Walhydra's buddy Grumpy Granny recently left a comment on the Back Porch about the image in the blog header:
Walhydra figures it might be fun to give her readers a bit of a tour. She feels rather silly about this, but then she knows she likes to show off. Why else publish a blog to begin with?
Now, Walhydra doesn't usually think of this as an altar. It's just the worktable that holds her PC, keyboard and monitor.
Even so, she's strewn it with precisely arranged geegaws, just as she does any surface she can get at.
When she lived with Nikki (Husband #3) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, they had this ongoing teasing match about surfaces: dressers, credenzas, coffee tables and so on.
To Nikki, surfaces are just something to put things on. To Walhydra, of course, surfaces are something to display things on.
Every item aligned with every other in a sort of arcane aesthetic geometry which Walhydra herself doesn't actually understand. She never sees or assigns any "meaning" to the arrangements. Nonetheless, she can just tell when they aren't right, when this book is just a smidge too many degrees rotated in relation to that knickknack...and so on.
Hey. Virgo. Whadaya expect?
Once, Nikki caught Walhydra moving a stone on their coffee table slightly to the left.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"I'm making it look more random," she said, grinning at her silly self as she did so.
From then on, whenever they had a spat, at some point one or the other of them would threaten: "I'm going to rearrange the stones on your dresser and break the spell!"
Of course, Hubby Jim (#4 and holding) has caught onto this trait of Walhydra's...and he doesn't hesitate to tease her about it. She, in turn, teases him about the eight-year-deep midden heaps of letters, bills, printouts, books, floppy disks, etc., all around his work area.
Anyway, back to the altar. This being a workspace for communication—Virgo communication, at that—it presumably ought to belong to Hermes/Mercury.
Walhydra relishes the hodgepodge realm of rulerships ascribed to this deity: messenger of the gods, patron of boundaries and of the travelers who cross them, of shepherds and cowherds, of thieves and road travelers, of orators and wit, of literature and poets, of athletics, of weights and measures, of invention, of general commerce, and of the cunning of thieves and liars.
She takes an especially perverse satisfaction in the trickster aspects, which she associates with other favorite dieties and totems.
Crow, Ratatosk, Loki....
Um...Severus Snape....
She's much less satisfied with that business about Mercury Retrograde, though she sometimes manages to deal with it in her own grumpy, anti-social way.
In any event, looking at this image of her workspace, the gentle reader might notice that Walhydra is what a snide friend of hers once called a "crystal queen."
There was a time when Walhydra gave serious study to the alleged metaphysical powers of crystals. Now she tends to just have them about or carry them as the whim moves her.
With extremely few exceptions, she prefers uncut, unpolished crystals. Those prettified stones in the New Agey stores, the ones with all their facets polished smooth, give her the willies! They feel dead—or, much worse, alive but trapped in deaf, dumb and blind bodies!
"How would you like to have all your unique character, your wrinkles and warts and birthmarks, sanded off?" she asks. "It's criminal!"
But crystals aren't really the point. Arcane alignments aren't the point.
The point—all joking aside—is that Walhydra genuinely delights in being surrounded by beautiful, vibrant beings, and this is what she'd done with her Hermes Altar.
Above the desk on the west wall is what's left of a Vietnam 1972 red dragon poster (the borders were trimmed to remove spaghetti sauce splotches from when this used to hang over her stove).
The blotch in the lower left of the frame is a yellowed fourleaf clover, brought to her years ago by one of her counseling clients, when this dragon hung in her office in a medium/maximum security men's prison in South Carolina.
To the right on the north wall is a small Green Tara tanka.
Neither image does justice to the clarity, detail or power of the originals, yet the reader can at least get a sense of color.
Hubby Jim always teases Walhydra that her favorite color is bland. But that's just because, on a day-to-day basis, Walhydra wears "uniforms." Khaki and mildly colored business shirts to work; black on black, sometimes with an autumn-colored shirt, on her own time. It keeps things simple.
In any event, here's the sweet little character who keeps Walhydra company as she types. He sits to her left on a wooden stool. A little rag doll she found at the Christmas Made in the South trade show, the second year she and Jim were in Florida.
The little guy was made of found cloth fragments by an Appalachian craftswoman. Although he may look forlorn, he actually has a funny smile made with Xs of black thread.
Walhydra thinks of him as that happy inner child, pre-polio, who loved magical adventures and the the color yellow.
His neighbors are a pottery frog candleholder, a moss agate bowl, a jade bear totem and a tangerine quartz point.
Then there's a cluster of stuff on the left back corner of the worktable.
No, that's not one of the monoliths from 2001: A Space Odyssey, although the little mannikin in front of it might feel like he's surrounded by monoliths. It's just a speaker for the PC.
This little guy hasn't revealed a persona, as the rag doll has, but Walhydra found him at her favorite art supply store...so that says something. He raises his right hand over a big quartz crystal. To his right are both selenite and smokey quartz. That's an orange fire agate in front of the selenite.
The beautiful piece to his left is polished labradorite (one of those rare exceptions to Walhydra's taboo on polishing stones). Other odds and ends: a Tibetan quartz cluster (in the shadows), a tiny quartz wand, a coiled snake netsuke (polymer, not ivory), black tourmaline, a black tektite, a quartz ball and an apophyllite pyramid.
And, of course, the eyes of the Compassionate Buddha—in case Walhydra ever bothers to notice that she's being looked upon lovingly by the cosmos she grouches about so much.
Best for last....
Yes. That's Hubby Jim.
In the late 1980s, Walhydra took a darkroom course—remember way back in another century, when photographs were recorded on film and had to be developed?
She could never get JimJim to pose for her without his making a silly face, but he finally let her take this one while drinking cappucino in front of their favorite Columbia, SC, coffeehouse.
It's actually Walhydra's favorite picture of her Sweet Man, because it captures his Leonine Urban-ity (that's a private joke).
The little guy in the corner is JimJim in around 3rd grade. (The pink tint is not because he already knew he was gay then, but because the photo faded.)
The odds and ends: rough faceted rubies and garnets, witchy finger rings, and a long quartz crystal. (There's some purple flourite, amethyst and lepidolite off camera to the right.)
Oh, and, yes, she is left-handed. Of course!
So there you have it: way more than you ever wanted to know about Walhydra's obsessively organized work space.
And maybe a hint that, even though she's learned (through many painful mistakes) that it's best to laugh at herself in public, she also knows that any stone can vibrate with life.
And so it is.
Blessèd Be.
Walhydra likes to tease her amanuensis about a typo he makes occasionally with his totem name, Bright Crow.
Since he's been typing for forty years, often to earn a living, he just shrugs and laughs. Nonetheless, she thinks the question her title asks is worth exploring.
Now Walhydra herself refuses to explain to anyone what her name means, but it does have a sort of folk etymology.
Back in another century, Walhydra was working as a male secretary for an international construction project in Saudi Arabia. That's where she met Nikki, Husband #3 (JimJim is #4).
Nikki is a gifted and humorous witchy fellow from the Isle of Wight. For the several years that he and Walhydra worked and traveled together, they constantly shared their fiction writing with each other.
Nikki had a properly British muse, yet he insisted that Walhydra had to have two, to whom he gave suitably Teutonic names: Waltrot and Hydrant. As the writing partnership progressed, it was decided that Waltrot was responsible for all the Sturm und Drang, while Hydrant wrote the comedy and the "gushy bits."
Fast-forward fourteen years or so to the mid-1990s. Walhydra was now writing as part of several Pagan, Gay, Christian and All-of-the-above chat rooms and discussion boards on the Web, using the screen name of her amanuensis.
At some point, a wise witch invited Walhydra and several dozen others to leave the chat rooms for a private, flame war-free listserv of mostly Pagan, mostly women elders. These are all folk who revere and emulate the Crone aspect of the Goddess.
Somehow, when the amanuensis began writing comic, autobiographical stories for this dear online circle of friends, Walhydra sprang full-grown—by a sort of spiritual parthenogenesis—from some probably unprintable union of Waltrot and Hydrant.
Around this same time, in the course of changing Internet service providers, the amanuensis was casting about for a new email/screen name.
That was when years of dream journaling, fantasy writing and attending to the confounding yet salutary links between outer and inner world imagery yielded up the Bright Crow totem name.
"Oh, I get it," says Walhydra, rather smarmily. "A clever, squawking bird who's good at mimicry and eats carrion or steals hatchlings from their nests for food."
Always willing to annoy Walhydra for the fun of it, the amanuensis nods. "Yeah, that too."
He knows that the name actually has much richer though more ambiguous significance than this. Of course, those deeper meanings can only be hinted at through storytelling.
There are early clues in a story fragment he wrote in Arabia, just before his twenty-ninth birthday.
An unnamed figure climbs the stairs of a milky white, marble tower and steps into a burned out chamber, the outer wall of which had been blasted away ages ago by arcane fire.
Crows swoop and laugh as he looks out over endless green lawns and hills to the north, and, to the south, "scorched black ruins, stumps and fire-charred shrubs, and hard, cracked earth."
Soon there follows this passage:
Yet again the crows laughed.
"Are you dead yet?" they asked—not with sneers, but with something vacant and cold in their voices. Their laughter was vibrant, inhuman, devoid of emotion.
He smiled and raised up a hand, where a small stone lay in the crease of his palm. The sun caught its ruby heart, and it gleamed with a laugh of its own. The crows flew away.
"So," Walhydra observes. "The good old 'harbinger of death and destruction' crow."
"Well, yes," the amanuensis replies without apology. "A novice Lutheran shaman might perceive them that way."
"Huh?"
"You know. Europeans spent centuries killing each other off with famine, plague and war, all the time carrying the Cross in front of them. As if death were a punishment meted out by the righteous on the unrighteous."
"So crows...?"
"...were omens of death as retribution for evil—or as the victory of evil itself."
"And since everybody dies...?"
The amanuensis smiles silently.
"I hate when you do that!"
The tower and the crows figured again in later story fragments during the early 1980s. After that they faded into a writer's archive as Walhydra began her fifteen-year career counseling addicts, sex offenders and mentally ill prison inmates.
Then death changed.
In the late 1980s, Walhydra's step-father of only five years died rapidly from cancer.
This wry, taciturn man had enabled Walhydra's mother, Senior Witch, to heal herself of decades of hurt. Then, in the space of four months, he went through several rounds of chemotherapy and relapse, sought out and made amends with everyone he'd hurt or been hurt by, and died quietly while Senior Witch slept in a chair next to his bed.
Next, Walhydra volunteered as an AIDS buddy for a thirty-year-old named Richie, who told her when they first met, "I've already had my argument with God. He's told me who's going to meet me on the other side, so I'm ready to go. But...," he looked around the room, "my friends aren't ready yet."
A year later, Richie came home by choice from one too many hospital trips for rehydration and tube-feeding. To everyone's surprise he was still living after a month, despite receiving nothing except morphine drip for pain.
One morning Richie came out of his drug fog...he'd been claiming he and his friends were all sitting at card tables on the roof playing bridge...and said, "Tell me what's happening to my body."
They told him about the scarcely breathing skeleton.
"What's today's date?"
They told him.
"My birthday is Tuesday. I want a party and a cookout."
Two dozen people met at Richie's home the next week—some of them for the first time. Friends from Richie's old home in New Orleans had FedEx-ed a daubache torte. They brought the cake with candles and balloons into Richie's bedroom and sang Happy Birthday to the grinning skeleton.
Then he spoke to each one privately. To Walhydra he said, "Your work is done now. Thank you."
He died two days later, having said nothing more after that night.
Walhydra sits back in her chair, remembering.
"And then there was Alex, who hated my using the term 'sex offender,' because he said if it hadn't been for older men teaching him how to make love as a teenager, he would have lived a miserable life. He got to dance in full regalia with his tribe at one last powwow in North Carolina, before AIDS took him at fifty."
She shakes her head.
"Then there was Luther, our best friend Randy's lover. That was the first time I actually saw someone take his last breath.... And I just remembered! My Mom was there with us!"
"Yes," says the amanuensis.
"But, where are the crows in all of this?"
"Crow is shimmering, iridescent black in this world, because his feathers absorb all light. But on the other side, he gleams as bright as light."
"Oh. Bright Crow."
"Yes," says Bright Crow. "Death isn't an evil. It just happens. If anything is evil, it's the hurt we all do to ourselves and to each other in order to pretend that we are escaping death."
"Oh."
"That's why, whenever I hear a crow caw, I turn toward it, touch brow, lips and heart, and say, Blessèd Be'."
"...?"
"Because it is saying to me, 'Don't worry. You're just mortal. You don't have to figure out how to survive all of this.'
"It's saying, 'Just do the best you can for everyone at the moment. Then forgive and ask for forgiveness."
"Oh."
And so it is.
Blessèd Be.
Note: One way to consider the Crone is as that aspect of the Divine which, in the form of a wise woman past childbearing age, strives on behalf of her people to learn about and teach the terrors and blessings of mortality.
She does this by facing them honestly, walking through them with eyes open, breathing deeply, and returning to tell the tale.
Mary at the cross and Easter tomb of her son is one of Walhydra's examples. Another is Mother Teresa. Green Tara is a third.
Walhydra doesn’t like to acknowledge her East Coast liberal condescension toward the popular gullibility of “the masses,” especially their love-hate relationship with celebrity and their gleeful embrace of “miracles” which claim to trump science.
She and hubby Jim have not had a television since 1992, shortly after the now-departed Miso the Cat came into their lives. This means that they learn about news and culture the old fashioned way, through the newspaper and the radio.
And...by browsing the tabloid covers at the grocery checkout. One of their favorite games is to count how many different covers show Brad, Angelina, Jennifer and Company in how many contradictory combinations of adoption, jealous spat, breakup, secret meeting, ecstatic reconciliation, etc.
Given her myopic view of the world, Walhydra was delighted to have her eyes opened a bit by Elizabeth Svoboda’s recent New York Times article about University of Bremen neuroscientist Doris Tsao’s research. Intrigued by how readily people will claim to see “faces” given the right configuration of light and dark areas, Dr. Tsao eventually discovered three regions of the temporal lobe in macaque monkeys which fire at the slightest glimpse of such a configuration.
Of course, Walhydra was also fascinated, and she plunged immediately into an extensive Google search.
[Aside: “I became a librarian,” she says, “because I can’t remember anything any more, but I know how to look things up.”]
She quickly found the term pareidolia, referring to the misperception of vague and random stimuli as recognizable. As Dr. Tsao’s research confirms, we have a “hardwired” survival technique enabling us to recognize faces from a distance with poor visibility—but this wiring also “sees” what isn’t there.
Or so the scientists claim, say Walhydra’s skeptical masses. For every space probe photograph revealing the natural structure of the Cydonian “face” on Mars, there is a True Believer who can prove that it is actually artificial.
All of which brings us back to Walhydra’s condescension and subsequent enlightenment.
What mainly caught her eye in the Times article was the picture of Diana Duyser’s grilled cheese sandwich. After keeping this sandwich in a reliquary for ten years—during which time she insists it got neither moldy nor crumbly and brought her miraculous blessings—Mrs. Duyser sold it on eBay for $28,000. Definitely a miraculous blessing.
And why all the attention? Because you can see the face of the Virgin Mary on the toast.
Umm....
Walhydra sees it too. Or, rather, some cells in her temporal lobe fire because a certain configuration of light and shadow matches the hardwired primate pattern for recognizing a face.
A woman’s face. 
Gazing upward. With lipstick and, Walhydra imagines, the permed wave of her bangs falling coyly over her right eye, in the manner of a Hollywood starlet—if that isn’t going too far....
So, this is a case of religious pareidolia. A Catholic woman seeing the Virgin Mary, where a Muslim might see the name of Allah or a verse from the Qur’an, written in Arabic script.
But, um.... Walhydra furls her eyebrows.
Could it be, then, that Mrs. Duyser’s reaction to the toast means she had already experienced Mary as the personification of divine feminine benevolence and compassion breaking into her life?
Sort of like the Tibetan Buddhists’ acknowledgement of Green Tara, who refused to become a bodhisattva until she could do so in female form, and who then returned to bless the world, as she does to this day.
Maybe Mrs. Duyser came to her lunch already imbued with a trust in and longing for Divine Presence, and her temporal lobe—and the toaster—just did the rest.
Hmm....
That gets Walhydra to wondering, a bit ruefully: How does one move from scorn for the credulous to a working, sustaining faith for oneself?
Increasingly as she approaches—eek!—sixty, Walhydra finds herself suddenly awake at 2:30, 3:30, 4:30 in the morning. Wide awake, with “monkey mind” jabbering away, listing off and analyzing all the problems ahead.
How to provide long distance care and safety for her Mom, Senior Witch?
How to trust her knowledge that, beneath their well-guarded father-and-son barriers (“After all, boys will be boys”), she and her Dad, the Lutheran pastor, live in the same land of the heart?
How to sustain hubby Jim’s career hopes, when the alpha male-driven winds of academic bureaucracy may be forcing them to move again.
How to get the code on that library web page to put the pop-up menu where she wants it?
How...how...how...?
For her first thirty years, Walhydra alternated between her favorite pastime of despair and her search for the right combination of outer world rituals and magical thinking.
Hoping to find the perfect grilled cheese sandwich.
Now, instead, she drags her old bones into the dark living room to do limbering exercises flat on her back. Stumbles into her meditation room to sit a squirmy, inattentive zazen....
And at some point, amidst the monkey chatter, glimpses the right combination of dark and light patterns to remind her of a face which no one can see and no one can name adequately.
It is a face of calm certainty, saying, “Be still.”
Walhydra exhales.
“Be in the present moment.”
Walhydra inhales.
“Walk in this moment throughout the day.
“Everything else is in your mind. Memories of what’s happened. Imaginings of what you hope or fear will happen. Struggles to control and reshape both.
“It’s just monkey mind, doing its hardwired job of trying to survive in the jungle.
“But you don’t have to give it all of your attention all of the time. After all, it’s had millions of years of practice.
“And eventually you’re going to die anyway. Everybody dies.”
Walhydra has stopped squirming.
“So just be in the present moment. It’s the only place your awareness can actually be.
“Five hours from now, you can only be in the present moment. Five days. Five years.”
Walhydra grins silently. She bows, rises to her feet—much lighter than when she sat down—and stands before her Jesus/Buddha altar.
The words of the old ex-slaver John Newton come back to her:
Amazing grace,
how sweet the sound
that saved a wretch like me.
I once
was lost,
but now am found,
was blind, but now I see.
Amused at the horror of her Lutheran ancestors—not to mention a number of Pagan, Quaker and Humanist friends—Walhydra giggles as she feels her right hand lift to the ceiling on its own, in good Pentacostal style, to send this blesséd energy back to the Source who has graciously shared it with her.
Blessèd Be.
Above the desk on the west wall is what's left of a Vietnam 1972 red dragon poster (the borders were trimmed to remove spaghetti sauce splotches from when this used to hang over her stove).
To the right on the north wall is a small Green Tara tanka.
The little guy was made of found cloth fragments by an Appalachian craftswoman. Although he may look forlorn, he actually has a funny smile made with Xs of black thread.
Yes. That's Hubby Jim.
