Dancing Down the Moon

Just Breathe

Like I said, it's not all about food this month.

Aside from being extremely scary and awful, one thing I have learned from S1ren being hospitalized is that I've let a lot of things slide, in particular my breathing.

I used to teach my students to put their hands on their bellies and breathe so that their hands moved in and out with every breath; I'd talk about our tendency to breathe high in the chest, which triggers the body's fight-or-flight response and contributes to long-term anxiety.  We'd work on Darth Vader breathing (aka the Ujjayi breath, I believe, in yoga) and following the breath, and how just pausing to slow your breathing consciously could ground you in a heartbeat, so paying attention and keeping the breath long and slow was good for overall health, meditative ability, and de-stressing.

Yet another in a long line of examples of "Do as Sylvan Says, Not as She Does, Because, DAMN." 

Watching my friend fight to breathe and seeing how her breath came in panicked gasps when she couldn't get enough oxygen made me remember all of those lessons, and throughout the day I've been taking notice of when my breath goes shallow and what a difference it makes to my state of mind to breathe as if it were on purpose.

When you watch your breath you become so much more mindful of the overall state of your body.  You become aware of tightness, pressure, and pain; how your posture affects your ability to take a full breath, and therefore energize you or enervate you; and how slowing the breath can help still the mind, or at least give you something to focus on besides the gibbering of the Squirrel Brain. 

My favorite breath exercise has always been the Zen mindfulness verses I read in Thich Nhat Hanh's Peace is Every Step.  He gives you verses to recite mentally while breathing on the inhale and the exhale, such as,

Breathing in...I know I am breathing in.
Breathing out...I know I am breathing out.

I've found this pattern enormously adaptable to stressful situations:

Breathing in...I calm my body.
Breathing out...I am relaxed.

Breathing in...I breathe in love.
Breathing out...I release all fear.

Breathing in...I acknowledge the tasty tasty donut.
Breathing out...I make a healthier choice.
Breathing in...I place the donut back in the box.
Breathing out...I smack the sonofabitch who invented Krispy Kreme.

Well, okay, not so much that last one, but you get the idea. 

The Beauty of 52nd Chances

It's never too late
to start the day over
it's never too late
to pick up the phone
it's never too late
to lay your head down on my shoulder
it's never too late
to come on home

~Michael Franti


I assume you woke up this morning.

If you did, that means you had a chance to start over.  If you wake up tomorrow morning, you have another.

(If you didn't wake up this morning I'm guessing you have more pressing concerns than reading this blog.)

When you're learning to meditate one of the techniques you may encounter is "coming back to your breath."  You sit and focus on the in-breath and out-breath, perhaps even counting them.  When you're distracted by thoughts, which is pretty much inevitable, do the great sages tell you to throw down your mala and give up?

No.  They say, "bring yourself gently back to your breath and start again." 

It goes that way for a long time before the practice begins to sink in.  Inhale, exhale...oh, look, a bunny!...wait...inhale, exhale...inhale, exhale...I should paint this room...wait, start over...inhale, exhale...sometimes I feel I have to (BOM BOM) get away, I have to (BOM BOM) run away...shit.  Okay...inhale, exhale...

As with meditation, so with life.  As long as you're still alive, you can start over.  A season of sorrow can give way to a season of joy, or at least a season of recovery, day by day, choice by choice.  No matter how often you've screwed up in the past, you have another choice right now.  You may make the positive choice right now and a less-than-positive one in ten minutes, but after that you get to try again.

The best part is, you don't always have to start from scratch.  Often it feels like you've completely screwed the pooch and are back at zero, but before you begin again, ask yourself: what did I learn from the last try?  What can I apply to the present moment to help me stay on course this time? 

Perfection is not the goal of life.  Evolution is.  We will never be perfect, because as we evolve, the whole universe does, and "perfection" evolves too.  But who says perfection is something to reach for anyway?  It's boring.  It doesn't move.  I want a life that moves, and to move is to change. 

Rock your imperfection until you fall over in a sprawl.  Then shake yourself, get back up and keep on dancing.

Sometimes all it takes to get back in your personal groove, whether that's a meditation practice, an exercise routine, or whatever, is to just pick one thing to start doing again and lean into it gently, letting that one small change tip over another and another. 

As long as you're breathing, the gods are saying, "Try again.  You've got time."

It's never too late.

Be Your Own Role Model, part 1

My circle of friends includes some very talented people.  I was thinking about how you could ask me "Do you know someone who _____?" and chances are I could say, "Yeah!" and name at least one person who not only could do ____, but could do it phenomenally well.

I started making a list.  I know people who sing, drum, do yoga, dance, hoop, spin poi, garden, build their own furniture, reupholster furniture, do their own auto repair, paint walls, paint pictures, cut and style hair, sew, make soap, wrap stones, make mead, make jewelry, raise horses, do mendhi, read Tarot, and fix things.  I know massage therapists, metalworkers, teachers, web designers, photographers, writers, advocates, hospice workers, midwives, artists, musicians, sign language interpreters, and interior designers.

All of this describes about ten people.  If I were to expand my parameters to everyone I know, the list would go on forever.

Being the sort of person I am, I was starting to feel like an underachiever, when the part of my brain that isn't crazy said, "Wait a minute...you have a boatload of talents too!" and started making another list.

Here are some of the things I can do, from the awesome to the silly.  Sit down and make your own list--what are your talents?  Your skills?  What can you do, either through innate ability or acquired learning? 

I can write fiction/nonfiction/a bit of poetry;
bake,
cook,
dance,
sculpt,
draw,
lead guided meditations,
create rituals,
hang pictures level and write straight without a ruler,
create dance mixes,
pick things up with my toes,
kick ass at Trivial Pursuit,
cast Runes,
paint,
build gorgeous altars,
type 85 words per minute,
sing (My BFF insists I include this even though I disagree),
shag like an animal,
make people laugh,
and probably more that I can't think of off the top of my head.

Then of course there are things you'd like to learn or do, but haven't managed to yet--languages to learn, hobbies to take up, places to go.  Websites have sprung up all over the Internet to help people keep track of their life lists and to-dos. 

I started a list on 43Things.com, and I'm hoping to get started on at least one of the items this month (I haven't decided which yet).  I'm planning to keep 20 items on the list at all times--I don't want it to get so long I give up on the whole idea, but I want to keep it lively.  You're welcome to look at my list, and have fun starting your own if you like; I think it's important to be proud of things you can do and have done, but also important to keep challenging yourself to grow and do new things.

To me this is different than my old habit of making yearly goals I never met--these are wider plans, and I didn't force them on myself in order to keep a tradition.  Some are things I've always wanted to do, and some have arisen in the last year or two as life has unfolded in its ass-backwards, sublime way. 

Keep in mind the following quote from one of my media heroes, Stephen Colbert, made during a graduation speech he delivered:

Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don't learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying "yes" begins things. Saying "yes" is how things grow. Saying "yes" leads to knowledge. "Yes" is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say "yes."

Even a cynic like me has to admit there's wisdom in the idea of saying "yes."  So think of all the things you'd like to do but have been putting off until you're thinner/richer/whatever.  Consider saying "yes" to something that you've been denying yourself, something that will make your life more full and more authentic.

First, though, look over the list of "I cans" you made, your present fulfillments, and say it out loud:  "I'm amazing!"  

Dyslexic Cows Make Great Meditators

Let's say you're drawing a picture of a giraffe:  a four-legged ruminant mammal with horns, a superlong neck, and spots.  You draw a lot of giraffes.  You love giraffes; in fact you become well known for your depiction of giraffes in your giraffe blog.  You even write a book or two about giraffes. 

Then one day you draw a giraffe with a shorter neck.  Next you draw one with shorter legs.  A week later you shorten the neck even more and make its horns longer and curved.  The next giraffe you draw has a few large spots instead of lots of smaller ones.  Finally you draw a giraffe with pronounced udders and hooves instead of two toes.

You realize at this point that it's not a giraffe.  It's still a four-legged ruminant mammal with horns, but definitely not a giraffe anymore, and while you can label it "giraffe" all you want, deep down you know it's a cow.  Cows are awesome and giraffes are awesome, but cows are not giraffes and giraffes are not cows.

That's really all that happened to me.  Over the years since I wrote my first book I've been tweaking and reinventing tiny parts of my spiritual practice and cutting out bits that didn't work for me.  Finally I looked at the picture as a whole and realized that while I've put together something pretty nifty, it's really not Wicca anymore.

I say that as someone who's always championed the idea of eclecticism, and still do.  I really think that as a religion Wicca has a lot of room in it for a wide variety of beliefs and practices, but still, at some point you have to draw the line for yourself or your tradition.  Staunch traditionalists have been saying this all along, albeit to a much narrower set of criteria.  I'm not saying they're right or wrong, I'm just saying that eventually your giraffe is a cow and it needs to find other cows to graze with.

Religion is the public face of a community's spirituality.  Spirituality is much more private and individualized.  Religion is what people agree on when they're in a room together partying with God; and regardless of the rules, any religion can become dogmatic even when it's supposedly dogma-free. Does that invalidate it?  Of course not.  We're lucky enough to live in an era when we have a choice what religion to practice, or none at all.  We can choose our community and choose to either work within an established system or cut-and-paste with care to create something just for ourselves.

Wiccan belief is not what trips me up; it's a problem of practice, focus, and attitude.  In my ideal version of spirituality I am a mystic, not a magician.  The influence of Ceremonial Magick has always kind of...well, not bothered me, but definitely not spoken to me either.  Rituals based on the Wiccan framework with Circle casting in a dozen steps and Quarter calls and all of that almost always leave me bored and disconnected. So often the attention is all paid to the steps themselves that the actual center of the ritual, the part that's supposed to do something, gets neglected. This isn't to say great rituals don't exist, just that even the vaguest formality is too much for me these days. Besides, I'm not afraid of being eaten by psychic oogy-boogies while I pray.

(Hardcore magical ritual is another thing altogether--I'm speaking mainly of celebratory and seasonal rituals here.)

The focus on fertility and sex in the community is also grating to me, as I've blogged about here before.  I'm sure plenty of people would chalk that up to personal repression, and it may indeed be, but you know? I don't care. I don't want to pretend my chalice is a big vagina. There's something inherently violent to me about the whole Great Rite in Token symbolism anyway, picturing the penis as a blade; my body is not a sheath. Neither is my Goddess. I understand celebrating sensuality and pleasure, but to me that's something that can't be done in the proper reverent frame of mind except in private.

But that's a rant for another day.  Suffice it to say that I'm a great lover of Nature and the seasons, not just the mating season. Add to that the squick factor of the traditional Wheel symbolism, and well, it just doesn't feel right with my own approach. 

That's really the point of all this babbling--I got my Wiccan education via people like Scott Cunningham who said things like, "if it feels right, and doesn't hurt anybody, go with it." Jettisoning the label feels right to me. As with veganism and all the other things I believe in, I don't expect everyone around me to do the same, or to agree with me.  I'm just speaking my own truth, sharing my experiences, and trying to honor my own evolution.

Most of my life I've been afraid to exist outside of categories.  Like a lot of people who turn to alternative mores I've struggled with the feeling that I never belonged anywhere--not at church, not in the cliques at school, not in my hometown, not at college, not in the Pagan community. Still, humans need to feel that sense of place and  unity, and often we cling to vocabulary words that no longer define us rather than risk going it alone.

My brain keeps begging, "But...but if you're not calling yourself Wiccan, then what are you?  You need a WORD!"

I wish there was one.  Pagan will have to do for now, although it's too broad; Witch is incomplete; Goddess-worshipper is too narrow and unwieldy.  Hell, if I can describe my spiritual path in 20 words or less I'll be doing better than a lot of people.  Maybe I'll invent a term.  Sylvan, 39th Priestess of the First Church of Awesome sounds pretty good. 

In the meantime, what I'm working on these days is stretching, growing past my old sense of myself.  In the painfully over-quoted words of Anais Nin,

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."

Cow, giraffe, zebra, elephant, hamster, ostrich:  whatever we are, whoever we want to be, may we all risk the blossom.

By Knot of One...

My early training as a Wiccan was fairly typical once I got to college.  After two years of solitude, stuck in a small town before the Internet, I found a whole new world in Austin and soon started a series of classes with a group that sounded reputable and had an eclectic curriculum.  The main advantage of the group was that it was made up primarily of solitaries, and once initiated students could go off and do their own thing, join other groups, and so forth, or continue up the degree ladder.  I liked the structure-without-structure.  I stayed with them for several years but eventually personal differences with the leadership drove me out. 

At the time it was a negative experience, as an unfortunately large percentage of Pagan group experiences are, but I'm grateful to that organization for several reasons, most significantly that through them I met some of the most important people in my life.  It was worth all the drama just for S1ren, quite possibly the most amazing woman I know.  I also might never otherwise have met Amber, fellow writer, early teaching partner, and all around cool chica. 

I also came away with a much firmer idea of what I wanted to give my future students and what I believed Wicca really was.  My brand of spirituality was fundamentally different from what I had seen in class, and I was glad to have learned that it's all right to be a black sheep even among other black sheep. 

More of a red sheep, really.  Or possibly paisley.

As Within, So Without

From our earliest ancestors-of-faith driving fat clay goddesses into the mud to the multi-layered symbolism of an array of Gardnerian ritual tools to the haphazardly elegant collection of shells, stones, and flowers of our coven's Ostara, altar building is one of the simplest yet most profound statements a spiritual practitioner can make:  I am here.  This is my universe.  These things in this place at this time have meaning for me.

We express our religious creativity and our desires through our altars, and we use their shapes, textures, and layouts to affirm our priorities.  Setting up a permanent altar is a very serious announcement to the gods that you intend not only to honor your commitment to Them, but to the space itself, both internal and external.  When you build an altar in the physical world you also build one in your heart, making room for miracles, allowing for the possibility of a magical world.

What do you suppose it means, then, when you neglect such a holy creation?  I found myself asking that question as I sat in front of my altar, knees drawn up to my chin, pondering the film of dust that covered the objects I had, more than once, declared sacred to me.  What does that dust say about the state of your spirit, your commitment to the Divine, and to yourself? 

It says it's time to get your house in order.

Ashes to Midol

Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

~TS Eliot, "Ash Wednesday"

Ever since I was a child I've had a fascination with Lent.  I grew up Southern Baptist, but our small town had a large percentage of Catholics, and the comparatively strange rituals of Catholicism seemed magical even though Catholic Mass, I quickly discovered, was no more engaging to me than a typical Sunday sermon.  All that standing up and sitting down baffled me.  A pancake breakfast, in comparison, was a much more accessible ritual.

Mass did have two things over our services, though--ceremony, which my spirit craved even at a young age; and a noticeable lack, comparatively speaking, of brimstone and Bible-thumping, or as I like to call it thanks to a certain t-shirt I saw once, Hellfire and Dalmatians. (And He sayeth unto them, "Bad dogs!  Bad!")  Little did I know that our local priest was engaging in some, er, extracurricular activity in the rectory (though thankfully not with altar boys in this case).  The whole Pope thing made me uneasy, and the older I got the less attracted I was to Catholicism's dogma, though the idea of being a nun did, and still does, intrigue me.

Still, as a child I would frequently "give things up for Lent" (with about as much success as most kids, I imagine) and would stare, mesmerized, at the smudge of ash across a friend’s forehead on Ash Wednesday.  I was always too self-conscious to ask what it was supposed to mean, or why you had to give something up for Lent.  It seemed like a game more than anything else.  Local restaurants offered (and still do) special fish meals during Lent, and to me this seemed a particularly grueling sacrifice as I didn’t like eating fish.

What does this have to do with Wicca?  Not a blessed thing, although it does provide an interesting contrast in worldview.  Wiccans, after all, don't generally devote much energy to concepts like penitence and atonement.  Guilt isn't really our stock in trade, as we do not view the world as fallen or human beings as inherently sinful and in need of redemption; although I have observed that, thanks to the religious experiences of our youth, many of us still carry around a great deal of residual guilt that takes years to exorcise. 

I'd like to say that this has led me to an in-depth exploration of the concept of guilt and its place or lack thereof in Wicca, or at least a lengthy meandering about the difference between guilt, which cripples the soul's evolution; and regret, which can empower us to create change and heal wounds that we all inevitably cause during our EarthWalk (unless of course we cling to it and transform it into guilt)…but alas, on this lovely warm Ash Wednesday in the year of the Common Era 2007, I am beset by a much more immediate affliction than guilt:  cramps.

Therefore, I leave you with this astoundingly brief and fairly pointless post, and go on a holy quest for a bottle of ibuprofen and my thermonuclear heating pad.

(This post was sponsored by our good friends at Acme Parentheses, the world leader in punctuation for confusing asides.)

My Most Recent Idea (of Shadows)

Pagans are a creative bunch. Whether it's because artistic and creative thinkers tend to shy away from the mainstream and therefore tend to congregate in alternative religions, or because our up-close-and-personal relationship with Deity tends to inspire us so passionately we have to find some way of expressing our ecstasy, or both, or something else entirely, over the years I have seen some of the most fantastic art and craft from my people, ranging from Tarot to music to sculpture and all points West.

I’m something of an artist, and by that I mean I have artistic talent but not the drive to make use of it regularly. My creativity finds its outlet in the written word, plus occasional forays into colored pencil art, wee sculptures in polymer clay, and even a painting or two. (Painting is difficult for me, as I have essential tremors in both hands, so mostly I stick to pencil and clay.)

Even if you don’t think you have any talent, there are some forms of art that any enterprising Pagan can create. The most obvious, and perhaps most important, is of course the altar, where form and function unite, making a Michelangelo out of every Aradia WeaselFox. The second is that "ancient" form of magical recordkeeping, the Book of Shadows.

The minimum to-do list

This past week on The Happiness Project blog, Gretchen Rubin posted her daily “minimum to-do list.”

It’s her list of things that anyone can do every day, so that at the end of the day even if you accomplished nothing else, you’ll know you at least did something, such as:

Make the bed
Eat a fruit or vegetable
Go for a ten-minute walk
Put your keys away in the same place
Touch everyone in your house with affection

I think Gretchen is on to something here, especially if you are seeking at the New Year to integrate your spirituality more fully into your daily life.

Notice that the list is not made up of negatives (I didn’t eat a box of cookies; I didn’t call my boss a rat bastard, at least not to his face). It may seem insignificant, but I find it is far more rewarding to do something than not to do it, so when making affirmations or doing spellwork—or creating a minimum to-do list—I try to keep my language positive.

Try making a list like this for yourself. What are the little things you can do every day to enrich your life without disrupting it? As I’ve said before, if your spiritual practice distracts too much from your routine, you are more likely to give it up in frustration when you realize there simply isn’t time to work, eat, sleep, play with the dog, read, pee, and spend two hours in lotus position surrounding yourself with Divine light every single day.

I think my list would, at the moment, look like this:

Make the bed
Eat a piece of fruit (I already eat plenty of vegetables)
Say something nice about someone (without snark)
Write in my Gratitude Journal
Take my supplements
Put something away
Pause at my altar

Normally I try and have a longer meditation or devotional ritual of some sort at least four or five times a week, but I usually manage to at least stop, light my central candle (and incense if I am home long enough to let it burn), and offer up a brief prayer every day. If I can sit down, so much the better.

Another worthy everyday practice is to greet the first living thing you see upon leaving your house, whether that’s a person, bird, tree, or whatever. Say good morning, offer a blessing, or just nod and smile. It starts you off on the right foot with the rest of the world, and can help you look up from your navel and notice what’s going on in Nature as you’re charging ahead with your day.

Dendrites

This morning as I sat shivering, waiting for my car to warm up, I happened to glance up at my sunroof and notice that it was etched with tiny ice crystals. My eyes followed their delicate pattern for a moment, then refocused higher in the air on the live oak that stood watch over the parking lot.

There among the branches I realized that the same pattern played out in the tree: snowflakes of blue sky formed by the spaces between the leaves. If I looked at the tree through the ice on my roof, I could fit the ice shapes into the tree, as if one had been made by tracing the other.

I thought of the stone in my pocket, and there it was again: the same pattern in the inclusions of a Sweetwater Agate. The small smoky blue stone comes from Wyoming, where manganese oxide forms lacy snowflake-like dendrites inside the rock. Though Sweetwater Agate isn’t generally listed in crystal-healing type books, I’ve always found it to have such a soothing, gentle energy that I keep it in my pocket on stressful days, seeking it out with my hand for reassurance.

Ice, tree, stone; seeing the same phenomenon in all three struck me practically stupid with awe, my numb fingers and overly thin sweater no longer important in the face of Nature’s perfect wisdom. From the seeming disorder of disparate elements, a pattern emerges. From the chaos, stars are born.

I drove to work feeling ridiculously peaceful for a Monday morning, my mind full of the connections among simple things. I thought about how spirituality is in essence the art of connection: we seek out and nurture our link to the Divine, and through it, find our common ground with others, and with all that is.

It has always been my opinion that all paths have validity, but that the spiritual paths that truly foster growth are those that seek to bring us closer to others, not build walls of "us" and "them." The Divine is what permeates and forms the entirety of entirety. Seeking it, we seek union, not division. The closer we come to the sacred, the fewer walls we are able to build. Religions that encourage their practitioners to find and exploit—or persecute--that which is different are, I feel, missing the whole point.

We can and should celebrate what makes us unique as individuals, but it is our shared humanity, our shared pain, our shared capacity for compassion and love, that religion should bring us home to; for those qualities that connect us—delicate branches in ice and stone, not lines drawn with a sword in the sand--are the essence of God.