Is your spiritual path a labyrinth?

First off, yesterday was Beltane and I was somewhere warm.  That was wonderful.  (What's "warm"?  Er, 15 C / 59 F.  My, how my standards have changed...)

Yesterday afternoon I was walking an outdoor, grass labyrinth (in the warm sun, mmmm).  There was a moment when its path took me very close to the center.  But suddenly, it changed direction and took me back much closer to the outer edge.  Dramatically. 

I was very much struck by the example of the labyrinth as spiritual path. 

Right that moment, following the path took me physically further away from the center.  Yet at the same time, it took me closer towards the center in terms of the process of the labyrinth, the path of the labyrinth.

I feel like this describes an awful lot of life.  And an awful lot of spiritual life.

Also: this labyrinth was generously dotted with goose poop.  I got to decide to step on it or around it. 

Does your spiritual journey ever feel like a labyrinth?  Does it ever feel like a labyrinth dotted with goose poop?

May all the goose poop in your life become fertilizer. 

The Wheel of the Year & the Slinky of Spiritual Growth

The eight spokes on the Wheel of the Year are lovely waypoints for me to check in spiritually -- with myself, with my spiritual friends, with That-Which-Is.

How are things going?  What is happening in my spiritual life?  In all parts of my life?  What is happening in nature?  How is what's happening in my spiritual life connected with what's happening in nature?  (Is it?)  

Used with permission. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wheel_of_the_Year.JPG

The spiral of the seasons -- a circle that never quite returns to the same place it was, but keeps progressing through time -- reflects for me the rhythms of life, and also provides a model for my spiritual life and spiritual growth.

Picture a slinky in your hands.  (If you have a real-life slinky, feel free to take an actual slinky in your hands!)

Is it a classic silver one, or perhaps one of the rainbow plastic ones?

Used with permission.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2006-02-04_Metal_spiral.jpg

Used with permission.  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Slinky_rainbow.jpg

Take the slinky in one hand.  Take your other hand, grasp the top, and pull it up; stretch it out vertically, so it looks more like the path a spiral ramp or spiral staircase would take. 

Used with permission.  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HK_TST_Urban_Council_Centenary_Garden_%E5%8A%A0%E9%80%A3%E5%A8%81%E8%80%81%E9%81%93_Granville_Road_Spiral_ramp_footbridge.JPG

Used with permission. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cologne_spiral_staircase.jpg

Imagine you are walking along that spiral.  As the spiral curves gently upward, imagine Spring Equinox; about an eighth of the way around, imagine Beltane; a quarter around, Litha; another eighth, Lammas; half-way around, Fall Equinox; another eighth, Samhain; three-quarters of the way around, Yule; another eighth, Brigid; and, as you reach the spot directly above where you started, Spring Equinox again. 

The repeated cycles of the Wheel of the Year travel in time along this vertical spiral.

At Spring Equinox each year, I might be at the same place on the spiral in one sense.  But I am at a completely different place in another sense.  Those two loops of the slinky, those two loops of the ramp, those two steps on the staircase, cannot occupy the same place at the same time.

As I have traveled the spiral, I have continued to travel in time -- and hopefully in other ways, too. I'm in a similar place, but it's not possible for me to be in the exact same place. 

How does your spiritual life resemble a spiral?

How is the image of a slinky, or a ramp, or a staircase, useful to you?  How does it help you? 

Ways to Help in the Aftermath of the US Storm

How can you help in the wake of Sandy?  Give time, blood, and money.

Seriously.

Money:

The Red Cross will still have a LOT of work to do, mostly feeding people, including emergency workers and people cleaning up their houses, in the coming weeks.  Not to mention still providing shelter and food over the next few days. 

To donate either to where the need is greatest or to your local Chapter, click here: 
http://www.redcross.org/charitable-donations

To donate by text message: text REDCROSS to 90999. 

Text donation FAQs here:
https://american.redcross.org/site/SPageNavigator/ntld_Redcross_text2help_faqs?JServSessionIdr004=hziibru202.app293b

Blood:

Many, many blood drives were canceled due to weather, and the blood supply could get critically low very quickly.  Please consider giving blood as soon as you can:
http://www.redcrossblood.org/

Time:

So many ways.  But most of all, become a Red Cross volunteer.  The American Red Cross workforce is more than 90% volunteer. 

http://www.redcross.org/support

Holding the East Coast and Midwest in the Light / in the Goddess during storm recovery.

Blessed Winter Solstice!

I hope everyone had a good Winter Solstice, filled with the blessings of the Dark Time of the Year.

Last year brought a very snowy Solstice to Seattle: Winter Solstice itself was the second of three snowstorms in a week. Record snowfall brought the city to a grinding halt for days. Winter Solstice was on a Saturday last year; it started snowing again that afternoon, and finally stopped snowing that Sunday night. (When we flew out to visit relatives on Thursday, the buses still weren't running in our neighborhood, and we hiked, using backpacks for luggage, half a mile to the freeway to catch a bus downtown to transfer to the bus to the airport.)

On Winter Solstice last year, a small group of folks still made it to our apartment for a Roses, Too! potluck and a Winter Solstice Celebration based on A Winter Solstice Singing Ritual. This was the second or third time I'd done it with a small group, using the cd for the music. We had five adults -- just enough for readers and the narrator -- and a four-year-old, and had a warm, cozy time in the candlelight with the woodstove. Everyone made it home safely, eventually, though the two miles uphill to the U District was a haul for some.

It was a beautiful Solstice.

(c) 2008

So, now here we are in central NJ, and there's record snow here already now, too! (I think it's just following me around the country right now...)

Friday evening, dear F/friends who are part of the extended Roses, Too! community graciously hosted the Roses, Too! Tradition Winter Solstice/Yule potluck at their home in Philadelphia. They've hosted a number of potlucks in the past, and it was a treat, for me, for us to have a potluck there again.

We had delightful company and conversation, and we shared all sorts of yummy, festive, and comforting food and drink -- hot mulled cider, homemade fettuccine alfredo, cider donuts, chocolate (of course), apple cobbler with local Philly Vanilly ice cream, cranberry-jalapeno salsa (which I bought from a local farm store, but which is not as good as my friend Jennifer F's from CA), a cheese-pepper-onion torte with a sweet potato crust, all sorts of good things.

And then we shared a hilarious, intergenerational game of Apples to Apples. At one point, I was laughing so hard my stomach hurt and I couldn't quite catch my breath.

We knew a big winter storm was brewing, and sure enough, record snow came to much of the East Coast with a blizzard over this weekend.

Our community-wide Winter Solstice Celebration / performance of A Winter Solstice Singing Ritual (with SpiralSong, PAI/DVPN, and Pebble Hill Interfaith Church) was snowed out Saturday night, as was Sunday night's dress rehearsal for the second WSC.

Last night, however, lots of people made it to our Winter Solstice Celebration (with SpiralSong, PAI/DVPN, and the Inner Path), and it was just delightful.

I loved singing with SpiralSong again; our readers, narrator, and stage manager were wonderful; the "audience" (in quotes, because it's actually very participatory) were wonderfully present with us, and enthusiastic during the high-energy parts; our musicians were excellent (and I had lots of fun drumming with our drummer); and the management and collection of lit candles went more smoothly than I think I've ever seen it.

Our hosts, the Inner Path, are members of the Delaware County Peace Center, so our Celebration was at the Springfield Friends Meetinghouse. This is a great space for this Celebration -- conducive to the ritual, warm and intimate without feeling cramped, and quite nice acoustically (something that is definitely not true of all old East Coast Meetinghouses!).

Plus, there was this moment at the beginning, when the singers first saw the "audience" after we'd processed in, and were facing them, singing with them... I saw so many familiar faces, and so many I didn't know. Among the familiar ones were friends who were there for the first time; folks who were there for the first time in a long time; folks who have been to these Winter Solstice Celebrations every year since the first one in 1997; folks who drove long ways; women I've sung with in the past and haven't seen in too long; folks from different parts of my life who had no reason yet to know each other... It was a magical moment in the web of connection and community.

How has your Winter Solstice been? What gifts of the Spirit has it brought?

(c) 2006

A little unexpected wood stove geekdom

The apartment which Beloved Wife and I are renting in Seattle doesn't have a central heating system. It comes with electric oil-filled radiators and a woodstove, and our landlady pays utilities, including wood for the woodstove. (I think that bit is very smart on her part, because then she has some say in the management of the woodpile. We once lived in a house with two fireplaces, where the prior tenants hadn't taken very good care of the woodpile... and it was a damp, icky, disintegrating mess.)

I used the woodstove at Samhain for burning mementos to my ancestors and my dead, but wasn't sure we'd ever really use it for heat. I don't have any woodstove experience, in spite of the fact that my parents and my aunt and uncle heat with woodstoves. And although I know how to build campfires and fireplaces fires, I don't know much about building fires in stoves, and I can tell it's a very different sort of thing. (There's no grating; this stove is too tiny to put pieces crosswise... er?) I had this uneasy feeling, too -- while I liked the idea of not using fossil fuel or electricity, and not paying a big utility company to heat my house, I wasn't so sure about the environmental impact of burning wood. Plus, I have asthma -- do I want to heat my house this way?

Then the temps dropped to the 20s F, and there was just no way to get our apartment above 60F with the electric heaters. And there was the threat of electricity outages due to wind and ice. I didn't want to be learning how to use the stove when I couldn't see and it was 50F in our flat.

It was definitely time to fire up the woodstove.

And while I didn't find myself terribly proficient at managing it yet, I did find myself really appreciating, even enjoying, having a fire in the woodstove. There's a subjective difference between heat from a woodstove and heat from radiators, forced-air systems, and the like. I can't quite explain what it is, but it felt different, and I liked it.

I've also found myself appreciating the beauty of wood -- all the different shades of cedar, the sheen of maple -- in a way that's somewhat different from when woodworking or whittling. And I understand in a first-hand way now how Doug fir is fire-resistant, and how seasoned cedar kindling really is different from freshly-split cedar kindling from a seasoned log. There's something I really like about becoming familiar with, and appreciating, wood in this way. It feels akin to honoring the sacrifice of an animal I eat, the sacrifice of the Horned God, or to honoring the death of the plants I eat, the sacrifice of Lugh or the Grain God.

When the temperatures warmed back up, so that we could go back to keeping the house reasonably warm using the electric heaters alone... I felt a little lost without a fire to tend. One website I was reading recently summed it up nicely: heating with a wood-burning stove is a little like having a pet. Its presence is always there; it requires a certain amount of attention; it's warm; it can feel kind of affectionate.

I decided to do some research on how to build a good fire in a woodstove. My perfectionist self was feeling like there must be a better way to get a fire going than my so-so efforts thus far.

I discovered a handful of interesting things out there on the web; as with so much on the internet, some were useful, some less so.

There are a couple of methods to building a new fire in a woodstove that I'm going to try; there's a rather different way of starting new logs from existing coals that I'm also going to try. (Physics!) Crumpled newspaper, which is how I learned to do start fire growing up (gosh, doesn't that sound like I was a juvenile delinquent), does irritating things in a woodstove, and that's been driving me batty; so I'm learning to make "Nantucket Knots" (which somehow remind me of Brigid's Crosses). Physics again!

I'm enjoying the geekdom.

I also know a little about the guy our landlady buys our wood from. I feel good about how buying wood from him helps him support himself.

I like how, if you know where your wood comes from and you buy it locally, you can help support your local economy, can help support sustainable wood harvesting, can help conserve fossil fuel by not hauling your wood long distances. I like participating in the carbon cycle this way. I like getting a little off the grid. I like how a good woodlot is a renewable resource. I like how, if you use your woodstove well, you can produce less pollution than if you heat your home by most forms of commercial heating.

So I am a cautious convert to this wood-heat thing.

Which is not at all what I expected.

More snow...

The National Weather Service is predicting 1-3 more inches of snow... can you believe it?

Photos of Seattle snow

(Note: if you click on the slideshow, it will take you to a larger version.)

Three snowstorms in eight days. Whee!

Snow... snow... and more snow... in Seattle!

So, here we are in Seattle for the year... where I nearly didn't bring my winter coat with me, thinking to make do with layers of fleece, wool, and Gore-Tex. After all, the average low here in December, the coldest month, is 36 F.

I'm glad I brought my heavy coat. First, we had a week where temps didn't get above freezing, with record cold -- mostly in the 20s F, but then we dipped down into the teens. Then, in the last week and a half, we've had three -- count them, three -- snowstorms which have stopped the city in its tracks. As soon as things get moving again, we get more snow. With ice underneath.

It's rather astonishing.

But, this did make for a beautiful Winter Solstice.

Amazingly, some hardy souls did make it to our house to celebrate with us on Saturday night. Getting home was a bit of a challenge for them, but everyone seems to have made it back safely.

Beloved Wife and I live two blocks from the Arboretum, and less than a mile from the Lake Washington Ship Canal. We've had two beautiful walks -- one Saturday night through the Arb (where, at 1:00 am, people were still out sledding!), and one Sunday afternoon through the marsh boardwalk. I will post pictures. :)

We've had several more inches of snowfall since then.

We are well and truly snowed in at the moment. Wow!

Winter weather!

We have our first winter storm watch.

Now, I am a total weather geek, and I also love winter weather; so I'm excited at the prospect of actual snow on the ground in Seattle. (Whether or not that actually will happen with this storm remains to be seen, but there does seem to be a real chance of some lowland snow.)

Now I'm glad I brought my winter coat with me, since I'll be taking the bus to Bellevue for a Scottish dance teachers' meeting on Saturday morning. :)