Notes from Up North

In the past five days and nights Up North—in northernmost Minnesota, in Superior National Forest and Finland State Forest, next to the Boundary Waters, not far from Ontario—having experienced multiple encounters with loons singing day and night, ravens by the roadside, hearing wolves howling not too far away in the deep night, and wandering the land, I awake this morning knowing that the Northwoods has gotten lodged in my heart as one of my home places. It's in me for good. I will always need to spend some time up there.

I'm glad I was able to get away, however briefly, for a short camping vacation Up North, after a summer full of concerts, travel, stress (not all for bad reasons either), and mounting exhaustion. I had a few days on the land where I did nothing but read, play my flutes, chat with friends, and prepare satisfying meals. After five days and nights, I was ready to return home. But the return is also the re-entry to so-called civilization, crowded as it is with people and Things To Do, the re-entry itself can prove impossibly hard. So I find myself with my body back home, and my heart still Up North in the wildwood.

•



On the drive home, a bald eagle resplendent on the median of the highway, just pausing a moment before flying back over the water. Life is all around us, if only we would be open to seeing it. Passing by within feet of the Great Spirit, unafraid and still wild at heart.

Blessing the remains of coyotes and deer killed by traffic, their carcasses on the road shoulders, a common sight Up North, where the wildwoods are not separated from the villages and roads. Always a reminder of mortality, and of spirits moving on. Blessing as we pass seems the least we can do.

•



Since I'm a global nomad, without a real sense of hometown anywhere in the world, having grown up all over the world, having moved so many times when I was still a boy, I am often comfortable wherever I go. But I also have a small collection of places that have become special to me, home places, places where I feel connected to the Earth, where I feel at home, where I go to be reminded of those connections. Up there on Minnesota's North Shore, and inland, in the great Superior National Forest, and Kawashaway, has become one of those home places. This morning, back home in southern Wisconsin, I look at paintings and photos of Up North, images of ravens and the northern lights, and feel like my heart is still back up there. At least part of it always will be. Just as other parts of my heart reside in the Southwest, and elsewhere.

When you're a global nomad, a wanderer, certainly you take you sense of "home" with you wherever you go, as it resides inwardly. Yet it's also good to have actual physical places on this spinning ball of life-covered rock that you can also feel at home in. Good to travel. Good to be home again.

•



It grew into an evening ritual: As the sun was setting over our small beaver-pond lake, which curves around the north of the land and to the west, I stand on an exposed boulder to the west of the cookhouse, and play my shakuhachi for awhile. I play for the pine and cedar trees; for the light on the water; for the day's ending; for the sunlight that haloes all the finest pine needles with white fire.

One afternoon I played for a long time, and felt the silence move in around me. The silence that is deepened by the rustle of wind in the trees, by the pauses between the last note played on the flute and its echo from the low hills across the lake. The silence that deepens because it surrounds the few sounds remaining. The afternoon becomes completely still, and the pauses in between breeze sounds deepens until you can hear the Void behind the least sound.

But the Void no longer induces terror or fear, no longer threatens. It just is. It's just what you sense, that grounded emptiness beneath The Ten Thousand Things, when the illusions of consensus reality have all dropped away. This is the familiar Void, the comforting stillness of Nothing. I set out on this vacation to Do Nothing, and there it was.

After listening to the silence—which is worth at least a month of any other form of therapy—after hearing the Void behind the Silence, linger for awhile, the afternoon late afternoon sunlight bright and hot on bare skin, warming my fingers as they still hold the bamboo of my flute, linger and absorb this peace, this serenity, to bear with you as you re-enter the fray of what most call consensus life. Itself the culture that believes in its own necessity, neglecting to know its own lack of substance. In the silence, the world is vapor, and the walls between worlds so thin that all you have to do is step forward in your heart to meet the Great God Pan, god of panic, the Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

•



I awake in the late deep night, chilly and clear, the waning gibbous moon and the circumpolar stars all bright. I go out to the wall to drink some cold, cold water, and to the outhouse.

In the far distance, six or seven wolves howl. They are answered by a single wolf voice much nearer to me. The pack sounds about two miles away, on the land between two of the smaller lakes to the south and west. The wolves have been heard howling in our camping region for the past two or three summers, and tonight I get to hear them. Long low voices, singing in complex harmony.

These are not coyote howls. I know coyotes well, I've had many encounters with them, some very up close and personal. I know what coyote packs sounds like. These are true northern wolves.

After awhile, the loon resident on our little lake begins singing, motivations unknown.

The sounds blend together under the bright silver moon. Eerie, atavistic, beautiful, transcendent. Cold silver blue moonlight and wolves howling: the perfect night Up North.

I go back to my sleeping place and have intense vivid dreams all night long.

In the Garden Grows the Heart

This spring I've been too distracted, too busy, occasionally too tied up in knots medically, even depressed, to give my garden much attention. Suffice to say that I have been challenged, unhappy, and mostly not having a good time. I haven't been physically sick—this is the first winter in almost twenty years that I have not been stricken with a cold or flu. I got through the entire winter with no illnesses, no walking pneumonia, nothing. That's new since the surgery.



I do love getting my hands in the dirt: it's very healing. But for one reason or another, I haven't had much time for gardening this year so far. That's okay, though, because over the past few years since I bought my house I've been planning and panting a garden that is mostly self-maintaining, mostly perennials, and can tolerate neglect.




The garden is designed so that some flowers are blooming, giving color and light to my home, from early spring through the first frost in autumn: there is always color, always fragrance. When the crocuses fade, the daffodils and tulips begin. At the end of the season, after the lilies have gone, the chrysanthemums reach their peak, sometimes lasting till All Hallows.



This year my crabapple tree was astounding. Just bursting with colors, and full of very happy bees.



In addition to the idea that something should always be in bloom, I planned my garden to inspire me photographically. I make new images every year. Even when I neglect my gardening duties, it mostly takes care of itself, and surprises me. This year the lilies have split again and in a month or so I will surrounded by literally dozens of lilies in several varieties and colors. Come July, the perfume will be overpowering in the evening, just as I desire.



This year the columbines have exploded, bursting out in huge bunches of blue, white and purple.




at sunset the bees
hover fitfully over stars:
blue columbine



The bleeding hearts lasted a full month, due to the initial warm days followed by weeks of cool and wet. The garden looks a little wild and dense this year—more English country garden than Japanese Zen garden—and the little dry sculptures I've made out of rocks gathered throughout my travels are mostly hidden by green growing things.

I admit it. This garden has taken me years to plan and assemble, but I love it. It's the talk of the neighbors, who complement the garden every time we meet on the street by the mailboxes, or just to chat.

Akathleptos

Slow humming in the air as the finger writes
along the seam of a bag to close its contents in.
Musical tones that hum in the mind's ear
long past the recording's end. Ringing stillness.
Piercing bell tone that fills the mind, crystalizing
quiet nothing. A bell ringing in an empty sky.

Connections: Driving a two-lane back road, glimpse
at the edge of field between wood thicket and tall dry
cornstalks, buck deer lifts many-pronged head to watch.
A single antler found in the lawn under the window.
Something hums behind that liquid eye. Antlered gods
watch from autumn browns and greens the moon rise.

Nights dreamt under desert stars, immense sky pulling
you out of sleep into floating vertigo: falling up
into asterisms thick as milk, bright enough to see the trail.
See other suns laved with wanderers. Disk of skydust.
Stars so close to high-desert camp you can hear them hiss.
Mountain itself vibrating, gong struck by solar wind.

Days of blood and sand, beating fists on indifferent
granite slabs till they're streaked with drying iron rust.
Implacable silence of stone reply. There is no why.
Broken on an altar cancered with flowering lichen,
poison flask of grey silence, questioned, unanswered.
Mute tenacity to break down walls that won't be.

These smaller mysteries are all we can obtain.
Slow catechism of local spirits, determined and listed.
The largest truth we know, love is all,
compasses only a piece of the boat. Rocking across rivers.
One night, doors opened, light poured out over
lintels made of translucent ivory carved with runes, names,

the long list of those who had passed before. A threshold
radiant with actinic epiphany. A door opens, a door closes.
And forget again, containered back into pitted shells of brain,
blood, internal living ivory not yet fossilized with patience.
Pans too small to hold much water. There for the filling,
easily overflowed. Bread loaf made from the memory of wet.

Apoptosis

Long walk down a long incline, long exhaling,
slow long disintegration, and you sit there
curled in your easy chair wondering if you should go on.
Spent all your energy today trying to care either way.
Fingers stroking root to keep you going, fingers
in the cleft of a life, somehow tickling the soul.
Some rhythm, some fuel in the mitochondria that could be
the power that powers the soul, which the body is inside.
A long cloak. A long remembering of winters.
Death and rebirth are all you have to live for.
Still a reawakening, a cold morning cocooned in wool.

Then a bleak cold rainstruck day full of wind and ire.
No impression made on the flow of otherness, though,
since everything seemed to be smooth on errantry.
Dying to live in the same precession as living to die.
On the day of the dead, when the year too dies,
the path turns to leafmold and ash. Flicker of werelight.
You have to die and be reborn to be transformed.
A lot less theoretical than it used to be, this threshold.
The renewal and replacement of nature. Why did the Buddha
die from eating a mushroom? Like all fungi, mushrooms
break down old useless dead things, making way for
new life that is to come in its place. The Buddha died
a natural death. You can't go on till everything is shed,
shriven, taken from you. The transformed life is emptied,
first. So many days of wander.

Long dream of being unable to either wake or dream.
Some days you just live, inside a disposable bag of separation.
Dying and living, the same. Out back the mold smell
comes from trees in high cold winds. Comes down the chimney,
comes over the threshold, where a new world begins.
Doesn't make a scene, just arrives. The gray and the green,
eternal conflict of growth and dissolution. The gray takes down
what the green has wrought. Elemental Pan, spirit of growth,
of life, Green Man, his twin brother the Brown Man, Gray Man,
cloaked in wet rotten leaves, autumn threshold of decay.
One enters the woods, one leaves the grasslands. Wave
as you pass on. Cells eat each other when it's time to go.

I've died and been reborn. Again and again. This time, skin slotted
by knives, thin hard scars seeming an ecstasy of drowning,
seepage and sainthood in one flesh, this time the healing begins
with dying. The creative destruct, end of the world. Clear out the old,
bring in the new. Have to demolish the living world to make room
for the next to come. Clear out the old dead things. The Goddess said,
Your heart didn't heal right last time, so we'll have to break it again,
and reset it so it heals properly this time. And struck Her anvil.
It was a true dream. The morning birds pulsed with light.

Oh but this suffering and endurance I've witnessed 40 years of days
in the wilderness is supposed to be for my own good, my healing,
If only it didn't ache so. Rather be in bed with four naked souls
exploring the death of epidural skin cells under massaging fingers,
than spend another day in ascetic cemetery glut. What hospitals
lack in their chapels are those sacred temple prostitutes of gone eras.
Those lovers who give you a reason to want to live, to come back
from the dead, thereby healing you faster, bringing you back to life.
Love and death, the only reasons to go on living.

If we are hollowed out and emptied, it's to make room for spirits
to enter and entwine. It's we who are the vessels. Greenmantle is the shell
that sheds a cloak of leaves that burns in autumn to make new spores
for spring renewal. And so the house that Pan built. You have to be broken,
again and again, to become soft enough for the god to enter you.
A million years to make this black earth soil. Blown to dust in a dry season.
Desert wind that hollows the heart, make mine a pilgrim's cave.
Have to let go of what you thought you knew. Have to empty the teacup
in order to be able to fill it with new tea. Each drop of pure water
into the bucket filled with scum pushes one contaminated water drop out.
Eventually, a million or so drops later, the pure replaces the oilslicked.
It takes no naked skull to know that the god created a mechanism
of making, the power under life. It takes no bridge to stretch the chasm
between the making and the mechanism of the made.

Now we fall down. Now we slow to winter's sleep.
The dead of the dead. That spring will come around the wheel
once more requires a leap of faith. This could be our last winter,
the gods' sleep when wolves eat the moon and the father-god, half-blind
so he could see, loses hold of the runes that hold the worldtree
in its shape, so it all goes to snow and frozen fire. We come from
a dark abyss, we end in a darker void, we call the luminous
interval between those life. When we stare too long into those
silver-edged voids, they tend to stare back. Everything unnecessary
gets stripped away. That can be a great undoing, or a little one.

A thousand sayings, a thousand days. All of it unnecessary fog
over the mind of clover. Too much of mind, now, the overflowing
teacup, let's return to the body's inner fire, blue stars in our flesh,
blue sun on a necklace sparking out hearts, fire inside bones and thighs,
and the long return to life, after long dark, each dawn. Shut up,
now, in the cabin of words, and watch birds flash in the fire of green.
At last it's morning, after nightlong embers have fed the dying.

Poet and Priest

It would be a realization of that which as yet we glimpse from afar, if a priest were also to be a poet, if a poet were allowed to be a priest, if the life of a priest and that of a poet were to intermingle and be woven one into another. . . .

It is time that we asked: what has become of the times when great theologians also wrote hymns? When they could write like Ignatius of Antioch, compose poems like Methodius of Olympus, be carried in hymnody like Adam of St. Victor, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas? What has become of those times? Has theology become more perfect because theologians have become prosaic?
—Karl Rahner, "Priest and Poet," essay from his collection Theological Investigations

There's a long tradition—bardic, skaldic, shamanic—of the priest being a poet, of the poet being a priest. It's tied directly to the ancient Paleolithic conception of spirituality as animist, nature-connected, mystical: the world is divine, and the Divine is the world. Not "in the world," but "is the world." The ancient figures of the Green Man, of the Great God Pan, of the Piper at the Gates of Dawn: all masculine images of the fecund and fertile cycles of the living world, which dies every autumn in the harvest, and is reborn every spring with the return of the Greening. A truly agrarian cycle. Lived in miniatures in the house gardens we keep in our window-boxes in our apartment windows overlooking the streets of our cities that we imagine are somehow divorced from nature. "Pan" means "everything," after all, which by implication means all of nature itself, all of the cosmos, all of the Universe.

We live in a very left-brain, rationalistic, materialistic, Apollonian culture. The solar god Apollo symbolizes light and consciousness, reason and commerce and rationality. The agrarian, fecund, earthy god Dionysus welcomes spontaneity and irrationality, the wildly creative and the sensual, somatic, sexual body. The sun god is in the sky, detached and rational, giving light to the world but removed from it. The earthy god is the Earth itself, its cycles of seasons, climate, violent and benign weather alike, tethered by gut-level emotion, feeling, and (right-brain) intuition to the physical and dark: the darkness of shadows, soil, and the grave. No wonder the priests of Apollo fear the revels of Dionysus: the celebrations of life that no do not ignore the reality of death, of the limitations of life, of the body. The detached mind prefers to believe it's immortal and unchanging, and events rational religions with philosophical theology to explain and affirm its immortality. Theology, however, is talking about God, rather than being a direct experience of God. When theology becomes too rational, too prosaic, the direct experience of God, which is often a disruptive experience, is given to the poets, the artists, the mystics, and the drunken (unmanageable) ecstatics who follow Dionysus.

Apollo fears Dionysus—but both are necessary, two halves of a whole that must be integrated, to become fully human. Organized, institutional religion prefers Apollo—a god who manages, and can be managed—while spirituality, individual, anarchic, based on experience rather than theory, prefers Dionysus.

We manage our art: we turn it into entertainment, thereby denature its potency, and then pat ourselves on the backs for being meaningless, for making poetry that has no impact on the world, that is in fact completely divorced from the world. But entertainment is death, precisely to the extent that it is not life-affirming. So much of popular music presented to us as entertainment is narcissistically anthropocentric to the point of nihilism. Where is its social consciousness? Where is its connection to the function of prophecy? of being the words of the priest?

I don't really believe in "American Idol." First of all, you would never find Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan on "American Idol." They would never have won.
—k.d. lang

Poet-priest k.d. lang once again speaking the truth no-one else has bothered to mention. And she's absolutely right. She articulates my own feelings, which I'd never put so clearly into words: why I don't watch "American Idol," and never have. The model of the music business that "American Idol" portrays is bitterly accurate in its fickleness, harshness, and supportive moments alike—both good and bad. There's a lot of that in real life, off course, but when you take bards and turn them into entertainers and then do your best to make a profit off them, it brings out the shadow something fierce. Many of the more independent-minded bards get out, or fight through on their own terms, and refuse to be broken. (Which is the theme of Tom Petty's song "I Won't Back Down.")

Can you imagine a recorded music industry if it was run not by non-creative business managers (who can be correctly perceived as parasites living off the creative gifts of others) but by poet-priests?

In fact, I can: it's what happened in the 1970s, when practically anyone who could put out a self-produced vinyl LP of their own, idiosyncratic music; and it is what is happening right now, when composers and songwriters can connect directly with their listeners via Internet downloads and direct album sales that do not pass through the gatekeepers and managers of the music industry. (Something which greatly upsets the managers, who fear losing their parasitical profits.) The managers are also no longer the gatekeepers of taste, deciding what gets released to the public and what does not. When artists can sell directly to their public, without going through the middle-managers, it's direct democracy in action: one person, one vote. (Which is theme of the song by Johnny Clegg & Savuka, "One (Hu)'Man, One Vote.")

So, what's wrong with self-publishing a chapbook of your own poems? Nothing. The big publishers would like us to believe that unless they retain their status as gatekeepers of taste, a lot of bad poetry will get published. The truth is, though, that a lot of bad poetry was published even when they were the de facto gatekeepers. Their track record on publishing quality is random at best, fouled at worst.

There will soon be no more priests. Their work is done. They may wait awhile..perhaps a generation or two..dropping off by degrees. A superior breed shall take their place....the gangs of kosmos and prophets en masse shall take their place. A new order shall arise and they shall be the priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest. The churches built under their umbrage shall be the churches of men and women. Through the divinity of themselves shall the kosmos and the new breed of poets be interpreters of men and women and of all events and things. They shall find their inspiration in real objects today, symptoms of the past and future....They shall not deign to defend immortality or God or the perfection of things or liberty or the exquisite beauty and reality of the soul. They shall arise in America and be responded to from the remainder of the earth.
—Walt Whitman, "Preface" to Leaves of Grass (1855 edition)

Merry Beltane

I can't get to any Beltane gatherings this year, but I did go out this afternoon, while it was still sunny, and stick my hands into the garden dirt. Planted calla lilies and tulips, weeded some pernicious scrub grass, cleaned out and mulched the hosta bed, generally spent time connecting with the renewing and healing earth. Daffodils exploding everywhere, the tulips about to bloom, too. Possibly even tomorrow; there was one tulip whose bud was reddening all day, visibly changing during the day. Lilies emerging from the earth. The bleeding heart bushes have spread, and are nascent with pink flowers. I should probably transplant a few of them to the back garden, to thin them out. The rose bushes are all coming back to life, with small red-green leaves clustered around their bases, and some of the last year's stems greening up again. Robins in the crabapple trees that are just about to flower.



The Great God Pan, the Green Man, all coming back to life now. Reminds me to feel alive, even when I'm not at my full strength.



So, Happy Beltane to those who celebrate the return of spring to the land. And happy spring to everyone else.

Blessed Be!

Restless Spirits

It's that time of year again. That time of year when the ghost stories and the ghoulie images and the badly clichéd horror movies are all dragged out, dusted off, and given an airing. I found a few vintage "ghost" images by doing a simple Web search:



These classic photos are heavily influenced by the Spiritualist craze of a century or so ago. THe ghosts are painted in, or multiply exposed. One image contains Spiritualist symbols hovering in the air around the person's head, no doubt meant to be seen as floating in his aura. During that time, lots of mediums held seances to contact the dead, the Ouija board became popular, and it all became rather a parlor game. Some mediums were exposed as hoaxes; Harry Houdini made a particular crusade of debunking Spiritualism. The Ouija board does work, certainly—but it doesn't contact any spirits you really want to talk to. More parlor games. Cheap thrills. A little spooky titillation. An evening night's fun scaring each other.

Randolph Stow, an Australian writer, set his novel The Girl Green as Elderflower in Suffolk, where he lived towards the end of his life. It's one of the most memorable novels I've ever read, along with another of his, Visitants. A lot of The Girl Green as Elderflower is based on Suffolk folklore, including the local Green Man nature spirits, and one contacted via Ouija board who appears to have evolved from ghost to genius loci. In this novel, the Ouija board is believable, and benign; it's operated by a rather fey child, who seems half-spirit herself at times. Anyway, it's an excellent, even thrilling novel, which I recommend.

Otherwise, I hate Ouija boards. They're nothing anyone wants to fool about with.

The Spiritualism of seances, mediums, and contacting the dead, even though it was a popular craze a century ago, never developed into anything substantial. It's associated somewhat with some of the founders of The Theosophical Society, many of whom were influenced by the Eastern mysticism just being discovered in the West at that time, and some of whom were active explorers and documenters of psychic and supernatural phenomena.

The Day of the Dead, Hallowe'en, All Hallow's Eve, All Saints' Eve, has an older history. It's the old Celtic pagan festival of summer's end, called Samhain. In Mexico, it's the Day of the Dead, when people go to the cemeteries to commune with the ancestral dead. Whole hosts of cultures have similar celebrations. The Japanese festival of honoring the ancestral dead, the O-Bon festival, ostensibly Shinto-Buddhist, is in fact much older, and predates the arrival of Buddhism in Japan. Other cultures all have their days of the dead, when the living connect with the dead. Many cultures feature rituals of cleaning and decorating the ancestral gravesites, be they cemeteries or caves.

This time of year, it is said, the Veil between the worlds grows thin, making it easier to contact the dead. And making it easier to walk between worlds, especially on Samhain night, when the Doors open between worlds. So modern neo-pagans will often scry during Samhain rituals, to divine their near future, to finish whatever unfinished business with the dead is left to be handled. It's a rich time.



Ray Bradbury wrote a short illustrated novel titled The Halloween Tree, a version of which was made into an animated TV movie special, first aired in 1993. The story takes a small group of children traveling through time to discover the real meaning and historical roots of Hallowe'en, and where some of the customs of the night originated. It's a genuinely scary and thrilling story, even for adults. I recommend the book and TV special alike to your attention; actually, I recommend Bradbury's entire opus as some of the best writing of the 20th C. Two Bradbury novels which made a huge impact on me, and which I still re-read occasionally are Dandelion WIne and his genuinely creepy fantasy thriller Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Last Hallowe'en, handing out candy to the many neighborhood kids from my front door, I received what I took to be a great compliment. A group of older teenage girls came up to me, all smiles, and told me that I had the spookiest house in the neighborhood. that made my day. Although I've been ill a lot, and am tired, and have been struggling to do errands this month, I intend to have the spookiest house in the neighborhood again this year.

Of course, one of my secrets to achieving that honor was that I hid a small sound system in the bushes in front of the house, next to the walkway, where no one could see it, but from where emerged lots of spooky sounds that I'd edited together. I mixed for this playback event a custom full-length CD of horror sound effects, spooky classical music tone-poems such as Mussourgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain," and other material. It was lots of fun making that edit, actually.

Having led off with some silly vintage photos, I'll end with two more serious ones, which for me evoke the mood and spirit of this time of the year's turning round.


O-Bon


the Witch Tree

Green Man 2

In the Greening, the Great God Pan, the Green Man rises again, come Spring, come Summer.

Earth Spirals

Spirals made in my garden, during the last warm days in November, before the first snow. A last resurgence of the earth spirits before the quiet dormant months. We won't see these patterns again till spring. Then they'll emerge from the melting snow like crocus emerging from the soil.

the Greening

In the 12th Century C.E. abbess and mystic Hildegard of Bingen coined the word veriditas, a blend of the Latin words for "green" and "truth." Verditas describes nature's divine healing power, the power under life that sustains all life. When we eat green plants, we take in veriditas. We re-connect with nature through veriditas.



Gardening is an active participation in the lifeforce, in the mysteries of the universe, in creation, in management. When I garden, I feel connected to the earthpower. When I tour caves, deep underground, one of my favorite kinds of place to visit when I am traveling, I feel surrounded by the earth, by Earth, by Gaia, by the earthpower, by the element of Earth, the element I am naturally strongest in. When I re-connect with Earth, I come back to center, I find healing, I find solace and comfort. Earthworms constantly churn the topsoil: everything we love that grows, every ounce of soil, has passed through an earthworm's digestive canal, at one time or another, to be cleansed.

There is a spiritual capacity in carbon as there is a carbon component functioning in our highest spiritual experience. If some scientists consider that all this is merely a material process, then what they call matter, I call mind, soul, spirit, or consciousness. Possibly it is a question of terminology, since scientists too on occasion use terms that express awe and mystery. Most often, perhaps, they use the expression that some of the natural forms they encounter seem to be “telling them something."
—Thomas Berry

My purpose is to garden, to watch the cycles of life and death that spin the Yearwheel round. My purpose is to make art, music, poems, because to make is to participate with the Divine in Co-Creation. My purpose is to get out of my own way. My purpose is to keep going, to keep making art, even on the day I die.

Meister Eckhart compares the work of the artist with the Annunciation scene. The spirit that comes over Mary and begets the Christ in Mary. He says this is the same spirit that comes over the artist and begets the Christ. So this is the Cosmic Christ being born in you. And of course it’s Eckhart who says, “What good is it if Mary gave birth to the son of God 1400 years ago and I don’t give birth to the son of God in my own person in my own work.” That’s art. What you give birth to is the Christ, or the Shekinah the wisdom, or the Buddha nature. You are giving birth to it just like Mary.
—Matthew Fox



Everything that is, is alive. The world is alive with beauty, with grace, with seed. I make thousands of photographs of flowers in bloom: flowers, the sexual organs of the plant in question. The sexual display. The Divine's creative sexuality, fecund with the greening, with veriditas. My friend Al calls these photos bee porn.

There is no creation that does not have a radiance. Be it greenness or seed, blossom or beauty, it could not be creation without it.
—Hildegard of Bingen

Gardening is aprticipation, is co-creation. So is making art. But art-making needs to be done with the intention to co-create. Poets most praise, for poetry is either praise or masturbation. Art-making must be done with concentration, focus, and attention. It must also be done with intention. Not mere self-pleasuring, but in order to get something out, to get it down, to spell it clearly.

The mere process of fixing imagery onto surfaces or forms does not ensure spiritual development. It is the intention and awareness from which artists create that determine whether their work will serve mammon, ego or spirit.
—Alex Grey, artist

Intention does not mean fixing meaning. It does not mean interpretation, or programme. Intention does mean focused awareness, and thinking of the consequences of actions. Why is there so much ugly art in the world? Is it still trying to shock us with its newness?

I plant lilies, I plant hosta, I plant bulbs and rooted plants, and know they will eventually spread. Fecund and green, the rising life that emerges each spring from the soil in my garden is life itself, returning after winter's dormant slumber. In early spring the ferns grow from fiddlehead to full expanse, from mere fingers of light into long shade-shelters.



And there is an inner music. I hear the roots grow, ever so slowly. I hear the worms crawl inside the soil, rough and smooth, rasping and swallowing. I hear the scrape of cricket's legs on fallen leaves. I hear

Underneath all the texts, all the sacred psalms and canticles, these watery varieties of sounds and silences, terrifying, mysterious, whirling and sometimes gestating and gentle must somehow be felt in the pulse, ebb, and flow of the music that sings in me. My new song must float like a feather on the breath of God.
—Hildegard of Bingen



The soul is a breath of living spirit that
with excellent sensitivity
permeates the entire body to give it life.
Just so,
The breath of the air makes the earth fruitful.
Thus the air is the soul of the earth,
Moistening it; greening it.
—Hildegard of Bingen

An Encounter with Pan

E.M. Forster published "The Story of a Panic" in his collection The Celestial Omnibus in 1923. The story is told from the viewpoint of an unreliable narrator, a bit of a priggish English vicar to be honest, and is about a group of English tourists in the Italian countryside, who experience a moment of panic, literal panic, in the hills above Ravello.

Forster writes, in the voice of his narrator, of that moment:

The conversation turned to various topics and then died out. It was a cloudless afternoon in May, and the pale green of the young chestnut leaves made a pretty contrast with the dark blue of the sky. We were all sitting at the edge of the small clearing for the sake of the view, and the shade of the chestnut saplings behind us was manifestly insufficient. All sounds died away—at least that is my account: Miss Robinsons says that the clamour of the birds was the first sign of uneasiness that she discerned. All sounds died away, except that, far in the distance, I could hear two boughs of a great chestnut grinding together as the tree swayed. The grinds grew shorter and shorter, and finally that sound stopped also. As I looked over the green fingers of the valley, everything was absolutely motionless and still; and that feeling of suspense which one so often experiences when Nature is in repose, began to steal over me.

Suddenly, we were all electrified by the excruciating noise Eustace's whistle. I never heard any Instrument give forth so ear-splitting and discordant a sound.

“Eustace, dear," said Miss Mary Robinson, "you might have thought of your poor Aunt Julia's head."

Leyland who had apparently been asleep, sat up.

"It is astonishing how blind a boy is to anything that is elevating or beautiful," he observed. "I should not have thought he could have found the wherewithal out here to spoil our pleasure like this."

Then the terrible silence fell upon us again. I was now standing up and watching a catspaw of wind that was running down one of the ridges opposite, turning the light green to dark as it traveled. A fanciful feeling of foreboding came over me; so I turned away, to find to my amazement, that all the others were also on their feet, watching it too.

It is not possible to describe coherently what happened next: but I, for one, am not ashamed to confess that, though the fair blue sky was above me, and the green spring woods beneath me, and the kindest of friends around me, yet I became terribly frightened, more frightened than I ever wish to become again, frightened in a way I never have known either before or after. And in the eyes of the others, too, I saw blank, expressionless fear, while their mouths strove in vain to speak and their hands to gesticulate. Yet, all around us were prosperity, beauty, and peace, and all was motionless, save the catspaw of wind, now traveling up the ridge on which we stood.

Who moved first has never been settled. It is enough to say that in one second we were tearing away along the hill-side. Leyland was in front, then Mr. Sandbach, then my wife. But I only saw for a brief moment; for I ran across the little clearing and through the woods and over the undergrowth and the rocks and down the dry torrent beds into the valley below. The sky might have been black as I ran, and the trees short grass, and the hillside a level road; for I saw nothing and heard nothing and felt nothing, since all the channels since all the channels of sense and reason were blocked. It was not the spiritual fear that one has known at other times, hut brutal overmastering physical fear, stopping up the ears, and dropping clouds before the eyes, and filling the mouth with foul tastes. And it was no ordinary humiliation that survived; for I had been afraid, not a man, but as a beast.

More cannot be said. Possibly not even a poet could find suitable words to depict an experience so primal, so mysterious.

The rest of Forster's story is about the aftermath of this event. The young man, really a boy, among their party, Eustace, is open to the experience of meeting Pan, and would become a Pan-worshipper then and there, as only one of the Italian locals seems to understand; but Eustace is restrained, thought to be mad by his oh-so-proper English companions, and fights wildly to escape, only to die mysteriously in the end. Forster is equivocal about the meaning of this death: was it perhaps a boy rushing into the arms of his god? The English tourists, disturbed and shattered as they are by their own experience of Chaos, can only comprehend it as a tragedy. The boy is understood and supported only by the young Italian man present at their hotel—himself no doubt a knower of Pan—and there is a homoerotic subtext to the story, as the connection between Eustace and the young Italian is sensual in ways the English neither comprehend nor condone. That wildness, that freedom, that openness to Nature and its powers: that is entirely what overly "civilized" men suppress in themselves.

Pan is the god of panic as well as of nature. He is the wild, the things we cannot contain or explain or control. To be a follower of Pan means giving up control. You cannot predict what will happen: you could die, torn apart in your ecstasy the way Orpheus was ripped apart by deranged followers of Dionysos.

Pan (sometimes appearing as Dionysos, or Eros, or even Priapus) is a theme that recurs in literature again and again: a necessary wildness. We are more wild than we like to think we are, and we need a necessary wildness to keep our balance. If we become too Apollonian, and forget Pan/Dionysos entirely, we become stifled and stiff and blocked and repetitive. A soul-death awaits not long after. Writers need to be wild.

There are other moments of Pan's panic that I remember encountering in works of literature, and the other arts, that have stayed clear in my memory, as moments of liberating breaking-open. An encounter with Pan is always liminal, always a threshold experience, always happening in part in an interzone between reality and other-reality. And never without fear, or some other version of panic—we are always somewhat afraid of what we cannot comprehend, even if we welcome it—but also as moments of recognition. I keep returning to these many moments in recognition, and to remind myself not to be too certain about life, its meanings, or anything else, really. There are still many huge Mysteries that exist, and break through into our lives, always without warning. What is a vision but an experience of panic?

There is a legend (retold in the Forster story, but not invented by him; it also occurs in Moroccan folklore, for example) of sailors in the Mediterranean off the wild shoreline hearing three loud knocks echo across the sky, then a loud voice out of the sky saying, "The Great God Pan is dead." Another legend has it this happened when the Christ was born, signaling the change of gods from old religion to new—but while it's easy to believe in the legend of the great voice, it's also easy to disbelieve the recounted timing as part of the pagan-Christian tension that dominated Europe during the early centuries Anno Domini.

Nonetheless, Pan is very much alive. If we could recognize his form, his new and changed forms, and manifestations, and visitations upon us, then he wouldn't be Pan. Just like the Tao: The Pan which can be named is not the true Pan.

The themes of Peter Weir's film Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) are in many ways parallel to Forster's story. In a way, Weir's film is a profound homage to Forster's story. The themes of repression, both cultural and sexual, are overt in the film; the theme of Mystery is depicted, vividly and terrifyingly, in ways very similar to Forster's description. On a picnic on Valentine's Day, a hot silent afternoon, four school girls disappear mysteriously at Hanging Rock; this causes a huge rent in the local social fabric, and the rest of the film traces the aftermath of things falling apart. One young man, having a deep crush on one of the girls who disappeared, goes up into Hanging Rock a few days later, and in a similar mysterious event, brings her back. But the one girl's return to the girl's school is even more terrible, as it brings to the surface all the fears and frustrations and panic of the other girls. There is a homoerotic thread of love between some of the schoolgirls, depicted by Weir simply and with elegance, that further parallels the homoerotic subtext of Forster's story.

What rough beast, in Yeats' poem "The Second Coming," often interpreted to be the coming of the Antichrist, could also be interpreted as the return of Pan: of nature-worship, of paganism.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

This poem was written in 1919, in the aftermath of the horrors of World War I—that first awakening to the death of meaning that became the Twentieth Century, that became Modernism, and eventually post-modernism's deliberate equal leveling of all meaning or value into eclectic sampler culture. (Could post-modernism have happened without samplers, and digitization, and the computer's impact on contemporary culture? It seems doubtful.) The poem is usually interpreted as depicting the end of certainty, of the old traditions, as the Modern age begins, with its horrors and uncertainties—and so the poem is often seen as apocalyptic: but perhaps it is in fact hopeful. The disruption of the social fabric is necessary, the old must fall away, so that the new life can begin, to make a new and perhaps better world.

What if the new arrival on the scene was Pan, his hour come round at last, in the great cycle of death and rebirth, to reclaim his place as the mover of events, the bringer of chaos, the destroyer who clears the way for new creation, much as Shiva brings about the explosion out of which life begins? Is that enough to cause panic?

The creative destruct is almost a Modernist archetype. It shows up in those French poets who more or less invented Modernist European poetry, working in France at almost the same times as Whitman, Dickinson, and Emerson in the US. I refer of course to Lautremont, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud. Later, Artaud continues this work of "the derangement of the senses." Much commentary on Baudelaire and Rimbaud focuses on the "bad boy" element of the poetry, and of the poets, too: the explicit, intentional shock-value; the breaking-away from normative social values; the experimentation with things society hates and fears. Artaud extends these tropes further in his Theatre of Cruelty. (One notes as an aside that post-Modern adolescent young males in Euro-American culture tend to be as obsessed with Rimbaud, in their teenage years, as do many adolescent Euro-American females with Sylvia Plath; and for similar reasons.)

Yet what is often missed in literary criticism is Baudelaire's intention, openly stated by the poet, to tear down the old literary values so that something new can come in, something alive and fresh and vivid, rather than formalist, stale, decadent, and corrupt. Lautremont and Baudelaire developed the prose-poem form in part as a reaction against the straightjacket of French formalist metric verse, dominated for over a century by the alexandrine; so the prose-poem itself was a revolt, a rebellion, an attempt to shake loose of the old stale literary values and tropes. Baudelaire knew that he needed to destroy before he could create. Baudelaire wanted to start all over again, with a clean slate.

And that is the key to the creative destruct archetype: the old must be cleared away, before the new can be brought in.

Where most literary critics, and most writers for that matter, fail utterly to comprehend this archetype is that they get hung up on the initial destruction, and never get to the creation—or, if they do, it's an afterthought. Merely a footnote, in some cases. The last, redemptive chapter of Dostoevsky's Crime & Punishment is barely 5 percent of the overall book. Death is always sexier, according to the rules of commercial publishing, than is redemption. Much more ink is spilled depicting the awful, than is spent on reporting good outcomes. We've gone so far, in this, that many artists and critics have become so immersed in thinking that only violence and degradation are "true stories" or can depict the truth, that even the redemptive ending of Crime & Punishment is criticized as unbelievable.

All too many artists act as if they believe that only evil is real; that men are beasts; that there is no hope. Crime fiction and police procedural TV shows continue to be, unquestioned, the dominant forms and stories in our culture: best-selling suspense are almost universally whodunits. Only a happy ending in mainstream fiction is suspect.

And thus we have a century and more of unrelentingly bleak and horrific apocalyptic art, relentlessly rehearsing and proclaiming The End Of All Things—The Modern Urban Apocalypse—so that very little hope is left, very little depiction of what comes after the apocalypse. If you look back in European cultural history to find anything similar, you must go back to the late Middle Ages, where the Apocalypse was one of the main story themes. Frank Wilson coined the term pornography of despair during a review of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel The Road—and Frank's coinage works very well, in my interpretation, to categorize all this relentlessly apocalyptic art, which gives us The End, over and over again, but never fast-forwards to what survives after what is lost, or what might be rebuilt. Or, if it does, it's often only the last page: an afterthought, a tiny little bit of equivocal hope, more of a sop to sentimentality than an actual resurrection. So we have the pornography of despair.

But in all this, we forget Pan. Because Pan is that resurrection, that return to life. Pan is not the god of the apocalypse, but the god of the return of Nature's meaning, the god of Chaos: and it is out of Chaos that Order emerges, or re-emerges, that form arises, that a new world is born. The cycles of time, in many of the world's greatest mythologies, are depictions of this dance of Chaos and Order. Michael Moorcock, in his large cycle of stories of the Multiverse, of the many incarnations of the Eternal Champion, defines Creation as a dynamic balance between Law and Chaos. We could also say: between Apollo and Dionysos; between Christ and Pan; between totalitarianism and anarchism. And there are yet other names for this balance. Again, the Tao: the yin-yang interpenetration of light and dark, each constantly emerging from the other, whirling forever in dynamic balance.

Michael Crichton, trained as a medical doctor, but rather an anti-science critical philosopher in all his fiction best-sellers, puts the apocalypse into perspective. He has his mathematician character, Ian Malcolm, indirectly remind the reader in Jurassic Park that what we call the apocalypse is only our apocalypse. Malcolm objects to the "death of all life" scenarios that the environmentalist doom-sayers repeat, almost as cant: in fact, if humanity does manage to exterminate itself, this isn't the end of the world. The cockroaches and lichens will survive our human apocalypse. "Life will find a way," says Malcolm.

And that is Pan's message: life will find a way. It will always find a way.

Jurassic Park is a novel in the modern genre of post-apocalyptic fiction; but it also about resistance, and renewal. It reminds us that we are not the end-product of Creation, its ultimate achievement; it is only our hubris as a species that allows us to think so highly of ourselves, in our arrogance. This reminder of our true, rather small, place in Creation is akin to what is found in much of Robinson Jeffers' poetry.

Crichton's strength as a fiction writer lay in the accuracy of his science, in the truth of his mathematics, and so his speculations are grounded in more reality than a lot of other post-apocalyptic fiction. If you want a sense of the science behind the apocalypse, gather in the paleontologist's perspective, and ask what the fossil record tells us about the history and extinction of species on our planet.

There have been at least 5 "extinction level events" found in the geologic record: 5 times in which The End Of The World has made room for new species to develop, evolve, grow to fill in the ecological niches, and spread outwards across the face of the world. If we humans experience another ELE, we can have faith that life will still find a way: Pan will watch new life spread outward across the planet, eventually.

The second dose of humility offered by the paleontological record is that, ELEs or not, most species only live a few million years, at most, then degrade, and disappear. Most species have a species-level lifetime, analogous to our individual lifetimes. Most species only endure for a few million years, then die out. For every species alive on Earth today, there are many more that lived out their millions-year lifetimes, as species, and have died a natural death.

Of course, one way in which species live out their lifetimes and disappear is that they sometimes evolve into something unrecognizable, new, and completely different. I doubt a member of Australopithecus would comprehend us as his distant children, as cousins. If we as a species also someday become something other than what we can recognize as still ourselves, we no doubt will regard that change as a kind of death, a kind of apocalypse. The pain of birth is refracted in the pain of rebirth. What we think is the apocalypse is only our apocalypse. We re-emerge, changed:

Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
—from Shakespeare, The Tempest

Rich and strange, what rough beast, suffering a sea-change, only to re-emerge, new and utterly Other. This is action of Pan: this is what panic is, what Pan does to stir the world to keep it alive, keep it new, keep it green, fertile, and alive with possibility.

Our fear of Pan's encounter, our panic, is that must give up what we were, to become what we shall become, what we must become. Our panic is because we don't know what's happening, or what we are turning into.

Let's hope that we cannot avoid that wildness in ourselves, that rich wildness, which we need in order to survive. Let's hope, next time we encounter Pan, that the boy will live.

The Essentially Pagan Nature of Environmentalism

Last dream before waking: I am carrying a load of wood, long stripped pine logs, with others, from a forest patch to a trucking site down the road; our work group is two Native girls, a friend, and myself; we take turns carrying and maneuvering the load of wood, trying to get where we’re going; we get to talking about our motivations for why we have all become environmentalists; I talk about my birth and life in Michigan, how I felt directly connected to the land, how I still feel connected to the land when I settle some place; the older of the two Native girls, the one who talks, finds this a good thing, and close in kind to the values and feelings she herself has, and was raised to believe.

People need to always remember, the Earth will endure, even if we destroy ourselves. We could destroy ourselves, still, and the habitats we rely on for survival. But “save the planet” needs to be rephrased as “save ourselves.” We are the ones in danger. The planet itself is enduring, and will still be here even after we, as a species, have either died out, or evolved on to some other state, possibly a space-borne one, either technologically or inherently, or something wildly beyond imagining.

The dream, and the thoughts it springs forward upon waking, that I’ve written here, remind me of the essentially pagan nature of the thoughts and feelings behind the environmental movement(s). Pagan, in the original Latin, meant the people of the countryside, the pagani, as opposed to those who dwelled in the center of culture in the Big City. Pagan also meant the country people's little religions, the thousand little gods, the statues of Priapus in the village greens, and other fertility symbols, the old Dionysian/Bacchan rites, the gods and festivals that were tied to and marked the agricultural annual cycle. Pagan, once Rome became Christian, the Holy Roman Empire, who consolidated their power in the One True Church, as some have called it, also came to mean all the little pre-Christian, non-Christian belief-systems and local religions that institutional Christianity strove to supplant throughout Europe. Thus do the conquering monoliths of organized faiths label those they have supplanted, murdered, and exterminated: heretics, heathens, witches (which meant, originally, wise ones), pagans. During the Inquisition, which some scholars insist has never ended, women and men alike were burned as witches because their local wisdom was based on the local herbs and beliefs, not the One True Church. The shift in meaning of the word pagan to mean non-Christian was part of a method of centralized political control, of the consolidation of temporal power as well as religious domination. In which case, being the fundamentally anti-authoritarian beast that I am, it pleases me to be labeled, pagan, witch, heretic, faggot. I own all those labels proudly, in defiance of Church authorities. And my dreams, ever archetypal and resonant, continue to remind me of my own essentially pagan nature: my feel for the land, for the forces of nature, weather, time, erosion, wabi-sabi, the agricultural annual cycle, and the non-human beings that travel alongside us on this turning globe. There’s a squirrel bounding across the snow in the yard out back: gather ye nuts and berries while ye may.

I am not anti-human in the slightest, although I don’t think we’re the center of the universe, the measure of all things, or the end product of evolution. Evolution continues, and will do so when we're gone. If the theory of evolution is correct, our species like many other species has a lifespan of probably a few million years, at most. After that, we would not even recognize ourselves, if we are still here; we'll either have evolved or become extinct. The globe will circle our Sun for much longer than that. The earth does care about us, her wayward children, of this I have no doubt. Meister Eckhart’s comment about how we feel separated from the Divine, be it God or Gaea, is relevant here: God is at home, it is we who have gone out for a walk. In all of this I agree with Robinson Jeffers, in his oft-misunderstood philosophy of Inhumanism, which is not misanthropic but rather reaffirms that all things human are rather small, and not the center of the universe. I am not anti-human, but I am opposed to the excesses of some of the humanist philosophy, which at times approaches narcissistic self-regard at the level of solipsism. What I am for is including everybody else in our self-regard, not forgetting that we are all One, and that a good guest in a home doesn’t mess up the furniture or leave dirty dishes in the sink.

But perhaps selfishness is the only motivation that many people will hitch their wagons to. If you point out that the real truth of the environmental movement is not “save the planet” but “save ourselves,” maybe people will actually begin to pay attention, and wake up to the truth that it’s not healthy to shit where you sleep. The planet will endure, whether or not we do. If an appeal to enlightened self-interest is what it takes us to clean up our acts, literally, then I’m all for it.

Archetype of the Garden

The Garden is an archetype, it's tied to the archetype of Paradise, lost or not. It turns up in artwork, myth, legend, and story from every culture; that's one way you can tell it's an archetype, from its ubiquity. From a depth psychology viewpoint, the entire environmental movement is perhaps motivated by the Garden archetype, and our desire to return to it, to create it. To re-create it. Gardens flourish in community patches, even on big city rooftops, in public parks, and surrounding private homes.

I have never really understood why an emerald grassy lawn should be considered more beautiful than a garden ramble. A manicured lawn is of course a symbol of the suburban control and domination of nature. And the Garden is always a little wild, a little chaotic, a little overgrown.

I have my own garden now, since I have my own home. I own my home, now. It's a small home, but I was able to pay for it out of my inheritance from mr parents' estates, and have no mortgage. The opportunity to live here arrived suddenly, and inexplicably, as if by magic. Everything fell together synchronistically and quickly. When I first toured what would be come my home, I had that feeling of rightness that real estate agents and homeowners talk about, when you just know you're in the right place, that you're supposed to be here. It was a novel feeling for me; this is the first home I've ever owned. It's small, but it's mine. A place to be, for awhile.

I have lived in or visited the tropic regions of this planet for significant periods of my lifetime. I grew up in India, about 14 degrees north of the Equator. I spent a year in Java, Indonesia, about 6 degrees south of the Equator. (The terms above and below the Equator show a historic Northern bias, which one might note even while using them.) Last summer I was in southernmost Florida. The smells of these places are thick, fertile, fetid, and memory-inducing. Smell-memory of tropical plants gives me childhood flashbacks. I could come to love parts of Florida, the state parks especially, even though this recent trip was a difficult, challenging, and occasionally horrible visit. The problem with Florida, as with so many garden paradises, is human overpopulation. We just don't seem to know how to find a balance, or when to quit.

We live on a Garden planet. A fertile planet. A giving world. Beautiful to the senses and nourishing to the spirit and body, a Garden was our first home. Our biggest problem is that there are too many of us, and we haven't yet learned not to shit where we sleep. Our short-term greed leaves long-term scars. Our greed gets us into trouble that we might not be able to repair. Gaea is good at repairing herself, give enough time; but we don't live at the time-scale anymore, as individuals, tribes, nations, or as a species. Gaea can absorb a great deal of our waste: but not an infinite amount. She is still but one small blue planet among a vast host.

Have we lost the Garden? No angel with a flaming sword could guard those gates nearly as well does our own remorse and guilt. In truth, we exile ourselves from the Garden; no one else is to blame. We made choices that led us to leave the Garden, and go exploring. These were necessary choices, because they led us towards growing up, becoming responsible adults, rather than remaining sequestered and secluded, infantile innocents. But still we want to return. We want to return not as innocents, any longer; but for solace, and perhaps for deeper knowledge of what we once knew, and left behind.

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
—Joni MItchell, Woodstock

The Garden is where we find the Tree of Life, with bees buzzing around its roots, transmitting teachings to the flowers from the soil. The Garden is where the Earth Spirit lives, emerging from below to shape the soil. The breath of Dragons between the hills.

In a dry river bed in a Japanese garden, filled with smooth black stones, small moss fronds make their home. Elsewhere, a thin-bladed maple darkens its leaves in shyness towards dusk.

Shade of the dates in an oasis surrounded by tall sand-dunes: shade that provides cool shelter, the water of life.

Fetid lushness of the mangrove swamp, patiently making land where none was before; then the birds move into their new apartments, and the gators.

On a high mesa in the cold light, a stand of sages moves slowly towards the cliff-edge, clinging, clinging. When they flower, bee-lust, intoxication.

The Garden is too big, in itself and as a topic. I can barely touch on it. I can only offer scattershot images, knowing that each one will find a home, deep down, move in and sit there, humming. (The bees, again.) I have to pull back and look under my own feet; I can't take in the titanic world.

My own small garden, in patches that surround my own small home on all sides, is settling in for the winter. On the north wall, the barest wall, the riverstones under the drainspout—I added a new layer—sit round and mostly smooth and content, waiting for their annual ice-rind. On the west, the wall with the big windows I sit beside when I write, the rosebushes and crocus are mulched. On the south, the side bed banked with flat limestone slabs is ablaze with red leaves on the row of shrubs. In two places, spring bulbs lie waiting.

On the east side, by the front door, the largest flowerbeds lie ready. Planted with spring bulbs, beginning to move before the frost slows them to dormancy, white rootlets are emerging. They're not awake, yet, just stirring before their deeper sleep, under their blanket of cedar chips.

I worked hardest in this part of the Garden, this year, removing some of what was stagnant, waiting till spring to better organize what remains. I removed three slow juniper shrubs that were growing sideways instead of tall, that had become hard and slow and stupid. A hundred flowers will bloom in their place, come spring. I planted mostly perennials, that need little service, and will return in glory each year. They will be in a mix of formal rows and wild tangles. A Garden should always remain half-wild, a little uneven and chaotic, and never be too manicured, too organized. Some parts should always be left to go nuts, frolic in mad reverie, explode in all directions. You can weed and control and organize all the other zones; but always leave one spot imperfect and natural. It's the spirit line, coming back into the weave, in which Gaea's breath moves through. Sun and wind, storm and calm, all are powers greater than ours, to which we must bow.

And I've made a small rock garden. A trail of stones crosses the flower bed, a dry river. Another dry river crosses to the base of the crabapple tree, now leafless but still heavy with late autumn berries the birds haven't discovered yet. I've hung small candle lanterns from the boughs. A circle of stones stands in a cleared circle beneath the tree. This is the start of a more permanent land art sculpture, something I intend to endure, while all other such sculptures, things I feel called to assemble on my travels, are ephemera, only the photos remain. The circle of stones is made with rounded, eroded rocks I found digging in the small garden on the house's west side. Some are green with algae or moss.



A circle of standing stones, menhirs, a henge, something new reflecting something ancient. We have always built stone circles, since long before recorded time. Inukshuk mark the paths across tundra. Stupas in the HImalayas at the high passes. Stonehenge, Brodgar, and the others. I am not done with making the rock garden part of my new home's garden; more will be done come spring. Like the Garden, the stones will rest over winter, dormant, sleeping, perhaps restless in sleep, eager to begin again. Come spring, I have to weed out some thickets of inherited shrubs and flowers; a chore I did not get to this year. A Garden can take many years to emerge, not to create but to manifest: the plants and rocks tell you where they want to be placed, if you listen hard enough. But listening to rocks is slow, and while plants think faster and louder than rocks, you still have to slow down, calm your own heartbeat and bloodflow, to hear them. You must become osmotic, rising sap slow day's climb towards sunsky raincloud heaven. The Garden is always moving towards Heaven. Patiently reaching for the light.

Veriditas

butterflies everywhere butterfly gold flower blue black band of wing shadow sun greenlight orchid scent purity of water flowing slough cedar foot and mangrove

green lake mirror in gold sun set windless birch bosque

spring treefrog peeper on bamboo

green heron wing cup curl into shadow over koi pond ocean shore river night

whisper trees whisper long sigh in afternoon sun breeze over all and air over all settling branches in high crown bent over bowing to sky earth every earth one

flank cedar on dolomite spear up to sun as in Greece where cedar soar on white dolomite cliff this place like the other merging one becoming same place same time same light Greek light dolomite crown of swaying spear branch and feather

slow sludge stagnant pond algae choke solid mat algae grown together wings of flies

sentinel sagebrush on mountain south slope bright sun alkaline soil hard pan pack think crust sage brush in wind tumbling

and butterflies everywhere luna green moth butterfly eye of heaven eye of earth eye wing sun antenna questing nectar sungold honey nectar sweet fragrance juniper sage cedar sweetgrass earth loam earth ascending earth one green one green man gold sun blue heaven and all rise merge to one green karst of mind

What the Bee Knows

My favorite honey is from bees working basswood (American linden) trees: dark, rich, sweet, flavorful. Basswood is also one of my favorite woods for woodworking projects: light, strong, very fine-grained, pale but lightly honey-colored. I have a custom-made worktable made from basswood, adjusted to my height, that allows me to stand upright and write or work on art projects without any back or posture issues.

Your average supermarket honey is still honey, usually clover honey, but what I love best is the honey from individual beekeepers selling their wares at the farmers' markets, or small local shops, or similar-scale venues. Local commerce. My favorite candles to burn are handmade beeswax candles; the scent is divine. I make candles from time to time; when I make beeswax candles, I tend to make them for myself rather than to give away. Then there's the whole thing about the healing properties of honey, in various uses and cultural systems.



PL Travers is one of my favorite essayists and writers. Her "thinking is linking" style has had an impact on my own essay style. Of course, she's best known for creating Mary Poppins, but I think the numerous essays she did for Parabola Magazine are essential reading. Since 1976, when Parabola: The Magazine of Myth and Tradition began publication, Travers was a regular contributor and consultant editor. In 1989, a collection of her numerous essays from Parabola (with a few from other sources) was published as What the Bee Knows, Reflections on Myth, Symbol and Story. This is one of my treasured books; it's long out of print, but if you run across it, wade in and be glad.

The title essay, "What the Bee Knows," was originally published in Parabola, Vol. VI No. 1, February 1981, in the issue themed on Earth and Spirit. This remains one of the best documents on the significance of bees that I've ever encountered. Travers begins this luminous essay completely sideways, an essay tactic I adore:

“Myth, Symbol, and Tradition” was the phrase I originally wrote at the top of the page, for editors like large, cloudy titles. Then I looked at what I had written and, wordlessly, the words reproached me. I hope I had the grace to blush at my own presumption and their portentousness. How could I, if I lived for a thousand years, attempt to cover more than a hectare of that enormous landscape?

So, I let out the air, in a manner of speaking, dwindled to my appropriate size, and gave myself over to that process which, for lack of a more erudite term, I have coined the phrase “Thinking is linking.” I thought of Kerenyi—“Mythology occupies a higher position in the bios, the Existence, of a people in which it is still alive than poetry, storytelling or any other art.” And of Malinowski—“Myth is not merely a story told, but a reality lived.” And, along with those, the word “Pollen,” the most pervasive substance in the world, kept knocking at my ear. Or rather, not knocking, but humming. What hums? What buzzes? What travels the world? Suddenly I found what I sought. “What the bee knows,” I told myself. “That is what I’m after.”

But even as I patted my back, I found myself cursing, and not for the first time, the artful trickiness of words, their capriciousness, their lack of conscience. Betray them and they will betray you. Be true to them and, without compunction, they will also betray you, foxily turning all the tables, thumbing syntactical noses. For—note bene!—if you speak or write about What The Bee Knows, what the listener, or the reader, will get—indeed, cannot help but get—is Myth, Symbol, and Tradition! You see the paradox? The words, by their very perfidy—which is also their honorable intention—have brought us to where we need to be. For, to stand in the presence of paradox, to be spiked on the horns of dilemma, between what is small and what is great, microcosm and macrocosm, or, if you like, the two ends of the stick, is the only posture we can assume in front of this ancient knowledge—one could even say everlasting knowledge.

After this, Travers gets into bee lore per se, but always with a slightly sideways skew to her viewpoint. This is the essence of poetry. I always think of what E.M. Forster wrote about the poet Constantine Cavafy as

a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing at a slight angle to the universe.

It seems to me that poets always stand at a slight angle to the universe. Travers most certainly did as well as Cavafy. Whenever I re-read one of her essays, I often feel my own perspective has shifted somewhat; a thing to seek out, for poets.

Later on in her essay, Travers talks about talking to the bees, as well as listening to the news they give us of the land, the soil, the sky, and the earth itself; bees are keepers of the earth-knowing:

But this apprising of the bees, telling them, for all one knows, what they already know, is not the business merely of great ones. The bees are constantly being told. No beekeeper would fail to do it. For if they are not courteously kept informed of everything that happens, they will take umbrage, swarm, and fly away, or die of grief or resentment. In the British Isles and all over Europe, the folk continually keep the bees abreast of the news, at national as well as local level; decking the hives with crepe or ribbon, whichever fits the case. On one occasion, an ancient great-aunt of mine, hieratically assuming a headdress of feather and globules of jet, required me to accompany her to the beehives. “But you surely don’t need a hat, Aunt Jane! They’re only at the end of the garden.” “It is the custom,” she said, grandly. “Put a scarf over your head.” Arrived, she stood in silence for a moment. Then—“I have to tell you,” she said, formally, “that King George the Fifth is dead. You may be sorry, but I am not. He was not an interesting man. Besides,” she added—as though the bees needed the telling!—“everyone has to die.”

Again, at a wedding reception in an Irish garden, I found the gardener, a family retainer, morosely surveying the scene. “All this colloguing and gallivanting, and never a word to the bees!” he grumbled. “Why not tell them yourself?” I asked him. “Is it me to be doing such a thing? It needs to be one of the kin.” “Well,” I told him, “the bride and the groom are my godchildren. Would I be near enough?” “Ah, you would!” he said, with a brightening eye. “Yer a bit of a bee yerself.” So, puffed up with this piece of flattery, I went and told the hive and it hummed. The news would be spread abroad and doubtless commented upon.

And this leads her eventually, circuitously, her essay following the bee's own weaving path—thinking is linking, after all—to the heart of the matter: that we must have the earth-knowledge, the chthonic myth-knowledge in our bones, in order to live:

Our profane life is full of these hidden meanings, of clues that we are at pains to find but pass by, not knowing what to look for—or, more exactly, how to let meaning discover us. For this to happen we need to become aware, as our forefathers were well aware, that by the fact of being born, each of us has assumed a place in the cosmos and is part of all that is. But not only that.

Myth, by design, makes it clear that we are meant to be something more than our own personal history. It places us—and it is not a comfortable position—squarely between the opposing forces that keep us, and the world, in balance—the two Earth Shapers, benign and malignant, checking and disciplining each other to produce a viable whole. One has only to think of Prometheus, forethought, and Epimetheus, his unfortunate brother; or Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu, the light and dark of Zoroastrianism; of the Hindu Vishnu and Shiva, preserver and destroyer; of the Navajo Water-Child, born of the rivers, and Monster-Slayer, born of fire—the cool flowing sap of one and the solar heat of the other; the angels and devils of Christianity.

How pleasant it would be, and easeful, to be able to choose between them; to fall to one side or the other and so escape the conflict. But the myth allows us no soft option, at any time in our lives. A child of three once said to me, “I am two boys, Goodly and Badly.” Alas! too young for this, I thought, but at the same time realized that truth requires us to be young, no matter what our age. And then came the faltering, anxious question—“Which do you like best?” I knew the answer, and all the breadth and depth of it, but I had to appear to pay it mind. If I chose Goodly, then Badly would be in the wilderness, alone with his badliness and lost. If Badly, then Goodly would be in the same plight, alone with his goodliness. “Joy and woe are woven fine/A clothing for the soul divine.” “To tell the truth,” I said gravely, “I like them both the same.” The look of anxiety turned to relief and a trustful hand met mine.

We are both light and dark, Ahriman and Ormazd. We are both the Hunter, Orion, and the Seven Sisters, the Pursued, the Pleiades, the Sisters pursued into the sky.

Myth is essential to us: we must always be aware of it, and of its story in our lives:

For if man does not, of intention, enact it, keep alive its rituals, preserve unbroken the chain of its being, myth will enact itself through man. It is doing this now, all over the world, with ambivalent intensity—the tidal wave of births and deaths; the devil invoked in the name of God; instant heroes and instant villains; gods masquerading—myth has its wit and irony—as Chairman, President, or Mullah; Persephone abducted to the Underworld, eating the symbionic pomegranate and her mother searching for her child through the California fields; the Great Goddess rising in wrath, dressing up as female priest or terrorist; she who is terror as well as beauty—the Hindu Kali, the Celtic Morrigan, La Belle Dame Sans Merci—and be her very nature priestess with no need of dogcollar to proclaim it, is calling herself, not such honorifics of nobility as Gaia, Isis, Hecate, Hera, but Women’s Liberation. All these show myth in action. For good or ill? That is not the question. It is always for good AND ill.

And at last, Travers reaches the conclusion of her pursuit of myth, by returning to what the bees know, and can tell us:

So, we are left in question, which is where the myth is designed to leave us. Time, space, and matter are mutable realities. The Sphinx, the Pyramids, the stone temples are, all of them, ultimately, as flimsy as London Bridge; our cities but tents set up in the cosmos. We pass. But what the bees know, the wisdom that sustains our passing life—however much we deny or ignore it—that forever remains. Begotten, not made, it is here to declare to us, in the words of the old Greek poet Aratus, that “Full of Zeus are all the ways of men.” That word “full” means what it says, and therefore, with the ambiguity of myth, reminds us, too, that the sky is always falling, that the bough inevitably will break and the rain it raineth every day.

What does one do with these trifles, not unconsidered, that are snapped up from the bloodstream? Throw them back, as the fisherman does the riddler, to let them grow and breed! So—I toss them into a tributary of that whole planetary vein, that flows just around the corner; from which, long wandering beside it, I have learned so much. And also thrown into it so much—lamentation, doubt, question, gratitude, and joy. Let it all go, river, to the sea to be made over, absolved and dissolved, suffer the sea-change and return as bee-stuff.

Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song!

Bees are also symbols for industriously accomplishing the impossible. Witness the long conundrum in science of understanding how the bumblebee is able to fly; for a long time it was a great mystery. It was only high-speed stop-motion photography that allowed us to understand that the high wing-beat-rate was how it was possible at all. But the improbable mystery remains.

Then there is pollination. Bees are not the only pollinators, no, but they are the major pollinators, worldwide. They gather and they pollinate; so all bees are essentially "honey" bees. (Talking myth here, even if science disagrees.) So: symbiosis with the rest of life; without them the plants would have a problem. Bees also furnish food, and prey on other insects, as part of the food chain. Bees that nest underground help churn the soil, over time, and replenish it. So: fecundity; life-force; nourishment.

Bees are another sign of spring, of life returning to the land. Like the first robin, the first redwing blackbird, the first crocus flower poking up through the snow or carpet of last year's leaves, sighting the first bee of the season is a revelation, and an affirmation. I haven't died. The world is coming back to life. Maybe someday I will too.

As Ted Andrews says in his book about totem animal powers, Animal-Speak:

If a bee has shown up in your life, examine your own productivity. Are you doing all you can to make your life more fertile? Are you busy enough? Are you taking the time to savor the honey of your endeavours or are you being a workaholic? Are you attempting to do too much? Are you keeping your desires in check so they can be more productive? Are you taking time to enjoy the labors and activities you involve yourself in?

Bee is obviously about celebration and organization, too. They live in organized colonies, with social, sexual, and functional roles laid out clearly; a diverse yet purposeful commmunity. Bees tell us that we can all live together in harmony, however impossible that sometimes seems. Perhaps the way to do that is to dance the bees' dance, orient ourselves to the sun, moon, and stars, center ourselves and our lives around Spirit and the Goddess (the Queen Bee), and work together in community. The Celtic tradition says that bees are the secret wisdom coming from the other world. In Jungian as well as Celtic terms, the archetypal perfect society is centered around the Queen, the Great Mother, paying homage to the sun in sacred dance, and producing from the fields and woods a substance that can both feed and heal and intoxicate.

Then there's mead—fermented honey. Mead is one of the oldest fermented alcoholic beverages in the world. Some recipes still in use are truly ancient: old enough to out-date the first cities. So: celebration. When we see the Queen Bee as the Queen of Faerie, then perhaps judicious draughts of mead might assist the "second sight" or the celebrant's transition to the faerie world Underhill.

And wax: for polishing, for light, for many other uses including waterproofing, threading needles to make clothing. And the antiseptic and medicinal properties of honey were surely known to the Old Ones. To think that we mostly usually it only for a sweetener these days! Wax for candles casts the smell of beeswax throughout the room, an intoxicating, sweet scent that opens the mind as well as the senses.

The bees humming and buzzing, thrumming and churning. The soft hum lulls us to sleep, and draws us into the Dreamtime, into the dreamworld, the Summerland, paradise. In the Welsh bardic tradition, a harp is known as a teillin, which is altered form of an t-seillean, "a bee."

Bees benefit from blossoms, practice useful things, work in the daytime, do not eat food gathered by others, dislike dirt and bad smells, and obey their ruler; they dislike the darkness of indiscretion, the clouds of doubt, the storm of revolt, the smoke of the prohibited, the water of superfluity, the fire of lust. —Ibn al-Athir

Our relationship to the bee is very old. Bees appear in ancient sacred geometry, maps, and earthworks. Who knows? Perhaps early humans, at the start of the agricultural revolution, when they started banding together in communities, noticed that the bees were also banded together in communities. Maybe they studied them as models of community; hence, the early usage of bee-symbols as far back as human temple architecture goes. Perhaps we were influenced to form communities because we noticed other communities already existed. Bees are certainly agricultural role-models, on some levels.

So, what the bee knows is what the earth itself knows. We must continue to talk to the bees—but we must also listen. There is lore the bees can whisper in our ears. Let them land on you, don't brush them off from fear. Let them crawl into your ear and whisper-buzz that ancient wisdom, that quiet voice that only comes to us when we sink most deeply into time, into the sinking and cooling that is Mystery, that is the Godhead, that is what the bee already knows is there.

Green Man (a haibun)

Finally the evening wore down to nothing. The day's heat faded into blue, and I began the postponed yardwork. I found my old lungs in the tall grasses, where I'd thrown them that bitter morning last winter. They still had a few coughs in them. I left my lemonade nearby, to dessicate and water vivid lemon thoughts. I electrified the grass in that part of the lawn with the new twirly-bladed whacker; it stood to attention before fainting dead away. I covered myself with flung tailings from that green mind, lacing seed-fronds into my long hair, a dandelion pair for earrings, and coal-black eyes made from fallen walnuts. Gradually I left myself behind; gradually I felt the greening rise, bursting through my feet as the shoe-soles wore away, climbing vine-like shins and calves and under loose jean-shorts, up under shirt, clothes gone, vine skin, green skin green muscle turn to follow sun, sex sprung vine dry nut shrivel copse, twist, turn, morning-glory rising through breast, turn, tendrils awhirl, cup behind corn-ear, shoots, wheat-teeth, grass-stem eyelash, peat-eye, green brow, vegetable gaze, all, mind knoll tree slow thought growing slow stone-slow sun turn sun follow mind gone all green white husk.

druids cursed to stone
burst forth spring life-force issue—
bloom of summer skin