The Spiral Turns: Happy 2014!

{I wrote this on January 3rd, 2014, but neglected to post it until now.}

 

Tonight I saw a sky so beautiful it made me ache to look at it. I was – and am – very tired, but on impulse I pulled the car over at an open vista on a scenic road I often travel and take for granted. The wispy clouds of the day glowed faintly purple, like a swirling nebula; the stars shone clear through and around it – even the distant fires of such as the Pleiades. The setting crescent moon shone silver-blue, and I watched it sink gracefully into a cradle formed by tapering redwoods whose shapes were lacy black shadows against the heavens. The silence was profound, unbroken, perfect.

 

Whoever, wherever we are, whatever our circumstances or beliefs, we can be thankful that being human means we can choose to savor moments of awe and wonder when they come. Life here is full of grief, and the shadows of fears both real and imagined; but it is also full of piercing beauty and sweet comfort. 

 

I’m a little late saying it, but may this new year bring all of us growth, prosperity, and perfect moments of pure wonder. Happy 2014, everyone. /|\ ❤

The Beauty of Night

Last night I went for a walk in the dark. I kept to the road so as not to disturb sleeping creatures; it took me through the woods around my home, past other homes, and down to the pond, which was my goal.

I dislike using outdoor lights unless we need them for practical purposes, so the darkest part of the path began right outside my door in the deep velvet shadows of the redwoods.

I could see almost nothing at first, save the black lacy shapes of treetops against the misty sky. My eyes tried frantically to adjust, straining to catch any ray of light they could, but the darkness required me to rely more on my other senses.

I felt my way and listened, noticing that as I took each step memory seemed to return to my sensory nerves. I did not hear my own steps on the road when I began, but as I went further and stepped on a dry twig, the sound was like a gunshot announcing my presence to the whole forest. I began to hear in layers; my own steps on top, then the rustling of nocturnal animals nearby, the songs of crickets, the faraway drone of motors from the main road.

Hearing was not the only sense that sharpened as I went; my olfactory nerves came alive as well, and I noticed new scents mingling with the more familiar smells of the trees and earth. The smell of the air changed subtly with each step, and began to make me feel I could almost see the swirling of the air currents I disturbed as I passed.

My eyes, too, adjusted to the darkness, and the road began to have a faint glow of its own.

Soon after I noted these sensory changes, I came near a home whose porch light was on. It was not bright; yet to my night-adjusted eyes it was like a tiny sun searing my retinas. I turned my head to avoid looking at it, amazed at how a few minutes’ walk in deep darkness had changed my senses.

The pond is lovely during the day; yellow water lilies in full bloom, ducks, coots, geese, blue herons, snowy egrets, huge red and blue dragonflies, water-loving trees with boughs like green hair along the banks, dead wood resembling carved driftwood. All these are daylight glories of the pond, but I had not seen it in detail at night before, and it called to me quite distinctly as the fog rolled in from the West last night.

There was a half-moon high in the sky; her light was diffused by the fog, creating a silvery ambient illumination unparalleled in its capacity to create gentle, otherworldly mystery in a place that is in daylight so familiar.

The first indication of the pond was the bass song of the bullfrogs, ringing clearly across the water. The voices of smaller, quieter creatures as well as the soft liquid voice of the water itself joined them as I drew nearer, playing a complex night symphony I had not heard before.

Once I came from beneath the redwoods into the more open space around the water, I could see very well. I stood marveling at how utterly different the familiar pond appeared in the mist and moonlight; colors are muted, but shapes are clearer, dimensions somehow subtly different.

One of my favorite bay laurel trees brushed my face with her leaves, and I noticed her scent was a little different at night, as all scents are. The trees seemed awake in a way they are not during the day; imbued with ethereal vitality.

I’ve always loved to be outdoors at night, but every time I take a walk beyond the familiar borders of my own property I discover again that the world is a different, equally beautiful place by night. And every time I take a new nighttime path, I wonder why I have not done this before, why I don’t do it every night, in fact.

I wondered also last night why no one else was out walking in so much beauty; it seemed suddenly a deep loss that all this is there every night, yet goes mostly unknown to humans who live in its midst.

My opinion of my own species is notoriously low in many ways, but I remain optimistic that we are all capable of much growth if we choose it. In some ways, I don’t want most other people to discover the same things I treasure in nature – I guard the secrets of the forest jealously from all but those I love and trust, knowing most people care nothing for nature but what use or profit they can gain from her.

In that regard, I know I would have resented coming across other people walking near the pond, and I’m glad I was alone. Yet in another way, I can’t but wonder if people would begin to change for the better if they remembered how to love the night instead of fearing the darkness; if they realized how fantastically beautiful muted colors and lacy shadows are against the reflection of moonlight in the water, and how in the darkness you begin not only to hear sounds, but to feel their vibrations. How your senses begin to operate together, so it becomes difficult to tell where feeling or hearing ends and sight or smell begins.

I mused on this as I returned home, again averting my eyes and wincing at the stabbing shards of the porch light, which seemed even more invasive on the way back.

It’s natural to fear danger, of course; we still have an instinct for survival that coaches us to be cautious of anything unknown. The darkness embodies – or at least it symbolizes – everything we don’t know or can’t understand; we depend so much on our sense of sight largely because it makes danger much easier to avoid. Since we have technology now that allows us to create our own bright light artificially, we find it easier to avoid darkness altogether than adapt to it and learn to know it.

Still, we do ourselves a great disservice if we never embrace the darkness, but spend our lives avoiding the unknown. Death and darkness are linked in many of our minds, yet we forget that life begins in utter darkness. The still deep blackness of the womb is the first home any of us know in this life; yet we forget its warmth, safety, nurturance and protection, seeing only the threat of what we do not know.

I don’t want to share the beauties of the night, the forest, the sea, or anything else I love passionately in nature with humanity in general, because I’m a bitch like that. Also because I worry over the rampant destruction our species tends to cause wherever it goes. Nonetheless, part of me regrets that more of us do not embrace it, learn to love the darkness and delight in the expansion of our senses, the unique freedoms it grants when we allow it to envelope us.

So I’ll say it – a bit grudgingly – to whoever reads this: go for a walk at night. Not with a flashlight or a torch or a lantern, just walk in the darkness and let it surround you. I won’t tell you it isn’t scary or potentially dangerous, but everything we do in life is. Our conceit that we have complete control of any kind over anything is false; a mere illusion. Darkness can dispel that gently, reminding us of so much we have forgotten.

Learn to enjoy the other world that comes alive at night; get to know it, marvel at it, and finally, become part of it. We, too, are part of nature, though we have largely forgotten it.

The Long Dark

I grew up in New York City, and I remember a third-grade field trip to the Empire State Building that was endearingly chaotic (though I have little doubt the teachers and parents on that trip did not find it endearing at the time). Somehow at least 15 of us – about half the class – crammed into an elevator without a single adult, and someone pushed the right buttons to send us hurtling up to the observation deck, screaming our little lungs out the whole way.

The elevator stopped at least once, I remember, and the horror on the faces of the adults who suddenly confronted this elevator packed with screaming third-graders was something to behold. To this day, I pity the security guards at the top who had to deal with us until our teacher and parents caught up.

We had been telling each other apocryphal stories about how someone accidentally dropped this or that really light, harmless thing off the observation deck and it fell on someone’s head and WENT RIGHT INTO THEIR BRAIN. O_O So of course some of us spent the entire time on the deck daring each other to drop something off.

Well, here in the redwood forest, a drop of water falling from a tree branch 250+ feet above you onto your head feels like a cold, wet SLAP. It has a bracing, not unpleasant effect when it’s actually something you’ve been needing, as in my case.

I love trees, as everyone knows who knows me, and I especially love and revere the redwoods for their gentle, nurturing spirit and their protective immensity. They make me feel small and safe, two things that have not usually gone together in this lifetime for me. I can accept a cold, wet, gentle slap from them, especially when it wakes me out of the torpor of depression.

This comes right on the heels of the shocking horror of the latest school shooting. Let me make the disclaimer here and now: I talk about my own grief because that is all I feel I have a right to talk about; I am in no way comparing what I feel with what those directly affected by this tragedy are feeling. I can’t even imagine what they must be going through, and I don’t pretend I can begin to grasp it. I have had no words since this happened, largely because I am silenced by the immensity of anguish the families and friends of the victims are even now enduring.

That said, the ripples of this tragedy encompass us all, though to a far lesser degree. For my part, the horror of this shooting sent me – along with many others, I have no doubt – back into a depressive state. Depression, as we all know, is [often] repressed anger. There is no justice in this realm; not real justice. We try very hard to make some sort of system for justice, but really, it’s not in our power to be truly effective. This is a place of duality: order and chaos, where things are not fair. They’re unfair mostly in my favor, as any first-world citizen can and should realize; but even in our glittering, brave new world, terrible things that steal joy and hope invade without warning.

The way those children died is heartbreaking; it was cruel and unfair in the extreme, and there will never be justice for them – at least not on this plane. Yet the soul somehow requires justice, despite the fact that it is difficult to even begin to find; so we must cope somehow.

This is the time of Winter Solstice, when darkness is at its peak. We burn the Yule log all night as a beacon of light through the longest, darkest night of the year; for our ancestors, it was a grim time of death, hunger, illness, and bitter cold – often a time of despair.

And when dawn broke after that long, cold, bitter night, it heralded hope for new life. Not one that would restore what was lost, because that is not the nature of this harsh realm; but one that would continue the brutal, beautiful cycle that life is here and now.

We can never go back to retrieve what was lost; it is one of the bitterest truths of our lives on this planet. Yet whether we will it or no, the cycle will continue, and the light will return. The light begins to grow stronger at the very moment of greatest darkness – and as is so often the case, I believe that what is true outwardly can reflect inward truth as well.

May our hearts endure the long dark night of the soul, that they may also blink in the new light of the coming dawn, and remember warmth. Deep peace to us all.

What’s Wrong with Silence?

This morning I read a well-intentioned but silly article listing ten things to say and not to say to people suffering from depression. As I read it, I felt more and more like a jerk because none of the “right” things to say would be right to say to *me*. I kept thinking, “Really? That’s supposed to help? Why are they telling people to say this?” So I felt worse than ever after reading it – until I saw that one of the commenters shared my feelings.

I realize articles like this are meant to be helpful; all the good intentions on earth get poured in there and slopped together in a big happy mess. However, in depression’s case, this only makes everything worse.

Here’s why: When you give people a list of ‘things to say’ to someone who suffers from ___________ [<– fill in the blank, although this is specifically about depression], you are setting up an expectation in them of being able to actually help their stricken loved one via America’s favorite kind of panacea: Instamatic Helpfulness!

No. Anything Instamatic is probably crap, which we should really know by now.

So what ends up happening is that well-intended people try to reach out, perhaps using these ‘magic words’ listed in the article, and when this does not end up helping, the would-be helper is disappointed. Perhaps even hurt or confused. This adds more complication to the already staggering burden of depression.

Our culture has become obsessed with noise, filling every void with it, meaningless or not. C.S. Lewis had a quote that went something like, ‘Music and Silence are divine; noise is diabolical.’ Yeah, I’m too lazy (depressed) to look it up, but I do agree with that.

But Americans love noise! Noise and what I sometimes call “I-CAN-DO-IT”ness combine in this tragically deformed philosophy that there must be *something* to say for every occasion. There has to be some magic word, some special key, some button to push or sequence of buttons to push, that will solve every problem and unlock every door.

The thing is, there isn’t. Video games are a great escape in part because there is always a solution and often a shortcut; but that is simply not always the way life works.

The deepest, most profound emotion can never be expressed in words, whether it’s joy, sorrow, terror, or rage. In the cases of both joy and sorrow, words can so easily cheapen and ruin these moments of hushed, sacred feeling that almost hum with genuine fullness of being.

Depression is not the same as sorrow, and vice-versa; but a similar rule applies, I find. Depression is a battle that can only be fought by one person, no matter how loving or well-intended his or her family and friends may be in wishing to help conquer it. It’s a private battleground; no seconds allowed in the ring.

I’m not saying support and love are not welcome and appreciated. They certainly are; but I for one feel much freer to concentrate on each day’s challenges when that love and support is given with understanding, respect; with silence.

I love silence; it can be soothing, healing, and restful in a way nothing else really can. When I’m fighting depression, I do realize the ‘fight’ looks a lot more like me lying down in the mud refusing to move; but believe me, I’m fighting. And silence will help me far more than a cheerleading section or a parade of attempted distractions.

It’s OK not to have the answers. It’s really not OK to try to pretend we do.

 

Wide Awake

Today is a strange day, filled with a sense of anticipation that is as bewildering as it is refreshing. The redwood forest through which I walk each day is a magical place at all times, yet it’s too true that familiarity dulls the senses. I always enjoy greeting the trees and the land and the water, yet I have been preoccupied of late; distracted.

A day like today is a remedy for all distraction – it refuses to allow preoccupation. The whole land seems to hum with a sense of expectation, the trees seem to be holding their breath, the water seems restless and watchful. Around every turn I met my familiar friends, yet they were different today. I saw them with the eye of a stranger again, and was filled with wonder. The structure of the leaves, the kinetic positions of the branches; all seemed drawn in stark relief, sharp and clear, more transcendent than ever.

Movement just out of sight was constant, it seemed; sudden small motions in the corners of my eyes – I would look and see leaves shivering, as if something had just disturbed them and departed in a blink. A Steller’s Jay, unusually quiet, landed in my path, then flew onto a branch beside my head, and kept pace for a while (no doubt wanting food). A flock of quail burst out from beneath and above an old fence, then raced ahead of us on the path for a time. A huge eucalyptus gave a sudden crack while I was walking beneath its branches that made me jump, thinking a branch was coming down on me; but I looked up to see merely a sheet of its old bark falling from it, revealing the smooth new skin of the tree beneath.

Specific places I sense to be sacred – mostly redwood circles or the pairings I tend to call portals – stood out almost aggressively today; impossible to pass them without awe.

Berries are vivid on their branches, leaves brilliant lemon, gold, scarlet or purple. The older leaves litter the paths in drifts, then rise up in little swirls and spirals when the wind plays with them. The ivy that carpets the ground and adorns the trees seems to glow and quiver in the slanting sunlight, or sleep in deep green velvet shadows.

The trees are awake today; far more wide awake than I am, I think.

How Much is Too Much?

This is what I wonder as I sit beneath the noble, beautiful redwood in the southwest section of my back yard, allowing its steadfast peace to soothe the tumult in my soul.

My last post was largely about my parents and the people I grew up with in the confines of an abusive fundamentalist christian cult. This one brings me to the next step: wondering how much abuse is too much. Is it time to draw the line, to cut ties, as so many of them have done to me? I do not want to be in any way like them; my moral code does not include rejection of living creatures for the sake of ideas. Yet I am now considering that perhaps there is a time and a place for rejecting people who continue to be unrepentant abusers, even as they claim to love me.

Given today’s political climate, the misogynists fighting to retain patriarchal authority in this supposedly free nation and throw women back to the 1950’s, it is not surprising that women who have been abused in the name of patriarchal religion or politics are feeling especially incendiary over these issues. I am no different.

When a woman is raped, it has long been very common to blame her for it. This may be accomplished in a variety of psychologically and emotionally devastating ways. Even worse, this is also true when the victim is a child. Here is what happened to me:

When I was perhaps eight years old, my parents left a community church of a fair size, with an active Sunday School program I still remember, to join a small cult calling itself a church in a bad neighborhood. One of the first displays of real insanity that I recall was the pastor’s inexplicable antipathy to children’s toys of all sorts. He believed that for too many of us children, our toys became idols that we worshiped rather than worshiping the ‘true god’.

For evidence, he cited a book called ‘Turmoil in the Toybox’ [see the author interviewed here; it’s part 1 of 10, for those with strong stomachs and a healthy sense of humor –> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc1plbNqTFE] which contained anecdotes of supposed demonic attacks that came through toys such as Cabbage Patch Dolls, My Little Ponies, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, and so on and so forth.

I never liked Cabbage Patch dolls as a kid; I thought they were ugly. After I heard the pastor’s sermon, embellished with an incident or two from the book involving bloodthirsty CPKs that attacked their owners, I was terrified of them. I told my friends who had them that they were in danger, that these toys were demon-possessed and really scary; please recall, I was eight and believed everything authority figures said.

What I did love were My Little Ponies. I had a collection of 72 ponies, including the Dream Castle and the Show Stable; I loved brushing their hair and making up stories with my best friend and my little brother. My little brother loved He-Man, and I will never forget the fight we had when I discovered one of my pastel-colored ponies being used as a warhorse for Skeletor. That’s hilarious, healthy, normal childhood behavior; but in the eyes of the authority figures around us, it was an indication of demon worship.

The paranoia about children worshiping demons steadily worsened, until my brother and I one day watched in tears as all of our beloved toys were thrown out into the trash as tools of the devil. The fact that I fought it so hard marked me ‘rebellious’ in the eyes of the church authorities, who have since that time *never stopped* demonizing me.

I had a stuffed panda bear with whom I had slept since I was nine months old; my mother claimed she had seen a demon in its eyes, and threw it out. We spent a large part of every week stuck in church being brainwashed with this sort of fearmongering condemnation of everything we were as children and everything we loved that was not Jesus. We were beaten (their word for it was ‘spanked’) for talking back to our parents or any adult in the church about anything, or for any infraction of the prison-like rules set in place to ‘protect’ us from demonic influence, worldly friends, or our own sinful imaginations. I was beaten, for instance, because I drew pictures of unicorns. All my unicorn toys had been thrown out, and I missed them, so I drew them. This was no less than an act of rebellion against God, where I grew up; the equivalent of treason.

Even books by Christians were condemned as demonic and thrown into the trash – my favorite books, all of them: Narnia Chronicles by C.S. Lewis, Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien – taken and thrown away.

Women were verbally abused and condemned from the pulpit almost as much as children; inherently twisted and given to demonic influence, since Eve had spoken to the serpent. I distinctly recall the pastor telling one of my friends  on one occasion to go home and change her clothes before church because he could see her pantyline. No one asked him why he was looking. This is the environment in which we lived.

The church opened a Drug Crisis Center for male drug addicts; they took these men in off the street and “cured” them of their addictions, using nothing but Jesus, of course. Nothing but Jesus would *really* work, after all. Some of these men were dangerous criminals, but none of our parents thought twice about exposing children to their unbridled influence.

So when I was somewhere right around puberty – 11, I think, perhaps 12 – one of the habitual drug addicts who had risen to the level of being a deacon in the church found me alone and raped me. He was very large, and I was very small; it was extremely painful. There was blood.

I was immediately ashamed and terrified, knowing I could not tell my parents. I got rid of my bloody clothes and tried to sleep that night without much success, crying into my pillow over the pain and fear that now seemed as if it would never, ever end.

My mother suspected me of some wrongdoing, because I was acting abnormally over the next week or month, I no longer recall, if I ever really knew. Finally, to avoid punishment for something I had not done, I told her that this deacon had ‘touched’ me. Her reaction was to bring me before the pastor immediately, who insisted on seeing me privately to discuss the incident. When we were alone, he had me re-enact the incident for him. I was shaking and crying; he never spoke to me afterward, just called my mother back in and informed her that I needed more modest clothing so that I could no longer seduce men of God.

And that was her solution; get rid of my jeans and buy me baggy pants and long skirts from thrift stores.

The fear and the shame of living this way for years damaged my mind and emotions for a very long time. I was forced to marry very young, to a man who was close enough to my parents in his theology to please them. I ran away, but was defeated by an early pregnancy which later ended in violence, and returned to the only home I knew. I tried very hard to be ‘good’, always feeling the shame and degradation of my gender and my inherently ‘rebellious’ spirit. I bore three children over the years, and tried to be the best parent I could without tainting them with my evil nature.

But finally, one of my patronesses (or, if you like, one of my Jungian archetypal constructs who stands for self-protection) spoke clearly into my mind and warned me that if I did not get out and start living my own life, I would completely die inside. So I told my then-husband I needed freedom to follow my own path. This resulted directly in an incident of physical abuse, not of myself, but of my daughter, who was standing up for me due to his verbal nastiness in front of the children.

I was willing to tolerate abuse of myself, since it was what I had known for so long; but seeing my child abused brought all my latent fury to the surface. It gave me the strength to break out of the cage at last, taking my children with  me so I could protect them as a parent should.

So that was how I left the second prison I had lived in, and began my true life. As a result of my de-conversion from Christianity, and perhaps even more my come-out as a pagan Druid, I have been confirmed in all the narrow, hateful minds with whom I grew up and later lived as a demon incarnate.

I have found deep healing as a Druid, studying old myths as an archetypal path; tearing down the old structures built on fear and hate, learning to live under the eye of the sun without that fear and hate. It has been a dark, often painful journey out of that prison of abuse into the light and beauty of the world, and I have lashed out during some of my worst moments at people I love – family I have been given to replace the blood family that never protected me. They love me anyway, like a real family, without judgment and with honesty about all our flaws.

I even learned to truly love and forgive my parents for the first time, as a Druid. Christianity taught me nothing but hatred and fear, and I could never forgive them while I tried to follow their religion, ironically; it’s only as a pagan that I found strength for that.

Since that time, about a year and a half ago, I have been trying to open communication with them. They are not well off, and getting older. I wanted to be able to offer them somewhere to retire comfortably, but I knew that could not happen without first trying to work through the past and have an open, honest dialogue. Over the years, they have offered me apologies for throwing out my toys and books – though the more serious abuses were never discussed.

Today I received an email from my father in response to my latest attempts at honest, open dialogue. He informed me that I was a pathological liar as a child, and therefore nothing I said could be trusted. This, among many other insults, misquotes, and borderline insane ranting, peppered with assertions of loving me very much which – despite myself – I must admit touched me.

This completes the picture of abuse; other women who have suffered from ‘Blame-the-Victim’ paradigms can attest that calling the victim a liar is as popular as blaming her for what was done to her. They will do this insidiously as well as cruelly, assuring you that they are sure you actually believe your own lies, but they know The Truth, and they have Divine Vision, and can see right through your lies.

When someone does this to you long enough, you start to question your own sanity. Your own memories and pain; you wonder if you have actually done this to yourself, if none of it happened and it’s you who suffers from paranoid delusions. Fortunately, I am not under their influence any longer to the extent that I lose my certainty; but I’m still close enough to that confused, wounded child to remember how it felt to go spiraling down that path of self-hatred and the inability to trust my own mind.

I really believed my parents had changed; that they were progressing at least minimally on their own path. This tells me that if it all began again, they would do nothing different. And how do I accept that, as a person who loves and respects herself, who has finally learned to be proud instead of ashamed to be a woman? I really am not certain that I either can or should.

And so I come to another crossroads.

REAL LIFE!

There are few things more frustrating than trying to communicate with people who seem absolutely determined to misunderstand you. What I have realized, though, is that it’s not about me; it’s about focus.

The people of whom I speak are simply unable to comprehend a worldview that has a totally different center than theirs has. They are in many ways like narcissists, except that their central obsession is an object other than the Self – at least in their perception.

Here I am, minding my own business and trying to maintain a grip on my own affairs. I have my faith, my family, and some other passions that are usually connected to one or both of those things. They occupy my thoughts and my time pretty exclusively; for instance, right now I’m learning a lot about permaculture, I am writing a book, I’m attempting to make a Crane Bag as part of my spiritual journey in the Ovate Grade, we’re getting ready to move to a gorgeous place in the redwoods next month, and about fifty other things I could list. I’m not sitting around brooding about what other people believe or think or do. I don’t have time or energy for that, because MY LIFE IS FULL AND BEAUTIFUL. Fraught with its own difficulties and dangers, yes, but full and beautiful nonetheless.

Part of my journey includes healing myself of the really deep wounds I sustained growing up as I did, in a fundamentalist, abusive cult. My spiritual path as a Druid gives me the tools for that, which is one of myriad reasons I am very thankful for it. As part of this journey, I recently had a very honest discussion with my father on the phone. I cried, told him I loved him, and explained several aspects of the past and present that we needed to be clear on.

One of these aspects was that he really needs to stop calling my patronesses ‘demons’ and thinking he needs to cast them out or speak in tongues (he’s a bit Pentecostal, my dad) whenever he comes near me. It’s insulting to me; they, my patronesses, don’t care – they just pat him on the head and go about their business. It’s me who has to try to deal with him and my mom, and try to forge a life that includes them without capitulating to unreasonable expectations on their part, as I spent most of my life trying to do.

My parents do not mean to be bad people; they truly thought they were doing what was right, I believe, during all the years of abuse. This is possible for me to see and say only since I left their insanity and found my own path – a path on which I have finally found healing and fulfillment. I paid dearly for it: lost all my friends, lost credibility, lost my home, lost most of a year with my children when my ex-husband kidnapped them, and so forth.

However, I also gained real life, along with real friends and family that transcends biology in real-life ways, instead of being based on an ancient book full of flaws and hate that is yet touted as Divine and inerrant. I gained a path that is truly based on trust and growth, instead of one that was nothing to me but grief, stinging thick smoke, and blood-stained mirrors in a maze.

I have never denied that some people may really find truth and love in Christianity. How they can is a mystery I don’t want to understand, but I don’t deny the possibility that some do. However if in fact they do exist, they are the minority, as history, logic, and personal experience clearly dictate. For me, Christianity was a slow poison that was almost deadly – I escaped it just in time. It was devastating; a dry desert full of scorpions that looked like bread, fraught with blinding sandstorms that threw grit in my eyes and filled my stomach with choking, dead dust.

Yet when I say this, the most loving and generous of immediate reactions that I can expect from a Christian is that all this is because I was never a real Christian. I never had a true understanding of their god, who is the only one, or their truth, which is the only truth. Poor, poor me, that I came so close to the Real Absolute Truth yet failed to grasp it. Sad, blind, lost creature that I am, they say from behind their dirty smudged enclosing maze of mirrors.

It is a bitter irony to me, because the truth is – the Real Truth is – that being a Druid has made everything around me come to vivid life; it has reshaped me to be a creature of nature, alive and joyful. it has taught me to value each living thing for itself, not as just one of many works done by a vainglorious Artist starving for worship.

Druidry taught me the Elements; to be one with the wild wind soaring and plunging in abandoned precision, one with the leaping heat of an open fire seeking the sky and its blazing star-parents, one with the liquid smooth unbreakable strength of water running over rock, one with the deep silent immovable dark earth in hidden eternal night.

Druidry gave me back my senses in more than literal ways: it taught me to listen; to hear immense deep voices of ancient trees, swift whispery tones of little breezes, clear strident notes of river-spirits, liquid silver song of moonlight, steady thrum of patient ocean, tiny sweet melody of plants and pebbles and all the teeming life of the soil underfoot. To see a leaf as it is, a unique individual with throbbing veins and a face of its own to turn toward the warm golden sun, yet also part of a great green canopy shading all beneath, keeping tender soft life from being burned in the uncompromising fire of that same sun. To touch rough bark and feel the living form within; soft velvety moss coating jagged rock; feathery fern reaching out in silent appeal; smooth, cool stone with heart of glittering fire; cold clear water with earnest, pure intensity; elusive touch of summer breeze perfumed with night-blooming jasmine. To breathe in and know that smell is essence – sharp tang of cut grass, mellow honeyed depth of redwood duff under noonday sun, brine-coated beach washed in patient knowing tears, fresh sleepless tranquility of pine and fir, deep fruit of earth after rain, musk of soft-furred creatures, aromatic flowerbeds bristling with vibrance.

All the complex simplicity of life is laid out for me now, and I am no more nor less than a full participant. I have a path to tread, a purpose to fulfill, a journey to complete – and it is both deadly serious and ebulliently joyful.

I walk between worlds; I slip into the shadows behind sunbeams and explore the darkness behind rainbows. I learn from the spirits of the land, from ancient ones more advanced on their journeys than I am, from other creatures around me on parallel paths – human and non. I see the macrocosm of galaxies and universes, and I know it is neither more nor less breathtaking than the microcosm of atoms and subatomic particles swarming beneath every molecule of the few substances we know how to measure.

All this and more, so much more, is mine now. So when I speak to my parents, or others who share their views, and they think my life is still narrowed to the tiny wavering line it once was, and they reference every word I say in the honest, pure generosity of my new heart back to their god and their path and their ways, it escapes me what I can possibly say to convey how wrong, how backward, how unseeing those references are.

There is a kind of narcissism inherent in every exclusivism, be it religious or secular in its worldview. Absolutism clouds even the possibility of real vision; it takes a wide beautiful spectrum and narrows it to a single point of barely discernible hue, and then because the ones who adhere to these tiny pieces of available light and claim it is the only true light must know underneath how inferior it is, they inflate their solitary viewpoint into the only viable way of life.

They offer me their pity because they think my life is about hatred of their god and their ways and their little book; and I, frustrated, seem to them to confirm this every time I repudiate it – there is no way to show a narcissist the bigger world, because they surround themselves with mirrors that reflect back to them only what they already see.

How could they ever understand that it is I who pity them, because I really do understand their worldview, whereas they have not the slightest grasp what mine is? I don’t want to pity them; I don’t want to be frustrated. As a result, I keep having irrational hope that they are beginning to see and comprehend what I try so hard to say, because I do not want to condescend to them. Yet they continually condescend to me without even realizing they’re doing it, and they have no concept how embarrassed I am for them that they’re doing this, still doing this, from their tiny little dirty mirrored room. I am outside in the wide dangerous beautiful world, living the life I always dreamed of, the one I am meant for; I have no use for pity tossed at me from the cracks between the mirrors in the little squalid room I finally escaped.

An exclusivist religious person sees only his own god because that is all he can see. They believe their “Absolute Truth” is all there is, so they begin every conversation and every thought pattern already believing that all the points you try to show them really lead back to their one single solitary narrow band of hue in one tiny part of what is, truly, the wide beautiful spectrum.

How is it possible to reach them, to talk to them, to make them understand? I really have no idea. I despair of being able to find a key to unlock the dank little room they lock themselves away in, calling it a palace of light and beauty.

Time and Measurement

These are the thoughts with which I awoke this morning; they gave me goosebumps. Not because they’re original – they are certainly *not* original; but I think because of how fully formed they were when I woke, as if someone had just spoken them to me, and his or her voice still lingered in the air.

I think they will be incorporated into the book I’m working on somehow, but they aren’t really part of the story per se. They arrived separately, after a night of very odd dreams:

Time is a curious phenomenon; it is measured objectively, split into sections that are in theory universally the same: seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades; these are the orderly, precise parts of which our lives are composed.

Nonetheless, time is not experienced objectively. Oh, true that years may pass unremarkably, the passage of their hours and days carried out at a leisurely, sedate pace, making it seem that time – and life itself – is a tame creature that we have brought into subjection by our mathematical precision of measurement.

Yet all that is needed to shatter this illusion is the smallest unit; one second may contain the ingredients by which all minutes, hours, days, and years that follow it are marked by a catastrophic difference from all those which preceded it. Change is frightening not only because it is by its nature untameable, but because it proves also how truly wild Time remains in spite of all our civilized imposed measurements.

We do not experience time objectively; we experience it on its own terms. It is the countdown of our allotted number of breaths and heartbeats; it is inexorable and unpredictable regardless of our efforts to make it otherwise.

A person may suffer whole worlds of pain within the confines of an instant; there is no limit to the volume of experience any given moment holds.

So by all means, cling to your timepiece; watch it define with precise little numbers the passage of what we call Time – but that will make no difference at all when Change comes in a whirlwind, transforming your familiar minutes into alien dervishes spinning out of all control, carrying you helpless in their epicenter.

The Wild Things: my tribute to Maurice Sendak

People who know me find it hard to believe, at times, that I was a timid child. I was also an imaginative child. Timidity and imagination are, when mingled, guaranteed to create monsters of unparalleled viciousness.

I was plagued by many terrors; some were imagined, and some were real. The ones I remember with most clarity, however, were those that qualified as both. Authority figures were real, and my natural timidity was enhanced by stern reinforcement from the earliest age that anger or defiance against any authority, especially a parent, was an unforgiveable crime. It was a crime so awful, in fact, that the Ultimate Authority, God, would punish it with an eternity of burning in the Lake of Fire. And this was on top of the punishment the human authority figures saw fit to mete out!

Whenever my best friend was not nearby to make me brave, I crept around school in fear; in my house it was often even worse. What no one realized was that my greatest fear was not of anyone or anything outside myself; it was of my own temper.

I knew, as no one else did, how furious I could become with my mother over a punishment I perceived as unjust. How easily I could have run away without a single glance back, enraged with my father’s sternness. How spitefully I could imagine my teacher sitting on a pincushion if she embarrassed me in class. I learned at a very young age about God’s justice, and how without his forgiveness, being that angry just *once* was enough to get me sentenced to burn forever in a terrible place called the Lake of Fire.

So my anger was a deep, terrible secret I kept hidden with the awful, careful precision born of sheer terror. I could only hope that if my parents did not suspect how angry I was, and my teachers never guessed it, perhaps, just perhaps, God would not notice either.

And then one day I read a book at a friend’s house: Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak. And here was this terrible, brave child named Max whom I instantly came to envy and admire intensely: he was running around dressed as a wolf, throwing himself completely into his imagination; whenever I got close to that level of abandon in my play, I was called sharply back by a reprimand. The interruption would make me angry, and then I would cower in fear that someone might see how angry I was; but that was not what happened to Max.

Max, that terrible, wonderful boy, talked back to his mother – and he was punished, but it never cowed him. He was beautifully, appallingly defiant when sent to his room with no supper.

And then a forest grew up in his room; such a forest! It was like a dream and a cartoon and a painting all at once. I wanted to be Max so fiercely it made me breathless. He went sailing across days and nights, oceans away from his mother, and did not look back.

The Wild Things frightened me; they reminded me of adults I knew. I disliked the one with human feet the most; I have always had an aversion to feet, and the only time that changed was when I had children – their feet were perfect and lovely.

Yet here was Max, once again facing down those who were so much larger and stronger than he was. He even looked frightened in one picture; but his courage never wavered. His confidence was unbreakable, and he used it to tame the wild things. He became their king, wilder even than they, and he led them in a rumpus that blended in my mind, as I read and looked at these wonderful paintings, with the romps I only imagined being free enough to have.

Then, incomprehensibly to me, Max decided to return home. The wild things threatened to eat him up out of their love for him if he tried to leave them – that gave me a sick little familiar tremor of fear when I read it – but Max never flinched. He faced them down and did exactly as he intended to do.

When Max got home, he did not find himself engulfed in a lake of fire, but back in his room. What startled me the most was that his supper was waiting for him; his mother had forgiven him.

I was stunned by this book. It gave me a hope I had never known before, that my anger was not some terrible deformity of character that must be kept hidden at all costs, but a common emotion known to other children too. These children even ran away and did things I could only dream of – but they came home again, and found their supper waiting. Max’s defiance did not lead to any horrible consequence, but to an adventure from which he returned hungry and ready to be in his home with his mother again. His anger was gone, not because he hid it in terror of anyone knowing about it, but because he spent it on a wild rumpus across an ocean.

This lesson about anger is one that I did not consciously embrace until only last year, as my psyche achieved a new and more profound level of healing; but it was a lesson that began with Maurice Sendak and his story of an angry child sent to his room without supper. This book helped me survive.

This was a book that broke the mold of its time; it did not tell beautiful lies, but admitted some ugly truths – and then took the sting of shame out of the ugliness. False humility was not even a distant echo for Max; robust, obnoxious self-confidence overflowed from him. Children like this read this book and suddenly knew that it was all right to be confident, even obnoxious and loud and ugly sometimes. It allowed us the freedom to be real.

I am truly grateful both to and for Maurice Sendak’s life and work; for his honesty and courage to go against societal norms, to reach his audience regardless of cultural disapproval.

Thank you, Maurice; you go with our love and blessings. Long may you romp with the Wild Things.

The Christian Hate Club

Lately I’ve noticed some pagans ‘sticking up for’ Christians when other pagans say anything negative about them. I think this makes them feel good, like they’re building bridges of peace between two groups long at odds, accomplishing something worthwhile in the universe.

In some cases, I think they might be right. There are certainly Christians who are awesome people, and they are not part of the Christian Hate Club; on the contrary, they are arguably the foremost targets of the Christian Hate Club – after people like me, who have tried their faith and rejected it for reasons of conscience. Pagan druids are by nature inclusive and welcoming, and as such I feel we should be among the first to embrace this type of Christian; not as ‘one of us’, but as part of Oneness. The fact that this type of Christian and we pagan Druids diverge sharply in our beliefs and practice, yet know how to respect and tolerate each other, is part of making the vital point to humanity that unity in diversity is truly possible. And quite beautiful, when it works.

However, there are also still many, many very extensive pockets of the Christian Hate Club. Some pagans do not know about this, although it’s gotten very difficult to avoid knowing it given the recent political climate here in the USA. What I find these pagans lack is firsthand experience. They’ve been sheltered from the harsh reality of blistering hate poured out on Outsiders by the Christian Hate Club, and so they have a naive expectation of being able to create bridges these people won’t burn (preferably with as many pagans still on said bridges as possible).

I, and many other pagans, do have that firsthand experiential knowledge of the Christian Hate Club. Sadly, after having publicly come out of the Pagan Druid closet four years ago, I am still experiencing what in Amish circles is called ‘The Shunning’. I’m not shunned by every Christian friend I ever had – and I’m very grateful for the ones I still have; they’re precious to me. In part because they give me hope for a future that is not only free of hate, but free of Clubs – in the negative, exclusionary sense – as well.

However, the vast majority of people I grew up with and spent most of my life considering my friends have partaken in The Shunning.

I grew up in an abusive authoritarian Christian fundamentalist cult. It was horrible, and those years did a lot of damage that is still now being undone. Part of that damage was marrying the one guy my parents found acceptable when I was far too young; he was not as fundamentalist as they were, so at first it felt like relative freedom. Over 15 years of marriage and three children, however, he became in some ways even worse than my parents had been. He could never stay in any church, because he always knew better than the leadership what god *really* wanted. I supported that, because I was going through my own constant questioning of this book that was supposed to be holy, finding more and more that was impossible to reconcile with either itself or my conscience; so I agreed when he took issue with church leadership. Then I would get a respite from church for a while, until he found a new one to try.

I made what I thought were very close friendships in some of the later churches; I began to feel secure in myself enough to try new ways of testing Christianity, trying to understand how it was OK to believe it, to preach a god of love who sent people to hell for breaking the Sabbath (Old Testament) or for not believing in his one and only True Message (i.e., traditional fundamentalist Christianity). I tried to believe this was a perfect book, that there were good reasons that god told Joshua to stone the old man to death for gathering kindling on the Sabbath or mandated that a woman be given to her rapist in marriage as long as she wasn’t previously claimed property of some other man; in which case the rapist was to be stoned.

Finally I realized, No. There is no excuse. There are too many obvious contradictions, too many ways this book reflects the hate I have too often seen from the Christians around me toward all Outsiders. There were debates in Sunday School classes about who is more detestable: atheists or pagans? And are there degrees of Hell so that some will burn hotter forever [gays, pagans, atheists, dark-skinned people, etc.] than others [friendly, useful, helpful people like the Buddhist who offers more food than he can afford to the food bank, and donates his skill as a gardener, but still burns in hell forever].

So I went back to the faith of my ancestors, my true heritage: Druidry – Celtic polytheistic nature spirituality. I have never regretted it, and my path is more beautiful and fulfilling than I ever could have imagined five years ago, mired in the Christian Hate Club and looking desperately for the Exit door.

What did shock me, though, and still continues to in some ways, was the outright rejection and hatred from people I once considered friends. Some of them I’ve known most of my life, since I was a child. These people cannot tolerate my Otherness, and my refusal to be ashamed of it. They have a vested interest in presenting themselves as ‘loving’, and their “Love”, it turns out, is just like their god’s: conditional upon absolute obedience and conformity.

So I am told I’m hateful, and because I show hatred toward a system of religion that abused me for most of my life, and has caused untold bloodshed and pain for much of the world over millennia, they have to ‘unfriend’ me (to use Facebook terminology). So they put themselves in the righteous position of “Love”, slamming the door in another person’s face – even someone they’ve known for many years, and/or to whom they have told sweet-sounding lies of unconditional love and friendship – for being Other than they are; for being Different. For telling the truth, instead of perpetuating their pet lies. For being courageous, going out and forging a new life instead of pretending the old one is all right just because it’s safer.

Others are even more extreme in their hatred: they consider me dead. I am not even acknowledged as a living person; they showered sympathy on my abusive ex-husband when I left after he hurt our daughter, and offered him hospitality and all the “privileges” of friendship I once enjoyed. They join my ex in saying that I am a walking corpse, because I have rejected their faith.

These same people who have treated me with such abuse, hatred, and infamy, are still ‘Friends’ with my children. Some don’t know my children except through me, yet they include my children in their exclusive Hate club because my children are still christian. Still young, and to be pitied, with such a reprobate for a mother.

How insidious is it, to befriend a woman’s children while spitting in her face and rejecting her? How abhorrent, to pretend to love while displaying such ignorance and hatred? How should I react to this hypocrisy, this continual disgusting display of blind loyalty to a corrupt and hateful religion? Do I want your ‘love’ being showered on my children? Absolutely not. It revolts me to see these people leaving happy little ‘buddy-buddy’ messages for my children, having cut off all contact and ties with me because I am somehow a Lesser woman because I’m not ashamed of who I really am.

More than that, perhaps, it frightens me; I don’t want my kids to join that club, or any hate club – but I know how seductive and heady a thing acceptance can be, especially to adolescents. I know my children are very smart, wise beyond their years, and full of real love. I also know that these people – at least some of them – want to ‘teach’ my kids how to be ‘real’ Christians. The idea makes my stomach roil.

The Christian Hate Club does more every day to prove to me that I am more than justified in calling them a Hate Club, and in finding them morally disgusting.

So, I think my fellow pagans must wake up. Realize that the Christian Hate Club will not thank you for defending them; they take it as their god-given right, and they thank him for making you go against your natural inclinations to continual evil and sin. Learn to distinguish between worthwhile Christians and the Hate Club members, and learn to have some courage and integrity in the face of their constant hypocrisy and habitual manner of calling hatred love and love hatred.

Their own Bible ironically says it best, while embodying the ideas it herein condemns: “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness.” [Isaiah 5:20]

Yes, woe to you, false friends and liars, hypocrites and haters. Woe to you, because that is the crop you are sowing for yourselves – and no, the sowing of the seed that will later be reaped in the harvest is not a metaphor that belongs solely to the Church. It has been a pagan metaphor for thousands of years, and is more rightfully ours than yours. Your seeds of hatred born of fear will give birth to deeper fear and greater hate, and so you are caught in an endless spiral of what you’ve created: Fear and Hate under the false name of Love.

The rest of us are well rid of the Christian Hate Club – and all the Hate Clubs. We would be better occupied creating that world we sometimes glimpse, the one without hatred or fear of anything Different, the one built on love that is truly unconditional, compassion not limited to what we can understand; the world we have to build ourselves by belonging to it. Then we can give the refugees from the Hate Clubs a place to go for healing and help, without ever bowing or bending to the hate ourselves.