[Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four]
The high and honorable ideal of spiritual work that I’d declared in the previous post began yesterday with a day of moving. (In hindsight, how appropriate! What needs to move in our consciousness, to free up space and energy for change? Things ask me that question, but unless I’m paying attention, I may not bother to make any answer. An opportunity missed. And it was one I’d asked for, by the act of making spiritual commitment.)
Moving — no, not a whole house. My wife and I rented a U-haul truck to salvage five used metal filing cabinets for the non-profit historical society she works for. We drove “across the water” of the Connecticut River to pick up a rental truck in New Hampshire, located the engineering firm that was moving to new digs, had finished digitizing its files, and no longer needed the cabinets, shifted them from the third floor of their offices in downtown Concord, NH, into a narrow elevator, loaded them into the rental truck, drove them the 100 miles to Vermont through November rain and sleet, and without the help of two obliging young engineers and their moving dolly, slid and rocked and manhandled them into the historical society’s storage barn (only certain reinforced areas of the old floor are strong enough to bear any weight), dropped off the rental truck at the nearest depot 25 miles away, and finally returned home.
I mention these details not because they’re “special” but because they’re quite evidently not. You’ve all done similar things — one day or most days busy with “mundane” details, challenges, inconveniences, delays, grappling with the physics of objects and the temperaments of people, as if the spiritual and the this-world were different things, rather than one large thing with many faces. We always tend to separate the two, thinking they operate under different rules, rather than in a harmonic of the same rules, and in the process we miss the very thing we’re looking for.
What was I looking for? I awoke this morning in a foul mood, amplified by sore muscles courtesy of the previous day’s move, and lay in bed watching every objection to happiness parade across my consciousness. Well, this oughta be fun, I snarled to myself. Time for some house-cleaning, by which I meant a serious attitude adjustment. My consciousness is my home, after all. I need not abdicate it to things I neither want or need.
I’d photographed the two images below yesterday afternoon, shortly after getting home from the move, and they seem to characterize where I was, where I still am, as I begin a period of “spiritual” work. There’s only one work, says my inner Druid Council. How can I bring more light and joy into the sphere where I’m working? Otherwise, what’s the point?
November twilight — between the worlds?
But if I’m looking to generate spiritual “lift”, the same way a plane taxis down a runway until it can take off, I need to allow for both time and energy inputs. Try to stay “up” all the time, and I’ll run out of fuel. The old biplanes of a century ago could glide to a landing with engines off. Modern jets typically have a “critical engine” — as in “if no engine, then not enough speed to stay aloft”. As in … crash. In addition to generating lift, I want to glide, not crash. I may not “get there” as fast, but I won’t shatter, either.
Every moment opens up a pathway between the worlds, but some are simply more visible than others, easier to navigate. Twilight , with clouds scudding across the sky in the rising wind, is one of those moments. The Dark Half of the Year sounds properly dramatic — and it is. But it can also mislead me, if I’m not heedful. The Dark Half still holds out a great deal of light, just as the Light Half still includes darkness. The proportions have shifted, that’s all. Are shifting still. Something to keep me on my toes, alert to possibility.
Twilight — an invitation to dream, to watch clouds, to wait as the day fades, as the first deer venture onto the meadow across the road, as the silhouettes of birds wing across a deepening sky, as the first stars peer out from between the clouds.
stone with lichens
From the kitchen window this stone with its lichen cloak looks yellow now, in November, though up close it’s more subtle, a paling green. A complete Martian landscape, in my own back yard. Lichen is one of the oldest of living things, a partnership of fungi and bacteria, a whole neighborhood. Some six percent of the earth’s surface is covered with lichen, announces the Wikipedia entry . Varieties abound — some 20,000 species. (If the Druid “mentor of the day” takes electronic form, then Wikipedia, today you are my go-to guru. Start where you are, whispers Inwardness. Yes, I hear voices: don’t you?! What matters is which ones we listen to, right?)
In the previous post, I asked, “If I make and mark a dedicated passage of days to mirror and invite a specific passage of influence from one plane to another, what will happen?”
Here then are a few of the happenings. A clearing of the way, a deepening, a coming face-to-face with things as they are, not as I want them to be. Images of where I am and what I’ve asked for. But passages opening, too, because nothing “stays the same”. We each stand with a foot in many worlds. (OK, says the imp in me. If that’s true, then how many feet do I have?!) Passage happens all the time.
Some of the purposes of a period of dedication: to pay attention, to notice the passage, to recall its textures and sounds and colors, and perceive the wisdom it carries with it, to notice as it carries me, too, to someplace new, how that feels, what it offers. To transform.
I keep on arriving, immigrant to shores both familiar and strange. I step out of the boat, half aware of the waves slapping the gunwales, often less than half aware of the pilot, the oars, the sail, the mast. Now onto the beach, up from the shore, on the edges of new country.
Vista, possibility. New vantage points. Welcome, and challenge. Respite, refuge, home — adventure, too — when I’m ready.
Between one moment and the next, eternity happening constantly. Once again, the awen-self a little more awake, and busy with shaping what comes, the partnership of all our days.
On to the next day of listening, of wakefulness.
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A Druid Way 