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

Is it Spring yet?

New Chaste Moon after Imbolc, Ash Wednesday, Year of the Rat
Having hidden under the covers since mid-October, Walhydra has been wondering how to go about poking her head out again, crocus-like.

Some of her readers may recognize the sense of awkwardness which can accompany recovery from depression.

After months of moaning to friends and avoiding strangers, now Walhydra has to go about telling folks how much better she is feeling. Not the sort of thing a melancholic person usually enjoys—unless, perhaps, it includes modestly accepting congratulations for having made such wise medical choices.

What's more, in difficult moments, Walhydra catches herself indulging nostalgia for the perverse comfort of hiding beneath her own seeming despair and helplessness.

Fortunately, this latest round of depression has been far too viscerally unpleasant, and Walhydra's real-world responsibilities, far too important. After the annoying detour in December, she is glad to report that the SSRI experiment is now working well. Whenever she realizes that the nostalgia is tempting her, she quickly tells herself: "It's the chemistry, stupid."

Of course, now that her chemical balance is being artificially maintained, Walhydra knows she needs to be an adult again. She needs to face and deal responsibly with a maze of family, medical, financial and legal matters of far more consequence to others than any mazes she's lost herself in before.

That's part of the "becoming mortal" business she acknowledged before Yule. Walhydra has no children of her own (at least in this lifetime). She hasn't until now been responsible for assuring the wellbeing of loved ones…except, of course, for playing fair as an equal adult partner in the blessèd relationship with hubby Jim.

However fraught with risk her previous descents into the underworld might have seemed, it was Walhydra who would be most directly hurt by inaction or ineffective action. Now there's her mother, Senior Witch, her sister and brother, her father, the retired Lutheran pastor, and his second wife, the two step-sisters and their three children…etc., etc., etc.

It's no mystery why Walhydra crawled under the covers of depression back last Spring.

Obviously, though, Walhydra's prolonged crisis hasn't really been just about brain chemistry. In fact, because of the "annoying detour," her best Virgo efforts to engineer a recovery of psychic orderliness before Senior Witch's Christmas visit backfired. Instead, Walhydra was in the midst of side effects-induced panic attacks for the first three days of that visit.

Life's real presence yanked the covers off and said, "deal with it!"

Walhydra's real crisis, in other words, has been a crisis of faith. Not, the gentle reader should understand, a crisis of losing faith. A crisis, rather, of using faith when nothing else was available.

"It's all well and good," Walhydra grumbles, "to say, 'It's the chemistry, stupid.' But when every little challenge, real or imagined, seems enormously ominous, you still have to act—or at least to keep yourself from fleeing in panic."

Now, Walhydra is always wary of talking about faith in public. She is very firm in her private faith—even when she doesn't practice it very well. However, the public faith words are all taken, and they carry too much controversial, contradictory baggage.

Walhydra's friend Cat put it very well recently, when she described Cuban American Quaker minister Benigno Sanchez-Eppler's concept of religious code-switching.

[Beningo has spoken] on what's it's like to have a rich, active spiritual life with roots in (literally) two languages, since his spiritual development occurred in Spanish in his youth and in English in his adulthood. Some of the language with which he has mapped his spiritual experiences does not translate well from one tongue to the next, and, to truly communicate his deepest experiences, he finds he must have access to both languages at once—something linguists apparently term code switching. The point Benigno made over and over again was that "code switchers are not confused."

And what I believe he meant—what seemed clear from the context, where he was discussing tensions between strictly Christ-centered Quakers and universalist Quakers, like myself, who draw upon many religions traditions in understanding our spiritual leadings—was that those whose religious experiences span multiple mythologies or
traditions are not playing pick-and-choose, designer-style spirituality.... Rather, we are code-switching—using the metaphorical language best suited to reflecting the lived spiritual experience we are trying to convey.

I am not saying that God or the gods or Spirit is a metaphor.... Instead, I'm saying...that, because we humans don't understand the gods..., we only ever understand them through metaphors—imprecise, inadequate, but powerful echoes of a reality we can only dimly touch.

Some of us have heard the voice of Spirit speaking in many different metaphorical/ mythological "languages." We have become bilingual through experience. We are code-switchers, and it can be hard for us to communicate in ways that others will hear and respect.

But we are not confused—except to the extent that all of us, attempting to meet the eyes of God, necessarily are...

"So," Walhydra says, staring her audience down. "I'm a code-switcher, and I am not confused. See if you can keep up with me."

Privately, Walhydra tends to use the "code" of her native religion, Christianity.

For decades she has quested on Pagan, Buddhist and other paths, having discovered in seminary that the outward forms and doctrines of orthodox Christianity didn't really compute for her.

As Walhydra wrote to Cat in response to another blog post,

When I came out in 1973, I realized that I had to make a choice between striving to meet the expectations of "acceptable" Christianity, on the one hand, or embracing and living what Mother-Father God created me to be, on the other.

If one hears YHWH say "Forget the safety of cultural and religious orthodoxy and live with me"—and if one accepts that daunting challenge—fear, awe and joy become ongoing vibrations in one's life.

It's difficult ever after to really explain to anyone else what it is that one trusts so implicitly...or why.

In the past few years, though, Walhydra has been looking for the pre-theological core of her faith, her spiritual enthusiasm [from Greek enthous, entheos, possessed, inspired : en-, in + theos, god].

Guess what? She found its roots in the positive visceral childhood experiences of Lutheran Sunday School, her father's sermons, her mother's organ-playing, and the hymn-singing of the congregation's old ladies.

What an interesting surprise!

This actually makes sense, though. Ever since childhood, the real Jesus—who is far more real than any of the "Christianities" seem able to express—has been Walhydra's hero.

Walhydra imbibed all of those Sunday School stories and sermons and hymns, to the point that Jesus became a real presence for her, a divine human of fierce integrity and fierce compassion. Whenever anyone makes false claims in his name, he lets her know. More to the point, whenever Walhydra causes harm or tries to hide, he lets her know.

So...back to the winter faith crisis, which stretched from Samhain through Yule and beyond.

While the SSRIs were swirling around, tripping homeostatic switches back and forth, Walhydra was trying to do her job (pretending to be nice to library customers). At the same time, she was trying to psyche herself for the visit from Senior Witch—plus her brother, sister-in-law and Bard sophomore nephew, a beautiful, brilliant trio from the sacred land of Massachusetts.

[Note from the amanuensis: More on this visit in another post.]

How did using faith work through all of this? Every morning when she awoke, every moment throughout the day when swirling neurochemicals threatened to pull her under, Walhydra would stop herself with a deep breath.

"I'm just in the present," she would whisper, and try to center down into the divine Presence.

If that wasn't enough, she would reach for whatever outer world spiritual geegaws might help her remember that she is okay. That she is loved by the Divine One, even when all she can do is sit there in chemical panic.

If she was fortunate enough to be with hubby Jim, that blessèd man would spontaneously whisper "I love you" and give her his warm Leo hug—without asking for explanations or striving to "fix things."

A month later, Walhydra is sailing into the new year, starting new projects at work, and mentoring a bright new library associate on her staff.

A week before Imbolc, just when Walhydra was itching to plunge back into the blogosphere, another of her online friends gave her the marvelous gift of sharing the dream she had had about Walhydra the night before. Somehow this wonderful soul had glimpsed the shimmering, gorgeous colors beneath Walhydra's drab black uniform.

"Drat!" Walhydra thought, secretly delighted. "My secret is out."

So, here we are. A new moon. A new year. Having survived the ”Super Fat Tuesday Bowl" and blessing ourselves with the ashes of the One who holds us all.

When Walhydra finally lifted her covers, she noticed something nice. A year ago in March, she had bought "on faith" an orchid plant which she was told would have a cluster of small white blossoms if it bloomed.

Well, here it is.

Spring is here.

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

"Jewel Orchid," Ludicia discolor

Walhydra's year of becoming mortal

This one isn't at all easy to tell.

It's not that there's anything Walhydra is ashamed to reveal. Rather, she has wanted to write for several weeks, yet the source of the problem itself has prevented her.

Let's start it this way: last week Walhydra became part of a neurochemical experiment involving selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (aka SSRI anti-depressants).

That was after she finally recognized just how much of her energy and concentration it was taking each day to tightrope walk with equanimity between anxiety and despair.

"Hell!" Walhydra says. "It's taking concentration just to make myself get out of bed in the morning...let alone do tai chi foundations, sitting meditation, bike riding, prayer, breakfast, or any of those other things which might nudge me toward wanting to do another day."

The crisis came two Mondays ago during the weekly LGBTQQFX bowling league, which Walhydra and hubby Jim usually enjoy so much.

"Well, I enjoy it now," Walhydra explains. "The first three years I hated it!"

Ever the self-critical Virgo, Walhydra used to get increasingly angry through each game, because she knew she could do better.

She pictures herself channeling her Swiss-German-Lutheran-pastor maternal grandfather, who used to utter a suppressed "Oh, pshaw!" whenever he bowled a bad frame. Except that Walhydra, not being a nineteenth century gentleman, utters things a bit less polite.

Finally, toward the end of last season, she realized she had to either quit bowling or stop caring so much. She started wearing a silly hat each week, joking with team mates instead of critiquing each ball she threw—and began to enjoy the company. And to bowl better!

The above seems like a digression, but the point is that Walhydra was having a fine evening that Monday, bowling high, laughing, feeling peaceful and relaxed, all through the first game.

Then, during the second game, hubby Jim mentioned that the thigh from which he had had a cancer removed about two decades ago, the thighbone which he subsequently broke about a decade ago, was aching.

A real-world cause for cautious concern, yes. But Walhydra literally felt her mood plunge from peak to pit and stay there. And stay there. And stay there.

"Alright," she said to Jim (with some difficulty, given her sudden sense of despair). "This is definitely brain chemistry out of whack."

Now, it might help the gentle reader to know that, as part of her current program of "becoming more mature," Walhydra has been amusing herself (ha ha) with the acknowledgement that she is of melancholic temperament.

Not that it's any news to her, but reading such an accurate (if unflattering) description of her character on a site quoting Rev. Conrad Hock about the ancient "theory of humors" actually made Walhydra feel better. To use her old social worker's jargon, describing her least favorite traits as just a part of her temperament normalized them.

"Like maybe I'm not hopelessly doomed by my utter moral failure in not being able to control my moods with reason? I'm just melancholic? Yeah, right!"

[Maybe it doesn't make Walhydra feel all that much better. The distance between irony and sarcasm is not very great.]

For Walhydra, a key passage from the website was this one:

[The melancholic] has a strong will coupled with talent and power, but no courage.... If difficulties in his undertakings are encountered..., even if they are only very insignificant, he feels discouraged and is tempted to give up the ship, instead of conquering the obstacle and repairing the ill success by increased effort.

Walhydra questioned the "no courage" part, but the rest is her at her worst. Fortunately, Swiss-German Virgo et ceteras are constitutionally averse to giving up the ship, so they keep hoping for some regimen of self-discipline which will bypass this trait.

Here were a few clues:

He should always, especially during attacks of melancholy, say to himself: "It is not so bad as I imagine. I see things too darkly...."

He must from the very beginning resist every feeling of aversion, diffidence, discouragement, or despondency, so that these evil impressions can take no root in the soul.

"Ah," said the rational part of Walhydra's mind. "Of, course. Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy. Not quite my religion, but I can translate."

So Walhydra came up with a new version of her old "It isn't about me" mantra which went: "It's just temperament, not circumstance."

This worked for a little while.

Of course, Walhydra isn't dealing just with temperament but with deep down grief. Mortality.

In the past two years she has watched the deaths of Jim's father, several dear friends (the latest not three weeks ago), and the venerable family familiar whose passing inspired this blog, Miso the Cat.

Walhydra's eighty-something father, with whom she has gradually developed a loving adult friendship, is struggling with Parkinson's and other infirmities.

And, as the faithful reader knows, Walhydra's mother, Senior Witch, her closest friend and spiritual mentor, is declining into Alzheimer's.

This is not just temperament, or circumstance. This is Walhydra's own personal version of what every human being faces: death and the certainty of death.

It's enough to make one want to be beyond feeling.

And that, Walhydra now realizes, is what she has actually been working on in her haphazard morning rituals over the past year: trying to be "beyond feeling."

She hasn't been denying causes of grief or fear, yet she's been trying to avoid the slippery slope of melancholia. In the process, her brain has done what that organ knows how to do: suppress its own chemistry until Walhydra was deep in depression.

Ex-clinical counselor that she is, Walhydra started suspecting this a month or so ago. That Monday night's emotional plunge convinced her. The next morning she made appointments for a doctor and a counselor.

The doctor, a gently reassuring, semi-retired older man, commended Walhydra for still trusting her clinical judgment—and started her on a two-week SSRI trial.

The counselor, crew cut, jockish, maybe forty, was capable yet far less reassuring. Not through any fault of his own, but because he was from the newer, brief behavioral therapy school, rather than the "talk therapy" one for which Walhydra felt such a deep need.

"And he's too young. I know more than he does," Walhydra moaned to herself.

"Of course, dear," Goddess noted. "You're the elder here."

"But that's just the problem!" Walhydra insisted, annoyed at this divine interruption of her whining.

As self-reliant as she is, in periods of stuckness and despair Walhydra longs for someone older and wiser to turn to for comfort and guidance. Yet in her small circle, the "older and wiser" ones are her fading parents and her lost friends.

She has numbers of wise, supportive peers with whom she shares reciprocal friendships of encouragement and sympathy. But no intimate elders.

This is a new and distressing reality. The other title Walhydra had considered for this blog post was "Walhydra's orphan year."

So now here she sits again in her favorite coffeehouse on her Thursday off, eight days into the chemistry experiment.

In clinical terms, Walhydra knows that SSRIs take at least two weeks' dosing before they begin to reach an effective level. She also knows—now far too intimately—that their initial side effects can include a heightening of the very anxiety and depression they are meant to treat.

For most of the past week Walhydra has walked through generalized sadness, punctuated by long bouts with a hollow pang that grips her solar plexus.

"It's hunger, dear," Goddess suggests.

"No. Eating doesn't help."

"I mean hunger to get on with your life. You're feeling the feelings you were avoiding, magnified out of scale."

"My feelings are hurt and fear, damn it!"

"Yes."

"Yes what?"

"Just 'yes'." Goddess sighs. "You can't act and avoid at the same time, dear."

"But it drags me down so. I have to push myself through this chemical fog just to go through a day. I have to make myself eat, ride my bike, go to work. I have to keep myself busy every moment or I sink back into it."

"Yes."

Walhydra sags into her chair.

"There's no one to help me...except...." Walhydra feels a moment of lightness. "Except that Jim keeps hugging me and saying 'I love you'." She smiles slightly, despite herself.

"You see?"

"But he's gone all day. There's no one else."

"Ahem."

"Oh, yeah, well, there's you, I suppose."

"You suppose."

"I can't feel you. I know you're there...caring about me...but...."

Goddess ponders. "Go outside in the wind and touch that tree."

Without hesitating, Walhydra goes out into the bluster. As she steps off the pavement, the green of the damp grass shoots up almost through the crown of her head. She touches the rough bark of the tree and stands there. Still. The aching in her chest becomes quiet for a while. She goes back in to her table.

"It's gone again," she laments as the quavering seeps back in.

"Of course. That was only a reminder."

"Well...what good is that, it if doesn't stay with me the next moment?!"

"There is no magic, only belief."

"Oh! I hate it when you go all wise on me like that!"

"Duh!" Goddess giggles.

"I'm not getting important things done, damn it! I sat at the auto repair shop all morning, reading desperately to distract myself while I waited. I ate lunch. I took care of car insurance. I got the car washed and waxed. Now I'm here."

Walhydra glares at Goddess as if this explains everything.

"And...?"

"And I'm not getting Mom's business done. Legal work. Finances. Arranging in-home care for her Christmas visit. Finding assisted living in case she comes to need it. It's too scary. It hurts too much!"

Walhydra pauses.

"I feel like all I'm doing is plodding along and indulging my weakness."

"Nursing yourself."

"No. Well...."

"If you had a broken leg, instead of a broken heart?"

"Well...." Walhydra considers. "I'm afraid if I don't do this all well, that...."

Goddess holds Walhydra's gaze. "Everybody dies."

Silence.

"It keeps coming back to that, dear. However well you do, everybody dies."

More silence.

"You just do the finite amount you are able to do in a given moment. You don't measure yourself against anything else. Not even against your own history...or expectations. Just do what you can at the moment—even if it is only to breathe a bit more deeply."

Walhydra inhales slowly.

"See?"

Silence.

"Who do you think is going to punish you?"

"Huh?"

"You don't think 'God' will punish you for your finiteness, do you?"

"No! You know I don't believe that!"

"Then don't act like you do. Just go on."

"But...wait. Why do you bring 'Him' up? Aren't you both...?"

"Yes, yes. As you once said, I'm 'that same guy.' But you come to 'me' when you've let too much of that imaginary 'faux-christian boogeyman god' hide the real One's love for you."

She sits down beside Walhydra. "And when you want mothering."

"Yes."

Silence on both sides.

"So what do I do?" Walhydra asks at last.

Goddess gets a wicked grin. "Don't you read your own blog, dear? Just 'do the next thing'."

Walhydra frowns.

"Okay, try this then. Instead of your little intellectual mantra, try this one."

As Goddess stands up to leave, she peers into Walhydra's eyes—very deeply. Then she speaks softly.

"Joy and sorrow are weather, but the Spirit is the road."

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

Note: LGBTQQFX = Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, Transgendered, Queer, Questioning, Friends, and Xnyone-else-we-left-out.