Winging It

It is hard to believe that over the course of a decade, I've never yet used this title, "Winging It". Good heavens, my entire life has been about "winging it". 

I am on a short retreat, always the wrong word for me. I think when I do it from now on, I will call it a "return", because it is more a case of returning to me than retreating from the world. Increasingly, I want what I am doing to be about me, not about the world...as I have also said before, this is ever-challenging for a "girl" brought up in a narcissistic environment... On that note, without thinking, I forgot about retreat mode and turned on the public radio morning news. It was a good reminder that at my worst, my narcissism may be in the 5 range on a scale of 1-10, and some of what we are seeing worldwide is about a 15. It is all relative. And we women need to reclaim our inherent powers, even if it means sometimes swinging the pendulum a little too far in the other direction.

A lot of people on my wavelength are using the term "new timeline" to refer to the new paradigm we have entered...I'm not totally thrilled by the wording, either the "time" or the "line" part, but having said that, I don't have the energy to find something different today. Suffice it to say that the last occasion I was on a "return", I envisioned that I was heading into a future timeline that was even more hermit-like than my present. And in my first few hours here, I slipped into that mode. However, breaking through that energy has been a tiny but consistent energy of future companionship, of partnership, of supportive love with another person. Maybe, just maybe, this will be my last solo retreat. 

To return to the topic of wings, I am still troubled by how few birds I continue to encounter these days. Sure, there are some. I finally saw a few crows, a few robins, a few seagulls, a distant glimpse of an eagle, and one hummingbird. And I often hear what I think is a Carolina wren. But overall, still no dawn chorus, still not the variety of birds one would expect over the course of the summer. Even taking into account the fact that this is only my second summer back in this area, I trust my observations, and the situation is perplexing and concerning. Birds are winging it...somewhere.

Goddess Words 66: Loveliness

OK, so I plow on, a farmer sowing as many seeds as I can. And I'm growing and changing even as I write...hopefully the seeds are as well.

By the standards of 2026, "loveliness" is a rather dated word isn't it? I mean, even twenty years ago when I included it on my Goddess list, I suspect it was already passé. The concept of being beautiful to look at (as opposed to sexy or edgy) -- or beautiful in a moral or spiritual way -- may still be relevant (one hopes!), yet even to my own ears (strengthened by two decades of increasing feminism), there is something rather wimpy about the word. If I were to die tomorrow, and the main thing people said about me was, "She was a lovely person", my immediate thought is that I would be fuming from the heavenly realm! Think of all those 19th century portraits of beautiful women in white dresses, languishing on sofas or window seats, staring into the distance. Women perceived of as being lovely because of stillness and inaction. Heck, I used to resonate with such images, and wished I could be transported back about two hundred years so that this would be all that was expected of me. I could be myself, think deep thoughts, and not have to pull myself together every morning to tackle the NYC subway system, grab a bagel, take an elevator far up a skyscraper, and deal with the news of the world. "The real world". 

Of course, if being a lovely woman painted in a moment of leisure was "the real world" for anyone, it was only for a handful of privileged women, not for the vast majority of women worldwide who labored ceaselessly, often enslaved -- literally or figuratively. And, of course, I have barely ever heard a man being complimented on his "loveliness". So there is an overlay here of female niceness, insipidity, powerlessness, maybe even superficial prettiness, that is not very appealing. Having said that, coming from my particular background, I am a little ashamed to confess that "loveliness" is still a kind of tentpole for me, a safe energy to fall back into when the world overwhelms me, much like being nice and mute.

Yet I trust my inclusion of the word in my Goddess list all those years ago. Why and how did I associate loveliness with the Goddess?

If I go to the heart of the word and shed all my personal random associations, it is a little easier to embrace loveliness. First of all, the word's core is "love", right? True loveliness surely starts within, in the heart, in the ability to love. That ability to love leads to a moral and ethical solidity vis à vis other people, animals and the earth; and the ability to embody love, compassion, generosity of spirit, power sharing, even gentleness. When these qualities become a person's core identity, it is inevitable that it shows "without", in a person's face, bearing, and general energy. Their love shines outward from the core, in a ripple effect. These people are so love-filled that love is flowing out of them. They are genuinely love-ly.

If you accept the proposition that love is the most powerful force in the world, a lovely person (female or male) isn't actually powerless, or languid, or inactive. They may be some of the most powerful people in the world no matter what they are doing or not doing. A more Goddess-centered community construct would honor loveliness, not only with appealing oil paintings, but with true respect and attention. What do these spirit-rich people think? What is their world view? How do they treat other people? If love is their core value, what would love-based institutions look like and function like? Why don't we listen to them?

Far from being limp dishrags staring out at the landscape, lovely people have an active energy, a valuable gift for the world. They can be exquisitely powerful. They are a fractal manifestation of the Goddess. On second thought (an hour into writing and editing this essay!), I would be honored if I were praised for my "loveliness"!

New Moon, Eclipse, and Meteors

What with one thing and another, this is a powerful day. So once again, I will keep this shortish.

My new moon resolution is to re-frame how I express and experience love in the rest of this lifetime. I've alluded to this already, but today seems like a good day to declare it. I haven't lacked the ability to love: if all my positive emotions toward English church music and England had been used as a power source over the years, I could have lit up every state I've lived in! But I haven't yet experienced sending that love in the direction of another human being, or experienced it returning to me in that kind of personal way, and that is the new path I'm finally ready to explore. Over the next month, as the moon slowly becomes visible and brightens again, may my new intention light the way. If my path still looks a bit old on the outside, may I remember that the crucial change has happened within--curiosity. What would it be like to have a true life/spiritual partner? What can I do today to open myself to this?

And a quick note about Anglican chant. I went online yesterday to hear a few versions (from some of the top cathedral choirs) of Psalm 22, with its "roaring lion". And I am so proud of myself!  I listened to these different variations with pleasure, amusement (at the creativity of the organists and choirmasters) and, literally, joy. I love, love, love Anglican chant, as hard as many of the words of the Psalms can be these days. But there was not one ounce in me of bitter-sweetness, homesickness, or any mixed or negative emotion. For an hour, I was simply filled with delight. It appears that cleaning out the crevices is working!

If there is some new path showing itself to you in the sun or the moon's mysterious half-light, or in the sparkle of meteors, may you at least look at it with curiosity. If it is right for you, you will probably know it!

A Roaring Lion

Saturday was the Lion's Gate, a concept I had never heard of before sometime last year. (I'll let you look it up, because even now, after about eighteen months of listening to astrological talks, I still don't understand the actual astrological pieces of any of it, just the general energies.) This whole month, what with 8/8 Lion's Gate and then two eclipses, is apparently particularly powerful, astrologically and spiritually, and a portal for those of us women more fully embodying the Divine Feminine.

Because this portal appears to be coinciding with my reaching deep into myself to heal some remaining bitterness and pain around church music, it was interesting to remember words from Psalm 22, which I used to hear on recordings (and also sang at Royal Holloway and possibly also at St. John the Divine): "they gape upon me with their mouths: as it were a ramping and a roaring lion." In fact, this is such a classic psalm, giving creative organists leeway to literally mimic (musically) the roaring lion (and bulls and hounds, among other traumas!) Our choral Anglican chant would proceed in such a controlled fashion, while the organist decorated/word painted ornately around us. 

In my personal life, I haven't been a roaring lion. And yet just now, I re-read the last three or four posts, and realized with surprising satisfaction that the roaring lion in me is coming out. By telling some of these stories, I am no longer in hiding. I am no longer as scared. The real me is becoming more and more visible. Roar.

A Few Notes

Today, just a few notes, I promise.

I had a dreadful night's sleep. It sounds ridiculous, but I think I am waking up when the moon comes out, wanting to accompany it through the night, out of fear that "we" will do something to obliterate it.  In those wee hours I am full of energy, now, not so much.

Another thing happening is that some of the gunk referred to yesterday isn't waiting for me to find it, it's almost literally jumping out of the crevices saying, "Here I am, deal with me!" The cutting remark that haunted me last night came from when I wanted to audition for a choir and was told, "We have more than enough excellent potential countertenors. Why would we need to scrape the bottom of the barrel to audition you?" Countertenors are men who sing in the female alto range, which I sing. It doesn't matter that it wasn't really personal. It still cut to the quick.

In our emerging Aquarian Age, someone throbbing with love for a form of art -- and talented in the field -- simply will not be turned down. Period. The world needs love -- and beauty -- too darned much.

In the last few days, I'm still seeing and hearing too few birds. However, I have seen two rabbits, one woodchuck and one squirrel. I also saw one half of a rainbow last night(!) Oh Lordy.

It is Intense

It is intense to hit such a mother lode of unresolved issues and pain, although it is also a relief. The only way to clean out my crevices is to actually see the gunk clogging them up, not to mention clogging up my body and soul. As far as shame goes, I'm a bit ashamed that I have not been able to immediately hold the men and boys' choir tradition in a greater place of love and forgiveness, but at least (to mix metaphors entirely!) pulling the dirty laundry out from the corners helps me to see what needs cleaning...at least I am no longer afraid of facing these stale emotions, or of revealing them to others. This wandering mystic has never been a saint, and this week will be proof!

Having said that, I continue to be encouraged that Gaia is arguably going through this exact same process, in her own way. She is cleaning out the crevices of her body, the places where her own anger and frustration at poor treatment have gotten stuck. She's bringing old gunk to the surface, rolling over, turning things over, cleaning things out -- not to lash out at humanity but simply to wipe the slate clean enough to start anew in this era of higher energies. In a similar way, ultimately, I'm not writing what I have written (or will write) to assess blame or criticism. These constructs are of such long standing that there is no one person to blame! But up until now, I could perhaps protect myself by avoiding dealing with certain pain and shame...now avoidance will only weigh me down. The time to fully feel is now.

The other thing I am trying to remember is that, from a Goddess perspective, my journey was perfect. From the perspective of trying to discover and embody values that are the utter opposite of those in our current paradigm, my journey was perfect. It was natural that I tried so hard to engage with that paradigm in the way that would have been most fulfilling for me, and natural too that my passion and talent being consistently blocked was so devastating. But when I gaze at the lifetime of experience from Her eyes, I completely get why it was the way it was. No, I don't want to use that to gloss over a lode of anger. I dearly need cleaning and healing. But it does take a little of the edge off.

Incidentally, I'm having a harder time walking through my emotions around the apparent crash of space junk into the moon. It's like, it's exactly the same kind of disrespect. Ugh.

This is an intense time. If it becomes intense personally, then the "only way out is through", right? 

Memory

This is a case of, I woke up feeling that I wanted to share a memory of an event in my life, but initially nothing came to mind (that I haven't already written about, anyway!). Once this particular memory popped to the surface, I tried mightily to push it back down, but in the spirit of cleaning out the crevices (July 22), I'll forge ahead, although it terrifies me.

Yup, several key memories of my attempts to enter the world of English church music remain quite close to my chest. Why? Well, for a long time I kept hoping that I might still make a name for myself in that field and I didn't want to burn any bridges. A second reason was that I felt a deep sense of shame at having been so unsuccessful. It's absurd, of course. There simply were no girls or women in the field during my formative years of the 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's, and just trickles by the 90's. By the early 2000's, it was changing in the UK, but virtually not in the US. A few British women of my generation made a little headway around the edges during that 50-year stretch, but my early intention to become the first woman conductor of the Choir of King's College, Cambridge and devote my entire life to this singular musical genre could never have happened, no matter what Herculean efforts I might have made. The fact that I still feel ashamed about my lack of success is almost as heartbreaking as the fact that I lived a life so far removed from that world. It's all heartbreaking, it still is, every day.

So here's a memory that I've been trying to bury to spare myself just a little of that heartbreak. It illustrates the incredible strangeness and paradox of my whole life.

My two years in Helena, Montana were, in most respects, among the hardest ever, even though I was near family. For much of the time, I lived at the YWCA, and I struggled to get any kind of work, much less anything that would have had meaning for me. Singing in two choral groups helped save me, as did starting to do research about my favorite composer, Herbert Howells. My first article about him was accomplished simply by sending emails and letters to some of his former students. My laptop was perched on my lap on my rather saggy twin bed in my nun's cell of a room at the Y, and I was surrounded by scribbled notes and drafts. If I remember correctly, my computer died at some point in the process, so the bulk of my work (emails, research, article drafts) ended up being done at Helena's public library. (I mean it when I stress the centrality of public libraries to my journey!) "Herbert Howells, the Teacher" was first published by the British Music Society News in January of 2013, then reprinted by The American Organist later that year.

Around that time, I was invited to teach a class about Howells at Helena's Episcopal Cathedral. Inevitably I discussed, and played a recording of, the motet "Take Him, Earth, For Cherishing", purportedly sung at John F. Kennedy's funeral. I had always thought this to be a dubious story, and several students in the class pointedly asked how (and why) on earth a piece by a British composer would have been sung at the funeral three days after the president's completely unexpected death. Why wouldn't an American composer have been chosen? More to the point, we all wondered how, in the early 1960's before the era of faxes and email attachments, a piece of music could have made it from Britain to Washington in that time frame. There was something clearly wrong with the story, and I promised attendees that I would look into it.

I started to dig. It was slow going at first, but I stumbled upon the name of a former organist-choirmaster who would help me "crack the case". On a hot summer afternoon, I was walking through the Y's living room towards the staircase up to my room, when my cell phone rang. It was the organist, happy to tell me what he knew. I grabbed a pen and a piece of paper with some open space to write on, and at first sat in a comfortable chair, trying to scribble down notes and ask him questions. Eventually, the loud sounds of TV ("Law and Order: SVU") and general conversational hubbub forced me out onto the porch, where I continued the interview. Even as I spoke with him, I thought, if this organist knew the conditions under which I was doing my research, he might never have called me!

(Please, don't misunderstand...moving into the Y was by far the hardest thing I had ever done. Slowly but surely, though, the place became a safe haven, and a place of growth and solidarity with other women. Sometime soon, I'll write more about the experience, for which I am profoundly grateful.)

"To make a long story short", my second article "'Take Him, Earth' Revisited" was published by The American Organist in September 2014. Howells's motet was, in fact, first sung in Washington a year after Kennedy's death by a Canadian men-and-boys' choir. This update by no means diminishes an extraordinary piece of music, but it was a big revelation which should have met with a fair amount of hoopla in the music world. To my knowledge, this never happened. 

I'm full of trite sayings today: "What came first, the chicken or the egg"? Is it the fact that I was female (not male), Smith- and Royal Holloway-educated (not Oxbridge), and ahead of my time that led to my gaining no life traction at all and ending up living and working in the most inappropriate circumstances for my goals? Or is it because I started in the proverbial wilderness (as far as this tradition is concerned) and kept ending up there, that I couldn't eventually gain a little deserved respect or attention? Perhaps both. At this moment when all these traditional constructs are beginning to collapse, perhaps it doesn't matter.

But remembering this story has stirred up some long-hidden anger, humiliation, and frustration. It is hard to imagine a human being with my level of intellectual, spiritual, musical and artistic skills being more thoroughly swept aside -- except, of course, there have probably been hundreds of thousands over the centuries, women and men of the wrong background, or gender, or educational accomplishment, or religion, left "homeless" and invisible. And for a woman in a patriarchal construct, nothing was in place to support my actual thriving or success. I guess what keeps me going even today is remembering that I've never been as alone in this silencing as I have felt. Every day that I am still alive is an accomplishment, hopefully not just for me, but for so many others. 

Yes, today's memory is bringing up a lot of negative emotion, but I hope bringing that to light will lead to eventual healing. That's all I can say today.