Dumkopf Uber Alles

Chim-chimeny, chim-chimeny, chim-chim-cheroo
You elected a fascist, let’s see what he’ll do...
Chim-chimeny, chim-chimeny, chim-chim-cheree
He’ll start taking rights---both from you and from me,
There goes our health care, without plans for more,
And the hate groups are laughing as memberships soar,
The White House a circus of buffoons and boors,
A president tweeting of nuclear war,
Chim-chimeny, chim-chimeny, chim-chim-cheree
Parades feature Klansmen and alt-right Nazis,
Children imprisoned as racists all cheer,
Journalists subject to threatening jeers.
Chim-chimeny, chim-chimeny, chim-chim-cheroo
His election’s a thing we will all live to rue---
Well, at least those who *do* live
To see this mess through..

The Wood-Witch's Wisdom

The witch lived in a house in the forest, as witches often do. It was, in fact, a gingerbread house of sorts, or at least a house with "gingerbread" trim that curled and scrolled about its eaves and porch. The house had been built a few lifetimes ago, when the forest was more of a meadow with a belt of woodland around it; in the intervening years, buttercups and daisies had given way to beech, oak, and pine. The house was now invisible from any of the land around it, and too dark from trees to grow more than a small garden, but the patch of sky above it showed the stars beautifully at night.

She lived more or less alone, apart from a three-legged dog and a cat with one eye, and various other creatures like the hedgehog family that came and went from the herb bed and potting shed. It seemed that the witch, being so very whole herself, attracted the broken and spiky and reviled beings of the world. Some came to be healed and fed and loved, and others, usually men, came to poke holes in her as if they couldn't help it. She fed and loved them too, for a time, but often they didn't heal. The persistence of brokenness puzzled her. Men puzzled her on the whole. She regarded them much as she did the black snake that occasionally sunned itself on a stone at the wood's edge: rather beautiful, in its way, and undoubtedly useful in the grand scheme of things, but cold-blooded and sharp of tooth, and potentially dangerous.

It was autumn, and the leaves were a glory and a song upon the trees, setting the eye ablaze and the mind a-dreaming with beauty and change. The witch wandered about gathering wood to see her through the winter, and collecting what the forest offered in its season of bounty: nuts and berries, mushrooms,  bark and pine needles. She went farther afield too, even into the town sometimes, to gather along the hedgerows and fields, and to buy milk and cream (she was desperately fond of butter), and a bit of flour, and tea leaves, and sugar. She bought her clothing there too, from the second-hand shop mostly, as she wasn't especially skilled with a needle. She was good with dyes, though; often what she bought was transformed with plant magic into joyously coloured frocks from the humdrum things they started as. Sometimes, her shopping done, she would even take tea in the little tea-room in the town centre. She would sit with her basket and patchwork bags under the table, looking out at the cobbles and shop fronts, blissfully enjoying her tea and cakes despite the covert stares of other patrons, and occasionally petting the cats that always appeared when she was there. Either she was unaware, or simply didn't care, that her frocks were considered outlandish, and her lack of hat and length of hair unseemly, and that every aspect of her appearance and behaviour and lifestyle mystified the good people of the town.

Whatever they thought of her and her odd ways, people did visit the witch occasionally. Sometimes if they were ill, they would send someone to bring her back to their houses, which put the doctor's nose out of joint entirely. She had helped to deliver not a few babies in the poorer houses, and a couple in the great houses too, when the lady in childbed had taken a dislike to the doctor. She was known to be good with herbal remedies, and good, too, at untangling hearts and minds. Somehow, after an hour spent by her fireside, chatting and taking tea, people felt their lives smooth out a bit, and they went home more comfortable than they came.

In another time or place, they might have shunned the witch, or worse. They might have let mystification run amok, and come to resent or fear her, and behaved badly. As it was, on the whole they let her be, with a touch of envy and a bit of head-shaking, but nothing harsher. It was easier, and safer, for her as she grew into middle age than it had been when she was young and lithe and a magnet for the eyes of men as she walked. Her lonely house in the wood was a refuge not just for her, but for any in need of a bit of patching up. If she herself was broken, it didn't show. Her body was growing a little creaky, but her soul seemed sound. Whatever sorrows might haunt her at times---as they do all living folk---didn't shake her essential wholeness. She was at home in herself and in the world. At times, when she laid her hands on someone's pain, there was a light on her face that seemed to shine from within. Children saw it, animals felt it, and the injured and grieving warmed themselves by it.

There is a grace that comes with wholeness, or perhaps wholeness is itself a grace. There is grace and wisdom in letting go, and in opening to receive, as trees do, as flowers do. It is beautiful to behold, and draws the broken beings to it, because that is the way the world works in its infinite wisdom and mystery. It is always wise to love what is different and whole unto itself, because it may have a medicine. What is whole contains the seeds of healing for what is broken. This is what the witch knew from looking at the world and living her life in her way, sound as a nut in its glossy shell: she was a part of the whole and thus unbreakable. Whatever happened to her couldn't touch the core of her; cracked or swallowed up, she was still part of the great wholeness. That was the source of any magic she had, and she knew it.

May we all find a witch's grace, soon or late.

borealis

i tied a ribbon to a branch
on some wind twisted tree
alone in a field of snow
the northern lights rippled above
wild ribbons in the sky
significant yet ordinary here
a sight my ancestors knew,
boreal magic, their green-blue glow
lights polar nights strange to me
until now. i have entered a tale---
i shall ride a white bear
or a reindeer to the snow queen's lair
for love, climb glassy hills,
dance swans into life from my sleeves,
speak secrets with pale foxes,
fly on the barred wings of an owl
under those waving curtains of light,
i will touch magic in carved stones,
know the true bride from the false,
spin light into gold,
free the firebird in my heart,
draw myself alive again
from the mortar louhi kept a while,
grinding my tears into salt
instead of drowning by inches.
my ribbon prayer will bleach and fray
as i do, and one day
i will whisk away my bear borne tracks
with an old birch broom,
leaving only stories behind
to cover my cast-off bones
and my spirit will sing in the wind
and clatter in waves of light
until it finds a new home,
in another tale,
winter-borne and strange.

The Same Landscape

She went hiking with some people who were all more of the doing type, while she was only, or mostly, a being type. Partway through their planned route, they came to a beautiful spot by a bend of a small river, where there were a few trees making gracious shade, and large flat rocks beckoning to be a seat there by the river's voice. She decided to remain there, while they continued onward. She watched them grow smaller as they moved into the distance, following the curve of the path ever upward into the hills. Where she sat was high enough to see the sagebrush rolling out and down, to see some of the river's path to lower land, and the higher hills in a dark, protective curve behind and to the north of her. She sat in the shade, resting, and breathing in the scent of the sage, the smell of warm stones and sand. She listened to the slight sounds of dry grasses and leaves moving when the wind moved over us, and the small song of the river caressing its stony bed. This was its early autumn song; it would sing a louder one, no doubt, and do a wilder dance, come spring, when the snows melted on the hillsides and flowed into its course. Insects in the brush sang in bursts, a lone hawk moved high overhead in hieratic circles; and somewhere hidden from her, a bird called in notes she didn't recognise, so she couldn't put a human name to the bird, only listen and love it wordlessly, as a guest in its home. The whole place shimmered with the joy of sunlight on water, the gratitude of moisture in a dry land. She pulled off her boots and socks, rolled up her trousers, slipped out of her shirt, and waded into the water. Surprisingly cool under the strong desert sun, it drew the fatigue of walking from her and filled her with the same joy or wordless peace that lay over all the place, that was written on the sky in the hawk's flight and the high thin clouds drifting, that was in the song of the bird and the insects and the leaves and the water.

She didn't know how long she sat in the river or drowsed there afterward on the shaded rocks. She drank a little of the river water, sacramentally, although she had a full bottle in her pack. She ate a bit of the food she'd brought. Her clothes now dry, she put her shirt on again. She became part of the song there, in her silence; sometimes, you have to be silent to be truly part of a song. This is a mystery.

Eventually, the others returned. They rejoined her, speaking about the wide views they had enjoyed from the ridge tops, moving as a group to the river to splash hot faces and arms, though no one else drank from it. They talked of the snake they had glimpsed at the edge of the path, and the steepness of the last section of the climb. They asked her what she had been doing there, all that time, and she said lamely that she had been resting on the rocks and listening to things. That she had gone into the river for a bit. That it was a very comforting place. She said the kinds of things that being people say to doing people, knowing that it wouldn't mean much. Then they all got up, putting on packs and hats, making ready to hike back out. She dipped her cotton scarf into the water and tied it wet around her neck, for coolness, but also to keep the kindly spirit of the river with me as long as she could. In silence, she said her farewells to the river and the stones; the earth and the sage; the trees, the sky, the hawk; the hidden insects and unknown bird.

She didn't miss the view from the hills. She didn't miss the conquering exertion of the climb, the 'achievement' of it. She wondered if any of them felt a kinship with the hawk up there on the ridge, or if their spirits had time to hear the song of the land as they moved through it. She wondered how different the wind sounded up there, and if they noticed it. She wondered what they would remember of the place later. Somehow, she was especially happy to rest in being more and doing less that day. She would carry the taste of that water with her, and the scents and sounds and shifting light and colours, forever. She would have the peace of that place in her bones.

silences

what gifts do we bring to those whom we love?

what weapons do we bring to a battle?

every lover is an undiscovered
country, and all our maps are wrong, so wrong

we may as well use them for wrapping up

the pieces of ourselves that we cut off.

this quiet is not peace, nothing so pure

it is the absence of strife that echoes
after strife, the calm that comes after tears,

the measured decision to say nothing

yet again. silence is my gift to you.

once i could have given you other things

it did start that way, but now my sole gift

and perhaps my weapon, is this silence.

and you? your gift is anger, your weapons,
noise and flight from the field of our battle.

i do not know myself whether silence 

is gift or weapon, but i know it feels

like it is all that i have left to give.

totem

i have moved

without your moving me

i have seen 

what you have not

i remember

all that might have been

i know what you forgot

tangled

if i untangle you from me,

will i then begin to see

will i find then finally

what is is that i should be,

something finer, fierce, and free?