In the Dark

I wake up early to have time to sit in my warm, cozy cottage, drink coffee, and meditate.

This morning, I was up early enough to finally hear my CSA, From the Farmer, make their delivery. A box on my doorstep with apples, oranges, shallots, mushrooms, lettuce, carrots, a parsnip, beets, and some cider. My bedroom is near the front of the house and I’ve been wondering how they manage to slip up onto my step, leave my box, and disappear without waking me. This morning, I saw; the delivery person — swathed in coat, hoodie, hat, gloves, scarves, and sweat pants — almost tip-toed up to my door.

And I stop to bless them; to thank the workers who grew and harvested the food, the warehouse people who packed it, the silent driver who delivers it to my door.

About 45 minutes later, I made a second cup of hot, sweet coffee and heard the trash man come and empty the recyclable bins. My town does two trash collections on the same day. The first is for recyclables and the second is for the small bit of trash I have that isn’t recyclable and that I can’t compost. It’s cold, dark, dangerous work this time of year, with the sidewalks and roads still icy and temperatures before dawn hovering around 15 degrees. It’s dangerous, hot, and smelly work in the Summer and it’s not well-paid.

Derrick Jensen notes that:

“All gave some, some gave all,” read the bumper stickers, but no one ever mentions, at the huge police funerals or elsewhere, that garbage collection is far more dangerous—with a far higher mortality rate—than police work; and don’t hold your breath waiting for the next Bruce Willis or Tom Cruise action flick about courageous garbage collectors putting their lives on the line to clean up the mean streets of New York or L.A.

I stop to bless them, the people who carry away what I no longer need, who recycle what can be recycled, who work in the cold, and the danger, and the dark.

With whom would you find yourself in relationship if you woke up early to sit?

Picture found here.

(Almost) Wordless Wednesday

Heard both of these on the way to work this morning.

So mote it be.

But right now, things are more like this:

But I believe the first line of this song and tell it to myself like a spell:

Tuesday Evening Poetry Blogging

won’t you celebrate with me

~ Lucille Clifton

won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

Picture found here.

Monday at the Movies

I don’t know about you, but about this time of year (when it seems as if Spring may never come, when it has been too cold to be outside since forever, when my heart is full of worries of frozen pipes and decimated camellias, when the long-predicted Water Wars have begun — you know, in February) I can use some good news.

Here, this will give you hope:

Watching this, I couldn’t help but think of Gerard Manley Hopkins‘ poem, God’s Grandeur. The poet says, “And for all this, nature is never spent. There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” I think he meant “spent” in the sense of worn-out. He’s contrasting the deep freshness of nature with modern civilization: “And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.”

But what the wolves have done for the rivers gives me hope and reminds me that those of us who work to save the planet do not work alone. Gaia, Herself, is eager to spring to our aid, if we will only let Her. There is, deep down, a dear freshness that we can scarcely imagine. Wolves can change rivers. Mr. Hopkins predicted as much:

And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because [Sophia] over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Of course, not everyone is as wild-eyed an optimist as your faithful correspondent.

In his brilliant essay, Rewilding Witchcraft, Peter Grey says:

To understand rewilding, half of the title of this talk, we begin with wolves. Not the last ones in England, extirpated in 1700 about the same time as the last witches were hung, but in Yellowstone National Park in 1994. Here the reintroduction of wolves created a seeming ecological miracle, a trophic cascade which changed the flow of rivers, brought back a diversity of plants and birds and animals. How did this happen? How did an eco-system in crisis undergo such a dramatic volte-face? When wolves were returned to the environment the deer were forced to change their habits as were coyotes, avoiding the blind traps of the river valleys whose plants, trees and shrubs burgeoned and provided further environments for birds, voles, foxes, beavers. The apex predator was shown to be the vital element in biodiversity. Man is the only exception to this rule.

Seven years ago I would have passionately held that this was a model for Witchcraft. I felt that the collapse of industrial civilisation was our most likely outcome due to peak oil, the bell curve of high purity crude proposed by the geologist M. King Hubbert. This showed that the oil production which fuelled the age of plenty which we have lived through had peaked in 1970. The cost of extraction for tar sands, fracking and deepwater drilling are desperation and unable to balance the demands for infinite economic growth.

For those of you new to this idea I recommend John Michael Greer’s The Blood of the Earth as he is both a Druid and a leading thinker in the peak oil movement. But we do not simply have peak oil, we have peak water, peak wood, peak rare earths, peak everything that is drawn into the maw of the inexorable algorithim of industrial culture and the inevitable wars and revolutions that resource scarcity produces.

I once reasoned that, in a long slow decline of living standards, witchcraft as a low tech, local response could perhaps survive the coming storm and that hand in hand with rewilding habitats as re-enchanted sacred spaces it offered the potential for a post-industrial recovery of bio-diversity. Examples such as Yellowstone, and in particular Chernobyl, showed how seemingly impossible recoveries could occur. Rewilding offered the possibility to heal the land and with it ourselves – that is, those of us who made it through the choke point when the oil based economy failed to feed us all. If I want to be mischievous, I would have extended the metaphor, suggesting that by reintroducing the practitioners, the wolves, we would have kept down the population of neo-pagan apologists, the deer, and in doing so gained a thriving diversity.

Now everything has changed. We have a different ordeal that we need to undergo.

Rewilding is alas the final position of an ecological movement facing catastrophic losses. It is a beautiful thing to see a living system revivified in a cascade of life and more life. It has given those in the often harrowing world of the ecological movement a glimpse of what can occur in a system that is enabled to right itself. Nature is beautiful in her abundance, and indeed what many neo-pagans mean when they say Goddess. Yet the essential failure of rewilding is this: we cannot simply introduce new predators, or species such as bison or beavers, into small isolated environments whilst industrial culture is destroying the entire matrix of life on the planet. These sanctuaries will inevitably be deregulated by government, hand in glove with industry, and overrun. I fully endorse the rewilding movement. For those in environmentalism we should give our absolute support; though I believe that their project is doomed it does not mean that we should not commit to these principles. I am not suggesting quitting. Far from it. These small victories will make a difference as we approach the choke point and particularly for those who have or choose, in spite of the facts, to have children. Witchcraft, being animist, is not so selfishly anthropocentric, our personal loyalty lies not with our genetic survival but aligns with the fate of all things to which we are innately bound.

Grey’s final line brings me back to John Muir‘s statement that “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”

It is an act of deep magic to, at the same time, appreciate how grave this crisis truly is and to hope, with full faith in the magic of nature, for deliverance.

Derrick Jensen (yes, I know he’s unpopular with some BNPs) has more to say about hope:

The more I understand hope, the more I realize that all along it deserved to be in the box with the plagues, sorrow, and mischief; that it serves the needs of those in power as surely as belief in a distant heaven; that hope is really nothing more than a secular way of keeping us in line.

Hope is, in fact, a curse, a bane. I say this not only because of the lovely Buddhist saying “Hope and fear chase each other’s tails,” not only because hope leads us away from the present, away from who and where we are right now and toward some imaginary future state. I say this because of what hope is.

More or less all of us yammer on more or less endlessly about hope. You wouldn’t believe — or maybe you would — how many magazine editors have asked me to write about the apocalypse, then enjoined me to leave readers with a sense of hope. But what, precisely, is hope? At a talk I gave last spring, someone asked me to define it. I turned the question back on the audience, and here’s the definition we all came up with: hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.

I’m not, for example, going to say I hope I eat something tomorrow. I just will. I don’t hope I take another breath right now, nor that I finish writing this sentence. I just do them. On the other hand, I do hope that the next time I get on a plane, it doesn’t crash. To hope for some result means you have given up any agency concerning it. Many people say they hope the dominant culture stops destroying the world. By saying that, they’ve assumed that the destruction will continue, at least in the short term, and they’ve stepped away from their own ability to participate in stopping it.

I do not hope coho salmon survive. I will do whatever it takes to make sure the dominant culture doesn’t drive them extinct. If coho want to leave us because they don’t like how they’re being treated — and who could blame them? — I will say goodbye, and I will miss them, but if they do not want to leave, I will not allow civilization to kill them off.

When we realize the degree of agency we actually do have, we no longer have to “hope” at all. We simply do the work. We make sure salmon survive. We make sure prairie dogs survive. We make sure grizzlies survive. We do whatever it takes.

And, so, to borrow and then change a line from the Bard, to hope or not to hope; that is the question. I’ll answer it. To borrow and then change a line from the Xians, as for me and my house, we will do both. We will hope for deliverance and unexpected help from Gaia and we will, with Jensen, and Muir, and Grey, make sure salmon, and prairie dogs, and grizzlies, and, most especially, wolves survive.

We won’t be gone long; you come, too.

Sunday Ballet Blogging

Watering In

For Yule, Landscape Guy gave me Jenks Farmer‘s wonderful book, Deep Rooted Wisdom: Skills and Stories from Generations of Gardeners. I finished reading it on my last business trip. I’d recommend the book just for the pictures and for the stories about the great characters/gardeners from whom Jenks has learned over the years. Muriel Rukeyser was right about stories.

In one chapter, Jenks recommends, whenever possible, watering by hand rather than with an automatic irrigation system or with sprinklers. You know, carrying water to the plant in a watering can and standing there making it rain in just the right spot and by just the right amount. Or taking the hose (and, when we do it here in the South, a glass of iced tea or wine, depending on whether it’s a morning or an evening watering) and standing in the garden, watching it, listening to it, watering by observation. At the end of the Watering-In chapter, Jenks says:

Collect and focus the energy of moving water in the soil and air around a plant. You might call it chi, positive energy, lining-up, or paramagnetic force — whatever you call it, it pulls together your own energy with that of moving water, plants, and life in the soil.

Those simple actions and involuntary connections make life rich. One tiny action can set off a chain of scenes in our minds. Sometimes during a watering conversation, I’ll hear in my own voice an inflection, a tiny change of tone when I’m getting excited. I’ll then recall an afternoon, years ago, on a road trip with a friend, looking over a vast desert, my friend fixated, holding my shoulder, imploring me, saying “Now? Now you must be excited! Say it out loud!” Or when I water with a coffee can, I see the smooth twisting of water becoming a muddy stream of cypress pond water, pouring from the bottom of a tiny tin that my father picked up to nurse along a newly planted ocean tree seedling behind a barn that he dreamt of renovating, of making into our house.

Watering-in does all of that for me. It’s so elemental, something that builds unforgettable connections. When you teach someone to water-in, make sure it’s a fun experience, an important moment; it may be a moment they associate with watering for the rest of their life.

It’s such a sensual thing to do, watering plants. The feel of the water, the sight of the plant, and the soil, and the water being sucked into the soil. The smell of wet dirt. The sight and sound and presence of the birds who show up and want to play in the water. And when it’s hot, of course, I water myself a bit, too.

How do you water? Do you have a memory of learning how to do it?

Picture found here.

Perhaps I Need to Write More About That

Like Rebecca, I have been rising very early all Winter to luxuriate in the morning dark. I make my coffee, and take my medicine, and cook myself the same breakfast that countless Southern women have cooked, and then I sit under an afghan, shawl on my shoulders and socks on my feet, and I do my morning meditation. The Winter dark surrounds me like a lover, like a safe blanket, like the arms of the Goddess.

I’ve been traveling for work this Winter and, so, I’ve sat wrapped within the loving arms of Columbia, St. Francis, the Angels. And wherever I’ve been, I’ve grounded, cast a circle, and called the powers, and spirits, and beings of that place, and done my morning magic — same as if I’d been home. Because we Witches, we’re only at home in our own landbase and we’re always at home wherever we go.

I introduce myself: Hello St. Francis and thank you for welcoming me to your place. I come from Columbia’s District and I am her devotee. Please let me work my magic in your place. Here’s some crumpled camellia leaves and a bit of dried rosemary from my bit of Earth, made of the Potomac River, just outside of Columbia’s space. May my offering be worthy. May my offering be accepted. May my offering do good. Here’s why I’m here . . . .

And then I head off to the federal court surrounded by mosaics of Goddesses, to the 20th floor of an office in the financial district where I am the only woman at the meeting, to an airport beside the bay, to dinner with clients at a restaurant fed by Buddhists, to my computer to write.

Through it all, a devotion to The Bramble Bush unites everything that I do and perhaps I need to write more about that.

May it be so for you.

Picture found here.