The contract is clear: if you want to live…
Theme: Magicians Reporting for Duty
Week 39: The contract is clear
Beautiful Magicians,
I’ll say it out loud, even when no one is listening: it’s hard to be human right now. That is, it is hard on us, the ones who pay attention. Who notice. Who see what is happening and feel helpless to stop it. We who cannot abide war, genocide, cruelty—the poisonous fruits of patriarchy.
I plant myself firmly in that field. The field of reverence. Of kindness. Of tenderness. Of devotion. And I sense you standing there with me. It’s a strange thing to live in that field. Aware of the horror and aware of the beauty at the same time.
When I look around at who is standing in that field, I am heartened by the great souls who have put their devotion into words. I need to read their words. And share them. Whenever we gather to pray in The Song of the Morning of the World rosary or Her Council of Love, or any of our intensive gatherings, I like to read my latest discoveries to the circle gathering to pray. Invariably the words plant seeds in our hearts and affect how we pray.
We are cultivators. Cultivators of reverence and hope.
And that’s my intention in writing these Notes from the Field each week. I hope to cultivate more love, more reverence, more devotion. I hope to cultivate the memories of how we lived before patriarchy and how we will live after patriarchy.
That’s the entire point of the Praying in the Dark series.
My newsletters are typically seeded in the night. I jot down what I hear or feel on the yellow pad beside me. In the morning, I reach for the pad, holding a vague sense that something happened in the night. That’s what happened last night.
Quotes from Annie Dillard kept drifting in and out of my liminal awareness.
Do you know Annie Dillard? She is very dear to me. And although I didn’t realize it at the time I first encountered her, she laid the foundation for the deep mystical work I am doing today in the Praying in the Dark intensives.
I can’t remember the first time I read her Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It had to be at least fifteen years ago. Maybe longer. All I know is that I fell into a trance reading it, placed it lovingly on a special shelf in my bedroom bookcase, and have returned to it many times. I’m guessing I’ve read it at least six times. Each time a revelation.
These are my criteria for great writing:
- it puts me in a trance (in other words, mystical theta)
- I find I need to read and reread the book or poem
- each time, I find something startling, something holy, something I didn’t realize the first time around
With those criteria, there are only a few writers who I consider treasures in the world.
Annie Dillard is one of them. She died on September 15th and I’ve been returning to Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and her great treasure for writers: The Writing Life.
If you are unfamiliar with Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, here’s a simple synopsis. Annie goes to the same spot on Tinker Creek in Virginia’s Roanoke Valley every day for a year, observing, watching, and relishing the abundant life—and death—of nature. Or, as she puts it, “beauty tangled in a rapture with violence.” Then she treks home to write about what she saw that day.
We are blessed to sit in bed or a chair and return to Tinker Creek with her. Frogs, snakes, butterflies, even mosquitoes will never be the same.
When I reached for Pilgrim today, my hand knew exactly where it was. And now, I’m putting Pilgrim on my nightstand to read for the seventh time.
By the time Annie spends a year on her spot on Tinker Creek, she comes to a glorious conclusion. One that has deep meaning for me. It stopped me in my tracks the first time I read it. I’ve reread it so often, I have it memorized. It is about death.
Now, the problem with death, the reason we are so afraid of it, isn’t because of nature. It’s because of religion.
Patriarchal religion to be precise. For thousands of years prior to the arrival of invasive tribes who worshipped a disembodied angry male god, we honored the natural cycles of life and death.
Because we knew there was a third movement: the return. Life, death, return. Life, death, return. That’s natural and normal.
We only began to fear death when those bloody sky gods (and oh how they love suffering and blood) told us death was an ending. And a scary one at that. If you didn’t obey the sky god’s laws right up to the moment of death, you could face horrific punishment. Or oblivion. You might dissolve into nothingness.
No wonder religious people, in particular christians, are terrified to die.
My Catholic father was so afraid to die that, upon learning he was riddled with cancer, he told the hospital to prepare papers for him to sign. But these were not the normal papers other people sign, like a DNR (do not resuscitate) or any other agreements about quality of life. Oh no. My father signed papers that demanded the doctors do anything and everything to keep him alive. So they did. They removed five organs where any vestige of cancer might be lingering. It took a week, but eventually he died of total organ failure. My mother was distraught, not because he died, but because she visualized him facing the horrors of purgatory.
Would you welcome death if you thought god was waiting to punish you? But all that is a lie. A patriarchal lie.
What is the truth about death?
Listen carefully to Annie:
“That something is everywhere and always amiss is part of the very stuff of creation. It is as though each clay form had baked into it, fired into it, a blue streak of nonbeing, a shaded emptiness like a bubble that not only shapes its very structure but that also causes it to list and ultimately explode. We could have planned things more mercifully, perhaps, but our plan would never get off the drawing board until we agreed to the very compromising terms that are the only ones that being offers.
The world has signed a pact with the devil; it had to. It is a covenant to which every thing, even every hydrogen atom, is bound. The terms are clear: if you want to live, you have to die.”
I have underlined that line: if you want to live, you have to die countless times. I have spoken it aloud. Shared it with friends. Prayed with it. Every time I return to it, another spec of dust of patriarchal nonsense about fear of death gets swept out the door.
When Beloved Vibration of Sophia! landed in my body on December 26, 2014, She filled me so completely that there was no room in my body or my mind or my life for any patriarchal lies about who I am.
I knew immediately that not only was I not a sinful creature; I was—and you are—Her sacred treasure of life. And if we are Her sacred treasure of life, that means, we are also Her sacred treasure of death.
Does that strike you as odd?
In my nightly prayer, The Queen’s Love, I say:
We sing the song of One Mother
And all Her infinite faces of infinite love
The sun, the moon, the stars, the earth, the seas
Hawk above, fox beside, worm below
Seen unseen, we are one body, one breath one love
Her body, Her Breath, Her love
She is our beginning-less beginning
She is our endless-end
Turning and returning, turning and returning
We are born and reborn into Love
Always and only into Love
So it was, so it is, so it ever shall be
Life without end, world without end,
Love does not end
This is Her eternal truth.
That’s what we knew and how we lived for thirty-five thousand years before religion. And that’s the foundation of everything I do.
Annie finishes this section with her unique summation of the heiros gamos of life and death:
“The world came into being with the signing of the contract. A scientist calls it the Second Law of Thermodynamics. A poet says, ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/Drives my green age.’ This is what we know. The rest is gravy.”
What a precious way to describe old age that holds within it the seed of the return: “my green age.” Imagine how sweet the world would be if we who can see the contract on the horizon, would describe ourselves as living our “green age.”
I’ll start. At 78, I am not just enjoying, I am relishing my “green age.” Because I know, and I know that I know, that patriarchy is wrong. I will, and we all will, experience the return. The blessed holy return.
This is how we cultivate reverence. We hold reverence for life and reverence for death.
Life is fragile, death is fragile, handle with reverence
Janet
PS: Praying in the Dark: When People Feel Safe, Patriarchy Falls Apart is continuing. And you are always welcome to join. It is a foundation for all to come for the next two years. And it's so delightful. We are bathing in the original experiences of safety. Follow the link for full schedule and details.
Questions? Write to me janet@janetconner.com
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