Navigating Mystery, Part 8 (final)

 That Persephone travels between worlds has always fascinated me.  I believe She  reframed what was once done to Her into an acceptance of Her fate and Her calling, and into a graceful way of moving through and relating to transitions.  She reframed uncertainty into mystery. When I can acknowledge and stop the self-torture of imagined fear, I have a chance of doing so also.  I live in and with this story and try to follow Her lead.

With this understanding, I can finally stand up. I head for the rose garden, a place of exuberant beauty in early June.  The waters of the fountain cascade down their stone steps, accompanied on both sides by pink roses in full bloom.  I walk past the little pond surrounded by crimson, peach, yellow, deep red, and white roses, all exuding their intoxicating fragrances.  I love the roses but do not linger; I am headed for the hillside where the oaks and redwoods live, a bit of the wild held captive but alive in the city.  I sink down at the foot of a redwood, my back against its strong trunk.  I respect the oaks, but I love the redwoods.  Here it smells of redwood duff, spicy and clean, and the ground is littered with twigs and dried needles.  It is not a soft place to sit, but no matter.  Finally, the young woman across the pond stops yelling into her cellphone.  There is a sweet breeze, and now the caws, cries and songs of various birds filter through.  I close my eyes, just to listen more deeply.

 

Morcom Rose Garden, Oakland

When I open them again, I turn to face the tree and am stunned to see what I am sitting next to and had not noticed before.  Someone has left an offering at the foot of this redwood tree – bougainvillea, lavender, thistle, poppy heads - a messy arrangement clearly here for some time.  It reminds me of that first trip to Eleusis, where I also found an offering left by someone else.  I straighten out the tangle of dried flowers, making some artful order out of the chaos, and then add something of my own.  How wonderful to feel again the companionship of unknown, unseen lovers of what I also love and venerate.  The tree does not speak to me, per se.  But sitting in its calm and majestic presence is sufficient.

 

Uncertainty will always be with me as it is with everyone. There is an old saying that false security is the only kind there is.  Freeing myself from the grip of fear, does not mean it will never visit me again.  There is no “happily ever after” in my or any other story.  Even in fairy tales, “happily ever after” really implies “happily until the next trouble arrives.”  I may not be “cured” but I hope there has been some healing.  There is a world of trouble outside this garden, full of violence, grief, disaster, and plenty of pain.

But what is happening in this moment is full of life and of mystery and deserves to be lived prayerfully. I look around.  The trees, the roses, the hillside, the mother walking by with a baby in a front pack, the sky, the sun falling in full force over there and in dappled patches here under the trees, the crows winging overhead, the offering of flowers … this is life, all of a piece, sacred, here and now.

 

I stand up, look around, and confirm that this tree, the one I was drawn to sit beneath, is the only one with an offering at its foot. 

 

When I reconsider to whom and to what I give my authority, here is my answer:  I give it to the redwoods.

 

 

Found offering

Asherah of the Redwoods

I call and invoke you,

Old Mother Redwood –

Come and be my Asherah.

I will make you a shrine

as my foremothers did

in the terebinth groves

of the holy land.

Before Yahweh knocked down

your posts and poles

and usurped your seas,

Before your hilltops were razed

for the building of fortresses,

Before the men decided that

all power must be delivered

by their hands,

Before your daughters were forced

to cover their heads,

You raised the wildness of spirit

and delivered oracles,

You offered your breasts 

to feed the people,

You rose from the deep earth

to the high heavens,

glorifying and demonstrating

what we all have to do –

Praise the green and growing earth,

Sink down our roots

and raise our spirits,

Nurture all and stand tall.

I ask with yearning heart -

Be my Asherah,

here on this land,

at this time,

for the need is great,

and I vow to stand

with and for You.

It Begins With a Call (Part 26): Redwood Dreaming

More on redwood trees (continuing from the last post) …

I had a dream about them and the teacher.  In the dream, she is bringing a group of us to a redwood forest to perform a ritual.  I am stunned by a particularly beautiful and huge redwood tree and go to hug it, while the others sit down next to a creek.  When I join them, I see that a group of young people is approaching from across the creek.  We get up to go somewhere more private.  The scene changes - we are now in a retreat/spiritual center where there is a large room with an altar and many Native American artifacts.  The teacher hands me two slender rattles and tells me that although I will need to share them with another person, I’m to use them while I dance in the ritual.  She then goes and lies down underneath the altar table, to begin the ritual.  I go back to pick up the rattles and see that someone else has already taken them, so I pick up a larger gourd rattle to begin to rattle and dance.

I had been considering getting a phone consult with her for a while, and after having the dream, I decide to go ahead and schedule one.  In preparation, I listen to the recording of the one-on-one I had with her at the intensive last June.  It turns out that I had forgotten a lot of it.  We had talked about my sense of what my mandate is at this time.  I told her that I knew I had the ability to hold space, and that my sense was that my mandate was tied to that.  We talked about what holding space meant to me, and she spoke now of me needing to do it not only for/with people, but for/with the trees. 

We then (in the phone consult) talked about fire, and how last year at another workshop I had written a powerful fire piece that led her to say that I was to carry fire (recounted here).  Six months later, I developed lung or pulmonary problems after the ash from the fires up north drifted here.  I wondered if it happened (even partially) due to my inability to carry fire appropriately, or if I’m overly sensitive and take too much on from the intensity of the work with her.  Two years ago I came back from her intensive with the head/neck pain that is now chronic, and this last time I came back and almost immediately developed respiratory distress.  Gratefully, I listened when she said she didn’t believe that to be true. In her4 view, we are all suffering, just as the earth is suffering.  In a recent, deeply moving and troubling article, she labeled if “extinction illness.”

I understand that redwood trees are resistant to fire.  Sequoias actually use fires to open their seed cones, release their seeds, and clear the ground to geminate.  I hope to learn something from them.  

At least, I know I can go out and breathe with the trees.

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