Light

In the wee hours of this morning there was a total lunar eclipse, the moon smudged by the earth's shadow to a faint charcoal blot in the sky. This afternoon the winter solstice occurred, heralding the longest night of the year. The day was a double whammy of darkness. Though the eclipse was a lovely distraction from a sunset at 4-something p.m., many of us quickly returned to waiting, with varying degrees of patience and strength of mood swings, for precious daylight to show up earlier and linger longer once again.

We humans are diurnal creatures, evolved to go about our business in the daylight. Our circadian rhythms respond to an increase in the duration and intensity of natural light by making us more energetic and happier. Darkness makes us inclined to eat more (back AWAY from the bathroom scale and no one will get hurt!), sleep more, be less active, and generally get a bit unbalanced, sometimes just plain weird. The return of daylight hours is an important milestone for every human in the circular pattern of every year. And that's why virtually every culture and tradition has some kind of celebration marking the return of the light. Often those celebrations of a primal relationship with our world are embellished with an overlay of religious myth -  for instance, Jesus, in the Christian tradition, is called the "Light of the World" and is said to have been born in the dark of the year, even though there is no historical evidence whatsoever that his birth took place in December - coincidentally close to the solstice, too. Even Groundhog Day on February 2nd is a secular holiday celebrating the coming sun and the imminent end of winter. The fun superstition of Groundhog Day was overlaid on the Catholic holy day of Candlemas, which in its turn was overlaid on an ancient celebration of the goddess figure Brigid, bringer of fire, knowledge, medicine and writing to the Celtic people (note that all those gifts are forms of light or "enlightenment").

Whatever your belief system, take the time to acknowledge that we are creatures of light, our shadow side notwithstanding, and revel in the few minutes of additional daylight we begin receiving each day after today. Greet the day as you would greet a good friend - notice its new clothes and tell it how nice it looks. It will hang around you for the pure pleasure of the relationship between light and that which it illuminates...and you will be the better for it.

Happy Return of the Light!

Happy Holidays: Rituals of an Overcompensator

A Facebook friend recently posted a comment that she didn't understand people who get stressed out about holiday rituals like sending cards, putting up decorations, baking cookies and so forth. Her assessment was that, since nobody is making you do these things, why do them if you don't enjoy them? Simple, yes?

Lucky you, if you are as clearly well-adjusted as she and do not comprehend the workings of the mind of an obsessive neurotic. But if you have nothing else to do for the next few minutes, sit at my feet, Grasshopper, and I will attempt to enlighten you. Perhaps this mini-education will allow you to generate some compassion for us poor, screwed-up perfectionists who get twisted into knots during the holidays and never seem to figure out how to untie ourselves.

This holiday season, I'm trying to talk myself out of sending the usual holiday letter and cards, and it's no mean feat. It's wrenching: it actually HURTS to think of skipping this ritual. It almost hurts more than trying to figure out how I could possibly carve out time to do it. Part of the problem is that I do love doing all the things which, to me, symbolize the essence of the holidays, and set this time apart from all the rest of the year. Writing a pensive holiday letter, sending cards, baking, putting up sparkling lights or decorations - all that feels meaningful, like a gift to myself and an expression of love to others. Unfortunately, constraints on time and energy often turn my feelings about beloved holiday traditions into something more like a love-hate relationship. And then there's the endless downward spiral of feeling bad about feeling bad, at the time of year when you're supposed to be filled with happiness and good cheer. Oh, I can take the dance of holiday dysfunction as far as your imagination reaches, and farther!

Plus I'm overcompensating for all the things my family didn't do at Christmas when I was growing up. We never had a "regular" Christmas tree; we decorated a huge philodendron that my paternal grandfather had planted and which presided over an entire corner of our living room. Kinda cool for an adult, maybe, but in a child's eyes it wasn't the way Christmas was "supposed" to be. Now we have a regular, real, u-cut Christmas tree every year. When I was a kid, we didn't always get cards out, and after my early childhood, my mother never seemed to get around to baking. So I have a real sense of urgency about doing those things. It seems therapeutic - when it's not killing me because I don't have the energy for all this stuff AND the Normal Obligations of Everyday Life.

This season, in an attempt to make sure I reach a reasonably healthy old age, I've adopted a new "yoga," a practice of letting go of just a couple of problematic to-do list items at a time. I may still struggle to find opportunities to bake and still get stressed about putting up all my Christmas tchotchkes, but I'm resolutely passing up the boxes of Christmas cards, taking a deep breath as we receive cards from friends and family, and will perhaps capitulate to sending an e-card at the last minute. I'm skipping most of the shopping, which I truly DO hate, and either contributing to charities on behalf of my loved ones, or scheduling some fun thing to do with friends and family who are local, rather than giving them unneeded stuff.

My Holiday Yoga practice includes gently returning to my basic worldview: that humans are uniquely suited to making meaning, and that that is our number one job in the world. If we are well-suited to making meaning, then we are equally well-suited to re-making meaning as necessary. If I understand the reasons why certain rituals feel significant, I can re-tool those rituals or adopt new ones that will still satisfy the drive to create meaning out of apparent randomness. AND I can live a longer, more contented life.

Finally, in the interests of gaining perspective on the priorities of others which we may not understand, let me point out a common, non-holiday-related obsession, mostly but not exclusively engaged in by women. Personally, I never have trouble suppressing a desire to run the vacuum cleaner, but I know people who will get up and vacuum the house at six in the morning. Repeatedly. Often. Happily. Since the task of vacuuming involves sweat and noise, and excludes sparkly decorations, twinkly lights or cookies, THAT particular fixation is totally beyond my comprehension. It all depends on your sense of what matters, doesn't it?

I wish you a holiday season filled with warmth, peace, joy, love and sparkles. 

"Bone Country" and rituals of place

As we celebrate a season of thanksgiving and abundance, many of us engage in rituals that center on relationship with family, friends and, of course, food. This season of celebration, plus a recent trip to my native state of California, got me thinking about another kind of relationship to be thankful for: relationship with place. Places that are important to us can be anchors to our past, as old friends often are, or act as stepping stones to our unknown future. When a place is in one's heart and one's DNA, we recognize each other in some inexplicable way.

I was born in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the East Bay hills of Richmond. The picture window in the living room of our house looked out west across the Bay to the blue-shadowed shoulders of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County. On fog-free days I could often see the Golden Gate, to the south of Mount Tam. The well-kept houses in my neighborhood were mostly stucco, modest but comfortable faux Mediterranean-style bungalows - though our home was constructed of redwood, daringly contemporary for its time. Farther up the hill, surrounding the elementary school I attended, eucalyptus trees stood sentinel and wafted their pungent fragrance across the schoolyard and down the steep streets.

 

My family moved 80 miles away when I was 6 1/2 years old, but my attachment to and memories of that early childhood environment have never lost their power over me. Something subtle and mystical, something that seems to penetrate to a cellular level, keeps me tied to those hills which have been kneaded like bread dough by earthquakes, to the always-choppy waters of the Bay, and to the aromatic eucalyptus trees that aren't even indigenous to the area but seem such a fixture of the landscape. Though I deeply love the place I live in now and don't plan to leave it until I leave this life, whenever I return to the Bay Area I feel welcomed home, as if I belong in some fundamental way to the soil, the water and the sky.

So, when I do return, I pay respects: I go to various locations around the East Bay which have some special hold over me, and perform rituals - sometimes without realizing I am doing so - that acknowledge and cement my relationship with the places that Clarissa Pinkola Estes would call my "bone country."  I go to Alameda Beach, which was my destination and my companion on daily walks when I lived in a student house during my master's program at the University of Creation Spirituality. I greet this place, sacred to me, by returning shells and rocks I have picked up on prior visits. This ritual reminds me that all healthy relationships, this one included, are reciprocal, and require giving as well as taking. 

I go to Tilden Park in the Berkeley hills, to ride again the splendid Herschell-Spillman merry-go-round that was the first carousel I rode, as a toddler - or simply to look upon it if it is not open for rides. The setting is incomparable and the merry-go-round is an exquisite example of the love that goes into true craftsmanship and which lasts beyond the lifetime of the craftsperson. Every time I visit I feel a quiver of the same excitement that accompanied each childhood trip to the carousel. These ritual visits restore my innocence in a jaded world, spark joy in me, and remind me of the importance of cultivating and welcoming a spirit of wonder and awe.

Indigenous peoples everywhere know about this kind of relationship to the land which brought them forth: that they belong to it, rather than the land belonging to them; that it sustains them psychologically (or spiritually) as well as physically. They know that the earth they were born on or upon which significant events in their lives took place is a part of who they are, a part of their story. And they do not fail to offer their bone country the respect and love it is due.

What places on this planet have a hold on your heart and your cells? How do you keep yourself whole, integral, by acknowledging that connection with your bone country? If you have never celebrated your connection to place, how might it make a difference in your mind, body and/or spirit if you started now? Could that be part of a season of thanksgiving?

Cosmogenesis, Chapter 1

Here's a new creation story - an attempt to apply the little I know about quantum physics to the age-old human quest for a meaningful myth about where we came from and what our place is in the universe. It has always seemed to me that all that is, is holy - by virtue of its "isness." What does "holy" mean? You look at the light dancing on the water, and tell me.

     Before the Beginning,  Mother God dwelt in a vast sea of potential with Her angels; and they were one in undifferentiated love. And the angels were the wave functions, sweeping tides in a Sea of quantum foam, and in their oneness with the Mother was the great goodness of infinite love and the great solitude of unrealized possibility.

    And the Mother saw that She could not know Herself or Her angels further without allowing for a new kind of goodness, the goodness of particularity.  And since it was in Her nature to desire self-knowledge, She prepared her womb for a great birthing: love made manifest. And in the pains of Her labor She groaned the Word that echoed through the deeps of the quantum Sea and birthed the universe in fire. And the Word was CHOICE.

    And the wave-form angels heard the Word and trembled in awe, for they knew the echo of that Word resounded as a call to them alone.  The Mother gave them choice: to remain wave functions, one with Her being, or to particularize and receive the gift of acting in the universe She had birthed.  And the angels who chose to remain as waves in the quantum Sea would float in the unity of the Mother’s love but be powerless to experience or influence the life of duality, the life of Creation.  The angels who chose to become particles would become co-creators, shaping and guiding the life that sprang forth in endless profusion. But the gift was not without cost.  The particularized angels would have to sever their oneness with Mother God, and be subject to the universal laws of life and death the Mother had set in motion.  They would know the sorrow of separation, and yet have the ability to reflect the glory of the One whence they came and to act with Her creative power.

    And so those first angels, vibrating with the great wonder of all that was, and was to be, answered the call and came forth to make their choice, to participate in the great dance of existence. And these particularized angels were the bodhisattvas and were precious beyond measure to the Mother. For they sacrificed their oneness out of care of the world of life and death, flickering into and out of existence, that the One might look upon Her creation, the love that everywhere mirrors Herself, and know its goodness.

    And so these bodhisattvas, the angels embodied, danced the great dance and became photons and hydrogen atoms and galaxies.  And they entered into relationship with one another as living systems.  And so they became even the earth upon which we stand.  And they walked, crawled, swam and flew over the earth as the living web of being: teachers and guides sent to us by the Mother through their own willing choice to live in time and die for the sake of love.

    People, do you not know that these same angels speak through the rough call of the raven outside your window in the dawn hours?  Do you not see them dancing in the light on the waves of the bay as the sun rises high?  Have you felt them in the touch of your beloved?  Will they not silently reflect the glory of the One as you gaze in the mirror tonight, performing your ablutions before retiring?  I say amen, and amen.

No service will be held

I read the obits in the paper almost every day. No, it's not my age - I've been looking them over for many years. I think it's my fascination with story: who was this person; where did they come from; what did they do; whom did they love; how long did they get to walk in this terrible, beautiful world? You don't get much of that information in the standard newspaper obituary these days, but still there's a texture of someone's life even in just their name, age and hometown. I'm drawn to those terse, factual paragraphs, again and again, trying to follow the raveled threads down to the rich fabric of a single human existence.

And it breaks my heart a little when I see, in the last paragraph, the sentence "no service will be held." I always wonder why the family and friends of the person who died chose to commemorate the end of their loved one's life on Earth by NOT commemorating it.

Maybe the deceased wanted it that way. Maybe the family is having a private gathering they don't want advertised. Maybe the grief is too great to contemplate sharing, or maybe the relationship was problematic and the grief isn't great enough, or is too mixed with other feelings. Maybe the friends and family aren't religious and they think funerals are only for those who believe in an afterlife. Maybe money is tight and the family doesn't see how they can afford a memorial gathering. Maybe a funeral reminds them of their own mortality, and that's too much for them to face. Maybe everyone's just too busy to plan anything. There are a million good reasons why people don't gather in community to remember, acknowledge and/or celebrate the life of someone they know who has died.

But there's one GREAT reason to go ahead and do it anyway.  It's not about "closure;" I intensely dislike that word and the way it's used in our culture to imply the ability - or necessity - to set aside difficult issues so we don't have to think about them again. When someone who has been significant in your life dies, there is no "closure" - that's a linear notion, out of place in a universe of concentric circles. Your relationship doesn't disappear just because the person is not physically present; you carry something of her/him with you in your brain/heart/cells/soul/genome/who-knows-what. There is, however, the tying together of two ends of a circle. There's a final sentence to a chapter before the new chapter begins. And there we are, back at the idea of story again - not closure, but continuity.

When we ceremonially celebrate the end of someone's life, we're also celebrating the fact that our lives go on. We're celebrating the contribution the person who died has made to OUR stories - individually and as a community. We're allowing tears and grief to mingle haphazardly with laughter and joy - a critical balance to maintain in a healthy, fully functional human life. We're acknowledging that, even though some among us may believe in an eternal life, no earthly state is static or permanent - and that it's OK to experience pain and confusion around that fact. We're taking an oath of citizenship in the universe, as part of a story so immense we can't begin to get our minds around it. And none of this is dependent upon any particular religion or belief system. It's just a condition of being "enfleshed" - plopped into an amazing and transient skin-enclosed form that is self-aware.

Death can make life seem bigger, more mysterious and vastly more precious, but only if we consciously and courageously use our talent for making meaning from seemingly random events. At a funeral or celebration of life - really, in any rite of passage - we create symbols and rituals that speak to something in us deeper than our thoughts and quieter than our restless intellect. We weave a story in which all of us are characters on a quest - first, to endure the unendurable, finally to unmask the good and the beautiful. And we walk home arm in arm from the grave, or the park, or the wake, with an opportunity to be better people, more integral people, than we were hours before.

Hold a service - of one, two or two hundred. Go on to the next chapter.

Daddy's girl

I'm Daddy's girl.

I'm a reader because of my dad, who read endlessly. I'm a critical thinker and a skeptic - never an easy believer - because of my dad, who was a chronic questioner. I'm a writer who's never satisfied with my writing because of my dad, who wrote for decades, never truly mastered the craft and always longed to. My father's DNA is twined tightly in my genes.

He taught English and literature most of his adult life - high school and then community college. He roped in dozens of former non-readers with "cool" classes based on works of science fiction or Tolkien's Ring Trilogy. He made awful puns and taught me the art of wordplay. He joined my friends and me in easy conversation when we came skulking through the door in the wee hours of the morning as he was grading papers at the kitchen table. We all called him "Pa" and sought the refuge of his high regard at a time when most adults didn't seem to hold us in any regard at all.

He gardened and he jogged and he made comments about not wanting to get old and infirm, but he was healthy as a horse so who cared, and then he dropped dead without warning at age 63 from a massive heart attack, two days before I was supposed to get married. I was 22.

And devastated by the swiftness of his going. We'd just mended - the night before he died - a falling-out we'd been having since he'd left my mother and moved into his own apartment. He'd always been the guy in the white hat for me, but lately he seemed to be firmly in the Bad Guy category. Though he wasn't abusive in the commonly-understood sense, his actions were destructive to the integrity of his marriage and family. The more I learned about how he'd been living life with my mother, the more harshly I judged him. Until I realized that he'd supported me without judgment through some truly awful adolescent traumas, and - at the very least - I owed that same compassion to him. So I told him that, and we cried over the phone, and I said I'd see him the next day, and by the time I saw him, he was dead.

It's been a long journey since that awful day. Over the thirty-plus years since my father's death I've continued to learn what a flawed man he was: how his drive to prove himself in every way and to be adored by everyone tore at the heart of our family. And I've had to keep forgiving him, keep releasing judgment, keep realizing that I never knew the whole story of what haunted him. But I DO know that most of us are haunted by something or other, that we're all flawed, and that we could all use a bit of compassion from just about any source.

Besides, I remember that Papa told me made-up bedtime stories when I was little; I remember that he brought me hot coffee and milk when I was a teenager, trying to get up to go to school after staying up too late the night before; I remember that he always answered my questions about correct grammar and punctuation without ever making me feel stupid for asking - and he always included in his responses examples I could understand. I remember that he took me to church when, as a young teen, I wanted to go, even though he was a staunch nonbeliever and it must have been torture for him to sit through the sermons. I remember that he discussed politics and world affairs and important questions with me as if I were perfectly able to understand "adult talk" - and, as a result, I WAS.

So, joining in the annual ritual that means more when we grasp how sweetly, sadly, grandly HUMAN our dads are, I say: Happy Father's Day, Daddy. I'm glad for who you were. You shaped who I am. And - finally, surprisingly - I'm grateful for that.

A little pagan in all of us: Earth-based ritual to (re)frame your life

Most of us who were raised in this Western, rationalist culture - even if we aren't members of an organized religion - hear the word "pagan" and have visions of Bacchanalian orgies of drink, sex, and the obligatory human sacrifice (after all, the notion of blood running across an altar is what makes the whole scenario so exotically sensational - it's not as if contemporary culture lacks for the drink and sex!)

Well, as the late astrophysicist Carl Sagan once said - MAYBE. There's no reliable written history of the rites and practices of paganism, and precious little evidence that speaks decisively about what our pre-Christian, earth-connected ancestors did or didn't do. What they almost certainly DIDN'T do is worship Satan - Satan as the familiar biblical character we know didn't show up until about 950 B.C.E., the foundations for the concept of a "satan" didn't arise until about a thousand years earlier, in the Middle East, and the earth-based spirituality I'm talking about is thousands of years older still. What the early pagans almost certainly DID do is become deeply entwined with the seasons of the earth and the cycles of the stars. They had to - these early agrarian societies couldn't have survived, much less thrived, without an intimate knowledge of the Turn of the Wheel, the march of the seasons. They had to know not only that spring followed winter, but when it was likely to happen. When the snow melts, when the soil warms, when the berries ripen, when the fish run, when the goat-kids are born - all that was critical knowledge if they wanted to make it through the next year without starving.

And so their celebrations of making it through another season were as intimately connected with the earth as they were: the seasonal rituals marked the balance points, summer and winter solstice, and the vernal and autumnal equinox. Then there were the "cross-quarter days," what modern written history calls St. Brigid's Day/Candlemas on February 1 or 2, celebrating the waning of winter and the waxing of the light; Beltane/Mayday, invoking "the force that through the green fuse that drives the flower" (thank you, Dylan Thomas), with its fertile and, yes, sexual energy (flowers are ALL about sex); Lughnasa on the first of August, the celebration of summer's bounty coming to ripeness; and, finally, Samhain at the end of October, honoring the fields that lie fallow, the year that is flickering out, the ancestors who walked the path before us, and the necessary thinness of the veil between life and death.

Christianity came along and strategically (brilliantly!) adopted and adapted these earth-based rituals to suit the new religion's story and gain converts who could relate to the old-new narrative: winter solstice became Christmas, spring equinox became Easter, Samhain became All Hallow's Eve (and, in Mexico, Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead celebration). Later, a secular, consumer-based society emerged and put many more layers of abstraction on those old religious rituals, finally settling on marketing-based "holidays" - an Easter and a Halloween all about candy, a Christmas all about gifts; Groundhog Day and Mother's Day and the first day of baseball season in spring or football season in fall. But notice how, despite modern marketing, we hold onto the use of ancient pagan symbols of nature worship: eggs and bunnies for fertility, flowers for sexuality/sensuality, trees and sheaves of grain and fire/candles and ritualized games. Maybe there's something far older than marketing that plays in our psyches, more powerful even than the slick images technology and advertising spoon-feed us.  

Because modern holidays are driven by people who want to sell things - be it candy, advertising time to sponsors, or religious dogma - we've come to regard those formerly sacred festival days as a product, manufactured for us to "have fun" - which usually boils down to getting an additional day off work, MAYBE plugging in a church service, then sitting in front of the TV and/or eating and drinking until we're half-comatose. There's nothing wrong with having a good time, but I wonder what price we're paying for moving further and further away from the real source of those celebrations and the source of our lives: the earth that bears us upon its surface and which we take for granted so completely. Our children play outside less and less; they (and we) barely know where our food comes from; few people, young or old, experience the cycle of seasons in the most concrete way, by planting something that grows, produces food, and goes dormant in the winter; we don't see animals give birth, give milk, get slaughtered for our meat, or die; we don't see PEOPLE die when it's their time. All the dance of life and death is hidden from us. We live in a sort of sanitized, comic-book world that bears little relation to the magnificent, violent, beautiful, heartbreaking, sustaining mother Earth whose rich gifts brought us forth.

Am I telling you that the antidote to this epidemic of disconnection is to blow up your TV, sell your boat, grow all your own food, wear Druid robes and dance around the Maypole on 5/1?  Nope - though some of those ideas are good and the Maypole dance is really a hoot to do - but no. Am I asking you to give up your Christianity, or Judaism, or Islam, or anything else? Nope - if you believe your God made the earth, I'm pretty sure your God would be happy to see you celebrate his/her creation with reverence and awe. Just...I'm just asking this, or something like it:

- To connect with an aspect of nature we usually run from: Put on old clothes and walk in the rain without an umbrella. Don't bend your head - lift it to the rain.

- A meditation to honor the dead in your family tree: Save your candle stubs and burn them on Halloween or sometime in the following 2 days, keeping vigil until they are all burned out. You can put out photos of your ancestors if you like. They made it possible for you to be here.

- Plant something - in a pot or in the ground - that will produce food. Commit to tending it for a season. If it bears food, eat the food and THANK THE PLANT. Best of all: share the food with others to celebrate your harvest.

- Every day that you drive to work or walk to the bus stop, wait a moment before you start out and: Take a deep breath. Use your senses. Sniff the air. Look at the sky. Listen for birdsong. Feel the life rising in you.

- When the weather gets more often clear than not, go outside every night at the same time for a whole month, and watch the progress of the moon across the sky.

- Take a child outside. Often. Take no toys. Take no cell phone, Blackberry, iPhone. Make up games. Play horsies.

- Get up early enough on winter solstice to go to the top of a hill or mountain and greet the dawn. Hold up a lit candle or a prism to the rising sun. 

Everything ritual that you do to reconnect with the earth makes you a part of Earth's story, makes life feel more REAL. Will these little things save the planet? Not likely. But they might just restore some sanity, some peace, to your life and to the lives of the people around you. In the end, perhaps that's what we most need to do.