A New Poem: Sanctuary

 I recently spent a week (online) at an intensive with Deena Metzger.  It can be difficult to speak about profound experiences, especially before you've had time to think about and integrate what you received.  I'm in that phase now, but here is one thing that came out of the experience that I'd like to share.

Priestess of words, of stars, of stones

(those bones of the earth that carry its stories),

place your hands and lean

your forehead against a great rock.

Let the wind blow through you;

be empty and clear.

Soak up enough of

the stone’s slow rhythm

so that you hear the stories

of the land, this land,

where your exile has ended,

where you don’t forget love and gratitude,

where you meet the sacred.

 

Then, place fire

in a circle of stones

at the heart of the temple,

which is the heart of your heart.

Tend the fire; do not let it go out,

or the temple will crumble,

and with no heart,

you will as well.

 

No one said the work

would be easy.

 

But once you are slow

and hollow and empty,

they will come to the fire.

They will come with

their broken hearts,

and broken bodies,

and broken dreams.

They will listen to the words

and warm themselves.

And you will give them

sanctuary.

Navigating Mystery, Part I

After attending Deena Metzger's Writers' Intensive a few months ago, I had the thought that I'd like to blog some of the writing from the week, but I needed to sit with it for a while.  I wasn't sure whether I would want to write more or at least revise what I'd written.  Looking at it from this bit of distance, I have decided that it's complete as it is.  Not liking long blog posts, I plan to put it out in segments.  So, here's the first :

“What if we reframed ‘living with uncertainty’ to ‘navigating mystery’?”  

-- Martin Shaw   

 

The first time I went to Greece, the car rental agent and the desk clerk at the hotel in Athens both advised us not to go to Elefsis.  “It’s just a dirty, industrial city,” they warned.  Of course, we went.  The Persephone story had been with me my entire life, ever since I danced the part of the north wind blowing over the meadow where Hades pulled Persephone into the underworld.  I was five years old.  The story wove in and out of my life after that. Eleusis, the old name for Elefsis, was where the mysteries celebrating Demeter and Persephone were held for over 2,000 years.  How could I not go?

 

The historical site did not disappoint.  When I arrived at the Plutonion, the cave said to be the place where the goddess descends and emerges from the underworld, I found a bouquet of flowers someone had left on the ledge at the opening.  I was not alone in loving and honoring this ancient being and Her story!  Tears filled my eyes.

 

The second time I visited Eleusis, my mother was dying.  The trip had been arranged long before. I hesitated to leave the states, but my mother encouraged me to go.  Red poppies covered the Spring hillside, and we were practically the only visitors to the ruins on that weekday morning.  This time, I sat by the maiden’s well, where Demeter wept for her lost daughter, and I wept for my dying mother. 

 

Sitting on the rim of a well, a liminal place, at a liminal time, considering the deep relationship between mother and daughter.  I never fully understood why the Persephone story took me the way that it did, but certainly the mother-daughter bond was part of it.  I was a Spring child, too. 

  
The Plutonion, Eleusis

A New Poem: The World of Our Making

A few weeks ago I attended Deena Metzger's Writers' Intensive.  Once again, a profound week with a wonderful group of writers.  The intensive does not focus on writing poetry, but rather on stories.  Still, one poem came in response to the poem I received at the beginning of intensive, something to contemplate and consider.  I may blog some of the personal story I wrote about later, but in any case, here is the poem.

This summer,

water use in our dry

northern California

will be restricted.

My little pomegranate tree,

only two years old,

just burst out with three deep red flowers.

Last year the tiny fruit fell off, too heavy

for spindly young branches to bear.

I don’t want the baby tree to die

from lack of water, so I will

catch shower-heating water in a bucket

and save the liquid from steaming artichokes

to dribble onto the dry soil.

 

The rains do not come, cannot come.

No rain to evoke sadness

or a flow of memories, but sadness

and the ghosts of memories arrive.

What comes from the sky is dust,

what water arrives is in our eyes.

Looking up for omens and comets,

we struggle to see, to hear something,

to wait for a message, to change.

And still, I love the earth.

The earth Is not the world.

The world of drought and fire,

floods and reckless storms

is of our making.

Our tears are salty and insufficient.

The blown dust and ash clog our eyes.

Yet despite all the horror, all the brokenness,

the redwoods and pines draw up

and display their good green life.

The earth still and always reminds us

to keep on, to love anyway,

to sit down with our ancestors’ ghosts,

to keep telling the stories.

The earth has everything, bears everything –

us, the trees, the life-giving waters,

the myriad other beings.

With all that we have done to her,

can we do any less?

I recently attended (on Zoom) a week-long writers' intensive with Deena Metzger.  It was wonderful and, well, intense!  Some of the writing I did was on the theme of place, which has shown up here quite a bit of late.  Here's a piece of what came out of the writing at the workshop.

Down at Glen Echo Creek, the dappled light filters down through the trees, illuminating patches of grass and brown earth layered with tangled exposed tree roots.  Cascades of bright orange nasturtiums with their round green leaves spill in profusion down the steep but short bank.  The water runs swiftly on its way down to Lake Merritt, which opens its mouth to the estuary and finally the bay.  The water burbles and sings as it hits a curve in the bank, flowing around the rocks and roots that form a tiny peninsula.  There is a green smell, part fresh and just a bit rank in  this damp and shady slice of an otherwise drying June landscape.

Sitting on rugged tree roots jutting up just above the creek, I can imagine that I am deep in the natural world.  I can avoid looking up at the green house on the other side of the fence at the top of the opposite bank.  Of course, I know that Piedmont Grocery and all the other shops on Piedmont Avenue are only a block away, but here there is a hum of insects, a few occasional bird chirps, the caw of a solitary crow.  A host of tiny insects dance on a patch of almost still water.  Down a ways on the other bank, a tumble of gray rocks rests just above the water, bearing patches of sunlight, holding and sharing their slow stories.

What do I not notice?  There are sounds of passing cars on the street only a dozen paces away and the steady drone of vehicles on the freeway a few blocks from here.  I prefer ignoring those.  There is a sudden wafting aroma of tacos.  A foghorn sounding from way down at the bay.  The knowledge that a few short blocks from here another homeless encampment has formed beyond the iron fencing the city installed to keep them from settling under the freeway overpass.  There is an ache in my left hip from sleeping uncomfortably last night.  I'd prefer ignoring that, too.  What I don't see is frequently what I turn away from.

Before I leave, I make a small offering and thank the green world and the water I am so privileged to live in and near.  I ask the water what it needs.

"Just continue to love," it says.

It Begins With a Call (Part 31) - Mind the Gap!

I’m gathering up my courage and going to Deena Metzger's  Writers’ Intensive this year.  Although I have always been (and seen myself as) a writer, it’s the Healers’ Intensive I’ve felt called to three of the last four years.  Until now.  I don’t know why the original call or why the change, but I’m trusting my instincts.  In my experience, things start gearing up well before we get there.  Now, a little over a week before it starts, Deena sent a friend with some health issues the following:

“What might spirit want? Why did this potential condition in particular come to you in particular in this particular time in your life and history? What are you dreaming? Might the dreams be speaking to you?  Why this kick in the ass? What might you be called to? What path emerges for you to walk and if you step on it, you can tell Spirit you got the message and the potential illness is unnecessary. “

Such good questions.  I myself have cycled back into some familiar unpleasant symptoms and find this most timely for me as well.  This entire piece, It Begins with a Call, has been me addressing these questions. 

I know Deena would say that what is happening in our bodies is what is happening to the earth. 

Topanga Canyon

Two nights ago I dreamed a lot.  I do not remember any whole dreams, but I remember five very distinct images:

1.    Facing two others, I assume their posture of arms upraised, bent at the elbows, palms out.

2.    Bringing a pomegranate tree in a tub out of a dark storage place.

3.    Bringing cups of tea from a corner shop to my daughter-in-law and her mother.

4.    Arriving on a residential street at night with others and exclaiming, “Oh, we’re mapping the inner landscape!”

5.    Cards with symbols or images on them being placed down in a square form.

These feel significant, and I think they are connected to the intensive, but I’m not clear how.  Fragments.  But gem-like and potent.  What does spirit want? 

I see: the posture of a priestess; Persephone and bringing the pivotal image of the story out into the light; service; laying out the divinatory images.  But what does it mean to map the inner landscape?  How do you do that?

There are gaps in my understanding of what to do, what is needed.  There is this:

Mind the Gap II

Life is full of gaps and holes,

Like a worn-out rag.

There are gaps in my thinking,

gaps in the floor in a recent dream,

gaps in this old house

where the rats squeeze through,

gaps in my understanding.

There are gaps between what I say

And what you hear,

Gaps in my calendar,

Gaps our hands and feelings

Cannot seem to bridge.

There are gaps in the heart,

holes made by departed loved ones.

There are gaps in atoms,

Spaces we cannot see but know are there.

Gaps are not always bad.

They may reveal doorways, openings

To the way out.

Gaps can be minded,

Carefully considered,

Filled, expanded, crossed

Or simply acknowledged

It Begins With a Call (Part 25): Old Redwood Mother

Last fall, I had the good fortune to go to a workshop in Pt. Reyes with Sharon Blackie.  I love her books, especially If Women Rose Rooted.  She speaks to our need to reconnect with the land, and also of the mythic imagination and story as a way to bridge to it.  Her teachings are  very much in agreement with Deena Metzger's, but she comes at her beliefs and approach from a different direction.  Like Deena, she believes that stories and dreams are not all for internal reference, and that psychology (as Hillman postulated) has failed us, by making it all about us.  Blackie says that the land requires us to be in relationship to it, to the place where our feet are planted.  Blackie also works from the imaginal world, the mundus imaginalis, which lies between the sensory world and the mental realm.  She agrees with Hillman about each of us having a calling.  

But Blackie is fortunate to not only live on wild land but also in a place where the old stories of her culture are still alive, and rooted.  Most of us are not so fortunate, and especially those of us who live in cities.  I have been thinking a lot about how to connect to the earth, right here, especially since the last healers’ intensive.  I have not found stories from my ancestry that inform my life, and I don’t know much about the stories of this land, the stories of the Ohlone people who were here before we invaded.  So how can I use story to help me root and connect into this patch of earth?

One of the exercises Blackie had us do was map all the places we have lived.  I also added to my map the places where I had meaningful experiences on the land – Shasta, Delphi, Phaestos, Malta, Kilauea Iki on the Big Island.  Really, connecting to the land of the places where I have lived has not, regrettably, been an important aspect of my life.  Most of the places I’ve lived did not necessarily give me the feeling of “Ah!  I’ve found my home!”  

But one thing that stood out on my map was the significance of gardens and trees.  I have felt connected to so many trees – the oak at our house in Menlo Park, the owl trees at the seminary when I lived in an apartment nearby, the redwoods here and at other places, the pepper tree and eucalyptus in Topanga, just to mention a few. And here I l also love feeding and watching the birds here.

I am reminded of Blackie’s story about living in a place where she found no geological feature or local tale about the Cailleach, her beloved Old Woman archetype.  And so, one day, seeing a heron and hearing it screech like an old hag, she found her own Old Crane Woman, an imagined version of the hag.  That set me to thinking; maybe there’s an Old Redwood Mother here that I could adopt.  Blackie encouraged us to make stories about the places we live and to bring ancestral stories to them.  So, suddenly an insight!  In my ancient ancestral lineage, the people worshipped Asherah.  She was Mother of the gods, the tree of life, and also the Lady of the Sea.  Asherim – carved or uncarved wooden poles - were placed in groves and on hilltops in Her honor.  Sometimes trees themselves were seen as Asherim.  Her priestesses and priests were prophets and interpreted dreams.  I have not seen stories about Her, but She is one I feel connected to in ways that I do not with much of my Jewish heritage.  Maybe Old Redwood Mother is my modern day Asherah.  Maybe She will help me connect to this land.  She does not dwell right in my yard, but She is within view, rooted at the house below us on the hill, and She has sisters a little further down the street and in the Rose Garden a few blocks away.  

I need to be outside to speak with Her, to breathe with Her, but I intend to do so.

Asherahs