The Daemon speaks to the Eidolon

There is this idea out there, foreign to me, that true love will never break your heart.

But I would have you know -- true love will break your heart many times, and every time.

How could it not be so?

Do you think you could step fully into the glory of it, and not be utterly transformed? And in the transforming and tempering, not be torn apart, if only to be remade into a better vessel? Love is an act of courage. Yet you must become unarmed - strip away the armor that you might have gotten so used to that you thought it was your skin. It will hurt. It will be messy. And it will be ongoing.

The secret is, if you would be open to this sort of Love, then you must also love the breaking.

Meaningless measurements of time

An anniversary of an event seems like a pale and silly thing, in light of you and your LIGHT--the person you are and have been, which pervaded and transformed everything. And certainly all that I am. Not an event, just you. You who lived in such beauty and intention, I would not dishonor you by focusing on the unintentional. No, I wrap myself about all the other times, and the timeless... How do you make an anniversary of an eternity, anyway? (And so many exquisite eternities we shared.) Short answer... you do not. You just love, and remember, always. 

 There is not a single moment that I do not

Madness begins in Exile

Since we just observed the Melinoeia, it seems appropriate to post this.  It's one of my favorite poems that I've written.  I wrote it in a particular state of madness, several years ago.  In fact, as you might notice from the title, I'm pretty sure it preceded and spawned the "in Exile" concept of my blog's title.

Isadora in Exile

hair raises

skin crawls

the ghost within is writhing

and she’s wanting nothing  (not)

more                                  (true)

than a drink, or a few

and the sweet sharp symmetry

of skin, broken for ink

(I do)

it well/s (up), it’s fine

she counts on state of mind

--onetwothreefour--

Oh, Isadora! you’ve lied

while you lived and

you burn when you hide –

he replied, “In deed.  And in sanity.”

yes, the soul may divide

it self hope full and hope less,

while it’s daydreams for breakfast

(they taste bitter in the un-

                    rest)

where peace battles numbness

it is, it is this

and it’s

this

and it’s this and it’s

night again, so we meet

where saltwater creeps

and she’s chanting (chant-chant-chanting)

for sleep

      (for a sign)

begging Stars

     to align

she knows, contemplating constellations

is the only (sure) explanation

to keep her (name) from changing

or raging and/orating, and poetry-making

so she can House herself

between liminal

unreliable sunrises

    (and regards)

            little else

she wants nothing more

than her blue, bruised eyes

to be kissed,

one at a time/to be kissed

one, at a time

she wants nothing more

she, Isadora,

(excepting your) wants (is)

nothing

(any) more

Some beautiful words from my eternal lover...

My path is forever just beginning, and my feet are always soft and sensitive to
the earth's new caress, this Moon is always my first cycle, and this sunrise always
my first communion. Speak to me, and you speak not to my flesh, but to my spirit,
whom I have set at the feet [of] a great soul, a god of friendship and epiphanies, a
parlay with Myth itself and one who peeks in Destiny's mirror, and sees not himself,
but his brothers and sisters.

 
I dream for who we are, and I dream for who we are not, for in between is truly
what we shall become.
/crazy

-- from one of my husband's many journals

Elevation & Rumination

I wanted to write a little bit about the elevation ritual I performed for my husband between Feb 1st and 9th. I wanted it to be during a waxing moon which is one reason it nestled up so close to Anthesteria and I haven't had a chance to write about it until now.

This is just one of the things I learned about while taking Galina Krasskova's course on ancestor work.  The lessons were a big help for me in getting started honoring the dead and I highly recommend the class if that is something you are interested in. Ancestor elevation is something you can do if you think a particular soul is troubled or distressed, but can also just be done to send them love and energy for peace and well-being. 

My desire to do this came after my birthday in November, when I'd had an incredibly vivid, lucid dream of my husband telling me, among other things, that he was sad and lonely. Whether this was a projection of my fears or not, I felt compelled to do this for him. At best, it would help his soul heal. At worst, it would just be an big showy display of how much I care about him, and there's certainly no harm in that.
 
Because the altar needed to be left out on the floor for 9 days in a row I actually set it up in a walk-in closet.  My brother's cat has been an absolute terror lately and I didn't trust him to not desecrate it.  Although this was done for practical reasons, I rather liked "opening the door" at the start of each night's ritual. Sitting on one side of a doorway and having his altar be on the "other side" later struck me as very symbolic.  This is what it looked like:

 

I can't really describe how soothing it was to me to look at this altar with all the white and the flowers.  I hope he found it as comforting as I did.  More than once, I would open that door and sit down to perform the ritual and I felt a very profound timelessness, a feeling as if I had been doing this same ritual not just for a few days, but for months... or always.

I said prayers to Dionysos, Ariadne and Arianrhod, each ending this prayer with "I entreat you to open the ways of blessings between myself and my beloved... Protect Him and keep him in your realm, and if he becomes lost or sorrowful, remind him of your mysteries, and your love, and the love of those who still remember him." I modified the prayers for the elevation very slightly, and called to spirits, ancestors and guardians who were special to him or watched over him, both particular ones I knew and any in general who wished to help.

I also added a prayer that was a blend of several of the prayers and instructions in the Orphic gold tablets.  (I've been reading a book about them - Ritual Texts for the Afterlife by Fritz Graf & Sarah Iles Johnston -- and I find them to be powerful and beautiful.)

Every day I tried to have a special food or drink offering.  The first night it was a specialty beer that I'd bought before he died and wanted to share with him.  Another night it was special chocolates I'd found, one with honeycomb and the other with mushrooms.  On another it would be a donut and Dr. Pepper (favorites of his).  Twice, it was a full meal.

Another offering, perhaps the most significant, was music.  I played all the records of our favorite band.  And yes, actual records, most of which are rare and were painstakingly acquired by us during the time we were together. This act of offering the music was actually really really hard for me.  We used to lay down together and just bask in these songs, and even in those most exquisite moments, the beauty of it would threaten to overwhelm us.  In fact it is so personal, so deeply and achingly *resonant* to the beauty of our relationship, that I almost don't even wish to share the name of the band.  Like I wrote during Anthesteria, music is a pathway, and this pathway happens to wind through the most intimate and precious parts of my soul and memory.  That we both adored this music, could find the eternity in it, was a metaphor for our love of each other, for the miraculousness of finding one another.

Each day I did the ritual it felt a little different.  Some days were more emotional than others. I can't say there was exactly a progression that I felt.  In fact, if I had to make such a judgment, I'd say that things sort of culminated somewhere in the middle -- at a point where I could actually feel myself being a conduit of the blessings bestowed by the spirits around me.  The energy flowed into me and then through my heart chakra and towards my husband, or at least my focal point on the altar for him.

Although I didn't consciously plan for it to happen this way, the urn that I had had custom painted for him arrived on the 6th or 7th day. So as part of the last night's ritual I transferred his ashes into the urn. I was glad to have this gift for him.

I had asked for certain specifications with the urn but how it turned out was a total surprise.  I burst into tears when I first saw it because it was so perfect.

Some footnotes to this... There have been a lot of things before and since the elevation ritual that have been significant to my grief process and mourning.  I don't know if I could possibly list them all.  Major ones include getting a couple tattoos with his ashes last month, which didn't involve as much physical pain as I feared and hoped for.  Anthesteria was somehow both a blessing and a trial.  There were loud and clear messages of hope from Dionysos, but I felt my husband's absence more than ever.  I put my whole heart into the festival, and my heart felt the stress of it.  A friend's divination told me it's time to come out of mourning, so of course I rebelled and fell into another pit of despair, or a "spiritual temper tantrum" as I've taken to calling them (since I know better than to despair and it's really just the same emotional riffs to the key of I can't/I won't/I don't want/I will never...)  But I came out of that dark place quicker than usual. I found a book I was obviously meant to find that put things into perspective while at the same time one of my best friends had a vision that reiterated the same perspective/message for me.


In short, I have to move forward.  That was another thing given to me during the Aiora, while walking the labyrinth.  We have this idea in life of an infinite number of paths to take and sometimes that freezes us into a state of panic and indecision.  But there's only one choice of action in the labyrinth.  You walk or you stand still.  The path is already there, whether you perceive the pattern or not, whether you have faith in it or not.  And I think that's truer to life than we know.

Khutroi

When I wake up, I dress in black and make some food for the dead…

I cooked up 8 different grains and beans that were in my pantry, and added some raw milk and raw honey.

I meditated for a bit, opened my last bottle of wine, and headed for the cemetery.  While driving there, my thoughts were going in circles, revisiting the night before, the past and the future, what I know and what I don’t know and all the sore spots in between, and I brought myself to tears several times before I even got there.  

I left my crown of creosote that I’d made the day before in the central tree of the cemetery, then made a wide circuit, pouring out wine and water as I went, murmuring soft greetings to the graves I passed.  A small detail struck me more than usual this trip -- the way that people buy joint gravestones or plaques and have their names on there but leave the year of their death blank in the meantime.  How strange this seems to me, these blank spots, just waiting for the person’s number to come up.  Practical, yes. Still, absurd.

The weather from Pithoigia to Khoes got suddenly warm (go figure!) and the weather today was also very nice -- as in, no jacket needed and I was quite comfortable in sandals.  I stumbled upon one rather curious bench that was not dedicated to any particular person, but simply to love.

After pouring out the porridge beneath a hedgerow, I burned and sprinkled tobacco, and burned incense.  I did another EVP session, as my husband and I had done on Khutroi two years ago.  I listened to it straightaway, but didn’t pick up anything.  I really have no idea if only those who haven’t crossed over yet can communicate in such a way. My husband and I would wonder about this, but besides him I’ve never met any pagan paranormal enthusiasts who could debate this topic with me. (I also wonder, can you theoretically capture EVPs of other spirits? Gods?)  If nothing else, the session got me talking out loud and into a receptive state.

I said a couple hymns to Hermes, left some coins at a hedge boundary.  I felt a sudden fondness for Hermes, perhaps because His trickster nature reminds me so much of my husband. (Which would come up later, too.)

I continued my circuit of the cemetery after that, picked up debris and poured out more offerings.  The sunset was very pretty and by that time I had the whole place to myself.  But it hit me as I looked around from the center of the cemetery to the hundred and hundreds of graves spreading around me, most with their own bunches of imitation flowers… No, I didn’t have the place to myself.

On my way home I stopped at my dad’s band rehearsal.  I had declined the invitation initially, because of Anthesteria, but suddenly I knew I needed the company and the experience.  I love that my dad is in a band.  Playing in a band is how he met my mom, back in the day.  Also, that’s where I get my excellent taste in music, in case you were wondering.  I had a really nice time, and felt much inspired to pick up my own musical pursuits again.  (Did I mention they did a Doors’ song too?  Yeah, they rocked.)

Back at home, I sat at my Anthesteria shrine again, and did one more thing… I listened to that EVP session from two years ago.

I had never listened to it before.

We had always meant to.  It just never happened.  And then he died, and I didn’t feel like I could. Hell, I wasn’t even sure I was going to make it up to and through Anthesteria… but if I did, I knew that this would probably be a good time to listen to it.  

And, it was okay.  No spirit voices, unless you count my husband’s coming back to me through the years.  It was nice to hear his voice. Not as painful as I expected, just nice.  He had said this spontaneous prayer to Hermes, and while I was listening to it, it just hit home… how devout and spiritual he was. And I don’t think many people saw that side of him, because of how intensely personal it was to him.  But we were lucky enough to share that with each other.  And listening to him, I thought, surely the gods and his guides would take care of this soul! This soul who loved them and just plain fucking LOVED so much.

I transcribed it, word for word, this part of the that session that turned into an impromptu praise of Hermes:

“Hermes Khthonios, I give praise and honor to you today.

Remember us.

Remember us remembering you, and our praise of you,

And our praise is Love.

I've recognized your work in my life,

I've been the receiver of your casual gifts.

You've changed the way I look at things.

I've always appreciated your luck,

I've always appreciated you gambling on me, and with me.

Anyone with a mind that is of the gambler's mind,

they know that they deal with ill fortune just as much as they do good fortune--

it comes with the territory.

Thank you for all the small things that have reminded me

that luck is a two sided coin

and pain doesn't last forever.

Praise be to Hermes!”
 

Well I got through the session without weeping, but not writing about it without weeping. Oh my beautiful poet.

And how strange to hear his voice say that death will come to all of us soon enough, as he talked to the dead.

Then this girl with the still-beating heart banished the Keres and hung up creosote branches in the doorways.  And now I’m going to go take a cleansing bath.

Just love, little flowers, just love.

Love your fate

"At a certain moment in Nietzsche's life, the idea came to him of what he called 'the love of your fate.' Whatever your fate is, whatever the heck happens, you say, "This is what I need." It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge.

If you bring love to that moment - not discouragement - you will find the strength is there. Any disaster that you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow. Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You'll see that this is really true.

Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not."  -- Joseph Campbell



I've thought of this quote often in the last couple months, in different contexts.  Most recently, it's the possessive quality in the phrase, "the love of your fate".  As in, this fate is mine. It is something that belongs to me, and was even chosen by me before I was born to this life.  (That is my personal belief, at least.)

I can lament, I can rage, I can weep and pound my fists... And the pain of having been separated from my beloved certainly warrants all of this and more. Sometimes the sheer terrible reality of it hits me out of nowhere. That I can never again look in his eyes or hear his laugh or feel his touch. That his body is now ashes.  And just as terrible, sometimes, is the deep knowing that I will never experience such happiness as I did in those few years we were together.  That just as everyone else gets to live in a state of hopeful anticipation of their future, that mine could never live up to my past.

But on the other hand... I was blessed to be embodied with him in this life, to have known that joy and happiness, to have truly experienced unconditional love.  Should I be considered less fortunate, for having known such blessings in my past versus having the amorphous possibility of something like it in my future?  When not one of us is guaranteed anything in life, except for death?  Would I wish to trade places with anyone I know?  The answer to the last is a definite no, and even that small realization is empowering. Taken as a whole -- my fate, my life, the entirety of my relationship with my beloved -- they are mine to cherish, even when it sometimes feels like my heart is breaking.

And my beloved's fate is his own as well, and I can not try to rob him of its significance -- I can't belittle it as simple tragedy or happenstance -- not on a spiritual level, anyway.  His death was his, and the manner and timing of it all significant to his soul and his path.  Even if one does not believe that such things are planned, per se, it is still certainly sacred and even beautiful.  When someone you love transforms, literally transitions from one form to another, can you do other than continue to love them in their new form, and honor the transition?

Part of our wedding vows:

Him: "I pledge myself to you, and I will love you even beyond death."
Me: "I pledge myself to you, and I will embrace our fate and all that it brings."

So perhaps we even knew, on some level.  Regardless... here I am, my love. Embracing our fate.  And I know you are loving me still. 

Like a dream

I rediscovered this the night after my husband died... this poem that he had hand-written on a loose piece of paper, tucked away in a notebook by the bed. I didn't remember until now, that he had written it this last Anthesteria on Khoes.  


it is like a dream
you and I
when we are awake
when we are not speaking
when we are just loving
when you come just moments
    from my face
when we line up in arc
and in breaths
when i can hear your dress
kissing the gravel
when I want to climb back
     on the swing with you

Death

My husband died this morning.  I'm a widow.  These are not metaphors.

Dreaming of Trees

In a little over a month, if all goes according to plan, my husband and I will be taking a road trip up to the redwood forest in honor of our first anniversary!!

 

Combine my growing craving for green and forests with a general fascination with redwoods (especially fired up since reading The Wild Trees by Richard Preston), and you have a very excited panther.  We're going to be camping for several nights in the northernmost national redwoods park in California.  I've been totally geeking out by researching everything I can, about the redwood trees themselves, the parks, hikes, you name it.

 

We're also going to be spending a day and night at the Joshua Tree National Park, a place I've always wanted to visit but never have, in spite of its much closer proximity.  I love joshua trees, they are adorable and quirky. 

 

Things we've talked about seeing on the way include The Lucky Mojo Curio shop in Forestville, and jaunting up to the Oregon mystery vortex, perhaps stopping at a winery or two.  I'm trying to sedate my inner planner from going to crazy though. Must leave room for spontaneity. 

 

By the way, if you assumed my favorite tree was a redwood or a joshua tree, you'd be wrong.  It's a boojum tree.  Which looks like a tree that got stuck in a vortex, incidentally. 

 

And of course, the best part is that I get to experience this whole trip with the one person I can never get enough of.  I'm even just excited at the prospect of the hours of driving in the car together. 

So this is the stuff I've been daydreaming (and sometimes nightdreaming) about and no doubt will be for the next month.  I feel like whatever I can imagine is guaranteed to be trumped by the experience itself.  I've been pondering things like, what are the nymph spirits there like?  What sort of faces of Dionysos might I see in such a forest?  What sort of mushrooms might we find?  Ha!  Can't wait!

We have a camping trip next week as well, to a favorite spot along the Mogollon Rim.  It's funny how much I've turned into a camping person.  I didn't used to be!  But now I find I get a soul-craving for it if I've been away from nature too long.

Heart-joined & Hand-fasted

On September 9th I married my partner, true love and soul-mate.

 

I don't say soul-mate lightly.  I remember well an unexpected, overwhelming feeling of epiphany one day, so strong that I wept, that in my love for him and the subsequent choices I made, I had fulfilled something karmic.  And every day that I wake up next to him or see him smile, I know how incredibly lucky we are.

 

He asked me to marry him in February, on a devotional day to Aphrodite (though he did not know the day's significance at the time). 

 

Our legal marriage on the 9th was a simple affair at the court, but was just the first.  Our wedding is three-fold.  The 2nd was a private ceremony in the woods on the Autumn Equinox, and the 3rd (which was last weekend) was a public rite and reception for friends and family.  Doing it three times wasn't our original plan, but developed over time as we searched for ways to incorporate everything most important to us without compromising anything.  I've come to see it as binding on the physical, spiritual and mental planes, respectively.

 

Because of him, I became and continue to become more spiritual, and a better person, and closer to Dionysos.  These were not his intentions of course, but simply the side-effects -- of falling in love, of learning selflessness, of being torn apart and put back together, of riding the ecstatic highs and devastating lows.  (For our road was not always easy.)  He is Dionysian in his particular beauty, creativity, trickster nature, and all the ways he's liberated me.  Even his last name which I have chosen to share has Dionysian qualities.  Did I come to love Dionysos more because of him or him more because of Dionysos?  Such a question needs no answer.

 

And though I tend to search for definition, his own spirituality defies definition, is fluid and shamanic and highly personal.  I learn much from him though he would probably not call himself a teacher.  Sometimes I still marvel at the depth of conversation we are able to achieve about abstract things, particularly spirituality.  It's as if our similar viewpoints combined with our inherent understanding of each other can bridge the gaps when we reach things that are hard to explain in words.  We have been known to share dreams -- something we are still exploring, and which I have never had with anyone.

 

We both met in the shake up of our Saturn returns, and getting married feels like the resolution to that era.  Together we redefined ourselves, and now the future seems even more full of possibility. 

 

(And I have to add that during our wedding reception this past weekend, I was finally able to dance again - after over 2 months of recovering from a broken foot!)

love is the every only god

Thursday I had set aside as a devotional day for Aphrodite.  Somewhat unplanned, I ended up spending the whole day with someone I love very dearly, and we had some very intense and heartfelt conversation.  Even looking back on the conversation itself, there is an air of something incredibly sacred about it. 

 

So was the intention of having this devotional day ahead of time part of how it turned out, very much a day devoted to Her, though not the way I planned?  Is it simply synchronous?    I had in the back of my mind a bit of guilt that I hadn't meditated for the goddess specifically, hadn't done any of the solitary things I had planned.  I didn't even give her offerings until Friday.  But would She mind, considering how it went?  A interesting lesson in what devotion is - not always what is planned, and that the spontaneous participation in life and its synchronicities can be even more powerful.

 

I am so filled to the brim with gratitude to Aphrodite and Dionysos and the immanent Divine for the gifts I've been given (and just as importantly, the knowledge to see these gifts with clarity) that I'm not sure how to express or repay it sufficiently.  I am blessed.  But how could I not be?  I am god, as are You.