Test

Test

Galaxies Like Snowflakes

(Sometimes, it helps to put everything in perspective and to remember that we are all made of the same star-stuff still giving birth to brand new stars.)

/hat tip: Jean Houston

Monday Evening PotPourri

*Leonard Cohen is releasing a new album. I hope when I’m his age, I’m still doing work as wonderful, creative, authentic, and just plain good as Cohen does.

*I also hope that, in about a hundred lifetimes or so, I can be half as amazing as Yeshe Rabbit is today.

*Joanna Powell Colbert has a wonderful post up concerning being native to your place.

How then does each of us become native to the Place where we live?

It has to do with listening, and connecting. Getting to know the Place where you live so intimately that you identify with it. Gary Snyder says, “. . . if you know what is taught by the plants and weather, you are in on the gossip and can truly feel more at home.”

So I’ve learned to be in on the gossip of my Place.

I watch as the Steller’s jays squabble over the sunflower seeds I set out for them and notice the towhees and juncos who quietly await their turn at the feeder.

I wait for the red-flowering currant to show up in bright pink and magenta on early spring days, when the landscape is otherwise still brown and grey.

I know where the chickaree (Douglas squirrel) hides her stash of seeds and nuts in the autumn, and what part of the woods holds the most luscious mushrooms.

I know the slough where the great blue heron lives and when the tree frogs will begin their chorus in the spring.

I know where to harvest wild onions in the summer and where to find nettles in the earliest days of spring.

I know how far north the sun sets at midsummer, and how low in the sky it rides at noon in midwinter.

This, then, is how we become native to the land: by loving her well, first of all. By observing, being aware, studying, and participating in the life cycle of the land instead of dominating it.

I hope that, if I live on my little Bit of Earth for the rest of my life, I can be more and more “in on the gossip.”

*Here’s a lovely poem for you.

This Ecstacy
~Chard Deniord

It’s not paradise I’m looking for
but the naming I hardly gave a thought to.
Call it the gift I carried in my loneliness
among the animals before I started
listening to the news. Call it the hint
I had about the knowledge that would explode.
In the meantime, which is real time
plus the past, you’re swishing your skirt
and speaking French, which is more
than I can take, which I marvel at
like a boy from the most distant seat
in the Kronos Dome, where I am one
of so many now I see the point
of falling off. There’s not enough seats
for us all to attend the eschaton.
This ecstasy that plants beauty
on my tongue, so that if it were
a wing, I’d be flying with the quickness
of a hummingbird and grace of a heron,
is so much mercy in light of the darkness
that comes. Who would say consolation?
Who would say dross? Not that anyone
would blame them. All night I hear
so many echoes in the forest I’m tempted
to look back, to save myself in hindsight,
where all I see is the absence of me.
Where all I hear is your voice,
which couldn’t be more strange.
How to go on walking hand in hand
without our bodies on the path
we made for our feet, talking, talking?

Picture found here.

Roots Down, Branches Up

What I was doing yesterday: working.

What I’d have been doing if I didn’t have to work:

Next year, I am definitely going to make it to Rooting DC.

Sunday Ballet Blogging

I Contain Multitudes

I’m an old woman. A second wave feminist. A recovering victim of Patriarchy.

THE most healing, most empowering part of my spiritual practice has been Dianic Wicca — a religion focused on the divine feminine. I don’t doubt that there are lots of other forms of Pagan practice. I’m simply talking about what’s been useful to me.

I cannot begin to convey what it meant to me to read, for the first time, in The Politics of Women’s Spirituality, the notion that women, too, might have been created in the image and likeness of the divine. It was as if the sky opened up and meaning poured through, directly into my life. Seeing divine images of women — women giving birth, women nursing children, women sitting astride lions — changed me, forever. The most spiritually important rituals of my life have been skyclad rituals with other women.

I have a lot of experience being “the other” in society. My career — the way that I spend, on average, twelve hours of every work day — is spent being the other. I’ve dealt with clients and colleagues who call me a “lady lawyer,” as if “lawyer,” meant a man and there was a need to identify “lady lawyers” as a special class.

I understand colonization. I have lived my life colonized (and, yet, also, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, colonizing).

Yet, I will never be able to understand what it is to be born in a body with a penis, but to be a woman. I understand that, for some people who are my sisters, this is what life has dealt to them. I want to reach out in solidarity to them, even as I know that I can never understand, completely, what they have gone through to be women in this world.

But, here, now, this is me sending respect to the path that you’ve had to walk.

I want to respect, as a person with a lot of privilege, the experiences of, for example, people who come from the African disaspora and who may, at times, want to gather to themselves to heal some of those wounds. I have no right to invade those rituals.

I want to honor the experiences of, for example, men who have been wounded by patriarchy (and, pace, Robin Morgan, I understand how all men, even those who do not feel like men, are privileged by patriarchy, but I also see, as a sister, lover, mother, grandmother, how patriarchy wounds men). I have no right to invade those rituals.

I want to stand in solidarity with Heathens who feel the need to pour blots with their own kin. A woman who honors and works with her own ancestors, I want to honor all who want, as well, to work with their own ancestors. I have no right to invade those rituals.

I want, regardless of my own orientation, to stand guard outside the sacred circles of those Paganii who are lesbian, who are gay, who do not recognize any boundaries. I can’t know what their paths have been. But I can honor and respect their paths and hope that they honor and respect mine.

For over a year, I’ve kept mostly silent about the controversy at Pantheacon over who is or isn’t allowed into which rituals. I don’t go to large Pagan rituals. I’m not about to start. I wasn’t at last year’s Pantheacon. I’m not at Panthecon 2012. I may not have a right to speak about this. I am a woman who practices in private and who has almost always circled with other women.

But tonight I will speak.

Zsuzsanna Budapest blazed a trail that I, weaker of ankle than she, have followed for years. Her books sit on the shelves of my library. When I needed light, her lantern reached back to me. Her teachings are ingrained in my practices. I consider her an honored elder. I see many who now want to shame her for standing up for women. It’s fashionable these days to be “more tolerant than thee,” and to criticize women who want — as do many other groups — to spend at least some time circling (in that odd phrase) together, alone.

On the one hand, I am happy to see younger women who no longer feel the need to circle exclusively with other women. That’s what we (I and, I think, Zsuzsanna,) wanted to see happen. On the other hand, I’m worried by the easy attacks on old women, by my memory of how easy it was for other women to win approval from the patriarchy by attacking those of us who stood up for women’s rights.

What I want is a Paganism full of diversity. I want to honor and respect those who draw a circle that includes me and those who draw a circle that says, “We need to be inside here for a time. That means that we need you to stand outside. Can you please stand here and guard our door?” We need rituals that are drawn as tightly as needed to guard the sanctity of those who have been othered and excluded. Of those who need to other and exclude themselves in order to preserve their own sacred and diverse identities. Of those who simply want to draw a circle and stand inside it without being attacked.

And we need to draw big circles, circles that include all of us, that remind all of us that we have more in common than we have separating us. Gaia! We’ve got all the time in the world. We can draw all of the circles that we need to feel safe and we can draw all of the circles that we need to feel included. This is, after all, a v fluid religion. I have grown due to circles that allowed me to be safe and myself within narrow, sacred boundaries. I want to spend my life nurturing Pagans, standing outside and guarding circles when necessary, and being guarded when that’s what I need.

Do I, as a woman who was born with “women’s” genitals and a (sometime all-too-obviously) woman’s body, need to invade a ritual for my sisters who were born trans? No. What I need to do is to respect their rituals. Do I need to exclude those women from every ritual that I do? No. What I need to have is space for everything. And, luckily, that’s just how much space we have.

We contain, in the words of the poet, multitudes.

Tonight, I will light incense for those who want to stand inside a safe circle. Tonight, I will light incense for those who want to be included. Tonight, I will light incense, sit at my altar, ground, center, and simply be present for all Paganii.

I shan’t be gone long. You come, too.

Update: I very rarely delete anyone’s comments, but I have deleted two. Both comments made good points, but did so in a manner that I think adds fuel to the fire. These issues invoke a lot of raw emotion and that’s natural. But I think we need to begin to discuss them with an eye towards building bridges rather than shouting each other down. Thanks in advance for your understanding.

A Trip to the Museum

I think it was Christopher Penzack who once said, “We’re Witches; maybe we should do something about that,” when discussing some problem that Pagans may have. I’ve always tried to take it to heart.

And so, although what I “should” have done was to work late last night and go put in a good twelve hour day at the office today, what I, instead, “did” was to head out of my office last night to enjoy a great discussion with one of my dearest friends (and a dinner of her husband’s amazing penne a la vodka (nota bene: sample recipe; I think J.’s is better. I should know; I ate three helpings)). And, this morning, I got up, took myself out to Falls Church for breakfast, and went to the National Gallery of Art.

It’s not often that I get genuinely pissed off with the world. But when I do, well, I’m a Witch; I should do something about that. And the past few days, I’ve been pissed off. One of the things I’ve really appreciated: the suggestions in comments and e-mail from my readers about what gets them through rough times. Beauty is one of the things that gets me through and today, I went out in search of that cure.

As I walked into the museum, this lovely temple to beauty, it suddenly dawned on me: I’ve been coming to this place, usually at least once a month (with a few dry stretches: law school, I’m looking at you), for (as of this Spring) fifty years. Half a century. I can find the ghosts of my younger selves by wandering past the pictures that they loved at various stages. That wasn’t really why I came today, but it was what I found.

When my mom first walked us through these marble halls, everything amazed me, but I was most taken by the fountains. Somehow, spending my first five years in Boulder, I’d never seen a fountain. (We had a museum. It had dioramas of Native Americans and dinosaurs. No fountains.) And here they were: fountains! Water bubbling and flowing and spilling. Lots of them, inside, surrounded by light and flowers.

I spent time today at the central fountain, dedicated to Hermes, fleet-footed messenger of the Goddesses/Gods.

Today, there were flowers surrounding the fountain. Flowers that would never, ever, in nature, bloom together: tulips, azaleas, hydrangeas. You might think that, lover of nature that I am, I’d disapprove, but, nope. This is art. I’ve never seen marble shaped like Diana or metal shaped like Mercury, either, but they’re lovely in the art museum.

Later, I wandered into one of the side courts (where there are Sunday concerts) and visited another of my favorite fountains: two cherubs playing with a swan.

Same flowers here, except that there were gardenias blooming, as well. It will be months until my own gardenias overwhelm the garden with the scent of the Summerlands, with the scent that I imagine must precede and surround Aphrodite. I stood next to these hothouse gifts and breathed in the scent for long, long minutes.

And then I saw her: five-year-old me, here for the first time, in her first pair of slip-on (as opposed to saddle) shoes and a dress that her mother made, just moved to D.C. — a startlingly-serious devotee of the Virgin Mary, staring in awe at a statue of angels and a swan, and in communion with the sound that water made inside marble halls. I want to pat her on the head — no I want to take her in my arms, hug her — and whisper to her to never stop looking for beauty, even though some rough things are going to happen to her.

And, so, I do.

A few years later, my parents took us to the museum to see an exhibit of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. I remember standing in line for what seemed like forever to me. Mona Lisa’s not here anymore, but I remember the lovely, dreamy background of the picture and I see similar ones in many of the paintings from the fifteen hundreds.

When I got a bit older and my school would take us on field trips to the art museum, I loved (and it’s a sign of how shallow I was and still am; I admit it; sue me) and, still do love, Fragonard, especially The Swing (even then, I think I was planning gardens) and Diana and Endymion.

I sit down on the bench to rest my old bones and there she is: ten year old me, gazing at that picture of happy people in a garden. She’s too serious, I think, now, for a ten-year-old. It already doesn’t make sense to her: this business of having a mind in a body that everyone thinks makes her unfit for a life of the mind. Maybe, she’s thinking, if she tries, if she just applies her mind (!), she can grow up to be a carefree girl on a garden swing. But that’s not likely; Pisces that she is, she’s just as drawn to Diana in the Moonlight, working magic on a shepherd. I want to hold her hand, smooth her brow, give her a talisman that will get her through puberty.

And, so, I do.

When I was in my early teens, I became fascinated with Watteau’s (again with the shallow) Ceres, and bought a cheap reproduction for my bedroom wall (I may have paid 25 cents, back then). I couldn’t have said to anyone what it was about that picture that i liked, but I just knew that I needed it on my wall. I walked over to the picture today and couldn’t find my younger self. But I grounded and left a circle of magical intent for her, just in case she still walks past there, now and then.

By the time I was in my twenties, I’d taken some art history courses and everything that I saw at the museum was filled with meaning!, history!, philosophy!. At that point, I was in love with the Impressionists. I wandered through those galleries soaking in the beauty and the notion that things can change, that just because things have always been done one way doesn’t mean that they must go on that way. I was a single mom, supporting myself and my son on a very meager schoolteacher’s salary, but I found the money to buy another cheap reproduction, this time of Monet’s House of Parliment, Sunset. (The one other bit of art I had back then was a canvas poster of Picasso’s Hand with Bouquet, which will always, for me, summarize the late 60s and early 70s.)

I can see her, the ghost of that young woman trying so hard to be strong, to hold it all together, to still have some kind of interior life while she pours out all that she has for her child and her students. I walk past her, not letting her see me, as she’s so busy projecting that she doesn’t need help from anyone. I want to slip a few dollars into her pocket and send her a vibe that she really is doing quite well, all self-sufficient and hard-working.

And, so, I do.

Finally, I walk to the one picture that I have loved best of all, ever since I was a little girl: El Rio de Luz (The River of Light), which I’ve always called “Morning in the Tropics” (and which, I swear, is once how it was labeled in the museum). To this day, I can’t tell you what it is about this picture that speaks so directly to my soul. No copy on the web does it justice; it’s too detailed and nuanced to be reproduced. If I had to say, I’d say that I like the sense of new beginning that the picture conveys, a new beginning that springs from a ritual performed every single morning for aeons. But that’s not, that can’t be, all of it. That can’t be all that’s kept me — maiden, mother, crone — returning to this same spot, this same bench for half a century. I suppose that, on the day that I can say what this painting means to me, I’ll be ready to dance through the veils. I wouldn’t mind at all if, upon slipping through those veils, I find myself floating on this river of light.

There may be the ghost of a forty-year old woman, trying to establish herself as a lawyer and to live through a diagnosis of breast cancer, standing in front of that picture. She seems to keep standing there a lot, even during lunch hours and brief moments stolen from chemo and writing motions. I walk past her and slip her some jokes that will make her roar with laughter. It’s the best medicine I can give.

I wander over to the East wing and ask the guard where I can find the Antico bronzes. He says to me, “We have an exhibit, Ma’am, but it’s not ancient bronzes; they’re Renaissance.” I say, “Yes. Those,” and he points me in the right direction. And, oh my, there’s a lovely Cleopatra, with a snake carved along the base of her bust and more Herculeses (which even the Renaissance (as well, I’d like to tell my guard, as the ancient) artists were willing to show as, at once, quite muscled and quite middle aged) than I can count. It’s glorious. If you have time between now and April 8th, please go.

I spend time with the Goldsworthy installation. I love Godlsworthy, but, sadly, of all his works, I like this the least. I do like how his rock installations move from outside the museum to inside and, well, rocks. I love rocks. I just wish my city had a Goldsworthy that I enjoyed more.

And then I walk back into the West
(wing) and take myself to lunch at The Garden Cafe, which has a special lunch in honor of the Antico (not ancient, but Renaissance) exhibit. When I leave, the waitress gives me recipe cards, printed with pictures from the exhibit on one side and recipes (I’ll make the bucatini e pancetta if I can ever find good pancetta) on the other. What a great idea! I love it.

On my way out, I stop at the museum shop and find a lovely book about swords (one of his obsessions) for G/Son. They have several good books about castles and life in the Middle Ages that are a bit too old, but I also pick up several plastic figures. The nice lady at the cash register rings up the book, the plastic king and queen, and then stops at my final purchase.

“Nice souvenir,” she says. “Oh, thanks,” I say. It’s for my G/Son. He’s about to be six.” “You’re buying your six-year-old grandson Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guards the Underworld?” she asks. “Yes,” I say. “Yes. I am. I think he’ll like it.”

And, on my way out the door, I send, not exactly a Witch’s cackle, but the full-throated laugh of an early crone who loves her life, all the way back through the marble halls of the museum and to the half-century-full-of-former-selves standing there.

This Spring, I’m planning to bring G/Son for his first visit.

I didn’t go to the museum today looking for my Younger Self, just for beauty. But I found so much more. May it be so for you.

Friday Poetry Blogging

Personal Helicon

~Seamus Heaney

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

Picture found here.

Me, In a Bad Mood

Several years ago, a bunch of white men got together and limited women’s rights to abortion:

Today, a bunch of white men got together and talked about limiting women’s rights to birth control:

I am just saying.

There’s a lot of chortling in the Twitterverse and the Blogosphere over how the Republicans are really stepping in it by going all out against birth control. After all, women vote and about 98% of them use, or have used, birth control. Goddess knows, I hope that’s how it plays out.

But I’m not so sure.

One thing you can say for the Republicans and the Dominionists is that they are masters at moving the Overton Window. (And one thing you can say for Democrats and Progressives is that they give new meaning to the word “lame” in this regard.) And what’s happened over the course of just a few weeks is that the argument has shifted from keeping abortion legal and accessible (an argument that we’ve been losing, BTW, up until Komen went too far, too fast) to whether it’s a vile intrusion of big government onto the religious rights of fundies for women to have access to birth control. I may be a bear of little brain, but it’s difficult for me to see how that’s a huge win for women.

The brilliant Sarah Posner warned us about this some time ago when Newt Gingrich began ramping up his rhetoric about the poor, persecuted Catholics. Christians are v good about insisting that any time they’re not allowed to impose their (completely unworkable, anti-woman, anti-reality, sex-negative) worldview (I won’t call them morals, because they’re not) on the rest of us, that means that we’re picking on the Christians. Honest to Hera, Mobius had nothing on these guys; they’re that good.

Charles Pierce is one of the lone voices suggesting that maybe we ought to be concerned instead of celebrating.

Seriously, does anyone here expect any prominent Democrat to come out and take a stand to protect women on this “icky” issue? I don’t. Not Barack Obama. Not Catholic Joe Biden. Not Katheleen Siebelius. None of them. Nancy Pelosi made one statement today and then shut up. In fact, I expect Obama and the Dems to do what they always do in the face of these entirely-predictable negotiating tactics by the right: retreat some more. Keep negotiating against themselves. Pretend that there’s a middle ground and keep running after it as the fundies snatch it further and further to the right.

Meanwhile, there are a few expressions that no one dares to utter in this entire debate: (1) Population Explosion. (2) Planetary Carrying Capacity. And the fact that those terms dare not speak their names is a HUGE part of the problem.

And, yes, for all that many of us have been saying for years that these people really wanted to abolish birth control as well as abortion, I can’t say that I’m enjoying being right.

I’ll just add that there’s no reason for some of these insane policies to stop with women. Maybe gay men should have probing anal exams before they can get access to drugs for HIV/AIDS. Or to condoms. Sure, it has no medical purpose and is done simply to shame, humiliate, increase costs, and hurt. But we’ve apparently crossed that Rubicon. Maybe immigrants should be subject to humiliating medical exams before they apply for citizenship. Maybe people who apply for unemployment insurance should be waterboarded once a month. Maybe women and children claiming to have been raped or abused should be thrown into a lake. If they sink, they were telling the truth; if they float, they’re lying and should be punished.

I have an idea. Let’s leave the tender consciences of the Catholic bishops (who aren’t worried when their own priests bugger little boys, but who faint and cry at the thought of having anything to do with providing birth control) intact. The government, via single-payer health care, can provide birth control and abortions (fuck the Hyde Amendment), free of cost, to women who want them. As to the argument that Catholics don’t want their tax dollars supporting something they find abhorrent, I’ll simply note that war is against my religion. Torturing people is against my religion. Drilling for oil and cutting timber on federal lands is against my religion. Holding people without charges is against my religion. Tasing people is against my religion. Breaking up peaceful demonstrations is against my religion. And my tax dollars get used for all of those things and many more that I find abhorrent. So unless we’re going to add about 500 pages of check-off items to income tax forms, the Catholics can either suck it up or become tax protesters, facing jail and foreclosure as serious anti-war activists, Quakers, for example, do.

Damn. I’m sick of this bullshit.

A Prayer for Nonbelievers (Whose Face Looks Exactly Like Mine)

This just may not be my week to feel optimistic about the human race.

I generally do a pretty good job of “illegitimi non carborundum,” even if that means simply not exposing myself to too much batshit insanity. I remind myself, in the words of Dr. King, that although the arc of the moral universe may be frustratingly long, it does bend towards justice (and sometimes, I stand under the full Moon and yell, “Bend, Motherfucker, bend!” at that arc, just in case what it needs most is some of my dulcet, reasoned encouragement). And, when all else fails, there’s the Wendell Berry tonic:

THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

So, maybe it’s the February doldrums. Right now, with all the leaves gone, when I drive up onto the TR Bridge from alongside the Potomac River, what I see is bags-and-bags-full of trash, thrown onto the breast of Mother Earth: plastic cups, and beer cans, and styrofoam clamshells. Spring will come and, by Summer, most of that trash will be invisible and some of it, at least, will slowly biodegrade.

Maybe it’s the sudden and intense assault on women’s health and reproductive rights, up to and including my own state’s recently-passed law that:

will require many women in Virginia to undergo vaginal penetration with an ultrasound probe against their consent in order to exercise their constitutional right to an abortion, even for nonsurgical, noninvasive, pharmaceutical abortions.

(Seriously, go stock up on day-after pills NOW. This weekend.) It’s awfully discouraging to be re-fighting battles that we won decades ago.

Maybe it’s the now-routine use of tasing to “control” American citizens, or the use of domestic drones to, again, control American citizens.

And maybe it’s just that Wislawa Szymborska recently abandoned us (May the Goddess guard her; may she find her way to the Summerlands; may her friends and family know peace), or that Mary Oliver is gravely ill, and I wonder who’s going to be left to keep throwing lifelines out to me when I need them.

Maybe it’s that I haven’t seen “my” homeless vet for over a week and I’m worried about his bad heart, worried, as always, that the little that I do for him is not enough, even as I use it as my shield when other homeless people ask me for aid.

Maybe it’s too much work (even interesting work that I love), making Jill a dull girl who ought to have the sense to book a flight and get away for a few days.

Maybe it’s that John Michael Greer is too often right

At any rate, it seems as if I’m not the only one worried.

T. Thorn Coyle writes that:

My heart feels pensive. If the heart can think, then today, mine is preoccupied. Not quite sad, though tinged with sadness, but moving between heaviness and lightness, between sorrow and deep joy, between optimism and unknowing.
Thousands of Americans are living in tent cities right now as homes stand empty. 47 million live below the poverty line. People repeatedly ask the Occupy movement what its demands are. No one asks these other tent dwellers for their demands. They simply hope that they will fade into obscurity, and that the rest of us won’t share their fate. Few want to look poverty in the eye or shake its hand, fearing its contagion. This fear impoverishes us all.

. . .

Greece is on fire. Nigerians live in poverty while their government thrives. Drones, long seen in Pakistani skies, are soon to fly over the U.S. Peaceful protestors are gassed and beaten. Children starve. Forests are decimated. Fish are gasping. Whales, confused.

Thorn’s answer is multi-facted. She advocates building bridges, seeing and making art, paying attention to ravens and children (“Oh, the children and the flowers are my sisters and my brothers . . . and the song that I am singing is a prayer for nonbelievers; come and stand beside us; we can find a better way”, as the young Hecate Demeter used to sing to Son as she lullabyed him to sleep), and being kind. She advocates being brave and doing whatever heroic thing presents itself.

And those are all good answers.

And here’s the other answer that my age has taught me:

Things get better. Time passes. Moods change. Spring comes and the increased light dances a cosmic dance with the chemicals inside your DNA; you walk barefoot on the grass beside the white flowers and, all of a sudden, it’s all ok. Sometimes, it really is as simple as that.

And, I remind myself of the lyrics from the Christine Kane song, Seasons Changing:

I’m in this ocean.
Yeah, I’m really out there,
With no one to throw me a line.
Rolling and crashing, I’m rescued by
someone whose face looks exactly like mine.

I’ve rescued myself before. I can do it again.

And, in the end, sometimes, there’s, as a wise woman once said, no way out but through. You draw on the breadcrumbs that wiser, happier You threw down for just such times; you remind yourself that when you’re going through Hel (not that my mild pique is anything like that bad), the best thing to do is to KEEP GOING; you pull your collar up around your throat; you head into the wind, and well, wherever you go, there you are.

In the end, I knit caps for the les Propriétaires, so that I can feel as if I’ve done something useful. I clean the house, file papers, get things organized so that I’ll be free to be outside when Spring comes, I take G/Son to seed swaps and show him how to make pictures of protection in his mind for those who need it. I walk on the treadmill to make myself feel as if I’m not giving up on being embodied.

I’m looking forward to seeing an exhibit tomorrow at National Geographic. I’m looking forward to talking about books with one of my dearest friends. I’m looking forward to a Presidents’ Day ritual to protect Witches receiving death threats. I’m looking forward to time with my G/Son. I’m looking forward to Sacred Space. I’m looking forward to Spring planting. I’m looking forward to a better world where we protect the planet, and women, and children, to a world where my G/Son doesn’t have to ask me, in a worried voice, about what happened to Occupy DC’s library.

What gets you through?

Picture found here