When I went out on the front porch today, I saw that the first of our lily plants had two blossoms on it, the first of the flowers we planted this year to bloom. The first of the plants we lovingly placed in soil that is jointly owned by my husband and I and my father. Actually, the Packhorse did the planting; I have the opposite of a green thumb. My contribution has been limited to picking out the bulbs (we planted 27 of them, and so far 20 have come up) and admiring them from the first tiny shoots to these first miraculous blossoms, talking to them and singing to them—they don’t seem to care that my alto is quavery and sometimes I go off-key (I make sure that Dad, who sang in choirs or choruses for 30 years, isn’t around to comment). And I thought of the old Shaker hymn...
'Tis the gift to be simple,
'tis the gift to be free,
'tis the gift to come down where you ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
It will be in the valley of love and delight.
Refrain:
When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend we shan't be ashamed.
To turn, turn will be our delight,
'Til by turning, turning we come round right
Shaker hymn
Around the beginning of May, I was out on the porch paying my evening visit to my plants, sitting there in the bright coral of sunset and missing the softer, gentler twilight of New England, when I suddenly realized something very odd. For the first time in five years, I was quiet inside.
There wasn’t a tight band around my temples, an ever-present low-grade tension headache threatening to burst into an explosion of pain. My neck and shoulders and lower back weren’t tight, and I didn’t feel as if someone were watching me with tight lips, oozing disapproval. I didn’t feel as if I didn’t belong. I didn’t dread my mother-in-law’s arrival, fearing that she’d have had an argument with her daughter, co-administrator of the daycare where they work, and that her anger would spill over onto us, because we were Wiccans and, from her point of view, weird. Even before we’d moved in with her, we’d felt like outsiders at family gatherings, because it had been made very plain to us—by my husband’s siblings-- that we didn’t fit. That feeling of always being slightly off is exquisitely painful after a while.
Instead, I knew I was part of the Universe, and that who and what I was, was just fine.
In the pain of being surrounded by an atmosphere of dislike and distrust (my mother-in-law loves us but she doesn’t even try to understand us; we are simply beyond her ken because we are Goths and Wiccans), I had forgotten that plain truth: I had lost the gift of simplicity. I accepted her complications and limitations (that there can only be one Path and one God, and any other way is WRONG) as my own. She had banned us from practicing our religion at any time or any place so long as we lived under her roof, and I had kept that promise. Eventually I concluded that silent prayer wasn’t covered by that ban, but by then I had lost the ability to be still in my heart. Her back yard had always felt like sacred space to me, and now it was just another place. I began to avoid it and spend a lot of time in our bedroom. I retreated into myself.
In March, we moved into this house out here in a still-rural area of Barrow County. My Dad stayed with my MiL while we got things ready(he cannot survive without cable, and it took forever tog et that set up). There were a lot of bumps along the way. The Tacky Khaki paint the builder used turned the dusty rose we painted our bedroom a violent Malibu Barbie Pink, and we ended up glazing and sponging it with the palest shade of blush-tinged white we could find, so that it looks like a Tuscan villa. I like to watch the light play over the marbles colors, now a soft, faded rose. It is a small pleasure that makes me sigh with contentment. We painted the huge bathroom a geranium pink (sounds awful, but there is so much white in there and very little surface to actually paint) and added a vase full of black silk roses we bought at Wally World several Halloweens ago, along with some erotic netsukes we brought home from Japan.
It’s been a period of adjustment, with Dad being weaned away from MiL’s influence. He’s had to take a huge step forward into the twenty-first century so we can pay most of his bills online—and he’s letting us take that over from him and MiL (what took him two afternoons is now done in an hour max), and into trusting us. There were some very rocky moments. He’s had a tendency to treat me like a servant when I cook, and praise the Packhorse to the skies when he does. He’s also been rude and critical of me at times, and he can be scathing, calling me a Drama Queen when his words cut me to ribbons and my eyes filled with tears.
I finally confronted him with the question, "Do you love me?"
"Of course I love you. You’re my daughter."
"Then we have a very different definition of love. Because to me, love doesn’t include being cruel to the people I claim to love, and what you’ve said to me just now was downright cruel."
My husband joined in. "How would you have liked it if someone spoke that way to Fran?" (Fran was my mother, who died in 2005; Dad worshiped the ground on which she walked).
"I would have told them off."
"Well, Bob, that’s what I plan on doing the next time you talk that way to my wife. You’re being her father doesn’t give you the right to treat her badly."
It took a couple of go-rounds, and Dad still has lapses, but he’s learned to respect me, and to realize that I am a person in my own right. He notices it when I am dressed nicely to go out, and when I returned from having my late-spring haircut ( my hair is so thick and wavy that I cut it into a curly bob for summer to get the weight off the back of my neck; if I leave it long I am stuck with pony tails and French twists which give me headaches after a bit), he told me I looked beautiful. I don’t think he ever said that to me before because there was only one woman he truly considered beautiful—Mom—and I never measured up, being too short and too large-boned and way too curvy. He truly sees me.
On April 31, Beltain Eve, the Packhorse and I warded our yard with salt, and placed a pinch over every door an window. It’s an old custom for cleansing a place and keeping out negativity. So far, it seems to be working. Except for an abundance of poison ivy, the place feels safe and calm and welcoming, a home. Our home.
Perhaps the most interesting change for me is that I feel part of the cycle of life again. We’ve lived in apartments or townhouses for the entire twenty years of our marriage, and it’s hard to get emotionally involved with flora that isn’t yours. Throw in my allergies ("Everything green that grows on the Eastern seaboard" is how the doctor summed it up when he tested me, and, after seven years in Japan, that has been expanded to include a lot of plants that grow in the Pacific Rim) which make spending time outdoors problematic for me, plus living in a section of the country I don't much care for, and it is all too easy to become very disconnected from the natural world. I still have the allergies, and this year the pollen was sheer hell on my asthma, but watching those bulbs come up, along with the slower progress of the all-red perennial garden, has given me back something I had been missing without even knowing it: a tie to the earth and, through the earth, to the universe. Or as Carl Sagan phrased it, the recognition that we are all star-stuff.
So every day now I go out and sing or talk to my plants, knowing that we are all ensouled, all partners in the Dance of Life. I used the Christian version of the old song "Lord of the Dance" when I married the first time in a Catholic Mass –the thins we do for our parents—but these days I don’t pretend not to be the witchy woman that I am at heart. And yesterday evening, I sang it to my lily about to burst into bloom, a lily born into song.
When She danced on the water and the wind was Her horn
The Lady laughed and everything was born
And when She lit the sun and the light gave Him birth
The Lord of the Dance first appeared on the Earth.
Chorus:
Dance, dance, where ever you may be
For I am the Lord of the Dance," said He
and I'll live in you, if you live in me
And I'll lead you all in the Dance," said He
I danced in the morning when the world was begun
I danced in the Moon and the Stars and the Sun
I was called from the darkness by the Song of the Earth
I joined in the singing and She gave me Birth
I dance at the Sabbat when you chant the spell
I dance and I sing that everyone be well
When the dance is over do not think I am gone
I live in the music so I dance on and on and
<chorus>
They cut me down but I leap up high
I am the Light that will never never die
I live in you if you live in me
I am the Lord of the Dance said He
<chorus>
I dance in the Circle when the flames leap up high
I dance in the Fire, and I never, ever, die
I dance in the waves of the bright summer sea
For I am the Lord of the wave's mystery
<chorus>
I sleep in the kernel, and I dance in the rain
I dance in the wind, and thru the waving grain
And when you cut me down, I care nothing for the pain;
In the Spring I'm the Lord of the Dance once again!
<chorus>
I dance at the Sabbat when you dance out the Spell
I dance and sing that everyone be well
And when the dancing's over do not think that I am gone
To live is to Dance! So I dance on, and on!
<chorus>
The moon in her phases, and the tides of the sea
The movement of the Earth, and the Seasons that will be
Are the rhythm for the dancing, and a promise thru the years
That the Dance goes on thru all our joy, and tears
<chorus>
We dance ever slower as the leaves fall and spin
And the sound of the Horn is the wailing of the wind
The Earth is wrapped in stillness, and we move in a trance,
But we hold on fast to our faith in the Dance!
chorus>
The sun is in the southland and the days grow chill
And the sound of the horn is fading on the hill
'Tis the horn of the Hunter, as he rides across the plain
And the Lady sleeps 'til the Spring comes again
<chorus>
The Sun is in the Southland and the days lengthen fast
And soon we will sing for the Winter that is past
Now we light the candles and rejoice as they burn
And we dance the Dance of the Sun's return!
<chorus>
They danced in the darkness and they danced in the night
They danced on the Earth, and everything was light
They danced out the Darkness and they danced in the Dawn
And the Day of that Dancing is still going on!
<chorus>
I gaze on the Heavens and I gaze on the Earth
And I feel the pain of dying, and re-birth
And I lift my head in gladness, and in praise
For the Dance of the Lord, and His Lady gay
<chorus>
I dance in the stars as they whirl throughout space
And I dance in the pulse of the veins in your face
No dance is too great, no dance is too small,
You can look anywhere, for I dance in them all!
Lord of the Dance, pagan version
Sometimes the simplest of gifts are the greatest. A lily blooming. Time with my father, for us to really know each other. A quietness in the spirit, where a sigh is a prayer. Simple gifts, as part of the Eternal Dance. I hope I never forget that again.