Full moon malaise.

It’s time. I find myself deep into December, the snow so paltry there isn’t even that sense of noble winter survival. Nope, there is instead a sense that there is so much wrong that I have to stay almost unconscious to continue.  Yet nothing in my life supports me zoning out. My situation, my job, my belief system, my self knowledge, all require me to remain involved and present. It seems almost unfair.

I know IT isn’t fair. I see the larger picture across the globe; sufferings and war, wealth and opulence.  I understand the level of privilege I have.  Just to have the space, the electricity, the heat, the computer to complain isn’t fair.  None of this is fair. 

But I know Justice.

I know Justice exists.  I have a feeling, a physical feeling of what or who Justice is – in my chest.  I feel the lucid place within my body.  I feel the clarity of Justice.  I am not just.  But I know Justice.  So when kids complain about things not being fair, and we tell them “that’s the way life is, it isn’t fair.” I have a feeling we are telling a lie. 

I also know that it’s true.  But maybe fairness and Justice aren’t the same thing.  Maybe the process is much less immediate, much less finite. Maybe the wheel of Justice is so large we can’t understand its girth.

I hate that idea.  And I think it must also be true.  Justice manifests sometimes in ways I observe.  And sometimes not; at least not within my observation.  If Justice occurs and I don’t observe it, does it still change the balance within my life?  

What if Justice occurs outside my time? What about then? 

And if in fact the effect of Justice is like ripples in a pond – ever sending circles out across time and space; can I not then relax into the possibility that is all works out?  One way or another balance and beauty, love and life; will become the new culture. 

In perfect love and perfect trust.

I have a friend who says that a lot now.   That phrase has never worked for  me.  It seems to be self-defeating.  I’m really aware of personal and, frankly, global inability to be “perfect.”  So, take perfect out.

In love and trust.

Hmmm.

Yes.  I can seek to live in love and trust. 

The moon is almost full.  The glass is almost full.
Now if it would just snow.

snapshots

For Samhain I have a wall of mental pictures, too diverse to hang together. 

I always loved Halloween.  Children do.  But for me it wasn’t just the costume and candy. It was the cold. It was the dark.  I loved being out in the October night, masked and unknown.  Those were the days of marathon trick or treating.  We would drive to the big town 17 miles from our farm and go up and down those streets lined with houses. That was where really good treats were.  Candy bars and gum and popcorn balls, sometimes homemade caramel apples There were streetlights but much dimmer, much further apart – sometimes only at the corners.  Along those silver sidewalks were streams of children. Adults waited by the car, smoking.

One year I was dressed as a chicken.  I know for sure this wasn’t my idea.  No one has ever wanted to be a chicken for Halloween.  My mother dressed as a clown, an annual event, with blacked out teeth and pigtails and my granddaddy’s overalls. I couldn’t help feeling embarrassed.  Not so much cause my mother was young enough to still want to dress up for Halloween but because our costumes were bad.

(another time)

At home, in the apartment on Mass Ave, I had finished candying straggling trick or treaters. Later they arrived, fresh from downtown Boston, after watching late night costume shopping and acid dropping outside Berkley School of Music. Ah the tales of subway costumes - Was she a nun or was that a costume? No, was that an accountant or was that a costume? – and walking from Harvard Square. Lights and people and color and the smell of leaves were what they told.  They acted out the Halloween scenes into the late night until I went to bed leaving them laughing.

(later)

The hilltop yard had four altars – one to each direction.  In the east, massive mountain shoulders black against star sky, there were veils to pass through into the dark. In the west there was a huge barrel filled with water and floating apples.  There were only a few  left. I had delayed the apple bobbing with some thought of maybe skipping it, but I found myself kneeling down to plunge my face into the cold water, apple skidding out of my reach.  Finally, with some help holding my hair back and maybe shoving an apple in my mouth, I succeeded.  My face tingled in the chill Vermont air.

(tonight)

He came home tonight from trick or treating.  Not as much candy as last year, sign of the recession maybe.  One house gave him a plastic snake, a plastic scorpion, and two cards – one says

I ♡ class warfare

The other says

Downsize

Over a picture of a guillotine.

Óangela magara 2011

I've seen fire and I've seen rain

Unlike James Taylor I’ve only seen rain lately. It’s raining now and has been for several hours. Sometimes the rain is hard but always it’s steady. If I had been flooded out last week I would be afraid. Some communities are taking precautions by asking people to go stay with family or friends on higher ground for the night. I’m sure all the hardest hit places are very alert right now. I have seen rain but rarely this much and this often.

Our local community is, like many in Vermont, along a river. We have been affected three times this summer by flooding. Irene is “the worse flood since the hurricane of ’27.” I’ve had places I shopped closed since May because of flooding. Some were just getting back into business when this flood hit. Some fared better, some fared worse this time. But economically this is very hard for Vermont. Not even thinking of foliage season or ski season but the businesses that those of us who live here shop at, have dinner at, visit for new glasses, or to see a dentist; are affected. Some have had to clean up after a flood two or three times this summer. I don’t know how these businesses will fare in a year. But they are part of the fiber of this community and this state and would be missed if they were to close. This gives “buying local” a whole new meaning.

I live in Vermont so buying local is something I like to do. Now I feel like it’s a bigger issue. It is one of the ways Vermont can recover from the losses it has suffered. It’s going to be harder to stay in business as a dairy farmer if your silage all floated down the river or your feed corn was made useless by flood waters, not to mention if you lost half your herd. Buying Vermont milk, cheese, and butter is part of what I can do to help. Anything I can buy directly from a farmer is even more help since all the profits go directly to them. This is going to be more difficult because so many farms, the really good productive ones, are located on bottom land. Flat, sunny land by the river is rich, less rocky, and warms up quickly in the spring. It can be wet but it grows good crops.

Some farms lost 1/3 of their crops down the river. Some lost the fields as well to erosion. The same torrents that ripped the roads apart tore through farm land as well. I love those farms and honor those farmers. There’s not work much harder than farming. To have this kind of economic loss is going to – no, let’s put it another way – could make this winter really hard for Vermont farmers. If there is anything I can do to ease that difficulty I want to do it.

And the artists, the man who sells firewood, the blacksmith down the road, I need to see what they have I need and buy what I can from them. For now, buying local is a civic act of integrity. It is how we will all survive together.

This wasn’t what I had intended to write when I sat down. But the rain keeps coming, the cool is beginning, and I feel the urgency of fall preparation. This time it is taking on a much larger scale.

© angela magara 2011

Response to Oslo

It hit me hard. Made me feel unsafe. Violence in Oslo? Oslo? There seems to be no reason for it. None that I can actually understand. I was horrified.

But this morning I realized that I when hear about a bombing in any of the middle Eastern countries I don’t respond in the same way. I’m not sure why. Unpacking that reality I am seeing layers of myself and my thinking that I always need to examine. I don’t think I am less affected because of racism; although I do come from an extremely racist society. I don’t think it is based on sectarianism, although I see in myself, as a feminist, layers of assumptions about the condition of Muslim women that need to be unpacked. I think my mind has been conditioned.

I have been hardened by the violence daily displayed on the media to accept a bomb in Kabul. I accept that innocent citizens going about their business are killed because of where they live. It seems to be within the parameters of reasonable to me if it happens in Kabul. I understand that there is war in Afghanistan. This certainly affects my thinking but should it?

My caring and compassion have been expended for Afghanistan I suppose. But I have a fresh supply for Norway.

I don’t find that thinking particularly appealing. Nor do I want to become accustomed to death from violence wherever it occurs. I want my heart to stay tender to suffering without flinching at its repetition. I breathe in the pain and accept it, breathing out compassion. I breathe in our loss, transmuting it, to breathe out release. I breathe in anger and breathe out forgiveness. I breathe in my own limitations and breathe out forgiveness. With each breath I am, like the trees, supporting life. It is part of my work as a human.

Breathing in suffering…

I wonder if humans naturally long for “resurrection” as part of their mythology. Whatever dogma, it seems returning from death is integral to most faith systems. It is the rock upon which Christianity is founded.

As a converted Christian, I honor the day lilies for carrying in their life cycle the same assurance of return. The seasons here in New England resonate with the resurrection story; spring with its slow coming, summer filled with birdsong, rampant mating and blossoming, followed by harvest in fall. All of this abounding life slowly folds in on itself and withdraws into the seeds and roots that carry next year’s rebirth. Winter comes then in white and silence. Though it is dark and seems sometimes to stay far too long, Winter finally releases us all into the life of the next Spring.

Each turn of the season holds feasts and celebrations. Each turn on the cycle, on this wheel of the year, lays up memories and stores of all kinds to carry us humans along. We know, in our bodies, the linear passing of time. Yet we experience around us in the natural world the circling pattern that life dances. We know that after the long silence of winter will come the upspringing of life. There is reassurance in that knowledge. The hope of the Christian resurrection is a mental, dogmatic, representation of the truth told in the natural world. After death comes new life.

There are a lot of things being said and done that represent themselves as Christian. But it seems to me that the core of this belief system is the faith that eventually, after death, believers will know new life. So today, on this most important of Christian holidays, I pray for new life for Jesus’ followers. May they, as the lilies rise above their old stalks and spent leaves to flower, let go of the old fears and teachings that separate them from non-Christians and, finally, know new life.

I am holding the hope for resurrection.

©angela magara 2011

Earth Day Psalm

Ever since the disaster in Japan I have become more and more aware of a truth I had known but had not experienced viscerally. Simply, we are joined together into this manifested place - Earth.

I wanted to offer a poem for Earth Day. This is Psalm 108.



OH Goddess I am rooted; now can my full voice ring true.
Awaken, Life in my body, rise up Life in my mind, dance Life in my Spirit and
Join the star chant.

Whatever words my lips shape, Goddess is heard.
Earth formed me and all I form holds Her.
Sacred water, within – without
Breath – sacred too
There is nothing I share with all life that is outside the Circle.

In this lies the hope.
In the truth of our family lies our confidence.
This is our strong city, our deepest well, our mountain.
Awaken Life.

Then all is well.
Countries and peoples alive with the stars.

***
May we
Sing with the trees
worship the Sun,
Make love to Water
As long as breath is shared
April 22
2011

we protect you

"We protect you," the towering evergreens told us. In this time of thinning ozone, of acid rain, and possibilities I probably won't learn about until much later; trees are standing sentinel for us. They, and other green bloods, are cleaning the air, catching toxins, and offering oxygen so we can breathe.

Long ago the trees taught me that by breathing, like them, I can transmute toxins within my body and spirit into health and useful energy. I can breathe in my own anger and hatred, my grief and resentments and breathe out clean air. Like the trees I have magic within which changes things. I breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. My hypothesis is that just as we have the physical means to perform that change; we also have the tools to change negative feelings and energies into useful and often positive ones.

This process is win-win. I process my negative feelings and ultimately transmute them. At that point I can breathe out positive energy into the situation that was troubling me or into global health and wellness. My exhales are one of the elements of life for trees. Together we hold part of the web of life between us. Within that connection lies opportunity.

It is a relationship of air.