It Begins with a Call - Part 1

I have been working on a piece of writing for some time now.  It is a work in progress, and I really have no idea where it is going.  But I'm taking a deep breath, taking the risk, and starting to share it.

This story begins with breaking a lineage.  This story begins with a fire.  This story begins in childhood.  This story begins with a dream.  This story begins with a longing.  This story begins in elder years.  This story begins with a call.  This story begins with an image.  This story begins with fear.  This story began centuries ago.  This story begins with a story.  All of these beginnings are true.  Or maybe none of them is true.  What is true is that this story does not have an ending, no happily ever after.  It may or may not ever have an ending, except for the inevitable death of the writer of the story.  This story is what I have.  Or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that this story is actually many stories within stories.

           

Let’s say that it begins with a call.  Things do begin with a call.  Sometimes you hear it, and sometimes you even follow it.  If you don’t, something dies inside, and a particular way forward shuts itself off to you.  The call is always surprising, fresh, original.  Where does it come from? Spirit, intuition, the thread you’re given to follow, your dreams, your parents’ dreams, out of left field?  Sometimes it emerges out of memory, out of what has transpired in this life, or in one’s parents’ lives or their parents’ lives.  It may lead away from these, or deeper into them. 

           

For instance, in my life, I continued and furthered the breaking away from thousands of years of lineage that my parents initiated.  I am close to one hundred percent Jewish, all the way back.  My parents, however, joined no temple and never attended one other than for the requisite Bar Mitzvahs and weddings.  I always believed they simply chose to reject organized religion.  Someone must have told me that; it was the story that I believed.  My older sister recently informed me that it was all her fault.  Our parents had tried to enroll her in Sunday school, but the synagogue gatekeepers refused to place her in the higher-level class that my parents requested and felt she warranted.  So, they left in a huff and never came back, and neither my sister nor I got formal religious education.  I’d never heard that story before. 

We did celebrate Hanukkah and Passover, and my father spent Yom Kippurs sitting alone in the back yard (or later on the patio of our house in Miami), praying or contemplating, or whatever it was he did out there.  When I came of age, I left even these observances behind.  The traditions had a fond, familial feeling, but not enough significance for me to carry them forward.  I’ll always be Jewish in my bones, but I no longer carry the lineage, and my sons even less.  I feel a certain wistful regret about this, but, again, not enough to draw me back into the fold.

           

And yet, despite my disconnection from religion, from early on, there was something ineffable and intangible that hovered around the edges of my consciousness.  There was an inkling of another reality, a murmur of a call.  I didn’t understand that.  I didn’t know what it was that I felt.  At night, alone in the darkness of my bedroom, before my older sister was sent up to join me, I sometimes had an experience.  The dark took on a quality of brightness.  There was no light, but there was an indescribable brightness to the dark, followed by a vision.  It was always the same vision: a garden swing, double-sided, in an arbor.  The light was golden and ethereal.  A child in pale blue corduroy overalls sat on the swing, and perhaps others. Maybe the child was me. I always felt a sense of peace at seeing this scene, maybe even euphoria.  The way I described it to myself was, “I feel clean.”  I never told anyone about this. I’m not sure why; perhaps I knew they wouldn’t understand, and I didn’t want to minimize its power.  It didn’t happen frequently, and I couldn’t will it to happen.

In waking life, at age four, my ballet teacher planted the seed of a story in my awareness, and, like a magical vine, it grew and twined itself around my being.  As the years passed, it beckoned and called and sang and tugged.  Its name was Persephone.

Camus said, "A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."   Persephone was mine.

My Persephone SoulCollage® card

The Gesture: Part 2

            Here is another revelation.  I believe that I turn from Spirit, ignore it, forget it, don’t trust in its existence.  I believe that I am fundamentally alone in the universe – no help, no hope. 

            These beliefs are lies.

            My writing itself exposes the lies; it is infused with Spirit.  Every morning I light candles and sage and make the call.  Even when I think I am writing garbage, it is all done in Spirit.

            The gesture becomes the mudra of my elder years, acknowledging shame and love, pain and compassion. 

            This is how I know:

            She speaks to me, and I listen.  I have learned over time to do this, and it has taken both the strength of Her reaching out to me and also a certain surprising willingness on my part to entertain the possibility that the communication is real.

            In Malta, in the mother temple of Ggigantija, my back leaning into Her ancient stone body and feeling a hand on my head, I heard Her say, “You love Persephone because she is one of my forms.”

            In the Arizona desert, I woke up in the middle of the night hearing the words, “Go out and pay homage to the night.”  I dragged myself out of bed and walked outside, looked up, and saw a shooting star that swam across the sea of the dark sky more slowly than I had ever seen before or have seen since.

            At Eleusis, I had a vision of Demeter and Persephone, and I trembled seeing offerings left for them by other devotees.

            A few months ago I dreamed an aardvark crossed my path. In waking reality, I had recently written a piece called Walking through Walls.  The morning after the dream, I googled “Aardvark” (after searching for pictures of squat animals with snouts, not even recognizing what the animal I had dreamed about was).  I read how magicians in Africa use aardvark parts to walk through walls.

            These are just a few episodes of spirit presence in my life.  There are others.  I have sat with Persephone in my meditation, and She has told me She would walk with me through life and into death.

            Persephone’s path to the underworld is a downward spiral into the center of my heart.  She appeared just this morning as I uncovered the shame I had buried as a child, perhaps my first journey into her realm.  Here is the revelation – the underworld is at the core of the heart.  Only kindness and love can lead me out.  It was, after all, my mother’s misguided but well-intentioned love that led me in.

            But I do have another mother, a dark mother of heart-breaking wisdom and compassion.  If I ever know trust, if I ever take refuge, It is in Her hands that I place my soul.

It was a solitary road.

She’d seen no one

since leaving the women

at the crossroads.

All she knew was

the sound of gravel

crunching underfoot,

the wind in the Monterey pines

and the sound of the sea.

“Pacific is the wrong name,

for something so immense,

so powerful, so relentless,”

she mused.

“Maybe they named it that

as a prayer that it would prove true,

as a wish for their safety.”

She laughed aloud,

and the wheeling gulls overhead

cried out too, as if in response.

Memory was like

the ocean’s waves,

rising and falling,

touching shore and

running back

to the dark depths.

She realized

that she had now

lost her fear

of its failure,

had even relinquished

the worry about

where she was going and

when she would get there.

The wild and bitter wind

swept her mind clean

and left only

the pounding of her heart

and the rhythm of the waves.

The chopping barks of seals

called to her.

She could see distant splashes

where their sleek bodies

dove into the heaving sea,

disappearing below, below,

down into the dark, cold

depths of their home.

            Early in childhood, prior to assuming shame, I found the world to be wrapped in magic.  Things sparkled and glowed with energy, and words created images and stories.  They revealed what was true, what was real, what was sacred.  Words were a puzzle one could put together and take apart, forming and reforming, a magic that was endlessly fascinating. 

            If I root out and clear away the shame and self-doubt, I may find the old and eternal magic below it all.

            I want words to flow, falling as if over cliffs, in waterfalls of syllables that might be beautiful or clunky, or shining, or bouncing off rocks and open to the sky, the wind, the trees, the clouds, the stars.  I want to find words that will be ladders to the universe without and to the dark chambers within.  I want my magic back.  I want to be the purveyor of words and the conveyor of Spirit. Here is my (probably unsurprising but necessary) confession:  I am a mystic.  I claim it.

            My hand is on my heart.

            

The Gesture: Part 1

 

            The gesture is everything, says everything.  The hand on the heart is not a sign of protection or hiding; at least not this time.  It is an expression of grief, and the grief arises out of shame.

            My mother, coming of age during the Depression and birthing me soon after the Holocaust, wanted only to see me survive and thrive.  She saw me as willful, fiery, carrying the tempestuous temper of my father, which in her eyes would not serve me in this world.  It was not only fine but expected that I would be smart, but my task was to avoid revealing too much intelligence or too much spirit.  In that way, I would be acceptable and find a husband.  Being too much of anything – brilliant, impassioned, strong, ambitious – would be disastrous for a woman.

            My mother’s way of instructing and socializing me was shaming.  If that did not succeed, then outright sarcastic ridicule was the rod used to avoid spoiling the child.

            My humiliated and diminished heart held onto the shame, shoving it down into its deepest, remotest chambers.  There it quietly pulsed in rhythm with my heart, hidden yet present, waiting, waiting. 

            Four of us sat at a booth in a crowded coffee shop having Sunday morning breakfast: three abundant plates of omelets, crispy hash browns and biscuits, and one pathetic bowl of oatmeal.  Mine.  I was trying to heal a bout of esophageal pressure/pain that had cropped up after a series of colds and the fatigue that followed our annual Day of the Dead grief ritual.  My friend asked about how the ritual had gone, and I spoke about my regret over a small misstep I had made during the ritual. I was pleased that I had had enough maturity and awareness to admit my clumsiness and to make amends.  But it had truly been a tiny failure in large field of goodness.  It is telling that this is the story I chose to relate about the day.

            When I finished speaking, he asked if I realized that I had placed my hand over my heart as I spoke - precisely where I was experiencing my physical distress.  No. I was totally unaware of the gesture. 

            I had previously thought that the discomfort in my chest was a result both of depletion and also of taking a psychic hit that I saw as an energetic sword thrust into my heart by the one whose feelings I had disregarded.  There may be truth in that; a leader can easily become a target.  But maybe it was directing me towards my wound.  What if it were a sign like an arrow saying, “Hey, look over here!”  What if my body had responded to my shame, self-judgment and feeling of failure by tightening up my chest?

Surveying the road. 

Or roads, I should say, 

observing what is coming this way -

A limping figure, hard to see 

at this distance.

Ah, her hand is over her heart,

this girl or old woman approaching.

“What does your gesture signify?”

we ask, Hecate and I.

“This is the place, the only place,”

she responds, shaking her head.

“Good,” we say.  “That’s good.

This way or that way?”

She peers down one road, then the other.

“Does it matter?” she asks.

“Oh, yes.”

“Then I’ll go this way.”

And without hesitation, she proceeds

and quickly disappears from view.

I look at Hecate.

“Was that the right way?” I ask her.

She shrugs.

“Maybe a bit longer, but surer,

and with a view of the sea.”

I let out a sigh,

breath I did not even know

I was holding,

and notice my own hand

resting on my heart.

            How much is enough?  This is the struggle.  It is difficult to do what I am called to do.  It is even more of a challenge to notice and give myself credit for what I do accomplish.  How will the struggle change when the shame underneath everything is exposed?

            Here is what is emerging: the desire and effort to be kind.  Generally, being kind to others is not difficult.  Being kind to myself?  Another story.  The gesture of hand on heart becomes the token, the sign, the image for the new work.  It does not differentiate between working for the children and grandchildren and working to give the gift one has to give.  Seeing how all the work is intertwined is eye-opening.