Blog o’ Gnosis

This poem may not be finished—I have spent the evening taking it apart and putting it back together, and still have some tinkering to do around the edges. But what fun to have a new poem to share for Brigid! And to be writing poetry again. The stress of the past few years must be easing up. May it be so.

Fresh Powder

My mistake was thinking
I had been down this slope
before. A night spent traversing
the ridge, looking for tracks as phantom
traces of moonlight and tree shadow guided
me first to one route then another, a faint
smoothness to the land here, hints of
familiar curves waiting there,
around the bend. But
no sure match—memory
promising what the moment
did not contain. Backtracking,
confidence giving way to doubt,
the lift and heave through hip-deep
powder, a strained ascent for another run.
Then, dawning wonder: I had not been here
before. Never these woven flanks of land, never
this finely-tuned air warming to dampness in
my nostrils. I pause to listen, fingers
flexed like dowsing rods sweeping
across the mountain. Minutes
pass, possibly days.
From behind me an owl flies
low, disappearing into the shadows ahead
and my feet follow, maneuvering rise and swale
with harnessed speed. The boughs overhead give out a soft
cry, and a rustle of downy feathers, sinew and silk. Such unearthly
beauty this night, the heavens keeping watch, and so many miles before we           both can sleep.

Anne Hill
Feb 1, 2010

I had to go back to this post to find the earliest reference (Reya’s original blog post is lost in the mists) to the now annual Silent Poetry Reading in honor of Brigid (Saint or Goddess, as you prefer). And while the first invitation was for a single day’s blogging event, watching the misty full moon tonight got me thinking of a favorite line from a poem that I want to offer, so I will simply declare that this year’s event has begun!

Life is hard enough; why shouldn’t we take all the full moon weekend leading up to February 2nd to celebrate this patroness of the arts and healing, and read her a poem or two?

For those of you with dormant blogs (ahem, Oak and Pandora!), now would be a great time to dust them off and offer up a poem. And for those of you who are more web-savvy (I’m looking at you, Yvonne and Cat), perhaps there is a way to aggregate everyone’s contributions, so that it is easier to have a glass of wine on Brigid’s feast day and browse through all the great poems.

Update: Yvonne has set up a system: if you post a poem this weekend, go to delicious.com and enter your post url with the tag brighid2010. (Or get a geeky friend to do it for you; it’s not super intuitive.) If you just want to read all the poetry, search for the brighid2010 tag at delicious and all our posts will show up together. Magic!

This is a poem I wrote back in 1990. I remembered it because the last line came back to me tonight, and I still really like it. Here it is.

The Basket
(after John Berryman)

What should I do, evenings, cobwebs
swaying in the rafters and three finely
printed invitations nailed to the

message board? (they quote Neruda, say
Bring the Children, or Softball at the
Reception) But marriage? Why flower

the hair or slip new diamonds through ears,
when the chapels are emptying: vessels
thrown with relief into rivers, small

silver placed in the notches of trees and
bells over arms of sky? The bride’s demure
look is not modesty but ambivalence—notice

the primrose which holds her gaze as he
leads her out of the valley. The day I
ate caviar from your navel and we pulled

each other through the brush to gather
the sweetest berries, I thought you were
a finely feathered basket, serpent-coiled

and watertight. We have been each others’
alibis, laughing as the caterers filled our
plates, saying we were too young to know

better, with the happy couple making the
evil eye behind our backs. Now, three-fingered,
I sit nights mending coil, sedge soaking

in the dish pan. I will make them one with
blue feathers, tell them marriage is not bells
but the basket, and we its constant gleaners.

I have just spent an hour watching the excellent Rachel Maddow interview people about the public health disaster unfolding in Port au Prince. Once the visual shock of some of the images registered—the wounded lined up in the hallways and parking lots of barely functioning hospitals, the man lying on the ground whose IV had run dry and who was slowly dying while family members held his hands—I began to realize that my personal connection to this scene felt like more than that of a casual viewer.

I have in my home a couple pieces of furniture made from fine Haitian mahogany. The story behind them goes that my grandfather, a Naval doctor, was stationed in Haiti during the U.S. occupation. His job was to oversee construction and be officer in charge of one of the many rural hospitals the U.S. built. Unfortunately, I do not know the exact area. Roads were quite scarce in Haiti at the time, so my grandfather rode out every day on horseback to oversee his hospital.

One morning after a great storm, he rode through the woods to work and came upon two giant mahogany trees that had been felled by lightning the night before. He had his men go out and bring the trees back to the compound, and later had a local carpenter make a whole set of furniture to his specifications.

I am quite sure that as a Naval officer my grandfather perpetuated our racist, destructive governance of Haiti in many ways. I also know that he was a good man and a strong leader, and that he probably ran an efficient hospital. It breaks my heart to read that, of all the ill that was done to Haiti during the occupation, one good thing that did endure were the hospitals we built—many of the buildings were still functional well into the 1990s.

My father was conceived in Haiti, and in the latter part of 1926 my grandmother sailed to Washington D.C. so that Dad wouldn’t be born on the island. (Her standard joke: “I didn’t want to have a black baby!” As a child, this really confused me.) My grandfather joined her later and ended up doing the delivery himself, when her regular doctor was out at a D.C. New Year’s Eve party.

Pop-pop (as we called him) returned to his post shortly after my dad was born, but my grandmother stayed with family in New Jersey for another couple months before travelling with the baby back to Haiti. During her absence my father’s older brother, not yet 2, stayed in the care of Haitian nuns.

Haiti needs our help long-term. After this crisis has passed, we need to figure out how to help the people of Haiti without repeating the missteps of our ill-begotten occupation a century ago. Can we do it? Can we aid the infrastructure, literacy, health care and survival needs of the country, while making sure that the system we help build is what Haiti wants and is capable of sustaining in our absence?

My family had a hand in the meddling—and also did some good in the country. I have an old gateleg table, in need of some repair but well-built out of beautiful wide mahogany boards, that reminds me of my connection to the country every day. May all go well, may relief get to those in need, may Haiti emerge stronger and more vibrant than ever. Viva Haiti.

I did not buy my home on my own. It was bought several years ago by my then-husband and me, as we looked to the future and decided that we wanted a house on the California coast to retire to. We got a fixer for a great price, and spent the next couple of years working on it so we could rent it out as we waited for those golden years of retirement to roll around.

As you can probably guess, that’s not what happened. Well before the housing market sprung a leak, our marriage did. And what was going to be a dream vacation home waiting for our habitation became a half-finished crash pad that I moved into when it was clear I needed to leave.

In the years since, I have learned a thing or two about surviving the breakup of a long-term marriage. Not from reading books on the subject — I stay away from most self-help books like the plague. My friends were the ones I turned to, kvetched to, and leaned on throughout the seemingly endless divorce process.

The principles I learned and practiced got me through those four years, and continue to serve me well in my new, post-divorce life. So on the off-chance that someone else is in the same predicament, here are the five most important principles I learned for surviving a divorce.

1. Know what you are in for. Because many of my close friends had also been through bad breakups, I learned a surprising amount from them about what to expect. But the best road map came from a therapist who said, “it takes four years to get through a break-up.” I protested when she said this — who wants to hear after two months of sheer agony that there are 46 more to go?

She continued: “The first year is awful. But the second year is worse, because while things are just as hard, you’re exhausted from doing this for a year already. By year three the drama has calmed down a bit, and you start getting your new bearings. And the fourth year is the clean-up year, taking care of details you let go, and moving on with your life.”

I have to say, she was right. Like it or not, it does take about four years to get through the whole thing. (Not including co-parenting, of course, which is a lifetime gig.)

2. Always face the dragon. During a divorce, there are so many days when you just want to do nothing. And of course, you need lots of down time. But often you want to do nothing because there is one thing you really need to do that you just dread. Maybe it’s talking to a financial adviser, or filling out a complicated form. Maybe it’s having a difficult conversation with your ex. Whatever that one dreaded thing is, you have to do it. I call this “facing the dragon.”

Whenever I felt miserable, I went over in my mind all the things that were feeding my misery. Usually there was one task I really didn’t want to do, and my rule was that I had to do it. I could avoid everything else on the list, but that one thing I had to attend to. And you know what? It saved my ass. It was grueling and painful, but I showed up prepared when I needed to be prepared, and handled important things in a timely manner. I am thankful every day for all the effort I put in when I really didn’t want to get off the couch.

3. Hunker down. When you’re not facing the dragon, you do get to collapse sometimes. Do things that give you pleasure, or at least take the edge off, and bow out of anything you’re doing that isn’t helping you survive. Social events that you’ve lost interest in? Let them go. Friends that leave you feeling drained? Take a raincheck.

Be responsible, especially if you’ve got kids to take care of, but aside from that take stock of the things you no longer want to do, and drop them. Instead, take advantage of the opportunity to re-shape your life by staying focused on what is important and letting the rest fall away.

4. Sometimes, it’s good to watch The Godfather. That was the advice of a trusted friend who listened to me complain one day about the injustices I was dealing with. I laughed, but she repeated herself: “No really, go and watch it. I can’t explain it, but you’ll feel much better.”

I decided to humor her and rent the movie, though I didn’t think it would help. But once I hit the video store I ended up in a near-trance walking down the aisles, and I left the store with not one but three DVDs tucked under my arm: I’d rented The Godfather, but I also got V for Vendetta and The Corpse Bride. When I emerged from the next two days of cathartic movie-watching I realized my friend was right: I did feel much better.

5. Give yourself room to grow. My half-finished crash pad had the beginnings of a lovely garden, and after a few months of neglect I realized that if I let it all die, it would very quickly be the most depressing-looking house to come home to. I resolved to replace the dead plants right away, and make sure all of them were hooked up to water.

As I was planting them, I followed the instructions and left what seemed like a ridiculously large amount of room around each plant. Apparently those little starts would grow quite big someday. I doubted it, but gave them room anyway.

Meanwhile, I had a house with a cavernous bedroom to furnish, and I had to decide what size bed to get. Should I be frugal and get a double or (shudder) a single? Or should I buy a large bed that was the right size for the room, and that said rather strongly that I planned to stay here and did not intend to sleep alone forever? Maybe because I had been so optimistic with the plants, I decided to get a big bed, with the best quality mattress. Every night for a long time I went to sleep alone, but in the most comfortable bed I had ever slept in.

The next year, my little plantings filled out in the garden and were very happy I’d given them the room they needed. And after all those difficult years, I am so very grateful now that I chose to be optimistic about my bed and other things, and gave myself enough room to grow.

This article was originally published in the Huffington Post.

Just like dressing for success puts our best foot forward, dreaming for success can help us achieve our biggest goals this year.

Last year I shared 10 great tips for having big winter dreams. But more important than having big dreams is knowing how to work with all the dreams we have. Here’s how to make every dream count, no matter how small.

1. Remember your dreams and write them down. Even if you only remember a word or name, color or feeling, write it down. Dream recall increases the more we practice it.
2. Go for what makes you happy in dreams. Some traditions insist that to be happy in waking life you must pursue pleasure in your dreams. Being successful in 2010 means being bold, so start by doing what you want in dreams even if it’s something you would never do in waking life. It’s just a dream–go for it!
3. Don’t run from conflict in your dreams. This may take some practice, but you’ve got all year, right? If there’s a dragon chasing you at night, coach yourself to turn and face it. Likewise with intruders, thieves, and other scoundrels. You will soon find it easier to overcome obstacles of all kinds during the day. Seriously, it works!
4. Keep tabs on your health. If you are sick or injured in a dream, don’t freak out, but do heed the warning. Dreams usually work on the symbolic level, but sometimes they have direct, concrete advice for us. Always check out a health concern in a dream, it could be the best move you ever make.
5. Pay attention when things go bad. Notice what happens just before a good dream starts becoming an anxiety-ridden nightmare. Do you hesitate out of fear? Is there a misunderstanding that sets things off the rails? Are you listening to someone with the wrong information? Figure out what the glitch is, and start overcoming it in waking life.
6. Look for dream allies and treat them well. Dreams are full of unforeseen turns of fortune, if we know what to look for. Just as in fairy tales, if someone offers you something in a dream be gracious and thank them. It may look strange, but looks can be deceiving, and we never want to turn down what could be a golden opportunity.
7. Always go for the highest good. If you have a choice of two actions to take in a dream, and one of them benefits you alone whereas the other benefits you and several others, take the second choice. Start now to shift those self-centered patterns in the dream world, and you may find that others are more willing to help you achieve your goals on waking as well.

We all have to sleep and dream, no matter how desperate, ambitious, or energetic we are. The good news is, our dreaming minds are perfectly capable of helping us with our waking goals–when we act in accordance with our values and stick with it in spite of the setbacks that inevitably occur. In a year where money is scarce and every advantage counts, who can afford to discount their dreams?

This article was originally published in the Huffington Post.

One summer in the beginning of the Aughts, I spent an amazing week in Somerset with Donald Engstrom and Sharon Jackson. That is to say, the weather was amazing, the countryside amazing too, the company was fabulous, and the spot we were staying in was perfectly lovely. Our job, on the other hand, was thankless, arduous, and at times grueling.

We were teaching at Avalon Witchcamp, the first year that the camp did not have any of its regular teachers there. It was an experiment in “introducing new talent” and “altering the camp dynamics,” which surely would benefit the entire community in the long run. We were, in effect, substitute teachers while the camp was in its adolescent rebellion stage.

Having spent years working as a substitute teacher I had a premonition that it would be a tough gig, but didn’t want to believe it beforehand. After a day and a half, though, I instinctively moved into damage control mode with Donald and Sharon: Stick together. Be sympathetic to everyone, but don’t promise anything. Project confidence, and do what you do best.

We each had our strengths, but Donald had one technique that seemed to always—at least momentarily—quiet the discontented and bring the camp into some kind of altered state together. I watched him, transfixed, until I figured out what he was doing. Anyone who has seen Donald in ritual will know exactly what I mean when I call it “Stirring the Pot.” Here’s how it’s done:

First, be stocky, Swedish, and Lutheran. Have a low, gravelly voice and enjoy humming. When it is your turn to guide the energy, step into the circle and keep your gaze on the fire.

Before taking another step, extend your arm toward the center of the circle, fingers pointed slightly down to the flames like dowsing rods. Start a little hum, as low as possible, and as you do this begin to slowly swirl your fingers in a circular motion, still pointing down toward the center of the fire.

Let the hum build into something barely audible, then into a song containing actual syllables. It doesn’t matter what the syllables are exactly, but they should sound like a cross between a Native American raven chant, a Saami joik, and a middle-aged guy puttering in his garden.

Continue this stirring and singing until you have the crowd in the palm of your hand, so to speak. You’ll eventually want to say something, if only to snap people out of their trance. Take your time, and enjoy being able to talk without challenge. Cap off the ritual with warm beverages indoors, and stories told in a salacious tone. Rest easy, get up in the morning, and do it again.

We’re all about holidays in this house: Solstice, birthdays, Christmas, Boxing Day, New Year’s Eve, and Hangover (New Year’s) Day. It’s all good, and all cause to light the house with shiny, colorful things.

Yesterday we headed to Deborah Oak’s place in San Francisco to celebrate the Solstice with old friends and great food. John Sulak was there, still knee-deep in his book about the Zells and about to swear off Pagans for good (present company excluded, of course). The lovely Robin Dolan gave us all a Victorian fashion lesson by wearing a gorgeous red satin corset over…a black cotton turtleneck. What Would Dickens Do?

Thorn and Jonathan were there too, and from them I got an update on the brouhaha at the Parliament of World Religions. Naturally, I am shocked and appalled. But also strangely comforted that (a) we care enough to go to these things, (b) we keep building bridges and talking with other traditions, and (c) we keep talking to each other.

Meeting up with former circle brothers and sisters gave a special glow to the evening, and I came home this afternoon warm, happy, and sated. Meanwhile, Jojo and her friend decorated the tree in our absence, and the house is now ready for the next festive event in a jam-packed week: Jojo’s 17th birthday on Wednesday!

And on it goes. Another season of cold and warmth, squalls and firelight. Tomorrow morning I am being interviewed on someone else’s radio show: “Questing—Where Is the Path?” on KWMR, 90.5 Pt. Reyes Station, 89.9 Bolinas, and streaming on the web here. I am sure we will talk about dreams, but probably also about paths and quests. Those, it seems, are never-ending.

The other night I had a dream about returning home from a teaching trip, and deciding to take the last leg of the journey up the coast by bicycle. Cycling through the verdant green hills under dark storm clouds, I glanced to my right and saw an amazing scene: there was the City in the distance, its white and gray skyline clearly etched against the broad snow-capped hills of the East Bay. Geographically it was ridiculous, but that little glimpse through the clouds was so stunning that everyone on the road pulled over to gawk, get out their cameras, and take in the breathtaking scene.

As I was ready to go, two other former circle sisters came to greet me with big hugs and encouragement, and I mounted my bicycle again, still dry in spite of the rain, and headed home.

I take this dream to be a good sign for the year to come. May it be so. May all our dreams bear full fruit, and may the bridges we have built be strong enough to bear the traffic of many years of commerce, conversation, and communion. Blessed Solstice, everyone.

Back in August I commented in my review of Robert Moss’s new book that,

People are people…

The dirty little secret of the human potential movement is that even if we all develop to our fullest potential, our society will still not be perfect.”

Much to my surprise, I did not get a lot of blowback from that statement. Maybe people didn’t read the review that closely, or perhaps the human potential movement has lost some of its lustre—though I find that hard to believe, with our country’s obsession with self-improvement (and accompanying disregard for the real suffering of others) seemingly as dominant as ever.

In The Secret History of Dreaming, Moss details the way dreams have guided people and shaped history, and the book itself is a tremendously inspiring read. But in promoting a greater engagement with our dreaming minds, he also implies that if we do so everything will be better. Of course, the “secret future of dreaming” is outside the scope of an in-depth book on dream history, but that is what I immediately wanted to hear more about.

At the time, I thought the lack of controversy surrounding my review meant that I could set that subject aside for a while, but instead the opposite has occurred. I am increasingly curious about Sandor Ferenczi’s idea that “dreams are the workshop of evolution.” Great advances and cognitive leaps are being dreamed up by people all the time, but isn’t it premature (or at best wishful thinking) to call that process evolution?

Are we really evolving into anything new? Or is it just people, all the way down?

Phillip Zarrilli’s new book may have a title that only a theater critic could love, but the body of his work deserves to be known and practiced by a much wider audience—and in terms of this blog’s readership, I am referring to anybody involved in the expressive or healing arts, ministry, ceremony, or public speaking.

Psychophysical Acting: An Intercultural Approach After Stanislavski is about the core of all effective expression: aligning will, mind, and subtle physical energies so that they meld seamlessly with our actions. Zarrilli has made a lifelong study of how breath, awareness, focus and movement conjoin to create believable performance, but his inquiry goes deeper than that: he is after a level of performance and presence where “the body becomes all eyes,” and one is “standing still yet not standing still.” (Disclosure: Phillip is also a cool family friend.)

His is much more an Eastern sensibility than a Western one, and Zarrilli bases his training method in large part on an intensive study of the South Indian martial art kalarippayattu, a practice that requires power and precision along with expanded attention and awareness. To the physical forms of kalarippayattu, Phillip has added breathwork and movement based on yoga and taiqiquan to create “a complementary set of psychophysical disciplines that begins and ends each day of training with a series of simple, breath-control exercises.”

The core of the book is a close and careful explanation of the exercises Phillip uses in his trainings, starting with the breath and then moving into different modes of embodied experience. The exercises and concepts used in the book are amplified to great effect by the accompanying DVD-ROM, which is very well done and adds extended video and audio clips that demonstrate what his hands-on work looks like in training and performance.

Pagan religions are all about embodiment—the immanence of the Divine in nature and in ourselves, the omnipresence of the spirits and the ancestors, Gods and Goddesses. With such a multi-layered world view, it always surprises me how very little we know about actual embodiment, let alone practice it in our rituals, celebrations, even in private meditations.

To some extent this lack is being remedied by better training, but without in-depth models of what is possible and how to get there, we won’t progress very far. This book is an excellent manual for explaining just that. It is better suited to group than individual study, because these embodied states are extremely subtle and we need reliable external feedback to train them into our bodies. But anyone who is serious about improving their ritual skills should either consult this book, or work with someone who has.

Better yet, Phillip Zarrilli travels all over the place from his studio in West Wales, training people in his system of embodied performance. He is a wonderful resource, and very approachable. The enterprising group that hires him for a period of intensive or ongoing work would find that their time and money were well-spent. And the result would benefit far more than just themselves.

I have never been a blogger that can whip out short, frequent posts on the day’s most Googled topic, in the race to drive traffic to my site. Instead, I am one of many bloggers who write thoughtful pieces about the things that interest me, in hopes that those who are similarly interested will continue reading what I write because it’s good, not because it’s trendy.

Writing blog posts has meant adjusting my writing style to one that is more compact, because in this format a shorter rhythmic flow works better than essay writing. People (myself included) just don’t stay glued to a digital page for as long as it takes to read a long, expository piece.

Last Fall, by a mixture of luck and moxie, I landed a spot as blogger for the Huffington Post. That has caused me to tighten and focus my writing even more, to match the pace of the site and get more people to read my (still on the long side) posts.

I like the challenge. And while I mostly write about dreams, my raison d’être, I have had lots of fun with my last two Huffington posts, “How To Survive a Divorce” and “The Three Most Important Words In Any Relationship.” I will most likely keep experimenting with this style, the “truth-humor spritzer” as I like to call it, in my writing there.

For now, Blog o’ Gnosis and HuffPo are my two main blogging platforms. The third, at annehill.org, is where I upload podcasts from my weekly radio show, and cross-post dream-related articles from my other blogs.

For now, I can keep them all straight, and post once or twice a month to each blog. I have no plans to discontinue any of them, though I may cross-post more in the future. I have several fascinating books to review here in the next few weeks, and several interesting people to interview on the radio show as well. And the irreverent humor part of my brain is always churning up more ideas that are perfect for HuffPo.

For now, this is a workable model. However, I hope to be writing for money sometime very soon, in which case things may shift rather rapidly. If so, this would be good news. And you will hear about it here first, or possibly on my Twitter feed, or maybe in a cryptic Facebook status update.

Meanwhile, what is up with the time changing so damn late in the year? I am against it, and hope that no one is thinking of creating a New Religious Movement based on the “Fall Back/Spring Forward” cycle. Can you imagine the desperate entreaties to the Gods that would be happening right about now?