The Spread of Darkness

The way of depression is the sinking into that which is below, where Malkuth, the realm of the physical plane becomes even more of itself. There is treasure here. Having the dark places be a part of you, means being the movement for that which is more still, the truth for that which holds its secrets close, the fire for that which has found itself fallen.

But how can we come to do that?

At the top of the Tree, above Kether, there are three bright emanations, waves of light that gain in their lightness as they move out of our ability to perceive even the hint of their existence. These are the ain, the ain soph, and the ain soph aur if you’re googling. 

They are mirrored in a darkness that lies along the farther shore, the deeper shore.

The Deal:
Pick three cards using any method you want. Lay them out as your heart desires.

The Bright Darkness
What we know but cannot see or say. What brought us to this place, the reason we are here at this time, asking this question.

The Thick Darkness
Here the body moves through dense time, resistance, apathy, forgetfulness, disconnection. There are things we would be free of if we could.

The Grace at the Bottom
Total release, where our faith lies (you might be surprised) and where we rest and remember and find ourselves whole again.

In living with depression, we have few life affirming ways to work with the still, hopeless, stagnant energies we find ourselves straddled with. And most of the advice for how to deal with depression center on getting as far away from those energies as possible. 

That would be lovely if we had the energy to get off the couch. Depression is a dampening, a forced going in that can feel like a prison. The idea of getting away sounds like too much trouble because our energies are too drained, too attenuated. 

But there is still energy to be had. There is still the possibility of movement. There is still some note of volatility that can be sensed, its intelligence listened to. Though often it speaks of sad things, and meaningless things, and loneliness, it can still be the fuel for alchemical change. 

There are processes available in deep depression. Putrefaction, the sloppy, sluggy process that turns whatever is weak and futile into jelly, needs no more energy than using a remote or checking messages on your phone. 

If you find you have some heat, perhaps a bit of anger at your lot, or an itch of dissatisfaction, or anything that makes you want to move, you might try one of the deeper fermentations. Rather than letting your resentments merely simmer, let them bubble up like yeast, bringing air and light into the depression.

Meditations:
Awareness

Fresh Fruit

A Spell for Darkness

9 yards of rain
5 perfect kumquats
a thimbleful of old odds and ends no one remembers the names of

Sit in darkness and feel the rain fall. Shake the memories, filling the darkness with the voices of the past. After they have settled down, eat one kumquat. When the taste just lingers on the tongue, eat the second. There are times when we must feign insanity. Eat the third kumquat. For really bad cases of darkness, eat the fourth. Otherwise, bury it with the fifth. Cover the seeds with memories and let the rain soak the ground.

Personal Excellence

Because it's really all about facing the day while loving fiercely and excellently shouting down the bastards who would tell us we suck.

Know what is personal excellence for yourself. It isn’t winning or being the best, or better than. There is striving and allowing, striving to free the scales from your eyes and allowing them to fall away in their time. Striving to nourish the flower and allowing it to bloom. Striving to know your true will and allowing your best in this moment expressing it.

 The virtuous path honors all desires, seeking for all the self to become whatever it is becoming. The virtuous path includes allowing the whole effort to drop excellently into the subconscious while you eat chocolate or veg on the sofa, or do whatever lets you off the hook when that is what’s needed. Being excellent can mean getting the bills paid. It can mean lighting a candle and getting on when the electric is turned off. The virtuous path just makes sure the life keeps going, understanding that we can even be total crap excellently.

To know what is personal excellence for yourself is to know what you want, to know your true will.

Allowing what we desire to happen even when the chic pencil skirt pattern we found on that new craft blog totally looked like granny when we actually tried to make it and we realize making all our own clothes isn’t what we were desiring after all.

And so is bearing up and getting through, changing you game as the list of stressors gets shuffled on the wheel, and you are being pulled in too many ways, don’t know whether to buy food or keep the gas on, and every attempt to think of excellence sounds like failure, And in your excellent alignment with your true will you discover that a night on the couch is just the thing. The whole is the flux of all the standard obstacles in the course. The things that attack you and the things that just suck included. In all this movement we can stay with ourselves and then just do it the best we can. That is enough. That is life and love and everything called for.

You have checked all the boxes on the list just by staying moment by moment and being who only you are.

Facing all those moments with the knowledge that you are unique and always in the process of becoming something even more uniquely developed, with a great history to draw on and more adventures to tell, more people to draw the life forth from you, in the good way, so it joins with your friends, dancing under the stars and the tiki lamps befores returning to you refreshed and infused with new light and life. This is all excellent.

7 Signs It's Time to Take a Bath

1 - Your sister calls out of the blue and spends ten minutes telling you a mutual friend has been seriously ill before she tells you that he also died.

2 - The world crashes in, all loud and obnoxious. Horns and yells of “bitch!” or the far crueler judgment “nice”, spoken with a vengeful irony. That bicyclist didn’t even realize he ran the stop sign and he almost slams into your car. And your adherence to the rules of the road warrants the condemnation. People always think they have the right of way, shame you for moving through the world as if you deserve it. And you do. You move and get by and stay true to yourself, but it hardens over the loud day.

3 - Other people turn away, keep their distance. You’re not sure if you actually smell, or if they just see the sweat, fresh and clean, from your run, where you pushed yourself that last mile so that your legs tremble and you know they will be sore the next day.

4 - The hotel room has a tub with jets.


5 - The fungus between your toes is so think it spreads your toes. Your shoes don’t even fit anymore. Your socks are lumpy. The feathery strands of orange poke through the argyle. It smells of compost water, the dark brown tea of aging leaves.

6 - The cold seeps into the bones, the muscles are tight and cramped, having forgotten what it means to be touched. The skin slides over the lonely muscle, a shield and a curtain of shame to hide the separation of self and world. In the steamy warmth of the bath, salty as tears and ocean, fragrant of orange blossom and vetiver, the spine uncoils, remembering darkness.

7 - The layer of dust on your eyelids has grown so thick you cannot see your graying hands, cannot see the veins that have become such emboldened roads. Soak it all in the warm, steamy wet and let the drip of humid dreams block out the silence.

Orion and the Devil

I love that we are made of stardust. We are. We contain elements (like GOLD) that can only be made in supernovas. Yay!

Right now I have this picture of the constellation Orion on my desktop. You can just make out the Horsehead nebula to the right of the first beltloop, and further towards the hunter's knees, the eponymous Orion nebula.

There's Betelguese, at the left shoulder, all orange and sending the light of its own supernova hurtling towards us. It has already exploded, already made its gold, and we are just waiting for the light to arrive, which could happen AT ANY MOMENT - astronomically speaking. And in a billion years, there could be people made out of that star.

It should be known that I come down differently about the Devil's Bargain. That was a great deal. We get to live a whole life in the crazy incarnate state and the garden is just there waiting for us whenever figure out how to get back to it. Of course, the Devil had to make it seem like a rip off, had to pose as a snake in the grass, otherwise we would have suspected some trickery. It's just too good to be true!

I say that knowing that my middle-aged back is starting to hurt. I just got my first reading glasses last year. 150 works miracles, but my mother has just gotten 300s so eventually. I have one very close friend and for Christmas there was just my parents and my sister. I have a heartbreak still seeping from the 11 year marriage that fell apart 5 years ago. And through all this I've managed to not write that much, not create very many things, not break into management and also not get horribly addicted to anything, also haven't gone on a rampage, haven't oppressed anyone religiously or otherwise. I have neither had children nor left them on a bus. I have managed a mediocre life. And yet, when I look at Orion, I think there's something amazing echoing through me, through all of us.

To zoom in for the details of Orion go here.

The Hydra And The All-Seeing Eye

A path only reveals itself in the journey. No one knows what it looks like until they’ve traveled it. If we are lucky, we will receive instruction ahead of time telling us what to look for, but usually we don’t recognize either the instruction or the luck and will pass by the obvious landmark many times before realizing that dirt path past the twisty tree is really the way to the castle.

Way back when life was first starting to collect cells, there was a point when organisms started being able to detect light. These organisms - probably a Hydra or “living jelly” - had no eyes, no lenses, no cerebral lobes devoted to interpreting the data of photons. Instead, they had molecules, specifically proteins, within themselves that would agitate when hit with light. In darkness these proteins would go about their business interacting with other molecules the way they were built to do. But when hit with the energy of a photon, these molecules would take in the energy in the light and get energized.

Now the organism had a way to tell the difference between light and dark. But at first, light and dark would have no meaning. The experience of light for the Hydra was not illumination and focus. Objects were not revealed. The original experience of light was simply an excitement in the presence of something unknown.

It might have taken generations for any advantage to come of this. The proteins originally reacted to photons not because they were seeking enlightenment or even a hunting advantage. These proteins were simply following physical laws; their bundled atoms - just energy themselves - absorbed the incoming energy of the photons because they chanced to be arranged in a way that made absorption inevitable. At first, this reaction just existed on its own. It wasn’t tied to any action in the organism. The Hydra didn’t do anything because its proteins got excited by photons.

But eventually, a Hydra did do something in response to the light. It may have taken thousands of generations for a Hydra to link the feeling of light to the feeling of movement by a water flea, but when it finally made that connection, it started catching a lot more fleas…

*****

Scientists have discovered a link between the temporal lobe of the brain (the part behind your ears) and experiences of the divine. People who have temporal lobe seizures often describe feeling deeply connected with every living thing or report that they understand the grand plan of existence. The scientists are, of course, very careful not to make any claims regarding the existence of g*d (whatever that is) although many theorize based on the assumption that g*d doesn’t exist. This leads to some illogical reasoning.

The reasoning goes that because experiences of the divine are triggered by things like seizures and human manipulation, the brain isn’t really experiencing something “real” meaning “outside the brain”. Because some experiences of the divine through temporal lobe activity are caused by means we can easily comprehend, the divine itself - the thing experienced - must be something that exists within the realm of human comprehension.

It is true that we don’t experience the “out there” world directly but always as mediated through our brains. We are awash with radio signals but can only hear the music once we have a radio. And our experience of the signals is affected by how good the radio is. Our bodies are our radio picking up whatever signals they have evolved the capacity to receive.

But we can also experience similar signals that arise from the brain itself. We can remember and dream of visual images even in total darkness. In open brain surgery, patients can be made to feel things on their skin or hear sounds that aren’t there for the rest of the folk in the operating room. Our radio can make its own signals and sometimes it’s hard for us to tell where the signal is coming from just by listening to the song.

Just because we sometimes get signals from the universe within our brains, doesn’t mean that the world “out there” doesn’t exist. We don’t argue that chocolate doesn’t exist just because we can make someone on an operating table taste it by zapping their brain. And so, if we have a whole section of our brain that seems to perk up around experiences of the divine, we could in fact argue that there very well could be something out there for us to sense.

Imagine what those early Hydra would have said if they could think and reflect upon their new ability to sense light. Imagine they could talk to other life forms that didn’t have the ability yet. What could our light sensing forebears say about light when all they could do was feel a sense of excitement about something they could not yet imagine even existed?

“I feel something, I’m not sure what it is, but every now and then I get the strangest sensation. There will be stretches of time when certain parts of myself are excited, I can feel a movement within me.”

And how would the unseeing sponge respond?

“How can you feel a movement within you from something outside? You're delusional. You cannot prove light exists. Why should I consider light as even possible when I have no proof that it exists? Stop talking about light.”

G*d (Whatever That Is)

Gods are those parts of existence that are bigger than we can understand as individuals. They are like mountains. We can see them in their wholeness only at a great distance. From the other side of the valley we can look across to the far horizon and see the triangle shape of the mountain. We can point and say, "Mountain," or "Amaterasu," or "Desire."

But to come into any relationship with the mountain, we must move in close, come into direct contact with the mountain, with the god. As we move closer to the mountain, the god looms and then disappears, breaks apart into meadows and lakes and forests and the innumerable details of its actual existence. We may identify the god in its entirety only at a great distance; we can only know the god a piece at a time. We must walk in this meadow, aware of these flowers and that ground squirrel and remembering the ridges and peaks and other places, as we smell the heather around us.

G*d (whatever that is) is whatever the sum of everything plus the knowledge of that sum and the ability to comprehend both the sum of the parts and the whole. It may or may not be what we were expecting. G*d (whatever that is) is represented in our minds by figures of old men, or women with a thousand arms, or a giant winged snake with the head of a dog that shoots lightening out of its eyes. (It could happen.) We may see g*d (whatever that is) as a force we call compassion or creativity. But whatever we point to when we say g*d is just a mountain at a distance. We cannot predict what the old man is going to look like up close. She may look much younger in places. We cannot yet know what g*d is until we walk through her meadows and breathe his air. And we can’t begin to do that until we are willing to let go of our nice perfect view of the mountain.

Hail Tiresias

Ferruginous hawks are very solitary creatures.

Many species of animal can live quite happily in captivity. Wild boars, for instance, are often glad to give up a little room to roam if the fence keeps the hyenas away. Some species, like Red Tails, thrive in captivity. Well, it’s not exactly captivity when you let the bird off the tether to hunt. You are literally setting the bird free all the time. And Red Tails will come back. They are a lot like cats, another top predator species who really doesn’t mind someone else doing the hunting.

But Ferruginous hawks belong at the other end of the spectrum. Ferrugs live their lives assuming that once they’ve fledged, they will always get their own food or they will starve. Something in their biology makes it very difficult to accept or trust help. They barely like members of their own species, hanging out with their mates only to raise the kids high enough to kick 'em out of the nest. In captivity, ferrugs' gut instincts scream to get away, but the jesses (the leather ankle leashes used in falconry) keep them tethered and they must override their terror repeatedly. It wears on them and usually they frazzle out after just a couple of years of being cared for.

So when Tiresias was swept up in the invisible storm of a windmill and smashed down hard enough to literally have his eyes knocked out, he and the rest of the natural world assumed he would just die with no one to care.

But humans are a strange bunch. And the one who saw Tiresias fall brought him to the hospital at the Lindsey Wildlife Museum where the medical staff cleaned his wounds and drained his now empty eye sockets, gave him fluids and left him in blessed solitude overnight to pass out of this life as peacefully as possible.

Hawk brains are almost entirely devoted to the sense of sight. Hawks can generally hear pretty well, but they hunt so high up that smell is irrelevant. Really, sight is the way they get their information about the world. For Tiresias, the wide world from horizon to horizon that he had always known was now shrunk down to the physical limits of his body and the sounds of unseen people approaching. What we know of Tiresias is that his body was built for self-reliance and sight, and he had lost both completely.

We also know that for some reason he chose to live anyway.

Not only did Tiresias live, he recovered his ability to fly. His wings worked perfectly. If he’d been able to see, he would have been released back into the wild. But the one thing left of his original being was denied to him because of his blindness.

This didn’t stop him from trying. Staff members found him restless on the glove. He could hear spring and it made him stretch out his wings. We don’t know who had the idea originally, but at some point someone took Tiresias for a short glide in the park next to the museum. It took the hawk a few tries to test the limits of the long jess, but eventually, Tiresias learned to be flown. To do this, he had to trust the human at the other end of the jess not to fly him into a tree or a wall.

Tiresias lived at the museum for many years beyond the span of most ferrugs.

All life pushes against the limits of time, the current moment; we are all at the cutting edge of evolution. From the amoeba to the human, the physical vehicles that allow life and consciousness to come into being are all the very latest models. And in all of them, the possibility exists to push past the instincts and habits that arise from one’s physiology to become something more than just physical. We can look at our limits and see our own opportunities for adventure into the unknown.

Picture Credit: © 2006 Louis-M. Landry. [Alas, this is not a picture of Tiresias, himself. It is a different Ferrug and also how I imagine Tiresias looking as he hunts in the Summerlands.]

Keep Walking

Start with the darkness. You’re going to be there anyway so you won’t have to pack much. Just look to your left and see the open sea at night from the cliff height. The waves sparkling like black sugar. And breathe.

When you have satisfied your sweet tooth and tire of jumping to your death, you must do the impossible. Take one step to your right. Now walk forever.

Keep walking.

When you feel like stopping, keep walking. You will hate the walking. That won’t change anything. You can hate the walking so much your heart breaks, so much you would throw your mother in front of a bus, so much you would give the job to a small child who doesn’t know what she will become at such a tender age.

Keep walking.

There will come a point when you know you can’t keep walking. At that moment, when you want nothing more than to set your burden down, you must - and this is very important - keep walking. This is a good time to start begging. Begging the universe for a rest area won’t change anything, but it’s something you can do while you walk.

You will always be walking. You will tread over every kind of land. You will not pay enough attention to find your way back. You may not even remember all the places you have been or even care. The walking just means you are alive. It is not something to pay attention to. If you spend your attention on how much walking sucks, you will never do anything else but walk and hate walking.

Keep walking.

When we begin to allow pain to just be, we begin to live. Accept that pain is simply a part of being alive and let it go. It doesn’t make the walking any more bearable to blame your shoes, or the sky, or the people walking next to you.

One day she woke to find birds flying overhead. She decided to see where they were going. She might as well, she thought. She was already walking.


-

Great! Great! Great!

People sometimes talk of the Old Gods as if they went away when Christianity came along. Some did. I imagine them going to other planets or planes of existence and starting new cults where their followers run through the countryside kicking over the current resident's shrines and terrorizing the populace into loving one another. Some gods took a vacation, only coming back in the last century when things had calmed down a bit and their followers weren't getting cremated every five minutes. Some stuck around and got new jobs.

Hermes has always traipsed through history and the advent of Christianity didn't even slow him down. He is master at putting on thin disguises that never quite cover him completely but somehow manage to conceal him long enough that he can slip by without alerting the authorities. In Ancient Egypt, he wore a monkey suit to play cards with the the Moon, winning just enough days in the year so that Nut could give birth to the new pantheon. In Ancient Greece he dressed up as a baby to steal cows. In more recent centuries, he's been seen dressed as a centurion delivering express mail. (Seriously, a centurion delivering the mail. That's funny!) He's been Thoth, Hermes, Saint Expedite. And whatever role he's played, he's always been something more. He's neither Oz nor the man behind the curtain. He's not even the wind that blew everyone off course. He is that which takes advantage of the wind, of deception, of whatever he finds.

And that leads us to his role in Alchemy. In Alchemy, he is Hermes Trismegistus, otherwise known as a fraudulent scholar who wrote a book pretending to contain ancient wisdom. While other gods were getting their temples destroyed, Hermes proclaimed himself Three Times Great! and got himself a book contract. It takes a special kind of genius to flourish as Hermes has done.