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Bring in the Crone – don’t bother she’s here

No woman should feel ashamed of returning to the world through her work, a portion of its lost heart.”
I think this is attributed to Louise Bogan: would that it were mine.

As a matter of fact I do look 5 days over 60 because, well, that’s what I am. A Crone.

I gave myself a birthday present about a week before my birthday. I hadn’t intended to, but there it was anyway.

It had been a strange day. I was agitated — worried that after 59 years of making myself small so as to not make people feel bad, that I would have no credibility when it came to redefining myself and starting a new career. I mean, how could I receive compensation for my talents that I had for years minimized? What did I have to show as accomplishments?

What I have been relying on for income for over twenty-five years – technical writing – is no longer an option for me. I have been getting no responses to my resume, and, more important, the compensation offered is less than I earned twenty years ago. It was never an occupation that truly recognized the value of good communication, but at least it paid well. Now, it doesn’t pay enough to cover health insurance, let alone compensation for the frustration of an uphill struggle to write well in an unsupportive environment.

I had to find a new career. That was the source of my agitation and, quite frankly, fury.

I found myself feeling as if I had my hands on the plunger of a detonator that would bring down a house – empty, deteriorating, not safe for occupancy.

Metaphor alert: Just to be clear, this was a metaphor for how I felt. I had no detonator in my possession, let alone dynamite.

I succumbed to the feeling and pushed the plunger. It was a powerful boom. The structure unraveled. A cloud of dust engulfed the space that the house had occupied.

A momentary silence, and then the dust cleared, revealing, not an empty space, but a beautiful house surrounded by a lush garden.

My new house. The house of the Crone.

When I turned 50, I did a meditation in which I invited in the Crone. When I asked her how I could help she said, “Let go of youth. She’s no longer your friend.”

And then, “You know what you need to know to be your life. No one else can give you those answers.”

Well, ten years later, I got it, what the Crone was telling me.

And so, the week before my birthday, I received word that I would get what I had asked for: compensation for reading my creative writing. The first response to my request was “Well, that’s not going to happen.” The message being: “We’re doing you a favor by letting you read it.”

Well, I thought, if that’s your decision . . . I guess I won’t be reading my writing at your event.

Much to my surprise, about a week later, my proposal was accepted.

And . . . instead of feeling guilty about honoring the worth of my work, I just felt, “Well, yes, I do know what I’m doing and I know the value of what I am doing.”

It wasn’t so much that I deserved it as that my work has value: I had used the gifts I was given and turned them into the works of my hand:

“ . . . establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.”

And so, I felt what it was like to be me, without guilt, shame, or embarassment for having been given the particular gifts that are my talents. I had the right to live the life I was born into.

That was my birthday present to myself: I have the right to my life.

So here’s to my becoming a Crone – may I return to the world through my work, a portion of its lost heart.

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The Natural Sweetness of Life

Forgiveness is giving up all hope that the past could have been any different.
Either a direct quote from or a paraphrase of something really smart Anne Lamott wrote.

I’ve experienced a lot of disappointment over the past few months.

Hope by hope, I’ve had to let go. Not the hope for the future. But the hope that I could change the past.

That’s a bitter pill to swallow; accepting that the past could not have been any different. I think I finally understand that phrase – it’s a bitter pill to swallow. It doesn’t have anything to do with holding on to bitterness. It’s really about digesting it. Feeling the pain of disappointment at how things were, instead of how they could have been — if only. If only we all knew then what we know now.

But, of course, we didn’t know it then. And the only way that we can truly know it now is to forgive ourselves for not knowing before we could know it.

So I forgave myself for the number of times I strived for acceptance without really owning what I wanted to be accepted for. For being a child who wanted to be loved.

A door closed. And as is the case, another door opened – onto a blank page. And every writer knows how scary that can be – the blank page. In my morning pages I wrote, “What do I do next?”

Then I drew these three cards this morning from the Animal Wise Tarot deck:

Wolf: Intuitive guidance and guardianship

Beaver: Working for our dreams

Bear: Heeding inner voice and cycles

There was the answer to my question. Trust my own guidance and be willing to apply my efforts to what I imagine, not what I imagine someone wants me to do.

And here’s my favorite from today, the Bear card:

All bears have a fondness for honey, a symbol of the natural sweetness of life. When bear wanders in, it is a reminder that our innate potentials are awakening, but only by bringing them out in a new rhythm will we taste the honey of life.”

Here’s to today and the future, the bitter with the sweet.

May the past rest in peace.

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Bless You for Your Metamorphosis

I have learned that it is impossible to compete with mediocrity.

I posted that as my status on Facebook yesterday.

It’s amazing the wisdom that comes to you when you let go of all hope that an intractable system can change. The intractable system being one that is based on the assumption that there isn’t enough to go around. Enough love. Enough talent. Enough life.

And when the prevailing belief is that there isn’t enough, mediocrity prevails. It becomes ruthless in its pursuit of survival. You can’t compete with it because it equates winning with survival. Its goal is not to compete, but to win, regardless of its merit.

Mediocrity is the enemy of change, both on a personal level and a cultural one.

Mediocrity is not, in my mind, a natural state of being. To be mediocre, I think, one needs to choose to petrify one’s inherent abilities, talent, and worth in the interest of acceptance by the status quo. A land where nothing changes.

Karen Armstrong writes in A Short History of Myth:

If it is written and read with serious attention, a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one stage of life, one state of mind, to another.”

To that I say a resounding , Yes!

In this rewrite of my personal story, I think that my biggest epiphany has been about my relationship with mediocrity. I’ve sought it out to try to convince it that it didn’t need to be so afraid.

And when that didn’t work, I told it that it was, in fact, mediocrity disguised as quality. That pissed it off. It had to destroy in order to maintain its status as the status quo.

I think the job of the artist, the writer, the poet is to challenge the status quo. To be willing to go, as a shaman does, into the darkness to gain insights about the darkness. And then to craft those insights into a compelling work of art that portrays the possibility of transformation through change.

Metamorphosis.

The antithesis of mediocrity.

Bless you for your metamorphosis.

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Applying our Hearts Unto Wisdom

Teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”
Moses, maybe

When last I blogged, I decided to work on my howl. Howling to find my pack.

Perhaps because of that, a friend who Tom and I last saw years ago (as in over 40), came to dinner. He was in town for a high school reunion. Kelly was a part of the group called Auxiliary Players – a group comprising audacious high school and home-for-the-summer college students – that produced plays and performances during the summer.

Our friend Jim joined us. Tom has known Jim since they were both in the seventh grade. I’ve known him as long probably; his mom was my mom’s best friend. They played bridge together for more than 40 years. Marge sorely misses my mom. They were the only liberals in their bridge group.

The conversation turned to memories of high school and what they have done since. There were no stories of missed field goals, favorite cars, or even girls that got away. Instead they talked about music – and how their experience in high school nourished them as musicians.

At one point, Tom put on the CD recording of Psalm 90, a psalm that he set to music when he was nineteen. The recording was of the 1969 a cappella choir’s performance – a high school a cappella choir.

Tom set Psalm 90 to music after hearing it recited over the graves of four students – eighteen-year old boys – who had been killed in a dorm fire set by a disturbed resident. For Tom, I think the most important verse is the one that reads “ . . . establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.”

Let our lives matter.

His mentor, the high school music teacher, asked the choir in September if they were up to the choral piece – a fairly complex piece of music (anyone who knows Tom’s music knows of what I speak). Kelly told us that he thought if Tom wrote it, it would be okay. The choir worked on it through the year and performed it for their Spring concert.

As we listened to the recording, Tom heard the voice of a friend of his who died fifteen years ago of brain cancer. Kelly reminded him that the friend he had visited a day earlier was in the choir as well – a friend who is desperately ill with cancer and is not likely to live much longer. He asked for a copy of it so he could share it with his friend on his next visit, scheduled in two days.

The next time we saw Kelly, he had just returned from visiting his friend. Midway through the recording, Kelly said, his friend broke down in tears.

And I understood that this was my tribe.

People who transform and are transformed. These are not tiny-hearted men. They are men with enormous hearts. Men who had the courage as adolescents to follow the call of their creative souls and now, with the fragility of life staring them in the face, speak with a wisdom of the heart that had its seed in adolescence.

For me, the verse that resonates is the one I quoted at the beginning of this blog, “ . . . teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”

For me, that means being willing to experience life through a mortal body. To be willing to own what being alive means to me, and not shrink from either the joy or sorrow that might bring.

To honor my spirit.

To howl.

Note: The verses that precede my favorite one talk a lot about god’s wrath. I’m not big on that. But given who wrote these verses (Moses, maybe, then translated into English during the time of Shakespeare, by people who think monothesitcally) I think that the point is if you really want to piss off god, waste your life by not living it.

And on another note: I’ll see if I can post the recording of Psalm 90. Stay tuned.