Driving Audhumla

Wars of religion at my house

Three years ago today my father died, one week short of his 89th birthday. He's been on my mind a lot lately, mainly because I recently read all three volumes of O.E. Rolvaag's trilogy about Norwegian immigrants,  Giants in the Earth, Peder Victorious and Their Father's God.

Rolvaag's books were set in the 1870s in the territory that eventually became South Dakota . My father and his family came from Norway to Washington State in 1922.  But on many levels, those were the only two differences between the families of Rolvaag's protagonist Peder Holm and mine.

A home movie was made of my parents' wedding in 1942, something unusual for the time.  Part of it is shot inside the Catholic church in Ellensburg, Washington, and part of it is shot at the ranch my mother's family had since shortly after they crossed the Oregon Trail in 1857.

In the film -- which has now been transferred to video --  I can see my mother as a radiant, clearly virginal young bride, my maternal grandmother as warm and bosomy-looking as I remember her, and my dad in a rather dreadful Brylcreamed haircut, looking young, awkward, and scared.

I've always known that one of the big issues in my parents' marriage was the fact that my very Catholic mother married a Protestant, and thought this was so fraught because my maternal grandparents could barely endure a mixed marriage. But then I looked carefully at the  part of the film shows my dad's side of the family inside the church and saw the other side of the equation. They were Evangelical Lutherans from a very pietistic sect, and they are looking wary and anxious as if they expected Satan himself to leap out at them from behind one of the popish statues in the church.

In other words, one of the chief realities of my parents' marriage was that it was a battleground in which the wars of religion were fought over and over and over again. My pious mother was a product of the brand of Catholicism that truly believed there was no salvation outside the Church. Her single-minded aim was to get Dad to convert to Catholicism, no matter what the stakes. 

Dad came from a sect for which the Reformation was still very much alive and well. And I think, after reading Rolvaag's novels, I can begin to understand that probably he and the rest of his family had their religious commitment entwined with their desire not to lose their Norwegian culture. And there was no greater anathema for them than the Catholic church.

When they emigrated to Washington State from Selbu, Norway, my father's family and others from their same small town started their own Selbu Lutheran church in the middle of the wheat fields of Washington State's Whitman County. Dad, who was the youngest in his family, was in the last class that was confirmed there in the Norwegian language. For years the services were conducted in Norwegian. And people who were members of this particular Lutheran sect didn't drink, dance or play cards.  My mother's family did all three.

Because of the promises Dad had to sign in order to marry 'Mom, we were raised Catholic, in the triumphalistic Catholic church of the American 1950s. We knew we were members of the one true church and that we were to have nothing to do with any other. We never missed Mass, all of us were enrolled in Catholic schools, and Mom could never forgo an opportunity for us to do all the extra devotional things  like making the novena to St. Francis Xavier, and getting our throats blessed every February 3 on the Feast of St. Blaise. (Yes, we really did that).

My parents separated when I was in 4th grade and lived apart until the end of my 8th grade year. Dad was drinking, seeing other women, and when he did come home, was either knocking our mom or one of us around. Yet every night we were required to kneel around Mom's bed to say the rosary so that Dad would become a Catholic and come back home to live with us again.  That's right, please dear God make our wife-beating alcoholic unfaithful father come back home again. Talk about cognitive dissonance! Prayer was not a connection to the sacred, but, for me, at least, a guilt-ridden petition for something I truly didn't want.

Eventually Dad did convert, was baptized a Catholic, and did come home to stay. My mother was ecstatic. But nothing really changed. We still went to mass every Sunday and hit all the other novenas and devotionals at church. Dad seldom came as he was always out at Boeing nearly every weekend, doing some kind of important defense work or because he was needed by the space program.  When he did surface, it was often after he'd stopped by a bar on the way home with his Boeing and Air Force buddies.

He'd snarl because dinner was overcooked -- to the end of my days I'll always hear him say ``you killed the meat, Mary. You killed the God damned meat'' --  and became even more of a martinet about table manners. Even now I can't eat a meal unless my left hand is in my lap, and whenever I cut butter from the cube of butter, it has to be cut absolutely square. Dad's punishment for us when we misbehaved at the table was to force us to read the Bible, not a practice that filled us with the love of scripture.

I think Dad caught the words, but not the tune of Catholicism, and he viewed religion and religious practice  through the filter of his Lutheran upbringing. When he was old and frail and clearly dying, he was terrified of death, mainly, I think, because he envisioned he was going to end up in the worst hell of Martin Luther's imaginings.

Mom died 35 years before Dad. She had cancer of many kinds that put her through at least two agonizing years. Just as she did with my father's abuse, she saw the sufferings of her illness as some task God laid before her that she must endure out of her religious devotion.

There's an expression commonly used in Catholicism, ``offer it up for the poor souls in Purgatory.'' The idea is that one endures misery or discomfort for the sake of those poor souls that haven't yet made it to heaven, but who are doing penance in Purgatory for their sins on earth.  Mom offered it all up for the poor souls in purgatory.

Many times each of us begged her to get a divorce and start a new life, freeing her from Dad's endless cycle of drinking and abuse. She would have none of it because ``I made a solemn vow before God and this is what He asks of me.'' And I will always remember hearing her weep in the hospital when her beautiful long blond hair fell out after her radiation treatment. I can hear her saying ``I gave You everything else. Why are You asking this of me, too?'' But she offered it up, as she did everything else.

The last book in Rolvaag's  trilogy deals with the marriage of Norwegian immigrant Lutheran Peder Holm to Susie Doheny, an Irish Catholic.  This marriage was as doomed as my parents' and, for the most part, doomed for the same reasons.  Their only child is secretly baptised -- at two different times -- a Lutheran and a Catholic. Susie cannot fathom that there is any good in Lutheranism, and Peder despises the priest and all the trappings of Catholicism -- a rosary, a picture of Mary -- that Susie has brought into the house. 

Each character is so stiff-necked as to be incapable of tolerating, let along embracing, any divergent point of view. Each views the other's religion with fear and contempt.  And for each of them, religion becomes the defining metaphor. Peder is not as firmly connected to his church as Susie is to hers, but his mother, with whom they live, is nothing short of fanatical. And eventually Peder becomes infected with her intolerance, too.

I wonder what happened to that fictional child of Susie and Peder? What did he become when he grew up? I wonder if he was like me and my siblings?  I think it's no accident that none of my parents' four children practices the religion of either parent.

I had to make a change.  It took a long while for me to figure out where I wanted to go and then, how to get there. But now, when people discover I'm a  Pagan,  and ask me what my religious life is all about, I generally say I'm dancing with the Goddess. What do I mean by this?

I'm not offering things up for the poor souls. I'm not worrying about hell of any kind.  I live by an ethical system that emphasizes the here and now, not the pie in the sky, or the punishment down below.  I see the earth as sacred and dance my way through the turning of the wheel of the seasons.  I can stand in a  circle  shoulder to shoulder with Celtic reconstrucionists or Wiccans or Heathens for a ritual and not be undone by differences in pantheons or vocabularies.   I go to sleep at night in a room where a large fierce image of Kali Ma wearing a necklace of human skulls is on one wall, and a gentle-looking Kwan Yin pouring out the waters of compassion is on another.  When I knead bread dough, dump food scraps into my compost bin, push sunflower seeds into the soil or set my sewing machine whirring its way across yards of fabric, I know absolutely that I am a priestess of the Goddess and that I am performing sacred acts.

My world is now many miles from the worlds of Peder Holm and Susie Doheny, and, I hope, from the religious strife that was so entwined with my parents' lives, and so powerfully affected their children.  It may not be the world that any of my siblings or children would choose. But it's a place where I can breathe freely, find joy, and yes, dance, even considering my crappy creaky crone knees. Would that either or both of my parents could ever have found such a place!

I'm not saying that my place is better than either my mother's or my father's. But I do know that it works for me. And that I'll never try to inflict it on any of my children or others in my family. I already know that down side way too well.

Only three words

Geisha, Fuji-san and Hiroshima were the only three words I knew about Japan  in 1976. And I pronounced all three of them incorrectly.

And then, one day that summer, I saw a notice at the public library about bringing a little bit of Japan into one's home by hosting a foreign student for part of the summer. It was only for three weeks, we had enough room at our house, and I thought it would be cool for my kids to meet someone from a different culture.

So Izumi came to stay with us, and a huge door to another world opened up. Izumi was a graduate of Seishin Joshidai, also known as Sacred Heart University, in Tokyo. But she had grown up on Japan's northernmost island of Hokkaido, in a climate not all that different from Anchorage, Alaska. To her, the Pacific Northwest was a temperate-zone paradise.

She was an  extraordinary young woman. She loved poetry and music, language and the Northwest's wilderness. So many of the other girls who came over in the same group wanted to do nothing but shop. But Izumi played the piano, accompanying me on the violin, and we spent hours sitting on the floor of the Lake Hills Public Library reading both Walt Whitman and Basho and lamenting about the poor translations of each. She couldn't wait to get her hiking boots onto the trail at Mt. Rainier, and she loved the long walks  we took with my children in the Washington Park Arboretum. She taught all the kids how to do origami and to play janken pon and brought them all kinds of wonderful Japanese folk art and folk toys for omiyage.

To my surprise, she was well versed in western music, in the entire British and American literary canon I'd studied in graduate school, and, because this was the U.S. bicentennial year, she was well informed about American history.

And I knew only those three words about her homeland, and nothing about Japan's history, art, literature and culture.  The closest thing I'd ever had to Japanese food was a dish my mom whipped up in her electric frying pan that contained canned bean sprouts, which she called ``sukiyaki.'' I felt so ashamed of my ignorance.

After Izumi went back home to Japan, I decided to remedy my lack of knowledge of things Japanese. I went back to school and spent a year studying Japanese language. I started reading the great writers like Shikibu Murasaki, Kawabata Yasunari, Tanazaki Junichiro and Mishima Yukio.. I made repeated trips to the Seattle Art Museum (today the Seattle Asian Art Museum) and discovered that all the paintings and sculptures I'd seen on so many Saturday mornings over the years in my childhood were actually treasures from all the significant eras in Japanese history.

My book shelf started filling up with volumes about Noh drama, the design of Japanese family crests, the sociology of Japanese business culture.  Over the years, more and more Japanese students came to stay with us, and one of them -- a graduate student at the University of Washington we were supposed to host for three days -- ended up with us off and on for his entire term of graduate school.

I went to cooking class at Seattle's Uwajimaya and learned to cooked all the special foods associated with O-shogatsu (New Year's) and made them for our grad student. He took me to the Jodo Shinshu Buddhist temple on New Year's Day and I shocked myself by going up to the statue of Buddha, bowing low, and placing a pinch of incense onto coals glowing in a brazier.

One day I got a fancy envelope from Japan, and when I opened it, found an invitation to my first Japanese student's wedding. I saved my money, bought the plane ticket, got my first passport, and headed off to Japan. The wedding, held in Tokyo's tony Akasaka  district, was like nothing I'd ever experienced before. Unfortunately I really didn't believe my other Japanese students when they told me that black clothes are worn to weddings, so there I am in all the wedding photos, the only gaijin. Everyone else is wearing formal black kimono,  black dresses  or black suits and I am there in my $19.95 turquoise polyester shirtwaist dress from the Sears catalogue.

I'd mastered enough Japanese to give a speech at the wedding reception, and was thrilled to the point of speechlessness when I walked into a room before the ceremony, watched sliding doors be drawn back, and was face to face with this gorgeous apparition in red and gold uchikake (wedding kimono) that Izumi had become for her wedding. Together with her family I drank a cup of a special tea made from dried cherry blossoms, and then, like the others in the wedding party, sipped the three-times-three  drinks of sake from porcelain saucers at the Shinto wedding ceremony. This video is of a wedding very much like the one I attended, complete with the unearthly music.

 

Over the years I returned to Japan a number of times, often for work, and ended up in odd places I could never have imagined. One time I was up in Yamanashi-ken to visit the Suntory vineyards on the back side of Mt. Fuji. Another time I went fishing in Sagami Bay, watching golden satsumas fall from trees into the cobalt water, with Fuji-san silhouetted behind.  Another time, on a chilly January day, I sat on a cold cold wooden step above the raked sand and watched snowflakes drift down to cover the standing rocks at Ryoan-ji. I once visited a friend who had married a potter and who lived in a traditional Japanese house in the mountains above Kyoto. I had a horrible cold and was sneezing and sneezing and, one time when I was in the very narrow  hallway, sneezed so hard that for a minute I was afraid I would literally blow the house down. It felt like a scene from ``Three Little Pigs'' was going to play out right there.

One day I took the train down the Izu peninsula to see the 800-year-old Daibutsu (great Buddha) statue there, and walked a cobbled street behind  wagon with a charcoal stove that was roasting chestnuts. I once ate beef stew from a silver porringer at a restaurant near Shinjuku station  that presented ``oranda ryori'' and it took me half an hour to figure out it was serving a Japanese version of the Dutch cooking brought into Nagasaki by Dutch traders during the Tokugawa Shogunate. 

I was once one of the 3.2 million people who moved through Shinjuku station every day. They were all coming in to Tokyo, an endless river  of shining black-haired people at my shoulder height. I was like the salmon swimming upstream, trying to leave Tokyo to go up to Yamanshi-ken for an interview.

I sat in the highest and cheapest seats at Ginza's Kabuki-za and watched ``Renjishi'' with a bunch of Japanese little old ladies who snacked constantly from the o-bento boxes they brought into the theater and kept shouting out the stage name of the actors  dancing/performing the lions as they entered on the hanamichi. Here's a video of a scene from ``Renjishi' from the Kabuki-za, which is now being torn down and replaced by a multi-story office building.

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Another time I stood by the statue of the ``last Samurai'' -- Saigo Takamorio and his faithful dog --  the edge of Shinobazu Pond where the lotus seed pods stood above the water, and overhead a v-shape of geese flew past, honking mournfully. It was a gray chilly day with winter closing in hard.

Perhaps my oddest time in Japan came one year on Pearl Harbor Day when I happened to be in Tokyo. First I went to Yasukuni Jinja, the  Shinto shrine where the souls of Japan's war dead are supposed to live. Several high-ranking members of the Japanese Self Defense Forces arrived and made bombastic speeches to the spirits who were supposed to be present, and then little old ladies in black coats, bent by age like shrimp bowed quietly, presumably remembering people they knew who perished in what is called in Japan ``The War in the Pacific.'' I stopped at a vending machine and bought 100 yen worth of puffed bird food and tossed it into the air, and was immediately surrounded by a whirling cloud of doves who frequent the shrine. That they were doves seemed particularly apt.

That same day I took the Yamanote line to Jochi Daigaku (Sophia University),  the Jesuit school, and sat for a moment in the old St. Ignatius Church. I looked up at the light fixtures and realized they were identical to the ones in the Jesuit parish church I'd attended as a child. One of my cousins was the Jesuit priest who said mass atop Mt. Suribachi in the battle for Iwo Jima during World War II, and I found myself thinking about all the odd confluences that brought me there to Japan on that particular day. 

When I began wandering down my Pagan path, Amaterasu Omikami, Japan's sun goddess, was one of the first deities I encountered. I made her image in terra cotta clay and she hangs out on my wall o'goddesses by my patio.When I was visited her home at Ise Jinju  down below Kyoto, I tossed a coin into a wooden bin and clapped my hands together to let her know I was there.

I also became a devotee of Kwan-yin,  whom I first got to know as ``Maria Kannon,'' the image of the Buddist deity that concealed a devotion to Mary by the secret Christians  of the Tokugawa era.  Whenever we have a ritual honoring Kwan-yin,  Maria Kannon is the image in my mind.

After my first Japanese student returned home after her stay with us, I said something that seems so apropos today. I said Japan was no longer an anonymous spot on the globe, but a vibrant country, filled with friends, with history and culture that 'I'd learned to love. And that never, when something bad such as a natural disaster, happened in Japan, would I be able to be indifferent.

And now something really bad has happened in Japan, a horrible confluence of events. My former students are scattered throughout Japan's four major islands, and many of them had family names (like Watanabe) that are as common there as Smith and Jones are here. So it's doubtful I'd be able to contact any of them to inquire about their welfare.

But my ties to the country remain strong and deep, and my earnest hope is that the Japanese virtue of pulling together will help the country get back on its feet.

Does ballet have anything to do with life?

One of the things that's become very important to me over the years is my subscription to San Francisco Ballet. I can't afford the entire season as ballet tickets are so fiendishly expensive, but I do get a pair of tickets for a series of five performances each year.

Sometimes I wonder why I love ballet so much; why it's so important to me; and why it has the power to move me so deeply. On some level, I suppose, it's the fascination of what's difficult. Despite my years of ballet classes, I knew from an early age that my role would be as spectator and critic rather than performer. (It's  painfully obvious when you're 6'5" en pointe and the average male dancer is somewhere south of 5'7").

On another level, ballet sneaks around and speaks to the oft-neglected right side of my brain. It stills the constant flow of words and analytical processes that are central to my everyday life.  Seeing ballet -- and back in the days when I had intact knees, dancing  in ballet class-- makes a whole different part of my brain light up, and communicates impressions, feelings, experiences and thoughts for which I often have no words.

Years ago I saw Maurice Bejart's 1970 production of ``Firebird.'' When the Firebird/Phoeni/Revolutionary -- clad in a crimson unitard-- died, suddenly a dozen more rose up to take its place, shedding the baggy gray clothes they'd worn as partisans. The ballet so embodied the revolutionary spirit of the era, invigorating us all with a sense of the infinite possibilities for social change we'd begun in the 1960s.  I remember walking out of Seattle's Opera House, convinced we could do anything if we put our minds to it.  Here's a video with several small clips from that ballet.

 

Last year I saw SF Ballet perform Val Caniparoli's ``Ibsen's House.'' The friend who went with me had, like me, grown up in a conservative Scandinavian immigrant family. When the curtain came down, the two of us sat there in silence, unable to speak, tears running down our faces. Caniparoli had somehow spoken to us of that familial pressure for bourgeois respectability that was so stifling to each of us, and that each of us had rejected at great personal cost.  It was as if he had wandered around inside my soul and transformed what he saw there into variations for three female dancers. Here's a small segment of this ballet, performed by two of SF Ballet's  principal dancers.

 

This year the first performance I saw in my series was ``Giselle,'' Helgi Tomasson's re-working of what is the greatest romantic ballet of all time.  In the second act, Myrtha, the queen of the Willis (girls who died of broken hearts before their wedding day), draws Giselle forth from the grave and inaugurates her as a Willi.  Admittedly the plots of most story ballets, like the plots of most operas, require a very large willing suspension of disbelief.

 Before Giselle comes forth, Myrtha  stretches forth two myrtle branches and all the Willis (in long white Romantic-era tutus) appear from the darkness and form a circle around her in what is known as the grand pas des Willis (and my favorite part of the ballet). Here you can see this section of the ballet in a 1969 production by American Ballet Theatre that was staged specifically to be filmed.

  

 As I was watching the performance this year, I saw that circle as resonant and powerful a symbol as  water, or bread and wine were in my Catholic sacramental past.  The circle is all-inclusive: It could not exist without the participation, cooperation, focus and respect of each member of the corps de ballet. 

We Pagans often speak of generating a ``cone of power,'' and it's often something we experience at the climax of our spiral dance.   I remember the very first spiral dance in which I participated. It was indoors and in a semi-darkened room. When we were all tightly knotted together in the center of the room, I looked up at the ceiling to see the shadows of our upraised and converging hands.  And I found myself thinking yes, of course, this is why they're scared of us. We're so powerful when we are united for a common purpose.

And so are the Willis.They bear witness to each other. Myrtha may be the queen, but it seems to me that rather than command the Willis, she occasions and facilitates their communication, much as we do in circle. There are two variations for individual dancers and I always feel they are telling their their own stories, which the rest of the corps respectfully and patiently witnesses. 

I probably can't carry this metaphor too far. After all, Giselle does manage to protect Albrecht from the Willi's fury. But even so, when she bourees off the stage at the ballet's end leaving Albrecht living but bereft of her presence, you know it is because she must heed the call of the circle, that this is where she will find her strength and her form of survival. 

This part of the ballet has been very much in my mind ever since the post-Pantheacon agitation over the exclusion of transwomen from an all-women ritual.  For some reason I keep seeing all of us in a circle, bearing witness, telling our stories, listening respectfully and focusing our energy . I need to have all my sisters and brothers in that circle, not just those who conform to some pre-conceived notion of what constitutes an acceptable genetic and genital configuration.  It is only when we are all present that we can build that cone of power, reinforcing one another's energy and creating change to repair the web of life.

Home from the gathering of the tribe

I know, I haven't updated this blog for a very long time. Part of the reason is that I've been seduced by the ease of use of Facebook. And part is that it really hurts my hands to type anything that's very long or involved. But now that I'm back home from Pantheacon, my head is too full of ideas and memories for what I want to write to be contained in Facebook-sized bits.

The first time I ever went to Pantheacon was probably about a decade ago. I was part of a Dianic (all women's) circle, and had had no contact with Pagan men. So I walked in the front door and the first person I saw was a fierce-looking man with a black beard, wearing a kilt. He looked both scary and official, and I was afraid that this cozy cuddly Pagan world I'd found would be dominated by the patriarchy, after all.

Of course I was wrong.  The scary bearded guy turned out to be a member of the Pagan Alliance and has become a dear and valued friend over the years.  And the wild and exuberant variety of clothing and gender presentations of other P'con attended that gave me pause the first year are now one of the things I really anticipate encountering.

Panthecon is really, I would have to admit, a Pagan convention, held, in of all places, a Silicon Valley convention hotel. But the minute you walk through the hotel's front door, it's immediately clear you've entered liminal space. And it's like a huge family reunion. All through the four days of the President's Day weekend there are workshops, lectures, discussion groups, rituals, and lots of just plain fun events. If you're from one particular tradition, at Pantheacon you have a chance to encounter many others.

You can get as cerebral, as woo-woo, or as Pagans-just-wanna-have-fun as you desire at Pantheacon. We now have a significant body of Pagan academics -- that is to say scholars who are Pagan, who study Paganism, or who are Pagans who study Paganism -- with well-thought out presentations that advance the knowledge base for our very young/world's oldest religion. 

On the have-fun front, there's a big event Friday night called Pombagira that flows from a spiritual tradition from Brazil, to which everyone wears red and black and dances dances dances. A costume ball Saturday night meant Pagans wandering through the hotel in garb that would be right at home at Mardi Gras. We didn't perform the Beson Brigade's all-witch precision drill team number this year, which always brings down the house, but we'll be back next year for sure.

Pantheacon has drum circles, a costume ball, workshops on reading tarot and on the form of divination known as ``Oracular Seidh,'' which has been revived by Norse reconstructionists who, by the way, prefer to be known as ``Heathens.' '

I attended a ritual/workshop on the sacred androgyne, and sat through Prudence Priest's excellent presentation on Baltic Paganism, in which she plays a key role.  I heard Margot Adler (yes, that Margot Adler from NPR) talk about the meaning of t the current popular interest in vampires. (Her thesis is that it come from our sense of guilt for our own predatory behavior toward our natural resources, particularly our addiction to oil).

I also attended a ritual presented by one of the three branches of revived Druidry. I missed the Discordian ritual that is always a lot of fun, and also ``Yes they are: meeting and greeting the queerest of gods'' put on by the Circle of Dionysius.  I hope to get to both next year.

My role this year was to put on two workshops, one for crones on walking our talk. The other was a workshop I've presented a number of times in the past, honoring our grandmothers as our first source of unconditional love.  Both went well, I thought, with generous-hearted participants who brought so much energy and compassion to each.

One problem about the convention hotel -- the Doubletree in San Jose -- is that we cannot have flames of any kind. Candles are usually a bit deal at Pagan rituals, but those little battery-operated LED lights worked pretty well. At the crone workshop, one of the things we did was to identify some behavior, regret, guilt, anxiety or pattern of speech we didn't want to take with us into our crone years.  Usually when we do something like that at a ritual, we write down what we don't want or need and then burn the paper. With the no-flame policy that can be problematic.

But one of the fun things I like to do is convert mundane domestic objects to sacred purposes. So I placed a big clear-glass bowl of water on the altar, and handed out small pieces of Solvy on which to write. Solvy is a stabilizier that's used with a hoop for machine embroidery. It's water soluble.  

So after we wrote on the Solvy, we dropped our words into the bowl of water, swished it around a bit and watched the words disappear. At the end of the ritual, we had  a procession out to the parking lot where we poured the water from the bowl onto the base of some shrubs. Solvy is starch-based so it's totally benign.  I thought it worked really well. 

There wasn't a large crowd of participants at the Grandma workshop, which was actually good, because we got to circle up close together and everyone had lots of chances to talk and tell stories about the grandmas and other significant ancestors.  We made poppets of our ancestors, talked about what was special about them, and invoked their  most positive qualities for our own lives. I chose my Aunt Cathleen, to whom I actually have no blood ties. I chose her because shewas  the most patient, loving, and accepting person I've ever met, and she always made everyone feel welcome and secure in the center of her attention. Those are certainly qualities I'd like to bring to my interactions with my more-than-difficult family.

I didn't offer the yoni self-portrait workshop this year, and oh boy, did I ever hear about that!  It will be back, next year for sure.  I found that the last couple of years the workshop has brought up some very intense responses from participants -- a good thing in itself -- and that I needed to take a year off from that intensity and catch my breath.

It was a thrill to reconnect with my friends Nels and Judy from the Sacred Harvest Festival in Minnesota. I had been a presenter at their festival a few years ago and felt an immediate and profound kinship to my Pagan sisters and brothers from the upper Midwest. I hope they return again next year.

The real Pantheacon takes place in hallways, in the coffee shop, in front of the fireplace and at other odd meeting points.  People network, but not in a Rotary Club George C. Babbitt fashion. I came home with a suggestion from a book editor that I submit a book proposal, with a plan to work with several other women on a large multi-participant ritual focused on our responsibilities to the earth next year, and some connections to the nascent Pagan Newswire Collective. Also talked a ceramicist into bringing spindle whorls next year for drop spindles and a fiber artist into offering a class on drop spinning and the deities associated with spinning. And these are just the ideas I can think of in my present state of sleep deficit.

It took hours to get out of the hotel at the end of the conference. I sat in my room and looked out at the snow on the hills around Mt. Hamilton, a very rare sight. Suddenly an enormous raven dropped out of the sky and perched on the balcony outside my window.  He stood there for what seemed a long long time, cocking his head at me.  I don't know if it was Huginn or Muninn, or simply the leader of our coven telling me it was time to head home.  But it was definitely time to go.  But there's always next year.

 

Beautiful Things

Heian-era diarist Sei Shonagon was known for the lists she made of things she noticed in 10th-Century Japan's imperial court. In her Makura no Soshi (Pillow Book) she  wrote of ``Depressing Things,'' ``Things That Arouse a Found Memory of the Past,'' ``Things That Are the Reverse of Each Other,''  ``Scruffy Things,'' and `Things That Can Be Seen Comfortably.'' 

It's been a number of years since I last read Shonagon, and, just now was surprised to discover I don't have a copy of her book in the Japanese-literature section of my bookcase. So I can't check and see if she ever made a list of ``Beautiful Things.'' I feel sure she must have, given the refined sensibilities of the Heian court.

But today I am thinking of my own list of beautiful things, or, more precisely, beautiful things I have experienced recently. At the top of the list is last night's presentation of John Neumeier's ``Little Mermaid,'' performed  by the San Francisco Ballet. This is a new work, at least for San Francisco audiences, and it is nothing like the Disneyfied version of the Hans Christian Anderson tale. This is a version for adults only as it deals with complex and sometimes tortured  human relationships.

Tan Yuan Yuan danced the Little Mermaid role. She's clearly SF Ballet's marquee name, but for years I've intensely disliked her work, finding it technically brilliant but cold, if not heartless. However, after last night, all is forgiven. I think this will prove to be the defining role of her career.  She didn't dance this part, she became the Little Mermaid.

I've never seen her so expressive, and the tenderness and joy in her first love for the prince radiated clear to the top of the Opera House's dress circle, where I sat.  Her intense physical pain, when she surrendered her long flowing silken tail for human legs and feet was palpable, as were her shy and broken-hearted encounters with the prince on his wedding day. And the end, when she and the poet step out into the starry night of infinite space was breathtaking.

I've seen most of the great living ballerinas of this era -- and I don't use the title ``ballerina'' indiscriminately -- and have to say that after last night's performance, Tan takes her place in their ranks. 

Aside from Tan's performance, the entire ballet was special. It's hard to imagine that Neumeier managed not only to choreograph the entire full-length story ballet, but also designed the costumes, the intricate sets, and the lighting, which magically brought us from above to below the sea.  I read somewhere that he's a graduate of Marquette University, sister institution to the school where I got my undergraduate degree. Ah, the lengths to which a Jesuit education can be put!

Another beautiful thing I experienced recently was my coven's Ostara ritual, at which we welcomed Persephone's   return. We held the ritual outdoors in my garden, which I had been carefully prompting to full bloom in time for the event.

Each member of the coven contributed to the altar cloth by making a fabric nosegay . Each flower we fused to a lacy background represented a particular gratitude for the gifts of springtime. We fused these nosegays to a piece of mottled green batik fabric, then laid the cloth on the ground in the center of the circle. We then surrounded the cloth with a 6" border fern fronds and flower petals. Persephone was represented by a vase  of pink roses and baby's breath placed in the middle of the altar. 

The two of us who priestessed the ritual passed out scissors at the beginning of the ritual for each woman to cut seven different flowers and five different leaves from the garden to make up nosegays of living flowers. Once they were assembled, the bases of these little bouquets were wrapped in floral tape, and pushed through the middle of small paper lace doilies, which we then laid on the perimeter of the altar.  Later on we exchanged the bouquets, giving each woman a special Persephone wish for the springtime.

This was one of our rare rituals for which we were lucky enough to have little ones present. We had two tiny Persephones, both under two years of age. They played at the edge of the altar with potting soil, water, and any number of garden toys. The altar was so beautiful that I told everyone to take a mental photograph (I really don't like cameras at rituals), but I know what we really will remember with such fondness is the sight of the two little girls with their hands in the dirt, and the mud splashes they made on the altar cloth.

Nicole -- my co-priestess -- and I had a secret we sprang on  everyone. I told an updated version of the story of Demeter and Persephone  (in my recounting, Persephone becomes an impossible teenager who answers her mother with a whiney ``whatever'' when she's cautioned to be careful out in the big world; and Demeter is a have-it-all superwoman, distressed because she can't control her daughter the way she can manage the rest of the world).  After I finished telling the story, we had everyone stand and call out to Persephone, welcoming her home and asking her to bring us springime.

And she appeared! She was aspected by a young woman in a long flowing pale green dress, wearing a wreath of pink roses  in her hair. She brought a basket full of floral necklaces and gave one to each woman (and little girl) together with a wish that each recipient be filled with the joy and beauty of the season. Then she made the rounds of the circle and with a long-stemmed pink rosebud, cast blessings on all the pots of seeds we planted.

It was one of those perfect days, at least from my perspective. Not too hot, and not too windy. The flowers and all the women at the ritual were blooming, as was our beautiful Persephone. For the after-ritual feast, we had seasonal food, including a big platter of spring greens -- dandelion greens, pea shoots, tiny red onions, a finely divided mustard and fava bean thinnings -- my friend  Mark Thompson bought the day before at the Santa Barbara Farmer's Market .

The third beautiful thing was also a ritual we held at my loft several weeks earlier. It was a puja honoring Sarasvati, a Hindu deity associated with knowledge, speech, and  creativity.  I do this puja every few years, and it's very different from the sort of rituals my coven usually has. The puja emphasized individual devotion to the deity, with each woman offering sandalwood incense, and making specific requests for guidance and inspiration.

For this ritual everyone wore a yellow or gold saree, and the donning of the sarees and the building of the altar occur within in the context of the ritual. There is something magical and transformative that occurs when we have put aside our western clothes and entered  golden-clad into the presence of Sarasvati.

Again, I asked each woman to take a photo with her memory at the beginning of the ritual, when we were suddenly all arrayed in gold and yellow. And the altar that was built was beautiful. We used my portable design wall, covering it with several cut-up sarees. For a backdrop behind Sarasvati, we used a quilted wall hanging created by my friend Tristan Robin Blakeman. 

People brought yellow flowers, and  objects symbolizing the petitions they were making to Sarasvati. These were placed on the altar one by one. I used my purple ``Chinese children'' pincushion, symbolizing some of the unfinished art projects for which I needed a jump start.

After the ritual we had a feast of Indian vegetarian food. Brighde and I made an eggplant curry from a recipe I found on the Web. I've gone back looking for it, and haven't been able to find it again, so perhaps it was a delicious one-time dish.

I do have several photos my friend Brighde shot after the ritual. The first one is of the altar.  

And the second is of two of the women who attended.

 

Many of the sarees we used were used, and available at EBay.com. Some of the others were acquired from some of the saree stores on Berkeley's University Avenue.  I think that putting on these garments did make a difference in the women's experience of the ritual. And to me, it was certainly a beautiful thing. 

Some years ago I attended what I later realized was my first Pagan ritual. held to mark the end of a dear friend's life as male, and the beginning of her life as a woman. We who were there to support her  were all asked to bring something that symbolized our lives as women. 

I made a long garland woven of ribbons and all the flowers in my garden. I chose that because to me, one of the great joys of being female is the frequent opportunity to make beautiful things for the simple joy of the process.  Beautiful things made and enjoyed just for the moment have the power to move  me more than almost anything else. The ballet, our springtime ritual and our evocation of Sarasvati all fit into that category and rank high on my list of Beautiful Things. 

Home from Pantheacon

I'm still unloading the car, but after two days back at work, finally feel I've separated myself from the liminal space I enter every year at Pantheacon. I know that name sounds ridiculous, but I've gotten used to it, and even often abbreviate it as P'con.

Pantheacon is the annual gathering of California's Pagan tribes. And since I'm a crone with creaky knees and frequent middle-of-the-night bathroom trips, I'm awfully glad it takes place in a Silicon Valley convention hotel and and not in a campground.  We get together there every Presidents' Day weekend for four days of learning, ritual, and just plain hanging out.

This year I taught two workshops. One was the annual yoni self-portrait class for women only. The first year I offered this, I think I somewhat freaked out the Pantheacon staff by asking for four ironing boards and four irons. Now they know that I'm not using them for some scary kinky purpose so everyone's a whole lot more relaxed.

Brighde and I did a presentation based on the workshop we led for crones last year. Even though we had the crappiest time slot -- 1:30 p.m. on the day of registration -- we had about 20 women show up, and we took them through the program. We also recreated the various altars we'd used for the workshop and even set up the crone gate (which requires two full-length 2 X 4s, wooden stands and a crosspiece).

I wandered around the 'con, and attended various other teachers' workshops. Steven Posch's presentation on the elder gods of Paganism reminded me once again that I really truly am a Pagan and always have been. He talked about the sense of sacred places we Pagans have, and I started to think about what those might be for me. I met him a few years ago in Minnesota when I was a presenter at a group of Minnesota Pagans' Sacred Harvest Festival, and was glad to spend time with him again.

Ultimately, Steve's class made me a little sad and homesick, for my holy spots are still largely in the Pacific Northwest: Klapatche Meadow on Mt. Rainier, the weeping cherry trees we'd hide under and shake to create pink blizzards  in the University of Washington Arboretum, the giant broadleaf maple tree that used to center the meadow at Seattle's Volunteer Park, Deadman's Island in South Puget Sound, the trail along Denny Creek near Snoqualmie Pass, a grove of alder trees along Griffin Creek at CYO Camp Don Bosco. I have absolutely no trouble recalling any of these as each is so deeply imprinted on my mind and heart. And there is nothing in Catholicism that ever touched me as powerfully as these sacred places have.

Here in California I could probably say the mountaintop where we meet for Samhain,  the northwest side of Mt. Diablo in the spring, the beach at  Andrew Molera State Park, the palm tree oasis at Anza Borego State Park. Beyond this list I really have to reach and probably hitchhike on someone else's idea of the sacred. 

Sabina Magliocco, who is my favorite Pagan academic, did a really good workshop on seasonal food, foodways and sustainability with Laurel Mendes.  As I sat there listening to the presentation, I found myself remembering all the foodways of my family, and how tuned we were to the turn of the wheel of the year, even without being conscious of the fact. And after class Laurel answered my question about why we Norwegians indulge in such an orgy of baking for the Yule.  We may not remember this, but our ancestors did this baking as a way of using up the last of the previous year's flour before the weevils got to it.  Julekake, sandbakkes, fattigman, krumkake, brunekager, spritz, kringler etc. are all vestiges of a pattern of food  preservation. Who knew?

Sabina did a second presentation on the incorporation of our cultures' and our families' folklore into ritual. Again, I found myself remembering things I did when my kids were little, and that I miss so much these days. Even before I knew I was a Pagan, I always knew that the best part of the Yule was flooding the house with candelight, and that the summer solstice had to be spent on the top of a high hill so we could see the setting sun.  And every year when we weave floral-wreath headdresses for each other at summer solstice, I remember the solstice crowns I made for the kids from bedstraw and tiny daisies.

There were several rituals I wanted to attend Friday night, but I was so tired from the big push to get out of the house and down to San Jose, checked in to the hotel, and setting up and teaching the crone workshop that I made the mistake of going back to my room after dinner and just sitting on my bed and catching a little of the Olympics' opening ceremony. That was it for the night.

Religion is always a hot-button issue in my family. I'll go further and say that it was a malign, toxic issue in my family of origin, and it's not at all surprising that none of my sibs and I practice neither religion of our parents'. So I was really intrigued when several workshops that involved shamanic practices focused on families.

I don't do trance work terribly well in response to a guided meditation. For some reason, the aural pathway is never particularly effective with me. I do become the classic Martian anthropologist, sitting up on the chandelier, observing the strange humans in the room.  But still, I thought I'd give the workshops a try. One of them focused on some Saami shamanic practices, and since I have some Saami in my family tree, this appealed to me.

During the trance portion of the workshop, we were told we would probably encounter ancestors who were significant to us with reference to our spiritual paths. Imagine my surprise when what showed up for me was my beloved -- and very ample --  maternal grandmother wearing only her heavy-duty peach-colored cotton sateen corset from Lane Bryant. She's now been gone more than 50 years, which seems incredible to me when I think about it. In this trance my grandmother  was very very very upset at me for stepping away from Catholicism, and scolded me fiercely.  It was difficult and important for me to tell her that she was wrong about me and that Paganism is, not only right for me, but so organic to who I am that it's not even a choice.

A second shamanic workshop focused somewhat more on Tibetan and native American practices. Again, we were sent out in search of our ancestors, with the intent of healing some of the rifts, pain, and deficiencies in our family.  For this workshop, I found that I couldn't connect with anyone among the ancestors that I actually knew. But way way way way back, somewhere in a very cold and dark part of northern Europe, a female ancestor showed up and said to me, ``don't worry so much. We had trouble adjusting to Christianity in my time.'' 

I'm not quite sure what this all means, but I did get a sense that there was information out there in the ether somewhere that might give me more insight into some of my family's not altogether healthy psychodynamics.

One of the workshops I attended was put on by some Celtic reconstructionists from the Seattle area.  They were looking to old Irish literature as source material for a ritual they crafted for the returning warrior. I think this is a very good thing. We do have some of our young people coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan damaged physically, emotionally, and spiritually, and anything we can do to help them reintegrate into society is important.

Sunday night I went to a ritual about the various deities that are supposed to have been gay or are beloved of and invoked  by gay people, such as Dionysus, Aphrodite and Yemaya, It was very serious and somber and very irreverent and mirthful all at once, just the way I like ritual to be. I just about lost it, however,  when people began lying down on the floor to represent all of those we've lost to AIDS. My friend Robin channeled Aphrodite at this ritual, and she was absolutely stunning. And Joi Wolfwomyn, who will succeed me as the Pagan Alliance's Keeper of the Light, was outrageously wonderful and funny.

Of course I came home from Pantheacon  regretting all the great workshops and rituals I had missed, but there's never a way to take in as many as I wanted to. And some of the best parts of the conference were, as usual, just sitting and talking with friends, sharing information and insight, and just having a good time together.

I had to tip the bellman extravagantly, but he did manage to fit all the lumber inside Audhumla, not to mention my sewing machine, luggage, and the tubs of fabric, goddess statues, altar cloths, Wonder Under, irons, ironing surfaces etc. that I brought to Pantheacon.  Now I have just two more tubs to bring in from the car and un pack. And then it's time to start getting ready for Sarasvati's puja, which will be here at my loft February 28. After the winter doldrums, it's time to jump-start our creativity, and a puja for Sarasvati will do the job, I hope.  

 

The light returns

When the wheel of the year turns and we roll past the shortest day, I always feel like I get a second wind. The long dark days of winter are hard for me, which is one of the reasons why, homesick as I am for the beauty of the Pacific Northwest, and my many friends and family members there, I know it's not the best place for me to live.

Perhaps it's my Nordic DNA that's made me so sensitive to light deprivation. Whatever the source, the worst day of the year for me is always when daylight savings time ends, and the sun sets earlier and earlier each day. I remember well what felt like 4 p.m. sunsets November through February in Seattle.

People always ask me if it's the rain that keeps me from ``coming home'' to Seattle, and I always have to say it's not the rain, but winters with their short day length that close to the 49th parallel. I can't imagine how my youngest survived spending part of her military career through Fairbanks, Alaska's winter days where it's even darker most of the time.  

One of the reasons I most love being a Pagan is that it makes so much sense to celebrate the winter solstice as  the main winter holiday.  I just want to dance my way out of the darkness, singing ``hooray hooray, soon we'll have some longer days.''

For me, the solstice ritual is always about light. Every time there's ever been a Yule ritual at my house, I try to fill the place with the light of at least 100 candles. And back in my pre-Pagan days, for me the happiest moment of Christmas was sitting with my family at a table lit by my big Norwegian Christmas candelabra. I don't know what's happened to it over the years, but I certainly hope it now belongs to one of the children and hasn't been discarded.

This year we celebrated Lakshmi at the solstice. It was a somewhat unusual choice, I suppose, for those who were expecting green trees and holly. But Lakshmi's the goddess associated with Diwali in India, a festival celebrating light, and abundance, and a season of gift-giving.

One of my coven sisters designed the altar cloth we used. It represented the lotus on which Lakshmi rises up out of the foaming sea. In the very center we placed her stylized footprints that are often drawn on the pavement in front of Indian houses at Diwali.

Constructing the altar cloth was a major task. The lotus itself  was made from four colors of brocade and silk-like fabric resting on a white synthetic that represented the sea. This in turn rested on a deep red cloth on which my coven sister painted four golden elephants.

Each layer of petals was free standing, which meant that we had to cut out fronts, backs and internal batting. The fabric we found was beautiful, in perfect shades of red, pink, purple and gold, but it was miserable to sew. It slipped and slid in all directions, even with multiple multiple multiple pins and our taking great care. Here's a photo of the altar cloth, taken, unfortunately, before we lit the votives.

Another coven sister chalked a path made from Lakshmi's footprints all the way from the front gate into the house. We set lit votives on each side of the path, and had another 56 lit votives on the altar itself.  It was, I think, really beautiful, but I'm sticking with cotton for the next altar cloth I make.

In our coven, it's the tradition always to place the altar on the ground, in the center of the circle. That way it's a visual focus for the ritual rather than something incidental that is placed to the side. And yes, we did dance around this altar, singing a Lakshmi song, ringing bells and shaking tambourines.

At the conclusion of the ritual, we escorted each woman to the center of the lotus, invited her to walk in Lakshmi's footprints toward the light, and painted the footprints on her feet.

When I was in New Orleans, I learned a new word from my friend Eric Hess, who's taught it to his grandkids: ``sparkelicious.'' So we asked all those who came to the ritual to wear their most sparkelicious clothing. And oh my, they all did! We were quite a gaudy crew.

The next morning I got up very early and headed to Tilden Park to sing up the sun with a group from Reclaiming. It rained all the way over, and I hit such heavy tule fog on the twisting road out to inspiration point that I--who really do know my way around Tilden like the back of my hand--took a couple of wrong turns.

Eventually I got out to Inspiration Point and hiked in to the assembly point. It was what astronomers call ``civil twilight'' when I arrived. We sang a few songs, and did the solstice cheer for the sun: ``Our god is a fun god, our god is a sun god, Ra Ra Ra-Ra-Ra.''

We looked out to the east, to a vista dominated by Mt. Diablo, with many smaller rambling hills and small mountains in between. The tule fog snaked through the valleys like veils. The winter rains had already greened up the hills, so it was like looking out on what I think of as an irish landscape.

Finally the sun came up, or at least it was much lighter behind the clouds. The rain abated, and everyone danced a spiral dance on the somewhat muddy grass. Small suns--also known as Satsuma oranges--were handed out, and then everyone hiked back to parking lot and then headed off to work.

Last night when I came home from work, a waxing crescent moon stood outside my window, and appeared up-side down in the crystal candlesticks with which I'd lined the windowsill for the solstice ritual. The sun had definitely set, but a small amount of residual light remained in the sky. And this morning the garden--even in its stripped-down winter version--sparkled in the sunlight. The wheel has turned and we're heading back toward the light.

 

The season of marigolds

The last few pieces of the Dia de los Muertos altar need to be brought in, and the fading marigolds fed into the gaping maw of Kali Ma, also known as my compost bin. There's a definite chill in the air, and sunset is beginning to encroach on 5 p.m. We are truly entering the dark time of the year.

For me, fragrances are always the harbingers of this descent into the dark times. Clouds of copal smoke rise from the altars, combining with the intense vegetal scent of marigolds. Not the dwarf French marigolds of my childhood, but the tall African marigolds -- Cempasuchil or Flor de Muerto --  in bright orange and yellow. People pull petals from these flowers and strew them in front of the altars, as their pungent odor was believed to entice the ancestors home for a visit at this time of the year.

I spent part of last Sunday out on 14th Street in Oakland's Fruitvale neighborhood. It was the community's annual Dia de los Muertos fiesta, with altars set up down the middle of the street, Aztec drummers, kids in masks and costumes, and everywhere the scent of marigolds and copal.  Here's one of the temporary floral shops set up for that day. People were buying marigolds to take home and place on their own altars.

 

Some of the flower vendors were mobile.

 

Each altar was different, but they had many common elements: copal, marigolds, bright colors, pictures and mementos of those we've lost. Some honored not only people, but cultures and the environment that are threatened. One heartbreaking altar commemorated lost babies and young children.

 

Last year in Oakland, we lost four police officers to one lone gunman. The entire community was in shock and grief for a long time, so I wasn't surprised to see an altar in the four officers'  memory featured at the fiesta.

 

Another altar focused on harm done the environment and featured an Hispanic mother goddess at its apex.

 

Typically altars have photos of the ancestors who are being remembered, and often, some of their favorite foods.

 

This next altar celebrates a culture colonialism tried to annihilate.

 

One of the other things I like best about this festival is the number of wonderful Mexican craft items for sale, most of them by the people who made them. All seem to celebrate that cycle of birth-death-rebirth, with no fear of death or those who are gone from us. I love these candelabrum with skeletons and skulls, and the papier mache skulls in bright pastel colors. The bright colors are part of Hispanic culture's peace with death and understanding of the nearness of our ancestors after they've gone.

 

 

Skeletons and skulls were everywhere. This woman was a vendor, selling some of her Dia de los Muertos paintings.

This was one of the best skull makeups I saw. She's standing in the plaza watching the Aztec dancers perform.

 

And here's the youngest skeleton I found. At this point in the day, he's pretty much dead to the world.

 

Some of the Aztec dancers even painted their faces with skull designs.

 

This woman's huipul is embroidered with Meso-American skull designs.

 

When I talk about Samhain and Dia de los Muertos, I almost always use the phrase ``dancing with the ancestors.'' Our Beloved Dead are gone, and yet we call them to mind when we speak their names and when we dance with joy. Here's my favorite -- and, in some ways -- most thematically appropriate -- photo from the fiesta. It's two little ones dancing to some conjunto music played at a stage on the plaza. The dance of life goes on, while the  ancestors are whirling about its edges.

  

 
 

Growing up on ``the hill''

I recently discovered a Facebook group called ``I grew up on Capitol Hill.'' That's the Seattle neighborhood where I spent my childhood. I wasn't all that surprised to see the group already has 500-plus members, for it was on the hill that all the Catholic doctors and lawyers found the big turn-of-the-century homes for their 12-child families. A LOT of people grew up on Capitol Hill.

I scanned through the list of members and found a few relatives, a couple of classmates, and  many people who were either younger or older siblings of those who went through Holy Names Academy with me or St. Joe's and Seattle Prep with my brother.

In many ways Capitol Hill was a world unto itself in 1950s America. It was probably far more homogenous that many Seattle neighborhoods, and the clustering of so many important Catholic institutions may have led to some smug triumphalism that was part of my makeup back then. We had all the answers, we built our own community, and we had enough safety in numbers that we never needed to fear -- or, alas, explore -- worlds beyond our boundaries.

Still, I have many many fond memories of the years there. They've contributed largely to the adult person I have become, and maybe even to my profession as a journalist.

We lived somewhat distant from the Capitol Hill epicenter, which was probably located within a couple of blocks of 18th and Aloha. Instead, we lived far down on the eastern side of the hill, in an odd little section that was almost entirely Jewish. As a result, our neighborhood friends were not the kids we knew from school. We were ``other'' to the neighbors because we went to Catholic school, and we were ``other'' to our classmates because we lived on the opposite side of ``the busy street,'' 24th Avenue that most kids were forbidden to cross.

Because we didn't live upon the top of the hill, close to our classmates; because we weren't Jewish like our friends in the neighborhood, because our dad had taken the extreme step of marrying a Catholic and our mom had behaved in an equally unusual fashion by marrying a Protestant, I got used to  being a perpetual outsider, standing on the periphery, waiting, watching, evaluating and analyzing. Having an alcoholic parent contributed to this too, for we'd never invite friends home for fear of what they'd encounter, and our parents never socialized with the neighbors or parents of our school friends. At the same time, I had aunts and uncles and a passle of first cousins on the hill, and my maternal grandparents spent the last years of their lives living there, too.

So while we had some powerful connections to the community, I became the equivalent of a Martian anthropologist sitting on the chandelier, always watching, always curious, always trying to decipher others' behavior and attitudes for some clue to whatever ``normal'' might have been. 

When I climbed up the big hill to Holy Names Academy for the first day of first grade, I looked like all the other little girls in our navy blue jumpers and white blouses. But I can remember being amazed that they all seemed to know playground games I'd never imagined existed, and they even all knew each others' names.  Even now I can remember how surprised and indignant I was that everybody else seemed to know a set of rules that eluded me. Certainly the ``outsiderness'' I felt then is part of what makes me stand back and observe today, like a good journalist should.

We lived on Interlaken Boulevard, a graceful, curving tree-lined street designed by Frederick Law Olmstead that led directly to the University of Washington Arboretum, also known as Washington Park.  Our front yard actually was Arboretum property, with part of it a grove of rare dogwoods.

Our house was one of the grand examples of carpenter's gothic, built around the turn of the century by a Swedish immigrant who, stories had it, got rich in the timber trade and decided to build a house that would outdo the grand house his brother built next door. When we moved in in 1950, the house had inlaid hardwood floors, leaded glass french doors, marble counter tops, dark woodwork and wainscoting, a separate maid's staircase and a butler's pantry, a 3rd floor attic ballroom, and a genuine Tiffany chandelier that was larger than a wringer washing machine and had matching stained glass doors for the built-in china cabinets.

Our parents appreciated none of these features and systematically went about ripping them out to replace them with new modern 1950s details like huge picture windows, dropped ceilings made from acoustical tile, linoleum counter tops, recessed fluorescent lighting, and 4'X8' sheets of paneling that covered up the old lath-and-plaster walls.  I suppose we were like a lot of the kids on the hill in this regard: we lived in beautiful old homes that were raped and bastardized and became monuments to the worst of the 1950s' appetite for remodeling. Certainly a father with a couple of beers in him and a crowbar in one hand was a dangerous thing in those days.

Many of our classmates were from Catholic families with Irish or German roots, or, to a lesser degree, Italian. We were different. Our dad was a Norwegian immigrant who escaped the wheatfields of Washington State's Palouse country to become a Boeing engineer. He was Protestant, from an Evangelical Lutheran sect known for its austerity. Mom came from a pioneer Washington State family that was so ultra-Catholic that we even had our very own Jesuit priest cousin, famous for saying mass atop Iwo Jima during World War II.  Religion was, as you can imagine, a big deal in our family.

Every time I return to Seattle and drive by our old house on the boulevard, I take a look at the huge hill I climbed every day to school and wonder how I managed it with a heavy load of books and a violin case.  In many cases, adults go back and find the distances of their childhood weren't so great, but when I take a look at the infamous Galer Street hill and know I climbed it every day rain or shine, I'm amazed.

Although we participated in the wide games-- British Bulldog, Kick the Can, Hide and Seek, Red Rover -- that took in the whole neighborhood on those northern latitudes' long summer evenings, I  spent most of my free time alone. The Arboretum was my place of singular magic, with species of trees and flowers that only much later I learned were rare and unusual. I used to climb under 50-year-old rhododendrons that were two stories tall, and make leis of their dropped cone-shaped flowers.  I sat on the edge of the ponds carefully capturing strings of frog eggs I took home to hatch in a dishpan in the basement. In the spring I'd walk under one of the weeping cherry trees along the Arboretum's Azalea Way and jiggle the branches so I'd be caught in a blizzard of pink petals. And often I'd climb a weeping willow tree where I'd perch on a branch with a book in hand and disappear for hours into the adventures of Josephine March and her sisters. 

Our house was within easy walking distance of two great museums where I also spent hours. At the Seattle Museum of History and Industry in Montlake I fell in love with the button blankets and carvings of the Haida people, the Inuit masks,  and the Coastal Salish baskets. I'd look up with pride into the rafters to see the seaplane that was one of the first in the Boeing fleet and know that my dad was helping to design the newest jets coming off the line.  And the diorama of the Great Seattle Fire of 1889 always left me with a frisson of terror.

The Seattle Art Museum in Volunteer Park awakened my love of Asian art, from the rows of tiny Chinese snuff bottles to the terra cotta Haniwa figures to several folding screens depicting Japan's Heian era. The museum also had part of the Kress Collection of Renaissance art, most of it third-tier, but still impressive to my untutored eyes. And its occasional traveling shows were wonderful, including a Monet show that featured some canvasses that later perished in a museum fire in France. Of course like every other Seattle child, I rode the Chinese marble camels outside the museum's front door, and later photographed my kids riding them, too.

I'd also traipse through the Volunteer Park Conservatory, breathing in the warm heavy tropical air, and delighting in the way the mimosa ``sensitive'' plants would wither whenever my hand brushed their leaves. I'd wade with my younger sibs in the Volunteer Park wading pool that probably had a rather high number of parts per million of little kids' pee, and we'd race each other to the top of the Volunteer Park water tower, which was housed in what looked like a medieval brick castle, and gave us views for miles in all directions

It seemed our childhoods were much freer and less fear-filled than the lives of kids' today. I'd get out of the house as soon as I got home from school and changed out of my uniform, and spent weekends roaming the Arboretum with virtually no restrictions placed by parents. This was true for my three siblings as well.

We did a lot of the things our classmates did: bought penny candy at the same mom-and-pop stores, took 25 cents to the Roycroft Theater every Saturday afternoon for a program that included a serial, a newsreel, a cartoon and a feature film; built wooden hydroplanes and tied them to the back of our bikes for our own versions of the Gold Cup Races run on Lake Washington.  We sometimes went to the original Red Mill on Friday night with our aunt and uncle so we could have fish and chips and not have to go home to a kitchen that smelled like fried fish. 

We went to the Friday night social dancing classes when we were in seventh and eight grades, and stood on one side of the hall while the St. Joe's boys were on the other. I can still remember a couple of Jack Reilly's sequence of steps and calls from that 7th-grade square dance class where they partnered us up with the boys by marching us in intersecting lines. Reilly, who owned the Aqua Barn out in Renton, taught us square dancing in 7th grade and social dancing in 8th.

I played in the string orchestra at school and was nerdy enough that I stuck with my Girl Scout troop all the way through high school. (And some of the women who were in Girl Scouts and the orchestra with me remain close friends to this day). I was both intellectually precocious and physically awkward:  a teenager who suddenly sprouted to six feet tall by her 13th birthday, and who thought physics was almost as much fun as writing notes in Morse code and passing them to my friends.

I had crushes on the St. Joe's boys even though many of them were still so short their heads could tuck under my chin when we were dancing. I'm sure they thought I was impossibly tall and weird. Weirdness aside, I actually did get to some of the high school dances, and still remember the spicy smell of a carnation corsage a Seattle Prep boy brought me on my very first date. I also read ``Seventeen'' magazine like a Bible, and used to have such envy when I'd go to mass at St. Joe's and see my more well-off classmates wearing outfits I'd seen featured in the magazine's pages.

Saturday mornings belonged to Miss Ruth Doherty's ballet classes at the Odd Fellow's Hall on Pine Street. She was dwarfed and bent by what was probably severe scoliosis, but  every Saturday she stood by the barre in a gauzy pink tunic and tights and led us through each step. The classes were probably not the best, and we had to stop halfway through and put on the tap shoes for the hated tap class, but it was enough to feed my passion for ballet that remains with me to this day.

St. Joe's itself was also important, of course. In 1950s Catholic America, life revolved around the parish church.  I can remember being terrified of Father Rinn, who would stand outside of church wearing a cape over his cassock and his hands on his hips, ready to catch latecomers to mass. I'm sure I was one of the kids who fiddled with the communion rail and caused one of the cast-metal bunches of grapes to come loose. I remember walking up the aisle on my First Communion day, trying to step on and pop the white snowberries that fell loose from wreath that crowned the veil of the girl in front of me in line.  And of course, even long after my immediate family left the parish. St. Joe's remains the place where we go to get married, and from which we bury our dead.

We left the Hill in the summer of 1960 because Dad was transferred to Cape Canaveral, Florida, initially to work on the Minuteman missile and later, in the space program. Life was never the same again. A certain center and certitude disappeared. I returned from Florida to attend Seattle University--technically on First Hill, but certainly within the Capitol Hill ambit -- but I never again lived on the Hill.

It's funny though, every single time I come to Seattle, the car automatically heads up Pine or Denny, I cross Broadway, make a few turns and find myself on Aloha Street. I always take a quick left turn on 14th, drive around the water tower, head for the conservatory and circle around the statue of William Henry Seward. Then I head back toward the art museum, always looking to the meadow to my right to see if my favorite maple tree is still there. (On my last trip, I discovered it was gone). Then I park for a minute facing Isamu Noguchi's ``Black Sun,'' and, if I'm lucky, watch the sun sink behind the Olympics. 

Afterward, I head back to Aloha, drive past St. Joe's, circle the Holy Names block, then head down 24th to Galer. I turn right and hope the rental car has good brakes as I head down down down that very steep hill. At the bottom I turn onto Garfield Street and look at the back side of our old house, then nip under the Interlaken Boulevard overpass and take a right turn into the Arboretum. I take a right turn on the boulevard and head back up hill, slowly, peering for a glimpse of the old house that is now almost completely hidden by trees on its front side.

It's just one of those rituals I have to perform. It's a way of connecting to my particular set of Capitol Hill roots.  Today I'm a silver-haired grandma with bifocals, a member of a Pagan coven and a hard-nosed legal journalist here in the Bay Area. But every time I pass the corner of 18th and Aloha, I remember once again that I grew up on Capitol Hill and will always be a Holy Names girl.

We're the coven that makes stuff

On thing that distinguishes my coven from some others is that we're always making things. It seems we are seldom closer than when we're gathered around the table sewing, decoupaging stuff, carving pumpkins, carving gourds or . . . .

This year we made a new altar cloth for Samhain. In our tradition the altar is always on the ground in the center of the circle because we are non-hierarchical and we like having the altar as a central visual focus. And increasingly the altar is very simple, as we let fabric and clear votives provide the focus.

I saw a pattern for a small wall hanging in one of the quilting magazines. The pattern started with a snail's trail block that evolved into four intertwined witches' hats. I liked it right away, and thought it would be fun to make that a key element in our altar cloth.

At our Samhain celebration, we always remember those who have come before us who were persecuted and killed for being witches. So often these people--mainly women--were tried and killed on trumped-up charges because they were maybe mentally ill, were just plain uppity and cranky women, possessed property someone coveted, or had children or neighbors who wanted them out of the way. Yes, some were also healers and midwives, and had religious/cultural practices that were at odds with the patriarchal power structure. But for the most part, they were people who were unpopular and that somebody in power thought threatend the prevailing civil and religious order.

We read some of their names aloud and are always surprised every year that the burning times continue and some witches died only in the past year or two, in parts of the world that are still governed by fear and superstition.

So, to get back to the altar cloth, we decided to make the faces all different colors, to represent the fact that women all over the planet have been persecuted and should be remembered. I made one of the witches with a green face to represent Elphaba, the heroine in Wicked, who went on to become the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. Yes, Elphaba is fictional, but she stands in for those who mainstream society rejects, and calls too strange to be accepted.

The four blocks are bordered with dancing--and flying--witches, 13 on each side. We saw a fabric in a catalogue that contained these images, but no matter where we looked, we couldn't find it in stock. So we made our own little witches, and my coven sister Meg cut out every single one of them. LInda and Julie helped trace them onto WonderUnder, with which we've created more than one spell or two over the years.

Here's the whole altar cloth. And I'm planning to take it in and have it quilted so it will be more stable and hold up better over the years.

 

The witches have decidedly different facial expressions, including one who's downright crabby. 

 
And here you can see some of the little witches. They dance around all four corners of the altar cloth.

 

The other thing we do every year for Samhain is decorate candles for the Dia de los Muertos altar we set up out on my patio. Some of the candles are decorated with a variety of muertos images, while others have photos of family or friends or public figures we admire who died in the past year. This year I made a candle for my friend John Dauns and another for my Aunt Bertha Tjerandsen Slind. I also made candles for Teddy Kennedy and Walter Cronkite. Others made them for parents or grandparents, or even beloved pets.

Here's what the altar--ofrenda-- looks like in the daytime. It has big bouquets of marigolds (cempazuchitl) that are traditional for Dia de los Muertos altars. And on the ground to the right of the largest vase of flowers is the incense burner from which clouds of copal smoke rise during the day.

 

And here's a detail that shows some of the candles close up. That's John's up on the top with the red heart, with Ted Kennedy's candle at the left top. Down one shelf is a candle with a photo of Aunt Bertha and Uncle Ole (we honored him last year as he died just before Samhain 2008, but it was inconceivable to use a photo of Aunt Bertha without including her husband of 68 years), and Walter Cronkite. You can also see some of the little muertos figures I've made over the years.

Here are two life-sized wall hangings that have become part of the altar of the years, La Catrina dancing and Senor playing the guitar. They both have some anatomical issues, but after all, they're muertos . . . .

And here's the altar at night. It will come down tomorrow night, something I always hate to do, for I love to walk out onto the patio and see the glowing candles, and smell the marigolds and copal.

 

In this detail shot you can see La Sirena (the mermaid), the muertos bridal couple, and a tiny figure that's meant to be Frida Kahlo. And on the shelf below that, La Catrina, complete with a little fur stole.

 

All in all, it's been a wonderful Samhain season for me, and for the coven. Our Friday night ritual here was solemn and beautiful, and we were pleased to have four new friends join us for the evening. Saturday night we danced under the almost full moon on a mountain top, and called the names of the Beloved Dead to join us in our dance.  Next weekend some of us will go be part of the Besom Brigade, the all-witch precision drill team, which will make and appearance at the Pagan Alliance's Children's Samhain event.

When you get to my age, your personal list of Beloved Dead grows longer and longer. I think on some levels, I'd be awash with grief if I didn't have the chance to get together with my coven sisters and make things that added to our celebration, and provided us with special ways to remember those who have crossed the rainbow bridge into Summerland.