Diving Deeper

The Hanged Man

The above card representing the Hanged Man comes from the Haindl Tarot, a deck which draws on many traditions including the Holy Grail, the Norse Runes and astrology.  The concept of the Hanged Man has been an important one for me personally, standing for willingness to suffer for an as-yet-unknown good and in letting go of the past.

Interestingly, it is also a card of significance for my partner Joe (Odin - see later - being his chosen god), and his personal understanding of this archetype has helped me deepen my own.  When I came across this particular image, the connection between us seemed even more potently expressed.

The symbols in the card shown are: Mem, seas; Tyr or Tewaz, T, a war or god or god of law; Neptune.

When Joe and I began to live together in 2008, we drew the rune for Tewaz reversed.  We faced the emotional and legal aftermaths of my recent divorce.  Astrologically, Neptune was moving into my seventh house of relationship.

Like Water, A Labyrinth

To celebrate the first World Labyrinth Day (May 2, 2009)when people all over the world will be 'Walking as One' at 1 pm their local time, creating a ripple of movement as the world turns, here is the story of my own relationship with an outdoor rock labyrinth I created on a lovely piece of land in the Ozarks.  Although I am no longer there, I have many memories of the healing that place brought me and also, I believe, some of the guests at the retreat I co-created there.   In the next post, I present some of the poems that the labyrinth inspired.

Labyrinths have been known to the human race for more than 4,000 years as a symbol of wholeness and may have evolved from the spiral forms appearing in nature. Early labyrinth designs have been found on Cretan coins, Sardinian rock carvings, Hopi medicine wheels, Tibetan sand paintings, and in representations of the Tree of Life in the mystical Jewish Kabbalah. Lauren Artress, a psychotherapist and canon of the Episcopal St. Francis Cathedral in San Francisco, began a labyrinth revival a few years ago.   Now they can be found throughout the US in public parks, spas, hospitals, and churches.  People from all walks of life have been finding solace and solutions through this simple practice.

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Like water, a labyrinth follows a purposeful but meandering path.  Over the last decade I have practiced a form of aquatic bodywork that, in simple terms, involves floating (while gently massaging and mobilizing) another person in a warm water pool.  This has many physical and psychological benefits and, just like the labyrinth, it is also a movement meditation that helps one to open to the mysteries.  Both practices became part of my own spiritual path while I lived at the place I called Aquaest Retreat.

Like the wings of my father

And the raven
    will fly
        high above me
            like a blessing
                like the wings
                    of my father

From a poem by Sulis - full version here.

Image by Marion Rose - see more below.

In October 2002 on an anniversary of my father Ivor's death at age 56, I felt moved to write a memento to share with my family.  I had just moved to the Ozarks.  Now, on Father's Day in 2009, I'm still here, though with many tough challenges faced in the intervening years.  Next month I turn 50, and my father would have turned 75. 

This post was triggered today when I read a heart-warming blog by an online friend  Lissa Rankin about her own father's early death.  You can read that here.  The beautiful 'Lone Raven' above appears by kind  permission of Marion Rose who lost her own father to cancer aged 57 and has just defeated it herself to paint on past 50.  See more about her here.

I've updated and edited my earlier account slightly and a couple of poems ('I wish my father' and 'Black') appear in the next post.  I feel blessed by the love I'll always feel for this man, and his ongoing quiet presence in my life. 

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Since he died, my father has become the mystery inside.  It's over a decade now [written in 2002].  There will always be the sudden rush of loss and grief.  I rarely have his photograph in my possession but I have no trouble conjuring him up.

My mother phoned me from the hospital at one am - I had no idea they were there. 'Daddy's alright now, we'll go home soon.  He lost his vision so we came into the hospital to check.  Will call you when we're home.'  I thought: 'My father's going to die.'  The premonition still shocks me.  Six sudden months later he was gone.

My father and I had gone out for the day together not long before - to a meeting for freelancer editors on the coast - and he'd told me how he'd been feeling oddly thirsty for weeks.  That was the first sign.  I loved days out with him.  He took me on two of his long working trips when I was a teenager.

The agricultural richness of Queensland, Australia, the farmer who could talk while flies crawled over his face, Aida at the Sydney Opera house, going to tea with the ladies in Canberra, walking the green suburbia and thinking I'd like to work in botanic gardens when I grew up.  

A visit to Tonga where I saw the king in his dark glasses looking down from the gallery in a whiteboard church; and, in the front row, the statuesque white-haired Tongan woman I wanted to be like when I was 'old'. We lived happily on coffee and avocados for weeks while my mother was in England.

He flew with me from Fiji to Scotland when I exchanged pacific pace for northern vigor and went to study Botany as he had done.  He completed the Pathology section of the Royal Horticultural Society Dictionary just before he died - a job that came through my connections - and received a posthumous award.

If only I could remember all that we said on those journeys together.  I was learning so much about the world; I don't think either of us talked about our innermost dreams but probably they were being realized.  Mostly, I showed my dream stories to my mother who was always encouraging.  Still do, still is.

Once I wrote a poem against religion and showed that to my father - I was surprised at how much he appreciated it.  He hated the war-mongering of religion but felt it was fine for us to attend Sunday School.   My father was always even-handed, and people were attracted to that.

I can't remember him raising his voice or being visibly angered by any of us or anyone.  I do remember him talking away to himself in his office whether at work or at home.  And being a welcome addition to a party of men or women or both with his bottomless storytelling.

He smoked until he was 40 but I never saw that!  And I never saw him drunk though he could play a mean game of darts or pool and drink enough pints to make anyone else falter.  Astonishingly, my friends and I loved it when my parents walked in on our parties - they added liberated flair not glare.

Through the things he loved, with a quiet passion, I can discover more about him now that I am 'grown': people, plants, travel, history, music, literature.  Those adventurous years with my father and my mother - young working-class Londoners who took the opportunity to spread their wings - were a gift extraordinary. 

They took three children on a world journey and kept us as safe and free as any family can be.  Reading 'Watership Down' in smelly Rotorua, reciting poems for pocket money on Sundays in my parents' bed, sailing the little yacht SaMaDa in Suva Harbor, returning often to the friendly Cotswold village called Marshfield.

I always thought I'd express my gratitude for family by having children myself, but was filled with a restlessness that didn't settle until too late.  Then, my father's spirit took me through the impossible decision to have an abortion.  I promised myself I'd study wild herbs, become a green witch instead. I'm moving towards that.

When my father died, I stopped being the 'scientist' I never truly was but didn't stop being grateful for that training.  In the months of his illness, I read Elizabeth Kubler-Ross on the cloud-high roof of my penthouse flat  - 'Death and Dying' in full sunlight.  It felt uncomfortable to be preparing for something inconceivable. 

Massaging my father's hands and feet when words ran out led me on a sensual journey beyond words after he'd gone.  I studied bodywork and movement and everything alternative.  Set off for foreign lands - India, Israel, South Africa and now the USA.  Found water and plants and wild places.

My sister and brother-in-law had excelled in their medical training, and took my father through his illness with a stunning combination of pragmatism and sensitivity.  I remember the day they came to the flat to tell me what I already knew.  He was dying from the malignant cancer in his pituitary that had spread to his spine.

I did not ever hear my father talk of that prognosis or express despair or gloom.  If only he could have gone on that last trip to the Pacific he loved (he dreamed of retiring to the Cook Islands).  I know now that he prepared himself for the trip that will be last for us all. 

In the hospital gardens he told me so many, many stories that I wish I could remember.  I typed other memories while he dictated them to me - his vision having been affected by the illness - telling his child of his childhood and her inheritance.  It was unbearably touching.

My father's stories, overlay so many secrets to which he was loyal and (my oddest intuition) beholden. Nowadays, after quite a few years of the dog-eat-dog world, the integrity and authenticity of my parents shines a light for me; the value of being generous in deed before word. 

My father had seen the manipulations of religion but he shared spirit with my mother.  When he knew he was dying, he intrigued us with his private talks with the hospital chaplain and the village pastor who came when he died.  We all moved in a delicacy of truths over those months before October ended. 

Sometimes, I wish we had talked more at the time but, more often, I appreciate the spaces that are made for each person's acceptance and understanding.  Helping my father - soon so weak he could hardly stand - to the bathroom or cuddling up on the sofa were expressions of painful love never to be forgotten. 

The 25th of October came and we were all at home, a family again - my father, my mother, my siblings and me - and my brother-in-law.  My father had three grandchildren and two more came after he died.  He would have loved them as much as he loved all children.  We all have parts of him inside us.

We did not sleep but spent that extraordinary night in the familiar front room of Number 16 - my parent's bedroom.  My father had requested Schumann's 'Trout Quartet'.  My dear brother-in-law gave him the magic of morphine  - and then he drifted away from us. 

At one point, I told him that I would 'be OK' and have often since felt guilt for the selfishness of those words. My mother asked my father to squeeze her finger and I thought of the song: If you love me say so, If you don't love me say so, If you love me and [can't] say so, Then squeeze my little finger. 

A lilting song by Christy Moore called the 'Voyage' served to break the gathering storm clouds in me for many years after: Life is an ocean, love is a boat, In troubled waters it keeps us afloat, When we started the voyage, there was just me and you, Now gathered round us we have our own crew.

All who were able, came to the celebration that ended my father's life earlier than any of us could have imagined.  'Live fast, die young and have a good-looking corpse', he often said.  I am sure though that he would have been handsome at any age.  He had curly black hair and a roman nose.

My second husband (now ex) had his mouth, a thing I would never have revealed had he not seen it himself in the portrait my mother had later had painted of my father.  Finally, though, I have realized that I will never find my father in my lovers.  He is in me.

My father's spirit surprises me often.  Perhaps there is no need for a photograph when a person is so deeply embedded.  When he dropped the red roses at my mother's feet on the way to his physical resting place, I knew that death is not the last we know of someone.

A little background

My father was born to working-class East Londoners who lived largely in the 'Peabody Buildings' - he was proud of these origins.  His father Leonard had 'the knowledge' and drove a London taxi, as well as working as a boiler-maker at the Marmite factory.  His mother Mary was a secretary for Guinness, and loved nothing better than swimming which she did every day when she could.  Ivor David Firman was their only son.

World War II covered many of his childhood years which were spent with cousins in the country.  After National Service he earned places at Nottingham and Cambridge Universities.  He'd say proudly that he was the only seaman to be demoted and left the navy with a note saying 'This man lacks intelligence'.  My father certainly did not.  Bright, charismatic and as charming as any Leo, everyone loved him and vice versa.

He graduated in Mycology and Tropical Medicine after a year in Trinidad where I was conceived.  My father's work took us all over the world - Kenya, Fiji, Brazil, New Caledonia, Bhutan.  He told us he had been everywhere and done most everything he ever dreamed of as a child when he died.  He felt grateful.  I feel grateful.

See also My father (two poems by Sara)

Watership: birthday thoughts

Wild Rabbit's Dream

Out of the labyrinthine
underworld warrens
came a lone wild rabbit.
It was dawn and a glow
on the farthest horizon
touched half-open eyes.

A blur of dew clung
to the grass glistening.
As so many water bells
this night moisture sang
of Moon and the vortex
in which she had slept.

As wild rabbit became
accustomed to new light
she saw mirrored in each
droplet faces of memory.
Like tears they shone
with love's compassion.

Wild rabbit's thoughts
were moist as dreams.
But by now Sun rose
flushing gold on the hills
burning off ancient mists
of many past sadnesses.

She watched the sky turn
into an upside-down ocean.
Wind blew swirling clouds
moving sacred mandalas
across the open blue face
of a smiling girl child.

The child sang with joy
a good morning song that
ruffled wild rabbit's fur.
Her bright nose twitching
she tapped her back foot
and leapt out into the day.

(by Sara Firman, aka Sulis, 2007)

Fire in the East

though the yellow bird
  died the sun still rises
    in the east and the India
      of my dreams wreathed
        with marigolds is the body

of a moon goddess losing
  her blue-blind shoe to
    dogged innocence and old
      gods seeding their progeny
        in the red wars of proud lions

a sure resurrection of winged
  dreams flying over cold waters
    carrying rain clouds to dry soil
      planted with babies or beans   
        fire in the east is the true gift

(by Sara Firman aka Sulis, 2008)

My mother notes that I was due on July 4 and born on July 14, 1959 in London, spanning America's Independence Day and the French Revolution's Bastille Day.  A rebel perhaps but  a reticent one - apparently I resisted that birth and have resisted a few other strong but unavoidable calls. 

When I was looking for two poems that might reflect the watershed birthday I am celebrating today, the ones above stood out.  They were actually written in 2007 and 2008, respectively ,but they were looking forward to the morning of something hopeful.

It's curious that they follow two posts about my father since he is linked with both of these too.  He read Watership Down to my siblings and me on a memorable holiday in New Zealand - I specifically remember staying in a hot springs motel at Rotorua for one reading.

Both poems were also inspired by my recent explorations of astrology as a path to self-understanding, under the tutelage of my new partner Joe Landwehr with whom I will spend this birthday and to whom I owe more than I can say.

Birthdays are Sun times: I have Sun in Cancer, Leo rising, and Moon in Scorpio*. 

Here is a personal astropoetic image for that watery rising sun: the sun's warmth lifting up billions of tiny water droplets to become soft humidity in the air which then moves further up to gather together as clouds in the atmosphere above.  Then rain.

Another image is of a sunrise over the ocean, as in the Brazilian film set in Rio de Janeiro 'Black Orpheus' when two little boys take solace and find renewed hope in their own ability to draw the sun up by playing the song dead Orpheus taught them.

In a sense, perhaps I too am drawing up my Sun by playing the song that my  losses have taught me, including the loss of my Leo-born father (Jupiter trine Sun in my natal chart).  I now need to break away from family psyche and honor that wonderful legacy at the same time.

To be in balance, my Sun requires me to move water energy (particularly emotional and creative energy) outward into some form of expression.  This is a natural part of who I am and something I have struggled with through both denial and shame.  No longer.

An intriguing dream reminded me that yoga is one form of self-expression that activates my Sun; there is a Sun-line going through India on my astrocartography map.   Just after my father died I went to India for several weeks to study with BKS Iyengar. The second poem hints at this yogic connection.

Writing has been another form of expression.  Following my Moon and it's companion Neptune, it calls for a form of Wyrd (runic) Magic through which what I write solidifies and becomes the truth I must live.  To the extent that I am bound by the past, the ambivalence of these magical planets haunts me.

These two poems, tell of my Sun and Moon and the ever-present influence of Water.  They draw me up from the underworld of past pain where I have been for the last few years.  They call me to the frontier of the half-century of my life.  They ask me to sing another song of hope.  This is my birthday wish.

* for astrology folk Sun in 12th, Moon in 3rd.

See also this link on my aquatic bodywork website about yoga: The judicious use of natural forces

Inspiration: The deeper we dive

The deeper we dive, the less we mind upsetting waves.
Robert Augustus Masters (Aug 18th from web)

This beautiful image created by A. Andrew Gonzalez appears on Robert Augustus Masters' website.  The same image was used by the editor of Shamans Drum Magazine Tim White to introduce my article on the shamanic aspects of aquatic bodywork 'Dancing in Healing Waters'  (issue 62, 2002, pp. 17-27).

Noticing this, immediately reinforced the resonance I felt with Robert's work when I discovered it.  Robert A. Masters is a writer, psychotherapist, and spiritual teacher whose approach has an unswerving honesty and firm groundedness that always refreshes my own efforts to live a deeper life.

Under the heading 'Guidance for a deeper life' on his website, Robert says:

What I share here is crafted from over 30 years of deep immersion in – and equally deep work with – human nature and evolution. I’ve had my successes, but it's been my failures that have most deeply instructed me. Some of my most powerful teachings have arrived when I‘ve been down on my hands and knees in the mud.

When I too was down on my hands and knees in the mud, and wondering what to make of the strangely glittering persona of someone I loved who seemed to have thrown me there in his place, an essay by Robert Masters helped me to clamber onto the banks again.  He wrote of 'spiritual bypassing'*.

Spiritual bypassing is the use of spiritual belief and/or practices to 'rise above' or otherwise avoid dealing in any significant depth with our unresolved wounds and related emotional and behavioral problems....

Spiritual bypassing is a dehumanizing practice, however much it may talk about and believe in light and love and compassion....

The greater the pain of our unresolved wounds, the greater are the odds that we - if we are invested in being 'spiritual' or being seen as 'spiritual' - will manifest some form of compensatory self-inflation (however humble its robes), whether it be metaphysical grandiosity ('You created your past ...') or self-proclaimed transcendence of personal issues ...

I was one who minded 'upsetting waves' (see opening quote), and sought so much to calm things around me that I myself became becalmed on a dangerously silent sea.  It was the unnerving calm before a storm that apparently came from outside and seemed beyond my control - because I had not honored the currents of my own life.

Once as a teenager, I sat watching the sunset with my peers on a beautiful beach.  An older woman had joined us who wanted to befriend these barefooted youngsters.   She said 'Oh, the ocean is as still as a mill pond' but it was wild and choppy that night.  None of us wanted to put her right, since we felt her loneliness.

Loneliness often makes us fearful that if we reveal our true selves, or speak our truth, we will not be loved.  And many of us have been wounded in our self-revelation by a person we have loved.  My wounding gave me the gift of walking for many months in shadowy places.  But darkness  is where light glows.

I recommend Robert Masters writing to you.  And the mystical art work of A. Andrew Gonzalez. The image above seems to me to convey the energies of both Fire and Water.  It's a combination that recurrs in my explorations on this blog (see for example Creativity: Fire+Water).

You may also be interested in this post on my Aquapoetics website - Trance, dreaming, and aquatic bodywork - in which the work of another Robert Masters (Robert E.L) is described along with more from Robert A. Masters regarding the dream state.

More excellent writing on the subject of spiritual bypassing (a term actually coined by Charles Whitfield, author and long-time recovery counselor) which references the criticism of alternative therapies by science can be seen here: Spiritual Bypass by Bruce Bibee.

*Robert A. Masters' next book will be on the topic of Spiritual Bypassing.

Landscapes of Transition

This morning, I awoke with the story below in my mind.  As I rummaged among my old computer files to find it, I wondered if my remembering was connected with some time alert.  It was.  Yesterday's anniversary of Rabin's assassination in Tel Aviv.  I try to pay attention to such synchronicities, and so I am posting this today with a prayer for the transition of death.  May we all  face it and treat it with honor and grace.

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"Where were you when you heard the news?" My friend asks me the infamous question.  "Well, I'd just come back from a swim at the Queen Mother's Sports Centre and was about to eat breakfast when I turned on the TV - suddenly alone in a strange Westminster flat I am racked with uncontrollable sobs. This spontaneous reaction to the news of Princess Diana's death in late August 1997 kept me from cynicism as, through the following week, an astonishing public response was reported.  It is now October 1997: I am reminded of another equally tragic autumn day I will never forget.  The day my father died aged just 57 from cancer.

Memorable events tend to be strongly linked to the places we are in when they occur, and vice versa.  If something powerful happens when you are travelling, it may connect you with a 'foreign' place in irrevocable ways.  Two years ago, in need of some radical change, I found myself setting off for travels of no fixed agenda or timescale in Israel and then South Africa.  Looking back, I suspect it was no accident that I chose those two rapidly changing countries as backdrop for my own personal crises - landscapes and cultures that would provide many a metaphor for transformation.

So it was that on 4 November 1995, I was sitting with my Israeli hosts, in Tel Aviv, watching Crocodile Dundee, when bright ribbons of Hebrew lettering flashed across the top of the screen.  My hosts said nothing, but soon grim stillness filled the room, flattening the rowdy pace of the film.  Eventually, the confused scenes that accompany any tragedy were broadcast. "Rabin has been shot dead," and the nation, like our room, is silent with stunned pain. The handsomely stoic face of my host's grandfather, reference to the 'father of the nation', and the still sharp pain of my own father's untimely death, all gathered behind the tears that welled up in me.

In the days that followed, political naivity not withstanding, I felt a part of the sad emotion that made one country seem as one family. In the fateful city square, everyone felt their private bereavements as they lit public candles. Like the flowers for Diana, now on every London street corner, the condolence candles burned everywhere. Sweetness and light pours over wounds that run deeper than anyone could admit until those two separate tragic moments. Diane was a children's princess. In Israel, the most visible and vocal mourners were the youth, singing all night and writing poems on the walls.

But, after the soft-centred grief, came days of increasingly dark revelations about the deep divides between Jews secular and Jews religious. Sleeping on the floor of a Tel Aviv hostel when an earthquake made its way up the Rift Valley, I remember grumbling at my companion to stop shaking the mattress. Then stormy days and wild seas hit the city's beach promenade. Natural, political and personal upheavals came together in disturbing unison.

Israel seemed indeed to be built on shifting sands - a top layer of American glitz-and-tech over profound layers of ancient spirit mystery, all moving and mixing with disturbing vibrancy. Not understanding Hebrew, I was caught in the confusion of unsubstantiable impressions. Wandering unconsciously through Old Cities that are jumbles of ancient history, or Big Orange Tel Aviv with its garish players strutting a dusty concrete stage, I wondered at the tolerant muddle of races that seemed to characterize Israel.

I wrote my mother back in England to stay away from the winter's blizzards and the IRA bombs there, while Sky News fed me reports on devastating oil slicks, dirty divorces, doomed trees. So, bombs in Paris, London and Jerusalem. I noted that Israelis were expert at the controlled explosion of suspicious objects, and found in that a tough metaphor for my own inner challenges.

Israel became the perfect training ground for an English girl turning suppressed anger into positive fierceness. Walking the length of the beach front when you're female with fair locks is no mean feat. People are straightforward there: they do not hesitate to ask if I am Jewish (I am not), but there's no judgement in it. I think they are like those toughest of plants that can colonize barren ground and still produce brilliant blooms. Whereas, I feel more like a creeper, clingy and smiling at the same time.

It's spring and Purim, the Jewish children's holiday of Masquerade. I read that it is an excuse for carnival that has more murderous origins, now obscured by a complexity of religions and traditions. Feeling homesick, I have booked an immediate return flight. When the news comes over the radio, I am in the dance studio lost in the movement.

Everyone stops for a brief moment to listen, that same stunned stillness, and the class continues in silence. Back at the apartment, with my bags packed, I am again watching tragic TV. The rescue services are clearing glass and picking up body parts from the crowded mall where families were shopping for holiday fare. When I get on that plane, I am sick with anguish and within a month I am drawn irresistably to return to Israel.

Perhaps the country represents to me the challenge of maturity - how to deal with the deaths of parents, to accept compromises and responsibilities, to lead lives of selfless dignity, all without losing a childlike sense of joy and hope. Later, employed at a new spa up on the beautiful heights of a kibbutz in the Judean hills, I was immersed in another aspect of Israeli community.

Then, a helicopter carrying young soldiers back from the battle zone on the Lebanon border crashed and the whole country went into the deepest mourning I have ever witnessed. Mothers of soldiers not killed came to me for massage and the emotions spilled out of otherwise stalwart hearts. It was almost more than I could stand but for that irrevocable, inexplicable connection. Being in Westminster for the fortnight of our very British tragedy may have bound me back with my own culture. Yet, I still feel drawn to the desert country; and South Africa, well that's another soul story.

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Dreaming up the land

They say that living beside running water, brings on powerful and sometimes dangerous dreams.  This was my dreamscape.  My childhood fantasy, after seeing the film Ring of Bright Water, was to be a writer and live in a cottage by the sea with otters nearby.  In the summer of 2002, I was visiting friends in the Missouri Ozarks after a year of being a water gypsy.  I had been wandering from watering hole to watering hole, with my then-husband, looking for somewhere to settle. For four days, staying in our friends' dome-house deep in trees, I experienced the most spectacular thunder-and-lightening storms.  When the rain stopped, I reluctantly agreed to look at property in the unimagined domain of heartland America.

That was how I came to lose my heart and savings to several beautiful acres of land along about a half mile of Spring Creek in Douglas (colloquially known as Booger) County.  It wasn't just the river otters and the writing room at the back of the perfect log cabin that sold it to me. It was a certain and unnervingly deep sense of calling.  On the stormy nights of that first summer, local histories had me tossing and turning as I read of deluges that swept away small-holdings and grist mills along the bottoms of war-ravished valleys.  The sturdy log cabin was perched right over the widening creek. Finding the remains of a grist mill, unearthed by the past spring's flood waters, I did wonder if we courted imminent disaster. 

The quiet valley bottom was once a town for natives and then pioneers but, until that home was built, it belonged again to the wild creatures.  Ozark Mountains took shape three billion years ago when much of the country was covered by water; it was the first part of the continent to emerge from the sea and the land seemed ancient. Ozarkians' reply to those who belittle their mountains is that 'our hills ain't high but our valleys sure are deep'.  My adopted valley had a depth and wisdom that I soon learned to dream with.  Below its surface, hidden streams had carved secret labyrinths in the porous limestone.  Especially when it rained, water poured out of the hillsides like floods of ancient tears.

Living beside Spring Creek, I entered a new flow, a powerful and unexpected connection with the land. Not long after arrival, I was invited to a sweat lodge ceremony - a Native American ritual for purification through fire and water.  It was there that  I had an encounter with big cat medicine that seemed to be an initiation into wildness.  Walking to the leader's house in the dark and alone, I became aware of a large animal following comfortably behind me.  Perhaps it was Sparky their dog but glancing back twice I could not see him.  Then I looked down and saw with spirit-eyes the broad, dark head of a female cat: she seemed to be my guardian, my connection with the old wilderness of the region. 

A real cat companion, named Pink for her spirited femininity, soon came into my life.  She'd been abandoned to certain death when I found her under an oak tree at nearby little Big Spring.  It was a mossy spot where children attending the old schoolhouse (since destroyed) had once kept their lunchboxes cool in spring waters.  Being Pink's guardian gave expression to a maternal broodiness growing in me, her playful innocence made me sing.  I spent hours under trees coaxing her down, catching her as she launched her trusting self into my arms.   Watching her learn about, and long for, the wild deepened my own experience of it. 

She'd walk the trails with me and spend hours spellbound by the hunt for wood-mice.  There are many feral cats so I had her spayed.  How grim I felt when she came home with shaved fur around her yellowed scar, and lay pained for a week. Before long Pink was out enjoying the land with me again, though tentative in her ermine whiteness.  It turned out that Spring Creek made me so happy that I got pregnant.  Until I became fearful of the implications of bringing a child into a  turbulent marriage, I was peaceful and in awe of nature expressing itself in me.  I gave up my child.  I won't forget that wintry dawn: it was raining but not enough to stop me and my cat  from stepping out on the deck to smell the air. 

How much fresher it was than the air in Granite City miles away north, across the Mississippi River, where I allowed the termination of new life.  As we left the safety of our silent valley, I was treated to a frosted landscape of incredible brittle delicacy. It was just how I felt. Then a great bald eagle flew down in front of the truck and slowed our passage up a winding hill.  Not long after the last time that had happened, driving through another winter, we had crashed. Rationality wasn't in any of the sadness that lingered with the memory of the loss of my only child, but wildness was.   Poverty and death are fearful things to tamed humans yet wild creatures seem not afraid of either.  

When you live close to nature, your sensory perceptions intensify.  That same winter, I had an exciting daydream of going down a deep crack where the creek flowed in front of the house.  It seemed like the entrance to an underworld that I could not yet reach.  The circle of land that called me to heal by building a rock labyrinth on a flat area beside the creek was connected with a deep longing.  A few summers later, I buried my beloved Pink beside that spiraling symbol, along with the memory of the lost child. I still hoped that the same land that had brought me back to my own wildness would be my healing.

Just over a month before Pink died, I had a warning dream.  In it I saw a smallish beautiful wild cat, with cream and flecked fur in very good condition, maybe a bobcat or young cougar, behaving anxiously beside a pond.  When I looked closer I saw another cat under the water that appeared to be drowning and emaciated.  The healthy animal was obviously attempting and intending to rescue the other, though this seemed near impossible.  Perhaps the dream was for Pink.  She died from feline infectious peritonitis, otherwise known as 'wet' disease because it sometimes involves accumulation of fluid on the abdomen and lungs.  Perhaps it was also a dream for my own growing distress.

Death hearkens back to the chaos of creation: it can be a rite of passage eased by water.  The night Pink began to leave me, she wanted to be outside in the leaves breathing the dark air and the earth smells, hearing the creek's lament.  We sat with her protectively, aware that the cycles of life and death were spinning with irrefutable force around us.  Her grave was marked by a large flat stone imprinted with ancient waves, two P-shaped stones and a fossilized spiral shell, all from the gravel bar on that land.  Oak planks dredged up from the old ford in the creek separated the spot from the woodland.  It seemed to me to be a boat to help her travel to the next world and to remind me that I could go with her in spirit at least.

Upstream they were mining for high-quality gravel in open pits that soon changed the course of the creek and regularly turned the pristine water into a grey or brown flow.  Missouri is a notoriously rocky place - there was a beachful of astonishingly varied and ancient river stones on that land.  Turning grandfather rocks into gravel seemed tragic.   I wanted to honor the rocks by creating a forty-foot diameter labyrinth on a perfectly flat circle of lawn overlooking the creek.  It was a laborious creative project and the land called me to it.  It became and continued to be a meditation in turning up to the task without fail.  The reward was an unfolding relationship with the land and with each mysterious rock. 

Some days while making my sacred space, among the trills of birds celebrating spring and the melody of the nearby creek riffle, I thought I heard children singing out of the past.  Each trip to the beach required me to overcome a fear of snakes, taking the one who lay across my path one morning as more a requirement of respect than a warning to keep out.  I walked the labyrinth to commune with myself and the outdoors.  Pink used to walk it too, picking her way along the stones rather than the grass path.  Mushrooms, latent in the soil, pushed up on the west side - bringing an underworld of nature spirits to the surface. 

I created a full-moon labyrinth ceremony to bless the waters with a simple prayer: guide me through the mists that separate, reveal to me the land within the land, free the waters of the sacred springs, that I may wet my wisdom. I'd also wet my wisdom in a 'family' sweat lodge during the cool months.  A spot at the end of a logging track, tucked into a curve of rock and sheltered by a dogwood tree, seemed just right for a lodge.  Modern Native Americans sometimes feel affronted by the adoption of the sacred inipi ritual outside tradition but when a snapper turtle chose the freshly cleared earth between fire pit and alter mound to lay her eggs, I felt reassured.  


The sweat lodge or inipi signifies Mother Earth and so does the Turtle. Pink sat on a vantage rock watching us clear the path, build a fire around the rocks, and cover the bones of the first lodge with blankets from the thrift shop.  Sitting on the earth in the deep darkness of that dome, with herbs sparking on the hot rocks and steam rising from the water poured upon them, was an earthy and spiritual experience.  I've found it hard to believe that the tribes who began that ritual would deny it to anyone who wants to listen to the dreams of the land.  For me, the sweat lodge has been a place to connect with the earth, to commune with the spirits of my dearly departed, and to hear the voices of the ancestors who guard the land.

For a while, those ancestors honored me with stewardship of my creek-side home, and every loss seemed a test of my fitness for that task.  I like to remember Pink as she was one Sunday morning early, floating with us down the creek in the john boat.  Suddenly we came upon the otters playing and fishing, totally oblivious of our presence.  They made me think of the legendary sealwomen at play on the rocks, risking their pelts to the needy love of a fisherman.  I vowed then to safeguard them and their watery home.  Each time I walked the water-side labyrinth watched over by the spirit of Pink, I  renewed that vow.  But the dramatic day came when I left that land and broke the vows I had made to myself.

....................................................................................................................................................

The Ring of Bright Water may have been a fable I had absorbed into my psyche as a child and was unconsciously seeking to reveal to myself through my own lived life.  I fell for that land on Spring Creek like a lover falls for the most unlikely of partners, and that love brought me many harsh life lessons against a backdrop of pure soul joy.   In the next post, using my own experience with this film (based on an autobiographical novel by Gavin Maxwell) as an example, I'll explore how working with favorite and formative stories like these - turning them into personal myths - can lend richness to our understanding of the gifts and losses of our lives.

Celebrating my Centaur

Today my partner Joe Landwehr turns 60 and I am blessed to be celebrating that with him.  Here are just a few of the poems his presence in my life has inspired.  I should add that Joe is a brilliant poet and that one day we hope to create an anthology together.  Scroll down to see more about him on his own websites.  Happy Birthday.  Love you Joe!

(The image above was created by Joe's friend Michael McClure for Joe's first online astrology correpondence course - Eye of the Centaur - it has since evolved into Astropoetics.)

Diamond

I celebrate the
diamond you are
the sun heart
light on my shadow
a moment to live
magnificently
through sad music
and death talk
your love sings
of star change
rocking me to sleep

Esoteric romance

Tangled up
birds of a feather
you begin an
enduring love affair
inspired and conspired
your expectations
an avalanche of innovation

Fire fish

A year to play
the wild tapestry
and feel change glow
in a virtual landscape
of star blossoms
cascading like fire fish
over chocolate toast
all day.

I thank you, Joe

I thank you ...
for holding a wide open space for me
and letting the words tumble into that
making a chain across so many miles.

I thank you ...
for calling me in with pure longing
not wrapped or bound or disguised
so that I could feel its fearlessness.

I thank you ...
for letting me unfurl in this soft place
trusting my capabilities so that I can
range across landscapes unexplored.

I thank you ...
for welcoming me to your dream life
and expecting something wonderful
to rise out of those wildest of waters.

I thank you ...
for sharing your home and your body
such that I could nurture love again
fresh and light and simply beautiful.

I thank you ...
for all that is yet to come in sharing
and all that cannot be I release gently
into the great unknown of our futures.

Joe's websites

Ancient Tower Press publishes books that help you find the keys to unlock your own ancient tower, so that you can approach the Sacred Mystery of your Being with intuitive grace, creativity and vision. Joe Landwehr, author and publisher.

The Astropoetic School of Soul-Discovery, directed by Joe Landwehr, is oriented toward individuals – from any walk of life – who wish to employ astrology as an intimately personal language of self-discovery with which to more consciously approach their own soul’s journey.

Soul-seeking with Astropoetics

The change in my life from which this blog arose was a grand tumble, the one to which I, like most of us, in one form or another, was inexorably headed.  It had a fateful quality that alerted me to something more, something behind the drama that I needed to attend to, and very seriously.

Just as I began to fall into my Abyss,  a new friend and astrologer, Joe Landwehr, knowing my plight, threw down a 'bag of runes' called Astropoetics which contained some important clues.  I've been following these clues like the proverbial breadcrumbs through the darkness for over two years now.

Sharing a forest haven with Joe, I've had first-hand access to his wisdom and his love. In the past year, astrological references have slowly but surely appeared in writing related to the themes of all my blogs, but especially in the poetry on this one.  You'll find some examples below.