This was a document called \u201c1998 September\u201d\u00a0 Some things I recognize from a retreat with Deena Metzger in September of 1998 on Nantucket.\u00a0 She gave us writing questions based on the myth of Cupid and Psyche.\u00a0 Some of this I wrote during the retreat, some I added as I typed up later.\u00a0 Without going back to the original hand-written notebooks (still stored in my attic) I don\u2019t know what\u2019s what.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think it matters.\u00a0 This is looking at my life from a completely different direction.\u00a0 It\u2019s too long for a regular entry, so I\u2019m going to make it a page, an alternate story to the original page \u201cAbout Jenny.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat is the secret of beauty?\u201d
\nand \u201cWhy do I keep being drawn to the moon?\u201d<\/p>\n
A circle of dancers on the playground \u2014 snow still on the mountains but warm in the sun.\u00a0 A bird flies overhead.\u00a0 For a moment I am wearing homespun, skirt and shawl.\u00a0 I feel the earth beneath my bare feet and know that we have danced this dance on the spring equinox every year for thousands of years.<\/p>\n
To ask a question you really don\u2019t know the answer to \u2014 actually, I\u2019m not sure I can even formulate the question: but it\u2019s about why do I continue to react with pain and hatred and disconnection to the sound of the planes?\u00a0 Why do I find it so invasive?\u00a0 Why does it have the power \u2014 why do I give<\/span> it the power \u2014 to ruin a beautiful day?\u00a0 What I feel is not pain or grief or anger, all of which are alive \u2014 what I feel is the deadness of being cut off from the vital springs of my life.<\/p>\n Write about the state of psyche you are encountering in your life \u2014 places where you were innocent, self-absorbed, places where you offended the gods by not recognizing them.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t even know where to begin \u2014 I\u2019m thinking about that terrible shock, when I\u2019ve been in a place of \u201cI\u2019m safe\u201d or \u201cI can handle it now\u201d and then something comes along and shatters it.\u00a0 Perhaps it\u2019s the illusion that I can enjoy the beauty of the world without bringing into consciousness the terrible damage that humans have done and continue to do.\u00a0 Complacency also to imagine that I could be truly \u201cfinished\u201d with some important issue in my life, instead of having it continue to reappear on deeper and deeper levels. The God says \u201cNo, you can\u2019t push past this.\u201d<\/p>\n I am infuriated because I can only see the trivial human activity that wrecks my connection with the sacred \u2014 how can it be real and\/or worthwhile if it can be so easily broken? [NO! The planes are no kind of nature, not a mythic force but a denial, a disappearing of the world of myth.\u00a0 My job is to ENDURE.\u00a0 I can re-member when the ordeal is over.]<\/p>\n [Deena speaks of my ordeal as \u201cthe necessity to endure the unendurable; to stay awake in conditions in which being awake is intolerable.\u201d She says \u201cThis is crucifixion.\u201d]<\/p>\n [If I try to deal with the planes in the world of the planes, in the language of the planes, healing is not possible.]<\/p>\n To tell the story, you have to tell the WHOLE story.\u00a0 Doesn\u2019t mean you let yourself off the hook \u2014 just look at all the factors that influence you.\u00a0 Tell the story, not to understand it, but to illumine all the details.<\/p>\n The Story of Noise Sensitivity: All the Factors.<\/p>\n In 1984 \u2014 I finished writing a book This is turning out to be a very long story.<\/p>\n I think the phobia may connect with abuse. Journey into Courage \u2014 a theater piece written and performed by women survivors of domestic violence.\u00a0 I\u2019m supported by women while we redirect our pain into protest.\u00a0 As we go our separate ways, depression and anxiety return. I read about anti-depressant medication, hear it can be helpful in cases of phobia, decide to try it.\u00a0 I am desperate, even my life-long commitment to avoid drugs goes to the wall. I try: continuum, retraining my hearing.<\/p>\n At the beginning of July I read in a newspaper that the airport has signed a new lease and are \u201clooking forward to a bigger and better season.\u201d<\/p>\n My terror goes through the roof and does not subside.\u00a0 I leave the house before 10AM every day, with everything I need: supplements, food, books, journal, tapes.\u00a0 I go to sanctuary at a friend\u2019s who lives out of town, I have several of these sanctuaries.\u00a0 Or else I take the dog and go to the Pemigewasset Trail. I don\u2019t come back until it\u2019s dark and I know that the planes have stopped. In desperation I go back to Dr. Brunette and beg for a prescription for tranquillizers so I can sleep.\u00a0 She is very superior and tells me the depression will return.\u00a0 By the end of the year I\u2019m thinking a lot about dying.\u00a0 I weigh 105 lbs. I discover hidden beliefs: That summer I spend exploring a new world: I visit family, go to a dance workshop, work in the garden.\u00a0 By September, I\u2019m getting pretty tired of the constant snarling, but it\u2019s not stopping me from doing what I want to do. What can I do?\u00a0 What is this about?\u00a0 What meaning can I find in my life?\u00a0 What context can I create that will help me understand?\u00a0 Or maybe it isn\u2019t \u201cunderstanding\u201d that\u2019s needed.\u00a0 I don\u2019t even know how to ask the question. \u201cWrite a story you haven\u2019t told yet, or haven\u2019t told all of it…\u00a0 Imagine that what you\u2019re beginning to write is an offering \u2014 as best you can \u2014 something you do out of love.\u00a0 Try not to limit who you are.\u201d<\/p>\n The Other Story: the Story of the \u2018Red Woman\u2019 Thinking in the dining room about what I would like to share.\u00a0 One important thing is having this person wake up in me, “as the flame enlarges the wick”.\u00a0 She is both me and not me, she is huge, she is a flame, a fountain, she has wings.\u00a0 I don’t know her name.\u00a0 Her color is red.\u00a0 My life is dedicated to her service.\u00a0 The work that we do together is the geomantic healing of the planet earth.\u00a0 I know the timing of the festivals and the steps of the dances, and the placement of the stones. The She Who is me and not me \u2014 is she my soul? God? She seems much bigger than I ever imagined my soul to be, and at the same time she is much more personal and unique to me than I could ever imagine God. I began to write a book called \u201cWritten in Blood\u201d which traced the thread between cutting myself and writing with the blood \u2014 and my damaged and wounded creativity \u2014 and my childhood in an alcoholic and abusive family \u2014 and my attempts to heal.<\/p>\n I joined a drama class for women who were survivors of domestic violence and six months later found myself on stage: But when the women of \u2018Journey into Courage\u2019 disbanded, I began to sink into the pit of depression.\u00a0 Slogging my way through days of greyness like ash falling from a volcano, I struggled to keep going like one who knows it would be dangerous to fall asleep in a snowstorm but has forgotten why.\u00a0 \u201cNow put your right foot forward… Now put your left foot forward…\u201d\u00a0 I no longer knew that there had ever been a Red Woman.<\/p>\n I decided that, even if the creator of the universe was blind and malignant, there was still a Spirit of Love.\u00a0 Even if that spirit was not the highest power in the universe, still it existed.\u00a0 I could think of nothing else to do with my life but offer it to the service of the God of Love… \u201c…if any god would want such a miserable life as mine,\u201d I thought, and then realized that any god of love worthy of the name would accept any offering, no matter how miserable or hateful the person offering. At this time my husband and I were engaged in building Neskaya, our \u201cDance Hall \/Dojo,\u201d designed to be a sacred space for the practice of spiritual disciplines involving the use of the body: aikido, yoga, sacred dance.\u00a0 As I went deeper into the greyness of despair and horror I left him to carry the burden of the project.\u00a0 Every now and then I was overwhelmed with panic: \u201cWe\u2019re spending all this money on a dance studio, and I can barely move.\u201d At one point I asked him if it would be all right if I never did anything more than teach a couple of hours of dance a week.\u00a0 He said \u201cYes.\u201d What did I notice today?\u00a0 The tiny oak trees in the lawn, cut again and again but refusing to give up, now dense with leaves, bonsai oak trees.\u00a0 Cut down again and again, but still flourishing.<\/p>\n \u201cTo have faith is a rigorous act.\u00a0 To have faith despite the lack of visible proof \u2014 to hold on to what you know in the face of the Void \u2014 is extraordinary.\u00a0 It\u2019s the opposite of innocence.\u201d<\/p>\n We have an experience of Spirit, self-validating in the moment, but when we try to explain it, it disappears.\u00a0 \u201cMaybe it didn\u2019t really happen.\u201d Psyche\u2019s sisters are the voices inside that undermine what we know.<\/p>\n Can I find this place in my life?\u00a0 When the planes come, I think: \u201cIt didn\u2019t really happen, it wasn\u2019t real.\u00a0 I don\u2019t have a vocation, I\u2019m not on the path, there is no path.\u00a0 My creativity is a cheat, I\u2019m just \u201cshowing off\u201d, just trying to make myself important.\u201d Today is the day of silence. The Story of My Mother and Breast Cancer My sister was angry that she hadn\u2019t told us before she went into the hospital.\u00a0 They didn\u2019t tell us about Dad\u2019s colostomy, either, until it was over.<\/p>\n It has taken a long time for me to understand how I was deprived of vital lessons \u2014 I continue to be astonished at the degree of deprivation: the things not said, the things not shared.\u00a0 There are whole aspects of human experience that I only know about through books.<\/p>\n What my mother taught me about mortality is that you must never acknowledge it.\u00a0 You must never show weakness, or neediness, or difficulty.\u00a0 You must carry on, with head held high.\u00a0 If you never let anyone see your pain, then it doesn\u2019t exist.\u00a0 To help her keep to this code of honor, she drank until her body was saturated with the smell of bourbon. Growing up surrounded by lies, I developed enormous hunger for the truth.\u00a0 I turned to science hoping it would give me a way to tell truth from lies.\u00a0 Spirit led me to Miss Hill, my beloved astronomy professor.\u00a0 She taught me about \u201cparadigm shift\u201d before Thomas Kuhn ever wrote his book.\u00a0 She taught me to identify assumptions, that a hypothesis can only be held as long as the facts support it, and that what we consider to be \u201cfact\u201d depends on our assumptions.\u00a0 The \u201claws\u201d of science are nothing more than assumptions that have so far been held up by the facts.\u00a0 The science of astronomy is founded on the colossal assumption that the laws of physics, as we discovered them in our laboratories, here on the planet earth, over the last 400 years, that these \u201claws\u201d are true throughout all time and space.\u00a0 Using what she taught me, I peeled away the lies, eventually seeing past the assumption that intellect could give me all the answers, that science could provide me with the truth. I continue to use it: Identify assumptions, do not consider any hypothesis to be eternal law, and learn from my own experience.<\/p>\n I live in the present now.\u00a0 I notice the liquid spiral of the water as it curves from the spout of the watering can to the roots of the plant.\u00a0 I love my husband and we can speak our love; I love my friend Lynelle and we can speak our love.\u00a0 I feel pain when I see the pain of these two loved ones, knowing there is nothing I can do to help, but be there, stay alongside, silent.\u00a0 I feel joy when I put together a program for my dancing circle and they love it.\u00a0 I enjoy: the call of the chickadee, washing dishes, the beauty of Neskaya in the light of the setting sun, that first cup of tea.\u00a0 I am so grateful for my life and all its trials that have led me to this point.<\/p>\n Aphrodite\u2019s anger: the Spirit of the Place \u2014 Franconia Notch \u2014 a place so sacred that the Native Americans would not live there \u2014 is outraged at the airplanes, at people who exploit the beauty, even at people who try to enjoy the beauty without caring appropriately for the place, without offering reverence to the Divine. To break the silence \u2014 a single image of beauty: The Descent into Hell Four rules: Beauty is the speech of the Red Woman \u2014 I can speak her words, use her images, but I\u2019m not able to talk about her.\u00a0 I know the words and images come from another realm, I share them for their own sake and for the sake of the community.\u00a0 In the same way, I teach the dances for love of the dances and wanting to share what I love.\u00a0 When I teach the dances it\u2019s about the dances, not about me.<\/p>\n I will walk the path of my scars. This was a document called \u201c1998 September\u201d\u00a0 Some things I recognize from a retreat with Deena Metzger in September of 1998 on Nantucket.\u00a0 She gave us writing questions based on the myth of Cupid and Psyche.\u00a0 Some of this I … Continue reading
\nBut this doesn\u2019t feel like a \u201cdeeper level\u201d, if it did I could (perhaps) feel challenged by it.\u00a0 Instead it feels like the same old shit, somehow being tripped up by something that is basically trivial, instead of being able to \u201cpush past it\u201d and \u201cget on with my life\u201d.<\/p>\n
\nIf I make the airplanes trivial \u2014 they are just stupid\/unconscious people trying to make a buck, they are foolish people who are able to stay unaware that what they are doing might wreck someone\u2019s enjoyment \u2014 I get angry at myself for being so weak.\u00a0 \u201cDon\u2019t let them bother you.\u201d \u201cIgnore them.\u201d \u201cDon\u2019t be so sensitive.\u201d
\nIf I make the planes a shamanic ordeal, then am I guilty of making a mountain out of a molehill to make myself look heroic?\u00a0 That\u2019s the answer I would have used on myself not so long ago.\u00a0 Now I\u2019m not so sure.\u00a0 Are the trivial everyday acts, that destroy the natural environment and kill the soul \u2014 are these not some kind of shamanic ordeal?\u00a0 The planes fragment what should be whole, and my job is to re-member the beauty of nature.<\/p>\n
\n\u2014 I felt sick all the time
\n\u2014 I got extremely sensitive to noise
\nhearing the cars on the highway
\nhearing the rattle of the bridge on the bottom of our road
\nhearing the cat on my lap purr and thinking it was a chainsaw…
\nI was diagnosed with systemic yeast \u2014 I went on a very strict diet \u2014 no wheat, no sugar, no yeast, no vinegar…
\nI began to learn about alcoholic family dynamics
\nWhat I didn\u2019t know was that I was also dealing with unbalanced brain chemistry.\u00a0 I blamed myself for my \u201cbad moods\u201d, for being \u201ctoo sensitive.\u201d
\nThe pain caused by the airplane noise was indescribable: my brain stopped working, I could not function in any capacity, my heart felt pierced by a blunt instrument.\u00a0 I could never describe it well enough.
\nI imagined that if I could describe the pain well enough, the people who flew the planes would stop doing it.
\nI began to see the parallels with my alcoholic parents:
\nThey are hurting me by \u201chaving fun\u201d
\nThey don\u2019t want to know they are hurting me
\nI get blamed for being hurt: \u201cYou are too sensitive\u201d
\nSeeing this does not make it any different.
\nI try to express my pain and anger.\u00a0 I write, paint, scream, cry.\u00a0 When anger starts to come, I\u2019m sabotaged by feelings of weakness and nausea.
\nNothing does any good.
\nGradually, my physical health improves through diet, yoga, medication \u2014 the headaches and nausea and extreme sensitivity to noise diminish.\u00a0 I\u2019m left with the airplane phobia.\u00a0 Just reading the word \u2018airplane\u2019 causes panic.\u00a0 I wake on a beautiful morning and am overcome with dread.\u00a0 I can no longer garden, or spend time in the woods as I did when we first moved here.\u00a0 I feel sick and scared on returning \u201chome\u201d from a trip.
\nMy father dies.\u00a0 I feel relief.\u00a0 I discover that I have most of the signs of someone who was sexually abused as a child.<\/p>\n
\nI try: Neuro-Linguistic Programming, hypnosis, therapy
\nI try: Kripalu workshops, \u201cHealing Traumatic Memories\u201d
\nI try: body work, dream work, process work
\nI imagine that if I could remember what had happened I would be free of the phobia.<\/p>\n
\nI go to \u201cNational Depression Screening Day.\u201d I fill out their questionnaire and am told that I\u2019m in a \u201csevere depression.\u201d I laugh: if this is \u201csevere depression,\u201d I\u2019ve been severely depressed most of my life, ha ha.\u00a0 (This turns out to be true.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t know it until my brain chemistry was normal.)<\/p>\n
\nDr. Brunette prescribes Paxil.\u00a0 I go through five days of unbelievable hell before I quit taking it.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t know it was possible to feel so much fear and live.
\nI don\u2019t feel depressed again, but anxiety begins to take over.<\/p>\n
\nMy house never gets cleaned.
\nI do laundry on rainy days.
\nI\u2019m sleeping less and less.\u00a0 Every hour and a half I wake in terror, burning sensations in my chest and elbows.\u00a0 I\u2019m having trouble eating.
\nI try: acupuncture, hormones, energy work.
\nBy the end of the summer, I\u2019m losing my ability to cope.\u00a0 My husband is afraid to leave me home for a week so I go with him to concertina school.\u00a0 I spend a lot of time making colored drawings in an attempt to keep the anxiety at bay.<\/p>\n
\nA friend suggests I should see a new therapist.\u00a0 I go to Dr. Rankin who sends me to Char for help with medication.\u00a0 She recommends imipramine, and starts me on 10 mg per day.
\nThe first sign that the drug is working is I begin to gain weight.\u00a0 I start sleeping better.\u00a0 The menopause symptoms disappear.\u00a0 I have hours of relief from terror, and then whole days.
\nAt the beginning of June, the planes start flying again and I\u2019m having a hard time with the noise.\u00a0 Dr. Rankin has been helping me notice what triggers my fear.
\nShe says she sees a pattern in my reactions: if something goes wrong, I define the entire effort as \u201cnot working\u201d when in fact the first few steps may have been fine.\u00a0 This is a revelation.\u00a0 I see how I can retrain myself.
\nI face a sunny Sunday with a sense of confidence instead of dread.\u00a0 As each plane snarls past the house and I do not fall apart, I mark \u201cone plane survived\u201d on a piece of paper.\u00a0 By the end of the day I have survived 13 planes.\u00a0 The plane phobia is over.\u00a0 I thought it would take months.<\/p>\n
\nthat I\u2019m \u201cnot allowed\u201d to need protection
\nthat I\u2019m \u201cnot allowed\u201d to protect myself.<\/p>\n
\nThat winter, my creativity burgeons with Russian Night and Winter Solstice, \u201cDancing the Sacred Calendar\u201d and the \u201cRed Woman.\u201d
\nThis June I hear that the airport is closed.\u00a0 I rejoice.\u00a0 I revel in the quiet, in my garden, in beautiful days free of the constant snarling.
\nAt the end of August the planes start again.\u00a0 I react as badly as ever \u2014NO<\/span> I don\u2019t, it\u2019s NOT<\/span> back to \u201csquare one.\u201d I don\u2019t fall apart and I still have my \u201creal life\u201d.\u00a0 But I am plunged back into pain, hopelessness, helplessness.\u00a0 I watch myself start to feel \u201cnone of my work has done any good\u201d and recognize the pattern Dr. Rankin described.\u00a0 I talk to myself.\u00a0 I say \u201cYou still have Neskaya and circle dancing.\u00a0 You still have your vocation.\u00a0 You still have Dancing the Sacred Calendar and the paintings of the Dancer and the Red Woman.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 After a while it begins to help.\u00a0 The planes aren\u2019t so bad for a day and I think \u201cI\u2019m going to be all right.\u201d But on Tuesday, it\u2019s the same old snarl, over and over again, the groove that\u2019s worn in my brain.\u00a0 Once again I hate them, I want them to die, I watch my life and my work dissolve into greyness, I watch my love of nature disappear, I lose my connection to the green trees and glittering streams.<\/p>\n
\nWhy does this keep happening to me?\u00a0 What have I failed to learn?\u00a0 At least I don\u2019t see it as some kind of punishment because I\u2019ve been blatantly, outrageously, CREATIVE and showing off.<\/p>\n
\nShe first came when I was at Kripalu.\u00a0 It was October 31, and I was telling Shivani that it was Samhain, the new year in the Old Nature Religion.\u00a0 She said \u201cThe sisters here would love to know about that\u201d and I felt something, some one, expand out of me into the room.\u00a0 \u201cWho\u2019s that?\u201d asked Shivani, so I couldn\u2019t deny her presence.
\nI tried to write about her later.\u00a0 I knew that her color was red, and that she had great soft brilliant wings.\u00a0 \u201cIs she me or not me? She\u2019s so much bigger than I thought my soul could be, yet too small and too personal to be god.\u201d I understood that she had something to do with healing the abused and violated earth, by working to heal the abuse and violation done to us as children.
\nSomething inside me was angry and resistant, and resentful.\u00a0 Feeling that I have been pushed into this, that I’m being made to move faster than I want to go.\u00a0 Pushed by chronic illness into giving up bread, coffee, pushed by psychological pain into working to increase consciousness, pushed by sexual trauma into celibacy.\u00a0 Feeling angry that I never had a chance to live a “normal” life first and grow out of it naturally.\u00a0 Feeling angry that I’ve never had a satisfying sexual relationship with my husband.\u00a0 Reading the book “By Way of Pain” and feeling like this journey is too much work, too much pain, always being asked to stretch beyond what I can do, never a chance to rest and relax.\u00a0 Are there ever any rewards to make it worth the suffering?\u00a0 I want to go back, I want to stop . . .\u00a0\u00a0 but of course that’s not possible.<\/p>\n
\nI had thought that the only way I could have “chosen” to be sexually abused would be if I did it to end the long chain of abuse handed down from parent to child.\u00a0 That seemed too noble a motive for the person I believed myself to be.\u00a0 Then I began to suspect that I had done it to help heal the earth, and that is too great a work for me to choose (no wonder I said it wasn’t worth the pain) but since She woke up in me I know that She is big enough to make that choice, and I am only her servant.\u00a0 I’m honored and humble and grateful to be chosen for this work.\u00a0 “Incest Survivors for a Cleaner Planet” is a real sisterhood, and I am one of the sisters.\u00a0 This is knowledge not belief or fantasy.
\nSuch a feeling of stepping into my heritage, all the pieces of my life falling into place, little things making sudden sense.<\/p>\n
\nDrove south on Route 7, down a processional way lined with sisters, waving their arms, sunlight in their hair, sister maples and sister pines, sister bulrushes and other lovely weeds.\u00a0 I kept filling up and spilling over with love for everything, even the dead trees, even the dead raccoons on the road\u00a0 \u2014 even the motorists and the towns and buildings.\u00a0 The sun glittering on the rivers through the trees, aap sahaee hoaa on the tape deck.\u00a0 And gradually I began to feel how we were all dying, how our lives were being consumed by flame, how every cell, every leaf, every tree, every rock, was in motion, not a solid object but like a flame, coming into being and flicking out again, each one unique, irreplacable, fleeting so fast, love them, love them all my sisters, for you will never see this moment again, this rock, this leaf, this gleam on the water.\u00a0 Have compassion on them my sisters, on each unique, irreplacable being, bravely holding up its banner in the great wind.\u00a0 “I am the sacrifice unto the One \u2014 with every breath..”\u00a0 I have only the sense of everything dying, dying, and yet I know that the flame of life is the other side of all this dying.\u00a0 No words, no words at all.\u00a0 This is the God Shiva.\u00a0 So grateful, so eternally grateful.<\/p>\n
\ntelling the story of how I cut myself and identified with the soldiers in Vietnam…
\nreading a poem: Prisoners of War \u2014 \u201cthe experts are now saying that those of us who grew up in alcoholic and abusive families have lived with a level of stress that is equivalent to that of prisoner of war…\u201d
\ndancing the dance of a wounded bird struggling to fly…
\nAt the end I said \u201cThis production marks the beginning of the Artist in me coming out of the closet,\u201d and received enthusiastic applause.<\/p>\n
\nI knew my offer was accepted as soon as I got home and found a situation that challenged my power to stay open and loving.\u00a0 My husband was in a complete panic because he was sexually attracted to another woman and she told him she was aware of it but refused to respond.\u00a0 (It should be said here that my husband and I, though we love each other, had not had a sexual relationship for many years, for reasons that are still unclear.) I was surprised at the degree of compassion his distress called out of me, and I was able to be there for him in a very real and loving way.<\/p>\n
\nWhen I went through the five days of horror on Paxil, I remember dancing Kitka in Sybil\u2019s living room as a way of holding on to my center, or perhaps reminding myself that I once had a center.
\nNeskaya opened in the fall, after the summer of sleeplessness, burning pains, and continuous terror.\u00a0 Tranquilizers were helping me sleep, but didn\u2019t touch the Fear.\u00a0 Nothing had any meaning for me, there was nothing I enjoyed.\u00a0 I clung to the call of the chickadee, and the silver swirl of water as I washed the dishes as though they were photographs of someone who had died.\u00a0 With fierce commitment, I continued to teach circle dance because it was the only thing worth doing, even if there was no sense of satisfaction.
\nAs the medication began to work, my creative life began to burgeon.\u00a0 I signed up for a year-long program in Contemplative Dance.\u00a0 I designed ever more elaborate celebrations for dancers at Neskaya.\u00a0 As part of a weekend on \u201cRites of Passage\u201d, I invoked the Red Woman, calling her to reappear in my life.\u00a0 Almost as a joke, I mention the Sacred Calendar project to Julia.\u00a0 She responds with enthusiasm.\u00a0 Before I know what has happened I choose a date, write the flyer, begin designing eight altars to put around the dance floor.
\nMay 2-3, 1998: Sixteen people come to learn about the Sacred Calendar, its foundation in astronomy, the symbolic meaning of the eight major holidays.\u00a0 We start with Summer Solstice at noon, dance for Lammas at 3PM and Fall Equinox at sunset.\u00a0 For each holiday I light candles on the appropriate altar.\u00a0 We sleep from Samhain to Winter Solstice, rise at midnight and 3AM to dance the winter holidays.\u00a0 At sunrise we celebrate the Spring Equinox, have breakfast and wind the Maypole at 9AM.\u00a0 All parts of me are there: astronomer, dancer, set designer, priestess.
\nTo keep myself from crashing after this intense creative output, I sign up for Aviva Gold\u2019s \u201cPainting from the Source.\u201d\u00a0 I enter the state she calls \u201cplugged in\u201d where there are \u201cno mistakes and no accidents.\u201d\u00a0 I paint with my hands instead of my eyes, smearing paint where it \u201cfeels right\u201d rather than \u201clooks good.\u201d\u00a0 I tear pieces of paper and stick them on with paint, building up layers.\u00a0 The surface grows richer and richer.\u00a0 I dip my hands in a color Aviva calls \u201cPlacenta Red\u201d and they make a long oval shape in the center.\u00a0 I expect it to be a vagina, but when I look back from across the room, I see a woman: her hand in the ritual gesture, her feet poised, her head crowned with a pointed head dress.
\nNot until I get home and put her up on the east wall at Neskaya do I remember the Red Woman \u2014 who first appeared when I talked about sharing the sacred calendar, and became visible nine years later at Beltane, Festival of Embodiment.<\/p>\n
\n\u2018Just trying to make myself important\u2019? It\u2019s not \u2018me\u2019 that\u2019s important, it\u2019s the Red Woman.\u00a0 She came and she is real, and she dances the sacred calendar.\u00a0 And my life is devoted to her service.\u00a0 She is not trying to kill me, though she may have got me burned at the stake in the old days.\u00a0 But it\u2019s not death I fear, it\u2019s having everything I value be disappeared.\u00a0 That\u2019s what mother does.\u00a0 She annihilates what I value by not seeing it.\u00a0 The airplanes do too.\u00a0 Am I supposed to put myself in her service?\u00a0 NO! Not to be in service to my mother and her shallow values, but to be in service to the \u2018Red Woman\u2019, who may be unpredictable and dangerous, may lead me out on a limb, but will never disappear my values.\u00a0 No, I can\u2019t have \u2018safety\u2019, but I will know that I am on the center of my path.
\nI think about those oak trees, flourishing despite being cut again and again.
\nThere\u2019s something about the act of having faith that I need to hold onto when the noise disappears the beauty of nature and my sense of myself.\u00a0 Is there anything that is not disappeared?\u00a0 Or do I let the annihilation happen, knowing that Spirit will resurrect?<\/p>\n
\nI\u2019m sitting in the dining room, looking out over green lawn, darker trees and blue water to the sunlit sand and grass of the outer bar, and beyond it the blue of ocean.\u00a0 It looks so much like the view from Grampappy\u2019s house across the golf course to Stage Island \u2014 the same elements: green grass, dark trees, blue water, sand and grass, blue water again.
\nWomen enter the room behind me.\u00a0 I see their reflections in the glass, moving through green grass and blue water.\u00a0 I hear their footsteps, differing paces, the sounds of serving fruit and bread.\u00a0 I am nourished, nourished, nourished by the silence.\u00a0 O sisters, thank you.
\nToday\u2019s song is Island in the Sun:
\nO island in the sun
\nWilled to me by my father\u2019s hand
\nAll my days I will sing in praise
\nOf your sparkling waters, your shining sand.
\nI think about my father, his love for the sea, and what he bequeathed to me that\u2019s still worth having \u2014 this view, the sea in my heart, the little book of poems that went through the war with him.\u00a0 The rest of it \u2014 the drinking, the sexual innuendoes, the petty tyranny \u2014 has all dissolved like mist in the sunlight, or sand crumbled away by the tide.<\/p>\n
\nI didn\u2019t know she had breast cancer until she called me and said: \u201cI found a lump and I went to my doctor and I had a mastectomy and I\u2019m fine now.\u201d Knowing from painful experience that she would not want sympathy, I hesitated a moment.\u00a0 Finally I said \u201cYou sound fine, Mother.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nMy experience was that hiding my pain didn\u2019t make it go away.\u00a0 What I learned was that I was wrong to have \u201cbad moods\u201d, I was wrong to be \u201ctoo sensitive\u201d, that they were moral faults and could be controlled by an act of will.\u00a0 Since I was unable to change these things about my self, I was a failure as well as being sad and having difficulty.\u00a0 Perfect training for turning a vulnerability into severe depression.<\/p>\n
\nEros flees any attempt to pin him to a single identity, to imagine that how he is in this moment is how he will be in the next, to imagine that he will stay in the form in which you first saw him, to imagine that there was any way you could control him, hold on to him, make him be there when you want him \u2014 rather than coming and going as his nature demands.<\/p>\n
\nI saw the moon going down in the morning sky, her curve of white barely visible against the blue, her dark seas faded to transparency, an unearthly visitor to the sunlit world.<\/p>\n
\nMy life is getting drier and drier, greyer and greyer, all the juice is running out, has never been.\u00a0 Step by step through the rain of ash, the bitter fog, the deepening cold.\u00a0 Step by step.\u00a0 Now put your right foot forward…
\nI wake in terror.\u00a0 I get out of bed because it\u2019s just as scary to stay there, and sometimes things are better if I move.\u00a0 I do yoga because it\u2019s something for my mind to cling to.\u00a0 I have a sequence of postures written down because it\u2019s too hard to decide what to do next.\u00a0 I eat breakfast, forcing tasteless food against the dryness in my mouth.\u00a0 I wash dishes because it\u2019s something I can do and something that must be done, and it gives me an illusion of being effective, having a purpose. I lift a spoon out of the water, resist the impulse to scrub it quickly and move on \u2014 because what do I have to do today, nothing important, nothing worthwhile, nothing that would save the world or \u201cdo good for others\u201d \u2014 there isn\u2019t even anything I can do that would make me feel better, would still the panic, would give me the sense that there might be something that I could do \u201cright\u201d, something that would placate the angry goddess who has never been happy with me.\u00a0 So if there\u2019s nothing I can do, I might as well be doing the dishes, putting off the awful moment when I will have to decide what to do next.\u00a0 I scrub the spoon slowly, saying in my mnd \u201cThis too is God.\u201d I try to scrub it gently, reverently, with my anxiety-stiffened fingers.\u00a0 I notice the sun glittering on the dish water, the chickadee in the apple tree, the snow on the mountain.\u00a0 I know that at some other time, on some other planet, these things were beautiful.\u00a0 There is no beauty now, no peace, no silence, no warmth.\u00a0 When I have finished the dishes it\u2019s time to water the plants.\u00a0 I pour spring water into the watering can.\u00a0 I notice how the stream of water spirals with silver glints inside, how it follows a trajectory without rigidity and without looseness.\u00a0 As I pour the water on to the plants, I hold on to the silver spiral glint as a drowning person holds on to a rope she hopes might lead her to the surface.<\/p>\n
\n1) You are a writer.
\n2) Allow the relationships that heal you to enter your life with joy.
\n3) Recognize that taking care of yourself creates a better life for everyone.
\n4) Entertain and enact increasingly the idea that healing is a beautiful miracle that is increasingly available to you.<\/p>\n
\nI will give myself time for love.
\n\u201cYes\u201d is a noun, \u201cYes\u201d is a verb, \u201cYes\u201d is the only word.
\nI will strew petals on my table.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"