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.’
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