Had an awesome day yesterday out hiking with Leah near Barclay Lake, about an hour east of here in the Wild Sky wilderness area. The day was gray and misty (even in the city, the morning was one of those that seemed mysteriously calm and quiet, no breeze to carry the noise of traffic from busier streets). It felt so good to be out in the woods again, and to take some time to sit quietly by the shore of the lake and watch the mist drift through among the hemlocks and cedar. Everything was damp, darkening the skin of the trees to deep shades of brown and mahogany beneath the myriad shades of green from moss, lichen, needles, ferns.
After writing my first column for SageWoman (which, damn it all, bounced back when I tried emailing it apparently, so I don't know if it will have made it to Anne in time or not), I shared a draft with Jeff, who asked me if I weren't perhaps getting in touch with another goddess. When I read that reply, there was a thrill of recognition, and almost immediately a shy giddiness. (What it reminded me of most was way back, sophomore year of college, when Elliott asked me randomly one day if I had a crush on Ray... and it was like naming something I had already known but hadn't yet named for myself. Sometimes I need people in my life to point out the astoundingly obvious.)
I have a great deal of ambivalence about it. Not about.... her, but about the community. I am very hesitant to talk about it with anyone as yet, and maybe will remain that way. She isn't Celtic at all, and so I feel on the one hand that my cosmology has been thrown completely out of whack. I talked awkwardly about it with Leah some and found myself having to repeatedly hedge in what I was saying, tacking on all sorts of qualifiers about how maybe it wasn't really her, I would have to do more research and see. But even as I said it, I could feel what bullshit that was: it most definitely is her, I knew it right away, as soon as I recognized the truth of it. Why did I feel the need to pretend I wasn't sure, or to apologize that she didn't fit into a carefully planned and organized cosmological framework with all the appropriate cultural context?
I did some poking around on TC today, seeing what I could find of other people talking about her. It was depressing and frustrating — the main threads I found were full of bickering and nit-picking. Sometimes I feel like reconstructionists are so astoundingly literal, so pinned down by a misunderstanding of how historical research even works in the context of theology and relationship. I feel like I've met this amazing new person in my life, and these folks are full of dating advice along the lines of rifling through her old photo albums to find pictures of her dressed up for her school plays when she was five. And if you dare to suggest that maybe who she is now is not the same girl who wanted to be a pretty-pink-princess for Halloween, you get shouted down for historical inaccuracy. Not only does that seem deeply disrespectful to her and her wildness and her power, but I don't think I can have a relationship with a deity who is restricted to the past, fenced in by the interpretations laid on her by the ancient Greeks (many of whose views I find deeply problematic in any case).
I did a Google search for images of her done by more modern artists, and there she was, shining through in every graceful, powerful curve and arch, the whole ecstatic tension of her freedom, her self-possessed sensuality like a wild thing, a bridge between dark earth and illuminated night.... and to think, the folks on TC box her into the role of "pre-pubescent female" because the Greeks always portrayed her wearing a knee-length chiton. Like I give a fuck how the Greeks wanted to dress up their goddesses. My mother used to dress me in overalls and Oshkosh-b'gosh.
I am not sure why the reconstructionists believe that our ancestors were always in the best possible relationship with the gods — they were clearly not in the best possible relationship with other humans, instead they held views that were often misogynistic, xenophobic and downright cruel. Slavery, servitude, the second-class status of women. Why would I automatically think that they were any better at establishing healthy relationships with the divine? Didn't the gods abandon them, in the end, didn't Christianity take root in a society rife with injustice and the absence of the old gods? I just don't think that, if the old ways of being religious were so goddamned perfect, a bit of fire and sword and cross could have overcome them.
But I'm getting away from the point.
Or maybe not. My relationship with Brighid has become increasingly difficult — I feel her presence as a task-master and guide, but there is a distance between us that wasn't there before. I find myself troubled by the cosmology of it, feeling like I can't get it to hang together, and a resistance on her end. The other day I found myself feeling somewhat envious of Jeff's relationships with his deities, how they seemed natural and organic, to arise from a place of messiness that was closer to reality than the stilted, patterned structure I've tried to make of my theology. In some ways, I almost feel as though Brighid has referred me to... her to shake me up and break me free from my Libra-rian need for balance and equal-opposites in all things. She is just so utterly wild and beautiful. As though her wildness will break open my relationship with Brighid (and perhaps Manannan, too, though he has always come and gone as he chooses mostly in dream and vision), shake me out of this bizarre need I've developed over the past couple years to always ensure that my relationships with the gods conforms to the expectations of "historical accuracy."
I think maybe I won't call her by her more familiar name, at least for now. Maybe that will help.
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