Winter Light

I find myself almost incredulous at how deep a vein of contentment I can find in a single afternoon at home.

I love my home: my house, my garden, my woods.  I've understood for many years that buying stuff, things, doesn't actually build much contentment once I'm not in need.  I'll think, when I contemplate buying a new whatzit, that once I have that whatzit I'll be happy; I envision all the good and satisfying things I will be able to accomplish once I have my whatzit.  And, of course, once I have purchased it, brought it home, and unpacked it, it's only a matter of days or weeks before I'm no happier in my daily round than before I got hold of it.

This house has not been like that for me.  It's actually pretty rare that I come home without thinking, as I walk up to my door, open it, and slip inside, "I really love this house."

I think that is because a house, like land, is not really a thing at all.  Properly considered, we don't own either one: we enter relationships with them.  In the case of land, of course, there is the web of interdependent living things that is already there, from grass and the microorganisms and worms and grubs that live in soil to the trees, voles, mice, birds, and larger mammals that live in or move across that particular place.

Houses have some of that--more than a fastidious housekeeper would like, perhaps!--but there is something else that gives rise to the numen, the spirit of place that enlivens a house.  It may be the lives that have passed through the house over the years, or that have shaped its parts--trees for wood, glacier-rounded rocks for the foundations, and so forth.  Some houses seem to have more of that particularity of self than others; I'm sure it was one of the things that made us fall in love with the house before we bought it.

Another thing, however, was the light.

We had been living in a very nice, if shabby, Victorian duplex.  Lots of dark woodwork, nooks and crannies and a porch that was up in the treetops on the second floor.  But few of the windows faced south, and no room had more than two medium-sized windows.  Not only was the view of a densely settled urban street, but it was a dark view, from dark rooms.   Nothing we did could ever change that.

This year, I have been more aware than ever of the changes of light that come with winter.  It is hard to describe, but the shortened days of December left me without energy, worn out and weary by four, and exhausted and listless each morning when I rose in the dark to bolt my breakfast and head out to school.  I was leaving for work in the dark, and returning from work in the dark.  It was too dark to walk in the woods after work, and, with no snow to speak of this year, it was hard to avoid noticing how weak as well as brief the light of each day was, even when we were home.  I was not depressed--that is, I knew perfectly well that there was no especially discouraging thing in my life last month--and yet, my body was depressed: lethargic, irritable, sleepy.

We put up lights.  This year, for the first time, we were able to carve out a little time in our solstice preparations to consider decorations particular to this new house of ours, and we got strings of white icicle lights to go into the big, south facing front windows.  I began turning them on in the morning before sitting down for five minutes' breakfast, and my husband made a point of turning them on again as soon as he got home from work, so I would find them shining softly in the dark when I came home.

Those lights helped.  They really did.  It's not for nothing we decorate our homes with lights at Solstice.

But now the days are ever so slightly longer, the sun every so slightly higher in the sky at noon than it was three weeks ago.

And it has snowed--snowed, gotten warm, and then given us a hard, sub-zero freeze that has set up an enormous white reflecting mirror on the ground all around us.  Now there is light: light worth basking in, in our big, shabby living room with the wide southern windows.  Light I can steep in, when I'm home for lunch, in our cozy cube of a dining room, with enormous southern windows of its own.

I can look out my windows, from the comfort of my rocking chair or my couch, and see the woods with the tree bark painted orange in the light.  I can look up, and see the sky burnished an almost metallic blue--the blue of the winter sky.

On weekdays, I still have very little light while I am at home.  But moonlight or starlight, whatever light there is is picked up by the whiteness of snow and amplified.  I can walk in my woods at night, in a way I cannot do at any other time of year.  Indeed, the leafless trees open out the woods in such a way that I can see much, much deeper into those woods than at any other time of year.  Come summer, the seemingly infinite succession of tree trunk and tree trunk, receding off into the distances of perspective will vanish for me, cut off by a wall of green.  But in winter, my views are wide and deep.

And full of yellow light.

And so I find myself contented again, bodily depression lifting, opening myself like a flower to the glory of the return of winter light.

The Empty Bucket

Recent conversations with Pagans, in person and online, are bubbling up for me this morning, bringing with them troubling thoughts.

Do we care more about our rituals than we do about our gods?

It's happened more than once, lately, that the response to some concern expressed among us has been a rather pat, "I wrote a really good ritual about that, once."  As though the authorship was the main thing; as though the performance of a ritual script was enough to settle whatever questions living posed us.

I'm not knocking a good ritual.  But surely, the point of ritual is communion, relationship, and change--not carving a notch on a staff or athame.  We seem to think that rituals work if they're good theater, if they move a human audience.

We rarely ask if they are of any interest at all to any other audience.  Indeed, I've heard Pagans go on at length about how nothing any individual one of us can do would ever attract the attention of a god, and that those who think otherwise are fools or deluded... and lucky, as the attention of a god would simply destroy our minds, blow open our psyches and leave us gibbering in a corner.

The gods don't care, the reasoning goes, or if they do, we're unprepared to encounter them in any case.

As for me, I don't see a lot to choose from, between gods who don't care or are unavailable to us, and gods who don't exist.  That polytheism that denies the possibility of a relationship with our gods seems sterile to me, pointless.

Incidentally, I don't feel that way about non-theism.  I know plenty of what might be called "juicy" Pagan non-theists: they may not have much use for gods or goddesses, but their lives are spent in communion with spirits on every side: spirits of ancestors, trees, animals, and places.  Their rituals are not merely theater for their own entertainment, but doorways.

Doorways that lead somewhere.  Wells that bring up water.

Photo by Zserghei

Sometimes I think that, for many of us in the Pagan world, we found a well that gave us water once, but when it ran dry, we neither searched elsewhere for water nor attempted to dig the well deeper, but instead sat down and worshiped an empty bucket.

Too much of the conversation I hear among Pagans strikes me as an invitation to worship an empty bucket, and that makes me sad.

The gods are real, and there is good water everywhere, if you know--not so much how to look, but that looking is a possibility.

Gardens Are Just Weird

And amazing.

This is tonight's harvest.  After several nights of frost, and 18" of snow in a blizzard that left us without power for about 48 hours.

Bok choi, carrots, Swiss chard, and mustard greens, gathered from the snow.

The Saturday Farm

I love Saturdays.

I have come to think of the work that I do on Saturdays as "farming."  Now, I know it isn't farming--not really.  We have a medium-sized vegetable garden and two dogs, and that's not a farm, by any stretch of the imagination. 

But I keep thinking of a comment Joel Salatin made in Yes Magazine once, about how Americans have become used to thinking of our homes as centers of consumption, but how once, thinking of your home as a center of production (typically, a farm, for most of us for most of our history) was the norm.

And between trying to live with less plastic junk and trying to eat more sustainably and locally, Saturdays at home have become very productive days.  And that productivity--the willingness to substitute patience, skill, and thrift for consumption--I've come to think of as a species of farming.  (My apologies to actual farmers, whose work I increasingly appreciate.  But thinking in this way works for me, somehow.)

First thing this morning, after sorting the laundry and putting a load in to wash, I took a half gallon of local milk and put it into a crock to warm up to 86 degrees F.  While that was going on, I rinsed and repackaged the alfalfa sprouts I started on the window sills this week, and then I pitched the culture and rennet into the milk and set it aside to do its thing till tomorrow morning, when I'll put it into cheesecloth to drain and become next week's Neufchatel cheese for our bagels.

Then I took out the three bags of CSA veggies for the week, washed them and processed them, and set aside the share for our neighbor Janet.  By then, the first load of laundry was ready to take out and hang on the clothesline, giving me a chance to notice what an extraordinarily beautiful day it was.  Then I came inside, started the second load of laundry, and threw together the dough for two loaves of bread--enough to last us for about 2--3 weeks, at the rate we normally eat bread, so at least one loaf will wind up in the freezer.

After that, I put my feet up for a bit for coffee and a bagel, read a book, and hung out that second load of wash, by which time it was time to punch down the risen bread and form it into loaves.  While that was going on, I warmed up last week's vegetable stew--made with the whey from last week's Neufchatel cheese and the veggies we hadn't eaten from the garden and CSA share last week--and went out into the garden to get some salad greens to supplement the kale in the farm share.  We've got an embarrassing amount of bok choi, even given the predations of cabbage worms and the fact I've harvested about one a day to go into our lunches for school (rice and beans and some kind of vegetables, generally speaking) but there's a frost warning for tonight, so I picked some of the still immature green leaf lettuce, which may not survive the night, as well as some mustard greens and an icicle radish.  Threw in a bit of cilantro, too, just for fun, came back inside, added alfalfa sprouts, and served up soup and salad for lunch.

Regrettably, I decided that the remains of the autumn olive cobbler I'd made, then frozen, before our camping weekend, and thawed last week, was now too far gone to save, and I consigned it to the compost heap.  When I went outside to add it to the pile, I had a chance to wave to my neighbor Joyce, and ask about her health; she was raking leaves, but I know she has had cancer surgery recently, so I was anxious for an update.

Meanwhile, back in the house the newly-formed loaves of bread were rising, and after I did up the lunch dishes, I threw together a low-fat chocolate wacky cake to bake while I waited on the bread.  More coffee, more reading...  took out the cake, baked the bread, and here I am, writing this with the house smelling like chocolate and fresh bread.

This week's groceries, aside from our garden and CSA shares, will be the milk, butter, cheese and eggs from the coop.  Admittedly, we'll also be using canned beans, bulk rice, pasta, and canned tomato paste to supplement the fresh, frozen, and canned produce we put aside this week and over the summer.  But we've seen our grocery bills go down this year, not up, and I have to tell you, my house smells wonderful, and we eat like kings--vegetarian kings much of the time, but still... not much room for complaint.

And if we do get to craving some meat?  We've still got about 3 lbs of goose (drumsticks and wings) and a similar quantity of goose sausage we put up last spring.  A goose dinner whenever I wish--what royalty could ask for more?

What's more, it's fun.  It's satisfying.  And, while I know that there are a lot of people who don't enjoy cooking and don't enjoy gardening, it has been very satisfying to garden and to learning what to do with each season's produce.  And there's a change in how I approach my food and my home that goes beyond changing recipes.  There's a shift, and it's not one that has to do with an intellectual desire to eat seasonably.  More than anything, perhaps, it's a change of attitude--learning not to ask the question, "What do I want to cook, and what ingredients do I need to buy in order to cook it?" but rather, "What do I have on hand, and what can I cook with it so as not to waste anything?"

Making the most of what I have.  So, yeah, we buy coffee, and our spaghetti noodles are not organic.  I may change a recipe so that it's less gourmet, perhaps.  But it's also going to be more in keeping with where I live, and what the land is producing where I live now--this year, as opposed to other, hypothetical Octobers past.  This year, I have no winter squash--the field where they were growing was flooded by the hurricane--but I have an abundance of leeks.  So this year, I will not serve squash soup... but I will put sliced leeks onto my salad, along with the last of the lettuce, the mustard greens, alfalfa, and kale.

I'm adding value to ordinary things: vegetables, eggs, milk.  But I'm also relating to my world in a different way.  I feel more a part of the world I live in. And I like it.  And I love my Saturday farm--whether it really is "farming" or not.

So Much

So much of the pain in our spiritual lives, it seems to me, comes down to this:

It is bitterly hurtful to have our spiritual gifts rejected or ignored by the communities we belong to.

And yet, the price of bringing those gifts to those communities is being able to accept their guidance on where we are falling short, in error, or mistaken in how we use those gifts.  And that hurts, too--a desperate, sharp, shameful pain in the part of us that sees ourselves willfully rather than honestly, in ego and not in open-heartedness.

And then, for a lot of us, giving guidance that holds the potential to inflict such pain is almost unthinkable.  We are compassionate; we love, and we don't want to be the instrument of one another's hurts.  (And then, too, we don't want to risk losing the love of those we need to guide.)

And this turns out to inflict another kind of suffering: that of the lack of full and present receptivity and responsiveness to one another's gifts.

It is a rare gift, to offer honest, humble criticism in a spirit of love and kindness.  And it's not one much nurtured.

So there's the pain of rejection and the fear of rejection, the pain of honest feedback, and the suffering of avoiding that honesty.

So much of what hurts us in our communities is rooted in our gifts, and how we master our fears, and give and receive them honestly and with integrity...

...or not.