Not Here, Not There

When I was trying to grow up both female and Catholic, the church kept telling me about "the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost." And when we uppity women got too '"hysterical" to ignore, they threw us a bone and said, "Oh, yeah, well, the Holy Ghost? That sexless, inhuman dove or flame or whatever the fuck it was? That "thing" that gets so much less attention than the sexed, humanized Father and Son? That's you. That's the "divine feminine," or "wisdom," or "Sophia," at least to the Greek Orthodox, or something; can't you shut up now?"

Well, no.

And, so I was ready-made to be attracted to Wicca, with it's real trinity of Maiden, Mother, Crone. Now that's a trinity that I can understand and one that has nurtured my spiritul development for nigh on a quarter of a century, and it's the spiritual truth that I expect will be on my lips and in my heart when I dance across the river between my garden in Virginia and the orchards in the Summerlands (it's a thin border and a river full of crossing stones. I can see it, once it a while; I think that I'll be good at making that crossing, even as rooted as I am to this particular place.)

And, yet, like so many symbols, that trinity glosses over a lot of subtelties. And, especially as women live longer and fulfill more roles within the world, we're finding that there are a hundred different variations and subcategories between those three markers/archetypes. One of the most discussed, within the feminist Pagan community, is a fourth stage sometimes called: Queen. This is the woman whose family is raised (or who has mothered a creative project, social justice movement, business, work of art, or garden (hell, sometimes all of those) to fruition)and who is, in this day and age of modern medicine and preventive health measures, still sexual, active, vital, alive, able to create and grow quite a lot before she goes off (as I am beginning to long to do) to sit by the fire, dispense wisdom when asked, nap, and reflect. She's what I think that the Empress card was really meant to show and she's a combination of the Queens of Swords, Wands, Cups, and Pentacles. (We all wind up knowing at least something of all of them, by the time we get to be 50/60 something.)

Another, it occured to me today, is the Mature Mother. I was sitting in my garden and thinking about Ruby Sarah's recent post about Beltane being the holiday when the Kore laughs birds and flowers. And realizing that, for many, if not most, women in our society, Beltane sex, the kind that impregnates you (and any child or project born in late February/early March is counted lucky, as "Beltane got"), is often not quite the experience of a Kore, the young maiden just experimenting with sex. She's not Persephone, gathering flowers with her girlfriends and caught, all unawares, by Hades. She's more likely to have already gotten her education, learned to enjoy and use sex, started her career, traveled a bit (if my own acquaintances are any indication), sown some wild oats, had some fun, and then decided -- deliberately -- to have a child (birth a business, found a movement, etc.). Which is the great blessing that birth control allows to those of us living in the late 20th/early 21st Centuries. And, for that woman, that Mature Mother who is no longer a Kore, but not yet a Queen, sex -- and pregnancy and motherhood -- is likely to be quite different from those same experiences when had by a Kore, who can sometimes find herself (Goddess knows, I did) torn a bit unexpectedly and unprepared from her girlhood and into womanhood/motherhood, from nurturing herownself into nurturing a child, project, cause.

And, for me, gardening this year -- just after a once-every-several-centuries Winter and in the midst of both warming spells that have oak pollen falling two weeks before its normal Beltane fall and cooling trends that threaten with frost seedlings put out after our "normal" last frost date -- calls to this Mature Mother, this woman who has learned how to manage the changing weather of lovers (human, weather-got, Herne, or Greenman), my get (children, projects, briefs, art, businesses, etc.), myself. I'm not the Kore, rocked and challenged by pregnancy and parenting. I'm not yet the Queen, ready to rule based on all that I've learned. I'm still in the final stages of the Mature Mother, working now on giving birth to Myself, that person who may have gotten lost a bit, (primordial soup, the stuff of Hecate) but also created, in between Maiden and Mother.

May it be so for you. Blessed Beltane.

Picture found here.

Dancing In The Ice

Late last night, I stepped out, as I often do, onto the back porch for a moment before going to bed. It's my final moment with the trees and animals in my backyard, and I wanted to see if I could find the first sliver of the new Moon. It was cold and the sky was covered in clouds and then -- it rippled. (I don't know how to describe it any better, that moment when the veil moves aside a bit, thins so that you can see more through it than you could see before, you take the pill that makes you larger. So, it rippled.*)

The wind changed and tiny ice crystals began to fall, with a lovely bright noise, from the cloudy night sky. The branches of trees and lilacs, heavy with swelling buds, rustled like sistrums. The bark on the birch trees made love to the sudden cold. The atmosphere was instantly charged and I fell, standing upright, through caves of ice, across frozen fjords, into what C.S. Lewis called Northerness, high across the Arctic sky with Serafina Pekkala. My Scandinavian many-times-great grandmothers smiled at me, waved from their skis, reminded me that I come from a people who revel in the cold, pointed to my bare feet, and flew off into the dark. And I was back, on my own terra cotta tiles, in my own screen porch, watched seriously by my own squirrels and cat. And the wind chimes made a very serious "ting" as if to say, "Now, Listen. Now it begins."

And, there they were: the Maiden and the Crone, Spring and Winter, dancing around my frozen backyard, already carpeted with icy snow, dancing with the kind of stately gaiety reserved for special occasions. I watched them, so happy together, a beloved Nonna and her beloved granddaughter, and was reminded of the line: Life and death upon one tether/And running beautiful together. And, that's how it happens. We get one last big snow and that snow mulches and waters the already-emerged green shoots of daffodils and crocus. The warm winds of March will blow in within hours and melt the snow and it's all as it should be/has been/will(please the Goddess)be.

I've had an incubating idea for a post about how the old Maiden/Mother/Crone-Spring/Summer & Autumn/Autumn & Winter paradigm no longer works now that women live longer (thanks, Louis Pasteur!) and that Ostara ought, more than the festival of the Maiden, be thought of as the festival of play, something that even we old crones really enjoy. I wanted to talk about how one becomes freer, in some ways, to play and have fun as one ages, but you know, I'll let that gestate for a year. Just now, I'm all drunk on that loving dance of grandmother and beloved granddaughter.

Turn, Wheel of the Year, turn, and turn, and turn me around with you. I love my life more than I can say.


*It's so difficult as to be impossible to write in any comprehensible way about ecstatic experience, about what happens to a mystic in the moments when all the barriers dissolve, when what appear to be the false boundaries fall away and what appears to be the true web appears. St. Teresa tried, St. Catherine of Sienna tried, Rumi tried, Mary Oliver tries. My own pathetic efforts fall far short. (And, no, it doesn't pass my notice that it's during liminal times that this devotee of Hecate, Goddess of the Crossroads, is most likely to feel the infinite touch the buckle of her spine, to use Oliver's phrase.) In the end, words don't work for mystical experience, which happens to Younger Self, not Talking Self. Go catch that one moment in 53 years when the ice starts falling with exactly that sistrum sound. Go have an orgasm that dissolves all the borders. Go twirl around on a grassy hill with a friend and fall rolling down the hill on the green grass that's grown there for years longing for a child's body to roll down it. Stand in the sun and see that photosynthesis is the ultimate act of love and pleasure and fall down struck by the love and pleasure of seeing it. Go drink the mad witch's brew, love the reeling midnight through, grok the stars, come back, and we'll "talk." But talking won't really do any good, will it? And, by then, you won't mind, will you?

Picture found here.