Dea volente I will be livestreaming a performance featuring selections for all four of The Maeve Chronicles on Friday, July 22nd at 7:30. http://www.ustream.tv/user/ElizNMaeve
For me this is a celebration of twenty years with Maeve, twenty-one if you include her incarnation as the cartoon character Madge!
Hope to see you (or at least to have you see me) there and then!
http://www.ustream.tv/user/ElizNMaeve
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Monday, July 11, 2011
Stranger in a Familiar Land
Of course High Valley is familiar. My first stay was a two week stint at High Valley's summer camp at age eleven. I was warned then to “stay away from Olga’s son.” (My future husband) “He snaps people’s butts with towels.” When I was kicked out of school at sixteen, my brother suggested: “Send her to Olga. Olga will find her something to do.” So for two years I served a sort of tweeny maid at High Valley School. Later, married to the son and heir, I worked for a time as a cook and a drama teacher. My kids attended nursery school here. And when the school closed, I started The Center at High Valley, which I ran as a sort of back burner operation, always careful to defer to my mother-in-law’s sovereignty and always able to retreat to our house a mile away on the other side of the hill.
Now, as those of you who follow this blog might know, we have moved to High Valley to an upstairs apartment—which I had painted in many intense colors after years of living with white walls. It is a rabbit warren of an apartment where people get lost and where tall people look too big in the narrow hall. (My husband and I are both short). Our bedroom—two walls raspberry, two a rich green to match an old oriental carpet—is the one my husband’s parents shared. It has a commanding view of all there is to enjoy—and tend!
All my adult life, I have kept to an unvaried schedule: write in the morning, work at whatever the job I had in the afternoons and evenings. I raised kids, kept a comfortable house, without paying much attention to detail or dust, and enjoyed an undemanding yard surrounded by the friendly trees of a deep wood. Now that whole part of our life is past. Though our apartment is small and will be easy to keep, we have many other spaces to maintain for the Center, not to mention lawns and endless overgrown gardens.
And, for the first time in twenty years, I am not working on The Maeve Chronicles. (They are complete. Red-Robed Priestess is coming out in November.)
I have no schedule—at least not yet. I wander here and there, tugged by this or that task. Though I still write and have a counseling practice, I am feeling more and more like an arch-housewife and inept groundskeeper. Sometimes I long to go home to my old house and life, and yes, sometime I weep. More often, I feel tickled. I am enjoying being a stranger to myself, growing willy nilly into a new life. I like that every day is different and that the weather plays such a big role. It’s dry, so today is the day to mow. It’s cool and damp in the morning, time to weed. It’s raining…rest!!!
I will close this post with a recent poem:
Reluctant Gardener
Overwhelmed by weeds
besieged by poison ivy
overrun with grass
I weed-whack away at a bit
of lost garden and give
it a bad haircut.
I must plant something here,
something that will spread
and take care of itself.
Oh the choices! A low yellow bloom
whose name I forget, whose leaves
turn red in the fall.
Butterfly weed, iridescent orange,
and a butterfly bush that promises
to grow and grow, adding butterflies
to its blossoms. How tenderly I mulch them
as instructed: cardboard, dirt, hay,
how anxiously I water them,
how I plan to seek more plants
today, ground cover, dark red daisies,
lavender. Now the garden
is becoming mine, has called me
to itself through my ineptitude
and so we will grow each other.
PS: I don't seem to be able to comment on this blogpost anymore. Maeve has something to say. Here goes:
"I still exist and have a voice, even though my Chronicles are complete. My friend, Tim Dillinger, and I have plans for me to take back this blog at some point soon. Though she is not writing my story, Eliz is still performing portions of it live (and perhaps livestreamed). Her next performance is at the Barn Theatre at High Valley to celebrate my Feast Day Friday, July 22nd. Details on how to tune to livestreaming in will be posted on the blog!"
Now, as those of you who follow this blog might know, we have moved to High Valley to an upstairs apartment—which I had painted in many intense colors after years of living with white walls. It is a rabbit warren of an apartment where people get lost and where tall people look too big in the narrow hall. (My husband and I are both short). Our bedroom—two walls raspberry, two a rich green to match an old oriental carpet—is the one my husband’s parents shared. It has a commanding view of all there is to enjoy—and tend!
All my adult life, I have kept to an unvaried schedule: write in the morning, work at whatever the job I had in the afternoons and evenings. I raised kids, kept a comfortable house, without paying much attention to detail or dust, and enjoyed an undemanding yard surrounded by the friendly trees of a deep wood. Now that whole part of our life is past. Though our apartment is small and will be easy to keep, we have many other spaces to maintain for the Center, not to mention lawns and endless overgrown gardens.
And, for the first time in twenty years, I am not working on The Maeve Chronicles. (They are complete. Red-Robed Priestess is coming out in November.)
I have no schedule—at least not yet. I wander here and there, tugged by this or that task. Though I still write and have a counseling practice, I am feeling more and more like an arch-housewife and inept groundskeeper. Sometimes I long to go home to my old house and life, and yes, sometime I weep. More often, I feel tickled. I am enjoying being a stranger to myself, growing willy nilly into a new life. I like that every day is different and that the weather plays such a big role. It’s dry, so today is the day to mow. It’s cool and damp in the morning, time to weed. It’s raining…rest!!!
I will close this post with a recent poem:
Reluctant Gardener
Overwhelmed by weeds
besieged by poison ivy
overrun with grass
I weed-whack away at a bit
of lost garden and give
it a bad haircut.
I must plant something here,
something that will spread
and take care of itself.
Oh the choices! A low yellow bloom
whose name I forget, whose leaves
turn red in the fall.
Butterfly weed, iridescent orange,
and a butterfly bush that promises
to grow and grow, adding butterflies
to its blossoms. How tenderly I mulch them
as instructed: cardboard, dirt, hay,
how anxiously I water them,
how I plan to seek more plants
today, ground cover, dark red daisies,
lavender. Now the garden
is becoming mine, has called me
to itself through my ineptitude
and so we will grow each other.
PS: I don't seem to be able to comment on this blogpost anymore. Maeve has something to say. Here goes:
"I still exist and have a voice, even though my Chronicles are complete. My friend, Tim Dillinger, and I have plans for me to take back this blog at some point soon. Though she is not writing my story, Eliz is still performing portions of it live (and perhaps livestreamed). Her next performance is at the Barn Theatre at High Valley to celebrate my Feast Day Friday, July 22nd. Details on how to tune to livestreaming in will be posted on the blog!"
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
The Midnight Hour or WTFWJD?
It’s the midnight hour (i.e., between 3:00 and 4:00am when you can’t go back to sleep) before the dawn of Pentecost. For a week I have been struggling intensely with my core beliefs—and core pathologies.
Those of you who have read The Passion of Mary Magdalen will be familiar with the prologue “In the Night.” The Priestess Whores of Temple Magdalen welcome all comers, for the stranger might be a god or an angel. Or Jesus himself, as turns out to be the case when a Samaritan arrives with “a sick man near death,” and Maeve opens the gate she’d barred for the night.
If you follow this blog, you also know that I direct the Center at High Valley at the site of my mother-in-law’s former school. We are about to move into an apartment on that property, and we will be selling our secluded house in the woods.
High Valley has certain Temple Magdalen-like qualities. The school my mother-in-law ran for many years was home to kids with a variety of learning, emotional, and behavioral problems, which all have labels now but didn’t then. It was a place where misfits fit—including me when, as a high school dropout, I worked there as a sort of tweeny maid. The Center still has that quality, one I treasure. Our celebrations are open to people of all faiths and no faiths. The atmosphere is welcoming, the structure is organic. We often joke that we are an unintentional community. Just like at Temple Magdalen, we don’t have meetings, we have parties, music jams, storytelling, homemade arts and entertainment.
As many of you also know, I am descended from a line of Episcopal priests. I can recite much of the Sermon on the Mount by heart. The Gospel passage that is most indelibly imprinted on my psyche is from Matthew 25: “I was naked and ye clothed me, hungry and ye gave me to eat, thirsty, and ye gave me to drink, sick and ye visited me, in prison and ye came unto me. Inasmuch as ye have done it onto one of these the least of my brethren ye have done it unto me.” These verses are on my grandfather’s memorial plaque. They were at the core of every sermon my father gave in or out of church. They also informed my vision of Temple Magdalen.
So when acquaintances asked me to offer space at High Valley on a barter basis to a troubled woman, I said what I would call a complicated yes, though my gut would have preferred a simple no. The woman has no car (we live ten miles from shopping), can't do much physical labor (our major need) and is in rocky shape emotionally. Moreover, our tentative retreat space is downstairs from the apartment we will be newly inhabiting. I did manage to say no to a summer internship (after much agonizing) but I said yes to a three week retreat. Those approaching me on her behalf felt sure that a change from her current environment would lead to a breakthrough.
The woman responded to my offer enthusiastically but asked to bring with her a man with mental and emotional problems far more severe than her own. I’d met him, and my gut was having a fit, but my first response to her was a mild: “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” which of course she ignored. Then I said my first simple no: “The offer is to you, not to him.” Her numerous appeals that he be included became increasingly manipulative and, as I held firm, vituperative. In the end, she refused to come without him.
There was more than one sweated midnight hour during that week. One session began with: “At Temple Magdalen, they would have taken in both of them….” Suddenly Maeve interrupted and brought me up short:
“You are not going to go all fundamentalist on me! First of all, I have no intention of starting a religion. Second, Temple Magdalen and High Valley are not identical. At Temple Magdalen, we had a lot of staff, and we had two wealthy benefactors. So stop this line of thinking right now.”
Wow, I thought. There could be a blog post in this. Some people do refer to The Maeve Chronicles as their bible. You could argue that Maeve and I have rewritten the New Testament—but not to create a new orthodoxy! Temple Magdalen is a phenomenon not an institution. Moreover, The Maeve Chronicles end with a song called: “All Temples Fall.”
Despite Maeve’s admonishment, the midnight hour before Pentecost finds me fretting once again about my failure. “I wrote the Prologue (I say to myself--again). But I can’t live it. I am a hypocrite!” “Jesus Christ!” Maeve says, fed-up. “You have such a Christ complex. Go talk to Jesus. He’s the one who started all this.” So I do.
Jesus asks me: “What have you learned from me?” I quote all the passages about giving even more than you’re asked, concluding with Matthew 25. Jesus offers no comforting exegesis.
“Tell me what happened,” he says. And I tell him the story from the first request to take in the woman to my last no to including her friend. It must be the effect of his listening; I find myself taking care not to justify or reproach myself. I just give him the facts.
He receives the story without comment, and then he asks: “Where did you go wrong?”
“I said yes when I wanted to say no,” I answer.
Then follows one of those brief yet timeless life reviews in which this pattern is painfully and painstakingly illuminated.
Afterwards Jesus asks me, almost casually, just as a point of information. “Do you want to take care of people?”
“No,” I admit.
Then he asks: “What is it you think I want from you?”
I don’t answer right away, pondering all those deeply embedded passages, my compulsion to be good—at least (especially) in my own eyes.
“I want you to be truthful,” he says at last. “I want you to be real. I want you to be yourself.”
At just that moment, my hand closes on a cross pendant that has been lost for several days among the bed sheets.
“Ok,” I say.
And a few moments later, I fall into a sound sleep.
Those of you who have read The Passion of Mary Magdalen will be familiar with the prologue “In the Night.” The Priestess Whores of Temple Magdalen welcome all comers, for the stranger might be a god or an angel. Or Jesus himself, as turns out to be the case when a Samaritan arrives with “a sick man near death,” and Maeve opens the gate she’d barred for the night.
If you follow this blog, you also know that I direct the Center at High Valley at the site of my mother-in-law’s former school. We are about to move into an apartment on that property, and we will be selling our secluded house in the woods.
High Valley has certain Temple Magdalen-like qualities. The school my mother-in-law ran for many years was home to kids with a variety of learning, emotional, and behavioral problems, which all have labels now but didn’t then. It was a place where misfits fit—including me when, as a high school dropout, I worked there as a sort of tweeny maid. The Center still has that quality, one I treasure. Our celebrations are open to people of all faiths and no faiths. The atmosphere is welcoming, the structure is organic. We often joke that we are an unintentional community. Just like at Temple Magdalen, we don’t have meetings, we have parties, music jams, storytelling, homemade arts and entertainment.
As many of you also know, I am descended from a line of Episcopal priests. I can recite much of the Sermon on the Mount by heart. The Gospel passage that is most indelibly imprinted on my psyche is from Matthew 25: “I was naked and ye clothed me, hungry and ye gave me to eat, thirsty, and ye gave me to drink, sick and ye visited me, in prison and ye came unto me. Inasmuch as ye have done it onto one of these the least of my brethren ye have done it unto me.” These verses are on my grandfather’s memorial plaque. They were at the core of every sermon my father gave in or out of church. They also informed my vision of Temple Magdalen.
So when acquaintances asked me to offer space at High Valley on a barter basis to a troubled woman, I said what I would call a complicated yes, though my gut would have preferred a simple no. The woman has no car (we live ten miles from shopping), can't do much physical labor (our major need) and is in rocky shape emotionally. Moreover, our tentative retreat space is downstairs from the apartment we will be newly inhabiting. I did manage to say no to a summer internship (after much agonizing) but I said yes to a three week retreat. Those approaching me on her behalf felt sure that a change from her current environment would lead to a breakthrough.
The woman responded to my offer enthusiastically but asked to bring with her a man with mental and emotional problems far more severe than her own. I’d met him, and my gut was having a fit, but my first response to her was a mild: “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” which of course she ignored. Then I said my first simple no: “The offer is to you, not to him.” Her numerous appeals that he be included became increasingly manipulative and, as I held firm, vituperative. In the end, she refused to come without him.
There was more than one sweated midnight hour during that week. One session began with: “At Temple Magdalen, they would have taken in both of them….” Suddenly Maeve interrupted and brought me up short:
“You are not going to go all fundamentalist on me! First of all, I have no intention of starting a religion. Second, Temple Magdalen and High Valley are not identical. At Temple Magdalen, we had a lot of staff, and we had two wealthy benefactors. So stop this line of thinking right now.”
Wow, I thought. There could be a blog post in this. Some people do refer to The Maeve Chronicles as their bible. You could argue that Maeve and I have rewritten the New Testament—but not to create a new orthodoxy! Temple Magdalen is a phenomenon not an institution. Moreover, The Maeve Chronicles end with a song called: “All Temples Fall.”
Despite Maeve’s admonishment, the midnight hour before Pentecost finds me fretting once again about my failure. “I wrote the Prologue (I say to myself--again). But I can’t live it. I am a hypocrite!” “Jesus Christ!” Maeve says, fed-up. “You have such a Christ complex. Go talk to Jesus. He’s the one who started all this.” So I do.
Jesus asks me: “What have you learned from me?” I quote all the passages about giving even more than you’re asked, concluding with Matthew 25. Jesus offers no comforting exegesis.
“Tell me what happened,” he says. And I tell him the story from the first request to take in the woman to my last no to including her friend. It must be the effect of his listening; I find myself taking care not to justify or reproach myself. I just give him the facts.
He receives the story without comment, and then he asks: “Where did you go wrong?”
“I said yes when I wanted to say no,” I answer.
Then follows one of those brief yet timeless life reviews in which this pattern is painfully and painstakingly illuminated.
Afterwards Jesus asks me, almost casually, just as a point of information. “Do you want to take care of people?”
“No,” I admit.
Then he asks: “What is it you think I want from you?”
I don’t answer right away, pondering all those deeply embedded passages, my compulsion to be good—at least (especially) in my own eyes.
“I want you to be truthful,” he says at last. “I want you to be real. I want you to be yourself.”
At just that moment, my hand closes on a cross pendant that has been lost for several days among the bed sheets.
“Ok,” I say.
And a few moments later, I fall into a sound sleep.
Friday, May 20, 2011
The Rapture: Does it make Scents?
I thought I would write a possibly- farewell post in case any of us are going anywhere on May 21, 2011 that would take us beyond the blogosphere. For those of you who haven’t heard, the Rapture is supposed to occur this Saturday at 6:00 local time. If you think you are going and are worried about left behind pets , there are avowed atheists standing ready to help.
I personally have been much more concerned about the loss of my sense of smell as a result of a lingering sinus infection and/or allergies. It was missing for more than a week, sending me into a perhaps unreasonable panic that it would never return. The last six months have been extremely stressful, but this deprivation tipped me over some edge, as infirmities often will. Think of Job stoically enduring the loss of his family and all his wealth. But when he is afflicted with boils he sits down in the ash pit and begins his famous rant.
Yesterday morning, I smelled my coffee again. Everything fell into perspective. Who cares if we are in the midst of a messy move to High Valley, the yard awash in mud where the septic system remains unfinished? Who cares whether or not we can afford to maintain it or will resolve all the complex issues with our neighbors? Who cares about the toll the economy is taking on us and everyone else, the extreme weather of which we are having our share and which is almost certainly linked to global climate change? (BTW haven’t the tribulations already begun?)
I spent the morning in olfactory rapture. I could smell wet earth and grass, air laden with the scent of blossoms, never mind if I am allergic. I even liked the less pleasant smells, a whiff of gas at a station where I stopped for a second coffee (flavored with faux blueberry). I welcomed the smell of my own waste, which I realize is one way I assess my health. I decided I could accept how out of control my life feels, the world feels, if only I can go on smelling everything. Given a choice between the Rapture and staying behind, earth wins because it makes scents!
By lunch time, which I planned to celebrate by chopping garlic and onions for a stir fry, my sense of smell was gone again. I sniffed the onion and garlic at close range in vain. Since then it’s been flickering on and off like some faulty electrical connection, and I suppose it is like that. We had another night of torrential rain and I despair of the spring and summer events at High Valley with people slogging through mud and sinking in up to their shins. If I were Raptured, I wouldn’t have to worry about the septic system or about moving. It would solve so many problems!
On the other hand, October 21st (the date the world is allegedly supposed to end ) doesn’t get me out of enough responsibilities to be at all comforting. Moreover the release date of Red-Robed Priestess is not till November, which hardly seems fair. Since I am in control of so little, I think will go blow my nose again and check my sense of smell by sniffing my cold coffee. Whether I can smell it or not, I will remember that rapture and torment, heaven and hell are all right here, in every our breath and whiff.
Makes sense to me.
I personally have been much more concerned about the loss of my sense of smell as a result of a lingering sinus infection and/or allergies. It was missing for more than a week, sending me into a perhaps unreasonable panic that it would never return. The last six months have been extremely stressful, but this deprivation tipped me over some edge, as infirmities often will. Think of Job stoically enduring the loss of his family and all his wealth. But when he is afflicted with boils he sits down in the ash pit and begins his famous rant.
Yesterday morning, I smelled my coffee again. Everything fell into perspective. Who cares if we are in the midst of a messy move to High Valley, the yard awash in mud where the septic system remains unfinished? Who cares whether or not we can afford to maintain it or will resolve all the complex issues with our neighbors? Who cares about the toll the economy is taking on us and everyone else, the extreme weather of which we are having our share and which is almost certainly linked to global climate change? (BTW haven’t the tribulations already begun?)
I spent the morning in olfactory rapture. I could smell wet earth and grass, air laden with the scent of blossoms, never mind if I am allergic. I even liked the less pleasant smells, a whiff of gas at a station where I stopped for a second coffee (flavored with faux blueberry). I welcomed the smell of my own waste, which I realize is one way I assess my health. I decided I could accept how out of control my life feels, the world feels, if only I can go on smelling everything. Given a choice between the Rapture and staying behind, earth wins because it makes scents!
By lunch time, which I planned to celebrate by chopping garlic and onions for a stir fry, my sense of smell was gone again. I sniffed the onion and garlic at close range in vain. Since then it’s been flickering on and off like some faulty electrical connection, and I suppose it is like that. We had another night of torrential rain and I despair of the spring and summer events at High Valley with people slogging through mud and sinking in up to their shins. If I were Raptured, I wouldn’t have to worry about the septic system or about moving. It would solve so many problems!
On the other hand, October 21st (the date the world is allegedly supposed to end ) doesn’t get me out of enough responsibilities to be at all comforting. Moreover the release date of Red-Robed Priestess is not till November, which hardly seems fair. Since I am in control of so little, I think will go blow my nose again and check my sense of smell by sniffing my cold coffee. Whether I can smell it or not, I will remember that rapture and torment, heaven and hell are all right here, in every our breath and whiff.
Makes sense to me.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Out of the Closet
Note: We are in the process of getting ready to move from our home of twenty-six years to an apartment at High Valley. I am keeping a journal of the process. Below is an entry.
I finally open a dreaded closet, the one in my office (that used to be part of the attic). I know there are boxes of Christmas ornaments there and probably manuscripts, but my long ignorant bliss of rest of the contents is ending.
I pull out a box with a tarnished silver tray and another also tarnished tray with a glass cover (for smelly cheese?) and six small knives. Unused wedding gifts? What to do with them now? Polish them up and give them away? Add them to High Valley’s eclectic communal stash of cookware and plates?
There is a more poignant box presided over by Glumph (a stuffed lion who was hard for a three-year old to haul around; the name denotes the effort) and Elsa (of later vintage, named, of course, for the lioness in Born Free). Their already-worn fur now sports embedded mouse droppings. Chewed insulation lies in clumps, dry dirty snow that will never melt to any spring. And in the rest of the box: all my writings from just before college till just after as well as letters from my college teacher and mentor who took lavish epistolary care of me long after I was his student.
So I sit and read and sift, marveling at all the spiral notebooks filled with the ink of cartridge pens and the academic papers painstakingly typed on onion skin paper with handwritten corrections. I made far more attempts at writing fiction than I remember. I am impressed with some of my papers and exams. Such an unedited trove, one I would like to discover after my own death, though my progeny may not feel the same way.
Now I compose on the computer. I have lots of word files, but I weed through them, every now and then, pressing the delete key with a fair amount of ruthlessness. I do write and receive a lot of email (most of which I don’t save), but I think I wrote more letters, certainly longer ones, and I received wonderfully long, detailed letters in return.
I have lived long enough to see the passing of an age.
What will be in the closets of the digital age? Will there be no more steamer trunks of journals? (I have one of those, too, crammed with all the journals I wrote till my journal became electronic five years ago.)
I find I like typing with two fingers and having my words so easy to store and transport. I don’t like the mouse shit (or the pee on some of the pages) or the dust of the ages in the boxes. I don’t like the space all my old writings require. But I do like the thrill of discovery, of a largely forgotten life revealed. I felt the same way when we found my father’s correspondence with his father. I knew my father had been hostile toward my ambition to write, but until we found the letters, I never knew his father had said the same awful things to him, almost word for word. (Therein lies another post).
Will going through someone’s computer files or Blackberry yield the same excitement or poignancy?
I am going to have to kiss Glumph and Elsa goodbye (carefully so as not to ingest the droppings). I will probably keep only a small sample of handwritten drafts of published work. But I will keep the term papers and the early unpublished strivings in a file box from Staples. Enough is revealed in these that the journals, as I’ve always intended, can burn.
I finally open a dreaded closet, the one in my office (that used to be part of the attic). I know there are boxes of Christmas ornaments there and probably manuscripts, but my long ignorant bliss of rest of the contents is ending.
I pull out a box with a tarnished silver tray and another also tarnished tray with a glass cover (for smelly cheese?) and six small knives. Unused wedding gifts? What to do with them now? Polish them up and give them away? Add them to High Valley’s eclectic communal stash of cookware and plates?
There is a more poignant box presided over by Glumph (a stuffed lion who was hard for a three-year old to haul around; the name denotes the effort) and Elsa (of later vintage, named, of course, for the lioness in Born Free). Their already-worn fur now sports embedded mouse droppings. Chewed insulation lies in clumps, dry dirty snow that will never melt to any spring. And in the rest of the box: all my writings from just before college till just after as well as letters from my college teacher and mentor who took lavish epistolary care of me long after I was his student.
So I sit and read and sift, marveling at all the spiral notebooks filled with the ink of cartridge pens and the academic papers painstakingly typed on onion skin paper with handwritten corrections. I made far more attempts at writing fiction than I remember. I am impressed with some of my papers and exams. Such an unedited trove, one I would like to discover after my own death, though my progeny may not feel the same way.
Now I compose on the computer. I have lots of word files, but I weed through them, every now and then, pressing the delete key with a fair amount of ruthlessness. I do write and receive a lot of email (most of which I don’t save), but I think I wrote more letters, certainly longer ones, and I received wonderfully long, detailed letters in return.
I have lived long enough to see the passing of an age.
What will be in the closets of the digital age? Will there be no more steamer trunks of journals? (I have one of those, too, crammed with all the journals I wrote till my journal became electronic five years ago.)
I find I like typing with two fingers and having my words so easy to store and transport. I don’t like the mouse shit (or the pee on some of the pages) or the dust of the ages in the boxes. I don’t like the space all my old writings require. But I do like the thrill of discovery, of a largely forgotten life revealed. I felt the same way when we found my father’s correspondence with his father. I knew my father had been hostile toward my ambition to write, but until we found the letters, I never knew his father had said the same awful things to him, almost word for word. (Therein lies another post).
Will going through someone’s computer files or Blackberry yield the same excitement or poignancy?
I am going to have to kiss Glumph and Elsa goodbye (carefully so as not to ingest the droppings). I will probably keep only a small sample of handwritten drafts of published work. But I will keep the term papers and the early unpublished strivings in a file box from Staples. Enough is revealed in these that the journals, as I’ve always intended, can burn.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
The Last Party
Below is a brief excerpt from the chapter called "The Last Party" from my novel The Passion of Mary Magdalen, one of The Maeve Chronicles. Maeve and I reprint it here (with our own permission) as a seasonal offering. Readers in the region of New York State's Hudson Valley, please join me this Friday, April 22nd, 7:30 at High Valley for a community reading of the four chapters that tell the Passion story. There will also be original music!
“Listen, my beloved companions, and remember,” Jesus said, as we passed the unleavened bread and drank the first cup of wine. “Whenever you break bread together or share a cup of wine, I’ll be with you, in your midst. Haven’t we always feasted together? Hasn’t there always been enough and more than enough? I tell you, whenever two or three gather together to share what they have, there I am. There is life. There is the Kingdom of Heaven. Remember. Remember me then.”
“But why do we have to remember you?” Peter burst out. “Where are you going!”
“Where I am going now, you can’t follow. Not yet. But you will in time.”
“But how will we find you if we don’t know where you’re going?” Tomas fretted. “How will we know the way?”
“I am the way,” Jesus said quietly.
That is all he said. Or that is all I remember. If the Last Party was indeed an evening of esoteric teaching, only those words remain with me. The words and how he looked at each of us in turn, letting us understand him in whatever way we could.
When he turned to me, I saw the path the rising moon makes across the water. I saw paths made by wild goats in mountain passes. I saw how a flower tracks the path of the sun, how waves part for a ship’s prow; I saw myself opening all my ways to him.
After the second cup of wine, we loosened up and began to sing somewhat irreverent ditties about the plagues of Egypt and then more dramatic ones about the parting of the Red Sea. With the third cup of wine, we sang the ecstatic victory song of Moses’s sister, Miriam. Then all the women took up tambourines (we always had those at a feast) and danced. Soon the men got up and danced in their own circle. And we all sang, songs with no words, the women ululating.
At last a hush fell. We stood bright-eyed and flushed, glistening with sweat, wild with love for each other, as we had been that last night at the Wedding of Cana. Jesus went and flung open the door, in case Elijah should be waiting to come in. Still on our feet, we drank the fourth cup of wine. Then Jesus set down the cup and crossed the room to me. He took my hand and kissed it, the kiss of a suppliant to his priestess. When he released my hand, I took his and kissed it, the kiss of a disciple to her teacher. Then we stood facing each other, not touching, as the companions made a circle around us. In one movement, we came together and kissed each other on the lips.
“Listen, my beloved companions, and remember,” Jesus said, as we passed the unleavened bread and drank the first cup of wine. “Whenever you break bread together or share a cup of wine, I’ll be with you, in your midst. Haven’t we always feasted together? Hasn’t there always been enough and more than enough? I tell you, whenever two or three gather together to share what they have, there I am. There is life. There is the Kingdom of Heaven. Remember. Remember me then.”
“But why do we have to remember you?” Peter burst out. “Where are you going!”
“Where I am going now, you can’t follow. Not yet. But you will in time.”
“But how will we find you if we don’t know where you’re going?” Tomas fretted. “How will we know the way?”
“I am the way,” Jesus said quietly.
That is all he said. Or that is all I remember. If the Last Party was indeed an evening of esoteric teaching, only those words remain with me. The words and how he looked at each of us in turn, letting us understand him in whatever way we could.
When he turned to me, I saw the path the rising moon makes across the water. I saw paths made by wild goats in mountain passes. I saw how a flower tracks the path of the sun, how waves part for a ship’s prow; I saw myself opening all my ways to him.
After the second cup of wine, we loosened up and began to sing somewhat irreverent ditties about the plagues of Egypt and then more dramatic ones about the parting of the Red Sea. With the third cup of wine, we sang the ecstatic victory song of Moses’s sister, Miriam. Then all the women took up tambourines (we always had those at a feast) and danced. Soon the men got up and danced in their own circle. And we all sang, songs with no words, the women ululating.
At last a hush fell. We stood bright-eyed and flushed, glistening with sweat, wild with love for each other, as we had been that last night at the Wedding of Cana. Jesus went and flung open the door, in case Elijah should be waiting to come in. Still on our feet, we drank the fourth cup of wine. Then Jesus set down the cup and crossed the room to me. He took my hand and kissed it, the kiss of a suppliant to his priestess. When he released my hand, I took his and kissed it, the kiss of a disciple to her teacher. Then we stood facing each other, not touching, as the companions made a circle around us. In one movement, we came together and kissed each other on the lips.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
The Derivation of Catastrophe
As I write, heroic workers in Japan struggle to prevent what one headline called potential “nuclear catastrophe” in the wake of the record-breaking earthquake and devastating tsunami. I was struck by the use of the word, so I looked up catastrophe in my 1975 hardcover edition of The American Heritage Dictionary.
Catastrophe 1. A great and sudden calamity; disaster 2. A sudden violent change in the earth’s surface; cataclysm 3. The denouement of a play, especially a classical tragedy. The root derives from the Greek katastrophe from katastreiphen: to turn down, overturn. Kata-, down and strephein-, to turn. From the root Strebh, to wind, to turn, to twist.
At first the root meaning is not obvious to me. Then I think of the earth turning, like its own tides and storms, like the twisted strands of DNA. In a tragedy, literary or literal, there is also a turning. The tragic hero overreaches, underestimates, or both, and the tide turns against him, the people turn against him, the furies, the very elements. He is overturned, overthrown like a corrupt regime, downturned like our economy. We live in catastrophic times. Humans, as a species, share the tragic flaw of the hero, the illusion that we can control what is beyond our control for our own ends. And now we face global catastrophe.
Earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones, volcanoes (earth, water, wind, fire) are natural disasters not caused by human agency (though increased storm activity is linked to global warming). They are the earth shaping and re-shaping itself, losing and restoring balance, as it always has, as all life does. This dramatic flux is nothing new on planet earth. A cataclysm (kata, down kluzien, to wash) is catastrophic because we cluster in huge numbers along the coasts or on the slopes of volcanoes or on flood plains where the soil is fertile. And if we must build a power plant on a fault line to meet our needs, we do, hoping for the best, preparing (however inadequately) for the worst—all of us, in every nation that has the capability.
As we appear to be in a period of denouement in our collective drama, we might ponder the meaning of tragedy. The hero in a tragedy is not just flawed but heroic. Our advances in technology, medicine, agriculture that have hugely increased our population and our expectations all began with noble intent. The tragedy, as a form, gives us a chance to identify where the hero (us) lost his way. The survivors of the tragedy (us too) have chance to restore the balance that was lost and begin again.
Catastrophe 1. A great and sudden calamity; disaster 2. A sudden violent change in the earth’s surface; cataclysm 3. The denouement of a play, especially a classical tragedy. The root derives from the Greek katastrophe from katastreiphen: to turn down, overturn. Kata-, down and strephein-, to turn. From the root Strebh, to wind, to turn, to twist.
At first the root meaning is not obvious to me. Then I think of the earth turning, like its own tides and storms, like the twisted strands of DNA. In a tragedy, literary or literal, there is also a turning. The tragic hero overreaches, underestimates, or both, and the tide turns against him, the people turn against him, the furies, the very elements. He is overturned, overthrown like a corrupt regime, downturned like our economy. We live in catastrophic times. Humans, as a species, share the tragic flaw of the hero, the illusion that we can control what is beyond our control for our own ends. And now we face global catastrophe.
Earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones, volcanoes (earth, water, wind, fire) are natural disasters not caused by human agency (though increased storm activity is linked to global warming). They are the earth shaping and re-shaping itself, losing and restoring balance, as it always has, as all life does. This dramatic flux is nothing new on planet earth. A cataclysm (kata, down kluzien, to wash) is catastrophic because we cluster in huge numbers along the coasts or on the slopes of volcanoes or on flood plains where the soil is fertile. And if we must build a power plant on a fault line to meet our needs, we do, hoping for the best, preparing (however inadequately) for the worst—all of us, in every nation that has the capability.
As we appear to be in a period of denouement in our collective drama, we might ponder the meaning of tragedy. The hero in a tragedy is not just flawed but heroic. Our advances in technology, medicine, agriculture that have hugely increased our population and our expectations all began with noble intent. The tragedy, as a form, gives us a chance to identify where the hero (us) lost his way. The survivors of the tragedy (us too) have chance to restore the balance that was lost and begin again.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
WDJS: What Did Jesus Say? Individual and Corporate Discernment
There was a time in my life when in prayer and meditation, I would ask questions of Jesus (among other deities) and often feel that I had received answers—usually in the form of another question that made me see everything in a different light. When I learned that George W. Bush also spoke to Jesus in this direct, intimate way and based his political decisions on these conversations, I felt (and feel) uneasy. Was there any difference between me and the man who ordered the invasion of Iraq despite worldwide protest against this action, including the protest of many religious people and institutions?
In her recent article in Huffington Post “God in Wisconsin,” Diana Butler Bass notes that The Roman Catholic Church as well as most mainstream Protestant denominations have endorsed the Unions in their standoff with Governor Walker, but he remains immoveable, obedient to his personal understanding of God’s will.
Reading her article, I felt an appreciation for corporate religious practice, the checks and balances the institutional church can provide to the individual’s interpretation of divine will (which is often his or her own will dressed up as god, a particularly noxious and often dangerous form of spiritual inflation). My gratitude to mainstream institutional religion is ironic. I have always been on the side of those the church persecuted: mystics, heretics, and other nonconformists. Though I am an ordained interfaith minister, I currently have no institutional affiliation.
The daughter of an Episcopal priest, who practiced and preached the social gospel in the 1960s, I left the church to become a member of The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). I attended a silent Meeting (as distinct from a pastoral) where each person shared in the Meeting’s ministry and anyone moved by the Spirit could speak from the silence. Quakers temper the individual’s “leadings” with the corporate discernment of the whole Meeting. Their model works as well as any I have ever seen. So why didn’t I remain a Friend?
During my time as a Quaker, there was much controversy among Friends about their positions on Christ-centered as distinct to Universalist worship, abortion, homosexuality, and whether or not Friends could accept the worship of the divine as feminine. Friends often reminded each other that it took one hundred years for Quakers to come to corporate agreement on the abolition of slavery. When it came to my beliefs, I found I was not willing to submit to the discipline of corporate process. I was not, in essence, a Quaker.
For the past sixteen years, my communal (as distinct from corporate) spiritual practice has been hosting earth-centered celebrations at The Center at High Valley. Everyone is welcome, and no one has to believe anything. There is a beauty to these celebrations, which involve lots of singing, dancing, and spontaneous creativity, which many find people healing and even profound. But there is no institutional element, nothing to ensure that our heartfelt, eclectic traditions will survive in any form. Nor can we do something as fine as endorse the stand of the Unions. Our lack of institutional identity is a trade-off, a dance on the horns of a dilemma.
My personal spiritual practice is imaginative and has included re-writing The New Testament in a series of novels called The Maeve Chronicles, featuring the Celtic Mary Magdalen who is no one’s disciple and is even more hopeless at institutional affiliations than I am. In Bright Dark Madonna, Maeve struggles with people’s invocation of the resurrected Jesus’s authority. In a dream, she confronts Jesus. He explains somewhat ruefully:
“You’re going to have to get used to people having visions of me, receiving messages from me. It seems to be a side effect of the god-making death, as you call it. The druids never warned me about it… I can’t help ‘appearing unto’ people when they call on me, when they believe in me. I might even ‘speak unto’ them, but remember what Anna the prophetess used to say about prophecy, how it always loses in the translation and gains in the interpretation? It’s like that, and I’m afraid I don’t have much control over translation or interpretation.”
I would like to offer with a few checks and balances for people without institutional ties as well as those whose churches encourage direct, personal communication with the divine:
Is the divine message for you, regarding your own behavior and moral accountability?
Is the divine message directing you to reform others and possibly inflict harm on them?
If the latter, best to recall what Jesus already did say: “You hypocrite! First remove the beam from your own eye, and then you will see clearly enough to remove the speck from your brother's eye." -Matthew 7:4
In her recent article in Huffington Post “God in Wisconsin,” Diana Butler Bass notes that The Roman Catholic Church as well as most mainstream Protestant denominations have endorsed the Unions in their standoff with Governor Walker, but he remains immoveable, obedient to his personal understanding of God’s will.
Reading her article, I felt an appreciation for corporate religious practice, the checks and balances the institutional church can provide to the individual’s interpretation of divine will (which is often his or her own will dressed up as god, a particularly noxious and often dangerous form of spiritual inflation). My gratitude to mainstream institutional religion is ironic. I have always been on the side of those the church persecuted: mystics, heretics, and other nonconformists. Though I am an ordained interfaith minister, I currently have no institutional affiliation.
The daughter of an Episcopal priest, who practiced and preached the social gospel in the 1960s, I left the church to become a member of The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). I attended a silent Meeting (as distinct from a pastoral) where each person shared in the Meeting’s ministry and anyone moved by the Spirit could speak from the silence. Quakers temper the individual’s “leadings” with the corporate discernment of the whole Meeting. Their model works as well as any I have ever seen. So why didn’t I remain a Friend?
During my time as a Quaker, there was much controversy among Friends about their positions on Christ-centered as distinct to Universalist worship, abortion, homosexuality, and whether or not Friends could accept the worship of the divine as feminine. Friends often reminded each other that it took one hundred years for Quakers to come to corporate agreement on the abolition of slavery. When it came to my beliefs, I found I was not willing to submit to the discipline of corporate process. I was not, in essence, a Quaker.
For the past sixteen years, my communal (as distinct from corporate) spiritual practice has been hosting earth-centered celebrations at The Center at High Valley. Everyone is welcome, and no one has to believe anything. There is a beauty to these celebrations, which involve lots of singing, dancing, and spontaneous creativity, which many find people healing and even profound. But there is no institutional element, nothing to ensure that our heartfelt, eclectic traditions will survive in any form. Nor can we do something as fine as endorse the stand of the Unions. Our lack of institutional identity is a trade-off, a dance on the horns of a dilemma.
My personal spiritual practice is imaginative and has included re-writing The New Testament in a series of novels called The Maeve Chronicles, featuring the Celtic Mary Magdalen who is no one’s disciple and is even more hopeless at institutional affiliations than I am. In Bright Dark Madonna, Maeve struggles with people’s invocation of the resurrected Jesus’s authority. In a dream, she confronts Jesus. He explains somewhat ruefully:
“You’re going to have to get used to people having visions of me, receiving messages from me. It seems to be a side effect of the god-making death, as you call it. The druids never warned me about it… I can’t help ‘appearing unto’ people when they call on me, when they believe in me. I might even ‘speak unto’ them, but remember what Anna the prophetess used to say about prophecy, how it always loses in the translation and gains in the interpretation? It’s like that, and I’m afraid I don’t have much control over translation or interpretation.”
I would like to offer with a few checks and balances for people without institutional ties as well as those whose churches encourage direct, personal communication with the divine:
Is the divine message for you, regarding your own behavior and moral accountability?
Is the divine message directing you to reform others and possibly inflict harm on them?
If the latter, best to recall what Jesus already did say: “You hypocrite! First remove the beam from your own eye, and then you will see clearly enough to remove the speck from your brother's eye." -Matthew 7:4
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