In Memoriam: Thich Nhat Hanh

Yet another of my great spiritual teachers has died.  Buddhist monk, peace activist, author, and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh died today at Tu Hieu Temple in Hue, Vietnam.  I have found wisdom in so many of his books, but it is his The Miracle of Mindfulness that has become almost a daily guide.  I discovered it sometime in my four-year wait for a new heart after being put on the transplant list following my second cardiac arrest in my 30s. In that time of living with the ever-present fear of sudden cardiac death, it probably saved my life, and certainly my sanity and spiritual well-being.

During that time, I would try traditional meditations that required me to focus on my breath, but as every irregular heartbeat intruded on my breathing and invaded my awareness, that practice became more an exercise in increasing anxiety.  And then the miracle – mindfulness. While many mindfulness exercises do focus on the breath, Thay’s book opened up so many more possibilities.  Washing the dishes, chopping carrots, cleaning, reading a bedtime story to my son all became exercises in mindfulness. “Wash the dishes relaxingly, as though each bowl is an object of contemplation. Consider each bowl as sacred. . . . Consider washing the dishes the most important thing in life.” Consider washing the dishes the most important thing in life.  That line has stuck with me, reminding me that whatever I am doing, whoever I am with, is the most important thing in my life at that moment in time.  Being fully present to the actions, the thoughts, the surroundings, the people, the many beings in any given moment has been a precious gift in my life.   I don’t always remember.  I have to remind myself rather continually.  But every time I do, I am immediately more centered, and certainly more present not only to my own life, but to the other people and beings in my life. 

Of all the mindfulness exercises, the one that was most helpful to me at that time, and continues to be, is mindful walking.  I used to be a very fast walker.  I loved a brisk pace.  But when my heart, and the defibrillator attached to it that would shock me if my heart went too fast, commanded me to slow down, mindful walking turned what had felt like an impediment into a gift of awareness. Walking oh so slowly, I noticed the feel of the ground beneath my feet, the sound of the wind in the trees, the warmth of the sun on my back, all the variety of mosses, ferns, and grasses that had previously been a sea of green, the particular bends and twists of tree trunks, the songs of spring warblers and so many varieties of frogs, the patterns in the rocks, the way the snow squeaks at certain temperatures, the shifting shapes of clouds, the sweetness of my child’s voice delighting in the day as we walked together. A miracle indeed.

Years later, mindfulness exercises became a regular part of my Women and Spirituality classes.  I would bring in a trayful of fruit – segments of oranges or tangerines, slices of apple and banana, grapes, and always the classic raisin, along with some dark and milk chocolate. Each student would choose one thing to eat, slowly, with full attentiveness to the smell, taste, sound, and texture of the fruit or chocolate as they chewed, sucked, swirled, and swallowed the piece.  When they were finished, they would share all they had discovered, things they had never before noticed in something they had eaten routinely – the way the taste of an apple changed from the pulp to the skin, the way the pulp of the orange lingered long after the juice trickled down their throat, how long bits of raisin could stay stuck in the crevices of their gums, the silky velvet of a slowly melting piece of chocolate. What everyone noticed the most was how full and satisfied they felt after eating one small piece of fruit.  Another miracle.

I also would ring a bell at random times throughout the class, and then ask the students where they were.  About a third would be present in the class, but the rest were somewhere else -- reviewing a conversation they had had earlier in the day, thinking about a homework assignment they had to do, looking forward to the weekend; some were hundreds of miles away or ten years in the past.  Students would laugh or demure self-consciously about not paying attention in class.  Many were startled to discover how often they were not actually “in class.” How many of us are either in the past or the future, or someplace else entirely in any given moment of the day?  Yet it is here, in this present moment, that we are fully alive to the miracles happening all around us.  At this moment, as I write, miracles abound – the way each vein of the poinsettia leaves are illuminated in the sun, the way the snow cushions the earth in a peaceful softness, the way the sun pouring through the window can warm me even on this subzero morning, the tenderness that arises as I watch my dog soundly sleeping curled up in his chair, that the tapping of my fingers on this keyboard creates shapes on a screen that have meanings, and that I can share them with others by sending them on invisible waves of energy through the atmosphere. 

The practice of mindfulness has given me a gift of centeredness and calm that I can draw upon at those times when I’m feeling scattered, unfocused, or anxious.  It has made me a better teacher, a better listener, and hopefully a better friend.  It has given me precious moments that might otherwise have slipped away unnoticed. For all of this, I am grateful.

All this week, ceremonies in honor of Thich Nhat Hanh will be held at Hue Temple in Vietnam and at Plum Village, the monastery Thich Nhat Hanh founded while living in exile in France.  All are invited to join the services via livestream, and to engage each day in memorial practices.  One of the practices for today is a walking meditation, “walking with Thay, and connecting to our own and Thay’s unborn and undying nature.”  Today, I will walk with mindfulness and gratitude for all the ways that Thich Nhat Hanh’s generous sharing has centered my being, deepened my awareness, and awakened me to walk in wonder.

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Notes

Hanh, Thich Nhat. The Miracle of Mindfulness, Rider Books, 1991.

Memorial Services for Thich Nhat Hanh | Plum Village

In the Bleak Midwinter

Ever since the holidays, strains of “In the bleak midwinter . . . ,“ have been accompanying my thoughts on my wintertime walks. Yet the first line strikes me as absurd, for “bleak” is the last word I would use to describe these glorious winter days. The sparkling snow, the dazzling sunshine, and the deep blue of the sky against the white tree branches all offer solace to my soul.  Still, the song rings true, for in this midwinter, bleakness – a sense of desolation, loss, and despair -- shrouds the land. In the first year of the pandemic, I lost several people in my life, mostly older or ailing, two of them some of my closest friends.  However, this year the losses are not my own, but of those near and dear to me. Friends have lost brothers, mothers, sisters, children, friends, partners and spouses – to cancer, suicide, alcohol, a hit-and-run driver, injury from a fall, dementia, sudden death, and sheer despair – each of them too young, all of them tragic. Beyond the finality of death, an aggrieved world spins out tendrils of affiliated losses -- of community and companionship, safety and security, watersheds and wild places, touch and tenderness and trust; family and faith -- whether in god or humanity or the future. Thousands have lost the tangibles of jobs, shelter, savings, and physical capacity, and millions more the intangibles of dreams deferred, hopes for a nation, and belief in the basic decency of our fellow humans. And then there are the ordinary, everyday losses.  As a friend recently posted, “I am grieving. I miss Sunday breakfasts at the cafe. Live music. Dinner parties. I miss seeing people smile in the grocery aisle” (Jana Studelska, Facebook Post, 1/9/22).  We are all suffering utter and ongoing loss. 

In his book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller illuminates what he calls the five gates of grief: 1) loss of someone or something we love; 2) the places that have not known love --“the profoundly tender places . . .[in us that] have lived outside of kindness . . .” (31) — the shadow places of trauma and shame that we hide away;  3) sorrows of the world – the loss of nature and the existential crises of an increasingly uninhabitable planet; 4) what we expected and did not receive -- to be valued for our gifts, to feel of worth and purposeful, and simply to know that we matter; and 5) ancestral grief. The first we collectively grieve with family and friends in rituals of mourning.  We bring food, comfort the mourners, gather together, are present to all that arises, understand the need for time away from the ordinary. We are also finally beginning to recognize the very real impacts of the last, as we learn more about historical trauma and the ways that those living today carry the wounds of past generations. But we have no funerals for the traumas and wounds we hide away, no flags flown at half-staff for an embattled polity, no wailing walls for an earth on the precipice of irretrievable climate change, no coffins to hold the tears for all we had at one time hoped for, if not counted on -- whether that be that our work in the world be valued, our needs for health and well-being be respected, a shared sense of reality, a collective desire for the public good, or simply a smile in the grocery store aisle.

As a society, we are not good at grief. We don’t allow it. Three days max, then we are expected to be back to work, keep the economy humming – shop, go to the movies and the mall, “put on a happy face” and “smile though your heart is aching.”  We are uncomfortable with sorrow and pain.  Expected to wear a cheery countenance, we deny our suffering and the suffering of others.  However, loss unacknowledged compounds its effects, creating more damage and harm.  Grief will unleash itself somewhere. Unrecognized and unpermitted grief may manifest as excessive consumption – of food, alcohol, Netflix, stuff – anything to fill the void; or in unquelled anger, violence, hatred, enemy-making, and scapegoating -- all of which have erupted onto our world; or in the unmetabolized pain we pass on to the next generations. It is essential to our individual and collective well-being that we welcome grief, and that we tend it.

In the Sumerian tale of Inanna*, we find Erishkegal, Queen of the Underworld, in mourning. Her grief over the death of her husband and her displacement from her seat of power and reign, unacknowledged by the world, have left her angry, bitter, vengeful, and murderous. When her sister, Inanna, hears Erishkegal’s anguished cries, she journeys to the Underworld to comfort her, but in her bitterness, Erishkegal turns on Inanna and orders her killed.  Prior to her descent, Inanna had asked her faithful servant, Ninshubur, to send help if she did not return in three days. Help comes in the form of two creatures formed by Inanna’s Father Enki, who instructs them to cry when Erishkegal cries.  It is only when they reach Erishkegal and moan with her moans, cry with her cries, scream with her screams, feel her every pain, validate her loss, and tend her woundedness with compassion that she begins to heal, and finally releases Inanna.

Asian American feminist thealogian Rita Nakashima Brock shares a similar Shinto tale of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, who, wounded and angered by the rageful and desecrating acts of her jealous brother, retreats into a cave of silence, and winter descends upon the land. She is finally lured out by the noise of celebration outside the cave. The gods and goddesses have placed a mirror at the entrance to the cave, and so fascinated is Amaterasu by her reflection that they are able to block her return. The moral Brock draws from this story is of the need for good mirrors who will reflect back to us our pain, our brokenness, our suffering. In order to begin to heal, we must first be willing to acknowledge and share our pain to those who will mirror it back to us. Brock writes, “In our pain is the power of self-knowledge that brings us to a healing wisdom and compassion. We will not be made whole and healed until the truth of our lives can be seen and told,  . . . telling our own pain in a community of sisters who hear our gentle murmurs of loneliness and suffering and mirror ourselves back to us” (240).  We must be those mirrors to others as well, to moan with their moans, cry with their cries. “We must learn to listen to, hold, and support others for their empowerment and ours” (237).

We can release the grip of grief in our lives. We need ongoing ways to share our losses, especially those we hide away, to have them heard and mirrored back to us and compassionately tended. The particular cruelty of the pandemic is that it denies us what we most need to heal our grief — physical comforting, spaces for sharing our stories, singing and sobbing together, coming together in consolation — so it is especially important that we both seek out and be those good mirrors to each other in those places that we can.

Healing is also to be found in the company of our more than human relatives. Bring your losses to the trees, to the waters, to the four-legged and the winged ones, and they will hold them. “The cure for susto**,” writes Linda Hogan, “ . . .  is written in the bark of a tree, in the moonlit silence of night, in the bank of a river and the water’s motion. . . . in the mist of morning, the grass that grew a little through the night, the first warmth of sunlight, the waking human in a world infused with intelligence and spirit” (157-158).

A modification of Job 12: 7-8 has also been accompanying me on my walks of late, reminding me in this midwinter of our lives to -

Ask the beasts, and they will heal you;

the birds of the air, and they will comfort you;   

ask the plants of the earth, and they will give you peace.

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*”The Descent of Inanna,” inscribed onto tablets around 1750BCE, was discovered in the ruins of Nippur, Sumer’s spiritual and culture center, in an excavation between 1889 and 1890.  It would be decades before the 14 cuneiform tablets were translated and woven into a coherent tale. 

**Indigenous peoples of Latin America understand trauma and its accompanying grief as “soul loss,” or susto.

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Notes

Brock, Rita Nakashima. “On Mirrors, Mists, and Murmurs: Toward and Asian American Theaology.” In Plaskow, Judith and Carol P. Christ, eds., Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality. New York: Harper Collins, 1989.  235-243.

Hogan, Linda. “The Great Without.” In Hogan, Linda and Brenda Peterson, eds., Face to Face: Women Writers on Faith, Mysticism, and Awakening. New York: North Point Press, 2004. 154-158.

Strouse, Charles and Lee Adams, “Put On a Happy Face.” Strada Music Company, 1960.

Turner, John and Geoffrey Parsons, “Smile.” Bourne Co., 1954.

Weller, Francis. The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2015.

Wolkstein, Diane and Samuel Noah Kramer. Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer. New York: Harper & Row, 1983.

bell hooks: Feminism as the Transformational Work of Love

“Embedded in the commitment to feminist revolution is the challenge to love.”[i]

-          bell hooks

I’m not sure when I was first “hooked,” but at some point in my feminist life I began reading everything bell hooks wrote.  Over the years I’ve read a little over half of her 30+ books, and I have been grateful for the wisdom and perspective provided by each one.  I had come to count on her providing new sources of inspiration on a regular basis, and it was with great sorrow and sense of loss that I learned of her death on December 15th.  I have valued immensely the ways her work widened my partial perspective, challenged my blind sports, and gave me important viewpoints on everything from sexism, racism, classism, pedagogy, militarism, work, parenting, and more. I cannot begin to encompass all I have learned from her in a single post, so undoubtedly I will be revisiting her work often in the weeks and months to come. I write this first piece in great appreciation of her articulation of the meaning and practice of feminism as the work of love.

I began this blog in part because I wanted to be able to provide a corrective to popular misconceptions of feminism as a hatred of men, a resentful complaint, and/or a desire for equal access to power and position in the patriarchal, capitalist hierarchy. The feminism I know and love works toward the transformation of systems of domination and oppression to a world of justice, solidarity, and love.  This is the feminism bell hooks articulated so well.

hooks defined feminism simply as “a struggle to end sexist oppression” (Feminist, 24), but also recognized the interlocking of all forms of oppression. In the same year that Kimberlé Crenshaw famously coined the term “intersectionality” (1989), hooks also articulated that “feminist thought must continually emphasize the importance of sex, race, and class as factors which together determine the social construction of femaleness” (Talking, 23).  hooks recognized that feminism is not limited to gender oppression, but rather that it is “necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture” (Feminist, 24).  None of us is immune. As Audre Lorde reflected, “What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman’s face?” (132). Recognizing that we all have the capacity to oppress and dominate, hooks challenged each of us to examine our own participation in systems of domination. This “ongoing, critical self-examination and reflection about feminist practice, about how we live in the world” (Talking, 24) is one of the hallmarks of feminism. While essential, to be of use in the transformation of domination, it must be accompanied by incumbent action. Feminist solidarity requires that we each take responsibility for recognizing and rectifying those instances in which our actions contribute to the oppression and domination of others, as well as of ourselves.  For hooks, this is the very work of love. As she wrote, “When women and men understand that working to eradicate patriarchal domination is a struggle rooted in the longing to make a world where everyone can live fully and freely, then we know our work to be a gesture of love” (Talking, 27). Conversely, as she reiterated so often, “Anytime we do the work of love, we are doing the work of ending domination” (“Lorde,” 248).

When I first read hooks’ evocation of love as a transformative force embedded in a commitment to feminism, I resonated with her words immediately. It was the message that I had found so compelling in other resistance writers – as hooks did in Paulo Freire’s, “’I am more and more convinced that true revolutionaries must perceive the revolution, because of its creative and liberating nature, as an act of love (70); and in Albert Camus’s, “Then we understand that rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love. . . . this insane generosity. . . which unhesitatingly gives the strength of its love and without a moment’s delay refuses injustice” (304).  I recognize this force in my own deep desire for justice in the world.  Like hooks, I know such love to be a “source of empowerment, . . . a powerful force that challenges and resists domination” (Talking, 26) -- the foundation that sustains the work of creating a world without domination. hooks emphasized that every great movement for social justice has been grounded in love as a transformative force. In her years of working in social justice movements, she had found that “it was always love that created the motivation for profound inner and outer transformation. Love was the force that empowered folks to resist domination and create new ways of living and being in the world” (Writing, 194-195).

Much of hooks’ later work centered around defining and refining the meaning and practice of love in action in the world. This work culminated in her book, All About Love, in which she reflected on the implications of love in work, family, friendship, public policy, spirituality, and more.  Every chapter is worthy of long conversation and contemplation, but the one that has been in the forefront of my mind recently is her chapter on “Living by a Love Ethic.” In it hooks articulates a feminist vision of society shaped by this ethic of love, in which citizens and neighbors value and protect the common good -- a notion that seems to have disappeared from our national consciousness and will as of late, but that we sorely need in this time. How very different our society could be if we as a nation, as a world, lived by this love ethic. As hooks wrote, “If all public policy was created in the spirit of love, we would not have to worry about unemployment, homelessness, schools failing to teach children, or addiction” (All About Love, 98). And, I would add, public health, health care for all, poverty, childcare, structural racism, the school to prison pipeline, gun violence, environmental destruction, climate change. The list could go on and on. Imagine it – public policy created in the spirit of love. hooks challenged us to do more than imagine, inspiring us to do the daily hard and rewarding work of creating this society and these relationships based in love.

The love that hooks invoked is demanding.  As she said, it entails accepting “the fullness of our humanity, which then allows us to recognize the humanity of others” (Writing, 198).  That is not such an easy task.  It requires us to recognize not only the goodness in those we cast as “the enemy,” but our own shortcomings as well.  As one of her inspirations, Sam Keen, wrote, “When I know my shadow, I know that ‘they’ are like me. . . . [Those] I cast into the category of aliens are fellow humans who, like myself, are faulted, filled with contradictory impulses of love and hate, generosity, and the blind will to survive . . . ” (150). It is this recognition that galvanizes our refusal to engage in acts of domination, even against those who have oppressed and dominated us.  It enables us instead, in hooks’ words, to “engage a practice of loving kindness, forgiveness, and compassion” (Writing, 198). 

This is the work of transformational love.  This is the work of feminism.   To that end, as we head into a new year, I conclude with hooks’ charge to us all: “Let us draw upon that love to heighten our awareness, deepen our compassion, intensify our courage, and strengthen our commitment” (Talking, 27).

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Notes

Camus, Albert. The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. Trans. Anthony Bower. New York: Vintage Books, 1956.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  20th Anniversary Edition. Trans. Myra Berman Ramos. New York: Continuum, 1993.

hooks, bell, All About Love: New Visions. New York: William Morrow & Co., 2000.

______. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center.  Boston: South End Press, 1984.

______. “Lorde: The Imagination of Justice.” in Byrd, Rudolph et. al. eds. I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde. New York: Oxford U. Press, 2009.

______. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Boston: South End Press, 1989.

______. Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Keen, Sam. The Passionate Life: Stages of Loving. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983.

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde.  Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984.

[i] Hooks, bell. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black.  Boston: South End Press, 1989, 26.

Longing for Darkness

Hale Bopp

When I moved to Minnesota from Ohio, everyone back home voiced concern about how cold the winters would be.  Nobody warned me about how dark they would be, nor how long the dark would last.  For years, I complained, but gradually I have come to embrace the dark.  The dark invites us to slow down, to rest, to sleep, to dream.  It is a time to open to our depths, and to others. There is a kind of magic in the dark. Without the harsh light of judgment, in the dark we are more likely to share our secrets and stories, our wounds and our wonderings, our hearts and hopes with each other. As the deciduous trees lose their leaves, the sky opens as well, giving birth to the night sky.  As Sara Thomsen sings in her, “Darkness Cover Me”: “Holy Maker of Moonlight, singing through starlight. . . . womb of the night.”  The dark gives us the gift of stars. In the brief nights of summer, I rarely see the stars, but in winter they blanket the sky, giving me a sense of my place in the universe. They arrive like old friends -- the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades appearing in the evening, and Orion greeting me out my window every morning. When Hale-Bopp was visible from earth, I would look for her on my late-night drives home from teaching night class, and there she would be, my constant companion on those cold winter nights.  The stars remind us that we are not alone, that we are all related, for we are all made of the stuff of stars.

Lately I’ve been longing for darkness. When I first moved to my home in the woods, the night was dark. As the city has grown, and more houses have been built, and streetlights added, the dark is eclipsed by a never-ending twilight.  In my neighborhood, more and more people keep “security” lights on all night long, leaving me feeling invaded by the perpetual light.  In our human efforts to resist the dark, we have forgotten the earthly command to rest, and we are all suffering the consequences. Light pollution affects our health, throwing off our circadian rhythms, diminishing the release of melatonin – paving the way for loss of sleep, increased anxiety, and a host of other ailments.  Other animals’ health is affected as well, as is the migration of sea turtles and birds who navigate by the stars and by moonlight. We light up the night in order not to get lost in the dark, but perhaps we all have lost our way by being too much in the light. We were born out of darkness, and like the spring bulb that needs cold and dark in order to bloom, so do we need the nourishment of the deep dark to restore our creativity and power. 

In our longing for darkness, it is not just the physical dark that we crave, but the metaphysical, the spiritual, the deep well of the ancient dark divine, the original matrix.  As China Galland mused, “The longing for darkness [is] also a longing for the womb of god” (54). In her Longing for Darkness, Galland reminds us of the persistence of this longing, and her emergence as Ishtar, Isis, Astarte, Asherah, Tara, Kali, Parvati, Durga, as well as Mary and the Christian mystics writing of the motherhood of the divine. Her iconographic representations abound throughout the world, from the temples to Tara throughout Asia to the many shrines to the Black Madonna throughout Europe. It’s no wonder that it is within this time of deep darkness that Mary is celebrated within Christianity – Mary not as passive, but as the strong, courageous, fiercely protective, earthy maternal divine.

 Lucia Birnbaum reminds us that the first African mother is everyone’s genetic inheritance, honored for millennia as Erishkegal, Isis, Lilith, Kali, Oshun, Hagar.  It was only with the rise of patriarchy that the dark feminine divine was demoted, displaced, erased, and forced underground. Yet she continues to rise in our psyches and our deepest longings.  Each year, thousands walk hundreds of miles in pilgrimage to visit these shrines, all seeking connection with dark, divine, pre-patriarchal female energies of which we are all sorely in need.

Galland writes, “To say that one is ‘longing for darkness’ is to say that one longs for transformation, for a darkness that brings balance, wholeness, integration, wisdom, insight” (152).  Certainly, if there was ever a time when we have needed to restore balance, and to gain insight and wisdom, it is now.  We are a world profoundly out of balance.  It is theorized that dark matter is what holds the stars and galaxies together -- “matter,” from the same root word as “mother” – mater. Banishing the dark mater has thrown us off balance.  I image our world thrown off its axis, wobbling through the universe.  The energies and acts of hate, violence, oppression, domination, and patriarchy that have been surging throughout the world have thrown us off kilter.  We need the qualities of the dark feminine divine -- compassion, justice, equality to restore our balance, and to transform the violent, hierarchical, patriarchy which governs too much of our lives into a peaceful, radically egalitarian democracy (Birnbaum, 147). We have been there before; we can return.

To do so requires our vision and energies. bell hooks wrote of how as a child she would make the treacherous walk through a white section of town, where she could feel the hate pouring down on her, to the safety and homecoming of her grandparents’ home.  It was in the homes of Black women that she found her spirit nurtured.  Black women resisted white oppression by creating places to heal and be affirmed, and have one’s dignity restored – places where possibility could rise again.  The matrix of the dark feminine divine is such a homeplace, fostering both our resistance and the creation of new possibilities, in defiance of systems of hate and oppression. Like the places of renewal and resistance hooks found in the homes of Black women, dwelling with the dark feminine divine was for her an encounter with “ . . . the ground of our being, the place of mystery, creativity, and possibility, for it is there that we can construct the mind that can resist, that can revision, that can create the maps that when followed will liberate us” (2009, 243).  We can begin this resistance and revisioning by, as Audre Lorde said, “re-member[ing] what is dark and ancient and divine within yourself” (69), for it is in these dark places within “. . . where hidden and growing our true spirit rises. . . (36). The dark feminine divine renews us, strengthening our capacity to resist, and inspiring our vision for a different way to be possible.  

In the far north where I now live, the winter Solstice is celebrated with bonfires and candle lighting and feasting. For many years, I attended a women-only Solstice celebration at a lesbian collective homeplace. We would gather in a circle; an invocation to the Solstice would be read; and then as anyone in the circle felt so moved, she would light one of the thirteen candles, expressing her thanks or hopes or blessing – for health, for a loved one, for the earth, and always for the four-leggeds. Then the great potluck feast began with soups and stews, tater tot and pasta hot dishes, green and fruit salads, smoked fish, vegetables of all kinds, quiches, breads, and a plethora of desserts.  At some point in the evening, the announcement would come that the fire had been lit.  We’d pile on our winter jackets and boots and head out in the night, often in below zero temperatures. Each in turn would place the wreath upon her head and then, with clear intention, jump the fire, leaving behind the ills of the previous year and leaping forward into those things we hoped for in the new year.  Three of us who made music together would link arms and leap the fire together, before making our individual jumps.  It is at cherished times like these that I have truly felt the dark, divine, ancient, pre-patriarchal feminine energy – that place of possibility. The world could be like this.

Living in a place of such a long dark, I do rejoice in the return of the light at the Solstice, but now with a great appreciation for the gifts of the long night as well. The woman who was the firekeeper of the Solstice gathering recently passed, and as I was writing the section on bell hooks, I learned that she, too, had just passed.  This year, I will jump the fire in their memory and honor, and in honor of the ancient, dark, rich, feminine divine in us all.

“bell hooks” by Kris Simonson

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Notes                                                                               

Birnbaum, Lucia Chiavola. Dark Mother: African Origins and Godmothers.  San Jose: Authors Choice Press, 2001. 

Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future. NY: Harper One, 1988. 

Galaxies Protected by Dark Matter | Space 

Galland, China. Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna. NY: Penguin, 1990. 

hooks, bell. “Lorde: The Imagination of Justice.” in Byrd, Rudolph et. al. eds. I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde. New York: Oxford U. Press, 2009. 

______. Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1990. 

Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. 

Light Pollution | National Geographic Society 

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde. Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1984. 

Thomsen, Sara. “Darkness Cover Me.” Fertile Ground. 1999.