Lara Vesta's Blog, page 4

Listening to Spirits

 In March of 2016, I was at my parent's house in southern Oregon dreaming.  In the dream I received a job offer from Pacific University and was ecstatic--I love teaching and had taught for five years, from 2007-2012, before taking time away to care for my children and start a business.  The promise of a regular paycheck, benefits and a return to the collegiality and support of academia was, I believed, a Goddess-sent remedy for years of poverty cycles.  Plus, I was enrolled in a PhD program in Philosophy and Religion at CIIS, focusing on Women's Spirituality.  I loved the program and the education I was receiving aligned with my long term goals:  to bring spirituality--specifically non-religious ritual and earth-based community practice--into a higher education environment.  I had done this as a lay person for years, using ritual in all of my university English classes with great effect.  And I had created a course called Community Stories, which used ritual to build a container for personal/social/cultural story examination and the creation/implementation of a civic engagement project.  I loved my work.But physically, I had struggled to sustain a full-time teaching schedule ever since I had a bacterial infection in 2009, two years after I started teaching.  Combined with long distance parenting, blended family making and advocating for my son, who is on the autism spectrum, full-time teaching became more burdensome each year.  Especially challenging was the fact that as a term employee I was used to mop up courses senior faculty were only required to carry as a small portion of their course load, mostly required, writing intensive classes like Expository Writing and First Year Seminar.  While I loved--truly loved--teaching those classes, helping non-writers tell their stories in engaging ways, the amount of grading made the course hours drift long beyond the time spent teaching and prepping.  There are a variety of strategies professors use to get around reading tons of papers, including peer review and bookend grading (reading just the introduction and conclusion of a work) but this was not the culture of Pacific.  Nor is it a personal characteristic.  I care about my students too much to not read their work.By the time I left teaching I was burnt out and disheartened.  Self-employment was hard, too, but once I found my niche (community teaching, go figure) after years of various endeavors (ceremonial celebrant, spiritual business consultant), I could craft a schedule supportive of my fatigue and mostly avoid the worst crashing.  It's called coping, and it is a good strategy.  But I didn't know what I was coping with just yet.  So when I took on graduate school, ok, that was a lot to bring in to an already full life, I started having unusual symptoms. By the time I was dreaming at my parent's house in March of 2016, I had uterine fibroids, a cyst on my liver, a cyst on my ovary and a sinking sense that something was pretty wrong in my physical body.  In the dream I received the job offer from Pacific, and I was joyful.  But then I looked at the dream's version of my schedule.  It was ALL writing intensive courses.  The spirits said, no way, and I said, oh well, it was worth looking at.  But I knew in the dream it would be a bad idea to take on such a schedule.  I knew.When I woke up, I had an email with a job offer from Pacific and a schedule JUST like the one in my dream.  Can you guess what I did?***I took the job.  I became very sick.  I still haven't recovered, almost a year later.***Spirit came to me in a dream this summer, on the full moon of August.  A woman insisted that I teach a class in Ancestral Connection, a topic close to my heart and a big part of my own spiritual path.  I told her I don't teach anymore.  She would not let it go.  Finally I said I would teach it, and with the pull of spirit led timing, was told it needed to begin on the first of November and proceed for four Wednesdays.  When I woke up I checked the calendar.  November 1 is on a Wednesday.  Okay.I could choose to not listen.  I'm in another big transition right now.  We are moving out of the city, where I've lived for the past decade, where my husband works, where two of my children go to school.  We are moving in large part because I can't work consistently, I still haven't improved in the way we've hoped and we are having to accept that dealing with my ME/CFS might be a long process.  We can't afford to live here on one income.  We could barely afford it on two.  The move is daunting, my energy low. To live with spirit is to listen.  I am a dreamer, I receive information in my dreams.  Not just symbolic illusion, but clear communication.  It is a pathway for my ancestors--one of many.  The woman in my dream demanded I teach, never mind I've given it up, never mind the timing.  If I follow, the wyrd weaves pattern.  If I resist, it knots and twists, new paths emerge.  Some take me to the same place, the hard way.Ancestral Connectionis offered by donation with a suggested contribution of $100 to help my family transition into our new living situation.  Support your local wyrd sister.  Lean on in, let's listen together.By this and every effort may the balance be regained.

Resources for Resilience

These are some of the resources that have helped me understand the context and complexities of racism, allyship and the universal need for identifying and transforming systems of oppression. I come to these resources as a woman living in America of (presumed) European descent who is racialized as white.  I am also the mother of multiracial children who are often—but not always--racialized as white.  I am learning, it is a slow process, my education incomplete.  But the journey of this education is what I wish to share, because dismantling the destructive paradigms that perpetuate racist, sexist, speciesist, homophobic ideologies requires solidarity on the path.  I am indebted to my Building Conscious Allyship class at CIIS for many of these resources.You might wonder first at my use of the term "racialized as white," rather than calling myself a "white woman."  Racilization is an active word that gives context to what happens to all of us, regardless of our ethnic or cultural backgrounds, in a race focused society.  Race is one of those maddening points of simultaneity, as most social scientists agree that there is no genetic basis for racial separation, we are as a collective society racially mixed, and therefore racial categorization is something that happens based on perception.  Yet, in spite of the illusion of race, racial discrimination is very real, and the formations of race occur regardless of the non-reality of racial purity. Thus racialization is something that happens to all of us, and while as a person who is racialized as white it is important to acknowledge the special treatment this racialization offers, it is equally important to recognize the universality of racialization and that it is an active principle, thus subject to change.  Identity, therefore, can be transformed by simultaneously holding race as unreal, and understanding racialization.The creation of whiteness and other race categories occurred to protect and preserve the power of a particular racist perception, one intimately linked with capitalist goals, but not all people who would now be racialized as white were seen as deserving of the benefits and privileges of whiteness.  The complex history around the creation of whiteness and other race categories is interwoven with the advent of "modern" slavery systems, the privatization of land, the genocide of women during the witch hunts, the destruction of non-Christian indigenous spiritual traditions—including those in Europe—and the colonization of continents. Understanding this history can help us see how we are all oppressed by the systems that perpetuate racism, (let's name some:  Patriarchy, White Supremacy, Capitalism, Religion) and work together to create new systems to live by.Resources:On RacializationEveryone is Racialized from the University of Calgary:“The term ‘racialization' is very helpful in understanding how the history of the idea of ‘race' is still with us, impacts us all, profoundly, though differentially, as well, especially as the term emphasizes the ideological and systemic, often unconscious processes at work. It also emphasizes how racial categories are "constructed", including whiteness, but socially and culturally very real.Racialization is the very complex and contradictory process through which groups come to be designated as being of a particular "race" and on that basis subjected to differential and/or unequal treatment. While white people are also racialized, this process is often rendered invisible or normative to those designated as white, and as such, white people may not see themselves as part of a ‘race' but still as having the authority to name and racialize ‘others'. The process by which people are identified by racial characteristics is a social and cultural process, as well as an individual one. That is, a social order might "racialize" a group through media coverage, political action, and the production of a general consensus in the public about that group. An individual might "racialize" another individual or group by particular actions (e.g., avoiding eye contact, crossing the street, asking invasive questions) that designated the target individual or group as "other" or "not-normal." Racialization is a fluid process. A particular community might be "racialized" at a point in history but then later "pass into" whiteness (e.g. Italian Canadians). Whiteness and Whites can also be racialized but this process must incorporate anti-racist and alliance principles so that whiteness is perceived as a power-base, not a target."The Process of Racialization: From the University of York:“MANY SOCIOLOGISTS PREFER TO USE THE TERM RACIALIZATION AS OPPOSED TO RACE IN ORDER TO EMPHASIZE THE FACT THAT RACIAL CATEGORIES ARE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONS THAT CHANGE IN TIME AND SPACE AND CIRCUMFERENCE, AND ARE ATTRIBUTED WITH STATUS AND MEAN}”Aspiring Social Justice Ally Identity Developmentby Keith Edwards: Really useful in understanding the progression of ally psychology.  I used this in comprehending my own identity progression with regard to spiritual artistic appropriation.  See this blog post.The Problem With PrivilegeAndrea Smith:Speaking privilege is not enough.“Consequently, the goal became not to actually end oppression but to be as oppressed as possible.  These rituals often substituted confession for political movement-building.  And despite the cultural capital that was, at least temporarily, bestowed to those who seemed to be the most oppressed, these rituals ultimately reinstantiated the white majority subject as the subject capable of self-reflexivity and the colonized/racialized subject as the occasion for self-reflexivity.”Healing from Whiteness BlogSpecifically I found useful:How do I claim my own indigenous humanity as a white person?Cultural Amnesia: How the Celts Became WhiteWhat exactly is cultural appropriation and why is it harmful? (video)Marina Watanabe helps define cultural appropriation with regard to capitalist exploitation and spiritual symbolism.  A worthwhile watchCaliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici (links to pdf of book, but you can also find it for sale)The history of the body in the transition to capitalism. As a woman of European descent this book helped me understand the history of the witch burnings, my ancestral patterns of fear, and the connection with racism, capitalism and Christian privilege. The Uses of AngerAudre Lorde“I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own.”Coalition Politics by Bernice Johnson Reagon Johnson“We’ve pretty much come to the end of a time when you can have a space that is “yours only”—just for the people you want to be there.”Letter from Birmingham Jailby Martin Luther King, Jr.“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”Books that illustrate new stories, new systems, political, spiritual, personal:Woman on the Edge of Timeby Marge PiercyThe Fifth Sacred Thingby StarhawkLast thoughts:I find sheet mulching to be particularly cathartic.  As someone with a disability that prevents much physical action, I can write and speak and turn my attention to making wild gardens, full of metaphor, newsprint dissolving in the bodies of worms, roots weaving through the baselessness of this time that is no time.  Grow, seeds of new culture, seeds of the ancient.  Chant with me:  Grow grow grow grow grow.

Connecting With the Ancestors

Our ancestors are hungry.  In modern culture they are longed for but forgotten, or avoided, no longer the intermediaries between human life and divinity.  This past week I wrote about ancestral connection, something I began four years ago and a path I continue daily to surprise, amazement and empowerment.  I received many comments about yearning for ancestral connection, wondering how to build relationship with ancestors absent, or when the only known ancestry--family history--is painful and harmful.  What follows is the beginning of my discovery, source and resource, on this journey.  There is too much for one post, but here are some introductory ideas on how to work with your ancestors.First, some perspective.  We all have millions of ancestors.  The math is complicated by concepts like pedigree collapse and bottleneck situations (major death events like the plague) but on a theoretical level, everyone alive today is related to almost everyone else going back to about 8,000 BCE.  So there are a lot of people to work with in our bloodlines.  We tend to think of ancestors as those we know, and so if our immediate family is absent, messed up or unavailable, there can be a reluctance to pursue ancestral work.  But ancestry is spirit work.  You carry within you the genetic code of many.  The patterns of people who performed atrocities, yes, they are in there.  But also you contain those who perfomed magic.  Healing.  Nourishment.  Who made beauty.  Who await your attention.Ancestor work is especially important now for a number of reasons.  The primary one is that we are so distant from living close to the earth and the beings of nature.  Who better to teach us about place based, earth centered living than relatives who lived this way for thousands of years?  We all have people of the earth in our lineages.  Each one of us.  Some of us come from traditions that are buried and deeply fragmented, but dreaming and walking with our ancestors can help unearth the wisdom inherent in our bones.I should also state here that I'm not an expert, I'm a seeker on a particular path.  I practice the religious traditions of my ancestors from Northern Europe and so much of my work is focused on those spiritual methodologies.  I do include information from my time in the Women's Spirituality program at CIIS, and welcome insights from those practicing in other traditions.  My children are multiracial, and one of the reasons I began this path was so that they could have a rich, complete spiritual identity.  As a woman racialized as white, it has been revolutionary to explore my ancestors and offer to my children a fuller understanding of their European lineage.  It also has led me away from spiritual appropriation.  What I seek is available in my lineage history if I'm willing to dig deep and confront my fears.This work may bring up a lot of fear.  We have been conditioned to look outside ourselves for spiritual information.  Not only this, but many women of European descent carry deep trauma from the witch hunts, a kind of ancestral obliteration where we had to hide our relationships with the spiritual and magical.  Many of the indigenous spiritual traditions in Europe were intentionally dismantled first by church policy, then by political violence. (Huge intersectionality here with the witch hunts, the advent of capitalism, the colonization of the Americas and the beginning of the global slave trade--there is a root of widespread oppression in this time.  See the book Caliban and the Witch by Sylvia Federici for more about this complex of shared history.) It was not that long ago in blood time.  I find that whole swaths of information in my family line are obscured from me in ritual or meditation, and so the work of claiming is about persistence.First Steps for Ancestral ConnectionGather as much information as you can about all of your ancestors, including those you may know such as parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles.  Start assembling family stories, anecdotes, photos, documents. Look at where you have resistance or wish to simplify matters.  I have a friend with a powerful paternal Hispanic presence in her family, who had never explored her mother's Scottish roots because she saw them as less interesting.  When she began to investigate her resistance she found an intense connection with the magical practices of Scotland, and was able to uncover the synergy between her paternal and maternal lineages. Resistance can often mean the presence of power, and complexity is strength.  We are made of multitudes, you don't have to choose or preference one, and often different ancestries will call to you at different times.If you have little or no information about your ancestors, don't despair.  They are already in you.  You can access your ancestors at any time. A lack of information does not mean a lack of connection.  You don't need anything except intuition and will to connect with your ancestors.  Tools for CommunicationAncestor Altars:  Gateway to the Bloodline  Crafting an altar for the ancestors in your home is most effective when you are clear on your intention. Is it to heal bloodline trauma?  To create new connections?  To discover their spiritual practices?  Once you know the purpose of your altar, allow yourself to be led to the colors and textures that reflect your purpose (once you have a relationship with the ancestors they will let you know intuitively what they do and don't prefer).  You may choose to add photos of your actual ancestors, images of places they came from, objects that belonged to your family, or symbolic art representing your intention.  Then make offerings.  Traditional offerings to the ancestors include food, beverages, fresh flowers, herbs and stones.  Tend the altar with a daily ritual practice.  It doesn't need to be big, five or ten minutes of attention is enough to begin some energetic collaboration.  (For more information on ritual practice, see the 13 Days of Ritual in the Wild Soul School.)Dining With the AncestorsA simple way to let your ancestors know you are thinking of them is to set a place at the table and ritually feed them with your family.  This can be done in a quiet, informal way, or in a more formal ritual where you call in your ancestors to eat with you.  Make a plate of food for the ancestors.  Once you complete the meal, you may place the food on your altar, removing it the following morning or when the meal feels done.Sharing Drinks With the AncestorsToasting the ancestors with your beverage of choice (preferably something delicious) then pouring out some of the liquid onto the earth in their honor is a traditional way of making offering and including the ancestors in your daily life. This may be done with regularity.  If indoors, you can simply pour a cup for your ancestors, toast them, and leave it on your altar. Thanking the AncestorsThey are the reason we all exist.  Those millions of lives cycled through time so that you could be born at this particular place, with this unique set of characteristics and circumstances.  If you have children, the potentiate of the ancestors is even more vital:  they live through you and into your offspring.  In my spiritual tradition the female ancestors are called the Disír, and have a vested interest in aiding the perpetuation of the lineage.  Thanking the Disír, thanking all of the ancestors for the gifts you've received, for the safe passage of a child into this world, or for future protection, is a powerful practice.  Dedicating your work in this life to the ancestors and descendants helps orient your offerings in the scope of spirit time.  Daily Power Practice--Ancestor WorkAttune to ancestral wisdom by opening and closing each day with them in intention.  MorningIn the morning, as part of a ritual practice, ask your ancestors:What would you wish of me today?See what comes forward.  This might be a meditation, a journaling exercise or an art practice.  Keep a record of your process.  The instructions of the ancestors might be obscure at first, but after a while they will become more clear.EveningAs you go to bed at night, imagine yourself in a circle of protection.  From this place, set an intention to dream with your ancestors.  Ask for guidance on any issue, or for further relationship.  In the morning, write down any images or symbolic information.  And give thanks.In the next few weeks I'll offer several posts with more information on specific ancestral connection, including my own journey and a ritual meditation that I've used in The Power Class with incredible results.  Most ancestor work must come from your own direct experience.  With this in mind, I offer some reading with a caveat:  you won't ever find without what is already available within.  No one can communicate with your ancestors like you.  Because they are yours.  Alu.A few books I've found helpful on my path:Ancestor Reverence essay by Luisah Teish in Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Women's SpiritualityThe Well of Remembrance: Rediscovering the Earth Wisdom Myths of Northern Europe by Ralph MetznerWitches and Pagans by Max DashuThe Black World chapter in Neolithic Shamanism by Raven KalderaThe Motherline by Naomi Ruth LowinskyMay this work reach those who need it.  May the balance be regained.http://www.genetic-genealogy.co.uk/supp/ancestor_paradox.html

The Work of Self-Love

Transition is life work. Every day is a cycle of transition. Every change a moment of transformation. Right now I am in transition, a myth cycle like Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey or Maureen Murdoch's Heroine's Path. Transition is multiple and mutable, it happens in the micro and macro levels. Sometimes the road of trials is predictable and smooth. Other times, we get caught in the unexpected, the extraordinary. Even the good things in our lives--births, partnerings, new endeavors--can carry the weight of passage. Death is present in every change and however welcome, honoring the past, the lost, bringing into integrity the grief, the truth, this is the work of living fully. :: Ritual helps navigate transition. Even small rituals create psychic trails in the wilderness of our lives. An ancestral familiarity is opened as we connect with forces beyond the moment, our blood wisdom, our sacred craft. Rituals move us through the known and the unknown with greater ease. Ronald Grimes writes in Deeply Into the Bone that missed rites of passage leave holes in us, that we are haunted as by ghosts when we don't honor our transitions. :: This can feel daunting. So many unmarked passages accumulate in our lives, how can we possibly come into integrity with every transition? We can't. But we can begin to practice effective rituals daily, to build in the rooting and honoring of transition through self-care and story shaping. Tiny though they are, daily ritual practices open the door for a powerful wholeness. :: In 13 Days: A Ritual Practice we are going to create and sustain these daily anchor rituals for 13 days, beginning August 2nd, traveling through the full August moon and resting at the waning half moon in Taurus on August 14th. If you haven't already, register for the free practice at The Wild Soul School. I will be sending out more information about additional resources via the Wild Soul School early next week. :: Photo by the amazing @lorijo45

A Prayer for My Untended Dead

          It is hard to focus when there is a ghost in your office, especially a spirit as cannily gorgeous and witty as the late Dr. Lorelle Browning.  I heard her coming down the hall, sparks of light gleaming from her layers of jewelry, a delicious laugh and fragrance marking the space-time continuum.  It would be impossible not to welcome her in. Here she is now, standing in the corner, waiting for me to say something real.          Lorelle died of cancer, the first of three women in my life to succumb in a short six months.  When she died I hadn’t seen her for years.  Our last day together in 2012 was a spring one, chill and rain.  I had just finished packing my belongings and was preparing to leave Pacific University, where I received my MFA, where I taught as a professor of writing for five years.  Lorelle was department chair and took me to lunch as a gesture of farewell.  Halfway through a Caesar—lemony, herbed--she grabbed my hand, “I’m going to get you back here,” she said, squeezing with determination.  Faith in her undeniable power.And, she did.           The Norse had a word for ancestral spirits, community guardians, their beloved dead:  Dísir.  The Dísr could be single (Dís) or collective, would appear to tell the fates of children at birth--good fairies around Sleeping Beauty’s cradle--and just as easily the Dísir could cast lots determining who should die.            Dísir were specifically female, powerful, respected and feared.  They had a vested interest in the continuation of their lineage so would let you know if you were making errors in judgment.  The Dísir’s curse—discomfort for the recipient in this lifetime--could be curative, collective, a balm for future generations.  There were feast days for the Dísir, lengthy celebrations of ceremony, offerings and theatre.             Reverence of the dead extends cross cultures, with elaborate rituals including the exhuming of the bones, preservation of the corpse, ancestor honoring celebrations such as Dia De Los Muertos.  Yet in America our experiences of and with death are alarmingly blunt.  Our beloveds die, we grieve for a proscribed period of time (the average paid leave is three days), and return to life as normal. Our public shrines include the usual places of worship, roadside crosses and the occasional spontaneous memorial.   Our mourning is private, and its expression brief.            I learned of Lorelle Browning by reputation.  My former husband was a student of hers in the 1990’s.  A business major and self-described non-reader, English classes terrified him.  He said Lorelle swept in on the first day of class quoting Shakespeare and standing on desks for oration.  He had never experienced a teacher so passionate about her chosen field, and she shocked him into reading, studying and investigating language as art.  She opened his mind, and in this way I can thank her for that early relationship, for my two children.  If my former husband hadn’t met Lorelle and started reading I’m pretty sure we would never have married at all.              Like many Americans I am the child of immigrants.  My people come from Norway, Sweden, Ireland, England, Scotland, Germany and Czechoslovakia.   The earliest traversed the Atlantic in the 1600’s.  The most recent, my maternal grandfather, Sigurd Rosenlund, came to the US from post-war Norway in the 1950’s to attend college at UC Berkeley.  With this varied background we don’t have any set rituals around our dead.  Some of us are religious.  My cousin is an evangelical minister. My paternal grandparents were both raised Catholic but later left the church after the Paso Robles parish priest refused to bury my devout Czech great-grandmother, Mary Uchitel, in the sanctified churchyard soil.  They couldn’t find her birth certificate, or proof of baptism, so in death she was never Catholic at all.            My beloved dead are burned or buried quickly and with little ceremony.  Tucked away in corners of cemeteries in California and Oregon, scattered on the waves of the Pacific Ocean and the Bergen fjord.  They are not forgotten but spread out so we miss them but do not visit them.  We miss them and move on.           The rest of my American-dead ancestors rest in piecemeal places:  Kentucky, New Jersey, New Hampshire, the Dakotas, Washington State. Lately I have begun to trace them, following a path of irregular lines and incomplete records.  Genealogy is elitist.  There are vast resources devoted to my educated, professional ancestors, like Isaac Huntoon, founder of Anacortes, Washington.  Disappeared are the migrant workers, the illiterate and those fleeing oppression from Russia or famine from Ireland.  Learning their stories, I try to gather up their bones, to bring them into some unknown, unlived in, home.  In my heart, my mind, my memory I reconstitute an imaginary geography, a resting place for the untended dead.            I told Lorelle about my former husband one day, standing on the graves of  pioneers before Marsh Hall on the Pacific campus.  I had only been there for a few weeks, starting as a teaching associate after receiving my MFA a few months before. I didn’t know then that teaching had been hard for Lorelle after an early stroke, or that she was still recovering her physical capacity. But in that moment we exchanged something more pertinent than information—a tracing of vulnerability and mutual admiration that leads to the connection of friends.            I was raw that year.  I grew up in southern Oregon and my education has always felt inadequate compared to my colleagues with their R1 degrees and research fellowships.  I am a storyteller, an artist and writer who is missing whole chunks of early grammar and the literary canon.  Thinking of myself as an academic would mean pretending I was one… exhausting.  I’ll admit I laughed the first time someone called me Professor.  In 2007, as a teaching associate with a degree in Fiction, I’d spent much of the past decade pregnant, nursing and tending my two children.  I’d never taught a college class before, and though I knew a few faculty who were mothers, there were no other single moms in sight—which makes sense given that the university didn’t (still doesn’t) have child care.  I felt new and dumb, scared and alone.             Lorelle didn’t have children.  In the eulogy, delivered by her charismatic brother, I learned more about her than I had known in life. The truth is we were not close.  I had never met her husband or visited her home.  We didn’t socialize off campus.  She was a mentor more than a friend.             Luisia Teish says that to honor the dead you should cover a table or altar in white cloth, and place a clear glass of water with a teaspoon of strong spirits in it.  Raven Kaldera says that ancestors must be propitiated with regular offerings of food, dedications of music or flowers, and that once you start working with them you can’t stop without risking displeasure.  My children’s father is Hispanic, and each year in our household we build an ancestor altar at the cross-quarter day between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice:  the witch’s new year for my ancestors, Dia de Los Muertos for his.  We leave it up for a few weeks, or a lunar cycle and make food for the dead:  strong coffee for my grandpa Sigurd and great-grandma Louise, almond pastry for my grandma Barbara.  Each morning before I write I light the candles on the altar and speak to the dead, to let them know I am listening.            Albert Einstein said we could live as if everything was a miracle, or as if nothing was.  And as I get older I feel the truth in these words.  I could believe that the past is the past, over and done, that my ancestors and the dead I love have disappeared from this plane and will never return.  This, to me, feels shortsighted and lacking context.  When did we stop believing that those we love are with us? When did we stop bathing the bodies of our newly deceased, holding the traditional three day wakes while their souls left the earth, telling their stories, tending their graves, never leaving them in our lives alone?               In January of 2012 I was walking through downtown Portland with my partner when Lorelle called in her official capacity asking about my teaching schedule for the next year.  I told her I wouldn’t be returning.  I’d finally received a diagnosis after years of exhaustion and illness amid unrelenting transition.  I had a low-grade uterine infection, present for nearly twenty-four months.  A double course of antibiotics set me on the road to healing but I was wiped out.  Not just from the illness, but from the academic culture, the pressure to perform, the constant sense of inadequacy.            In many cultures consumption of the dead is seen as literal.  Our communities are buried in the ground, where we plant and gather food.  We are not ever separate from the dead, there is a communion, life to life.  We are not divided from the sacredness of dying, knowing we would be food for the future.            Martín Prechtel in his book The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise says, “When you have two centuries of people who have not properly grieved the things that they have lost, the grief shows up as ghosts that inhabit their grandchildren.”  I feel the ghosts of my ancestors in me like strands of cat gut, strung tight over my synapses.  They vibrate painfully in a longing for home, the desire to find a place of origin, to learn the language and songs, piece together a creative mythology that allows for a present past, a mythic present.  I know that at middle age I am just beginning my losses.  My grandmother, the youngest of twelve, lost both of her parents by the time she was twenty-five and all of her siblings by fifty.  Each day, each year is a potential for more loss.  And instead of clinging , I wish to be faith-full, full of ways to honor in each day the loved ones who are no longer flesh, crafting in community rituals that breathe the life of death into each cyclic year.                My ancestors lost and lost:  homes, lands, families, friends, languages, identities, religions.   Their lives were journeys of displacement, generational dispossession:  For Jane who arrived on the famine ships from Ireland, who lost her husband at sea and set sail again from New York to San Francisco with her infant daughter.  For Irene whose mother died in childbirth along with her twin brother, whose father died soon after, who was sent to live with relatives in Kentucky, Chicago, New Jersey.  For Frank whose parents claimed they were Catholic but may have been Jewish, fleeing from persecution in Russia to the tundra of Canada, then the harsh plains of the Dakotas, then to migrant work in almond orchards of California.            For my grandfather, Sigurd, who left Norway at the end of World War II to get an education.  The universities in Norway were decimated by the war, and receiving the news of acceptance to study chemistry in the United States felt like salvation to him. Boarding the ship to New York he didn’t realize he was saying goodbye to his homeland forever, for in the years of his absence he would meet my grandmother, marry and make the US his home.  And in that first year away at school his mother would die.  He wrote later, with pain that is tactile, even generations removed, about never seeing his mother again.          This loss, this longing is twofold:  we long for home, for place, for the landscape of knowing.  We long for people, for the home of relationship we find within them.  At the crux of these longings:  connection, durability, eternity, remembrance.          I dream of Lorelle.  In the last, months ago, she smiled at me and tapped my shoulder with one bold and manicured nail.  “You are an academic,” she said, her eyes sparking with what I miss most.  Her intelligence.  Her brain of fire.          Or maybe I didn’t dream this, I can’t find it in any of my journals.  But it is so vivid, this memory, her insistent touch.  What we lose we make again, in memory and practice we invent new philosophies, legacies and lineage.  Because if everything is a miracle, then the miraculous might bring us to what Edward P. Jones describes as, “seeing again for the first time.”          Because of that dream that was perhaps not a dream, I applied and was accepted to the PhD in Philosophy and Religion program at CIIS in San Francisco. And because of this dream I accepted a position to teach again, this year, at Pacific University.  Which is why I am squatting in this office with Lorelle in the corner.  Where she wants me to tell you what I know.         I know our dead are untended and they haunt us for it.  We wonder when we will get over it, get past the suffering and struggle.  We wonder when we will become ourselves again in the face of so much loss.  Yet the duration of our grief is centuries long, existing beyond our lifetime.  In Germany psychologists have begun vastly popular programs to treat unhealed ancestral grief, to repair rifts in the stories, to tend what was before unseen.  Lorelle had just been awarded her second Fullbright fellowship when she was diagnosed with cancer.  I don’t have all of the details, I wasn’t present at her end.  I do know the reason that I wasn’t able to visit in her last months was because the university she had devoted her life to had a practice that would remove her from the payroll if she was unable to work.  Removal from the payroll meant removal from health benefits.  So her colleagues worked a necessary subterfuge to keep Lorelle working even as she died.  Projects, projects for the dying.          She is nodding now over me, and my skin is goosebumped, my throat tight.  I come from a line of strong, courageous women, we all do, but we never get to say exactly how strong we really are.  To speak it is a risk that once bore our deaths by burning or drowning, accusations of witchcraft.  Now we risk our livelihoods, our futures by expressing what we bear.  In secret we might whisper, how did you survive that pain?           I told Lorelle about my uterine infection.  And she shared that she had Pelvic Inflammatory Disease.  We carried within us a similarity our exteriors did not show.          To admit these things openly as academics carries stigma, and already in my semester this year I feel like I don’t want to rock the boat.  In the past four years I have been self-employed, have moved twice, homeschooled my children.  With this autumn I remember how much I love teaching, it makes me feel joyful, it expands my heart.  A paycheck just made its way into my bank account and will appear again at the end of this month for the next eleven months.  My current husband and I have a dual income and health insurance for the first time in our eight-year relationship.  But as I write this I realize I can’t forgive a system that made it impossible for me to be a supported single mother and a professor, to work my way out of the poverty that early academic careers require.  And I can’t forgive a system that would take a dying woman off of her insurance policy, that would force her disabled partner to bear not just his grief but outstanding debt. Lorelle, I see you and I remember.Lorelle, I see you and I won’t forget.Is this enough?          Here in the late light of a September afternoon the ghost of my mentor, Dr. Lorelle Browning, nods her head and smiles, but mouths the word no.        When my maternal grandmother Barbara died two years ago there was talk about a celebration of life.  We had a small ceremonial acknowledgement, just my immediate family and my cousin, where we toasted and told Barbara’s stories and ate her famous fudge bar cake.  But we have yet to all come together, her children and grandchildren, strung along the West coast, to scatter her ashes and memorialize her passage.         At my graduate school residency last summer, I learned that I have deep roots on Barbara’s side in San Francisco.  My grandmother’s father grew up on Iowa Street, the son of Jane, the Irish immigrant and her second husband John, also from Ireland.  They lived in a house that was later demolished to make room for the 405.  When I booked an Air B&B in the Mission District I found myself next door to St. Peter’s Cathedral.  I felt something in the early morning air there, a dense familiarity as I walked through the district to school in SoMa each day.  It wasn’t until later I learned that St. Peter’s was the Irish community center for that part of San Francisco.  Jane, John, and their children, including my great-grandfather, walked the same streets to worship.         We know more than we know.  Somewhere in us the dead live, legions of them, in our blood and bones and cells.  I love the studies on immunological memory, on genetic transference, proving that we do not just fade out from existence but persist, in our legacy, the bodies of our descendants, neighbors, colleagues and friends.        The university bought a first folio page of Shakespeare’s –to honor Lorelle.  It will be displayed as part of the permanent collection.  I have a meeting this week with the university chaplain, to talk about creating non-religious spiritual programming for the students. Last fall I taught a class for a colleague where I had participants imagine the connection of their ancestors, as far back as they could go, roots of memory and heritage filled the earth below us humming with excitement and instruction.   A student told me this week that she studied abroad in Ireland at the urging of her ancestors in that very class.           A seed, blown, sometimes finds its way home.           This year I call on my Dísir, my sacred female ancestors, to watch over me as I endeavor to remember my beloved dead. Toward this, Lorelle, a beginning propitiation.An imperfect action.With imperfect words.**I wrote this essay in the fall and became seriously ill in December of last year, so am currently not employed--at all, let alone by Pacific University--and am no longer a student at CIIS.

Goddess Spirituality and Cultural Appropriation

This is a variation on an essay written for the CIIS Women's Spirituality PhD program in 2015.      At Winter Solstice in 2010, I began the first page of a devotional practice, of what would become The Moon Divas Guidebook, Spirited Self-Care for Women in Transition.  I sat daily at my desk, making art and writing by hand to integrate information gathered from several years of teaching self-care for women in transition—women like me, women like you.  The process was mirrored and multiple:  I was healing from transition through the creation of the book, in transition during the writing, writing about transition, and through the act of creation, preparing for transition.  My process was empowering, and I sought to share what I learned.     The Goddess was with me as I wrote, the divine feminine invoked in the statues and images on my altar (Kwan Yin, Lakshmi).  I did not yet have a specific spiritual tradition to draw from, but saw myself as spiritually eclectic, invested in the feminine divine.  I attended yoga and sang kirtan before an image of Saraswati.  I had Goddess cards for divination and Goddess books.  And I drew nourishment from each source I encountered, so starved had I been for God “in my image”.  I began to illustrate the Goddesses, and took strength from this, too.     I was conscious of the need to be culturally inclusive, so drew Goddesses from all over the globe:  Lakshmi, Yemaya, Kwan Yin, Nuestra Señora de Guadelupe, and Sedna all made their way into the book.  I draw in pen and ink, so the Goddess images could be colored in any way, envisioned with any context.  I thought of this as liberating and egalitarian.      I’ve since found that it was not.     I had a sense of uneasiness around The Moon Divas Guidebook, and I thought that came mostly from my own insecurity.  Since its publication, I barely marketed it, and though it has done well, taken on a life of its own, energetically I have always felt somehow conflicted:  Both extremely proud of my creation, and simultaneously embarrassed or shy.  A second edition was suggested, requested, but I dragged my heels.  Something in my work didn’t sit right.     Which brings me to this essay.  In July of 2015,  I was admitted to the PhD in Philosophy and Religion program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. In preparation for the first on campus intensive I ended up watching a brief film by Marina Watanabe for a class called Building Conscious Allyship with Professor Anjali Nath.  And when Watanabe said, “Cultural appropriation is basically when you take something from a culture that you don’t belong to…usually without understanding its cultural significance, and oftentimes changing its original meaning,”[1] I knew why I was so stuck with the energetic thrust of my well-received creative work:  due to my best intentions at cultural inclusivity, part of my book was appropriative.     A brief interlude and audience clarification:  I first wrote this essay for my Building Conscious Allyship class, but decided in the revision process to expand my audience and share my process of learning.  I first had to understand the role of allyship in a deeper way than soundbites and lawn signs.     In the article “Aspiring Social Justice Ally Identity Development,” Keith E. Edwards defines social justice allies as, “members of dominant social groups who are working to end the system of oppression that gives them greater privilege and power based on their social group membership.”[2] Allyship is complex and imperfect, and some of the intentions of the course—and as a product, this essay—were to create dialogue, examine intersections and develop tools to “build meaningful solidarity.”[3]  One of the questions I’ve entertained in regard to my own work as an artist is how to build solidarity with communities I am not a part of, and engage in liberation for all. Post interlude, audience clarified:  I’d like to highlight the “best intentions” I mentioned earlier with regard to the mindful creation of my book.  In intentionally crafting a multi-cultural pantheon for my Moon Divas Guidebook, I was not interested in solidarity or social justice work. I was an “aspiring ally for altruism,”[4] invested in representing people of color and differing ethnic and spiritual backgrounds, hoping of offer more women a way to feel comfortable with the divine feminine in the form of the Goddess.  Aspiring allies for altruism, according to Edwards, are motivated by the “other—I do this for them.”[5]  I was creating Goddesses from cultures outside my own as a perceived service, with no direct relationship with those Goddess centered communities.  As I write this, it looks strange to me.  The intention itself—to portray multicultural Goddesses--is obscured by the impact of my ignorance about the very cultures the Goddesses come from.  Acknowledging this error of intention was my first step on the path to an allyship of liberation.      As I began to explore my relationship to the Goddesses of the Guidebook in terms of allyship, I made a second discovery:  I had been drawing Goddesses who are actively worshipped, from traditions such as Hinduism, Santería and Buddhism. In my privilege and ignorance I took the symbol of living Goddess traditions and added them to my “collection.”  Changing their significance, using them for my own purposes.In examining the Goddess drawings I was forced to ask:What is the artist’s obligation in spiritual solidarity? How can the artist be accountable to the function and propriety of her art? How do we handle attraction to cultures and traditions that are not our own? What is the solidarity response to acknowledging unintentional cultural appropriation? What are the arguments against acknowledgment of artistic cultural appropriation?The Past and Our Future     Wendell Berry says, “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.” And I would posit, that if you don’t know where you are from, you can’t know where you belong.When I wrote The Moon Divas Guidebook I was unaware of the spiritual-shamanic traditions present in my own Celtic-Germanic-Slavic heritage.  About a year after the book was published I encountered the resonance in my bones:  I am also from people of the earth, and the traditions of my ancestors might be fragmented, feared and long hidden but they still exist.     Like Andi Mac Donald in her essay, “Why I Stopped Teaching Yoga,” “the process of starting to trace back my family’s origins has led me to see the way that many Americans of European descent have lost touch with exactly what so many of us are seeking.”[6]  My early illustration of Freyja lays bare my ignorance at my own spiritual roots.I have drawn her as a young girl, holding a cartoon cat, her chariot emblazoned with Odin’s Valknut.  From the art I can see that Freyja is not fully real in my understanding, but she would come to be.     A Google search for Freyja turns out all kinds of sexualized, stereotypical images.  Freyja oozing over her armored bikini, Freyja in a skin G-string with a panther and a sword.Some of these fantasy images are by participants in the northern European spiritual tradition (another discussion: patriarchy and heathenry) but most are not.You can find similar appropriative images of Goddesses in nearly every spiritual tradition.I should clarify here that I am not speaking to critical work created by artists a culture or tradition, such as Alma Lopez, Mexican born queer Chicana artist and her series.[7] With entire artistic traditions devoted to appropriation,[8] how can we as artists be aware of, and thus avoid, appropriation?            Another interlude—this conversation should not prevent exploration!  Just exploitation…Knowing where you are from, understanding the traditions of your ancestors is possible for some of us, but not for all.Choosing to follow a spiritual tradition because it answers a soul calling, choosing to draw a Goddess because she is appearing to you in dreams, these are not appropriative behaviors.  Since my coursework and class are spiritual, there is an open space in this discussion of allyship for spiritual exploration.Sometimes our attraction to stories in other traditions can lead us to the stories of our ancestors. Our largely secular American culture is hungry for spiritual possibility and the transformation of religious oppression.Sometimes the ancestors of another tradition can lead us to solidarity work with communities to which we do not ourselves belong.In the essay “We Are All Works in Progress,” Leslie Feinberg writes of trans liberation, “How can we forge a movement that can bring about a profound and lasting change—a movement capable of transforming society?These questions can only be answered when we begin to organize together, ready to struggle on each other’s behalf.  Understanding each other will compel us as honest caring people to fight each other’s oppression as though it were our own.”[9]     But how can we understand each other when we don’t even know how to identify oppressive behaviors?  In the video that initiated my awakening, Watanabe gives a list of questions influenced by Richard A. Rogers, to ask when approaching the symbols of a culture you don’t belong to:"Is it a genuine representation? Is it a sacred item like a Native American headdress or part of a sacred tradition or ritual? Who wears the item or participates in the tradition? Is it just anybody, or is it respected members of the community that have to go through a specific process in order to gain access to it?   Is it from a group that has been historically discriminated against? Might that group still be discriminated against today? Does the representation of the culture promote an exaggerated or a negative stereotype?"[10]          When I first examined The Moon Divas Guidebook Goddesses in the context of Watanabe’s questions, I felt hopeless and ashamed.  Facing me further into accountability was Edwards assertion that, “Aspiring Allies for Altruism seek to empower members of the oppressed group, which maintains some credit and some control in the person doing the empowering rather than encouraging and supporting members of the oppressed group to empower themselves.”[11]         This is where I acknowledge both my whiteness and my privilege.  In America, in the Pacific Northwest, a woman who is racialized as white, like myself, can pick and choose what spiritual traditions to draw from.  That I can do so without question--no one in the thousands of people who have bought or downloaded the first edition of my book have ever brought the issue of spiritual appropriation to my attention—is direct evidence of my privilege and the cultural acceptability of this appropriative practice.  As Linda Donaldson says in her essay, “On Medicine Women and White Shame-ans,”  “New Age Native Americanism”…referred to as NANA…”has emerged as a powerful catalyst for feminist transformation as non-Native women increasingly employ Indian traditions…to become empowered, as well as individuated.”[12]            I see this all the time in the culture I live in.  With the rejection of traditional patriarchal spiritual traditions, women who are racialized as white have become appropriative.  A topic for another paper is how perhaps cellular memory or genetic trauma prevents women who are racialized as white from investigating pre-historical spiritual traditions from European cultures, or blocks them from even knowing that indigenous European traditions exist.  Instead, in the homes of the women I work with and circle to, there are altars to Hindu Goddesses and Gods, Native American spiritual sayings on the walls, Buddhist prayer flags in the front yard.  I know this intimately, it was my path too, a mix and match philosophy: take what you can from wherever you wish. The Divine Feminine in all of her aspects, a symbol here, a prayer there. This is the definition of spiritual privilege. It also leaves many of us aching, empty and fragmented, willing to claim (exploit, purchase, display) the other outside us but not our whole complicated selves.            In the film On Orientalism, Edward Said speaks to the challenge of stasis, of creating an “image outside history, of something that is placid, still and eternal…in one sense you might say it is the creation of…an ideal other.”[13]  With our own traditions off limits due to the horrors and oppressions of the past, women racialized as white pluck spiritual symbols and practices that are commercially available, exoticized and othered within the confines of a racialized white capitalist culture.  We trade one history of oppression for another and call it spirituality.             Here in my privilege I will say, I didn’t know any better.  But confessing privilege and hiding behind ignorance are not excuses, rather they are keys that unlock a door of knowing.  Michael Schwalbe explores in “The Costs of American Privilege,” “It’s a predictable consequence of privilege…American privilege brings with it the luxury of obliviousness.”[14] He continues, “We also bear the cost of limiting our own humanity.  To be human is to be able to extend compassion to others, to empathize with them, and to reflect honestly on how they are affected by our actions.”[15]  The intention of conscious allyship is joyful and has the potential to bring an expansion of our humanity, our compassion, and to open our awareness to the very real issues of oppression that hurt us all.            Seeing my own appropriation of spiritual traditions through my art, in practice, has offered me an opportunity for atonement and recalibration.  I will say I could not have arrived here without first encountering my own lineage based spiritual tradition, without the confrontation of my own cellular trauma and grief at confronting the witch burnings, centuries of women who practiced earth based, indigenous spiritual traditions, annihilated in Europe.  To have this awareness allows me to be in continuity with the past of my people—a past fraught with the same structures and systems of oppression that continue today—and make continual effort toward healing and realignment.            What does this look like as an artist?            First, a story.            Once I began the journey to understanding the spiritual lineage of my ancestors, I also became intrigued by the concepts of personal gnosis and spiritual creation, the idea that in a shattered tradition, we can begin to connect with the wisdom inherent in us and draw sustenance from a co-creative spiritual existence.  I began drawing Goddesses again, but this time they were based on my own gnosis of spirit in place.            Drawing the pictures was easy.  Naming them was difficult.  The dominance of English, the very shapes of our letters, these carry a weight of diminishment, homogenization and linguistic oppression visible in our “English only” American culture.  I need a new language for what I feel, for the spiritual traditions I am co-creating with divinity in the now, but I’m not quite there yet.            I thought for a time that I would be able to use these new place portraits as a replacement for the multi-cultural appropriative Goddesses.  But I see the fallacy now in this potential, too.  My gnosis Goddesses do much to claim and inform a possible individual place-based spirituality, but they do little to redefine an ethic of social justice solidarity.   If we as women are going to ever transform the systems of oppression that subvert both us and our ecological home, we will have to build a new ethos.  Together.            Bernice Reagon Johnson says, “We’ve pretty much come to the end of a time when you can have a space that is “yours only”—just for the people you want to be there.”[16]  And I think that is what I’ve come to acknowledge in my artistic obligation as well.  In introducing women to the Goddess, they need to meet the Goddesses of many traditions, ancient and modern, to see their own lineage reflected in their features and rituals, to understand that old myths and new myths are available to us all.  In the interest of progression, I am taking action.            The praxis:Step One            I removed all of the Goddesses I have identified as appropriative from my website and associated social media accounts.  I have created a new edition of The Moon Divas Guidebook that explains my learning about cultural appropriation and replaces appropriative Goddesses with those from my own spiritual tradition.             I included information in the new edition of the Guidebook about cultural appropriation, and set an intention to collaborate in the future with artists from other spiritual traditions.**Step Two     I have realized through the process of writing this essay, that the primary strength for me in expanding my understanding of appropriation is the investigation of my own spiritual lineage.  I believe the traditions that attracted me initially were a doorway for inquiry about my own ancestry, and there is a debt of awareness I owe to the deities and symbols of all traditions, even those I am a part of.  Spirit requires tending, education, respect.  My Moon Divas Guidebook drawing of Freyja is a perfect example:  even though Freyja is from my direct ancestral spiritual tradition, my lack of inquiry limited my approach of her, and thus my artistic representation was limited as well.This past week I began to draw a new portrait of Freyja, based on three years of intensive study in the northern European spiritual tradition.  She is no longer an archetype, a psychological container, but a living Goddess, one I pray with and write to.  My understanding of her is shaped by story, but also history, independent research I’ve been conducting which fleshes her potency and legacy.  Freyja is the originator of magic, the Lady of the Vanir—older earth gods with a possible connection to not just the Germanic tribes but the Saami.[18]  She feasts heroes in her own hall, and practices customs more ancient than those of the Aesir.  In my new drawing she carries the staff of the völva, the Norse witch, and her face is simultaneously ancient and young.  The cat fur of her hood and feathered falcon cloak are symbolic of her magical power, and the runic formula on her skin is the net of wyrd—of fate—that obscures her true nature.  For an understanding of any Goddess is by necessity incomplete.  I could draw Freyja for the rest of my life and capture only a fraction of her lore, but through dedicated practice I may come to a fuller comprehension of her divinity.     By sharing my journey to the Goddesses of my ancestors, and questioning the commodification of spirituality in any form, I hope to open the way for others to do the same.  I do so here not as an expert, some perfect artist ally or practitioner.  I am a seeker.  I seek equity, justice, and solidarity.  I seek spiritual freedom and a return to earth-based, earth-honoring systems that shift our culture away from capitalist, white supremacist patriarchy.  The more research I do into the death of pagan/heathen traditions in Europe, the more clues I uncover as to the source of the illness inherent in modern culture.  The privatization of land, the destruction of European tribal communities, the commodification of work all shifted power into the hands of the few.  The witch hunts in Europe paralleled the colonization of the Americas and the creation of slavery in a timeline of horrific change.  The creation of whiteness and blackness, the disequity in modern gender relations, the exploitation of the earth for resources, the consolidation of power for the few--all intersects at that time.  Atrocity has a rotten, ancient root.  It begins with division from the land and each other.  It begins in a spiritual perception of separateness.     Artistic rendering is a process of learning, and spiritual art practice is about discovery. Discovering my own role in cultural appropriation is not about being wrong.  There is no room for shame or guilt in learning.  Shame and guilt are part of oppressive dualistic structures that perpetuate horrors upon us all.  I wish to claim responsibility for my learning processes, specifically with regard to spirituality and appropriation, as part of a long and winding educational life.  I wish to realign my art with an ever-developing ethic of liberation, and to continue to create in an effort toward cultural exchange.May the balance be regained.Notes**This project has been put on hold due to my precarious health, but if you are an artist and work with the Goddess please feel free to reach out to me.  I would love to connect for the future.[1] Marina Watanabe, “What Exactly is Cultural Appropriation & How is it Harmful?” Everyday Feminism.  October 15, 2015. http://everydayfeminism.com/2014/12/w... what is cultural appropriation[2] Keith Edwards,  “Aspiring Social Justice Ally Identity Development: A Conceptual Model,” NASPA Journal vol. 43, no. 4 (2006): 47.[3] Anjali Nath, “Building Conscious Allyship” (syllabus, CIIS, San Francisco, CA, 2015).[4] Edwards, “Aspiring Social Justice Ally Identity Development:  A Conceptual Model,” 41.[5] Edwards, “Aspiring Social Justice Ally Identity Development:  A Conceptual Model,”47.[6] Andi Mac Donald.  “Why I Stopped Teaching Yoga—My journey into spiritual, political accountability,” Moonlit Moth (blog), November 14, 2014, https://moonlitmoth.wordpress.com/201... Alma Lopez.  “Our Lady of Controversy,” Alma Lopez, October 15, 2015, http://almalopez.net/ORindex.html.[8] MOMA Learning, “Appropriation” Museum of Modern Art, Ocotber 15, 2015, https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learn... Leslie Feinberg, “We Are All Works In Progress.” In Readings for Diversity and Social Justice, 3rd ed., ed. Maurianne Adams et al (New York: Routledge, 2010), 447.[10] Watanabe, “What is Cultural Appropriation”[11] Keith Edwards, “Aspiring Social Justice Ally Identity Development:  A Conceptual Model,” NASPA Journal Vol. 43, No. 4 (2006): 50.[12] Laura E. Donaldson, “On Medicine Women and White Shame-ans:  New Age Native Americanism and Commodity Fetishism as Pop Culture Feminism,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society vol. 24, no. 3 (1999): 678.[13] Edward W. Said,“Edward Said On Orientalism,” Media Education Foundation, Northampton, MA: 1998, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVC8E... Michael Schwalbe, “The Costs of American Privilege,” in The Matrix Reader, eds. Abby Ferber, Christina M. Jiménez, Andrea O’Reilly Herrera, Dena R. Samuels (Colorado Springs: University of Colorado, 2009), 189.[15] Schwalbe 190[16] Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Coalition Politics, Turning the Century,”358. (File received for Building Conscious Allyship class, Professor Anjali Nath, San Francisco, CA, August 29, 2015.)[17] Edwards, “Aspiring Social Justice Ally Identity Development,” 47.[18] Christie L. Ward, “Women and Magic in the Sagas: Seiðr and Spá.” The Viking Answer Lady. November 23, 2015.  http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/seidh..., Laura E. “On Medicine Women and White Shame-ans:  New Age Native Americanism and Commodity Fetishism as Pop Culture Feminism.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society vol. 24, no. 3 (1999).Echo-Hawk, Walter R. “Native American Religious Liberty Five Hundred Years After Columbus.” In The Matrix Reader, eds. Abby Ferber, Christina M. Jiménez, Andrea O’Reilly Herrera, Dena R. Samuels (Colorado Springs: University of Colorado, 2009), 277.Edwards, Keith.  “Aspiring Social Justice Ally Identity Development:  A Conceptual Model.” NASPA Journal Vol. 43, No. 4 (2006).Feinberg, Leslie.  "We Are All Works In Progress." In Readings for Diversity and Social Justice, 3rd ed., edited by Maurianne Adams, Warren J. Blumenfeld, Carmelita (Rosie) Castaneda, Heather W. Hackman, Madeline L. Peters, and Ximena Zuniga, 447.  New York: Routledge, 2010.Lopez, Alma.  “Our Lady of Controversy.” Alma Lopez, October 15, 2015, http://almalopez.net/ORindex.html.Lorde, Audre.  “The Uses of Anger:  Women Responding to Racism.” Sister Outsider. (File received in Building Conscious Allyship with Professor Anjali Nath, San Francisco, CA, August 29, 2015.)Mac Donald, Andi.  “Why I Stopped Teaching Yoga—My journey into spiritual, political accountability.” Moonlit Moth (blog), November 14, 2014, https://moonlitmoth.wordpress.com/201... Learning, “Appropriation” Museum of Modern Art, Ocotber 15, 2015, https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learn..., Anjali. “Building Conscious Allyship” (syllabus, CIIS, San Francisco, CA, 2015).Reagon, Bernice Johnson. “Coalition Politics, Turning the Century.” (File received in Building Conscious Allyship class with Professor Anjali Nath, San Francisco, CA, August 29, 2015.)Said, Edward W. “Edward Said On Orientalism.” Media Education Foundation, Northampton, MA: 1998, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVC8E..., Michael. “The Costs of American Privilege.” In The Matrix Reader, eds. Abby Ferber, Christina M. Jiménez, Andrea O’Reilly Herrera, Dena R. Samuels (Colorado Springs: University of Colorado, 2009).Ward, Christie L. “Women and Magic in the Sagas: Seiðr and Spá.” The Viking Answer Lady. November 23, 2015. http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/seidh..., Marina. “What Exactly is Cultural Appropriation & How is it Harmful?” Everyday Feminism.  October 15, 2015.  http://everydayfeminism.com/2014/12/w... what is cultural appropriation.

Blood Stories

We begin to bleed in bedrooms, on subways, in soup kitchens and dentist office lines.  We begin with secret exaltation, rereading sections of Our Bodies, Ourselves, checking out our budding breasts for exponential growth.  We receive a day of long knowledge from our aunties or grandmothers, and each new moon we peek into our underwear, waiting for the sign that we are grown.  We gather in school restrooms and ask for tampons and pads with new pride.  Our mothers bake us cakes.  Our fathers buy us earrings the size and shape of a hummingbird’s heart.  We gather in glens with our other sisters, our sweethearts, our menstruating friends and picnic on red foods until the sun lines the summer grass all gold and we release our childhood to the emptiness of dreams.Or we begin to bleed in secret, hiding the kotex slipped from the nurse room in the elementary school.  Seven, eight, nine years old and unprepared, now we hear the whispered talk of urban environments and hormones in food.  Somewhere in our collective closet there are the pale pink shorts with the dark brown stains, or the white dress we wore with careless pride until the boys in the lunchroom began pelting us with spaghetti sauce and yelling, “period!”  Or holding their noses as we walk by.  Or leaving notes in our locker filled with words we hate to even touch.  Or it could be that no one knows we bleed because we approached our parents with concern and were met with bitter indifference.  A violent shove into the bathroom—always we are in the bathroom bleeding and we will know bathrooms for the rest of our lives, even at thirty-seven with three children and our partner urging us to the port-a-potty rather than returning to the coffee shop again, the portable toilet where we will have to squat and remove and unwrap and reinsert a tampon posed like some ancient birthing goddess or exotic bird over a sea of shit below.  In the bathroom of our early-bleeding childhood we will receive no instruction just awkward words of discomfort, from our mother who hates her body, from our father who really wishes in these moments that he was not a single parent.  Alone in bathrooms we bleed witness, our isolation as women in the gathering dusk.We bleed for years.  In high school we bleed onto the satin interior of a borrowed sleeping bag the first time we have sex with the boyfriend, J, whose hair hangs down like raven wings, whose teeth shine gently feral in the dark.  We are one tent away from our best friend and three boys we hardly know.  It is still daylight, midsummer, but we can wait no longer to divest ourselves of this virginity.  We feel brief pain, some pleasure, and pretend to come.  After, he washes us in the campground shower, soaping so gently between our thighs that we might break open.  Clean, warm, we join the others at the campfire and talk openly in a way we will wish for in every other relationship for the rest of our lives, the innocence of figuring, of learning by doing.  Sex is like that for us, but maybe never again, maybe never exactly as free as that moment, that first blood.We bleed with boyfriends after J, boyfriends who care about bleeding, who are aroused by it.  We also bleed with boys who are repulsed, who (again with the smells!) urge us to cleanliness, to Depo Provera and Nuva Ring eliminating the messiness of our bodies.  And give us chest pain, shortness of breath, thirty pounds of weight, acne, and some sort of temporary mental illness—depression, anxiety, seething self-hatred that doesn’t abate, that becomes lines on our arms and deep pits as we pick apart our imperfections.  When those boyfriends are gone, the synthetic hormones leached from our system by a long dry spell, we vow to not have sex with anyone we don’t love, abandon birth control entirely and take up new hobbies like smoking pot and knitting.  We begin to feel slightly like ourselves again.We bleed in college.  We bleed and we read Susan Griffin.  We read bell hooks.  We read Betty Friedan.  We listen to riot girrls and buy zines.   We bleed in collective, in a house of women.  We bleed in unison, someone alpha and the rest of us cycling along.  We hunger for the company of women, the candor and power.  We recognize an anger in our blood, a searing pain.  The word feminist isn’t shaped to fit us exactly yet, but without embracing it where else can we go?  Our male Yale-educated professor, the one we admire and wish would recognize us for the intelligent capable academic stars we are, tells us that our blood keeps us from leadership.  That the cycle of emotion and challenge of our blood is inexcusable in governing officials, in CEOs, in literary writers, in all positions of great power.  That if we want to be equals we must subvert our biology.  We must castrate the feminine.We leave academia for a long time after that.  We seek the world where we may bleed and have power.  We do not believe, cannot really know yet, or maybe ever, that our blood is power.   We fear ourselves, but long for something to embrace our wholeness.Maybe the world scares us.  Maybe our future scares us.  Maybe we graduate and hold a series of low-paying, low-prestige jobs.  Maybe our artistic aspirations fail us.  Maybe we are rejected by small presses and graduate programs.  Maybe we have forgotten how to have dreams.  Maybe we have never met a woman whose life and career we deeply admire.Maybe we fall in love.  Maybe, we think, with determined will, love can be enough.Maybe we get married.Maybe we become mothers.But not right away.  With the intent of conception, for the first time ever in our lives our cycle has a purpose, a biological imperative.  It makes sense!  We bleed because we ovulate, though why that information was left out of the sixth grade tutorial movie complete with advertisements from Stayfree and Midol, we may never know.  We discover middleschmertz, Christiane Northrup, cycle calculators and ovulation predictors.  We tend our ovaries and wombs like gardens in miniature.  We fall asleep at night with a hand over our uterine heart.When at last the stickiness of ovulatory mucus meets the fluid ejaculate of a lover or husband or inseminatory tool, life miraculously forms.We bleed into form, into being and bone.Into birth, some of us bleed gallons.  Blood of placenta, of hemorrhage, of Caesarean cut, of wonder and great pain.  After birth we feel vulnerable.  We feel invincible.  We feel something approaching only awe.  For every human ever living in this world was born, was carried in a mother’s womb, brought to be only through a mother’s blood.And maybe as we hold our daughters and sons still sweet with the warmth of our own bodies, we remember the summer before our blood began.  Maybe we all can remember running through grass near a creek with Joey and Angie and our little brothers, our shirts tied around our heads, long sticks protruding from cutoff shorts, the stars swirling in multiple dimensions above our tangled limbs. Maybe we remember breaking from the pack of kids, climbing the antique apple tree, branches half-denuded by blight, offering us a clear view of the fields below.  Our skin throbbing with bruises and scrapes earned in the daylong battle.  The air of the night a soft pulse, out in the distance there is music and noise from the adult world at the house.  But we are not yet of that world. We feel expanded, a part instead of everything else—stars, night, tree, grass, water, earth.  We breathe and catch the rhythm of our heart.  We breathe and feel the bare open nature of our bodies.  We are one with everything that matters, until the evening empties and our mother calls our name.(This story was first published inLiterary Mama in 2013.

13 Days of Ritual Practice

 In honor of Litha, the summer solstice I've updated my free offering at the Wild Soul School.  Formerly 13 Days of Self-Care it is now13 Days: a Ritual Practice.  If you begin tomorrow, you harness both the lunar (full moon on Friday) and solar energy as the 13 days progress.  To participate, just follow the link below and register at the Wild Soul School.  There are daily prompts, writing exercises, meditations and free downloads.  To enrich and enliven your practice, post your practice record on Instagram and tag it #13days.  I'll be sharing tagged photos in the days ahead.To the cycles, the seasons, the ancestral, and the sacred creative:REGISTER HERE FOR 13 DAYS: A RITUAL PRACTICE

Gullveig/Hei∂ and the Birth of Witchcraft in the North

This is the full text of an essay I wrote for the CIIS Women's Spirituality PhD program in 2016.  Health reasons have forced me to leave the program, but I am sharing some of the work I completed in the interest of opening.  I would change some of this essay today, in light of new information from Max Dashú's Book Witches and Pagans, Women in European Folk Religion which covers Gullveig and the Völuspá in depth and was not published at the time of my writing.  I also have found the work of Marija Gimbutas and Silvia Federici to be particularly helpful.  THRICE BURNED AND YET SHE LIVES: CLAIMING THE RUNIC FEMININENow she remembers the war,The first in the world,When GullveigWas studded with spears,And in the hall of the High OneShe was burned;Thrice burned,Thrice reborn,Often, many times,And yet she lives.She was called HeiðrWhen she came to a house,The witch who saw many things,She enchanted wands;She enchanted and divined what she could,In a trance she practiced seidrrr,And brought delightTo evil women.--The Poetic Edda, Völuspá[1]Forward     This is not a paper.  It is a story.  And like all stories of mythic time, it has no beginning and no end.  As usual, living in perceived non-mythic time, I worry about making the story right, about remembering all of the elements that I am “supposed” to incorporate.  As a student new to the study of archaeomythology, I am confronted with a set of “working assumptions”[2] developed by Joan Marler based on the work of Marija Gimbutas.  Each assumption could take me in a thousand different directions, and choosing to focus on the fragments and fractures of northern European spiritual symbols feels overwhelming even as I write these words.     Marler defines Gimbutas’ archaeomythology as, A discipline that covers such vast territory is intimidating, for I feel I have barely begun over this semester to scratch the surface of interlocking layers, specifically with regard to my subject:  the fractured esoteric and religious traditions of northern Europe, defined here as modern Scandinavia, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland and the British Isles.[3]     Yet when I sink into the dream of my ancestors, the curators and creators of these ancient artifacts, the runes, whose histories I seek, they laugh at my right and wrong.  They say, “There is no one way, there is only the way.”  Therefore I ask to honor them, these ancient peoples, their memory, with this work.  And I dedicate this writing to Gullveig, the thrice-burned Goddess whose transformative murder in the Poetic Edda attests to the magical power of women in prehistoric northern Europe.  Explorations of Gullveig ‘s story illuminate my own standpoint as a feminist scholar and seeker of northern European spirituality.  It is through personal relationship with the runes that I have come upon the thread of their origins.  It is through speaking the story of Gullveig that still she lives.            With permission from the ancestors I seek to narrow the scope of my viewing and look at Joan Marler’s four working assumptions of archaeomythology as detailed by Professor Mara Keller:1.  Sacred cosmologies are central to the cultural fabric of all early societies.2.  Beliefs and rituals expressing sacred worldviews are conservative and not easily changed.3.  Many archaic cultural patterns have survived into the historical period as folk motifs and as mythic elements within oral, visual and ritual traditions.4.  Symbols, preserved in cultural artifacts, “represent the grammar and syntax of a kind of meta-language by which an entire constellation of meanings is transmitted.”[4]      For the purposes of this paper I will be focusing on the last two assumptions in my investigations:  the surviving cultural patterns recorded in the historic Norse myths, and the symbols preserved in northern European archaeology and folklore.  It is from this symbolic fabric that my own journey with the runes begins, and where intersections may be found beyond the datable artifacts of recorded history, into the dust-blurred realms of pre-history, where symbols correspond the deep cultures of Old Europe as defined by Marija Gimbutas.[5]  Gimbutas looks to the Neolithic in her vast study of Old European civilization, focusing on, “the peoples who inhabited Europe from the 7th to the 3rd millennia BC…referring to Neolithic Europe before the Indo-Europeans.”[6]    As I trace back through time before the Vikings, before the Eddas, the Christian transcribed myths of northern Europe written in 13th Century Iceland, before the rune stones, my intuition pricks and my ancestors follow chill fingers up my spine.  There is something, here, waiting to be known.     Or, as my teacher Ingrid says:“Before the Vikings, before the Christians, before Odin and Thor....the Runes were.”[7]From Whence, the Runes     My mother has a pendant inscribed in runes from her father’s hometown of Bergen, Norway.  On one side it bears an engraving of a spinning wheel, on the other mysterious writing that captivated me as a child.  In early college I paid a student of languages to translate the pendant for me.  It was written not in new Norwegian, but in Old Norse and read, “Lake, River, Mountain, Norway.”  I thought the words lovely, if pedestrian.  I didn’t know that each letter was a rune, each symbol more than a word, but rather a “secret or whispered mystery”[8].  It would be nearly two decades before the runes would come into my life as beings and creatures that sing songs and inform.     Modern scholars have puzzled at the origins of the runes.  There is a conflict in the interpretation of the runes, for they are seen as either a pragmatic alphabet or a magical, ritual tool.[9]  Logical conclusions run that runes were both.  Adrian Poruciuc writes, “Much of the mystery that surrounds runes is actually due to the failure of practically all attempts at establishing where, when and by whom runes were “invented.””[10]     Amid such flummoxing resistance to a developmental timeline, archaeological evidence appears to be equally obscure.  The generally accepted oldest datable (and translatable) runic inscription on an archaeological object is on the Vimose comb from 160 CE Denmark,[11] which appears to bear the name of the comber.  And an earlier find, the Meldorf fibula, from 50 CE in North Germany, is possibly a runic inscription…or proto-runic…or Roman,[12] the arguments prevail in the absence of evidence.     In looking for the origins of the runes, I turn then to mythology for a clue as to where to pick up a trail deep and historically cold.  In the Hávamál, a poem from the Elder Poetic Edda recorded 13th Century CE Iceland, the runes are attributed to a “taking” by the god Odin after sacrifice:I know that I hungOn the wind-blasted treeAll of nights nine,Pierced by my spearAnd given to Odin,Myself sacrificed to myselfOn that poleOf which none knowWhere its roots run.No aid I received,Not even a sip from the horn.Peering down,I took up the runes –Screaming I grasped them –Then I fell back from there.[13]  And this is where the story begins to turn on itself, becoming a cycle in mythic time, an exercise in simultaneity rather than linearity.  For the Hávamál poem is known as, “The Words of the High One”[14], and that high one is Odin, the all father, the sacrificial god.  Where he takes the runes from may speak to their origins more fully than any allowable evidence, and may afford a continuity, a connection between the sacred symbols of past civilizations.  I would argue that the origins of the runes are neither linguistic or exclusively mythic, but sacred feminine magic, held in the trust-memory of pre-historic, Old European civilizations.  Their origins and functions have been long obscured.   But in order to parallel the runes with both magic and the sacred feminine, there is another aspect of the tale.  This is where I find the runes in my own life, again. Runic Mysteries and Skara Brae     I may have arrived faster to the runes had I been more brave.  In 1998 I traveled to Europe alone, a pilgrimage to the home of my dead grandfather, Sigurd Rosenlund, in Norway. I was supposed to arrive in London, then take a bus tour through England and Scotland, ending in the Orkney islands where there is a ferry direct to Bergen.  But at the last minute I canceled.  It was my first time traveling alone.  I was twenty-three.  I was afraid.     Fast forward through linear time: I met my teacher Ingrid Kincaid, who calls herself The Rune Woman, in 2013.  Through classes and in-depth gnosis work I developed a powerful relationship with the runes, seeing them as individual beings, in the same way each letter is both a symbol and a sound, each rune is the keeper of information.      Last year an art commission from Ingrid drew me to the Orkney Islands again and it is there I found in Skara Brae the evidence I sought linking the runes to a deeper history than the Vikings or the Eddas, the comb or the fibula.  Skara Brae is a Neolithic settlement in the Orkney Islands inhabited from 3200 BCE to 2200 BCE.[15]  This time frame falls partially within the Old European definition of Gimbutas, though outside of the Old European geographical area typically viewed as southern continental Europe.  What drew my attention to this particular complex was the presence of “pre-runic” writing.  As I looked closely at the symbols carved at Skara Brae I recognized not just “pre-runic” markings, but runes. [16]     I had the same feeling of revelation when earlier this semester I saw the diagram of Old European script from Gimbutas’ book, Civilizations of the Goddess.  Embedded in the ancient symbolic language of Old Europe are the distinct shapes of multiple runes, as well as numerous markings that parallel those at Skara Brae.   [17]     In his article, “Old European Echoes in Germanic Runes?” Adrian Poruciuc explores the parallels between the runes and the symbol systems of Old Europe, but resists the linearity/logical theory of development for the runic symbolic alphabet.  “Runologists should give up striving to discover a single origin for the Germanic runic script and to view that script as only alphabetic.”[18]  He cites the use of runes for divination as part of a broader, symbolic understanding rooted in a magical or sacred context, and parallels many of the rune signs with the Old European script.[19]     When I view the ancient script of Old Europe beside the pre-runic symbols of Skara Brae, something stirs in my cells.  There is a story here.  A story the stones carry.     One further artifact from the Orkney Islands is worth mentioning.  This from the excavation at the Links of Notland.  A tiny human shaped figurine, some 5000 years old.  Her body marked with circles for breasts, and a deep V between them.  They call her the Orkney Venus.[20]  She is the oldest Neolithic human figure discovered in northern Europe.  And she is distinctly female. The Runes and the Goddess       If the runes are a magical symbol system from Old European culture, then we must turn to the stories, the myths, to further ground ourselves into Marler’s fourth working assumption about archaeomythology.  For myths and stories contain sacred symbols, and these too can help us to create a fuller view of lost or obscured worlds.  In looking to the myths, I ask:  what is the relationship of the feminine to magic in the ancient northern European spiritual traditions?  Is there evidence in the myths to support a transitional relationship between the pre-Indo European cultures of northern Europe and the cultures of pre-Indo European Old Europe?  To attempt an understanding we turn to explore the ancient threads of the feminine through textual mythology, particularly looking at the stories of the Aesir-Vanir War, The Völva, The Norns, and Gullvieg to try to establish the origins of the runes and their relationship to the feminine.  I begin with the storyteller, the potent memory of female magic in ancient northern European culture.The Völva     In the Völuspá poem from the Poetic Edda, Odin calls forth a Völva, a witch or seer, from her grave.  According to Max Dashú the word völva comes from, “Valr:  The Norse name for a ritual staff, valr, gave rise to völva and vala, names for female shamans.”[21]  This Völva is ancient, of the race of giants, or Jotun, old enough to remember the beginning of the world, the history of all the nine worlds and all the races:I remember yet | the giants of yore,Who gave me bread | in the days gone by;Nine worlds I knew, | the nine in the treeWith mighty roots | beneath the mold.[22]     That the Völva comes from an ancient race that existed prior to Odin’s race of gods, the Aesir, is significant in our search for runic origins, as is the practice of seidr, or shamanic magic, both by Odin and the Völva in the Voluspá.    In the Yngling Saga it is written, “Njord's daughter Freyja was priestess of the sacrifices (sei∂r), and first taught the Asaland people the magic art, as it was in use and fashion among the Vanaland people.”[23]  In an interesting twist, if Freyja is practiced in the magic arts, she may be a descendant of the Völva Odin wakes by the very magic Freyja teaches him.     The Goddess Freyja is one of the Vanir, a race of gods whose name may etymologically be rooted in words meaning “friend,” “pleasure,” or “desire,” and are often associated with fertility, divination and magic.[24] Odin is one of the Aesir, a word of questionable origin and the center of a debate about who are the elder gods in the Norse pantheon.  Snorri Sturluson, scribe of the Sagas and Prose Edda in the 13th century, cites the origin of the word Aesir as Ásía, “the Old Norse word for Asia,”[25] which has its uses in the discussion to follow though it is in much debate.   The Aesir are referred to as the high gods, or sky gods, and occupy a different realm in the Nine Worlds than the Vanir.  The war between the Aesir and the Vanir is described in the Völuspá by the Völva:  Now she remembers the wars, the first in the world.[26]  That the ancient seeress from the race of Giants would remember the first of all wars is not in itself significant, but the fact that war did not always exist, but had a “first”, and her memory of the cause of the war, is incredibly important.  This brings us to Gullveig, source of the first war, and feminine magic. Now she remembers the war,The first in the world,When GullveigWas studded with spears,And in the hall of the High OneShe was burned;Thrice burned,Thrice reborn,Often, many times,And yet she lives.She was called HeiðrWhen she came to a house,The witch who saw many things,She enchanted wands;She enchanted and divined what she could,In a trance she practiced sei∂r,And brought delightTo evil women.[27]     The source of the Aesir-Vanir war was the abuse and burning of the Vanir goddess Gullveig.  “In the Old Norse tongue, the name Gullveig means “gold drink,” “gold trance,” or “gold power.”’[28] The symbolism of gold in northern Europe is beautifully spoken to by Norse scholar Maria Kvilhaug:  “The metal is obviously associated (in Old Norse poetry) with divine brightness, illumination within darkness, great cosmic forces and hidden wisdom.”[29]  Gullveig is stabbed with spears, and three times burned, yet she emerges reborn three times as well, reborn as a different Goddess, with a different name, Hei∂.  Lindow writes that, “In the sagas Hei∂ is a common name for seeresses, and it is also found in a geneology…presumably giants.  The adjective heid, “gleaming,” and the noun heid, “honor,” would suit nicely here as well.”[30]     The result of Gullveig’s initiation through death and rebirth is the creation of a powerful feminine presence, Hei∂, the seeress, the practioner of sei∂r magic.  She is associated with magic wands, or staffs, prophecy, trance and her relationship with women is established in the final line of the stanza, as she “brings delight to evil women.”[31]     The line about evil women in the Völuspá is questioned by Kvilhaug, who states, “The Norse word is illrar, which means bad, or wicked, and is the origin of the English word “ill”, “sick”. I have always suspected the original meaning to be “sick women”, because there are several Norse references to how the goddesses and witches may help sick women…Of course, “bad” can be just another word for unconventional.”[32]  She also reminds us that the writers of the Eddas were Christian monks, to whom all feminine magic must be necessarily evil.  Of a similar mind, Ralph Metzner translates the word as “contrary.”[33]     Gullveig’s transformation is remarkable for its endurance, bringing to mind the transformative initiations of the Eleusinian Mysteries, incorporating the potent magic of death and rebirth into a new cosmic order.  That her treatment inspires war between the Aesir and the Vanir is seen by many scholars as reflective of invasion patterns, similar to those described by Gimbutas’ Kurgan Theory.  “Since the Vanir are fertility deities, the war has often been understood as the reflection of the overrunning of local fertility cults somewhere in the Germanic area by a more warlike cult, perhaps that of invading Indo-Europeans.”[34] The war ends in peace and reconciliation.  From the sacrifice and initiation of Gullveig/Hei∂ emerges a specific form of women’s magic known to the Vanir goddess Freyja.  After the peace of the Aesir and the Vanir, which may provide evidence of a partnership between divergent spiritual cosmologies, Freyja moves to Asgard and shares sei∂r with Odin.  For this reason, Gullveig/Hei∂ is often seen as an aspect of the goddess Freyja, though I resist this merging due to a personal desire to keep the old stories and Goddesses complex, rather than simplifying them.     And it is in the spirit of this complexity that I introduce the Norns who have a role both in women’s magic and in the origins of the runes.The NornsThere stands an ash called Yggdrasil,A mighty tree showered in white hail.From there come the dews that fall in the valleys.It stands evergreen above Urd’s Well.From there come maidens, very wise,Three from the lake that stands beneath the pole.One is called Urd, another Verdandi,Skuld the third; they carve into the treeThe lives and destinies of children.[35]      The Norns are mystery figures in Norse myth.  They seem to function in multiple ways, primarily as as the keepers of fate or wyrd both as individual spirits (plural:  nornir) and as a sort of triple Goddess at the base of the World Tree.  In the Völuspá translation above, the Norns emerge from the lake, or well of Ur∂ at the base of the World Tree.  Ur∂ means Destiny,  ““Ur∂” (pronounced “URD”; Old Norse Urðr, Old English Wyrd) means “destiny.” The Well of Urd could therefore just as aptly be called the Well of Destiny.”[36]  Ur∂ is the name of one of the three Norns listed in the passage, as well as Verdandi, “becoming” or “happening,”[37] and Skuld, “is-to-be” or “will happen.”[38]  Raven Kaldera says, “All three names of the Nornir bear connotations of evolution of time as a repetitive and circular process…The Nornir are thus "out of time", not bound by the constraints of that evolution.”[39]     The Norns’ relationship with simultaneous, spiral or mythic time is potentially significant in the search for the runic connections with the divine feminine.  They are from the well of destiny, and simultaneously are destiny itself.  They are often seen as weavers, winding the thread of wyrd for individual and cosmic fate. Their number of three parallels an earlier mention in the Voluspá regarding three maidens emerging from Jotunheim, the land of giants:In their dwellings at peace | they played at tables,Of gold no lack | did the gods then know,--Till thither came | up giant-maids three,Huge of might, | out of Jotunheim.[40]     The connection of the Norns to the Giants, thus kin to the Völva, is important.  The Jotun are considered the primeval race in the Nine Worlds, those who were present at the beginning of historical time, but they are actually pre-historic and thus pre-temporal at least in a linear sense.  It makes sense that they would be the keepers of destiny, in the same way the Völva is the keeper of oral history.  They transcend the new Gods, both the Aesir and the Vanir, and yet are in a complex series of relationships with them for all of time.   Dan McCoy’s translation of the Völuspá says the Norns, “carve into the tree,” but Ralph Metzner translates it as “they carve the staves,” the staves being the runes themselves.  In this way we may see the Norns as the originators of the runes.     In the next poem after the Völuspá, the Hávamál, Odin details his sacrifice and acquisition of the runes:Peering down,I took up the runes –Screaming I grasped them –Then I fell back from there.     Odin is seen as hanging himself from the World Tree, over the Well of Ur∂, taking, grasping, the runes from the well.   The well of the Norns is the source of their origin, the source of nourishment for the world tree, and the web of wyrd or fate.  Are we to believe that Odin took, grasped the runes, screaming, without their permission?     And so the story stretches.     In the Völuspá Odin participates in the forced initiation of Gullveig/Heid and sees her receive the power of sei∂r.  In the following poem, Odin experiences his own willing initiation, his hanging, his sacrifice, but instead of receiving the power of divine illumination like Gullveig/Hei∂ he has to effort and grasp.  When he takes up the runes it feels like an act of appropriation, and it may well be.  In the same way he had to learn sei∂r from Freyja, Odin needed to take the runes from the well of the Goddesses of Destiny.  They were not freely given, nor did they prevent his grasp.     Based on the mythology of the Poetic Edda, the source of magic in northern European pre-Christian traditions appears to be feminine.  The origin of the Völva extends back to the race of Giants, to the beginning of time, suggesting that the magical and prophetic abilities of women (at least women of Jotun blood) are innate, primary.  The removal of the runes from the well of the Norns posits an origin to the runes from a time before the gods.  That Odin has to learn or take magical tools and abilities from women, through what amounts to acts of violence may serve as a metaphor for a transition in northern Europe from women’s power to male power.     This isn’t to say that magic and the runes are the exclusive dominion of women.  It is to imply that the powers of women in early northern European cultures were significant.  In looking at the forms of the runes relative to other Old European script symbols, it would seem there could be a common root.  And within Old European cultures there was a powerful reverence for the Goddess and the potency of women as life givers and connectors to divinity.   Northern Europe had a divine cosmology that illustrates in myth an initial clash between two “races” of divinities, but the Vanir did not convert to the religion of the invader—presuming the Aesir did represent an invading force of new gods.  Instead they made peace, exchanged wisdom, intermarried and co-created new stories together.  Women in northern Europe were famously free during the Viking era, able to fight, divorce, hold property and rule in ways women elsewhere were not.  The Oseberg ship burial, one of the most resplendent archaeological finds of the Viking age, is dated to 834 CE and contains the remains of two women with staffs.[41]  That these women were Völvas seems a distinct possibility.  Educator Kari Tauring says that, “Archeologists in Scandinavia have discovered wands (staffs) in about 40 female graves, usually rich graves with valuable grave offerings showing that Völvas belonged to the highest level of society.[42]  Tauring also indicates that tradition of the Völva extended into recorded history, and the position of women as diviners and seers in the Germanic tribes was commented on by Julius Caesar and Tacitus.[43]  Perhaps the merging of different cosmologies, and the sharing of magic empowered women in northern European societies, and allowed them to retain power even in the face of changing spiritual traditions, until a spiritual climate arrived that could not tolerate other beliefs or perceptions.  I speak, of course, of Christianity.     Is it possible that the magic of the ancient sacred feminine powers and the runes hold keys for surviving patriarchy and creating partner relationships?     If Gullvieg/Hei∂ can transform through death and rebirth, allowing the magic of sei∂r into the world, continuing to practice even after such torment, if Freyja can teach her former enemy the power of this deep, feminine magic even after such tremendous betrayal, if the Norns in their wisdom can allow Odin to take the runes from the well and share their whispered secrets with humankind, what lessons can we, women, who have lived through thousands of years of burning, abuse and theft by patriarchy, learn?    This question is poignant for me.  I come to the magic of sei∂r as a woman of multiple ancestries, as an American living on beloved but uncertain land, far from my ancestral homes.  I come to the runes as a mother to a son and daughters.  I come as a seeker of the ways of my ancestors, called to discover their fragments and etchings, called to listen between the lines of their tales.  I come afraid, for I have been taught to fear this wisdom of the symbols of my heritage due to their corruption and misappropriation in recent history.  And I come unafraid, for the deeper I travel the more I find that sings to me.     When we claim the runic feminine, when we stretch the threads of fate back far enough, through pre-history, and view their shapes, we claim our own pain and capacity for power, magic, and healing.   As we step toward the fire, once again, we can remember that in death is transformation, rebirth, the greater mysteries.     In this story that is my story, that is your story, reader, as you participate too, like the Norns, beyond the bounds of logical time and space, in the mythic cycle of creation, there is potential.  A soul seed as rich as the one the Völva knows, from the beginning of time.  In such a seed grows the world tree. [1] Dan McCoy, “Gullvieg,” Norse Mythology for Smart People, last modified May 12, 2016, http://norse-mythology.org/gullveig/.  I prefer McCoy’s sensitive and nuanced translation of the Poetic Edda to the commonly quoted Henry Adams Bellows version from 1936.[2] Mara Keller, “Archaeomythology as Academic Field and Methodology Bridging Science and Religion, Empiricism and Spirituality,” class distributed article, 3.[3] Joan Marler, “The Body of Woman as Sacred Metaphor,” Adrian Poruciuc, “Old European Echoes in Germanic Runes?” Journal of Archaeomythology 7, (2011): 67.[4] Keller 4 quoting Joan Marler “Introduction to Archaeomythology,” ReVision Journal 23, 1 (Summer): 2, quoted in Keller, “Archaeomythology,” 3-4.[5] Marija Gimbutas, Civilizations of the Goddess (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), vii.[6]Ibid., vii.[7] Ingrid Kincaid, The Runes Revealed (Portland, OR:  Inkwater Press, 2016), 1.[8] Susan Gray, The Woman’s Book of Runes, (New York: Barnes and Noble Books), 2.[9] Adrian Poruciuc, “Old European Echoes in Germanic Runes?” Journal of Archaeomythology 7, (2011): 67.[10] Ibid., 68.[11] Tineke Looijenga, “Texts and Contexts of the Oldest Runic Inscriptions,” Odroerir Journal Online Academic Library, (2014): 9. http://odroerirjournal.com/download/L... Ibid 9[13] Dan McCoy, “Origins of the Runes,” Norse Mythology for Smart People, http://norse-mythology.org/runes/the-... John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals and Beliefs (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2001), 164.[15] Skara Brae The Discovery and Excavation of Orkney’s Finest Neolithic Settlement, Orkneyjar, last modified February 25, 2016,  http://www.orkneyjar.com/history/skar... Yan Goudryan, “Skara Brae and Neolithic Science,” The Creation of Time: A Philosophy of Science Blog, December 6th 2010, http://www.goudryan.com/the-coft/skar... Gimbutas, The Civilization of the Goddess, 310.[18] Poruciuc, “Old European Echoes,” 71.[19] Ibid., 70.[20] “Orkney Venus—early people—Scotland’s History,” Education Scotland, accessed May 16, 2016.  http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/s... Max Dashu, “Woman Shaman Transcript of Disc 2:  Staffs,” Suppressed Histories, last modified 2013, http://www.suppressedhistories.net/wo... Henry Adams Bellows, The Poetic Edda: Voluspo, Internet Sacred Texts Archive, accessed May 17, 2016, http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/poe/p....  I am using the Bellows translation here for clarity around the image of the World Tree.[23] Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, The Online Medieval and Classical Library, last update unknown, http://omacl.org/Heimskringla/.[24] John Lindow, Norse Mythology, 311.[25] Ibid., 50.[26] Ibid., 51.[27] Dan McCoy, “Gullveig,” http://norse-mythology.org/gullveig/.... Ralph Metzner, “Freyja and the Vanir Earth Deities,” The Well of Remembrance: Rediscovering the Earth Wisdom Myths of Northern Europe, (Boston, MA:  Shambhala, 1994), 166.[29] Maria Kvilhaug, “Burning the Witch! – The Initiation of the Goddess and the War of the Aesir and the Vanir,” Freyia Völundarhúsins Lady of the Labyrinth´s Old Norse Mythology Website, last update 2016, http://freya.theladyofthelabyrinth.co... John Lindow, Norse Mythology, 165.[31] Dan McCoy, “Gullveig,” http://norse-mythology.org/gullveig/.... Maria Kvilhaug, “Burning the Witch,” http://freya.theladyofthelabyrinth.co... Ralph Metzner, The Well of Remembrance, 167.[34] John Lindow, Norse Mythology, 53.[35] Dan McCoy, “The Origins of the Runes,” Norse Mythology for Smart People, http://norse-mythology.org/runes/the-... .[36] Dan McCoy, “Yggdrasil and the Well of Urd,” http://norse-mythology.org/cosmology/... John Lindow, Norse Mythology, 245.[38] Ibid 245[39] Raven Kaldera, “Shrine to the Norns,” Northern Paganism, last update unknown, http://www.northernpaganism.org/shrin... Henry Adams Bellows, Poetic Edda: Voluspo, http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/poe/p....  I use the Bellows translation here for the clear image of the giant maidens emerging from Jotunheim.[41] “The Oseberg Finds,” University of Oslo Museum of Cultural History, last modified December 10, 2012, http://www.khm.uio.no/english/visit-u... Kari Tauring, “What is a Völva?” last modified October 31, 2011, http://karitauring.com/what-is-a-Völv... Kari Tauring, “What is a Völva?” http://karitauring.com/what-is-a-Völva/.

Tiny Shrine for the Ancestors

May you be seen, felt and known. May your skills and crafts be re-membered. May we heal the traumas of the past with your guidance. May we learn from you the names of earth prayer, forgiveness, correction, blessing. May we learn from you to clear fear and resistance in the face of death and transition. May we make offerings of time and attention. May we seek your stories. May we sing them aloud, again. Saga Alu. . . . . May the balance be regained.