Dearest Dark and Bright Ones....

In September of 2006, I entered the blogosphere using the tragicomic voice of a character I call my “curmudgeonly alter-ego,” Walhydra. As is the case for all egos, Walhydra is convinced that she is the real me, the important me, in this case inconveniently reincarnated as a “sixty-something, gay, would-be writer.”

Walhydra came into being as a storytelling device in the mid-1990s, when I was invited to join the Crone Thread, a private listserv of mostly pagan, mostly women elders, folk who understand, revere and emulate the Crone.

In the latter years of the blog, as I shepherded my own mother toward her death, it became more difficult to write with Walhydra’s voice.

As she herself said at one point, “How can I writing nothing but sarcastic humor when real life is shutting me down with grief and depression? It isn’t funny!”

I’ve made several attempts to revisit Walhydra’s Porch since Mom’s death in January 2011—and the death of my father this January. I love that grouchy old lady.

So far, though, silence.

For the sake of continuity, therefore, I’m copying the archival links from the Mileposts page of this blog onto a page of another blog, The Empty Path.

Please wander over to this other "porch" if you want to follow my meandering explorations.

I don't know when I will return to Walhydra's Porch. I certainly don't want to lay it down, and I'm going to leave all the posts live.

As my dear friend and sometime mentor Cat wrote me recently,

[This] is about not being able to keep up even a beloved facade when there are too many hard truths to tell in that tender, sincere voice that is also yours.

It's not that death isn't funny, or that Walhydra is gone. It's that the voice you use these days is the voice Walhydra uses in the middle of the night, talking with someone she loves and trusts about the really, really hard stuff... Or the voice she uses with a very sick child.

We shall see.

In darkness and in flame,
Blessèd Be.

Michael Bright Crow

Low profile

Walhydra hasn't deliberately been keeping a low profile, but it seems that way.

It's partly just that she's been busy elsewhere, like here, here, here and here.

But she has also been wondering: "Am I distracting myself from inner guidance if I rush to blog about it every time I am led to some new self-awareness?"

Heavy duty thinking for Walhydra!

Enjoy the waiting.

:-)

P.S. Check out the downloadable Screen Cleaner link in the sidebar.

Love letters

Ever since Walhydra entered the cyberspace bulletin boards and listservs back in the mid-1990s, she has marveled at the power of online correspondence to create and sustain friendships among people who have never met. She is still in touch with some of her closest fellows from that era.

It's no longer a mystery to her to learn in biographies and histories of the lifelong, voluminous exchange of letters between friends and lovers of previous centuries, people who lived across continents or oceans, and who might not see each other for decades, if ever.

Now, with the blogosphere, Walhydra sees an even deeper level of intimacy...intimacy which is remarkable for its frankness, given that it is out there for everyone—including our government's spies—to see.

The longing—and readiness—to know people at a real level of personhood ignores the dangers of distance or chance discovery.

And so...Walhydra wants to acknowledge the writing of one of her newer friends, Cat Chapin-Bishop, who, with her husband Peter Bishop, publishes Quaker Pagan Reflections.

In particular, Walhydra wants to direct the gentle reader to Cat's latest piece, about family life a decade ago with Peter's then 90+ grandmother Nora.

Cat and Walhydra—and the amanuensis, of course—have been trading comments across each other's blogs, as well as across the larger Quaker/Pagan blogosphere.

A harmonic resonance gets going in such exchanges.

Yesterday Walhydra cried—thankfully—when the story of Nora connected with that of her own mother, Senior Witch.

In turn, last night the amanuensis was finally able to write "On waiting and squirming" for The Empty Path, having now understood what it was actually about.

Thank you, Cat. Thank you, all of you cyberfolks. Thank you, readers.

And Blessèd Be

The Empty Path

The gentle reader may have noticed that Walhydra has been on a vacation of sorts since her last post.

That's because her amanuensis has been busy trying to figure out how to create another blog...and how to boil down all the things he wanted to say into an initial post.

For several months he's been reading the blogs of other Quakers and Pagans...and Pagan Quakers...and Quaker Pagans...and Nontheists...and so on, all part of an interesting cyber-conversation about religious group identity compared and contrasted with religious group membership.

There were so many good posts and comments, triggering so many deep responses on his part, that he was bogged down in the outlines-of-outlines-of-outlines stage of composing, well on his way to a dissertation—or at least an honors thesis.

After a week or so of watching him stumble through this increasingly intellectual exercise, Walhydra reminded him of what a dear friend of hers said recently:

God wants witnesses, not lawyers, so testify, don't argue.

"Just tell them what you know at the moment, not what you think would be clever to say...if you could figure out how to."

Walhydra can be a ruthless English teacher when she has to.

In any event, that gave the gay, fifty-something, etc., the impetus to finish a first post and go public with The Empty Path.

Walhydra is not at all pleased with the comment on the Profile page: "Walhydra came into being as a storytelling device."

"The nerve!" she snorts. "And after all I've done for him!"

But she understands that mere humans—especially writers, who are the merest—have to have their fantasies about being the real center of the universe. Walhydra knows who actually is, so she deigns to ignore the slight.

In any event, she sort of agrees with the About page, which explains—or pretends to—the blog's subtitle, "Nonaligned faith and practice in the present."

She just thinks this boy is way too serious.

For now, she's content to close with the Stephen Jay Gould epigram from the blog sidebar:

Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or even often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor—not because the new guideline will be truer to nature...but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent for conceptual transition.

—Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History
New York, NY:W.W. Norton & Co., 1991, p.264

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.