Goddessing

Teetering at the end of a pier in coastal Connecticut, the boy screamed and sobbed and threatened to jump. It was warm and sunny, an otherwise perfect New England day in a seaport called Mystic.

A crowd gathered as the boy's father inched close and talked him from the edge.

"I don't want to be here," the boy shouted.

"Where?" the father asked.

"On this earth."
(Antidepressant use growing, even among children)

According to a Reuters report, pre-school children are the fastest-growing group of patients in the United States getting antidepressant medication.

Of course, I have no idea what the scientific explanation might be for this phenomenon, but spiritually, I'm all over it. It seems like the Earth is a really hard place to live on these days. If taking in all the bad news is hard for me, an optimistic 50-something who understands content-bias in the media, think what it's like for children. We're bombarded with bad news on the TV and online, bad news not just about X or Y situation, but about the future of life on this earth. I can't imagine a childhood full of this planetary doom and gloom. It's hard enough coping with gendered identity and schoolyard bullying, let alone coping with the news that there may not be enough water to drink when you grow up.

To make things worse, many children live in families that believe in a biblical Armageddon, famlies that actually hope and pray that the end times are near. Most kids don't have the benefit of the Pagan perspective:

Come the Rapture, can I have your car?

You don't have to be a fundamentalist Christian, Muslim or Jew to believe in Armageddon, to live in fear of it, to anticipate it, to be fundamentally shaped by the possibility or potential of it. I'm personally guilty of loving post-apocalyptic fiction. Many of us, of all manner of secular and spiritual stripes, secretly hope for some kind of apocalypse, or believe it's inevitable. We may think the Mother will rebalance things through ecological and population disruptions. Perhaps from bad times will come a much-needed fresh start. We theorize that if humans are thrown back to thinking daily about where and how to get water and food, we won't have time for thinking about how to blow each other up with landmines or weapons of mass destruction. We want to get back to the land, to live off the grid, to be better prepared for the bad times ahead of us. After all, some of us think, we are in the end-times: the Kali Yuga, the end of the Mayan Calendar.

Well, I've had enough. Certainly the population of Pagans and Science of Mind practitioners and Wiccans and New Age folks and Heisenburg Uncertainty Seculars has reached a critical mass such that, if we put our minds together, we could create a thought-form to counter the well-constructed and potent Armageddon/Apocalypse thought-form that our Christian brothers and sisters here in American have been building stronger and stronger with each mid-East situation and every piece of news about earthquakes, mud slides, extinctions, pollution, and near-miss comets?

What would happen if we all agreed to believe in an impending event that will renew the earth, restore the health of oceans and skies, remove from danger the endangered species, catalyze the production and use of earth-friendly forms of energy and housing and locomotion, instill in human beings an instinctive consciousness of cooperation and compassion? What if we embodied our beliefs? Made bumperstickers, gave public talks, prophesied, wrote books about the impending ... what should we call it?

The Awakening?
The Cosmic Fresh Start?
The Great Evolving?

What do you think? Is environmental activism enough?

Reduce, recycle, reuse, rethink.

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On this day, in 1919, my grandmother, Lalla Rook L gave birth to my father, Harry Thomas L. He was her second son, though her first son died before my father was born.

We called my grandmother "Mam" and delighted in saying "yes ma'am, Mam," which never seemed to annoy her. She's the only person I've ever known well who was unconditionally loving. Or perhaps I should say she was the most unconditionally loving person I've ever known. She was petite (went on a diet, about twice in her life, when she weighed over 110 lbs.), the second of seven daughters, a quiet believer who read through the Bible every year, a few verses at a time -- a daily ritual.

She raised three boys who all survived military service in WWII. She was widowed early, worked as a seamstress in an upholstery shop after her husband died of leukemia, saved Green Stamps to buy Christmas presents for family members, made excellent popcorn, chow chow, lemon icebox pie, and all manner of good food. She never learned to drive. She did get a teaching certificate when she was 16, but she fell in love and married young and didn't get a 4-year degree, as did most of her sisters. In her 80s, she moved into a nursing home, and blossomed: she'd been a widow for nearly a quarter of a century by then and hadn't had much of a social life. She dressed up every day and loved visiting with all the residents.

Her first year in the nursing home, she was voted "Valentine Queen" in February. She hadn't wanted to give up housekeeping or gardening, of course. When I asked her, once, how she managed to be so happy despite illness, and sharing a room with a stranger and a grouch, and no longer living at home, etc., she thought for a minute and answered: "Well, I just tried to be happy every day, so every day, I'm happy."

My dad was much like her, in some crucial ways. He was loving and fun-loving, proud of his kids, a hard worker, generous of spirit. He grew up with his two brothers and parents "dirt poor" on a cotton farm in Texas, after cotton had gone south as a cash crop. He came into puberty during the Depression. World War II was his big adventure. Likeable, resourceful, a good communicator, and reliable, he spent most of his duty as a liaison to a high-ranking officer in North Africa. He did spend some time with a gun in Germany, at war's end, responsible for prisoners of war. Whatever those experiences, they were the source of lifelong nightmares that resulted in his crying out in his sleep in the middle of the night, something that waked me periodically when I was a teen.

Dad came home from the War with a bigger picture of the world and of himself than the one he left with. Forever after he liked good food, good company, good conversation, and traveling. He was a successful small-time salesman and eventually had his own businesses. We didn't have a lot of money, but we took family vacations once a year, and twice a year when there was extra cash.

He loved my mother, who was brilliant, creative, gifted, fun-loving, beautiful, and tragic ... an untreated manic-depressive, a rageaholic, an Adult Child of an Alcoholic, a narcissist, a sometimes sadistic, abusive mother and spouse. I was 5 the first time my dad told me he was going to divorce my mother, explaining that this meant he would no longer be living with us. I think when he saw the look on my face and when he thought about the consequences to his girls, he changed his mind. This happened more than once. He never left mother, never left us, and suffered with us through her brilliant hell. I know he stayed for us; he absorbed a lot of her viciousness; he didn't or couldn't protect us, but he didn't abandon us.

I can't tell you how grateful I am for my father. For Sunday adventures, little mini-trips out into the country after church; for a quirky and incredibly dry sense of humor I appreciated when I was older, and inherited; for staying with my mother until she left him, just after we two girls and she had (finally) graduated from college; for excellent grilled steaks on Saturday nights; for bringing home gifts from his business trips when I was a little girl; for his creative story-telling -- myths and fairy tales personalized to feature me as the protagonist; for my first car, a maroon Barricuda, for being proud of me, with cause and without; for Oktoberfest and Yellowstone and downhill skiing all over New Mexico and Colorado; for sending me to college; for leaving me a little inheritance when I was 28 and he died young of lung cancer, 30 years after quitting smoking, just as he was moving into semi-retirement at 63.

My dad believed in saving for your retirement. When I saw that he didn't get to have one, I decided that living for the present, living in the moment, was more important than living for some time in the future, which may or may not come.

I'm not sure I entirely agree with the P.D. James quote above, but when I came across it last night I thought about my dad and what I learned and inherited from him. Though my dad did live, to some degree, for the future, he also managed to live quite well, though simply, in the present. He didn't have big dreams, really. He was quite happy with the essentials of life. After his divorce, he dated a very sweet, loving, beautiful woman who was with him every day during his terminal illness. She had so much respect for him. I'm glad he had her. My mother visited him once while he was in the hospital, but she didn't go to his funeral. After she died, seven years later, I found among her papers a receipt for a single therapy session, dated the month of his death.

It's the end of a long day's work; I'll be having a delicious meal and fun conversation with my partner half an hour from now. In just a minute, I'm going to get up and go spend some time at my altar. I'll light some incense, look through some photos of my dad, and spend time in the present remembering the past.

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When I moved to Madison 11 years ago, I noticed how pervasively the residents used landmarks when giving directions.

What's so unusual about that, you might ask?

I'll let you be the judge:

To get to (the meeting at Sue's house, for example), go down Willy Street til you see the gray building with the old white shutters -- it's just after the daycare center with the red plastic sign on the fence. Then, at the next block, turn left. Follow that street as it curves around. You'll see some tall buildings on the right, and then you'll go under an overpass. Well, it's not really an overpass, it's just the parking lot for the Convention Center, but it was built over the street. Nobody liked the idea, but they did it anyway. Then, after the overpass, you'll go over some railroad tracks. Start looking for the street with the flower garden and water fountain at the corner. You can't miss it. There's a wrought-iron bench by the fountain. It's one of my favorite places to brown bag on a work day. Well, anyway, keep going for a few blocks until you see the church on the left with the purple door. Wait, is it purple? Well, it's either purple or orange. For years it was orange (I think) and then they painted it purple .. or maybe it's the other way around, but you'll see it. Be watching, because just after the church is an alley on the right. My house is two houses after the alley. I've got some chairs on my porch and there are two trees on the left side of the sidewalk.

Now, imagine being new to town. You're standing outside the food coop and some wellmeaning person is telling you all of this. How much of it could you write down? Accurately? If you wrote it down, how many accidents would you almost have trying to read your copious notes and notice sign colors and find what turns out to be a small piece of garden statuary in a town where almost every street corner has a flower garden, and all of this while cars are whizzing by and you're trying to figure out which lane you should be in?

And did you notice that almost no street name was mentioned? Would it surprise you to know that the one street name given is a name you won't find on a map? "Willy Street" is actually Williamson Street.

After four or five or six times of politely taking down this kind of direction and then experiencing frustration and anxiety trying to figure out which of the eight gray houses has old white shutters and which daycare center has the red plastic sign, I began to say "thank you so much" after listening patiently during these discourses and then ask for the address.

Ah.... So much easier, sort of.

You see, Madison is a town (ok, a small city), built around two large lakes and two smaller ones, whose downtown is a narrow diagonal isthmus connecting the southwest and northeast sides of town that have ballooned around the two large lakes.

To the Americans native to this area (the Ho Chunk or Winnebago), it was called DeJope (four lakes) or Taychopera, "the land of the four lakes."

I've been living 20 miles east of Madison for about six years, in a little village built up around another lake, called so poetically, "Lake Ripley." I've tried to discover its native name, but I'm told that it was probably called something like "the little lake east of DeJope."

Landmarks...or in this case, watermarks. Because not only are there lakes, but also many wetlands around them. Spring in this area is a time of water birds. Geese and cranes and ducks fill the airways, and it's not unusual to see them living their lives right beside the Interstate as you drive by. They seem heedless of the noise, speed, and size of these other beings whizzing by them. It's a time when flotillas of coots dot little Lake Ripley, wood ducks chatter in the trees, and Dutchman's Breeches pop up under the oaks behind the house, soon to be followed by Virginia bluebells and wild geraniums and swamp buttercups.


It's a prolific and relatively short season. A lot of nesting and sprouting and greening happen in a big hurry. In March, spotting the first robin is a rite of spring. Talk of red-winged blackbirds is common (the males come early to scout; it's not spring until the females arrive).

March and April are heady months. Occasional warm days give relief from February's cabin fever. Folks go jacketless and short-sleeved when the temperature rises into the high 40s, walking around as if their spring clothing spelled the end of winter: a magical act.

But in the excitement of opened windows and short-sleeved walks at Picnic Point, in the course of conversations about birds and wildflowers, in the ecstacy of trips to Lake Waubesa to see the migrating whooping cranes, there arise these familiar comments:

The first year I lived here, we had 17 inches of snow in May.

On Beltane in 1994, six inches of snow topped off the daffodils in our garden.

Winter's not over yet.

It's as if we need to remind each other that we might get caught in a blizzard while out experiencing a little splendor in the grass springing green from the brown landscape, that our spring hopes are just that. The greens and pinks of today might fade again tomorrow in overcast skies and a blanket of snow.

Like most city-dwellers these days, very few of us are native Madisonians. Fewer still are the Ho Chunk among us. Yet the land and the seasons, the lakes and the wetlands still define who we are, where we live, how we navigate.

Since moving here, I've met others who had the same bewilderment/frustration at the "how you get to my house" narratives, and who came to the same conclusion: "Thanks, and can I have the street address?" Of course, we learned that not all the streets are on the map and that, in this town of squares on diagonals, even map-reading is difficult. It's hard to get a bearing on the cardinal directions when you rarely travel due east or west or north or south.

I also find, a decade later, that the way I give directions has changed. I do provide a street address, and warn folks if I'm using a street name they won't find on a map, but I also give landmarks, more and more of them as time passes (after you've made it through downtown and passed a small residential area, look for the flower garden in front of the big house on the left, then pass the ... well, you get it).

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