Knowing What I Know

Yesterday I had tea with a new friend who told me that the big difference in his life these days is that he is letting himself know what he knows.

And then tonight, I was walking with my sweetheart down the sidewalk, fretting. Fretting and fretting about this problem I’m trying to solve at work. “Do you want to talk about it?” he said. “You know I do this shit for a living.” He grinned his wicked grin and looked at me. “I bet I can fix it.”

I haven’t shared this part of my life with him much. We are only a month in. (Okay, 34 days, but who is counting?) But I’m running circles in my mind tonight, hardly able to be present with him, us, with now. We are walking up to the pub for dinner. I suggested a walk because we are stealing a few hours while we both don’t have our kids and I want to be here.

And walking always helps.

So we are walking, climbing really, straight up the hill to the main drag in my little neighborhood. The sky is pearly gray and the yellow porch lights are beginning to show. The night is cold but fine. All around, the plum trees are holding out their petals, which are so much more knowingly pink than the cherries, which are impatiently waiting their turn.

We reach the avenue at the top of the hill. “Which way?” he says. And I point and we top another rise and the glowing lights and people of my little urban village are spread out before us.

That’s when he turns and he asks me. “Do you want to talk about it?”

No, I don’t want to fucking talk about it! I want to forget about it! I want to be here on this beautiful night with you and stop fucking worrying about it!! Leave me alone!!

Fretting makes me snarky.

But not stupid. At least, not as much as it once did. So I take a breath instead of speaking.

Clearly, there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to. But I’m against partitions. And anyway, it’s not working, is it now? Plus, this is important to me, and he is important to me... So I do. I start talking about how I am trying to solve this puzzle and I don’t want to overcomplicate it. I know what’s needed…But…Hmm… Actually, I think I’ve been trying to force a fit… And if I just…

We are passing shop windows, but I don’t see them. I am looking up and to the right and inside my own mind because there is a…okay, this isn’t very witchy, but there is, like, a venn diagram in my head, overlapping circles: Here is what is needed. Here is what I can do. It feels like the opposite of fretting. Here is what I know.

 I take a breath. Smile. Exhale. Look around.

“Sounds like you’ve got it to me,” he says. Then that grin again. “See? I told you I could fix it.”

Dr Seuss and Deadlines

Every year I forget how crazy the moss is now. Every year, about this time, I walk out into the woods and think to myself that the moss cannot get bigger than it is today. And this happens day after day after day. It's like the trees are growing fur. They clothe themselves in shaggy coats of moss and fern and lichen until the whole forest looks drawn by Dr Seuss. And now I'm wondering... This is a rainforested region, even if it is a temperate rainforest instead of a tropical one... What’s up there? Do we have orchids in our treetops? Are there bromeliads cupping mini ponds full of tadpoles that will grow into frogs who have figured out how to live and love and breed without ever touching the ground, like they do in Brazil, where I really, really want to go?!?

Let’s just Google that shit.

And, of course we do. Where the forest is wild and ancient, or even oldish, there is a world above me. I remember now! I remember that amazing day, when I drove down to Olympia with the very talented Ward Serrill, who is making a documentary film about trees. He had scored an interview with Nalini Nardkani, the Queen of Canopy Research, (A title worth capitalizing, no?): …Nalini Nardkani, who harnessed herself up and climbed hundreds of feet into treetops, who discovered whole new worlds that we never dreamed existed before she ascended that frontier, like an astronaut with ropes instead of rockets.

But I remember thinking that day that she wasn’t just a scientific pioneer. Not that there is anything “just” about science... and yet, she was more than smart and educated and rational and clear on the difference between hypothesis and conclusion. She was alive with her work. Spreading in so many directions. I remember looking at her in her office chair, surrounded by papers in her dark office at The Evergreen State College. (My alma mater, btw. Go Greeners!) Nalini glowed with her love of her work and also she tried crazy shit.  Like roping up artists and hauling them up to live on platforms in the canopy, so then they would go home and make music and sculptures and performance art pieces, which then turned into collaborative outreach on behalf of the forest… Like doing outreach to urban kids and also, hello, creating “Canopy Barbie,” a project which buys used Barbies and dresses them up like canopy superheroes so that young girls can see that they, too, can be scientists. (Okay, admittedly, scientists that always measure 39-18-33 with a size 3 shoe. But still. That’s making lemonade from lemons, in my opinion.)

This woman was smart and kind and present and excited and full of magic and glowing with her life.

She reminded me of moss. How it is on these days. And now the moss is reminding me of her. And also of who I want to be. Not a scientist with climbing gear exactly, though I would! But so fearlessly, wildly creative, so willing to extend and grow and yet be rooted, and to give back.

I’m thinking about this as I am designing my next project. I thought about it today, as I was ruminating about the agenda for this retreat, and all the puzzle pieces were spread out in my brain, clear by themselves and yet unconnected they way I need them to be...

But I learned something last summer about how I work. About my own way of reaching and pulling life from what’s around me. I ask questions. I listen. I read and I mull and mull and then ponder and then mull some more.

It seems like nothing is happening. During the mulling, I mean. This can be concerning when, say, you are on a deadline.

But I have learned to stick with it. 

Because then, if I hold out and let it happen, something clicks in me. Some pattern shimmers into place, thrumming with life, holding all the pieces and yet becoming more than the sum of it’s parts.

Like moss. (Bear with me.)

I learned this tonight when I watched Nalani’s TED talk. Moss creates more life. It is not a parasite. Yes, it grows on the bark of trees. But it grows in layers, and as the old layers die and the new ones grow on top, the old layers become a home for the life of that world. The old, dead moss is not dead at all. It becomes a layer that is so good at absorbing rain and air vitamins (there has to be a scientific name for them, but it’s late and I’ve done enough Googling today), the “dead” moss is so good at collecting life from the air that it becomes a second forest floor, up there, and the trees grow roots into it, from their bark, and the flowers grow and the frogs and salamanders breed…

I mean, obviously regular salamanders… not the mythical fire salmanders, because they breed in the heart of volcanoes and lava cracks…  

I only mention fire salamanders because there is something about that floating, magic-sounding world in the canopy that makes me think of fairy tales. I know that canopy world, somehow, though I’ve never been on one of those platforms. I know how it smells, green and brown, and how wild things peek from every leaf. I know how it hums with silence, and also the drip of rain and the crack of bough and the eerie call of … what was that?!?  I don’t know. I also don't know. Because sometimes it is dark here for a long time. There is so much mystery that I can only lean into it and wait, impatient and also devoted, until it reveals itself, a piece of the web of life, of story, as it did for me this afternoon.

When it does, I give thanks. I walk in the woods, my eyes turned up, looking at the moss, thinking, really, can it get any bigger than it is today?

Love and Silence

I have run into this problem before.

Hard to write when I am in love, which I am.  Though this is different than before.

But the writing problem is the same. All I want to think about, and write about, is love. And it feels both too all-consuming and too private to share… I am writing, anyway, by the way, even when not posting…

Meanwhile, work is happening. Meanwhile, mothering and the life of my home and my body and the slow turning of the creek toward spring is all happening. The flowering red currants have bared their pink tongues, like a many-handed Indian goddess, extending all her nectar for the Anna’s hummingbirds. I saw one at the top of a still bare thorny tree this morning. She was fatly fluffed and still, silhouetted on the branch in the grey midday March light.

Not long now until the trees bloom, until the Alders and Maples cover themselves with their pendant pale green blossoms and the whole insect word goes batshit crazy for sugar.

It feels like I am sugar high, four days out of six, and then not at all for four. I am constantly rising or falling on the wild magic of love, and yet… that is not the whole of me. I am remembering to remember my core. Maybe it is because we do things together that I would do to feed and balance myself if I were alone: walk in the woods, drink coffee slowly, even write, that one time…

Maybe it is because I am following my friend Dawn’s advice: to be my own lover also: to love myself for the ways that I have stood by me, over and over, for so many years. To love myself for my own faithful abiding.

Maybe it is because I have finally done a better job of choosing someone to be in love with.

These could all be true. All.

Meanwhile, I am returning to the soul work of storytelling as activism, as a way to bring the intelligence of the whole to the needs of the world, now. I am planning a retreat to elicit imagination and connection, to bring science and story together in a marriage filled by love that withstands paradox.

Which I am also living. And yet, I am having such a hard time writing…

What sense does it make, when the world is so in need of love, to be silenced by it? What sense does it make, when all I care for now is wholeness, to partition?

None, and yet there is this: When I feel that love rise up in me, sudden and green, it is a wild place, fae and silent and teeming. It is a meadow with a shelf of mist.  It longs to thrive within some bubble, protected from the vagaries of human culture. 

Even as it longs to sing without ceasing.

I am sure there is some middle ground here. 

The Elements of Kissing

A great kiss is an elemental spell.

The earth, of course. The body and touch. The feel of my lips, his, but not just lips also, tongues, teeth and, it turns out, the tip of my nose. The left tip, to be exact, because this kissing is so endless in variety and pleasure that we don't stop, and there is something about the way I hold my head that results in the left tip of my nose rubbing, over and over, against his rough stubbled cheek. I can feel it happening, but I won't pay attention to my nose. I ignore it. I pay attention to our mouths, his back under my hands, my waist under his.

(We kissed so much that in the morning I woke up with a scab, a bloody scrape on my nose. Earth to water.)

Water, then. It's not just the obvious, my mouth to his, the joining of the interior of our bodies, that precursor of what may be yet to come. There is taste here, which is or is not magic. Here, it is. And I know there have been times when I have kissed without love, when the pure friction and scent of lust had me gasping and crazed. I am not that teenager anymore, or even that woman. I have lost my taste for a kiss without heart. (I taste his heart.) We are in my kitchen, I am leaning against the counter, he is all around me and I can feel him, not just with my body but with the primal sea inside me, old parts, that care nothing for why or why not, but want only the joining, not with anyone, with him, who is just now all I can taste, feel, see. He surrounds me, fills me. Water. 

I am warmer now. I know the fire will come, but first, air… we breathe together. I whisper his name across our joined lips; this is life in our mouths. All around, the night persists. There are lights across the water, my old refrigerator hums. I can feel his breath merging with mine. (I am breathing through my nose, which tingles for some reason, why is my nose tingling? Well, never mind…) This is the beginning that is in every inhale. This is the exchange in every breath: my promise to take in, his to thrust, mine to wrap, his to invade, his to receive, mine to find, all in the slipstream of breath, of word, promise, of consent. Air.

And finally, yes now, the fire. It comes in a moment, a sudden spark under my sternum that warms my chest and fills me. It comes when I place the focus of my will, my hunger – fire is will and hunger – here, on the kiss. But only if I balance the hunger with listening. Fire comes when I pay attention. When, somehow, in the midst of the pleasure and merging and breath, I remember to notice this man, this love, right now. I am listening to all of him with all of me, to only the next fraction of now. I reduce the whole of myself to the listening and wanting of this tip of my tongue, this lip slowly sliding across mine. I am achingly aware of only this. Hunger. Will. I reach toward him, I receive him and the spark arcs across our bodies and lights my rib cage like a paper lantern rising.

A great kiss is an elemental spell.

Facing Down the Beauty Police

I went to get my head shots today. A head shot! Yes, you know it’s a professional photo, but doesn’t it sound more like an execution?

I would have felt that way about it a few years ago. I hadn’t had a head shot session in, what? Twenty years? And I remembered the feeling of nerves that last time, turning my smile into a grimace, like aliens had taken over my face. I didn’t want that, I didn’t want to be nervous and worried about how I look today. I wanted to be in my skin.

So, I started by going down to the creek. The moss was in full reaching mania. This is its time. Soon, so many edges will be softened by its chartreuse green fur. The pink cherry blossoms will billow and the blue-green lichen will spackle the rain-blacked branches, all against the pale pearl skies. There is no other time like this, when the warming days and still wet air form the conditions for this wash of color, this perfectly soft palette. I walked through all of it, the spring that is, and the spring that that is yet to come, down to the greening boulder in the middle of the still high waters and I faced the four directions and asked for help. Asked for my inspiration and my enthusiasm and my love and my strength (air, fire, water and earth if you are following along at home), to enter my face and free it from the bad grimace.

And then I went home and watched comedy on Netflix. John Mulvaney’s The Comeback Kid. Because yes, I wanted to be filled with what I believe and comfortable in my own skin. And also not to be just smiling at the camera, but – is it possible? ­– to relax and be myself enough to laugh my ass off.

The sun was shining bright when I left the house. I went down to Pioneer Square with my professional outfit and my casual outfit and shook the hand of Michael the photographer. He showed me into the studio – square, old brick, high ceilings – and started out by taking a couple of test shots to check the light. Right away those shots showed up on the (huge!) computer monitor behind him.

And that just kept right on happening.

It’s one thing to decide to relax and be myself and just have fun. It’s another to do it while watching shot after giant shot of my face come up, with my half-closed eyes and are those my teeth? and what is happening to my hair?!?

You can see how this could go right off the rails.

But no.  NO!

I will not let the beauty police ruin my head shot execution. Er, session.

Because, finally, finally, I have made friends with my face. Man, it took me years to get here. 43 to be exact. There is something about the last two years that settled me into my bones. I started looking at myself in the mirror differently, not sliding my eyes around and sucking my cheeks in and tilting my chin this way and that to see if my face is okay, to see if it is an oval or a heart shape, like I learned to as a teenager, taking those beauty tests that every Cosmo/Glamour/Mindfuck magazine says to. Finally not doing that anymore, but just looking at my face, this face, and accepting.

I know this face. It has been sculpted by not just my genes but my life. I have my mother’s eyes, but not hers, because one of mine has a dark dot near the iris and the green is slightly bluer and the orange is slightly oranger and mine have been opened and creased by different loves and pains than hers. I have my dad’s nose, but not his, because I can smell a winter-blooming daphne from half a block away, and whether a mushroom is done and my nose has a particular tilt to it that is mine and that I love, now, though my eyes always slid away from it before. I have lines around my mouth from years of using my voice. I have violet circles under my eyes that are as changeable as the moon, waxing and waning with my son’s uneasy nights, or the arrival of a new lover whose skin is like vitamins, or the fact that my dog (my dog!) talks in his sleep.

I love this face. I hear Edith telling me that sounds vain, but I think never being able to love my outsides as well as my insides… well that is also wrong. That is the second side of the double-edged sword, opposite the beauty police’s never-ending citations.

I love this face, just as surely as I love my life. So. I looked at that huge fucking monitor and kept on smiling.

After the shoot, I went through the pics, narrowing down to top five best and ten others that I just want. There was one of me looking up that I liked. Sure, my forehead is shining like I am wearing a coalminer’s helmet, but there was sort of dreaming in the expression… There was one of my actual so happy smile and several of my arguing, (We talked a lot during the shoot. Now I know exactly what that looks like.)

And at least one of me really laughing.

Power of being in my own skin: One.

Beauty Police: Zero.

Rhiannon, Time and Love

Yesterday I came upon this passage about love:

Never had Pwyll been more easy and comfortable with any Lady on earth. But never on earth had the warmth of laughter and talk filled the air around two people with a glow of rose and gold. He had been a flame, an ache, a straining agony; he had not known how he could bear to wait for the feast to end, for folk to lead them to their chamber. But every moment with her was good, however it was spent. Delight should unfold slowly, petal by petal. For the first time, the Lord of Dyved learned that, he who always had been flame-quick in his loves.

It is as good a description of the intoxicating, the time-bending, exquisite ache of love as I have ever seen.

And then, a chapter later, this:

“Time does not matter, only what happens in it. Time can burn like fire, or it can pass as quietly as grass grows.”

All of this from the myths of Rhiannon, The Mabinogian Tetralogy” to be exact. It is beautiful. I feel as if I am reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time.

Way better than the fucking Mab. Whoa! Did I say that out loud? But I found The Mabinogian hard and a little boring and I know I’m maybe not supposed to say that about the source text for this story, but when I read this kind of dense, old, slightly stilted language I feel like maybe I’m not as smart as I think I am, which is likely good for me but makes me a little aggressive.

Anyway. The Tet, as I will heretofore refer to it, is not boring. It is poetic and compelling and, as I am in the drunkenness of new love and also learning to bend time in new ways, it is hitting the spot.

Also, I am interested in this, the conjunction of love, and time, since that combination seems to be part of Rhiannon’s tool kit, and it is her story that we will be working at CAWC, after all.

I want to write about that. About how she uses time as her ally when she is being chased by Pwyll later in the story, and when she is unfairly accused of killing her child, how she deals with time’s prison, time’s release, how, maybe, she survives by the grace of love.

I do. I want to write about all of that. But I am suddenly stricken down, though it is only 9pm. I am as tired as if I were Pwyll, at the Battle of the Ford, fighting Havgan, the beautiful monster who leads the forces that would wipe away worship of the Mother, unsay men’s sacred relationship to the land, turn the father into “altogether a Being of wrath and fire.”

(I love this story. In it, in addition to beautiful love and bendy time, we will uncover forces of history that still are at work and forces of magic that never left us.)

I want to write about all of that, but like Pwyll, I am fucking exhausted. Not because my “lifeblood’s oozing away” but because I rocked my day, fought my cold, played a fierce game of D&D with my son tonight (Sorry dead cave bears) and just had a hot bath. Also, I just realized, forgot to have dinner.

Time to bend time toward feast and bed. 

Time Travel

Now, it's not just the wild roses and snowberries. The flowering red currants are leafing out too. And all over the city, the tips of the tree branches are growing, pale green dots on the cherry branches, red commas on the tips of the alders, as if the God of Spring is a calligrapher, writing the season plant by plant.

It is the changing time. And I am changing time too. Over the last year, I learned to be slow again, to enter the kind of formless time that would let me hear the smallest, deepest places in my core. I had to learn to stay there, and to return, return, return, in spite of the pain of my injury and the tasks of living. And I did, and I healed and I remembered that fast is not my only pace.

I’m coming out of the dream time now, re-entering task-type time as I return to work. Woo-hoo!! But I won’t stay only there. I know now that the work requires travelling back and forth: Into the dream, the story, the deep well. Out into the world, the agenda, the people and needs and minute-by-minute work of a day.

I think I’ve learned how to do this time travel, to pulse back and forth, not hour to hour but moment to moment, like shifting my weight from one foot to another. I have. I am carrying it out.

The trees are in that same pulse. Like the race at their tips is swelling out of the long, still connected quiet of winter. Like they are reaching and also listening. 

My Real Job

At Winter Witch Camp, Colleen said to me, “It’s not your job to be a perfect mom to Forest. It’s your job to keep his therapists employed.”

Isn’t that a good friend?

She said that because I took the grief path, the three-day workshop on transforming grief from the isolated experience that it usually is in our culture, into… well. They didn’t tell us what it would be transformed into. This was smart! It’s a good idea not to make too many promises at the beginning of witch camp. It’s a good idea to leave room for mystery and magic.

Which (witch) happened.

I mean, it happened a lot. It happened when I arrived and in spite of only two years under my belt at this camp, and a year away, I felt like a long lost beloved, over and over, from people who surprised me with loving me.

It happened during ritual on the second night, when my friend Horizon started talking about edgewalkers, and what it’s like to be on the outside, talked about what it had been like to be told she was less than human because she is fat (her words) all her life. All of this as she slowly took off all her clothes in front of 80 people in a demonstration of breathtaking courage. And then turned around and with the full authority and snap of her spirit said. “But I am stunning.” And she was, we were all stunned by her wild, fierce, gorgeousness. 

That was the beginning of the breakdown.

I haven’t had a camp like that for years. A crying camp. I mean I have, as Sayre puts it, been doing my laundry.  I’ve been keeping up. It’s not like the first time I went to witch camp almost 20 years ago and learned how to open my heart and felt like I had been turned inside out, skin exposed, too raw to live… (All of which reminds me of several images I had the uncertain pleasure to see this very night, when I was trying to one-up my sweetheart and, in a moment of questionable judgement, Googled “disgusting images.” May I just say: Wow.)

Anyway.

Last week was not my first time at the rodeo, but I cried my eyes out that night, and the next morning, went to grief path. So, I guess I was asking for it.

And out of nowhere, I was suddenly grieving for the years that I have been afraid for my son. I was sitting on the floor of Freya’s Hall, a long rectangular room with two walls of windows looking through the bare trees and over the icy lake. Thirty people with me, making altars, working alone, processing their own deep griefs—and there were a lot of griefs in there. I won’t share details, because we promised confidentiality, but there were such losses in that room that I kind of wondered what I was doing there. My life has been pretty fine, really. But on the first day of camp, I knew that was my workshop, in that way that I know things, and so I went.

And what happened was this: I made the altar to those lost moments when I couldn’t see beyond my fear, for the years of silencing myself because I thought it would protect him, for the ways that my fear might have hurt him… I made the art and I cried hard and I felt something in my chest opening up… And as I felt that sadness pouring out of me, I realized I didn’t want to grieve alone, in silence, by myself, anymore. And, I mean, the intention of that particular ritual was to break the hex of disconnection around grief.

But, it was weird…I mean I looked around the room. Nobody was looking up. Nobody was available for connection. That’s what I saw. A room full of bowed heads, silently shaking shoulders. Grief in isolation.

“Everybody is busy. They have their own work to do.” So said Edith. But I know her cruel tones, her dismissive cadence by now. And underneath her brushoff was a voice that I have come to trust.

Which said “Come on, Andrews. Man up. Ask for what you want.” (Sometimes I wish my brave voice didn’t sound like a stoned surfer. But you take what you get.)

So I closed my eyes and summoned the courage I had seen the night before, led by Horizon, but not by her alone. I reached into my breaking, sad, sad, chest for what was needed and the words that came out, so clear and, frankly, a little louder than maybe I meant, were “I don’t want to be alone!”

I called those words out into the room in a voice that never ever would have left my lips ten years ago. Maybe even five. Yeah. Definitely.

Before I could even open my eyes there were four people around me. I can’t tell their stories. But I can say this. We shared. We had a sort of crying cuddle and I could feel the grief in my own body and the grief in the bodies next to me softening, still separate, but not so hard, not so much like a cage, not so much like things of glass.

And then a hand on my shoulder and a voice in my ear. “Can I cry for you?”

I have never been asked this question before! But in that moment, though I had a brief worry that my grief might get snatched away, (Hags that sucke the bloode of children in the nighte), it really did seem like the obvious answer was “Yes.”

And so Angie began to Keen.

I’ve heard about this before. I’ve heard about this practice, across many cultures, of the keening and wailing, the communal exercising of grief, done together and led by those who can call something out with sound, with the music of loss.

I always thought it sounded sort of cool and primal but hard to understand. How can your keening touch my pain?

But here’s what happened: I felt that sound go through me and connect me to something I didn’t even know existed.

Later the witch who was next to me would say “She made a sound that was the exact sound of my pain.”

I don’t know that I could say that. I don’t exist for sound, for music, the way some people do. I love it when it touches me. But I do exist for images, for the pattern of light and dark and color. And when that sound entered me it drove down through me, like a column of darkness, straight through me, surrounding and carrying the hurt in me down down down, not just through me but below me as Angie keened and keened and keened, hand on my shoulder, darkness driving down, me dissolving but still held, until the small, tied-up pain that had been in me was released, not taken away, but let go to join all the grief of the world.

That’s what was down there, at the bottom of all of it. The grief of the world.

It was vast and it was dark and it was beautiful. Not scary. Not even painful. Which was surprising because my private grief had been invisibly hurting me so much for so long.

None of this I noticed in the moment. In the moment I was only there, weightless and not alone, not in pain. More like, actually, in love.

WTF? But yes. In love. Able to love, again.

Looking back now, it is maybe not so surprising. The inimitable Brené Brown says “There is no such thing as selective numbing.” (If you haven’t watched her TED talks on Vulnerability  

and Shame, bookmark them now.) Numbing all that grief was keeping me separate from my heart, my hope… not totally separate, I have loved and hoped and felt many things in the last seven years since I became a mom.

But when I left camp, my chest was bigger on the inside. I felt my strength returning to me. I felt less bound by perfection. More willing to love and grieve and try again. 

Even if it means keeping Forest’s therapists employed.

Boundary Lessons

Yesterday: a lesson in boundaries.

Couple of things about this: First, I am going to be talking about my son’s discovery of Pokemon.

If you are not a parent who is dealing with Pokemon, you may not know the obsession I was facing, but you have dealt with something similar, no doubt. When someone you love has totally lost their shit in a can’t-see-the(ahem)forest-for-the-trees obsession and can’t hear “no.”

Second, I really believe in good, kind, solid boundaries as the key to good love. Not too many! The ones that count, held with kindness and resilience.

And third, sometimes no matter how good, how worthy and valid the boundary is, it’s worth breaking.

So. It’s a sunny Saturday afternoon. Yesterday afternoon, in fact. Forest had just bought his first Pokemon deck. (Yes, I am taking condolences.) And, awesome, supportive mom that I am, I had been talking about Pokemon with him, on and off, for three hours as he rotated the following questions without ceasing:

·      Mom, what’s your favorite Pokemon?

·      Mom, what other questions do you have about Pokemon?

·      Mom, what’s your favorite Pokemon?

For three hours, I had been pulling particle after particle of loving parental curiosity out of my ass.

And suddenly, I was done. So done.

So I did as I have learned to do. I announced my done-ness. I said to Forest, “Honey, I need a break. Please go play in your room while I make lunch.”

This sounds kinder than “Leave me the fuck alone!”

At this point, I need to make the mother disclaimer. I love my son. So much. Like my ribs being pried open much. And also, I am sometimes exhausted by him, and I know that this is not really the maternal ideal. Endless patience is more like the expectation. I will never forget the time when Forest was about 22 months old, very fast and no impulse control. I was on the phone with my father and at my wit’s end and I said to him, “Dad, I feel like I am a butler to a chimpanzee with a personality disorder.” Long, long silence. Then, “But you love him, right?” Sigh. “Yes, Dad. I love him.”

So. The mother disclaimer.

But, honestly, these days are so different. I have more resources. More patience with myself and with him. More allies and more self-love. Plus, now he can read! And talk! And some of what he says is so hilarious. Like yesterday morning, when I was dosing both of us for our colds and he looked at me and said “Mom, too many vitamins at once makes my mouth sting and feel like rotten potatoes at the same time.”

Or last week, when he told me his pants had gotten too small by telling me his jeans were “as small as a pebble.”

Or last year when, after asking me when his grandma was going to die and when I was going to die – I replied to both with “I don’t know but I hope not for a long, long time,” – he thought for a while, and then looked at me and said “Mama, my great great great great great great great great great grandmother is mother earth, and she will never die.”

(Pause for effect.)

But also, these days are not different. I mean, this boy can talk. He can talk and talk and talk. He is an extrovert. He is a social creature and sometimes it feels like his talking is sucking the life out of me, because I, on the other hand, am squarely on the fence. I am an extro/introvert. I need both and when I go too long without my introvert time, say by being around an extremely verbal seven year old with a brand new pack of Pokemon cards, I can become quite cranky.

So, I have learned to take breaks. I have learned that if I take these breaks and feed my introvert, I can turn things around before I want to scream “Leave me the fuck alone!”

Which brings us back to today. At which point I was eight hours into non-stop interaction and a solid three into Pokemon patience.

And I just didn’t have anything left.

But Forest was so excited. And he came into the kitchen, a second time. “Mama, what’s your favorite Pokemon card?”

“Honey, I need a break. I need you to stay out of the kitchen until I’m done making lunch.”

 Then, again. The Pokemon question. I’m standing in front of the open refrigerator and he asks me a third time and I replied, “Forest. I need you to not interrupt me now.” Little bit of steel in my voice.

To which he replied:  “Mama, could you please tell me what I am doing right instead of what I am doing wrong?”

Boy oh boy.

I mean, on the one hand, I know this looks like maybe Olympic level manipulation, right?  Have I mentioned that my son is a bit theatrical? You should have seen the innocence shining out of his limpid blue eyes. 

But, that’s cynical hindsight. If you’d been there, if you’d seen him, you wouldn’t have thought that. And neither did I. Not even for a moment. His words washed over me like such clear water. I swear it wasn’t the air from the open refrigerator. Suddenly, I was awake and he looked like he had been doused in light. I wasn’t suspicious and I wasn’t tired anymore. I want to say I was proud of him, but that makes too much of me. I was amazed by him, showing me what a good boundary looks like. He said it with all this love just flowing out.

You should have seen the innocence shining out of his limpid blue eyes.

Goddess, motherhood has taught me so much… about being my best self by knowing what I actually need and then being willing to ask, about asking with very clear words and a very kind tone, about giving all that I have to give and still stopping before I fall off the cliff. About trying to be my best self and do all that and fucking it up and knowing that I have to keep trying anyway.

I looked at him. I had asked for a break. I had needed it. That was my boundary.

But maybe I’ve had enough practice at this boundary thing that I don’t have to be rigid anymore, don’t have to be in a fearful defense of the way I felt before... Because now, looking down at my son, with his heart in his eyes, bare to me, totally trusting, I didn’t need a break anymore.

“Yes, honey. I would be happy to do that,” I said. “That’s a very good idea,” I said. “Come here,” I said, and I gave him a hug, and a little cuddle, and then he did go play in his room, and I stood there in the cool blast of the still open refrigerator door and breathed in, all that I know and don’t know and love about this boy.

If that moment was a Pokemon card, it would have had, like, 150 energy points and a special attack: rolling heart blow, with a magnitude of X 30.

What other questions do you have about Pokemon?

Cold Threshold

Down at the creek, it is not just the Indian plum announcing spring, now. Also the snowberries, and the wild roses, all tipped with tender buds. Sayre sends me his “sidewalk omen” of the day: pictures of pairs of daffodils and popsicle stick fortunes and tales of sexy black cats. We agree that there is something in the air, about innocence and sex and magic. That this is the doorway, now.

And it’s also true that yesterday, in the field above Acer the Big-Leafed Maple, there was a flock of robins at least 20 strong. They have not given up their winter behavior for the pairing and courtship of spring.

Threshold. Hovering here.

Tonight, I flocked with my girls, drank chile-laced tequila, my concession to a wicked cold. Today, and in the days since winter camp, I have received texts and messages from the brave and beloved witches who are all over this land, working for magic or justice or joy or the simple revolution of slow pleasure in the seasons. I remember the feeling at the end of camp, the brief wavering: can I take this hard-won strength home? Can I take what I have found in this winter place out, and put it in service in the world?

And Jen Byers, saying to us all, as we prepared to say goodbye: “We have to stay connected. None of us do this work alone.”

I’ve heard that so many times before. Never believed it this way.

And I realized that I actually do love Facebook! I do believe in standing, with many hands on my shoulder, on the threshold of the season, the world, and loving all my witches, my beloveds, my allies in the air and fire, water and earth, feeling them behind me and above and below as I reach down and dig into the ripening soil of spring.

Arriving at Winter Camp

On the way to Winter Witch Camp, once we figured out how to close the fucking car windows, Colleen asks what it feels like to me this year, the call of camp. She told me it feels to her like a vortex, sucking her in. “Yes,” I say. I tell her that I feel a little bit of foreboding, almost. Hags are scary. They are the theme of this year’s camp. The day before, I’d looked them up in the OED, trying to find some root that made sense to me. What I found was mostly along the lines of “witches who sucke the bloude of children in the nighte.” Associations with goblins, ghouls and other “infernal beings.” Then I looked up “infernal” hoping for some relief from the Vatican propaganda there. And found only “associated with hell.”

Rats.

As Colleen drives and Betsy dozes, I look out at at snow-covered field after field, bordered by hardwoods, birches, with the occasional oak standing out. The oaks hang on to their leaves longest; they look rusty and vivid in this white and grey world. We pass a wide field full of geese, hundreds of them sitting black and bellied down into the white, as if they were swimming in a snow pond.

I am actually feeling nervous enough about what is waiting that I ask my allies to come along for this ride. Freya, the Norse Venus,queen of beauty and desire and fierce protector, who is always at that camp and also here in my heart. Brigid, the Celtic goddess of smithcraft and poetry, who says “Okay, but write every day.” And Kali, creative destructrix, who feels like a member of the Hag tribe, or maybe a goddess who sits on the Hag board of directors.

I put my phone on airplane as we pull in to the camp, and see my friend Sayre, who I haven’t seen since we said goodbye in the Redwoods in July after wandering the myth of Baba Yaga for a year together. I tell him I’ve been falling for someone, and have lost my feet, and am trying to get them back and he wants to know if we have all the connections, the head and the heart and the body. And I say I think so, and he tells me about his life and his heart and then we talk about what it’s like to not know, and to want, and to not know, and I am so glad I am here.

Then “I don’t really know what ‘hag’ means,” Sayre says.

I tell him what I found on the OED.

“Sucks the blood of children?” Sayre says, raising his brows. (Apparently I didn’t pronounce all the extra vowels.)

“Through their dreams,” I say. “But all this is from during or after the Inquisition. I couldn’t find anything that was earlier,” I say. And then pause… “I think it’s… it’s a naming of the worst, most fearsome shadow of female power… and I think what’s interesting is what is underneath that, what that covers up.”

“Well. Whoever comes will only be as bad as the worst fears in the room,” Sayre says, with typical Sayre offhandedness. This does not actually comfort me, which must show on my face, because he says “What? If everyone has been doing their work, doing their laundry, it will be fine…. You know, just that pair of dirty socks…”

“That rag that I spilled milk on two weeks ago and forgot about,” I say. Sayre wrinkles his nose at me and we both laugh.

Tonight is the opening ritual. We will call in the Hags, and so will the teachers who have been working within their mythic reach for months. And we will see who shows up. So for now, I will walk the island, walk the fields of snow, walk on the lake and feel what’s underneath and waiting for us.

Home from Winter Camp

Things that comfort me when I get home from Winter Witch Camp and I am missing the embrace of myth and my beloveds and the wild white winter and the trees that poured out purple hag light at dusk and the singing together in sacred space and the laughing together at the Hootenanny and the indulging of our murderous impulses together in the playing of Werewolf, late late in the dining hall, with a scheme and a bald-faced lie and a laugh that goes so long that it hurts and hurts and you still don’t want it to stop.

Things that comfort me when I get home from that:

·      The hyacinths that I was forcing on my mantle, in full fragrant magenta bloom when I walk into my house.

·      The way Sunshine the dog woo-woo-woos! that I am back and wiggles all over me and smells me and is so happy and the walk we take into the night, remembering what Seattle smells like after rain and the big burly fucking raccoon that we see humping his way through my neighbor’s hedge and remembering that here, as in Wisconsin, is it also Hunger Moon, as my friend Joseph calls it, because it is the time when raccoons are so hungry that they will do anything to get at the chickens on his farm.

·      The spontaneous stop at my friend Jamie’s house, which turns into two glasses of wine and two hours of watching the dogs romp and talking about camp and kids and love and then walking back to my house together because the talking is so good and it helps me come down from the sweetness of four days with 80 people who value integrity and vulnerability and are willing to sing and to be seen just as they are.

·      A long, sweet phone call with this man, remembering his voice, how our humor weaves together, and the ache of not seeing him yet.

·      The Mabinogian Tetralogy and the Legend of Rhiannon, which is open beside me now, more marked up every day.

·      The change to the land, when morning comes: down at the creek, the Indian Plum, harbinger of spring, has begun to bloom. The birds sing everywhere.

·      And most of all: MY coffee. MY bed. My laptop, on this couch, looking out the window at my garden, which holds my eyes while my words find their way onto this page. 

On the Way to Winter Witch Camp...

Colleen turns to me in the car and says, “It’s good to turn the car into a broomstick.”

We are packed and ready. We are leaving today for Winter Witch Camp. It’s that time before a weekend of story and ritual and myth and diving down when you don’t quite know what is going to happen, and some of it will definitely be awesome and some of it will be a surprise suck of confronting fear or shame and clearing that shit out.

We are breathing into it, though. “We are bringing the magic,” she says. “We are answering the needfire rune.” We are also blaring the lady power music- Brandi Carlile and Alison Krauss and as we pull up to her friend Betsy’s house, Melissa Etheridge, who is singing “Come to my Window.” So Colleen rolls my window down and we lean out together and sing at the top of our lungs “Come to my Window! Crawl inside, wait by the light of the moooo-ooon!!”

Colleen gets out into the snowy Minneapolis morning and helps Betsy huck her big ole bag to the trunk and it’s like 15 degrees outside so I push the button to roll up my window.

And it doesn’t work. I must be hitting the button wrong. I do it again. Oh! I know. Colleen bumped the child lock with her elbow. I lean over and push that. Nothing. Push it again. Nothing. Also the controls on the driver’s side don’t work.

The freezing fucking cold air is pouring into the car. We have a two-hour drive into Central Wisconsin ahead of us.

Have I mentioned that I am from Arizona?

Colleen drops into the driver’s seat, grinning. “Um,” I say. “How come I can’t roll my window up?”

Colleen tries my control. Hers. She looks at me. Tries them both again. “Oh shit,” she says. “None of them are working. Oh my god. This has never happened before. We must have blown a fuse.”

I put on my scarf.

Colleen starts looking for the fuse panel and I get on my phone to Yelp some service stations because I sure as fuck don’t carry spare fuses in my car, so I assume Colleen doesn’t. She can’t find the fuse panel. She googles how to find the fuse panel. I find a service station with lots of stars that Betsy says is good.  Colleen says “Oh, let’s just go.”

She starts the car. My window goes up.

For fuck’s sake.

I sure hope the needfire isn’t calling our ordinary common sense, because apparently that doesn’t come standard with a broomstick.

Time's Eddy

I feel as if I have been in a trance for eight days. Eight days without posting, while time slowed around me into a golden pool that makes me think of the moment that Pwyll spots Rhiannon, our Welsh Faery queen, and tries and tries to catch her, and can’t, though she appears to be moving slowly and he sends horses racing after her. I feel as if I have been in a trance like that: I am moving slowly, the world around me whirls, I am almost unreachable. And I think that that maybe the secret to Rhiannon’s command of time is not her divine nature but the way time is bent by love.

Stuff has been happening, which has been wonderful.

However, I have not been writing.  Which is not wonderful.

I mean, I’ve been writing. I wrote on February 2, for instance, like I said I would. I wrote about making the seven-pointed star out of rose canes and naming the forces that I was calling into my life. There are seven of them, one for each point. I started with Courage and Creativity, and then friend Kimberly Larson said “What other C words?” And I added Kindness, (honorary C) and Compassion and Candor and Connection and…

Wait. Now I can’t remember the seventh. See, this is part of the trance of spellcrafting for me. I can’t hold words.  When I am sitting on the low green velvet chair, feet on the hearth, the firewood and poker within reach, the drum at my elbow and the lights low enough that the flames dance like bright animals eating the past as the old spell burns and I take my shears in hand and cut the rose canes, bend and tie them into a circle, into one point, another, a third, rearranging them by the dancing light, balancing them on my knee until the spell has formed and I tie the points down, name them one by one…

When all of this is going down, and the magic is moving through me like music, I can’t hold words. It is difficult, later, when the trance has passed, to write it down.

This may also be part of the trance of spending, oh, say, five hours, in a bed on Bainbridge Island, in this man, this beautiful man’s bedroom… looking through the windowed ceiling into the black-feathered fir trees as those hours passed: The sun wasn’t up, the trees were only silhouettes against a silver sky. We kissed. The sky was pale blue, the trees had become darkest green. We kissed, talked. The sun was in the tops of the trees, lighting their crowns. We kissed, talked, laughed our asses off. The sun was hitting the silvered trunks, and all the greens had come in, mossy and blackish and olive and grassy and deep. And as all these hours unspooled around us, we lay naked, eyes open, eyes closed, and I was turning toward him and toward him and toward him again.

After that I could barely pay the parking garage ticket with my love-drunk hands, my skipping brain, much less catch the thread of these words and tie them down.

But today I got on an airplane, and Bam! I walked into the fleet, unrooted nowhere that is every airport in the world and time stepped back onto its old track and as the plane leveled off,  I felt the cogs of my brain begin to move with their old, wordy precision. I could see the world behind me, not through the shimmering bend of love but through the good glass of language.

I think, though, that I have learned something about Rhiannon’s command of time, of being there, still and deep. She has found time’s eddy, it is lit by her breath, moves to her own gait, is held in the throes of that which she finds beautiful and worthy.

And now I remember the seventh point. Of course. It sounds like a drum: Celebration.

Freddie Mercury and the Flicker

The birds are awake again; it's not just me. Suddenly, the shy Bewick’s wren is darting through the snowberry. I haven't seen her move that fast for months. And the Northern flickers are calling, a kee-kee-kee siren of spring, while they flash their red underwings, like a gentleman with satin scarlet flashing from inside his overcoat. 

Is it spring? Is it?

It feels like it. Though the official first day is still six weeks away, spring equinox on March 21… But I have heard it said that maybe this calendar is off just a touch, like a clock that is 90 minutes slow… I have heard it said that, in other times, the equinoxes and solstices were celebrated as the peaks of the seasons rather than their beginnings, and that the seasons began with the cross quarter holidays: the start of summer on May 1, its peak June 21... the start of fall on August 2, its peak September 21. Halloween as the door that opens to winter’s rush...

Right now I like this idea, because that would make tomorrow the first day of spring and there is something about naming a threshold that brings it to life, something about naming in general … Well. There is this: Last night I spent some time in a lovely conversation about the power of naming and patterns, and also the importance of mystery, which is entered, and persists, and changes the pattern. I am thinking about that conversation. Who can say where the seasons begin and end? Who can pattern that mystery and have it hold?

And yet…I wouldn’t mind saying “first day of spring” soon.

Yesterday after I untied the unintended hexagram, I walked down to the creek under bright skies. Lately, I've been listening to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury singing “Under Pressure” as I walk, over and over. On Friday night, I told my friend Quinn about this song. I think he rocks David Bowie and I told him I want to do this as a duet. He looked at me like I had just told him I wanted to wreck a train and handed him a ticket. “Really?” he said. “It is my Karaoke Mt. Everest,” I told him. “Okay,” he said, then nodded. “Okay.”

So I’ve been listening, over and over, as I walk past the still bare birch trees, and Freddie Mercury calls like the boldest Flicker: “Ee-dee-dah! Ee-dah-bah! Give love give love give love.”

But yesterday I forgot my phone and the wind was wild in the trees and then gone, wild and gone, subtle percussion. The meadow was deep with mud and tender grass and down by the creek I found the materials for the new star I'll make tomorrow, for Imbolc, February 2, which I may or may not call the first day of spring… which I may or may not see as Spring’s open door. Down by the creek, below the bridge, there is a stand of wild roses, and the broken canes lay across the path, green and pliable and cut down by some wind or branch or beast. I gathered them up, five in all– arching six-foot stems some – and carried them, verdant banner waving, up the hill to my home.

The Unintended Hex(gram)

This morning, I was looking out the window at my garden and particularly at the six-pointed star that I made some years ago. It was built of the pliable new growth of mock-orange and lilac, tender plant whips and twine. Now, it hangs from the weeping juniper, suspended by a beaded ribbon that was also a spell, one that I wove at Diana’s Grove when I was pregnant with my son. On that night, in the bitter February cold of southern Missouri, I wandered among the bare trees and under the bright stars, gathering blessings at the altars of the elements, singing and tying beads to the ribbon and asking the ancestors’ protection for me and my son.

Then one day, some years later, I made that star. And I hung it with the ribbon of protection by the path to my door, where it has swayed through many seasons, a perch for chickadees, a spinning wind toy.

A six-pointed star. Not five, not a pentacle, which is the star within the circle of unity. Not the pentacle, which is the very map of the human body, standing with arms out-stretched, as if waiting to be drawn by da Vinci. 

Nor is this magical, "Welcome to my house!" symbol a seven-pointed star, a septacle or faery star, which is the human body with wings.

No. I made a hexagram. Six points: A head, two wings, two arms, and one leg.

It has been hanging in my front yard since before I hurt my left hip, since before the long journey to reconnect my creative left side to my body. That is literally what I’ve been doing. And yes, I know the meaning of the word "literally," whatever the now corrupted OED says. This word means actually, physically, observably even. Not extremely. Don't get me started.

As I was saying… Over the past year I have been literally reconnect the left side of my body, pulling the head of my left femur more firmly into the hip joint and reawakening and strengthening and tightening the core muscular screws that hold my left hip securely in place...which has been a pretty amazing physical practice, actually.

And all this time, I've had the magical symbol for a human in flight while missing one leg as the guardian to my home.

I can’t believe I’ve never noticed this before. That shit is coming down today.

I'm not saying it's causal, of course… though I'm not saying it's not, either. I'm saying symbols matter, that there are more connections between the garden and the soul or the eye and the mind or the spirit and the body than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.

(Not you you, of course. I'm sure your philosophy is both expansive and profound. But that Horatio…)

Anyway that shit is coming down. Today! A new one with seven points shall be built. This will be my Imbolc ritual! (Imbolc is coming up on February 2nd, which marks the halfway point between winter solstice and spring equinox. This is when, mythologically, Persephone lights her candle and begins her ascent from the underworld. Somewhat demoted in these modern times to Groundhog Day…)

Today, I will untie that ribbon. I will take down that hexagram. Tomorrow I will write about what a hex is, which turns out to be connected to hags, which is the theme of this year's Winter Witch Camp. In two days, I will burn the hexagram in ritual fire, which simply means that I will have intention and abide in magic as I kneel before my hearth.  I am happier than I have been in so long, and healthier and stronger and more filled with blessings and protection than I ever dared to expect. And as the candle of spring lightens the world, as the mock orange or the oceanspray or the lilacs or the fill-in-surprise-plant-here (my garden is always surprising me) as they reach and grow, then will I gather the new growth and create the circle and the points and tie them in a clockwise manner, and fashion a new ward of balance and purpose and flight and connection that never ends.

Blessed be! (Blessed bees!)

I choose writing

I am sitting in the café in the back of the best bookstore in Seattle and this feels like choosing writing. I went for a two-hour walk this morning and this feels like choosing writing. On my way into the café, I stopped at the writers’ section and picked up Mary Karr’s book on writing memoir and this feels like choosing writing. I am going to be a consultant again, which will give me more time and keep me close to my path and this feels like writing is my choice.

(whatifwhatifwhatif)

Today on my walk I could feel those creeping in. The whatif’s. I walked until I found the giant evergreen, the one deep in the bank of Schmitz Preserve Park. I thought the tree was a redwood, which made me happy because of Cali camp and also because I googled redwood trees, which I did because last weekend I was visiting my friend Ravyn Stanfield for tea and she is reading a book called “Steal Like an Artist,” which says google everything. In the last few days I have googled: female ejaculation (do we have a word that is our own?), the Mercator vs. Gall-Peters projections (colonial and usual map vs accurate, check it out), Polar Plunge Seattle 2016, David Bowie (about ten songs) Tango classes and Sequoiodeae—the redwood tree.

The redwood tree shares the same chromosomal pattern with amphibians. Huzzah! (I need a frog theme song. And don’t say the Axolotl song, which is awesome, and contains the words "Metamorphic goo," but is nevertheless too filled with regret. Taking suggestions.)

Anyway. Redwoods and amphibians and ferns are polyploidal. Say it out loud. It feels like kissing. Polyploidal means more than two sets of chromosomes. I haven’t grocked how having three or more per chromosome is an evolutionary strategy and why this wild magic thread weaves through the warp of coastal forests, but I’m going to find out. And/or ask my scientist friends.

But the big tree isn’t a redwood. It’s a western red cedar. Which I also love! But I’ve been imagining redwood energy and also telling people that my new boyfriend is a redwood…

But the redwood foliage that fooled me in the half dark the last times I’ve visited, well.. it’s coming from the smaller tree that is reaching sideways for it’s own light. It’s reaching right over the trail; there is a patch, bare of bark, that shines like a ruby.

So, I opened my heart to that. Then, I came home and declined to serve on the financial review committee for the PTSA board because even though I care and I want to contribute, I choose writing.

Surrender and Go

Yesterday I was having a cup of tea with a friend who said “The light is coming back, but this is the remainder of the dark time.” She said this like the darkness was something to be treasured.

Sometimes, in Seattle, in January, it is hard to treasure the darkness. Everything outside feels so still. I can want spring. I can want change. Let’s go! But down by the creek, it doesn’t feel like much is changing. The frost at the bottom of the meadow melts or doesn’t melt. The moss grows a little greener or less. All is dark branches and pearly sky and brittle, thorny stems and mud.

And in my life there also is a stillness. A waiting. I keep trying to reach out of it, though. The friend who said that about the darkness is also my job search buddy.  We meet a couple mornings a week at the coffee shop. We check in, work side by side, remind each other to keep moving, even in the midst of uncertainty....

Keep moving, but surrender to uncertainty…

Surrender, but keep moving.

It’s fucking confusing.

I know this is how things work though. For fuck’s sake, this was the whole point of last year’s myth, and I got it, okay?

But I think maybe the keep moving part doesn’t look like my French press full of very, very strong coffee would have me believe first thing in the morning. Man, when that caffeine is punching through my system, keep moving feels like “Send out twenty resumes today!! Master LinkedIn! Go! Go! Go!”

But I don’t think this is what keep moving looks like this time of year. I think now is when I get to root deeply into what I believe and move from that.

I’ve started reading Evangeline Walton’s v of The Legend of Rhiannon, the Welsh myth that is this year’s roadmap for change. Hers is called “The Mabinogian Tetralogy.”

It begins with this sentence:

“That day Pwyll, Prince of Dyved, who though he was going out to hunt, was in reality going out to be hunted, and by no beast or man of earth.”

I feel that now. That I am not entirely in charge of the call, or the pace. And I am thankful that my man Pwyll is a good hero, in the sense that he doesn’t phone it in. I’m only on chapter four but already, I really like this guy. He has honor. He is willing to surrender himself to the call. And he summons the courage to face darkness that is unbearable in it’s depth. This is going to serve him later when he is the lucky guy who gets with the golden-light, faery-queen, goddess-of-the-land Rhiannon. But from the first, he needs that courage. Because, it turns out, the one who has summoned him to the aforementioned hunt is the Lord of Death: Arawn. Pwyll faces Arawn’s dark eyes and…

“Through their shining blackness cold seemed to stream through his blood and bones. Knowledge streamed with it, knowledge that he could neither understand nor keep. His brain reeled away from that awful wisdom, that poured into it as into a cup, and overturned it, and was spilled again.”

Makes job searching look easy, right?

Myth in the Midst of the Crazies

It is Christmas Eve today. I was in a shop yesterday and the staff were all exhausted. I was standing by the cash register and saw the mirror of my drooping shoulders in their own. I said "Merry Christmas!" in parting and got back a wooden "Merry Christmas." back. "Happy Solstice!" I added, as an experiment.

And each of the three brightened. Looked at me and said it back with life in their eyes.

This morning, my friend Jamie stopped by. "Fucking holidays," she said.  And then – and this is one of the things I love about her – added  "I've been thinking about the true meaning of Christmas," she said. "It means 'Peace on Earth!' I'm not saying 'Merry Christmas' anymore. I'm saying 'Peace on Earth!'"

Yes. How do we surprise ourselves out of the grayness and into the sacred when the to-do list is so long?

Myth helps.

My copy of “The Mabinogian Tetralogy” by Evangeline Walton arrived. Actually it got here about a month ago but the holidays (and travel,and dating) have made me frantic and crazy and I have not cracked it.

Until today. And the first page of the intro says that this book tells the stories in their original form, 

“…set in a time when belief in the gods of air and earth of fire and water, were vast, inexplicable realities in a world pregnant with magic, a world or marvels an wonders, teeming with starge creatures who might well be denizens of starge other landscapes and who almost certainly would have monstrous arcane powers. One of the great gift of magic is mystery.”

Sigh.

That there is like being made love to by a page.

And also, isn’t that so much of what we seek to call, in our witches work of re-enchanting the world? Isn't that what the crack of light in the deep winter is for? 

Merry Christmas, beloveds! Happy Solstice! And Peace on Earth!!

To RRAAaarrr!!! or not to RRAAaarr!!! That is the question.

Last weekend, I spent two days studying sacred leadership in Portland. It’s a year-long program with Ravyn Stanfield and Suzanne Sterling (and this weekend, guest star Dawn Isadora), plus something close to 17 badasses from Texas to Seattle who are up for the work. This time, the theme of the weekend was embodiment, and we did all this cool stuff: how to find and listen to my real yes and no by locating them in my body. Also, how to manage the panic hormones that lurk in a fight or flight state. We learned so many techniques! Breathwork and doodling and shaking all over, all of which reset the nervous system so that, once again, thinking is possible. We did little role plays, acting out a trigger and trying the techniques. Breathwork is the most undercover, by the way. Shaking all over works really well, but is sort of conspicuous. However, it was excellent at changing the subject, in my role play at least. Suddenly we weren’t talking about the thing that triggered me, we were talking about why I am hurling my arms and legs around like I have a full-body case of snakes in my underwear.

That sounds kind of sexy actually.

I’m still dating, by the way… But back to embodiment. Wait… That is about embodiment…

Focus, Andrews.

Okay. I spent the weekend learning about how to manage my nervous system stress response.

And then I came home and tried to get my seven-year-old to eat breakfast and get dressed in time for school.

And forgot everything.

Man. There is nothing like being full-dial screamed at before my first cup of coffee –“I WON’T EAT BREAKFAST!! I WON’T EVER EVER EVER EAT BREAKFAST!!! – to destroy my frontal cortex and make me want to reconsider my position on corporal punishment, or at least (and this is my reptilian brain stem talking) let the little fucker starve.

We have been doing this every morning since he stopped liking the old breakfast options, which makes me think it’s my fault. Which makes me start to pant like a hot dog and makes my ears buzz and my vision narrow.

All surefire signs of being triggered and flooded with the “No good decision will come from this” hormones.

A good breathing exercise here would be to inhale to a count of 4, hold for 2, exhale to a count of 6, hold for 2. Repeat. And repeat.

It would be so much better to do that than to scream at my son “STOP SCREAMING AT ME!!”

This is everywhere of course. My friend Luckey says that I see everything in terms of power, and since she is a Scorpio, she must be right. (Right, my Scorpio pals?) But in this case, it’s just true. This is the ultimate power struggle: who gets to set the tone? Will violence and intimidation and reptile mind be in charge of our family, our staff meeting, our culture? Or will we manage the discourse so that everyone feels safe and can actually think?

And, having managed the tone, who gets to define the question? For example, not “Is there going to be breakfast?” But “What will our healthy, not-cooked-by-me, preparable-before-the-caffeine-has-fully-entered-my-system-breakfast be?”

Hmm. Okay. Sometimes exploring the question reveals that we are not actually setting ourselves up for success…By which I mean that I could be doing the breathwork equivalent of a Bach Symphony and still couldn’t answer that question, much less insist on civil discourse at the same time.

Sigh.

I look to Rhiannon, since her story is my guiding star these days. Anything? Bueller?

Crickets.

I inhale to a count of 4, hold for 2, exhale 6, hold 2. 6, 2, 4, 2.

In the end, I do not let the little fucker starve and I don’t exactly scream, but I do use the “strict voice” as I tell him to be kinder to me and that screaming hurts me.

We are not late for school, but I am totally flooded. This is not how I want to start my day.