God or Goddess?

One of the reasons Walhydra was so slow about putting out the previous post is that she has become confused and wary about the so-called "God versus Goddess" thing.

As she said last time, during the difficult years about the only thing that kept her going was "centering down, breathing, [and] asking the God aspect of the Divine One to bring her back into his present moment."

She understands that the "God aspect" is the aspect she learned to know and trust as a child growing up in a loving Christian family and culture.

Nonetheless, despite the Truth which came through to her from that upbringing, it was an exclusively patriarchal and orthodox environment.

Patriarchal christianities have rarely been comfortable with the divinely fluid ambiguity of sacred language. They tend to want precision and changelessness.

Anyway, as life has gradually become livable and even joyful at times over the past year, Walhydra as felt divided about "which religion to practice."

"If I turn to Goddess instead of God, what if I lose my way again?"

"Um, Deary?" Goddess whispers. "This isn't about me. It's about you. It's about how you experience me, how you are most honest with and open to me—at a given moment."

"Huh?"

Goddess rolls her eyes.

"You need to go back and reread this! This was you way back at the start of the blog!"

"Um...."

"Don't you remember?!"

"Hey, wait a minute!" she exclaimed, eyeing the Goddess slantwise one day. "You're that same Guy…!"

"Yes, Dearie," Goddess smiled, batting her eyelashes. "Glad you finally noticed."

You see, as Walhydra now understands it, human concepts—including concepts like "the gender of the deity"—are just that. Human.

They are temporary and ever-changing maps of what we happen to know or suspect, at a given moment, about the character of our individual and collective experience of What Is Real. They are, just like the labels which direct us to them, merely pointing fingers.

But we know What Is Real.

"Oh."

"You say that a lot."

"Oh."

Walhydra grinned sheepishly.

And so it is.

Blessèd Be
Bright Crow

Oh.

Full Corn Moon

Walhydra has been trying for far too long to figure out how to reboot her witchiness.

Back in November 2009, when advancing Alzheimer's forced her to move her mother, Senior Witch, from assisted living into skilled nursing, Walhydra started hiding under the covers more and more often.

Eventually she realized that she was spending most of her time among the fluffy balls of "extra cat" under the bed.  By then, she had abdicated the caregiver's role to her psychic twin Crippled Wolf.

Walhydra resumed the SSRI experiment, which did at least restore enough equilibrium and energy for her to be a human being again. However, being human had ceased to be funny enough to tell sardonically humorous blog stories about. She left it to Crippled Wolf to keep things going.

By November a year later, she had brought both her brother and her sister for visits with Senior Witch—visits which they all suspected would be their last.

Senior Witch died in January of 2011.

Half a year later, Crippled Wolf was still seeking to understand the experience of bereavement. "Rationally he understands what death is, yet that deeper animal part of him continues not to understand. How can a person simply stop being?"

On Christmas Eve of 2012, Walhydra was back in South Carolina, helping her Dad "escape" for a day from the skilled nursing home where he lived due to Parkinson's.

Two weeks later, in January of 2013, Dad died as well.


---

There is a state of consciousness, spiritual dryness, in which all things including the living seem to be mere objects without divine breathe. Spiritual dryness is not disbelief or, worse, loss of faith. It is more like the barren fields of winter—yet fields which do not know if spring will ever come.

Increasingly over the years described above, Walhydra felt herself becoming a wintery field. Her wan strength has come from that discipline she learned during the first SSRI experiment.

Centering down, breathing, asking the God aspect of the Divine One to bring her back into his present moment.

This was not a solution, yet it was a powerful reprieve. It allowed her to proceed with "the next thing."

The down side of this approach is that it supports existing but not necessarily being. She goes through her days, sometimes even in a cheery and productive state of mind and mood. Yet something seems to be missing.

There is "getting the job done" and even "joy and companionship." What there rarely is is magic: that sense that everything is alive in a blessed and connected way.

---

"So what are you going to do about it?" Goddess asked Walhydra last Friday.

"Huh? Oh."

"Well? You keep whining about not seeing the world breathe. It's not that difficult—except that you're long out of practice."

Walhydra noticed a mammoth live oak nearby, one of the those beautiful grandparents with limbs has huge as normal trees.

"Well, I...."

"Oh, silly. Just decide you're going to see things that way and look!"

Walhydra glanced around. She walked over to the live oak, its massive triple trunk filling her view, and touched it gently.

"Oh," she said.

And so it is.

Blessèd Be
Bright Crow

No one gets out alive

Walhydra knows she is not the only person ever to have parents die. She knows she is not the only one to realize that she is mortal.

But she is trying to be observant.

At bedtime last night, she told hubby Jim, “I seem to be going through an inventory of all the things that can go wrong with my body.”

This while trying to stretch out the lower back ache exacerbated by the mushy, too-old bed, now elevated at the head to counter the resurgent reflux, for which she cannot yet reschedule the canceled upper GI endoscopy because, a week later, she is still trying to clear the gunk from a bronchial cold.

Oy.

But the cutting part of this, she knows, comes after, when she cuddles against his back, pressing as close as possible, silent, almost in tears, because she knows he, too, will die, as she will.

Every work day, Walhydra walks from the her car past the people in the park behind the Main Library who sit, huddled in all their clothes, surrounded by lives kept in bags which look like random garbage to the stranger.

Every day, she reads about another woman gang-raped in India, or another funeral procession slaughtered in Pakistan.

Every day, she sits, centering down in her clumsy, Quaker-Buddhist-ish way, calling herself back to the moment.

She senses someone over her left shoulder and turns.

“Oh, it’s you,” she says.

“Of course it is, dear,” the Goddess answers. “When am I never not here?”

“But….”

Don’t be silly. Go hug your husband and get some breakfast.”

And so it is.

Blessèd be,
Michael Bright Crow

More grace

Being Walhydra all the time is just too much work. At least that's how she's been feeling lately.

"Can't I please be someone else?" she asks.

Sorry, Dear," Goddess says. "I put in just the mix of ingredients I intended you to have for this incarnation. You're still trying too hard. Why don't you just go out for a little walk?"

"That won't do any good," Walhydra sulks.

"Probably not, in your case. But it's a nice day. Now run along."

This morning and yesterday morning were two variants on a frustrating theme which has been playing itself out for months now.

On Tuesday she awoke promptly at 5 AM—the alarm was set for 6 and she's been tending to sleep in till 7—and she knew she might as well get up. Monkey mind was already chanting the litany of work- and Senior Witch-related responsibilities which burden her days and nights.

Tuesday the tai chi, meditation and prayer did well their job of centering Walhydra into a healing awareness of the Divine Presence.

This morning, on the other hand, the alarm went off at 5...wah!...because she had set the clock wrong. She reset it for 7, woke again at 6, shut off the alarm, hid under the covers till 7:15—and finally couldn't stand it that the litany was still running.

Wash face, dress, walk out the door.

Walk the cool morning neighborhood. Squirrels, cats, birds, blossoms. Things which usually bring Walhydra back into the Sacred Present.

Not today.

But by the time she has returned home, hubby Jim is up, in his bathrobe, getting his breakfast.

As the gentle reader as surely figured out by now, Walhydra comes from a family of talkers. Being a preacher's kid, her first expectation is always that problems can be solved—if at all—by talking them out.

But Walhydra is sooooo tired of talking about all this, and it isn't working anyway.

So she just looks up sadly from the chair she's slumped into and says, "There's this deep down despair...I just keep getting stuck in the mornings with all the details...."

Hubby Jim walks over without hesitation to stand beside Walhydra. He hugs her head gently to his belly, and says, "I love you."

*sigh*

A few silent moments of this.

Then Walhydra stands for a hug. Warm, long, full-body, as Jim always readily gives them.

She gets a catch in the throat and it names itself: "Mom."

It's not about all the details. It's still about the loss.

After a while, Jim leaves for work.

Walhydra sits on the back stoop with breakfast, watching squirrels, cats, birds, blossoms. It's so quiet and reassuring. Such a welcoming Present.

What is grace? This morning it is—as often—this amazing hubby of hers who knows to hug instead of talking.

Walhydra asks Goddess when she can make an end of recycling the same challenges of loss and responsibility.

Goddess grins.

"To paraphrase Charlton Heston: ' When you're finished.' "

She stirs the breeze a bit.

"But meanwhile, Dear," she whispers, "ask for more hugs."

Blessèd Be.

Which next thing?

Walhydra realizes that she has created a dilemma for herself.

Well...actually she's created quite a few in her lifetime, but this one has to do with blogging.

The dilemma is this: How can she keep to her goal of writing nothing but sarcastic humor when, for much of the past few months, real life has tended to shut her down with grief and depression—disguised most often as a paralyzing sense of urgency?

"What?" the gentle reader exclaims. "You didn't tell us about that!"

"Of course not," Walhydra rejoins. "It isn't funny!"

As her amanuensis keeps pointing out, the constraints of satire censor out far too much of Walhydra's palpable human experience. She has to wait—especially after pain—until she can laugh about it, in order to be able to share it with her audience.

"So, what would you say?" she challenges him.

"I would say: I'm losing my mother.

"She's 83 and at least a year into early Alzheimer's. Last month, on extremely short notice because of a minor seizure, my siblings and I decided we had to uproot her from her home, church and neighborhood of forty years and move her to my sister's home, 600 miles away in Pensacola.

"I would say: She's still alive and safe. She's with family, with grandchildren, and putting the best face on it she can.

"But she's not the always-available best friend I've known most of my adult life. She's a sad, forgetful, disoriented refugee.

"And I can't take care of her the way I always have."

Long pause.

"Are you finished?" Walhydra asks, rather more meekly than she had intended.

"No," he says softly. "There's this: She can't take care of me anymore, either."

This is when both of them have to stop to deal with tight throats and tears.

Walhydra's usual manner, especially in crisis, is to be as professional as she can be.

Efficient social worker, doing triage. What's most important, right now, for Mom's safety and comfort? How do we get it done in the quickest, simplest way possible?

And then: How in the world do I deal with all these new financial and legal matters? With selling a house long distance? With supporting my angel of a sister as best I can? With keeping my loving brother up in Massachusetts in on the process?

With catching up on the job I've been away from for three weeks?!

All these responsibilities reel out before Walhydra, and she manages each as well as she can...at least until the crisis itself is past. Then she notices that there are all sorts of unfinished pieces lying around her—and that she has ground to a halt in an oddly numb panic.

Her sister shares a wise pastor's words: "Just do the next thing."

"But there are three dozen next things!" Walhydra cries. "Which next thing?"

After a few weeks of floundering and stalling—with, by grace, some genuine nurture from hubby Jim and friends at work and elsewhere—she notices another very quiet voice.

"The next thing, Dear, is to grieve."

"What...? Who...? Oh," Walhydra gradually realizes. "It's You. I wondered where You'd got to!"

An indulgent chuckle, like Spring brushing last year's leaves aside. "Silly old witch! You've been talking with me nonstop for weeks now."

"Oh, I know," Walhydra pouts. "I've been praying minute by minute for weeks now. 'Keep me in the present...help me center...guide my hand'."

"Yes, Dear," Goddess acknowledges. "You've been very courageous and faithful. But you haven't stopped. Except when you're unconscious in bed—and not even then."

She pauses.

"There's someone else you have to take care of besides your Mom."

"I don't have time."

"Um...."

Of course, Walhydra knows better.

In one of her earlier heart-to-hearts with her Mom, Senior Witch, she had steeled herself to say something out loud, allowing her sobs to come as she spoke.

"I've realized a way I've been fooling myself for the past few years. I've been pretending that if I just did a good enough job of managing things and providing for you, you wouldn't grow older and die."

Her mother hugged her, and they were quiet together for a while.

Then Senior Witch said, "I've realized something, too. I've realized that for years I've been telling myself that I was going to die perfectly healthy. Isn't that silly?"

They both laughed.

Goddess nods as Walhydra recalls the story.

"Yes," She says. "We have to keep reminding ourselves that we're mortal."

"Whadaya mean, 'we'?" Walhydra squints at Her a bit angrily.

Goddess just looks back, pretending to be inscrutable.

"My point is, you're allowed to be mortal. You're supposed to be mortal. You're not supposed to forget. It's when you forget that you play these hurtful games with yourselves and each other."

"But...but...."

"I know. It doesn't feel good. It's scary. It hurts."

"It hurts like hell!"

"Oh? No it doesn't." Goddess gives her Mona Lisa smile. "Not nearly that much."

Walhydra sits up, glaring. "You don't even believe in Hell! You claim it's something we made up to keep each other in line."

"I think you've changed the subject, Dear."

"Oh?"

"We were talking about you. Grieving. Or not wanting to."

"But I do...."

"Want to...?"

"No. Grieve."

"In your precise, Swiss-Lutheran-Virgo-Buddhist-Quaker-Witchy way."

"Stop teasing!"

Goddess holds her close for a while.

Late on the night of the day when Walhydra and her siblings decided they needed to move their mother, she and Senior Witch had said their goodnights and gone to bed.

Walhydra had tried to lay out the plan to her Mom, but only in a general sort of way. This was, after all, Senior Witch's first day home from hospital after the seizure, and she hadn't seemed all that well focused in the present.

Of course Walhydra couldn't sleep. She wandered into the darkened living room to try relaxation exercises and zazen. And of course her mind wouldn't stop.

But then it did.

And then the silence said: "You have to tell her what hurts."

Walhydra got up and walked toward her Mom's room, just as her Mom came out the door.

"I have to tell you...."

They went back to sit on Senior Witch's bed.

"I feel terrible that I'm...*sob*...taking you away from your home, after all this time of trying to keep you here."

Her Mom held her.

Then, "So, you're saying I have to move right away." A statement.

"Yes. Because of what we've been observing, what your friends have been observing, this past few weeks."

"Tell me what you've been observing."

Walhydra told her.

The constant forgetfulness. The losing of prescription meds in the wastebasket. The distress calls about minor problems which had already been resolved. The failure to feed herself well or even buy groceries.

"Then I have to move."

Walhydra marveled at the Senior Witch she remembered, back in the present for this crucial moment.

"Yes," she said.

They talked for a while, in love with each other, about how they managed to have such conversations. For years they had been adults with each other.


They had learned not to protect each other's feelings.

That is, they had learned that "I'm trying to protect her feelings" actually means "I'm trying to protect myself from her feelings, if I tell her how I feel."

Now they just talked.

"Do you remember," Walhydra asked, "back in September, when we went to rent a DVD that last night? You picked Iris, about Iris Murdoch's decent into Alzheimer's.

"And I kept wondering, all through the movie, 'Does Mom know this is what's happening to her? Is she trying to tell me something?' "

Senior Witch did her own Mona Lisa smile.

"I knew. And, no, I wasn't trying to tell you anything."

Walhydra looks up from her reverie at the Goddess.

"I feel like she's gone."

"Sometimes she is, Dear. Increasingly so. You can't bring her back."

They sit in silence.

"But you can keep talking to the Mother you remember. Keep writing to her. Even if she doesn't answer very well out of that body, out of that brain, she hears you."

"Don't get metaphysical on me, okay?!"

Walhydra doesn't like to admit how New Age-y even the most ancient religious assurances sound to her...or how much she wants to believe in them.

"Nothing meta- about it, Dear. We do hear you. Even if that body and brain are too tired to carry on much longer."

She stands and stretches, grinning in her usual, satisfied way.

"Just keep telling her, 'I love you.' That's enough."

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

The "God-Goddess" matter: or, What is the gender of What Is Real?

Having used that term "Goddess" in the previous post, Walhydra supposes that she ought to explain.

(Actually, Walhydra supposes that she ought to explain a lot of things, but…hey…this is her blog.)

Walhydra is always suspicious of labels. Labels are words. And words are merely pointers for stored strings of facts, fantasies, sensory, emotional and intellectual associations, personal and cultural experiences, memories, hopes, etc.—each string imagined to represent a discrete human concept.

And then there is What Is Real.

Wahydra realizes that she has always had less problem with the latter than the former. She imagines that she returned from the bardos this time with a Zen cliché tattooed on her…never mind….

"Don't mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon."

To be accurate, she has less problem dealing with What Is Real when she remembers that whole bit about the pointers. Even then she tends to get into trouble (and, occasionally, burned at the stake), because much of the human race insists that the pointers exactly and completely name and describe the concepts. More dangerously, they imagine that the concepts exactly and completely name and describe what they refer to.

Walhydra proposes an experiment: think of your mother.

You see? We are already in disagreement.

However Walhydra looks at it, however masterfully you paint the portrait of that dear and/or dreaded lady, Walhydra cannot possibly see the same whole picture, pregnant (pardon the pun) with all of its meanings and associations, which the term "mother" conjures up for you.

Now: think of God.

When Walhydra was a child, she was blessed that her father, the Lutheran pastor, preached a God who, though omnipotent, omniscient, etc., was always in loving, nurturing and forgiving relationship with the people he had created. It was easy for Walhydra to imagine and internalize such a string of associations for the pointer "God," because she was blessed to have such a human family.

Walhydra's Dad did not think it his job to seduce, cajole and harangue his congregation into a weekly cathartic ecstasy of guilt, so that even little children ran crying up to altar call. He wasn't like that at home, either.

What Walhydra remembers with warmth from her childhood with her Dad is gardening, fishing or building things, Sunday drives, and, especially, tickle matches on the living room floor.

Sadly, as Walhydra was approaching puberty, the tickle matches stopped. Since tickling is part of her own erotic fantasy material—Walhydra pauses here to blush—she wonders if her Dad feared a similar ambivalence in himself. In any event, thus began a painful distancing of father and son which is only now being healed, forty-some years later.

The cultural side of this matter, the stuff Walhydra absorbed by osmosis just from growing up in 1950s and 60s America, is that "God" equals "men" equals any guy with the power to make you do what he wants—like running up and down three flights of stairs because you forgot to bring your sneakers to high school gym class.

Though Walhydra's own Dad wasn't like that, when he began to withdraw from his soon-to-be-horny son, he got lost in the crowd of authority figures and bullies. By the time Walhydra stumbled off to seminary, Dad and God had become—in her gut feelings, that is—someone who could only be approached (and appeased) by being (a) a successful professional man and theologian, or (b) a miserable failure of a sissy who needed rescue, absolution and a paternal helping hand.

(Walhydra doesn't know at gut level—in this incarnation, that is—what this is all like for girls growing up, but she can well imagine.)

So…where were we?

"Goddess."

If her faithful readers have been paying attention (Walhydra insists you go back and review, if you haven't), they will know that Walhydra's Mom, Senior Witch, has implicitly embodied and demonstrated from the start those loving, nurturing, forgiving aspects of the Divine One.

Granted, Senior Witch grew up in pre-Women's Lib America, as the daughter, sister, wife and then divorcée of Lutheran ministers, so she had a lot of patriarchal you-know-what to dig herself out from under. Nonetheless, as basically healthy, self-possessed women tend to do, she was able to give Walhydra a subversive appreciation for the so-called "feminine" aspects of the Divine, without even knowing she was doing so.

That forceful ejection from the closet which you may have read about recently threw Walhydra right into the arms of the Goddess. Though it took her a decade or so—distracted as she was for a while by Holy Smoke (ahem)—Walhydra eventually had a moment of awakening.

"Hey, wait a minute!" she exclaimed, eyeing the Goddess slantwise one day. "You're that same Guy…!"

"Yes, Dearie," Goddess smiled, batting her eyelashes. "Glad you finally noticed."

You see, as Walhydra now understands it, human concepts—including concepts like "the gender of the deity"—are just that. Human.

They are temporary and ever-changing maps of what we happen to know or suspect, at a given moment, about the character of our individual and collective experience of What Is Real. They are, just like the labels which direct us to them, merely pointing fingers.

But we know What Is Real.

We can't not know. However, we can distract ourselves and each other from knowing by concentrating on, arguing over, even killing each other over the pointers.

A few years ago, Walhydra decided that, in order to be gentle with her mostly Christian friends and readers, she should compromise and use the term "Mother-Father God." That is a handy personal shorthand for what she now remembers—re-recognizes—about the Divine One.

Yet even that is still only words. It doesn't get to some of the deeper mysteries of What Is Real.

So, Walhydra wants to leave her readers with the words of someone else, the 14th century Persian Sufi poet, Shams-ud-din Muhammad Hafiz:

I Knew We Would Be Friends

As soon as you opened your mouth
And I heard your soft
Sounds,

I knew we would be
Friends.

The first time, dear pilgrim, I heard
You laugh,

I knew it would not take me long
To turn you back into
God.

—The Subject Tonight Is Love:
60 Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz
Versions by Daniel Ladinsky
(Reprint edition, Penguin, 2003, p.30)