Memoir: Slouching toward awareness -- a spiritual journey

[mdlbear]

When I started -- more than a month ago -- to write a post about my spiritual beliefs and practices, I suddenly noticed that I was actually writing a chronological memoir. I changed course and prepended a fairly crisp summary of what I believe, then posted it separately. This is the remaining memoir. I tried several different verbs in the title, including staggering and stumbling, but, well, Yeats. There was never much uncertainty about the "destination" -- the concept of "awareness" comes from Reformed Druidism (which I'll get to in a few paragraphs). It is more ambiguous and has fewer connotations than "enlightenment" or "revelation". But in any case I don't claim to have arrived at it. I'm still journeying.

It's mostly about stories.

I'm not particularly happy about how this has turned out -- it's long, but leaves a lot out (meaning it may be too short), and it's somewhat disorganized. But I started it last month and haven't worked on it in the past week, so it's what it is.)

...

My earliest religious influences were Passover seders at my paternal grandmother's apartment in New York, which were really more about the food than about the story, and the Time-Life book The World's Great Religions (which came out in 1957, when I was 10 years old). I found the chapters on Buddhism and Hinduism to be the most interesting; I think it was then that I encountered the Buddhist idea that "the theory that God is the creator, is almighty, and permanent is in contradiction to Buddhist teachings... For Buddhists the universe has no first cause, and hence no creator..." (--the 14th Dali Lama). My parents' take on religion was basically "we're not going to tell you what to believe; you can make your own decision when you're ready."

...

The next stage in my spiritual journal came at Carleton College, where I encountered the Reformed Druids of North America. They were started in 1963 as a protest against the college's chapel requirement, and were never officially rcognized, but the requirment was quietly dropped in 1964. Much to the surprise of the founders, people found it valuable enough to continue. I was immediately attracted to the idea of a religion that didn't take itself seriously, whose scripture explicitly stated that it was all made up, and taught that awareness was an individual matter, but that believing that nature (personified as the Earth Mother) was worthy of worship or at least respect was a good place to start. (It's worth noting that many of the original founders eventually became Unitarians.)

The Druid worship service includes the following invocation:

Oh Lord, forgive these three sins that are due to our human limitations: Thou art everywhere, yet we worship Thee here. Thou art without form, yet we worship Thee in these forms. Thou has no need of prayers and sacrifices, yet we offer Thee these prayers and sacrifices.

The ritual goes on to include a sacrifice (taken off a living plant, usually a flower or a twig); the joke was that the essence of the "Reform" was that we didn't make human -- or even animal -- sacrifices), passing around the "Waters of Life" (specifically Scotch whisky, diluted 7:1 with water), an optional sermon, and a period of meditation. The whole thing might be said to be profound in spite of itself. I was Archdruid of Carleton in my senior year.

I continued meditating, on and off, for many years, including at Quaker meetings on and around the Stanford campus during the Vietnam War years. I also continued practicing Druidism, celebrating a number of weddings (because in California the only formality required to officiate a wedding is signing the marriage certificate), and at least one memorial service. I should get back to meditating, but that may be a later discussion.

...

It was during those years at Stanford that I got to know Colleen, during Quaker meetings, folk dancing, long walks around Palo Alto, lunches at our favorite Szechuan restaurant, and singles dinners at the Lutheran church just south of campus. We got married in that church in 1976, not because we were Lutherans but because the pastor was a friend. (And the only pastor we knew, for that matter.) We catered the reception ourselves. Many people, including our parents, didn't think it would last. They were wrong.

...

The next turning point was August 4th, 1990 when our daughter Amethyst Rose was stillborn. A few days later, I wrote a poem that ended,

In the fields of the Fair Folk, somewhere outside of time, A girl who was never our child laughs and plays. From a tree with obsidian thorns and leaves of jade, She breaks a blooming crystal amethyst rose.

and posted it on the news group alt.callahans, which was... well, a place. Call it a text-based virtual reality. It was also, among many other things, the closest thing to a support group on the Internet, before the dawn of the World Wide Web. I also set Yeats's poem "The Stolen Child" to a tune of my own, because none of the existing tunes I knew of came anywhere close to expressing what I felt.

In the years that followed, memorial posts on or around Ame's birthday became a regular practice, and the imagery crystalized into a fantasy afterlife that became increasingly familiar. The fact that it was purely a fantasy didn't -- doesn't -- matter a bit. It's comfortable and comforting. I don't talk to her as often as I used to...

It wasn't until eleven years later that I was able to write my own song "For Amy". The last verse and chorus are:

I dream of a petrified forest And gaze at a stone, silent glade Where one crystal flower stands blooming, Her stems and her leaves of green jade; Obsidian thorns keen as sorrow, But when I've been forgotten for years, Still there in the twilight my Amethyst Rose Will be blooming, untarnished by tears. The flowers of summer are shattered Their stems wrapped in shadow and frost, Their leaves and their petals wind-scattered, Reminders of all we have lost; But one stands with blossom unbroken, No matter what bitter wind blows, Of love and remembrance a token, Forever, for Amethyst Rose.

It wasn't until 2007, when I made the mistake of singing it with (older kid, then 22 years old) Chaos sitting next to me that I realized how deeply they'd been affected -- they were five when Ame was born. And how oblivious I had been. (About a lot of things, but that's another story arc.)

...

Fast forward through 1999, when my mother-in-law died of of a stroke while being treated for metastatic breast cancer, and my father died of pancreatic cancer two weeks later. Colleen and I got through it together, partly with the help of a couple of songs: "The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of" and "Rainbow's Edge". I'm glad that I got to sing "Stuff..." for Dad a couple of months before he passed.

Getting through my father's death with only a few tears may be why losing my cat, Curio, to FIP in 2015 was such a shock. I cried on-and-off for the next two weeks. It was when I was writing the post that became his memorial page that I merged his story with Amethyst's.

In the end, he walked across the Rainbow Bridge calmly, eyes open and tail held high. In Valhalla, he's finally able to go outside, get wasted on catnip, and sleep on the grass in the sunlight. In the evening he walks across the tables -- he was never a lap cat except for Colleen -- and begs for scraps from the feasting warriors. He's especially fond of beef.

Sometimes, late at night, he'll go visiting. There's a petrified forest where it's always twilight, and a glade where stands an Amethyst Rose with obsidian thorns as sharp as his claws. Sometimes there's a girl there; he rubs against her legs and purrs very softly. Sometimes Bast goes with him. Bast willing, I'll see them again some day.

That might have been where Bast entered our household's pantheon, but I'm not sure. Desti, who found N at Cat City the same time that Curio found me, was the perfect image of one of the Egyptian statues of the goddess sitting in cat form.

...

(This part has been hard to write. I mustn't let the temptation to keep rewriting it hold me back.) Colleen died the night of July 12, 2021. We had been married 45 years, 6 months, 8 days, and 11 hours. I think I had shed most of my tears two years before, in the same hospital room on Whidbey Island. She had pulled through, that time. On her memorial page I wrote:

There probably isn't an afterlife, so fantasy will have to do.

She gets off her scooter part-way up the Rainbow Bridge, pats it gently on its tiller, and bids it goodbye. It scurries off -- where the ghosts of abandoned mobility aids wind up is no longer her concern.

A grey tabby cat leaps into her arms; she cradles him in one arm like a baby while with her free hand she fishes a handful of treats out of a pocket -- all of her dresses have pockets. "You're a good cat, Curio," she says.

She pauses on the field outside Valhalla to watch the fighting, which is just getting started; then goes into Freya's hall at the other end of the field to see whether she needs any help in the kitchen. After the feast she sits on the porch sipping tea with the goddess, the rest of the kitchen staff, and a couple of valkyries, swapping recipes and talking about their cats.

A young woman approaches, with the tabby walking in front to guide her. She is wearing a purple shift and a necklace of amethyst beads; she has her mother's eyes. Colleen sweeps her up in a hug that nearly knocks her over. "Amethyst!" she says, "I was afraid I'd never see you again! Have you eaten? Sit down and have a cup of tea."

I read that yesterday in my online grief support group. It seemed to be well-received.

...

A few days ago, as I write this, I picked up a book in the local Little Free Library called Crossing the Owl's Bridge: A Guide for Grieving People Who Still Love: by Kim Bateman. It's mostly stories, combining mythology with case studies, and the overall theme is "the loss of the physical coupled with a continued relationship in the imaginal... This idea will be used to give you tools to create the symbold or rituals that you need to to create a bridge -- a bridge between you and your loved one..."

It was the first time I've seen someone else describe, in print, the kind of spiritual journey that I've been on since August 4th, 1990. I found it reassuring -- validating (I think; I'm not entirely sure what that means) -- to know that I'm not the only one who uses fantasy and myth to simulate an afterlife they don't believe in.

Comments

[gingicat]

Thank you for sharing this. It's beautiful.

[redsixwing]

Definitely not the only one.

It's a lovely idea. Thank you for posting it here.

[acelightning73]

Aidan Kelly, one of the instigators of the "chapel requirement" invention of a new religion, belonged for a while to the coven I was part of. I really enjoyed some of his ritual poetry. He wasn't the most ethical person I'd ever met, and I once had to tell him that his repetitive propositioning of me was annoying.

Every Samhain I call the names of the people I loved who have gone on to the next adventure. I'm 76 years old, and my health is declining. While I want to know what happens next, I have many reasons to stick around, largely because my husband would be unable to function without me (when it looked as if I were dying of heart failure, he told me so).

I have occasionally called upon some of my beloved dead when I needed help. After the stroke, I tried to make some biscuits, and my hands had forgotten how. So I called to my mother and my aunt, who taught me how to cook, and asked them to put their hands over mine the way they had done when I was five years old, and show me how to make biscuits. It worked. And I haven't felt it would be safe for me to try to drive a car - I get overwhelmed too easily. And I'd beg my father to teach me to drive again, if I needed to. I do seem to be a fairly resilient old lady. I need to start working on the Father's Day dinner and fancy cake I'm planning, which will be my gifts to my husband. My son and his wife managed to somehow catch Covid again, and have tested "contagious", and they won't be visiting her family either.

[azurelunatic]

<3

(My icon is from the poem High Flight.)

[acelightning73]

One of my all-time favorites. It's a little ironic now to talk about the "high untresspassed sanctity of space", but the feeling is still there.