyes for the rest of their lives...and perhaps (who knows?) have moved down the generations. It might at least partly explain how those images affect, even at times overwhelm, me nearly 400 years later.

I won't begin to attempt to write about the violence, trauma, heartbreak, and homesickness of people grabbed off the streets into slavery, sent on forced marches, imprisoned for no reason, or deprived of their homelands in other violent ways. Those legacies are more horrific by far, and as a culture, we haven't even begun to process them. The experience of early white women settlers is barely on the same radar screen. And yet, if I put myself in their shoes (perhaps several of my own great-great-great grandmothers) -- literally on the cusp of getting off the boat in 17th century New York -- I have to assume they were baffled, heartbroken, and possibly even angry at having had so little say in the matter of their uprootedness. As they stood on the deck of the boat looking ashore, they probably only had about two minutes to recognize their truth. Within moments, they were pressed into action, to help their families get off the boat and acclimate to an entirely new continent. They might never again have allowed themselves the luxury of grief...but unspoken grief doesn't go away. It keeps flowing down the generations.

Homesickness may only happen when people are (or feel) powerless. Someone fully in control of their life (and for whom the system "works") can make healthy choices, decisions that are right for them. It has taken me nearly 70 years to really start feeling the extent to which, even now, we women are looking out of our eyes at, what is essentially, a foreign country, a "country" that may rarely operate the way we do. In this situation, where is "home", both physically and spiritually? How do we heal from personal and communal homesickness?

Goddess Words 19: Readiness

So, it's funny how the word "readiness" showed up on this list at least 15 years ago. At that point, I was still trying so hard to be normal, to be able to keep a living space, car and job going, and I was only on the earliest cusp of getting a personal handle on what Goddess-centered living might be about. Somehow, I must have intuited that it would involve being ready for the unexpected. Starting in around 2010, I began to live with far more readiness to change direction. And that's been my life ever since!

I don't like to focus on what things are not, but in this case I guess I need to. "Readiness" does not involve fear. It does not involve hunkering down, hoarding, weapons (absolutely not!), completely cutting oneself off and keeping people away. There are no compounds, no walled fortresses, no protecting oneself.

But in these coming months and years, as waves of increased love bring our planet to a new spiritual and environmental level, a certain kind of readiness will be important. Perhaps a better word is "flexibility". Although some people may be called to be almost as nomadic as I have been, I wouldn't wish it on most people. It has been hard, hard, hard, and even a more fluid world won't make such constant transitioning  easy. Perhaps it is more about mental and spiritual flexibility and readiness. It's about understanding that a more love-infused world is going to work much differently than our world does now, and to expect many changes. It's like, "I may be called by the Goddess (Nature, the spirit of the divine feminine) to move unexpectedly in a different direction. I need to be ready, in a love-filled way." For people who have homes and properties, it may not necessarily mean physically moving. But readiness will mean looking truthfully at one's environment and possibly taking sensible, modest, precautions, like insulating or doing foundation work. Some might consider growing more food, or using space to create beauty and art, or taking in a roommate who is on one's energetic wavelength. Readiness may mean gravitating increasingly toward peaceful "entertainment" and sports, or new ways of teaching young people or working in the community. It may mean holding to ever higher bars of integrity and fearlessness, even in the face of fearful narratives in the world.

And for some, it may mean the readiness -- if called from one's inner truth -- to make serious, major changes, inner or outer, in order to welcome new vibrations of love. For some, owning less and being able to make spontaneous changes will be right, but only if it feels right! Some people will stay more rooted and model the permanence of love energy, a new kind of connectedness to Mother Earth.

Being ready fearlessly is enough of a new paradigm, we all may need time to let that concept sink in! Blessings on all of us today, as we do that!

It's Freaky

I am more than overdue to do another Goddess word, but it's going to have to wait a few days. There are just too many freaky things going on.

So, literally, two days ago, I was still having trouble walking on the streets and sidewalks because of ice and iced-up slush. Today? It may make it up to 70 degrees F, which is extremely unusual. Snow is melting faster than I have ever seen it. We are skipping (at least temporarily) over the only kind of weather I enjoy, sort of a temperate 30-60 degrees F. Poor old Mother Nature, what extraordinary efforts she has to make to return earth to some kind of balance in the wake of our thoughtlessness. The rapid melting is uncovering tons of trash, which was either plowed down the street during blizzards or dropped by people figuring things would disappear into the snowbanks. I keep going out and picking up the next layer, trying to get this stuff into trash bags before it goes down the storm drains straight into Lake Superior.

Everything seems freaky to me right now. The notion that people believe they will be safer owning guns. The notion that a suicidal person would think it's appropriate to bring others down too. The notion of ever-expanding economies and cities and spheres of influence, without built-in ebbs. The notion that all this plastic will somehow disappear and never come back to haunt us. The notion that we can ever truly "win" any battle.

To navigate these freaky moments, it always comes back to the same thing. Breathing. Appreciating the beauty right in front of me. Honoring what I know to be true. Looking at the sun glittering on the water. Helping out a friend who fell and is laid up. Life, love and beauty. 

That in-between space, again

During the pandemic, most of my friends longed more than anything to see their children and grandchildren again. I have no doubt that the vast majority of 67-year old women have photographs of family on their dressers and mantlepieces. 

My dresser is adorned with photos of English cathedrals (interiors and exteriors, and Gloucester's matchless cloister walk). I also have, propped up, greeting cards of forests, birds, full moons, and hearts. I guess that pretty much says it all...these are my "children".

So in this year when the arc of my journey has taken me further from Christianity than ever, it's a very lonely, very empty Holy Week. The imprint of years of Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter services (and all the glorious music) simply doesn't go away. It is there forever. Yet I just cannot resonate with the battle imagery (life's "victory" over death), the money imagery (my life being "redeemed"), or any sense of joy specifically relating to Easter. I know that life is eternal -- I don't need any specific traditions or events to illustrate that.

If I need proof of life's lasting quality, all I need is to look at the glorious pink/orange moonrises over Lake Superior, the deer running down the city streets, the rapidly melting snow and the trickling sound of waters going down the storm drain. All I have to do is see the tiniest iota of green emerging from one of the snowiest winters on record, or to hear the first morning birdsong of spring, as I did this morning. I have no plans to go to church, eat a big Easter meal, listen to the "Hallelujah Chorus", or watch TV Easter fare. Except (I confess) for having bought some jelly beans (called "jelly bird eggs" at this time of year), I haven't purchased any of the stock plastic eggs or baskets or stuffed bunnies. I may walk down to the lake in the suddenly warm air --  and I will just try to keep breathing. This is another transition, another step in the journey, and as old certainties (or even formerly enjoyable traditions) fall away, I need to stay strong. May this weekend be, for you too, whatever is learning- and beauty-filled. If there is emptiness, may things you love trickle in.

It's a Revelation

Northern Minnesota is in the midst of quite an amazing storm. The last 24 hours have brought blizzard conditions, winds up to 68 mph, rain, thunder, sleet, and now, with  temperatures falling, back to snow again. The video footage of huge icy waves hitting the piers at Canal Park is remarkable. At one point yesterday, looking out, I saw tornados of snow, tightly packed whirlpools of white. And while we have been spared the complete devastation further south, it has been unusually extreme, even for Duluth this late in the winter. Plus, we are on the verge of breaking the city's all time seasonal snow record.

One of the things I have decided to do in terms of climate events (and, for that matter, most news events) is to look for what is being revealed. These storms -- particularly the ones wiping neighborhoods and towns off the map, leaving rubble in their wake -- are revealing a lot. Too many of the building blocks of modern homes and lives are toxic to nature. It's one thing when they are superficially contained within four walls. It's another thing when they are spread willy-nilly across the landscape.  Appliances, cars, siding, carpeting, plastic toys, neon signs, gasoline, insulation...all open to view. All open to the truth. Train derailments are revealing not just the condition of the tracks; they are a reminder to us of the real nature of the chemicals going into our cars, offices and homes. What is being revealed across the board at this pivotal moment in human history? In our politics, in national and international events, in economic trends, even in the choices we individually make on any given day?

In the end, is love the core energy of an event? (Love of people, non-human life, the earth, the universe...) For many people, thinking about "love" seems ridiculous in the face of all our complex challenges, but truly, that's why so much is happening as it is, so we will learn to love. Increasingly, love is all that will "work". So it is eminently practical to start to bring it into the conversation.

What will be revealed today?