"Even Then" by m. Claire

This kind of love
it is an organic
thing.

I don't mean
pressing the small, pale
button of a seed
into the accepting earth
as if it is then some guarantee;
as if the young, slender body of a
thing should hold up
more than it's
own head, no

this kind of love -
its footfall is quiet.
Like a camel's in the desert,
or the thick, white, silence of snow.

And it waits -
in the deep of the eyes,
until that moment it is finally seen.

And this kind of love,
it means standing tall in the bare wind,
even as the clouds disband
even as the warm sun finally claims you

yes,

even then.

True November

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: November 25, 2007 in NY Times
Find it here

A couple of days ago we had what the forecasts call a “wintry mix,” which always sounds to me like something you’d set out in bowls at a cocktail party this time of year. It was, in fact, rain, snow and sleet mixed with sand and salt and the sludge that gets thrown from the treads of tires. One minute snow was falling in clumps, and the next it was raining. The sky was the color of duct tape, and it let about that much light through. What a “wintry mix” does is make you want to stay home — or perhaps go into the world foraging for provisions simply for the pleasure of getting home again.

This is true November weather, in which I learn to admire the stoicism of the animals all over again. Stoicism is the wrong word, if only because it implies an awareness of being stoic. They stand over their hay in the wintry mix, and they seem to take it as it comes. I imagine them thinking, “No flies!,” as a way of enjoying this grim weather.

It’s the difference that makes a day like that so interesting. Till now, this has been a bright oaken autumn. The most vivid colors came and went, leaving behind the oaks, which hold their leaves far longer. The last few weeks have been dusted with a dry, wooden light, and the oaks have shown just how various and pungent their colors can be. It was as if the oaks had all stepped forward to remind us of a spectrum of color that goes unimagined in most years.

But everything changes on a wintry day. The woods seem to withdraw, even though the snow on the ground creates the illusion that you can see deeper into them. The brightness vanishes, and that gives all the subtler colors — the variations of gray on the bark of a maple tree — a heightened presence. As voluminous as the woods seem in summer, when they are full of shadow, now is when they seem most corporeal, most alive. I don’t mean the fact that you can trace a squirrel’s route along the maple high line or watch the woodpeckers in a hickory lining up for the suet.

I mean that the trees seem to be making a gesture of a kind they never do when the leaves are green, as though they could only really be themselves when the light is low and the air is damp and the year is drawing in.

"I like for you to be still" by Pablo Neruda

I like for you to be still: it is as though you were absent,
and you hear me from far away and my voice does not touch you.
It seems as though your eyes had flown away
and it seems that a kiss had sealed your mouth.

As all things are filled with my soul
you emerge from the things, filled with my soul.
You are like my soul, a butterfly of dream,
and you are like the word Melancholy.

I like for you to be still, and you seem far away.
It sounds as though you were lamenting, a butterfly cooing like a dove.
And you hear me from far away, and my voice does not reach you:
Let me come to be still in your silence.

And let me talk to you with your silence
that is bright as a lamp, simple as a ring.
You are like the night, with its stillness and constellations.
Your silence is that of a star, as remote and candid.

I like for you to be still: it is as though you were absent,
distant and full of sorrow as though you had died.
One word then, one smile, is enough.
And I am happy, happy that it΄s not true.

Patience, Like Water

Do you have the patience to wait
till your mind settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?

-- Tao Te Ching

Self Invention

"Conceive, as a basis, that every life is shaped by two crucial inventions. The first is imposed from outside, at birth and during childhood..., the second is projected from within, as the life picks up momentum, by force of will and imagination. So we begin by being invented and we progress, if we can, to invent ourselves. The decisive element is nerve -- how much? Do we dare?"

-- Nik Cohen in The Rolling Stone History of Rock and Roll

~ Rumi ~ Rumi ~ Rumi ~

Find the real world, give it endlessly away
Grow rich, fling gold to all who ask
Live at the empty heart of Paradox
I’ll dance there with you, cheek to cheek.
~
The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
How blind that was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.
~
Out beyond the ideas of wrong-doing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When
the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too
full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the
phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense.
~
All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea
my soul is from elsewhere, and I am sure of that, and I intend to end up there.

"Liquid Paper" by Peter Meinke

Smooth as a snail, this little parson
pardons our sins. Touch the brush tip
lightly and--'abracadabra!'--a clean slate.

We know those who blot their brains
by sniffing it, which shows
it erases more than ink
and with imagination anything
can be misapplied . . . In the army,
our topsergeant drank aftershave, squeezing
my Old Spice to the last slow drop.

It worked like Liquid Paper in his head

until he'd glide across the streets of Heidelberg
hunting for the house in Boise, Idaho,
where he was born . . . If I were God
I'd authorize Celestial Liquid Paper
every seven years to whiten our mistakes:
we should be sorry and live with what we've done
but seven years is long enough and all of us

deserve a visit now and then
to the house where we were born
before everything got written so far wrong.

Happiness, Fatal and Otherwise

"Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy, you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness."

-- Robertson Davies

"Marsh View" by David Starnes

From a window upstairs
you can watch the earth redesign
itself as mud, tall grass, and birds
as well as light, as well you must
stay drawn to shades of green,
ideals of green, all means of gold,
of russet, rust, colors beyond
association, barely earthbound.

You wake to the world the way
it ought to have remained, without
the squatters, the first of the big spenders.
Better to spend an hour at dawn
studying tides, deferring to songbirds
than measuring even your insignificance.
The window frames it all, the world contained
in its original skin, beyond your love.

Halos, Afterglows, Coronas

"The instinctive . . . purpose of a funeral or memorial service is to reunite the people most intimate with the deceased, and to collectively rekindle in them all the special living flame that represents the essence of that beloved person . . . . Though the primary brain has been eclipsed, there is, in those who remain and who are gathered to remember and reactivate the spirit of the departed, a collective corona that still glows. This is what human love means. The word "love" therefore cannot be separated from the word "I"; the more deeply rooted the symbol for someone inside you, the greater the love, the brighter the light that remains behind."

from I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter

We Are All Reverends

"Anyone's Ministry"

Ministry is
a quality of relationship between and among human beings
that beckons forth hidden possibilities

inviting people into deeper, more constant,
more reverent relationship with the world
and with one another....

standing for human dignity and equity,
for compassion and aspiration.

believing in life in the presence of death,
struggling for human responsibility
against principalities and structures
that ignore humaneness and become
instruments of death.

It is all these and much, much more than all of them,
present in
the wordless,
the unspoken,
the ineffable.

It is speaking and living the highest we know
and living with the knowledge that it is
never as deep, or as wide
or as high as we wish.

Whenever there is a meeting
that summons us to our better selves, wherever
our lostness is found,
our fragments are united,
or our wounds begin healing,
our spines stiffen and
our muscles grow strong for the task

there is ministry.

Excerpted from "Anyone's Ministry" in Out of the Ordinary by Gordon McKeeman

All the Good Advice That a Woman Can Handle

A friend told me in what felt like a joking manner, "Tell me what to do," and I responded with something like, sure, no problem, let me think about it. Also joking. Like I know enough to tell anybody what to do. That was the punch line.

And so this other friend is having difficulties and she really does want me to tell her what to do. Not so she can do it, of course. But she wants me to hand her an option so she can turn it over and over in the light, catch its facets and nuance. I tell her I cannot, that she is in the land of the hard questions now, and that there is no easy road out of that place, no straight and narrow. I can only listen as she works it out herself.

And so another friend is having difficulties and she in no way wants me to tell her what to do. And I want so desperately to tell her what to do, because to me it seems so obvious, so kharmic, so very much "you reap what you sow." But she just wants me to listen, so I bite my tongue and listen, and to me it seems like she's just digging the hole deeper. But I listen, and I hope I do it with the right attitude, even if it's becoming hard to remember what the right attitude is.

And I remember all the times people tried to tell me what to do. They had my best interest at heart. And they still do, as they watch me fumble and rail and make big unsupportable announcements about "the way things are." I know I do this, and I hate it , because I hate being wrong. I like being right. I am getting used to having been wrong, looking back and saying, oh jeez what was I thinking? But I still hate being in the moment of being wrong.

I think that's the way it works, however. It's the choosing and not the choice that really matters. Consequences are unpredictable anyway. Life is not an equation. You are not responsible for the consequences, only the choosing.

I do not know if I believe this.

Anyway, I am muddled today. But I was pondering telling people what to do, and I found this, from a book I'm re-reading now, called The Ironic Christian's Companion by Patrick Henry:

"People in despair turn to others in hopes of finding the answer, despite their own impenetrable conviction that there is no answer. The trouble is, in a sense they are right. No one else has an answer to impose on them. Truth that comes from outside bears all too easily the aspect of rebuke. The answer that is promise, and not threat, is locked away inside me, and it is an unexpected answer - the only kind, after all, that can do an end run around an unanswerable question . . . . To wait with patience [for this answer] is not to sit back and do nothing; quite the contrary. Indeed, Paul uses the image of labor pains, the very opposite of sitting back and doing nothing, to illustrate the activity and striving that go with the patient practice of hope" (131).

Can labor feel like a muddle? I'm not sure. I guess I'll find out.

The End Is Where We Start From

We shall not cease from exploration
and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.
-- T. S. Eliot

Rivers like Stories, Like Words, Like Books

"In graphic design, the word “river” refers to the white space between words that sometimes connects in a rippling vertical pattern down the printed page. Such a river is to be avoided because it can interrupt the flow of text in an irregular pattern and distract the reader’s eye from the horizontal progression of the printed words. But just as it may be a distraction, that space between words also confirms their meaning. If a river can both separate and connect on the printed page, it is capable of doing this all the more in the natural world.

"If this river were a book, it would be dense, obscure, difficult to read. Some rivers have a brilliant clarity; they are translucent, quick, clear about themselves and where they are going and where they are taking you. Others, like the Hudson, have a thickness and opacity, as if there were too much type on the page to take it all in. The pages are long and packed with intricate information, and even at the end of the page, you may not be quite sure of what you’ve read. Its narrative begins as a lake on the side of Mount Marcy in the Adirondacks, and the clear mountain stream running from it ends up as a tidal channel in the Atlantic Ocean. Its character, never fixed, is transformed during its passage from freshwater to saline, from a thin, winding stream to a broad, straight channel. It has a tide and a current, and it flows both ways; sometimes it flows both ways at once.

"Intimacy with the river, like other kinds of intimacy, is laced with ambiguity, with questions of ownership elusive and variable. And it becomes an easy thing to imagine yourself a particle in the river’s continuity, so easy, in fact, that you begin to see things the way the river might see them. And you see, then, how that continuity can be reassuring. You somehow go through life to a certain point always thinking that even if you can’t exactly start over, at least you can fix things or change them and that all the missteps and wrong directions can be corrected and that it is never too late. Later you may find yourself believing that is no longer true. I looked up the river and down it. Its flow was certain, its direction unchangeable, but still it could take on the day’s nuances of light, the vagaries of the shifting tide.

From "Just Beneath the Surface" by Akiko Busch

From Flower Children by Maxine Swann

“They feel a great tenderness for certain things. That was where the goats gathered. That’s where the cider press still stands, unused for years. Suddenly they feel enraged. How could things go unused like that for years? They should move back here, settle in, make it all work again, make it all as it was again exactly, replicate that world — but why? It seems to have suddenly slipped their minds that they have whole other worlds and even people waiting for them to return. And even so, why replicate this world that has gone? Because it was so perfect? But it was not. But it was. Perfect because it was the world before the world changed.”

For David

Sweetness for My Mother
by Stephen Dunn

Just when it has seemed I couldn't bear
one more friend
waking with a tumor, one more maniac

with a perfect reason, often a sweetness
has come
and changed nothing in the world

except the way I stumbled through it,
for a while lost
in the ignorance of loving

someone or something, the world shrunk
to mouth-size,
hand-size, and never seeming small.

I acknowledge there is no sweetness
that doesn't leave a stain,
no sweetness that's ever sufficiently sweet. ...

Tonight a friend called to say his lover
was killed in a car
he was driving. His voice was low

and guttural, he repeated what he needed
to repeat, and I repeated
the one or two words we have for such grief

until we were speaking only in tones.
Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough

to make sense of what it means to be alive,
then returns to its dark
source. As for me, I don't care

where it's been, or what bitter road
it's traveled
to come so far, to taste so good.

All This and The World As Well

A mix, done well, is a piece of art. The way themes weave together, images and ideas corresponding and contrasting. The placement of the songs, transitions between them, pacing. Once I learned a little about mixology, just enough to be dangerous, I wanted to make my own, but the process seemed daunting. I'd been in the company of too many works of genius to think I could step up to that particular plate.

But when Kevin at church came up with this project, I was intrigued. His idea -- to create a mix based on the Major Arcana of the Tarot -- came without the scary thought of trying to get songs in the right order, the hardest part of making a mix (in my mind anyway). The Tarot has its own order. Ditto on the themes. And not having to worry about all that freed me up to take the first steps toward my very first mix.

Except for the title, which in the end turned out to be the hardest part of all. A friend suggested Tina Whittle and her Ultra-Oracular Extra-Arcane Divination Mix. But it's not oracular, and it's not divinatory. It is mine, however. Kevin called his The Fool's Journey in honor of the first card. So I'm gonna call mine All This and The World As Well, in honor of the last.


1. The Fool -- "Get Out the Map" by The Indigo Girls
2. The Magician -- "The Man with the Hex" by The Atomic Fireballs
3. The High Priestess -- "West Virginia" by John Linell
4. The Empress -- "Guinnevere" by Crosby, Stills and Nash
5. The Emperor -- "The Queen and the Soldier" by Suzanne Vega
6. The Hierophant -- "John the Revelator" by Depeche Mode
7. The Lovers -- "Breathe" by Maria McKee
8. The Chariot -- "One Way or Another" by Blondie
9. Strength -- "Rain" by Patty Griffin
10. The Hermit -- "Into the Mystic" by The Wallflowers
11. Wheel of Fortune -- "Where I Want To Be" from Chess
12. Justice -- "Cell Block Tango" from Chicago
13. The Hanged Man -- "Big Strong Girl" by Deb Talen
14. Death -- "No One Lives Forever" by Oingo Boingo
15. Temperance -- "Pendulum Swinger" by Indigo Girls
16. The Devil -- "Essence" by Lucinda Williams
17. The Tower -- "A Hard Rain's A-gonna Fall" by Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians
18. The Star -- "Hold On Hope" by Guided by Voices
19. The Moon -- "Brain Damage/ Eclipse" by Pink Floyd
20. The Sun -- "Magnolia Soul" by Ozomatli
21. Judgment -- "Graceland" by Paul Simon
22. The World -- "The Whole Shebang" by Grant Lee Buffalo

1. The Fool -- "Get Out the Map" by The Indigo Girls

"With everything its opposite enough to keep you cryin'/ or keep this old world spinnin' with a twinkle in its eye/ Get out the map, get out the map, and lay your finger anywhere down/ We'll leave the figurin' to those we pass on our way out of town/ Don't drink the water, there seems to be something ailin' everyone/ I'm gonna clear my head, I'm gonna drink that sun."

A card of beginnings, spontaneity, and faith in the face of apparent folly. At card zero, The Fool hangs in the balance, neither beginning nor end. This song addresses paradox -- "the same sun that warms your heart will suck that gutter dry" -- and the movement of time, beginnings in endings, the seed of the ending in the beginning, and the folly -- and necessity -- of faith.

2. The Magician -- "The Man with the Hex" by The Atomic Fireballs

"You remind me of a man (what man?)/ Yeah, the man with the power (what power?)/ Oh, the power of voodoo (who do?)/ Yeah, you do, you do."

I love the drums and horns here, the whole swing rhythm. It's kitschy, of course, but it has the same energy as this card. It gathers to a greatness of sorts, as great as something off the Scooby Doo soundtrack can be. Plus, it shares the wink-wink acknowledgment that this Magician possesses something of the Trickster in him.

3. The High Priestess -- "West Virginia" by John Linell

"Sugar maple's winged seeds/ propellers spinning from the tree/ rhododendron evergreen/ look within and you will see/ there's another deep inside you and inside the other one there is another/ in the other."

There's a Russian nesting doll on my altar, and it's there because of this song, which captures the inward focus of the High Priestess, the potential and the mystery, the spiraling down from the obvious surface to the hidden depths.

4. The Empress -- "Guinnevere" by Crosby, Stills and Nash

"Guinnevere had green eyes/ like yours, m'lady, like yours/ she'd walk down through the garden in the morning after it rained/peacocks wandered aimlessly underneath an orange tree."

I wanted a song that captured the organic bounty of this card, its lavish easy abundance, and this song does it even without the significance of the name Guinnevere, which is a version of Gwenhwyfar, the Welsh Goddess who embodied the natural world, made mortal so that King Arthur could literally unite with the Land. Her name means "White Phantom" and she is often depicted as the Queen of the May . . . which makes her even more appropriate to represent The Empress. With her, "we shall be free."

5. The Emperor -- "The Queen and the Soldier" by Suzanne Vega

"And she never once took the crown from her head."

The Emperor represents order, structure, and authority -- and the price that they exact. I like this song because it shows how the craving for control can hide a startling vulnerability, and because it shows what people will do to protect that vulnerability, even a woman with a face like a child's. Maybe even especially such a woman.

6. The Hierophant -- "John the Revelator" by Depeche Mode

"By claiming God as his only right/ he's stealing a God from the Israelite/ stealing a God from the Muslin too/ There is only one God, through and through."

When religion becomes what the Hierophant forces it to be -- a conformity to a rigid group think -- it betrays the very same Divinity that it seeks to illuminate. God/Goddess/Holy Spirit has the integrity of the whole, not a piece hammered out to certain specifications. To believe in the piece is to commit idolatry.

7. The Lovers -- "Breathe" by Maria McKee

"My heart beats your blood, your breath fills my lungs/ Your heart beats my blood, my breath fills your lungs."

In contrast to the Hierophant, this card is NOT about the group -- it is about as personal as it can get, literally wrapped up in each other, blurring the boundaries between self and other. And the songs ramps up the desperation and fear and ecstasy that often accompany such union.

8. The Chariot -- "One Way or Another" by Blondie

"One way or another/ I'm gonna find you/ I'm gonna getcha getcha getcha getcha."

If there could be road music for driving a chariot, it would be this song, especially if you were driving said chariot on a stalking mission. Talk about taking the reins and exerting one's will. It also has that element of making one's choice into reality, of trying to control two unruly beasts that tends to charge off in different directions. Only in this case, the two options -- one way or another -- are really just the same thing.

9. Strength -- "Rain" by Patty Griffin

"Strange how hard it rains now/ grows in rows of big dark clouds/ but I'm holding on underneath this shroud/ praying."

Sometimes being strong means just holding on, quietly. Laying your head in the jaws of the beast and just willing them not to close on you. Sometimes strength is a powerful gentleness.

10. The Hermit -- "Into the Mystic" by The Wallflowers

"Let your soul and spirit fly."

The Hermit is a card about going inside, but it's also a quest card, a card of searching for whatever it is that is both inside and out. It's about withdrawing from the world, yes, but into something interior that is larger than the exterior (which sounds like a paradox, and I guess it is, but it makes sense -- bigger on the inside than on the outside). This song has that same feeling, of coming home into truth and beauty and love bigger than you thought they could ever be. Magnificently.

11. Wheel of Fortune -- "Where I Want To Be" from Chess

"When the crazy wheel slows down/ where will I be?/ Back where I started."

I fell in love with the musical Chess the second I saw "One Night in Bangkok" on Friday Night Videos. The whole East/West defection plotline seems hopelessly dated now, but the idea that you can step into an identity that carries you ever more swiftly away from who you were, that you can get sucked under that current so easily unless you swim for your life, that at some point your choice of direction dissolves and all you can do is keep from drowning . . . Yes. But. There is always a choice, even when the universe seems to be crunching you in its gears. Sometimes you can't see the choice. Sometimes someone else may have to point it out to you. But there is always a choice even on the wildest ride, even if it's simply the choice to keep your eyes open instead of shutting them tight.

12. Justice -- "Cell Block Tango" from Chicago

"He had it coming/ He had it coming/ He only had himself to blame/If you'd a been there/ if you'd a seen it/ I betcha you would have done the same."

Boy, after hearing this song, I just wanna grab some heartless bastard and kick his ass. Well, not really. In the end, all you really hear behind the anger and sharply faceted bitterness of this song is a complete lack of understanding. Because each murderess had it coming too. And then the cell door slams. They have mistaken vengeance for justice, a substitution this card would never allow. This is a card of cause and effect, as is this song.

13. The Hanged Man -- "Big Strong Girl" by Deb Talen

"Come on, come on, lay it down/ the best laid plans/ come on, come on, lay it down/ are your open hands."

The Hanged Man is all about the Letting Go -- releasing emotions, accepting what is, giving up control and learning this lesson: "don't push so hard against the world." It's upside down and paradoxical that surrendering can be a strength, but this card says believe it.

14. Death -- "No One Lives Forever" by Oingo Boingo

"And I'm very quick, but don't forget/ we've only got so many tricks/ no one lives forever."

Since the Death card is all about transformation and cycles and rhythms, I wanted a happy happy song here, to celebrate the paradox of this card. So "drink a toast and down the cup and drink to bones that turn to dust."

15. Temperance -- "Pendulum Swinger" by Indigo Girls

"Doesn't come by the bullwhip/ It's not persuaded with your hands on your hips/ it's not the company of gunslingers/ the epicenter love is a pendulum swinger."

Okay, this breaks the "only one song per artist" rule, but I break rules for the Girls. This song deserves a shot, especially since it demonstrates the essence of this card -- balance, even in the extremes, especially in the extremes, since extremes are necessary for this card. And it all comes back to center.

16. The Devil -- "Essence" by Lucinda Williams

"Baby, sweet baby, you're my drug."

I think the essence of the Devil and the essence of "Essence" are the same: bondage and helplessness and the lure thereof. It starts off pretty sweet, but then that first plunge hits and you realize the territory you've gotten yourself into now that you've stepped over the boundary. The Devil also represents all that is taboo, the shadow side that must be reintegrated if the self is to be whole, and this song hits that note as well with its waiting and stalking, its "flirt with death," and its search for essence (which can, in the end, never be found anywhere but inside -- that's what the singer doesn't get yet).

17. The Tower -- "A Hard Rain's A-gonna Fall" by Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians

"But I'll know my song well before I start singing."

Even Death isn't as frightening as this card -- lightning and devastation and tumbling into churning surf, dashed on the rocks. You crash into chaos -- down down -- and then, the revelation. That's this song to me -- people starving and people laughing, dead oceans and sad forests, places where none is the number. And then, after, your voice again.

18. The Star -- "Hold On Hope" by Guided by Voices

"Everybody's got a hold on hope/ It's the last thing/ that's holding me."

This card is the hope card to me -- I cannot see it without being inspired. There is a serenity on it, and peace. I don't think this song has peace yet -- there is still a sense of need and despair -- but it has an eye on something higher. In the mud, maybe, but looking at the stars. This isn't a card of solutions, but it is a card of faith, of "reaching out for the hand that we can't see" -- and finding it there.

19. The Moon -- "Brain Damage/ Eclipse" by Pink Floyd

"There's someone in my head, but it's not me."

When I see this card, I feel a kind of dazed delirious feeling, like I'm about to come down from a drug trip of some sort, on the edge of lucidity, the very boundary of it . . . but not quite. And as befits a card that occupies subterranean psychic lands, this piece is a dreamy stupor, half-shadowed, bizarre, fantastic. Mad, utterly mad, yet also utterly sane. Another paradox, but what else would one expect in a place so disorienting that truth masquerades as a hallucination?

20. The Sun -- "Magnolia Soul" by Ozomatli

"We gonna make them saints march on again."

The Sun always comes up after the dark dark night. This song captures that feeling of breakthrough and invigoration, the confidence and optimism of a breaking day.

21. Judgment -- "Graceland" by Paul Simon

"Maybe I'm obliged to defend every love, every end/or maybe there's no obligations now/ maybe I've reason to believe we all will be received in Graceland."

Absolution. That is the nature of this card despite its very heavy-sounding title. It comes with a sense of appraisal, of course, of separating wheat from chaff. But in the end, what gets blown away is the guilt and regret -- we are all found to be enough. Perfect. Cleansed and forgiven. And with this comes hope.

22. The World -- "The Whole Shebang" by Grant Lee Buffalo

"We'll take the whole shebang/ all or nothing, anything/ Ecstasy's the birthright of our gang/ we'll take the whole she-bang/ free your heart from guilt and shame/come and claim what's yours, the whole shebang."

Integration, accomplishment, fulfillment. The World delivers, but only if we claim it. To hold the world in our hands, we must give ourselves to it. Another paradox, like all the Tarot, like the way this song shifts from soft twinkling to full on dancehall. Like that. Just like that.

Faith, or Something Like It

Caroline Myss' explanation of faith: "Faith is the power to stand up to the madness and chaos of the physical world while holding the position that nothing external has any authority over what heaven has in mind for you."

From Rob Brezney's Free Will Astrology

From Galway Kinnell's "Saint Francis and the Sow"

The bud
stands for all things
even for those things that don't flower
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within
of self-blessing.

Circles, Cycles, Rhythms

A friend asked me today if I thought my life was going in circles. I told her yes, but that it was a good thing. I have a labyrinth on my altar, and I trace its path with my finger sometimes -- going in, circling the center, resting there for a moment of breath, then coming back out again. I am drawn the the idea that life is a maze, but not one you can get lost in. One that you find yourself in.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot -- "Little Gidding" (the last of his Four Quartets)

"Nothing Gold Can Stay" by Robert Frost

I am growing a pot of forget-me-nots -- they are such tender things. I have to prop them on the side of the pot, the first brave ones. They came up too soon before the sun could toughen them up, and now their stems are too spindly to support the spreading green of their leaves. The other ones -- the ones that bided their time under the rich dark soil -- are not as tall. But because they grew in their own time, according to their own cycles and rhythms, they will be able to grow tall and hold their own in the world.

They are teaching me a lot, these little green things.

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leafs a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

From Stranger Than Fiction

"Sometimes when we lose ourselves in fear and despair, in routine and constancy, in hopelessness and tragedy, we can thank God for Bavarian sugar cookies. And fortunately, when there aren't any cookies, we can still find reassurance in a familiar hand on our skin. Or a kind and loving gesture. Or a subtle encouragement. Or a loving embrace. Or an offer of comfort.

Not to mention hospital gurneys. And noseplugs. An uneaten danish. And soft-spoken secrets. And Fender Stratocasters. And maybe, the occasional piece of fiction.

And we must remember that all these things – the nuances, the anomalies, the subtleties -- that only seem to accessorize our days are really here for a much larger and nobler cause – they are here to save our lives.

I know the idea seems strange, but I also know that is just so happens to be true."

"Spring and Fall" by Gerard Manly Hopkins

To a young child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Dear All,

This isn't politicking -- I don't do that.

But this is about Al Gore's idea to generate some interest about the environmental crisis -- he reasons that a lot of signatures make an argument look real good, so he's asking for them. I was willing to send mine, and thought you might be too.

Check out his website at Al Gore Goes to Washington for the form.

And thanks. My daughter is breathing a little easier now.

"Spring is like a perhaps hand" by e. e. cummings

This poem was printed on the liner that came under my room service dinner this weekend. I almost didn't notice it, preoccupied as I was with the tiny salt and pepper shakers and making room on the bed for the tray. I tried to bring it home -- folded neatly into a tiny rectangle, tucked in the pocket of my suitcase -- but it got mangled somehow. Ripped in the middle, creased like crow's feet. But here is the poem, so lovely in a Chicago room with snow flurrying out my window and a full moon rising:

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere) arranging
a window, into which people look (while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here) and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and from moving New and
Old things, while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there) and

without breaking anything.

Discordian Charge to the Goddess Eris

"I have come to tell you that you are free. Many ages ago, My consciousness left humanity, that they might develop themselves. I return to find this development approaching completion, but hindered by fear and by misunderstanding. You have built for yourselves psychic suits of armor, and clad in them, your vision is restricted, your movements are clumsy and painful, your skin is bruised, and your spirit is broiled in the sun. I am chaos. I am the substance from which your artists and scientists build rhythms. I am the spirit with which your children and clowns laugh in happy anarchy. I am chaos. I am alive, and I tell you that you are free."

From the Irreverand Hugh, KSC, for Witchvox