The Journey

The other night when a friend of mine says, “You are so creative,” I am not sure how to take it. To say “Thank you” doesn’t seem entirely right. It seems to be missing the point. I spend some time in my notebooks writing down what the nature is of this creativity. It is is only Monday night, early Tuesday morning, in addition to the need to fill out exhausting paperwork in addition to the hope for better work and work that pays more,  that better sustains creation. I cannot believe how full of hope I was. I cannot believe the almost cloud I have been on the inexhaustible belief, hope and determination. I don’t feel it now. Last night I worked on several stories and contributed to the two writing sites I am on. At nearly five in the morning I was writing a letter and sending poems to a friend in prison. I got up, a little weary, but continued on with proofreading and submissions and the writing sites and then, overlooking the long steps to filling out new paperwork, was sent into a depression. At times like this I wonder if things will ever be easy, if I will ever have the work I long for. If I will ever feel good and confident about things again. It spirals into all the ifs, all the ways in which we might not be alright and I might be alright and it’s a little hopeless, and for a while I need to stop this working, I need to treat myself a little better. I need to, not try to feel good, but try to incorporate these feelings

On the other side of the worst of this minor depression, I know that there are things I need to do to get out of this place .i need to write in that green journal. I need to write myself out of this, and smoke myself out of this, to light the candles on the altar and sing old songs while I set up the images. Cigarette smoke, sage, smoke, dragon blood incense, I need all these things.

And I am writing in the green book but stop because I know what is being written there needs to be shared here. Its why, when my friend said I was so creative, I cringed a little bit. Because this is the admiring tone of someone who does not know where creativity come from or even what it is, who is making an amalgam of all the things I do, we are doing, and making this amalgam without understanding. I heard someone say that when people used the the term community it was a meaningless term for people who did not need such a term, and I think this is what the word creativity has come to mean because the truth is this writing, this journaling, these essays, this sculpture, these poems, these submissions and submissions, these rough drafts and final drafts, all of these are ways of writing myself out of the hole, of getting out of the dreadful box.

There are some, there are most to be be honest, who are fine with the box. There are those who have fallen so deep into the box there is no way of getting out, and they aren’t worried about surviving. They don’t really have to worry much if they’ll make it, because there is survival in the box. But you are losing your mind. You are losing your mind and this is why you write the three page poems, why you embrace the trees and vow to save your corner of the earth, why you almost howl with rage at cruelty and stupidity, at thoughtlessness and lies. This is why you’re more angry than you want to be so much of the time. This is why you learn the five point star, the six point star, the seven point star and so on and so on, why the myth given to you is not enough and so you peel back Mary and Jesus to find Isis and Osiris and then peel them back to find yourself. This is why you have learned the ninety nine names of God and delve into Qabala while you spend all night in meditation and burn incense and light the candles and cross the river to the place beyond, because the place right here is madness. It is not enough, and if you are not doing everything you can to carve the gods from your own flesh, then nothing is worth anything.

You are no fool. You believe in the stories because the stories are stories and in the stories is truth. You hold the holy images of the Gods and place them on the altar because you know all the Gods and Goddesses are inside you, and this doesn’t make them bullshit, it makes you the Kingdom of Heaven, and now and again you feel that keenly, but often it slips away from you, and you devote all of your life to finding it again. This is the journey of the artist. This is the journey of the bard, the poet and the shaman. This is the journey of the witch.

Feast of the Most Holy Theophany

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

-Journey of the Magi
T.S. Eliot

No one believes in forgiveness, not really. Many of us don't really believe in the phrase "I'm sorry". We have a hard time believing in really starting again. We have given up on evolution and no longer are convinced of revolution. We are jaded, not like adults, but like fourteen year olds with no hope of ever seeing prom. We stay stuck. We stay in the same place. We can't accept the phrase "I'm sorry" because often as not we can't really stand to say it. Mercy is not coming because mercy is not asked for and, often as not, it isn't given. We like the phrases, "we're the good guys. I'm a good guy." To admit that we aren't that great can be a bit much. And so the idea that there was a time when a man in camel hair came to the River Jordan and told people to repent is beyond our imagining. To see ourselves as the desperate people repenting, getting ready for a new age, is even more unbelievable. But this is the Feast of Theophany. Theophany is the second feast of Epiphany and we are told that once upon a time it was the original Christmas, the first Epiphany. At Christmas, shepherds come to see the baby Jesus and on Epiphany, the Magi, but today the Baby, grown into a man, comes to where the people are with the same aspirations as the people, a new beginning, an ending of the old, a commitment to a new path. This is the transition of celebrating evergreen and punch and too much cake to celebrating a commitment to life itself, and the day I celebrate entering the Young Tradition.

Initiation, a promise, is only as good as the commitment that follows. To be committed to a thing,a way of life, is difficult. To keep on doing is no joke. The Great Work, can be a hard work, a continuing resolution to keep going, to put aside what has been and walk ahead to what will be. This resolution is beyond black robes and candles. It requires everything, all the devotion of any monk or any nun. It tests us. all belief does, for belief is rare and dedication is rarer.

Today I went to pluck a wand from the thorn tree on the island where my nemeton stands. It has been raining for days and the river getting higher and higher is now nearly flooding its banks. By the time I am able to get to the isle it is nearly night and by the left over day I can see what a rushing river is, what a baptism can be. Baptism was not only symbolic of new life, This is the same river where one of my beloved dead, an eighteen year old freshmen fell and ended his life, and one misstep would have brought me the same fate. On the Eve of Theophany we remember commitment, we remember the true magic and power of putting away and picking up, and we die a little to be born a little. 

Epiphany

God appears in the most unlikely of places.... This whole world is the most unlikely of places.

On the second Sunday after Christmas and the surrounding days. Great Yule and Christmas collapse, or rather transform into the ill celebrated season of Epiphany, We don't do so well with Epiphany in the West. In this unmystical hemisphere it is merely the end of Christmas, but what it is, is the three weeks that are headlined (and guarded) by the Magi (Magoi, yes, magicians, wizards, enchanters) who came to visit and bestow gifts upon the infant Jesus. In the story they disappear at the same time Jesus, Joseph and Mary, all leaving the soon to be endangered Bethlehem. I'd like to think they notified the townspeople so they could save their own children. I'd like to think the wise men took Jesus with them. There is the old legend of Jesus studying among the druids and I don't know why this shouldn't be a legend to. The point of Epiphany is that this once privately Jewish savior, belonging to one people's story, is now the Christ and belongs to the whole world, learning wisdom from all corners, even at the feat of these wizards.

This is out of the order of things. These men have nothing to do with Judaism or with its prophecies and expectations. They are quite other. Surely what they mean when they say God is something shattering, something beyond what Joseph and Mary and all their friends knew, something, someone, beyond their theology. Beyond the Christian one two, most suddenly. Epiphany celebrates that, while all sorts of people like to define God and creation, both are beyond definition. They cannot be defined, only entered into.

The next two weeks of Epiphany celebrate the Baptism of Christ, which is also the day I celebrate my formal entry into 1734, and then Wedding at Cana. Wikipedia goes into greater length about what Epiphany means:

The word Epiphany is from Koine Greek ἐπιφάνεια, epipháneia, meaning manifestation or appearance. It is derived from the verb φαίνειν, phainein, meaning "to appear."[20] In classical Greek it was used for the appearance of dawn, of an enemy in war, but especially of a manifestation of a deity to a worshiper (a theophany). In the Septuagint the word is used of a manifestation of the God of Israel (2 Maccabees 15:27).[21] In the New Testament the word is used in 2 Timothy 1:10 to refer either to the birth of Christ or to his appearance after his resurrection, and five times to refer to his Second Coming.[21]

Alternative names for the feast in Greek include τα Θεοφάνια, ta Theopháneia "Theophany" (a neuter plural rather than feminine singular), η Ημέρα των Φώτων, i Iméra ton Fóton (modern Greek pronunciation), hē Hēméra tōn Phṓtōn (restored classical pronunciation), "The Day of the Lights", and τα Φώτα, ta Fóta, "The Lights".[22].... Wikipedia

Throughout the days of Yule we experienced the Divine in the horror of Nidhogg about the world tree, gnawing as us and calling us to go deeper. We experience him in the paradox at the world tree of the Trickster and Child, of Odin offering himself to himself and on the New Year we stand between the doors of Janus, Saturn looking to the past and Hermes to the future. Now, on this day, we are invited to witness the appearance of God again, in a baby held by its mother, in a baptism, at a wedding, in every aspect of life, for what Epiphany is really coming to teach us is that, in all of life, if we have eyes for it, and have put away our presuppositions, God is standing, ready to be seen.