Surrender to loss

 

I heard this morning that my father,  stricken by a massive stroke more than a year ago, died last night. A peaceful ending to a tormented life and I am glad of that.

 

Stumbling around  and calm but disoriented, unsure what to do and letting the waves of grief come up and fall away. I had no dreams, no intuition, no premonition – but then he was a stranger to me. I last saw him in 1979.

And so I begin the last stage of life after the Minotaur has died. So much to lay to rest. And I have made my own peace with the violence of my childhood, the lovelessness. The labyrinth has become a place as familiar to me as my own back garden, intricate and green and spiralling into a deeper understanding. But the heart goes on  in love and sadness, searching for what might have been, a child crying in the dark.

 

It is a day buttery with sunshine and the skies are very blue. The bird whistle so loudly in the garden I can hardly hear myself thinking, or give attention to the skirling of bagpipes blowing through my memories. A Scottish exile dying among green hills  that are not his own Highland hills. A daughter standing at the window looking out across a field suddenly grey and barren, lost to herself and an orphan in fact, but unparented since birth.

And another kind of understanding emerging with slowness and uncertainty. This is who we were to one another, a memory filled with long blue distances and silence.

Loving the irreplaceable specific landbase

 

And of course my indomitable housemate came back roaring with post-operative euphoria and found me rushing around the garden picking up fallen avocados knocked down by a gale-force wind tearing across  from the north. I am furious to see the fallen avocados because they would have been fully ripe and enormous in July. Only a few more weeks and they would have been perfect.

But nature doesn’t do perfect in human terms.

The fields and garden are green as sea lettuce, great tides of watery green sweeping across the valley after all the rain. A blasted valley nevertheless, broken branches and clogged heaps of leaves and roof tiles and cardboard boxes. I go out in a padded rain jacket and clear the ditches, rake up leaves so that the leiwater canals tearing down to the river won’t choke and flood. The four streams that run down from the mountain through the village are thick with garbage and debris — later this week we shall get together a work party and clear those banks too. Then do some mending of trees in the streets, lop off dangling branches and make sure there are clean breaks and that younger trees are firmly rerooted.  Cut back split and damaged bushes, rescue half-drowned seedlings. Simple co-operation with the nature forces turning our valley into a wild oasis.

 

It is not about us at the end of the day,  it is about Her. She is our Mother in her local and specific appearance, marvellous and unconquered. She detests our cultivation and meek prettiness. She upends it all with storm and then bends to tender recovery. We are part of the chaos and the glory and the retrieval of wilderness, we fall under Her Wild Loving. But we are not one bit necessary.

The ground beneath my feet

 

My beloved housemate, friend, and the only person I really think of as family, is having keyhole surgery on her knee. She has been lying waiting to be prepped for surgery lookng out on mountains white with snow. She called me to say she was going into surgery and I said some loving and encouraging things but she was arguing with a ward sister and not listening to me. Never mind, she heard my voice and I said what I wanted to say.

This evening I shall do a healing ritual for her, send her strength and blessings. Right now and most of today I am grounding myself very deliberately and mindfully. I have the imagination of disaster and hate hospitals and even minor operations and grew up expecting the worst to happen in any crisis.

Earlier I went out into the back garden and rooted myself like a white birch. The wind was so cold I could feel my feet like cods of damp clay and felt less grounded and rooted than frozen in place and unable to move at all. So I greeted the birds with ruffled-up feathers and tucked-in heads, all 0f them sheltering in the canopied evergreen trees, and came indoors.

Where I found that rain was coming down the chimney like a sooty waterfall, black and silky and ice-cold. A very Cinderella moment, especially with organic white pumpkins piled high on the dresser. My small dogs barking at the ogre roaring in the chimney as I dashed about with brooms and mops like a wide-eyed peasant girl in  the Perrault fairy tale. Shades of Angela Carter’s gothic noir too, the flue collapsing, black crows on the window sill, handfuls of rain flung against the glass like grey confetti. The prince off somewhere tilting at windmills.

Placing my feet on the lovely old worn rugs and afghans, I breathe in and exhale, feeling gratitude rise in me like a warm tide. There are no fairy godmothers with wands and the pumpkins are fine as pumpkins. The kitchen floor is awash with rain water and muddy paw prints. There is a hungry woman at the door reeking of cheap brandy and shame, drenched to the skin and refusing a change of clothes or hot food because only more brndy makes sense to her. My housemate may need to have another operation, she may not heal easily.

Yet this life is numinous and I open to all of it, the full unhampered consciousness of what gives joy and what brings in the shadow of fear and  pain, the old remembered griefs.  Grounding into the Mother, the deep earth under the rugs and the floorboards, the secret cellars and boulders and tap roots and sweet untouched soil and caves and a river of fire at the burning core. A phoenix in the sodden ashes.

Wands and coins falling

Turned over in bed and the wind roaring down from the north woke me. I had been dreaming of wands and coins: 10 wands, five wands, eight coins. A very unusual dream for someone like me — I know my own mythic patterning and this is unusual. Numerology? And I have  my own wild tarot preferences. But here I am pausing to enter into the Minor Arcana, the rich and duplicitous imagery of medieval times — and earlier.

There are eight coins, brown coins, perhaps dulled copper, and small change, tossed down on a scored wooden table. Across the room I am hurrying to catch a bus on a cold spring morning. Smething is ending and my heart is filled with grief and fear. Do I scoop up the coins or not?

This is the sign of earthy yet barren Virgo, holding her ear of corn, a little dusty. It is a sign to do with work and labour, the hard work of preparation, tilling fields, weeding rather than planting, and waiting for fruition. This is the tarot symbot for Pentacles, the number eight symbolising looped infinity. There is the bare brown earth; there is a protective circle; there is industry and the hope of reward.

For me this card connects to apprenticeship and dedication. An affirmation of the daily efforts, the maintenance of the garden, the studies leading to eclectic wisdom. A sign to do with craft, with dedication. The brown coins, the sheltering hillside.

And then the wands. The Five of Wands for obstacles and minor setbacks, upsets, challenges. The star-shaped sign, the five points of swords, the human body out-stretched or impaled. There is the red fire of passion, the fiery chakras, the strife. Conflict yes, but as a point of growth.

Aspects of emotional polarity, warring selves. In the Rider-Waite deck there are five men fighting — gleeful, pensive, angry, one with his back turned. But the conflict is only apparent, reconciliation is both possibe and desirable.

 

Then at the last, the burden of 10 wands, the bundling of edgy responsibilities. As I look at the card, I sense theLord of Oppression, not unlike Saturn, the Lord of  Limits. I feel the weight of too many responsibilities, the taking on ofwork I am unable to complete. A figure bent doube under the weight of the wands like staves for firewood. Shades of black, citrine, 0live and russet. Subdued, burdensome, the sense of oppression. The raging fires that reuce dreams to ash, the demands of the fiery wands. And yet the fire of wands is also a phoenix.

Not an easy combination and the dull brown coins and clashing wands stay with me as a source, a reminder of weariness and pain. But success may be close at hand and this last card can be read for transformation.

 

To persist — the small brown coins, the dusty bare hills. The struggle within that may be necessary and even fruitful. The crushing burden of work. But this too — that the winter of my discontent is nearing an end. An elemental  force may be breeding lilacs out of the dead land.

The Myth of Kin

 

 

An icy glittering winter solstice here, frost bitter on the grass and shrivelling the last roses, my old Crepuscule with its apricot blossoms. This past weekend I painted in the light-filled studio with my gnomic art teacher, aged 77, hovering and clucking under her breath at my imperfect brushwork. Skilled brushwork is like the Zen of breathing, letting the line flow as the brush wishes.

And this morning I woke chilled and bilious from eating unripe tree tomatoes, purply-red tomatillos, to discover I have become a great-aunt to tiny puce-faced Noah in the Antipodes. My youngest sister a grandmother, going through the water  birth with her daughter, the niece I have never known, the last to be born in Africa.

Once I would have sighed and shrugged off the pssibility that I might ever get to know any of my sister’s children. I know nothing of my alcoholic brother’s children on a Pacific island. My family are scattered and incomunicative for too many reasons to discuss. But as I myself enter the crone years (a great-aunt!) I become more receptive and open to possibilities of true blossoming kinship.

Kinship is a myth, and I am learning  with more and more intent and intuition to live by myth. So I shall send blessings and poems to this new child who may one day return to the Dark Continent Filled with Light. I know in my bones that my sister and brother yearn and hunger and thirst for the places of their childhood. The river gorges and savannah plains and msasa trees, the swooping fish eagle and samango monkeys, the smell of peppery dust and dried fish and mangos. Our pagan senses hold memory like a charm.

The year at its turning. My former lover in Wales climbed a hill to see the solstice dawn, with not a conscious flicker of reverence or mystic intuition. Never mind: the sweet man, the flowering rod, the disgruntled old curmudgeon, will make a Green Man yet. As a wise and witchy great-aunt, I hold the small tarnished  keys to faery and that is a place, a landscape, that defies borders and the crushing tedium of reality, the philistine hour. My occult vegetal love remains forever green and unconquerable, the secret dreaming world hidden under the hill. Magick is finally all about plasticity and the outpouring of narratuve, the nurturing of creativity and that dark-bright visionary within each of us.

So as I paint at the easel set up on my verandah, I introduce hyena sorcerers and baobab  giants and yellow-eyed African crocodiles into my cloudy landscape, dreaming up a playground for Noah, the little boy opening his eyes a day after solstice in the dazzling sun-rinsed light of the Antipodes.

Dark moon at solstice

 

The Dark Moon in Cancer coincides with the winter solstice here, a time for dreaming by firelight and looking within. I have been lying on a sofa reading the wizardry of Welsh writer Arthur Machen and seeding magic all around me. In a dream just before dawn, a tall grey cat with Egyptian spookiness guided me through a destroyed but lovely temple of runic inscriptions. I could decipher the lettering on rose-pink terracotta columns quite easily. As the cat stood looking through me and past me, I studied instructions on how to stitch together the ruptured chambers of the heart. Sigh. And just as I was asking the cat if he was in the habit of eating the tiny mice scurrying over the temple steps, I awoke, my heart aching and sutured, my tongue no longer able to talk cat –

A fledgling moon, a cat tail moon. The glyph for astrological Cancer has always reminded me of two plump and curvacious breasts, symbols of nurturing. I have set out beeswax candles and my stoppered jug of sea water, the briny spume of the Atlantic kept for ritual use.  Cancer is of course the sideways-moving pincered crab of the changeable ocean.

 

In zodiac lore, this is a water sign ruled by the moon. The breaking waters of the womb, salty and life-giving. The tides of emergence, the ‘cool moon laughing in secret’ of Hesse. The tenacious grip of the sea creature, the sideways dance, the mother’s grasp on the wriggling chid, the embrace that holds us fast until death. There is the shell or carapace of the defences, the clawed pounce. And within, the watery blood and tender flesh and vulnerable self. The Babylonian turtles who are twin stars of the sea moving together as one, our ambiguous destiny.

And the figure of the nurturing but possessive mother. I fight shy of Cancer at times, the clutch and seizure, the old demanding mother-love. I want to swim away, lost in the black and swelling ocean under  the dark moon. The daughter swimming towards and away from the womb, the mother, the source of nurture, the grip of the mother she too will become, the crone tenacious of life, the twinned destinies of mother and daughter. Mothering is the sign of the crab and ambiguous as those pincered claws and brittle shell, the all too vulnerable love. Here mother and daughter meet — or fai to meet- in the subterranean place.

 

When I sense the approach of the Crab under a sightless moon I feel I may drown, that I am held fast to an old place not of my choosing. And yet, I remain my mother’s daughter, cradled against the breasts, safe at sea in that rich salty maternal love. Cancer is of course the Fourth House, the Womb of Eternity. Here in the mother’s arms I experience my natal genesis and nemesis.

 

As the year tilts again towards another season, I offer my libations of sea water and my flickering candles and the Dream of Return that for me is aways the oceanic impulse, the crab in the changeable ocea, the seeding time of the dark moon.

Dreaming in animal

 

It is the rainy season here in the mountains, but not enough rain is falling and already there are fears of drought for the coming summer. But the garden is hyperactive with birds — plovers, Spotted Eagle Owls, white eyes, orange-breasted sunbirds, button quail,  protea seed eaters and mossies. Other wildlife too. Yesterday I rescued a small geometric mountain tortoise from the puppies. The sand lizards and geckos are proliferating, as are spiders and coppery butterflies.  Snails waltz all over walls and tree trunks and the long strappy eaves of the agapanthus,  leaving silver traces like  choreography.

For six years now we have observed one another as I go about in the garden or sit reading on the stoep, the wildlife and myself. They know me as well as I know them, the successive generations, the babies each spring, the berry-lovers and seedeaters and those just passing through the garden. And in recent years they have begun to speak with me in dreams, something I have not cared to admit to many people.

Because the dreams are strange and powerful and unexpected. A lizard blinks that great glittering eye and I find myself entering a dark cave, guided by geckos that shine in the dim interior like glowing amulets. There is a pulsing as at the golden heart of a bee hive and I need to surrender, echo the pulse in my bloodstream.

There are fruit bats clinging to verdigris walls and when I get up courage to look past the folded wings there is the night sky all studded with the galaxies once destroyed in another eon. A small creature just behind me is telling galactic histories that are also about my lost family and the wonders of my home on the archipelago, the rocky islands in a sea of music, the whales and dolphins singing  unforgotten histories, the moons like blue stones on the horizon.

All day as I walk around and sit at my desk, snatches of song and whispers come back to me — this is the immanent world,  alive and calling and warning,  recounting the myths I need to make my own.  A birds who is also my feathered mother is scolding me from the bare branches of a catalpa, telling me I need to go back to the cave. The cave is a ruined grotto,  a narrow womb, a place lit only by the moon.

Somewhere  in those depths the oracle is waiting and sometimes she will be hyena and sometimes the quick-striking cobra.  Wisdom has a price. But there is the descent and there is light down in the gloom, renewal and mystery and initiation. The cold bare branches are budding with scarlet and green tissue and nodal vigour. The creatures wait and watch me with unsentimental but loving eyes. I am dreaming in animal, dreaming desert and cave and ocean and wilderness.

Remembering June 1976

My kind of Goddess

The poem by Imagist poet and visionary HD:

HELEN

All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the lustre as of olives
where she stands,
and the white hands.

All Greece reviles
the wan face when she smiles,
hating it deeper still
when it grows wan and white,
remembering past enchantments
and past ills.

Greece sees, unmoved,
God’s daughter, born of love,
the beauty of cool feet
and slenderest knees,
could love indeed the maid,
only if she were laid
white ash amid funereal cypresses.

What has gone before

Like others, I am thinking about pagan values in this merry but wintry month of June. But I am also wondering why I cannot post a bluey-green image of a mermaid and struggling with a clunky keyboard. My homemade muesli has too much crunch. The  spotted eagle owls that fly overhead into the fields and woods have kept me awake much of the night, hooting into my dream hearing.

I believe in grounding practices. I am an African fig tree with a deep taproot and many other kinds of roots that form a holding canopy under the earth. Roots powerful enough to crush rocks. I have grown up in a landscape that is not pretty or domesticated or thick with human history, a landscape that dwarfs human presence. That suits me just fine.

I believe in an activist spirituality. I want to resist and struggle for a world that is once again wilderness and help create another vision of human community embedded in nature. I am a pragmatist but dreams keep me alive.

It is all sacred in a way I have yet to understand. The brokenness, the tragedy, the violence is all part of the tapestry, the unicorns in the forest, salmon leaping in icy mountain streams, the cradling bowl of blue skies and the screaming hawk, the wounded fisher king, the deer standing in the woodland clearing, the wild hunt, the terror and the blood.

The poet Geoffrey Hill wrote ‘By blood we live/the hot the cold, to ravage and redeem the world/ There is no bloodless myth can hold.‘

I believe in holding to the ancient truths, to the memory of those who have gone before. Our mothers, our sisters, our elders. Those who walked the secret ways and healed themselves and nurtured the vulnerable and hid from persecution. Their spirit lives on in me and I am honour-bound to share that spirit with other women.

We grow by taking risks. We grow through experiences that hurt us. We learn to celebrate our mistakes.

And at the same time as I write down these fleshed out and lived abstractions that mean so much to me I am worrying about my beloved housemate who has an inexplicable pain in her midriff and will need x-rays. I made her a dish of comforting Colcannon and burned it  because I was flustered and anxious and not paying attention. My small dogs have shredded a rose-patterned silk cushion of which I was very fond. I have had to replace the keyboard on my cheap and nasty computer. Life feels all too much and as if carelessness rules.

But I believe above all in what Teresa of Avila said in a time when to be a Jewish woman mystic was punishable by death and the only outlet for a different kind of visionary womanly life was the nunnery:

‘All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.’