rattle

The tribal gods are rattling the skies.

The prophets of Mammon foretell the demise of the economy without a human sacrifice; the god of Fear extends the hours of the gun shop, weaves a fantasy-world of strength. Who do you worship? asks a famous preacher on the screen. Yes, who? Who, who? I ask myself.

In the woods, a pair of Owls talks through the night. In the morning, I step out the door and feel the nearness of some other Presence. I take the path to the pasture hoping it is the Deer returned with the soft-eyed Fawn whose legs have already grown long. Deer are the messengers of God, they always come when I am aching for comfort. I don’t know how to endure these days without longing to shed my skin and join the leaf litter, Fir needle, cast-off shell of a Hazelnut, lost feather, bird song, purr of Owl-conversation.

But up on the pasture, it is a trio of Coyotes who wait, panting hungry around the Duck house. Somewhere the gods laugh and the Owls hush. I can hear the Ducks locked inside their house, the morning shake of their feathers, the murmur of anticipation as they hear my footsteps, oblivious to what stalks them outside. Last week we lost the oldest of the flock, a black and white Drake, stubborn and mean. I thought he’d wandered off alone, ended his old age under the Junipers, but now I see I was wrong. The Coyotes and I regard each other and one takes off for the woods. The other two remain. I watch, afraid to move lest I send them running after their companion. The largest one and I lock eyes and I see she will break before I do; she is so full of knowing. She is a beautiful creature, golden and brown, her narrow face intelligent and wary. I grant her safe passage with a nod of my head and the two of them escape into the safety of the woods. Later, I will walk in the woods myself, our shared domain.

Rattle away gods of my past, I have forgotten how to fear you.

The next day, the Deer are waiting. How much more beautiful they are now, how patiently they come. They bend their tender necks to the grass. Their sentinel ears test the morning air.

Notes:

**The Chinook people, on whose land I now live, called the Coyote Talapus and saw him as a complicated figure, part trickster, part transformer. I found it interesting that in modern Coyote stories told by Oregon Indian communities “his chief function seems to be to satirize and "hold off" the encroachments of Anglo culture.”

**Joy Harjo’s poem, Grace.

we'll be wanting voices...

“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers {painters, poets, photographers, artists, bakers, sculptors, musicians….} who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom - poets, visionaries - realists of a larger reality.”

~ Ursula K. LeGuin {addition, mine}

my repentant skin

“If we perish - I meant to say persist -

do we arise and turn

with the wind?….”

~Kyce Bello

I lose my appetite for distraction overnight. I’m full up with the world we’ve made, violent and exploitative, rapacious and unthinking. I’m full up on all the ways we can rehearse those realities as entertainment. I feel the great grief and burden of being human, full of possibility and yet incapable of restraint.

So many of our conversations now lead to: will the virus change anything? Will we just go right back?

My rational self fears writer Paul Kingsnorth is right:

“Now I will say what I believe: that this civilization will not learn anything from this virus. All this civilization wants to do is to get back to normal. Normal is cheap flights and cheap lattes, normal is Chinese girls sewing our T-shirts under armed guard, normal is biblical bushfires and barrels of oil, normal is city breaks and international conferences and African children poisoning their bodies sorting the plastic we have dumped on their coastlines, normal is nitrite pollution and burning stumps and the death of the seas.

We made this normal, and we do not know how to unmake it, or—whisper it—we do not want to.”

But maybe not for me, I think. Maybe for me (for you?) something else is stirring.

Prayer in the time of corona: Slow me down enough. Give me enough time to change, to really change. Drive the truth down deep of what I could be if I tried, of how I could really live.

Maybe I will not spend these weeks in the dark feeding from the trough of a broken culture. Maybe I will spend them instead under the sun, the moon, the rainy skies, listening to old wisdom, to the heartbeat of the world and its creative Spirit.

I went to bed last night sick of heart, but then I dreamed of bees. I was standing under the sun longing for them to find me, my arms held open, waiting for them to come explore the territory of my repentant skin.

continually

My body and mind have adjusted to quarantine-time by slowing down. There is nothing urgent on the schedule and yet the morning slips away between cups of tea and cleaning the kitchen, I blink and the afternoon follows. Only a month ago I was all efficiency and order.

I worry a lot. Not about myself or my loved ones, per se, but about the curtain pulled back, so many teetering on the edge of disaster. Has there ever been a war or plague or disaster that came for the rich and powerful and left alone the weak, the old, and the poor?

This morning we dialed up France and prayed from the prayer book together. There was a time delay, and so our words stuttered and doubled each other. “Our Father…” “Our Father….” “Forgive us…” “Forgive us…” “Give us this day…” “this day…” I imagine the prayers echoing continually, continually.

Every day I shed hesitations like November leaves, gaining clarity. Life feels compressed, focused. I know what I want from it. Another week of this and I will wonder what all that wavering and questioning was about.

What matters:

Relationships: obvious.

Connection: to the world here, now.

Words: “…in some ancient societies storytellers and healers were one and the same.” *

Joy: integration - heart, mind, soul, body

I see a road ahead that is my own. It winds up and down following the land. In the notes I keep from these days of isolation I see that I am no longer afraid to follow it.

“Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.” (Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities)

I balance the worry with gratitude, like everyone, seizing on the hints of a way we might choose to go in the aftermath. “What if everything shut down,” a young friend asks, “and we had to return to using horses?” For a moment, I imagine the clop of hooves on the roadway, feel my hand brush across a smooth flank, allowing myself a glimpse of a possible world. On the road below the house a car goes by, insistent. Our own cars sit calmly in the driveway waiting to be needed.

On our walks, we name the birds, the plants, the trees. We dig out the seed packets we hadn’t planned on planting and lay out the possibilities. It’s as if the earth is calling to us, drawing us into herself, the way I used to pull my babies into my chest to soothe them. All week the rain has been falling, shushing us, calming us.

I sign up for a class on bees. I stare out the window. Worry and gratitude surge and retreat. Prayers patter on the rooftop, hunger of the whole world for peace and safety, here, now. Somehow, listening, I discover I am not afraid.

*Terri Windling

March 23, 2020

Hello my friends,

The sun is shining today as I sit here and write to you, but it’s the last of the sun for at least a week.  I know that’s going to be hard for people who are just learning to stay home and be settled, and that makes me feel a bit anxious. (Fellow empaths, you understand: it’s hard to keep from absorbing everyone else’s feelings!) So far, at least in my small world, moods have stayed pretty positive and friendly despite the limitations put on everyone.  With the exception of those stubborn few people who refuse to stay home and isolate (which just baffles me !!) I do have a sense that we are all trying our best to save each other.

A lot of artists and writers have been rising to the occasion and posting extra content online and offering what they can to distract and cheer us all.  I’m so thankful for those people whose first instincts in a crisis are outward-facing.  They help us so much.  I’m not really one of those people.  In a crisis, I immediately go emotionally hypothermic:  all the blood and heat goes to guard my core.  I shut down all the extra functions, including anything creative, and close my circle to those who feel safest and most familiar.  It’s a survival function, as much as the instinct to reach out and connect is for others.  We probably need both things in a healthy community.  Some of us are just second-wave kind of people and our time to create and share and support will come. 

In the meantime, I’ve been keeping busy with projects around home.  My husband is working from my little basement office now (and rightly so, it has the best internet access in the house) so I have been fixing up another space for myself, painting and scraping and imagining new curtains sewn from my fabric stash.  I’ve also been making reusable sanitizing wipes (except I used Everclear since there’s no rubbing alcohol to be found), and cutting up old t-shirts for tissues so that the toilet paper will stretch a little further.  

I wrote at the beginning of this month that my current motto is Ora et labora.  That’s not changing any time soon and this week I’m going to make a new prayer altar as well.  We have four children, one who works in medicine, one living in France for the immediate future, and two who work in industries deemed “essential,” so I feel a little vulnerable about all of them being out and about in the world just now.  Somehow, it seems like a little altar might help the prayers be more real. 

So far, enduring a pandemic is like some kind of freestyle dance between focused work and focused nurturing.  Clean the pantry?  Yes.  Digital minimalism?  Not right now, thanks.  I would love to say that at the end of the day I am using all this time to read hard books and think deep thoughts, but really, I’m just trying to decide if I can eat more brownies and find something distracting to watch, just like everyone else I know. 

~ Once I get my new office space set up and it feels like things settle down a bit, I will get back to work on a newsletter for you.  I had planned on sharing a story this time.  Which is still unwritten.  (*eep*)  It will probably be an April newsletter since the days keep going by in a blur.  Our bookstore shut down so the giveaway will be on hold again.  Gee whiz.  Every once in awhile it hits me how strange this all is and how everyone in the whole world is feeling and experiencing the same thing I am right now.  Thank goodness for all of you who are able to respond right away and help us know what to do next.  I’m going to defrost eventually and get back to the words.  I will try to post something weekly though, so we don’t lose touch.  Thanks for your patience.  When I set up that prayer altar this week those prayers will be going up for you too. 

Peace keep you, my friends.  Second-wave people: no guilt. Just do you.

Love each other well.

tonia