The Old Woman

In the middle of the forest, somewhere off the beaten track, hidden, there is a little hut. This is the place where the Old Woman lives.

The Old Woman is the friend of the forest. She cherishes and attends. She is always present in the shadows, part of the breath of trees perhaps, or the small heartbeats of birds. She watches from the mouths of squirrels' nests, from the eddies behind the speckled rocks in the creek, from the line between shadow and light along the stems of grasses, from the flash of the wing of a bird. Once in awhile you might catch a glimmer of her out of the corner of your eye -- but never for long, never in a way that makes you certain.

She is a weaver and a healer, gathering blossoms and seeds, combing the jackets of coyotes and rabbits for the fibers for her blankets. Her concoctions bring the fever that helps us shed outmoded beliefs, and the inner quiet that helps new understandings to grow.

In the numinous juncture where the forest of the world meets the forest of the heart, she is the guide. Look for her when the outer world has exhausted you, when your well is dry and your work no longer brings you meaning. Her hut will suddenly appear in a little clearing as day slides into evening. She will meet you there. Her fire will warm you; her meal will nourish you. She is the attendant of the releasing, the setting down. In the simple silence of her forest dwelling, if you are willing to be empty and in need of her, your wounds will be healed and insights will come. She is catalyst for transformation.

As she helps tear down and tear apart, as you weep the tears that have festered inside you, she is the terrible soul-scourging witch. Afterwards, in the feathery blanket of her nurturing arms, she is Mother and Granny.

Here is how you find her: get good and lost in the forest wilderness. Leave the trail or follow it until it disappears. Lose the words and identities that have guided your way. Loose your understandings. At the threshold of darkness her cabin will appear. No matter how fearsome she is, address her respectfully and do not be afraid to go inside.

Then, give it time. A healing season in the forest lasts until all vestiges of your old self have fallen to the ground, been covered over and snowed on, often many times. The achingly tender new growth comes through the detritus into piercing air, and it must be sheltered until it is strong enough to meet the world. Get used to not knowing, not having an address, having no answers to anybody's questions.

When the Old Woman is ready to release you, a path will find its way to her door. It will be a tiny thing, strewn with boulders and sudden cliff faces, but you will know it is meant for you, and you will take it. You will walk it one step at a time, lamenting the necessity to leave the forest even as you anticipate an undefined future. You will know by then not to form definitions too quickly, and how to listen to the quiet wisdom of your own soul.

In My Dream Last Night

In my dream last night Rosean and I are with a young woman priest. We are all walking somewhere together, maybe at a mall. She tells us there is something she has known since before the beginning of time. Rosean wants her to tell us what that is. She is quiet. We wait. Then there is an interruption of some sort. People come and the priest talks to them. We continue walking, looking in shops, greeting friends. Rosean and I keep waiting for a moment when we can ask her again. There are too many distractions.

This is the sort of dream that begs for active imagination. In my imagination I can go back into the dream, dream the dream onward, maybe find out what I couldn’t learn last night. To do this I have to listen very carefully. My awake consciousness will want to take charge of the dream images, put words in everybody’s mouths instead of letting the characters speak out of their own integrity. The sign that I have set aside my usual conscious perspective and heard the truth of the dream will be that I learn something new.

I focus once again on the priest. She is short, dark eyed, with dark brown hair held back in a clip. She wears a grey skirt and powder blue blouse with a clerical collar, shoes with low heels. Her lipstick darkens her mouth to an earthy pottery color. She is serious, intent. Rosean and I walk one on each side of her. We are in an open plaza outside a number of small shops.

I stop and face her. “Please tell me”, I say, “what you know.”

She smiles sagely out of her deep brown eyes. “You know what I know,” she says.

I sigh. I hate these kinds of answers. I tell her I can’t think of a single thing I know since before the beginning of time. She looks a little nonplussed. Rosean and I both wait. We are not going to let her off the hook this time.

She looks at us both for a long moment, as though concerned that maybe we really don’t want to know what she has to tell us. We wait patiently. She nods and reaches in a large handbag she has been carrying. She pulls out a silver chalice and paten.

The chalice is etched with intricate designs. She hands it to me. When I touch it I know it is very ancient. As I look into it, it begins to fill with water. I watch the liquid reach the rim and spill over. As I stand there holding the cup, streams of water flow out in four directions, north, east, south, and west. I realize I do know this image. I have painted it, many years ago.

I set the chalice down on the ground. It continues to fountain.

The priest hands me the paten. As I hold it it expands. The plaza becomes a great plain stretching away to the horizon in all directions. Green grass waves. The streams from the chalice carve their way through the rich soil. There are tiny fish in the streams now. Little animals of all sorts come to drink and bathe. Miniature people scoop water into pots and take it away to their camp sites, bring their laundry to wash and their livestock to water

I am both holding the paten and standing on it with Rosean and the priest. I set it down, placing the chalice on it. The priest and I look at one another for a long silent moment.

I shrug. “I know this. But I don’t know what it means.”

“Yes you do,” she replies. “You know exactly what it means.” She taps me on the chest. “Know with your heart, my dear.”

I come to see that the image I have been given is a picture of divinity in its nurturing and sustaining capacity. The Holy is our ground of being and the nourishing water of our souls. It is central to all life, the most important thing. Everything moves and has it’s being in this great sustaining presence: The Tao, the Way of Things, the Source, God.

The priest is staring at me. When I finally look into her eyes once more she smiles at me. She smiles at Rosean, holding her eyes as well. She reaches out and takes each of us by the hand. “Feed my sheep,” she tells us. She squeezes our hands. Then she disappears.

I’m left with the image of her lipstick hanging by itself in the air like the smile of the Cheshire cat.

Child-rearing Grannies

I lit a candle a couple of hours ago. There are several things I am not ready to think about right now, and the little light on my altar is my promise and my reminder.

Two of my grandkids that I don't get to see very often were here for a couple of days. Now they've left, I'm missing them. When they were here, I was stressed and tired. How do the Arapaho grannies do it, I wonder -- raise six or seven grandkids at a time all by themselves in their teeny houses? How do they stay sane?

I am by far not the wealthiest Anglo in the world, but even so I live in such rarefied air. I have a bedroom and an office/studio, and can spend long hours alone there. I can visit with friends without having to break up fights, wipe noses, watch what little hands and feet are getting into. I have clean water that comes right out of my tap. I don't have to worry about how to stretch the food or about how not paying the heat bill makes the babies cry. I have the treasure of being able to plot my own course through life.

I met several of the Arapaho grannies when I worked for a church on the border of the Wind River Indian Reservation. I knew them when they were feeling most vulnerable, when they were having to ask an Anglo for help to keep their little ones clothed and warm and fed, their need to ask an ongoing reminder of Anglo supremacy. None of us liked the roles we found ourselves in at those moments. Try as I might to be respectful, I was still the one holding the purse strings. Try as they might to remember their self esteem and their righteous anger, they were still the ones who had to ask.

There are so many situations like this around the world. Most people are forced to play the role of having nothing. A very few get to play the role of having a lot. There are no intrinsic differences between us; just the hard, cold reality of how these roles shape us in the most basic of ways.

So now that I have been reminded again of the luxury of my life, I have to ask myself how I am doing. Am I being a good steward of the resources I have been given? Am I being a good servant?

And have I yet come up with any good ideas that would change that horrid scenario where people of dignity and courage have to beg from others? Where the few have to suspiciously examine the guts of the lives of the many before a meager few dollars change hands? Where wealthy people of conscience feel like trash because they have the luxury of choice in respecting the person sitting with them, but that person doesn't?

I am extremely grateful not to be a full-time child-rearing granny. And to all the wise, steel-spined women I have met who are doing just that in the most adverse of situations, all I can say is -- thanks on behalf of the world that needs those kids. I hope we can together keep looking for ways of doing it better.

Coyote and the Trickster Christ

A shadow stole through the mists of consciousness last night as I lay half asleep in the throes of sudden body temperature changes. Coyote, yellow-eyed and grinning, placed one wise, slender paw ahead of the other as he threaded his way across the inner landscape. He looked askance at me to let me know he was aware of me, and to show me some canny message of movement and silence.

In my mind's eye I watched his bobbing tail as he picked his way through the sagebrush, under an egg white moon. I did not have the feeling he wanted me to follow him. He had come, displayed himself, moved on.

When Rosean and I used to drive across Wyoming on our frequent long jaunts, Coyote would sometimes cross the road ahead of us. It was always wise to watch what happened next. Coyote is a devil to a planned-out existence. He likes to shake things up, unsettle what is firmly tied in place. He is the aspect of God that Clarissa Pinkola Estes speaks of in her little book The Faithful Gardener, "Though we think we are following the rightful map, God suddenly decides to lift up the road, placing it and us elsewhere."

Coyote magic runs through Rosean's and my lives in a strong river. We know that God laughs when we tell her our plans. We have learned over the years to find the joy in the moments we travel even as we grieve the shattering of expectations and connections.

Last night something different happened. Watching the retreating bushy tail, I was suddenly aware I was looking at a human face, a quiet presence of compassion and invitation. It was like my icon of the Compassionate Christ, how that icon would look if it came to life and realized itself beyond the foibles of the artist. Coyote was still trotting along, and yet from the same space the face was gazing at me. Gentled, embraced by those brown eyes, I lay quietly for a long time. Finally it dawned on me. "You are also the Trickster God," I said to this Christ who looked at me out of my heart.

Out of my heart he claimed me. "Who are you?" he whispered, as though it were a riddle to which he knew the answer that I must guess.

I found myself thinking of my qualities: determination and patience, arrogance, yearning for community, irritability, inarticulateness in some moments, eloquence in others, dead-on accurate intuition, flakiness. I thought of my compassionate heart -- and then of the abrupt coldness I can sometimes manifest. I remembered my quick mind -- and my absolute obtuseness in certain areas. I examined my desire to please people -- and my utter willingness to speak the truth when the chips are down. I looked in a thousand mirrors and saw the reflections of me at all my different ages. I thought I might have begun to form an answer out of all those and many more pieces.

"Who are you beyond all that?" he whispered.

I felt myself go completely still. I looked into darkness like soft felt. Thoughts swam away from me like fish. Feelings bloomed like flowers and disappeared. Going into matter until the atoms in my body were far enough apart that starlight shone through, I admired all the little universes. "Where is Laurie?" I wondered -- and then wondered who wondered. With that I snapped back into consciousness and found myself fully awake and lying in bed next to a deeply-snoring Rosean.

"What are you asking? What are you asking of me?" I addressed my memory of the Compassionate Trickster Christ, and saw again Coyote's most eloquent tail.

The whisper of a whisper reached me. I am not certain what he said. It was just that he had come, and had displayed himself -- and would shine in gentle compassion, once in awhile, from Laurie Gudim's eyes.

An Irish Temple

Today, on St. Patrick's Feast Day, I am thinking with millions of other people about Ireland. Rosean and I visited the island ten years ago or so at the invitation of good friends. It is the only place I have ever been off the continent of North America.

On Ireland is one of the most powerful religious sites I have ever visited. It is called Newgrange, and it is 500 years older than the Great Pyramid in Gaza. Think about that for a moment. The Pyramid was built in 2500 BC. That means Newgrange was built long enough ago to be older than our entire Christian civilization, two and a half times.

In North America we have little connection to history like that. The indiginous peoples of this land lived lightly on it, leaving behind few traces. We do not dwell among our ancestors like Europeans do. This makes us all a bit deranged.

But that is a topic for another time. I want to tell you about Newgrange. Newgrange is called a magalithic passage tomb because of when it was built and because human remains were found in the inner chamber. No one knows what it's function really was -- burial site, temple, maybe both. The civilization that built it has passed entirely out of history. All we know about them is that the Celts, who were according to story the sixth race of peoples to settle Ireland, called them the Tuatha De Danann, children of the goddess, and ascribed to them godlike powers.

Newgrange is a covered passageway leading to a cross-shapped inner chamber. It was built entirely by humans, using huge stones piled atop one another and covered with earth. The mound covers an acre, the passageway alone being around 60 feet long. The inner chamber is 20 feet high. It has a corbelled roof so skillfully designed that it has suffered little damage in over 5,000 years.

The most remarkable feature of Newgrange, though, is the alignment of a structure called a roofbox, built above the entrance to the passageway. It is so calibrated that it lets in the light of the winter solstice sunrise. Just at dawn (actually, these days a couple of minutes after dawn, but 5,000 years ago just at dawn) the sun creeps down the passage and illuminates the inner chamber.

Rosean and I visited Newgrange one morning in a group with our friends, a guide, and fifteen or so other tourists. The finale of the tour is a re-enactment of the winter solstice event. After we had walked down the passage -- narrow enough in places that we brushed the walls -- and had stood in the chamber for awhile having the salient features pointed out to us, our guide turned off the lights. She had warned us she would do this, of course, and had explained the procedure for exiting the site quickly. Many people have a strong claustrophobic reaction to Newgrange. Even with the warning and explanation, it was unnerving. We were plunged into megalithic darkness.

In this darkness, we stood quietly for long seconds. My ears rang with the silence. Though bunched with all those other people, I felt profoundly alone. I imagined what it would have been like for the people who built this temple. Maybe they walked the passage by torchlight in the middle of the longest night of the year. Or maybe they went in days earlier, fasted and prayed. I imagined them coming away from their daily routines, gathering to worship God in this special place they had prepared.

Then light came creeping down the passage and into the chamber -- the orange light of sunrise. I felt my heart lift with a profound joy. Even though this light was not the actual sun, it spoke to me with force and power, of the return of growth after stagnation, the return of hope after despair, the return of life after death. I felt it in the very fiber of my being.

Thousands of people enter a lottery each year to try and win a spot at Newgrange for winter solstice dawn. The event is webcast and also shown on Irish TV. It speaks deeply to all of us.

Perhaps we are a dawn-loving animal, a solstice species. We are capable of living in darkness. We can endure long nights, both of the world and of the soul. But our hearts are tuned to the moment when light hits the sky. No matter how rough it gets, no matter how gut-wrenching, no matter how dire, we wait for the promise of the birth of the sun. We wait for the wheel of fate to turn. We live by the moment when the wheel does turn; it is the most important of all our moments. We meet God's promise there.

Friday the 13th, Part 2

Today is Freya's day again. She came to me this morning, eyes full of leaves and sunlight, and asked me to tell you this tale.

When we lived in Lander, Wyoming, we had three huge blue spruce in our front yard. They towered over the lawn, keeping the grass green in the heat of summer, offering us shade and the fresh smell of sap beneath their prickly branches. One day a huge wind blew two of these leviathans over. They fell gently, side by side, together in their demise as they had been in life, missing by inches the neighbor's roof and leaving giant craters in our front lawn where once their roots had held fast to earth.

The next day, walking about among the suddenly vertical branches, most taller than our heads, we were heartbroken. These two great giants had been such good friends to us. We stood next to them, hands on their thick trunks, where the sap would no longer flow, and we grieved. The last moisture their spiky little needles knew was our tears.

Later our friend and priest, Ann, came over with her prayer book and her stole. Perceptive pastor, she had put together a liturgy for us and the trees. Rosean's daughter Al and a friend, visiting from Fort Collins, joined us in our ritual. There was a place for a eulogy in our ceremony, and we cried. We said our goodbyes and wished the tree spirits well in their return to union with their creator, and we cried some more.

Al's friend was quite mystified by this display. You could read it on her face. "These older women," said her eyebrows. "Wacky," agreed the tension of small muscles in her expressive lips. We didn't care; her presence was welcome anyway. Somewhere deep inside her, we were sure, in the place of Soul, her own roots were being watered.

In the place of Soul we greet our special trees by name. We climb up in them as soon as our small arms and legs are able, and they embrace us in a secret world of swaying limbs and sweeping vistas. We lean against their trunks in the shade to read. We bring our sweethearts to them, and later our children. We place our houses and our gardens under their spreading arms.

Whole ecosystems are born and die in the shelter of one single tree.

Freya tells me it is important that we all remember this. It is important that we give our hearts to our trees.

She knows it is a complicated issue. She realizes everyone must make their own personal ethical decisions based on the information they have been given. She would simply also like to point out -- well, dust bowls, for instance -- and maybe our problems with the ozone layer -- oh, and perhaps crippling drought -- those sorts of things, which in her view come about as the result of being out of communication with trees.

More importantly even than this, though, she would like to say: it makes us less than human when we do not love our trees.

Marionettes

Once upon a time the Lord and the Lady came from the land of the gods to see how the humans were getting along in London town. They disguised themselves as a young man and woman and strolled about the cobbled streets. They had quite a lark, eating pastries and wearing fine clothing.

They came to the outdoor market, where hundreds of merchants were selling their wares: lush vegitables and savory pies, cloth from the Orient, spices and dyes. They came upon the stall of a craftsman. This man had put the simple joy of his spirit into the creation of two beautiful wooden dolls. He did it just for the hell of it, because he wanted to sing the beauty of human form into the wood and make a toy children would love. He had hinged the joints of the dolls at shoulder, hip, knee and elbow so their limbs moved. He'd given them wrists and ankles as well and also allowed them to bend at the waist. He had painted their merry faces and clothed them in bright and colorful attire.

The Lord and Lady were so delighted by the dolls that they dropped their human form immediately and entered the wooden creations. Ah, how fine it was to move the wood that had already been infused with joy. The Lady became the female doll and the Lord the male. In this shape they laughed. Their brightly colored clothing and their jolly faces inspired them to delighted exuberence. They danced and cavorted. People gathered from all across the market to watch.

After awhile, tiring of this game, the dieties left their wooden forms and became the young man and woman once again, back on the edge of the crowd where no one could see them. They continued on their way through the market.

The craftsman was thunderstruck. First his wooden dolls were animated, then they were still again. The people were joyful and then disappointed. People drifted back to their own stalls or over to other delightful sights at the market.

The dollmaker, though, closed his eyes and savored the moments his craft had come to life. He made strings for the dolls, attaching them by little metal loops to hands and feet. Tying the other ends of the strings to his fingers, he could make his creations move about once again. It was a jerky comical dance, especially compared to the dance of the Lord and Lady, which had, of course, been perfect. But it was a joyful dance nonetheless, and it delighted the children. Thus did we learn to make marionettes.

When we work with clay and paint, cloth and wood to invest our crafts with the exuberance of our spirits, we invite God in all God's forms to come and dance. Such moments of connection with the deities are precious and not oft repeated. They inspire us to joyful relationship. They inspire us to make something new.

Elijah and the Widow

A story snuck into my consciousness on little spider's feet this morning. Right through the thin place between worlds it whispered. It's a Hebrew story, but there are similar tales in most spiritual traditions. It's about the relationship between us human beings and our prophets or our gods.

The prophet Elijah, so the tale goes, predicted a drought in the land in which he lived. God sent him into the desert to endure through this hard time, and he drank from a wadi and ate the food the ravens brought him.

When, after awhile, the wadi dried up, God came to Elijah again. "Go into the town of Zarephath," said God. "You'll find a widow there whom I have commanded to feed you."

Elijah went, and he found a widow at the gates gathering sticks. As was the custom, he asked her for a drink of water. When she brought it, he asked her for a little piece of bread as well.

Widows in Elijah's culture were the marginal people. Having no one to care for them, they had to rely on the kindness of their community for food. They were in essence beggars, and in lean times they were the first people to starve.

She told him she had no bread, only a bit of meal in a jar and some oil in a jug. She was, in fact, going home to cook this bit of food for herself and her son, and then, it being the last of their provisions, they would die.

So much, eh?, for God commanding her to feed the prophet. It doesn't seem she's heard this message. She is, in fact, in complete despair, at the end of her rope, without hope.

I met a woman a week or so ago who told me of a time in her life when she was without hope. "We all usually have a little hope hidden away somewhere," she told me. "To be without any hope at all is very different, very unusual. You know it when you are without hope." This widow is in that place. She is getting ready for herself and her child to end.

Elijah said to her, "Do not be afraid. Go ahead and do what you've planned, but first bring me a little cake of bread. When you've done that, make the cake for yourself and your son." Do not be afraid? Isn't the woman beyond fear? But there is only enough meal and oil for one cake, and yet he tells her to make two. "For the Lord God of Israel says the jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the Lord sends rain upon the earth."

I can imagine the woman standing there on the edge, once again, of hope. How painful that must have been for her -- like heat coming into frozen toes or a little food hitting a long-empty belly. She would have fought against the return of sensation, angry at being called back into life for such a flimsy promise. And yet called she was.

I imagine her weeping bitterly as she went home to do as the prophet asked her, telling herself it made little difference really if she and her son had a final meal or not, but knowing that giving up the grain and the oil was not what she was afraid of. No, she was afraid of the hope.

And of course the little jar of meal did not empty and the jug of oil did not fail. But I'll bet you that woman thought each morning, "What if today is the day the Lord fails me? What if I do something wrong and the promise is rescinded?" Every single day for the rest of the time of drought that woman, getting up with hope, had to also bear fear. Perhaps often she was able to tuck it away and trust in God's goodness, but it would have been there in some measure so long as she hoped.

How does the meal replenish itself in the jar? It is a miracle, perhaps directly from the hand of God, perhaps through the agency of a new and different relationship between the woman and her community -- after all, she was housing a prophet. Abundance is often a matter of sharing, without any plotting or control. Perhaps everybody in the town of Zarephath got a little more willing to give their last cake away, and so everybody found they had enough, just barely, to go around.

How do we replenish our belief in our dreams in a time of scarcity and danger? We have to open ourselves to God and the prophets that come to us out of the desert. And we have to take on the double burden of hope and fear.

Whatever You Send Me, I Will Plant

A few days ago I was up early, journaling. I hadn't had a dream the night before, so I was just sitting in the living room watching the color come into the sky. Suddenly, and it seemed a manifestation of the sunrise, I felt a presence in my imagination on my right. I looked there and beheld an angel -- this is what I knew him to be -- all shimmery like pavement in noonday heat. And, wouldn't you know it, his hair was on fire.

I have been feeling the economic crunch lately. Not enough income, too many expenses, ends that barely make it into the same county, let alone meet. I have been feeling all asea and rudderless, waiting with all my senses open for some understanding of how to proceed. This has left me just a tad sarcastic. I thought, "My own personal burning bush. How nice."

I am an Episcopalian; I am allowed to be irreverent. Yet sometimes I do wonder if some messenger of my soul won't one day, in the face of my grumpy self-centeredness, just up and disappear in a huff, leaving me with the anxiety, the obsessive compulsive behaviors, or the despair that comes as the result of being out of relationship with the psyche.

This messenger, though, was not a creature of emotion. He merely looked at me steadily until all my bluster and ill humor had cleared like cobwebs in a bright wind. Then he held out his hand.

Incongruously, for the heat he was putting out must have been immense, he cupped a tiny plant. In a little mound of dirt it sat, a spindly stem with four brand new leaves spreading hopefully toward air and sunlight. Instinctively I held out my hand. He carefully tipped the dirt and little rooted being onto my palm.

A seedling is a living thing, precious and unique. I thought about all the potted plants I have nurtured over the years: my huge thirty-five-year-old fern that needs to be transplanted again; the purple leaf shamrock given me by a friend from an era long past; the cactus that got frostbitten and grows like an hour glass; the vines that are threatening to take over the sitting room. What else would I do with a new little green sprig except plant it?

Suddenly it dawned on me that the angel was asking me a question and it wasn't about literal greenery. There must be hundreds of brand new little shoots, gifts of the Spirit, that come into being every single day and then wither away through lack of nourishment or get mowed down by the yang-clang of existence. They need somebody standing by with a pot and a watering can.

I made a pledge, and my whole heart went into it. The angel is just the messenger; I made the promise to God. "Whatever you send me, I will plant," I said.

This is my Lenten discipline. And all of you, my friends, can ask me how it's going.