Notes from the Cauldron

Dear Friends,

Welcome to my new blog.  As many of you know, I am working on an inspirational book in the style of Kitchen Table Wisdom which I am calling Broth from the Cauldron.  Below are a few selections from this work in progress.

Broth from the Cauldron

‘Double, double, toil and trouble,

Fire burn and cauldron bubble.’

                            –William Shakespeare                                             

After my grandmother died, my mother found a small notebook in which Arbie had written down all my cute ‘sayings’ when I was a child first learning how to talk.  The first sentence it recorded was; “I want to be a Witch someday.  Not Tuesday.”

As I was then a twenty-eight year old Witch whose coven meetings were held on Tuesdays, I burst into laughter.  I read through the little notebook and saw—to my amazement—that every other sentence was about Witches.  How does a child between the ages of one and three, growing up in a scientific, agnostic household, develop such a fascination?

My mother had the answer.

“You see,” she said after I finished perusing the notebook, “You were always like this.  Witches, magic, what the birds were saying out in the garden.  This is all you ever wanted to talk about.  We never encouraged you in the slightest.”

I patted her arm comfortingly.  “It’s true, Mom.  You never encouraged me.”

“The only explanation is reincarnation!” she asserted.  “You were always like this, from the very first.”

I nodded sympathetically.  “It’s not your fault.”

Do people choose a path, or does it choose them?

As an adult, one of the things I like about Wicca, or Witchcraft, as it is colloquially called, is that it is experiential rather than dogmatic, soulful as well as spiritual.  My spiritual explorations are in no way limited to what is defined as ‘Wicca’, or even Paganism.  Because Paganism includes many deities and practices, there is no sense of it having exclusive rights to ‘the truth’. All roads lead to the sacred.

I have been a Priestess teaching shamanic classes since 1976.  I have been teaching year-long Wiccan Apprenticeship programs—which I now like to call ‘Hogwarts for Grown-ups’– since 1991.

Initially, people often enter Wicca, colloquially known as Witchcraft, the path of the Wise, seeking control.  Not usually the control of others, but wanting to control their own lives, their outcomes.

            Magic has sometimes been called ‘the art of coincidence control’.

            But somewhere along the line, most of those who come hankering for power find their concept of power has widened and deepened to a flow far vaster than anything their egos could possibly generate or fathom.

            They exchange the illusion of mastery for mystery.

            Or as I often joke in my Apprenticeship program; “They came for the magic.  They stayed for the food.”

            By which I refer not just to the luscious potluck feasts we provide for each other, but to the feast of love, nourishment, the amazing blending of consciousness, the putting aside of ego and sharing of heart which occurs, miraculously, year after year.

Some of the most sacred and remarkable revelations of my life have occurred while I was engaged in ritual.  Most of them have occurred when I was engaged in living my ordinary, amazing life. 

Transformation is both magical and miraculous and utterly ordinary and mundane.

            Since Shakespeare wrote the lines, “Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble,” in his play ‘Macbeth’, our culture has shied away from the image of Witches cackling over a seething cauldron as an icon of unspeakable evil and horror.

            But a cauldron is only a big soup pot, something every family in old Europe cherished since the beginning of the bronze age.  Often it was their most valuable possession.  Because of it, whatever they gathered or raised could be thrown together with a little or a lot of water depending on the season and the abundance of available food, and a nourishing soup or stew would emerge.

            The cauldron has been a symbol for magic because it is an earthy metaphor for transformation—throw a bunch of disparate elements together and it somehow becomes more than the sum of its parts.

            When used for medicine, the cauldron could combine herbs into a potent, healing tea or salve.

            Hence the cauldron became known as a magical implement, the cauldron of changes.  But its powers were for good, not harm. There were many cauldrons in Celtic mythology.  The cauldron of Undry, belonging to the God Dagda, which miraculously churned out so much food and drink that no company every left it hungry.  The Cauldron of Cerridwen which holds the inspiration from which all artists and poets must drink to be inspired, the cauldron which also carries the promise of transformation which transcends death; the power of reincarnation, the mystery of rebirth.

            The Goddess Cerridwen changed my name and claimed me as her own over thirty years ago when I first stepped on the Wiccan path. She is the Goddess of transformation and creativity, and also the mother of Taliesin, the greatest storyteller in Celtic mythology. Stories simmer in our minds, often for years.  They can be nourishing and delicious as soup; they can be as potent as medicine.  The Witch is one who stands outside of the culture, in a little house in the woods, with her herbs, her observations, her stories and her wisdom.  She brews soups and spells, potions and cures.  These are some of the teaching and healing stories which have emerged from my journey.  They are serious and silly, simple and profound, and they are all true.  So scoot your seats a little closer, hold out your bowls.  I’ve been cooking this hotchpotch for 55 years and it’s ready now.

Have a little broth from the cauldron.

Water is the Heart

In Wicca, water represents the power of the heart, the power of love.  As a double Scorpio, water has always been my favorite element, my home base.  When I feel sad, immersing myself in water—particularly wild water, rivers, lakes or oceans—is a sovereign remedy.  So it made sense that my son and I went on a five-day river rafting trip down the Rogue River in Oregon the summer after my husband died.  Our family vacations had always been of the adventurous sort—skiing, river rafting, camping.

This stretch of the Rogue in Oregon is mostly classed as a 3-4.  But there was one long stretch of white water rapids classed as 4-5 called Blossom Bar.  For those of you who don’t understand river classifications, 3 is moderate, 4 is intense, 5 is extremely intense, 6 is unrunnable. 

We were assigned to a female guide who had only two years of guiding experience, and none of the other people assigned to our boat had ever done white-water rafting before, so I was fine with Zach’s choice to opt out of the boat and into an inflatable kayak.  But a few days into our trip, when we reached Blossom Bar and scouted it, I became terrified.

In whitewater rafting, when you reach a large rapid, you get out of the boats and survey the scene.  The guide points out the whirlpools and other death traps you want to avoid and shows everyone the route we want to go down.

This set of rapids was by far the longest and most intense I had ever seen.  Think horizontal waterfalls, with a few vertical ones thrown in, lots of boulders and dangerous snags and whirlpools that looked like aquatic tilt-a-whirls.  I tried to persuade Zach to get in the raft.  I did not want him kayaking down this stretch of water.  He simply didn’t have enough experience.  But he insisted, and as he was strapping on his helmet, I didn’t have the heart to interfere with his fourteen year old confidence.  Since my husband’s death I had become very frightened about my son’s well-being.  But I tried to hide my irrational terrors, not wanting to hold Zach back or damage him in some way.

So I consented, against my better judgment.  Seeing him, poised and eager in his kayak, I found myself praying harder than I had ever prayed in my life.

But the rafts were going down first, so I turned my attention to my guide’s voice and doing everything she said.

Unfortunately, our raft quickly spun out of control and went down the wrong chute and into a whirlpool.  Our guide shouted instructions and we paddled furiously to break the water’s grip.  Suddenly the whirlpool sucked the part of the raft I was sitting on underwater and I tumbled, ass over teakettle, into the churning foam.  The current tumbled me under the raft.  I popped up on the other side and immediately tried to haul myself back in the raft.  “Help me!  Get me in!”  I shouted.  “Grab her!” the guide yelled.

If someone goes in the water, the first thing you do is pull them back on the boat as quickly as possible.  The sides of a raft are high, so the people in the raft need to grab the ‘swimmer’ by the life jacket and haul them back in. We had practiced this in calm water. But the women on the raft were paralyzed, rigid, staring straight ahead.  They made no move to help me.  Rafters call this condition ‘brain-freeze’.  I made my way to the front of the boat, where the solitary male paddler grabbed me by the life vest.  The guide was struggling to maneuver the boat through the whirlpool with several of her paddlers no longer following instructions. “Hold on to her!” the guide shouted, “Don’t let go!”

Then the boat surged forward and ran me over.  But the guy held on, as he had been told to.  Unfortunately, he was now holding me firmly under the boat.  I fought my way free and again came to the side of the boat.  “Don’t hold me under the boat!  Get me into the boat!”

“Grab her!  Hold on!” the guide called.  He grabbed.  The boat ran over me.  And once again, the guy held me in a death grip.  The problem was, I was underwater, so it really was a death grip for me.  I struggled fruitlessly.  He held on.  Finally I bent one of his fingers back.  He let go.  Again I thrashed to the surface.  “Don’t hold me under the water!”   I looked at the four women in the boat, but none of them made eye contact or made any move to help me.  I swam back to the guy.  “Grab and pull!” I implored. He grabbed and tried to pull; the boat surged forward and once again I was being held underwater by a man who appeared to be determined to drown me.

When I finally freed myself this time I broke away from the boat, having given up on rescue from that particular crew.  It wasn’t that far to shore.  I thought I could make it.  But a wave of water hit me like a charging elephant, carried me down a small waterfall and thrust me down deep.  My foot got jammed in a crevice between two rocks.  My head was about six feet under water.

Every experienced rafter knows that foot entrapment is the way most people die on rivers.  If you fall out of the raft and can’t get back in, you are supposed to put your feet up and head down the rapids feet first, keeping them high.  This keeps them out of traps and helps bounce you off rocks without incurring brain damage.  But my thought that I could make shore had put me in the wrong position when I got swept down the waterfall. 

I yanked at hard as I could.  My foot did not budge.  I tried to collapse down to where I could undo my sandal.  But the force of the water was too strong, pulling my upper body away from my foot.  I grabbed a branch sticking out of the pile of rocks, thinking I could use it to haul myself down hand over hand.  But the branch was too saturated with water and was flaccid as a reed.  It too was caught by the current.

I had not had time to get a full breath before being plunged under the water. And time was running out.

A lovely vision shimmered into view.  It is hard to describe in human terms, but the closest I can come is to say that it was like a beautiful, emerald green door.  It was so lovely, I stopped yanking on my foot to stare at it.  It glistened and wavered in the water. And then I knew that if I went through that door, my husband Elie would be on the other side.  I yearned for that reunion with all my heart.  All I had to do was take one breath of the sweet surging water all around me and the key to that door would be mine.

You are hallucinating, a coldly rational part of my mind said.  You are hallucinating, and that means you are running out of oxygen.  What about Zach?

             Zach! Oh shit oh shit oh shit! What would happen to Zach if he lost his only remaining parent?  Think!  Think! What haven’t I tried?  I looked around, ignoring the green door and the way my heart wanted to dissolve towards it.  I noticed that the current was stronger up higher, closer to the surface, than it was lower.  Suppose I stretched out my arms as wide as possible and tried to use the force of the current to rip me off the rocks?  It would probably break my ankle, but I had run out of alternatives.  I stretched as high and wide as I could reach, willing the river to free me.

            The Velcro straps on my left sandal gave way.  I spun to the surface, exhaled—and plunged into wave after wave.  I got my feet up.  My face was only out of the water a third of the time but each time I saw blue sky I took a deep breath. I bounced off rocks and snags with my feet.  Somewhere behind me I heard my guide yelling, “Don’t swim, don’t swim—wait until I tell you!”

Sun slashed at my eyes through white foam.  Blue sky.  White foam.  Water up my nose.  Water in my lungs.  Breathe now! Don’t breathe.  Breathe now!  It was so cold that when my leg jarred painfully into a boulder I wondered if it were broken and I was just too numb to tell.  Finally I heard my guide yelling, “Swim!  Swim now!  Hard to the left!”

            I turned over and swam harder than I had ever swum.  A tiny cove opened up between boulders.  I kicked ferociously into it and hauled myself up on a low rock.  I wanted to check for broken bones but my hands were cramped into frozen claws.  My river guide pulled up to the rocks and tied the raft to some bushes.  She checked my body with practiced hands.  My right leg was turning black from bruises, and the left ankle, was swelling.  “I can’t believe you went all the way down Blossom Bar and didn’t break anything!” she exclaimed.

            But something had broken.  My self-pity, my suicidal yearnings.  My refusal to embrace a life that no longer contained my beloved. The opportunity to die was before me and I chose life. At that time I couldn’t yet embrace my own life as something worth living for, but I could commit to my son. It’s easy to die for love.  Living for love is harder. But living for love—for your self, for another, for life itself—is what grows us a soul.

Twin Towers

At the time the terrorists were crashing into the twin towers in New York, Zach and I were on a plane flying home from a scuba diving trip in the Virgin Islands.  When we had set up the trip, I had told him we had to be back by the morning of September 11 at the latest. 

“Why?” he asked, “College doesn’t start until a couple of weeks after that.”

“I don’t know; maybe there will be a hurricane or something.  It is hurricane season in the Caribbean.”

Zach nodded, turning back to the computer, punching in our dates.  “You want to come back through New York or Atlanta?”

“Not New York!”  The intensity of my reaction startled me.  Zach turned to stare at me.  “Atlanta, definitely Atlanta.  Not New York!”

“Mom, wouldn’t a hurricane be more likely to hit between the Virgin Islands and Atlanta then the Virgin Islands and New York”

“Maybe it isn’t a hurricane.  I don’t know what it is.  I just know we have to be back early the morning of the eleventh and we can’t come through New York.”

“O.K.”  Having grown up with me, Zach knew better than to argue with my precognitions.  “If we get back to San Francisco by 6:10 in the morning, is that early enough?” he asked, after checking potential flight schedules through Atlanta.

 I knelt and leaned my forehead against the desk.  Something about this return trip from the Virgin Islands was making me short of breath.  I cleared my emotions, imagined us landing in San Francisco at 6:10.  I relaxed.

“Yes, as long as we fly at night and get back that early, it will be fine.”

Yet when we landed in Atlanta for our return flight, I was nervous.  I kept looking at our fellow passengers, scanning their faces—for what?  Once the plane was airborne, every time I closed my eyes I saw visions of men seizing a stewardess and cutting her throat.  I got up and walked up and down the aisles, looking for potential hijackers, anyone who seemed crazy, nervous, or fanatical.

No one on the plane looked like the men I had seen in my mind.  Not a single face made me nervous.  I sat back down beside my son.

“What were you doing?”  Zach asked.

“Just stretching my legs.”

“Maybe I’ll stretch mine too.” 

Neither of us slept, though we tried.  When we exited the plane in San Francisco, Zach said, “I have never been so glad to get off a plane.”

“Why?”

“You know me. I love to travel.  I have never been nervous on a plane before.  Never!  But this time, every time I closed my eyes, I kept imagining hijackers killing the stewardesses and crashing the plane.”

“Really?  Why didn’t you say something?”

“I didn’t want to make you nervous.”

“I was having those same images.”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“I didn’t want to make you nervous.  Anyway, it doesn’t make sense.  Hijackers take a plane because they want to go somewhere, like Cuba. Or they want to free political prisoners.  Why would they crash it?”

He shrugged.  “Weird.  Weird that we’re both wrong.  Lucky though.”

“Yeah, thank God.”

We went home and slept for a few hours, and woke to find that our fears had become a tragedy. Days later, we started hearing the stories of heroism and compassion, the counterpoint to the insanity that believes the deaths of innocents are justified by a cause. They all moved me, but the one that touched me most was not one I read, but one told to my by my Turkish friend.

Her family had some Egyptian acquaintances who owned a small restaurant in New York City.  The night of September 11, they were open, but only one or two family friends had come to the restaurant.  The city seemed almost deserted.  Then three young men came into the restaurant.  They started cursing the owners as dirty Arabs.  They overturned tables, smashed plates and glasses and threw chairs through the windows.  When the place was trashed, they left. The owners called 911, and within minutes the police arrived, having collared the suspects nearby.

“Are these the guys who trashed your place?”

“Yes, yes they are.”

“I assume you want to press charges?”

The Egyptian man looked at the three angry, sullen young men.

“I understand,” he said.  “I understand what pain they are in.  I—let them go.  I do not wish to press charges.”

The cop looked at the restaurant owner as if he were crazy.  “I can’t take them in unless you are willing to press charges.”

“Yes, I understand.  It is a very difficult day for all of us.  Please let them go.”

The police released the men and they disappeared into the night.

The Egyptians began sweeping up the wreckage. 

But within half an hour, the three young men were back, and they had brought three more men with them.

The few people in the restaurant held their breath.

The men walked up to the owner and apologized.  They piled his hands high with money and promised to bring more to replace what they had damaged.  They said that when the restaurateur had been kind and understanding, they had realized that he was not the enemy.  Then they all stayed for many hours, cleaning everything that could be cleaned up, boarding up the broken windows. The man’s unfathomable generosity of spirit had broken through their hatred.

Extending forgiveness to those who have harmed us requires almost superhuman strength, like the supreme effort of childbirth. Perhaps we should not be so surprised that such an extraordinary effort can result in miracles.

Snakes Hate to Shed.  Butterflies?  Don’t even ask.

When people talk about transformation, they love to use the metaphor of snakes and butterflies.  ‘Shed your skin gracefully, like a snake,’ they preach; ‘Emerge like a butterfly from the cocoon,’ they enthuse.

Clearly, these people have never actually made the acquaintance of either snakes or butterflies.

Snakes hate to shed.  They remind me of menstruating women, grouchy, miserable, striking out at whoever is near.  They lie in cool water trying to help the skin loosen.  The rub up against rocks and branches trying to peel off the unbearably itchy container their skin has become.  They shed even the covering over their eyes, so during the process they are close to blind, intensely vulnerable to predators. 

Sometimes the skin slides off neatly, all in a piece, a lovely translucent envelope with each scale clearly delineated.  More often, they rub off annoying little shreds here, a few more crumbles there.  Imagine having no hands to help with the process, imagine having to undress by laying on the floor and wriggling off a skin tight body stocking until it disintegrated or finally peeled free. Hot, frustrating, maddening work.

Of course, when they are finished, they do look beautiful.  The new skin is brilliant, catching the light.  They are ravenous, and should you happen to have a mouse or rat handy they will scarf it down with alacrity.  One while on a river rafting trip, I hiked inland to see a waterfall.  On the way back I saw a gorgeous king snake, draped in elegant S patterns across some large green leafy plant that looked like something out of Jurassic Park.  It had obviously just shed; its colors gleamed so radiantly it was like the first snake, the original snake in the garden of Eden.  Any fruit that snake had suggested eating, I would have eaten it.  It’s beauty was that persuasive.  But having known several pythons and boas and corn snakes on a more intimate level, I knew what that snake had gone through to attain its jewel-like state. And I knew that every time that snake grew, it would have to shed anew.  We humans like to think of transformation as a one-time deal.  Go to a few yoga classes, attain enlightenment, never have to shed, sweat or strain again.  But, alas, it is as the Buddhist masters say; ‘before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water, after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water’.  Spiritual advancement is not one-stop shopping, nor is it a process of constantly moving up into ever-more rarefied atmospheres.  It’s more like this; you reach down into the muck, the emotional confusion, the shadow side of human experience.  Then you bring that piece of the shadow into the light, where it transforms, shining like the bright new skin of a lizard or a serpent.  Then you plunge back down into the gunk and feel around for the next piece of unconsciousness to be transformed.  Every time you grow, you must shed again.  And not just those few little aggravating things you’d rather not take with you to your next level anyway.  The whole container has to go.  As Jesus said, “You cannot put new wine in old wineskins, for they would burst.  You must have new wineskins for new wine.”  In other words, we can’t just rearrange some of the contents of our lives.  To truly grow, often we must shift the entire context.

Transformation metaphors become even more gruesome when we consider the metamorphosis of caterpillars into butterflies. When I was fourteen, and desperately hoping to evolve from a gangling, awkward adolescent to a lovely woman, I gathered a bunch of caterpillars.  I put them in a large, jumbo size former mayonnaise jar with holes punched in the lid, and each day replenished their supply of the leafed branches I had observed them eating.  Each day my siblings and I leaned our foreheads against the glass, examining them carefully.  Each day they appeared more or less the same.  Then, one morning we awoke and the caterpillars were all gone.  In their place, a dozen chrysalises hung from the branches, each the plain beige of a dried leaf.  But—the horror!  On the bottom of the jar lay a dozen caterpillar heads chopped off as neatly as by a guillotine.  What had gone wrong?  Were all the caterpillars dead?  They must be—no creature can survive without a head.  How could a headless caterpillar evolve into anything?  My hopes dimmed, but still I checked, every day, to see if there was any progress.  But the cocoons hung silent as withered fruit.

Over a month passed.  It was pretty clear these butterflies were never going to hatch. I had killed them by putting them in captivity. I should probably give them a decent burial.  But for some reason I kept putting it off. Long after I had given up on them, I woke one morning to find a butterfly crumpled at the bottom of the jar.  I took the jar outside, into the windy spring.  The butterfly on the bottom was dead.  But soon the other cocoons started shaking back and forth in mad struggle.  A tear appeared in one of them, revealing the orange and black of a folded wing.  The struggle continued.  I asked my mother if maybe I should tear the chrysalis to help the butterfly emerge.  She said no, that might kill it.  Trust nature to take its course.  It was hard to trust nature, looking at the dead butterfly, but I did.  I went inside and ate breakfast.  By lunchtime, not one caterpillar had succeeded in fully separating from its womb-prison.  But when I came outside after lunch, a crumpled butterfly had crawled onto the branch and was sitting there, damp and shivering.  Tears stung my eyes.  After all that waiting, all that work.  The butterfly’s wings were damaged.  It could never fly.  It was ugly and defective, like me.

I turned away, tears streaming down my face.  Probably they would all be like that.  What would become of them?  Probably they would starve.  I turned back, and to my amazement, saw a real butterfly on the branch where I had last seen a helpless cripple. Its wings had unfurled in the weak spring sunlight and were stiffening into their proper shape even as I watched.  It stopped trembling and began delicately testing the breeze with its new wings.  Another butterfly hauled itself up on an adjoining branch and huddled there, wet and rumpled, trembling violently.    Then a gust of breeze caught the first butterfly and lifted it off the branch; it fluttered, seemingly in amazement—and then bobbled off in the breeze, questing for nectar.  I gazed closely at the second butterfly’s face.  I imagined it was exhausted, disoriented.  I saw how the head of the butterfly in no way resembles the head of a caterpillar.  It was smaller, more delicate, with fern like antennae and a curled, elegant tongue in place of the voracious caterpillar mouth.  This time I watched the whole process as the sodden mass of crumpled black and orange tissue on the butterfly’s back spread and stiffened into an elegant flying machine, like a piece of origami suddenly unfolded into a miraculous creation.

By sunset, nine butterflies had emerged, shuddered in shock, then strengthened and flown.  I buried the first butterfly, who had perished at the bottom of the jar without tasting the freedom of the sky.  Two of the chrysalis’ remained unmoving and mute. After another two weeks had passed, I allowed my sister, the budding doctor, to dissect the unhatched cocoons.  Inside, there was neither caterpillar nor butterfly, just an undifferentiated mass of goo.  The caterpillars had dissolved, but out of that chaos, no new life had emerged.

Transformation is a terrible risk.  The old life disintegrates, with no guarantee that something better will arrive in exchange. Does the butterfly even remember its old past life as a caterpillar?  I thought they did, that first moment when they stepped off the branch and seemed amazed to be borne aloft.  But after that first astonished moment, perhaps it all fades, with the memory of all the suffering.  Perhaps nothing is left but nectar and flight.

The Z that stands for Zorro

Zorro, in Spanish, means fox.  But because of the masked man made famous by television, the Spanish Robin Hood, when we acquired a baby raccoon, we immediately dubbed him Zorro. 

Zorro had been one of three baby raccoons found in a nest when some of our neighbors cut down a tree.  One of the babies was killed in the fall.  Our neighbor kept one to raise, and my father took the other.  My father built a cage on the side of our house, about four feet off the ground, with a wooden enclosure where Zorro could sleep and some branches he could climb.  Our goal was to keep Zorro untamed rather than domesticate him, so that when he grew up he could return to the wild.

To achieve that end, we brought him ears of corn which he shucked and ate (we were living in the country in upstate New York and there were many cornfields nearby).  We also brought him live crayfish, frogs and tadpoles from the creek that ran through our property so he would learn to hunt.  Of course, wild food being hard to come by, we also augmented his diet by feeding him dry cat food, a delicacy savored by raccoons everywhere. 

Zorro had a large basin of water in his cage.  Though he had been too young when we got him to have ever seen his mother wash her food in the stream, the instinct was apparently hardwired.  He scrupulously washed every food item before devouring it, whether apples, carrots, kibble or the crayfish he joyfully ripped apart after discovering them in his water bowl.  My father, curious scientist that he was, decided to test Zorro’s instincts.  He presented him with food items that were large and awkward, like a banana.  Zorro fumbled it into the basin, dragged it out and then figured out how to peel it.  He gave Zorro fruit chopped into tiny pieces.  Each tiny piece was diligently washed, though several remained at the bottom of the water dish.  Then, the real test.  My father handed Zorro a sugar cube.  Zorro sniffed it delightedly, then began scrubbing it in the water. A moment later, he was patting all around the bottom of the pan, searching for the missing treat.  My father handed him a second sugar cube. Again, Zorro set to work washing it.  This time, a look of complete bewilderment spread over his face as, once again, the treat vanished.  My father proffered a third sugar cube.  Zorro took it, holding the white cube gingerly in his little black hands.  He looked at the sugar cube, and he looked at the water.  He looked at the sugar cube, and he looked at the water.  He approached the water, then backed away a step.  He began trembling all over, instinct warring with intelligence.  Finally, in a burst of genius, Zorro quickly swished the sugar cube through the water and popped it in his mouth.

“Only three tries!” My father said admiringly.  Of course, once Zorro had cracked the code, he never washed a sugar cube away again.  My father gave him another one the following week; Zorro executed his swish and pop technique flawlessly.

Humans like to think that we are smarter than raccoons. But when it comes to noticing that our habits don’t work in a certain situation—or maybe don’t work anymore at all—we are embarrassingly slow to change.

Put a rat in a maze every day of its life, and put cheese at the same corner of the maze each of those days.  Quickly, the rat learns where to go for the cheese.  One day, the researchers move the cheese to a different location.  The rat goes to the same corner as usual, realizes the cheese isn’t there.  The rat wiggles his nose.  He starts sniffing around.  He explores the maze until he finds where the cheese is hidden this time.

Put us humans in the same situation, and we will stand there bellowing; “But there has to be cheese here!  There’s always been cheese here!  I’m staying right here until the cheese comes back!” 

The rat, and the raccoon, are just intelligent enough to see the problem and figure out a solution to it.  Humans are smart enough to be stubborn, to become identified with and attached to our behavior.  We are smart enough to use our intelligence to sabotage our ability to make necessary changes.  We get tangled in our intelligence as if it were a ball of yarn, spinning all sorts of stories and rationalizations which keep us stuck. 

A friend of mine who was a recovering alcoholic once told me that when he was drinking, he frequently had the experience of waking up next to a woman he did not know and having no memory who she was or what they had done together.

“Well, that must have been a wake-up call,” I said.

“Oh no,” he laughed.  “Not at all.  All my friends were having the same sorts of experiences.”

In that moment, I realized what A.A. means when they talk about ‘lowering companions’.  One way to disguise our addictions, our bad habits from ourselves, is to surround ourselves with others who share them.

Once, I was giving a talk about Witchcraft to an anthropology class at Pomona College.  After I had been speaking for fifteen or twenty minutes, one young woman in the class put her hands over her ears and closed her eyes.  She remained that way until the end of the class.  She spoke to the professor before leaving the classroom.  Then the professor approached me and said, “That young woman wanted to apologize for covering her ears while you were speaking.  She knows it was rude.  But she is a Christian, and has been taught certain things about Witches.  She said that everything you said was so reasonable and logical, she knew that if she kept listening, she would start to believe it. The only way not to believe that you were a good person and what you were saying was true was to put her hands over her ears.”

Animals are not frightened by the possibility of increasing their intelligence.  Their survival depends on their ability to make the best choices in any situation.  They don’t worry that they will become a different, unfamiliar person if they explore a new part of the maze. They don’t worry about sailing over the edge of the known world.  They don’t fret about being different from other raccoons if they figure out how to wash sugar.  They don’t use their intelligence to thwart their own growth.  Primitive people of every culture spent an enormous amount of time observing other animals. And while we call those peoples ‘primitive’, they were often far more psychologically sophisticated than our modern culture encourages us to be today.  A shaman does not relate to the animals and plants inhabiting the natural world as ‘scenery’.  A shaman relates to each creature, including the plants, as fellow travelers, as potential teachers.  Zorro was one of my teachers.

Big Bucks

Visualization has become a popular, even mainstream, way of obtaining one’s heart’s desire.  There are teachers who claim that visualization is a fail-safe system, results guaranteed.  Of course, teenage boys who spend intensive time visualizing union with their favorite centerfold, even doing a crude form of sex magic over it, might be skeptical of such claims.  No matter how powerfully they imagine and visualize, that air-brushed girl doesn’t walk through the door to save them from an awkward adolescence.. Think of all the millions of people worldwide who have been praying for the deaths of Bush and Cheney for years, and consider the results.  If you can’t knock over a man with a quadruple bypass with prayers and curses, how effective can visualization and affirmations be? And yet, many of us can point to a time when we did magic for a particular outcome with astonishing results. Anyone who promises reliable results is lying.  The only guaranteed result is a flow of cash from your wallet to theirs.  It’s the siren song of the three monkeys—put your hands over your ears and shut your eyes and open your purse, and the latest snake oil salesman will give you a formula that cures absolutely everything, guaranteed.  And yet—those miracles.  What about the miracles?  And how can we get some?  

 There’s a saying in the world of magic; “Be careful what you wish for; you might get it.”  More experienced shamans counsel younger ones to be very precise and thoughtful about how they word their affirmations, as sometimes the outcomes can be quite precise—and yet not at all what the one invoking those results had intended.  My friend Michele told me a story about one of her associates at Nine Gates Mystery School who was hard at work creating more financial abundance in his life.  His affirmation was simple; he kept chanting, “Send me the big bucks, send me the big bucks, send me the big bucks.”  Then, one morning he walked out to his car, and standing right there beside his car were—you guessed it—two large stags.  The big bucks had arrived, but they were not quite what he had expected.  Of course, through most of human history, two stags showing up in response to your prayers and conjuring would be exactly the abundance the happy hunter had hoped for.  The universe has a wicked sense of humor and will happily point out your own human absurdity again and again.

So being careful what you ask for is helpful.  But sitting at home chanting, “I want $100,000 in unmarked bills delivered to my door Friday,” isn’t going to make it happen either.  You can’t just wish for peaches in your own yard.  You need to dig and fertilize  the earth, plant the seed, weed and water if you want a peach tree.  If you use visualization and affirmations as a way of avoiding your responsibilities in the physical world, your results will probably not be what you hoped.

Surrender is another component of successful magic.  I had a friend who was heartbroken over the breakup of his marriage.  He began to do a spell to call his beloved back to him.  But as he was doing his spell, he stopped before asking that his ex should return to him, and instead asked that he be united with ‘his soul mate’ without mentioning her name.  Two weeks later, he met another woman at a conference.  They are still together thirty years later.  He shudders to think how he would have missed his opportunity had he specified the woman he was convinced was his soul mate instead of letting the universe decide.  Yes, sometimes being too specific is what gets in your way.  It seems contradictory, but consider the tides. They flow in, and then they ebb.  Breathing requires both in-breath and out-breath.  There is an element of assertion, then surrendering to the highest good.

Magic is like wearing a seat belt.  Wearing a seat belt increases your chances of surviving a car accident.  It does not guarantee your survival.  The best sailor in the world can be lost in a storm, the best skier in the world can plow into a tree.  Our skills and our tools enhance our power to survive and to thrive.  But there is no magic formula that works each and every time. This is where mystery comes in.  Sometimes you do everything right and still are denied what you desire.  As the Native American Chief in the film Little Big Man says; “Sometimes the magic works; sometimes it doesn’t.” 

So you do your best, move with the flow, and if the flow doesn’t take you where you want to go, try to enjoy the ride.  Life really is the journey, not the destination. 

But I hope you make the big bucks.  Or at least, get to meet them.

Cookie Monster

As soon as Elie and I pulled into the campground in upper Yosemite, we knew there was going to be bear trouble.  Little sparkling rounds of car window glass were piled as high as a gnome king’s diamond stash in the parking place beside our campsite.  Even in the summer when the Yosemite valley floor was packed with tourists and the smoke from their combined campfires created a haze to rival the worst days in the L.A. basin, these upper campgrounds didn’t usually fill up.  Partly this was because they were primitive; pit toilets, no showers, no electrical hook-ups.  And partly it was because of the bears, who in the back country are plentiful, and fearless.  They are the trolls under the bridge of back country wilderness, and they expect a tithe from those who come to share in their territory.

We became more nervous when we saw the bear in question winding through flowering shrubs with her three cubs.  Having been camping since I was a kid, the sight of bears was familiar and not scary to me. But I knew that mother bears, being fiercely protective of their young, could be aggressive, especially towards anyone who inadvertently steps between a mother and her cub. In those circumstances, they often attack first and ask questions later.  So as Elie and I continued our hike we sang, whistled and talked loudly so as not to take the bears by surprise.  We made dinner while it was still light, and carefully hung out food from a tree.  We made sure there was no gear anywhere on our car seats that could be mistaken for food.  Of course, we knew not to have food in our tent.  But we weren’t sleeping in a tent.  The weather was so gorgeous, we had decided to just put our sleeping bags on the ground.  Now, viewing the shards of glass near our parking space, we had some minor second thoughts about our decision.

As it grew dark, our neighbor at the next campsite invited us over for cocoa and cookies.  His wife had brought some awesome homemade chocolate chip cookies and the packaged cocoa with marshmallows kept us warm as the night deepened.  After a while the wife took their two young kids to the tent to put them to bed.  Elie and I continued to sit around the picnic table with our gregarious neighbor.

“These cookies are so great,” I enthused, helping myself to another one.

“Yeah.  I’ll bet he’d like one,” the man said, gesturing towards the end of the table.  I followed where he was pointing and saw a bear just past the end of the table, nostrils flared with interest.  I looked at Elie and the other guy with alarm.  They were continuing to laugh and joke as if nothing were wrong.

Fine, I thought to myself.  If they’re not excited, I’m not excited.  I’m not going to be the girl and get all scared and anxious.  So I simply nodded and said coolly, “Yeah, I’ll bet he would.”

Now you have to realize that in my twenties, I had quite the feminist chip on my shoulder. Like many woman in the nineteen-seventies, I had experienced severe sexual harassment, been fired from jobs for not sleeping with the boss and experienced other consequences of sexism. I had begun lowering the timbre of my voice, convinced that men responded to lower tones as being authoritative.  And I was determined to show no weakness that would give any man the ability to dismiss me as ‘just a girl’.  So I crossed my arms beneath my chest and tried to look casual.  These guys think they’re tough?  HA!  I’ll show them tough.

 The bear began slowly moving around the corner of the table.  I kept a smile on my face.  The bear sniffed my low back as it went by.  No big deal, I said to myself.  The bear padded silently past Elie and then—WHAM!  A huge paw slammed down onto the table, right on top of the cookies.  Elie and the other camper jumped up as the bear dragged the plate of cookies over the end of the table.  The other camper whacked the bear on the nose with a newspaper as if it was an unruly dog, and the bear scampered off with a mouthful of cookies.

“Holy shit!  Did you see that!” the man exclaimed.

“That bear came out of nowhere!” Elie said.

“What do you mean, out of nowhere?” I said.  “You were just talking about him!”

“No we weren’t.  What are you talking about?”

I pointed at our new friend who was shakily stacking the remaining cookies back on the plate.  “You pointed right at him!  You said, “I’ll bet he’d like some.  Then I said, Yeah, I’ll bet he would…”

“I was talking about my son—in the tent—he can’t get enough of these cookies,” the man explained.

“You saw the bear and you didn’t say anything?” Elie asked incredulously.  “Why would you do that?”

Then I realized that the bright light of the Coleman lantern on the table had blinded them to the darkness beyond it.  Only I, seated near the end of the table had seen the bear. While I was competing, they were oblivious.  I looked at the guys, their eyes wide, waiting for an explanation, and right then, I got how incredibly stupid it was for me to try to ‘prove’ myself to men by competing with them and trying to look tough.

After the bear incident, I stopped chasing after tough.  I allowed my voice to return to its normal soprano range.  Instead of being soft on the inside and wearing a hard shell on the outside, I allowed my softness to show on the outside and became strong on the inside.  My vision of strong was no longer tough; it was flexible, like the willow for which the path of Wicca is named.  It was firm and loving rather than defiant and competitive.  I began describing the power I was acquiring, and teaching others to acquire, as ‘soft power.’  And the strange thing is, the more I softened, trusting in my true strength, strong enough to express myself compassionately, the more respect I got—from men and women both.

Hey hey we’re the Monkeys…

I hated those damn monkeys. When I was growing up in the 1950’s and 60’s, it seemed like every other house had them.  Usually carved out of wood, sometimes ceramic. One with its hands pressed tight over its ears.  One shielding its eyes.   One whose palms obliterated its mouth.

“See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,” adults would say sanctimoniously. My family was agnostic, and most people we knew in southern California, aerospace engineers. lawyers, doctors and other well-educated professionals did not attend church. There were no crucifixes in their homes.  Just the monkeys.  It appeared that the three monkeys were their gods, the ‘see no evil…’ homily their one commandment.  I couldn’t have explained why those monkeys, and that saying, made me so enraged.  But whenever I found myself in a room alone with them I would stick my tongue out defiantly.  I would see everything, hear everything and speak the truth, no matter what anyone else thought. 

The word denial must have existed in the dictionary, but I never heard it spoken.  Denial was the river in which we bathed, swam—and sometimes drowned.  Good people pretended everything was all right, even when it wasn’t.  No one was alcoholic, husbands never beat their wives, children were not molested, homosexuality had disappeared with the ancient Greeks.  Negroes were happy with their lot.   Why else would they be constantly singing? A good woman did not want to work outside the home, being designed only to raise children and treat her husband as if he were a demigod. If children crouched under their school desks, they would be safe from an atomic blast. Margerine was better than butter. Everyone was happy.  So happy! Happy all the time!  But when I went to my friends’ houses and saw their mothers hysterically slapping their faces or staring vacantly out the window at the blue California sky swilling martinis while the baby wailed unattended behind the closed nursery door, I had my doubts.  The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that everything was a lie.  And the reason people couldn’t see or admit that it was a lie was because somehow—those monkeys were controlling their minds.  What was the source of their malignant power?  Were they more than stone and clay? Were they related to the evil flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz? How could they be defeated?

I remembered when I was a much younger child, four and five years old, when my grandparents’ purchase of a black and white television set launched me into years of recurrent nightmares.  From the beginning, the television set in their living room frightened me.  Even when it was turned off, I would make as wide a berth around it as possible.  That picture box showed a terrible world, a world that looked much like ours did, but a world in which the color had been drained out.  A world of drab grays.  My recurrent dream was that an enormous spider, like a Godzilla size Daddy Long Legs was stepping with its long, delicate legs through the city and countryside, sucking the color out of everything the way I had seen spiders suck the juices out of a fly.  I would wake up screaming.  What if this dreadful spider came to Glendale and Manhattan Beach?  How could we live without color?

But as an older child I understood that black and white was a trick of a certain type of film, not a color-thirsty spider.  I did not yet understand that my nightmare had been a metaphor, that the human color-suckers—racists, McCartheyites– were in full force in the 1950’s, and that their evil creeds would need defeating again and again.  I made a conscious decision to resist monkey mind-control.  I decided the monkeys only had as much power as people gave them. And I refused to shut my eyes or my ears, though the thought of my father’s belt sometimes caused me to shut my mouth. 

Things seem more simple and straightforward in black and white, without all that distracting color.  And it’s a lot easier to ignore evil than it is to fight it.  The shaman—or any human who wants to be conscious—has to resist the temptation to walk down the  simple path, the easy path. Though the monkeys’ power was imaginary, a child trying to make sense of a nonsensical world, the power I gained by resisting their command to shut down was not.

Footprints

“I can’t talk you out of this?” I wheedled.

Elie and his best friend Paul sighed.  “We’ll be fine,” Elie assured me.

“I’ll get lost,” Paul admitted, “but then Elie will save the day, as usual.”

“You’ve never been worried about us going off before,” Elie said.

All the more reason you should listen to me now, I thought.  My intuitions were usually correct, and this camping trip of theirs, though planned for just a couple of days, had me completely spooked.  But seeing their determination, I prayed it was not my intuition but just some silly random fear.  I hugged Paul goodbye, then clung to Elie a few moments more than usual.  He looked at me fondly.  “We’ll be back safe and sound, I promise.”

“You’d better,” I threatened.  “Anything happens, you know I’ll haunt you in the afterlife.”

Elie cringed in mock terror.  “No worries.  I’m not done with this life.”

I blew him a kiss, trying to look jaunty as he hitched up his backpack, and they strode happily out to the car.  They’re big, strong, smart guys, I told myself, they’ll be fine.

That night, when Elie and Paul were scheduled to be in the Sierras, I had a dream.  In my dream, Elie and Paul were sleeping by the side of the road.  A light dusting of snow covered their sleeping bags and the road itself.  Tucked in their sleeping bags like enormous caterpillars, they snored on, oblivious to the cold.

And equally oblivious to the man with the bloody knife trudging up the hill towards them like a vengeful ghost.

I placed myself between the man and the sleepers, and expanded into a sheet of Goddess light.  My arms were out, palms facing the man with the dagger, creating a shimmering wall he could not cross.

The man with the knife stopped, uncertain, disoriented.

No need, I thought to him.  They’re fast asleep.  No threat to you.

He squinted up the hill, wavered.

I pursed my lips and blew, and the cold east wind blew through me, pushing him back, gently but firmly.

He gave one more searching glance towards the sleeping men.

Then he turned and went back down the hill, leaving a trail of bloody footprints in his wake. 

I jolted awake to the sound of our clock radio blaring the news; two men in their twenties found dead outside of a small town in the Sierras.

Two men found dead!  Terror gripped me.  I forced the fear away; just give me a moment to get clear I said to my panic.  I focused on Elie and Paul, holding their image in my mind, breathing steadily.  Are they all right?  I asked.  I kept visualizing their faces. The light around them did not dim or waver.  Calm suffused me.  They were all right.  I was sure of it. 

The next night, when they came home safely, as promised, they told me their story.

They had driven as far as they could, and then, too sleepy to go any farther, had parked their car by the side of the road, simply unrolled their sleeping bags on the other side of the road under some pines, and gone to sleep.

They woke the next morning with a sheriff kicking them lightly in the feet to see if they were still alive.  They hitched themselves up on their elbows to find several nervous cops milling around with their hands on their guns.  “You guys lose a couple friends last night?” the sheriff asked.  Then he asked them to climb out of their sleeping bags real slow, so he could see their hands. After a bewildered Paul and Elie were patted down and their car searched, the sheriff gestured to the meadow below the hill. Other police were inspecting two bodies sprawled there, each surrounded by a wide fan of crimson.  He turned their attention to the snowy road, and to the bloody footprints that had come within fifteen feet of them before turning back.

“Yup, I’d say you folks are darn lucky you’re deep sleepers.  Fella probably heard you snoring.  Hard to believe you slept through all that, but darn lucky you did.”

Hearing their tale, my knees buckled, and I collapsed.  When they heard my dream they became very silent. 

“Well,” Elie finally said, “I knew having a Witch girlfriend would come in handy.”

Vivid dream?  Astral projection?  Coincidence?  Magic?  I don’t know.  Ursula LeGuin once said, “I think the universe is not only stranger than we suppose, but stranger than we can suppose.”

Ursula is right.