Lughnasa and the Lughnasa Moon
Friday gratefuls: That bear. Fantastic Fungi. The workout. The fall. Mussar. Chili cheese dogs. A Friday with no appointments. Domestic chores. New neighbors coming. Three in a row. The Tarot. Kabbalah. Shan-shui poetry.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Liberation
Tarot: Cernunnos, #15 Druid Craft Deck
Six and a half years later. Three or four years after Kate. I saw a Bear! A big one. On the same road as I was. And, I was on foot.
Yesterday I did another of my outside cardio workouts. I chose to go around the “block” across Black Mountain Drive from me. A pretty long block as it turned out, about 30 minutes worth. Supposed to be 10, but I had a bad image in my head of the length of the roads.
Krashin went down hill. I’ve recently discovered all the side roads from my stretch of Black Mountain Drive go downhill. Hmm. Must live on the top of Shadow Mountain, eh?
Downhill in Krashin’s instance is toward a deep valley that runs between Shadow Mountain and Black Mountain. The forested valley has no roads, no homes, past the end of a short lane off Krashin. Wild. One or two homes on Black Mountain, perhaps a few more, then over the top of its 10,000 foot peak is the large Staunton State Park. Plenty of critters.
As I shook my head at how little I knew of my own neighborhood, I looked up. The road curved further away from a route back to Black Mountain Drive. A big black Bear ambled across it. Way big. Healthy with lustrous black fur, not in a hurry. Off on a morning errand hunting for food. Then it was gone.
A car came by from the Bear’s direction, slowed to a stop. “Yep. I saw him.” “Good. Just wanted to be sure.” No fooling around when it comes to either Bears or Mountain Lions. Either one can create havoc with the human body.
Being on foot made me vulnerable. I had no bear mace, no bells to ring. I was in shorts and a t-shirt, tennis shoes. Not fighting shape.
So I went on anyhow. Curiosity. That thread I mentioned a few posts back? Often helps me make decisions that are not in my immediate best interest. Where was the Bear? I wanted one more glimpse. Perhaps he hadn’t gone far into the woods. There are homes on both sides of the road, but their properties have many trees.
Couldn’t find him. (I say him because of the size.) I did keep looking, realizing I couldn’t outrun a Bear, they’re fast. Frisson.
During stretching I had started watching Fantastic Fungi, a documentary Tom Crane recommended quite a while ago. What a treat. Made me interested, yet again, in Mushrooms, Lichens. I’ve gone through phases. Ready for another one, I believe. Not only finding edible ones, but becoming more familiar with their roles in forest decomposition, communication. Also, psilocybin. (btw: the documentary is on Netflix.)
Just looked up the Colorado Mycological Society. Looks like fun. Birding? No. Not me. Hunting for Mushrooms? Learning more about them? Yes.
Point here with the Bear? The radical interconnectedness that Mycelium, the underground part of a Mushroom, a fruiting body for the organism, offers. Mycelium, threadlike, growing one cell at a time, dominate the rich soil layer near the surface. They carry nutrients back to the fruiting body, sure, but they can also transport nutrients between and among groves of trees.
Like Mycelium, the wildlife here are mostly invisible. Once in a while, a sighting. Usually Elk or Mule Deer. The occasional Fox. Marmot, Woodchuck. Squirrels. Chipmunks. Rarely, Bears, Mountain Lions, Lynx, Bobcats. We moved into their habitat and they’ve learned, more or less, to live around us, out of sight, wild. Like the vast underground networks of Mycelium, there are large populations of wild things all around us. At least up here in the Mountains.
We Humans live such sheltered lives, huddled in our right angled dwellings, getting our food from refrigerators and grocery stores, evading the fall of night with electricity. We, at least most of us, know little about how to sleep outside, find food, evade predators. Yet that is the way of wild things.
Cernunnos, #15 of the Major Arcana in the Druid Craft deck.
Cernunnos is the great horned God of the Celtic pantheon. “…the Gaelic god of beasts and wild places. Often called the Horned One, Cernunnos was a mediator (between humans) and nature, able to tame predator and prey so they might lie down together. He remains a mysterious deity, as his original mythos has been lost to history. A God of the Wild.
Given my brief encounter with the Bear and seeing Fantastic Fungi, this card calls to the deep in me. Joseph used to call me nature boy. My mystical feelings run not toward the ineffable, the distant God, but toward the Mycelium that connect us to the Wild life all around us. Cernunnos is the God of those tiny threads, often invisible to us.
People stop their cars to see Elk harems, Mule Deer fawns, a Fox warming itself on asphalt. Why? We don’t stop for dogs, cows, chickens.
That Bear. What a gift I felt seeing him. Why? Rising up from this Elk, that Fox, the Bear is the numinous presence of Cernunnos, the Wild as a dangerous and alien place. We shiver at the sight of creatures who navigate the wild in their daily existence. They are not of our world.*
Tarot commentators find this card intimidating, warning us against dark impulses, becoming enslaved to our wild passions. Not to me. In our sexuality, in our pairs, in our procreation we become one with the wild, perhaps only during the small death of orgasm, but perhaps also through bonding with another human, one of our own species.
These are not dark impulses, rather they are the wild portions of our own soul. Yes, they can scare us, make us do things we regret. Sure. But they can also show us the animal within us, the one who recognizes Cernunnos as its embodiment.
I celebrate the Wild. Cernunnos. Love making. That Bear.
*We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth. Henry Beston
a letter from Social Security yesterday explaining why they can’t pay me right now. My mistake. I didn’t give a new routing number after I closed the Health Care Credit Union account.
Still moving with a bit of the slows. Not anguished anymore, but distracted. Pruning Kate’s closets, dresser, jewelry chests. Reorganizing her sewing room for Ruth and the Bailey Patchworkers. Tom’s help. Most of this accomplished from my end.
The World card suggests that I’ve passed through an initial, and difficult phase of grieving. It feels true to me. Life with Jon and the kids seems set for a smoother, loving future. The most dramatic aspects following Kate’s death have come close to resolution. Pruning. All the administrative details. Living day to day without her physical presence. Taking charge of my own, independent life.
Summer and the Lughnasa Moon
two: Kate and Joseph. No doubt. Kate for love, for mutuality/intimacy, for discovering the best selves of two injured souls. Joseph for love, for nurturing, for satisfaction of a need to parent, for his wonderful life.
After that came one you might not consider. I decided early on with Kate’s illness that I would do for her what she could not do for herself. And, that I would greet each task with yes in my heart, with love. The depth of that decision was, I think, clear to me at the time. It was a choice to live that part of our lives primarily for her.
Summer and the almost full Lughnasa Moon
OK. There’s a streak here that’s inexplicable. At least by me. Granted that all perceived coincidence has a rootedness in the fact of personal experience and its interpretation. This close a hit feels unlikely without a bit of woo-woo in the air.
Tom himself, the smaller group of Ancient Ones: Bill, Mario, and Paul, and the full herd of the Woolly Mammoths are exactly those with whom I am most emotionally in tune. Congregation Beth Evergreen folks, too, but to a lesser degree because of a shorter period of time together.
No, not of Kate. Not at all. But of the stuff that she used in her daily life, no longer needed, and occupying emotional territory in my psyche. Her belongings are not a huge burden, but they are one and removing them feels good. Tom’s going to help me with that today. This is part of the pruning, the right-sizing, of my life, which includes my stuff, too. I plan to donate clothing of mine, as well.
Summer and the Lughnasa Moon
This tarot stuff is getting a little weird. In the upright Strength card Mother Nature, garland and a belt of flowers, with the infinite compassion and acceptance of the natural world takes the lion as a friend and companion. His predatory strength becomes allied to a strong anima. They complement each other.
Overall I’m feeling a bit untethered, as if the will to move forward gives way to fatigue. When I move Kate’s stuff, sort it, I find I can only do so much, then I’m mentally weary.
I suppose the cards are a way of taking me away from the immediacy of any one situation, taking me both away from it, but also offering a vantage point from which to consider it. Like a good therapist.
Monday gratefuls: Rigel eating and running. Mary’s pictures from the Van Gogh show and the Beach. Hsieh Ling-yun. Shan-shui poetry, creative sensibility. Wabi sabi. Fermented foods. Korea. The United States, as a vision. The United States, broken.
Fathers were different. More individual in our telling. More difficult, sometimes, but also more formative. My father, from whom I was estranged most of my adult life, gave me a willingness to express contrary opinions in the public square. A willingness to use analytics to solve problems, to understand political life. A tendency to wander, to find the curious and the unusual. A conflicted version of hard work. That is, he modeled hard work. Always. But he expected it of me just because he was my father.
We all agreed though that whoever we are now, in the elder stage of life, came through choice, intentionality. We are not the sock puppets of our parent’s gifts or their curses. Yes, they shaped our lives, no doubt, but how we use compassion, a sense of humor, a genius for invention, gentleness, a hard-edged approach reflects how we have chosen to incorporate them in the now long stream of our life.
The Lovers. A sequelae. As a change, a transformative wave, pulses through my life, as it creates difficulties, struggles, it does point toward a new creation. What will that new creation be like? Not sure yet. My sense, if I have to choose between important and unimportant (see below), I’m thinking of the difference between the Chinese literati role model and the engaged political and religious life I have known. Perhaps between passive and active. Learning and doing. Which will inflect my next path more?
Will I try to rebuild my past life, only at a different age and place? Will I listen to the murmurings in my soul? Will I follow what I believe to be the deeper path for me? Deeper at this moment in time. The Lovers card suggests I will need to choose. Are these the choices? Not sure. Are these the best choices? Again, not sure.
Some fear, too. Will I ride this out, find another path? Or will I wander, like Dante, in the dark wood lost?
We’ll get to the Tarot later, but let me say before we do that it’s good news to me.
