What a really lovely Lenaia it ended up being, even not ‘really’ celebrating it!
I didn’t do anything on Thursday except wear all wine shades to work, and picked up the custom pomegranate earrings our lovely local silver sorceress made for me.
But Friday was a weirdly warm 70 degree sunny day, horrible from a climate change perspective but so seductive. I stripped Fiona’s stall and then worked on getting all the grapevines (and probably some poison ivy) off a fallen tree that David will need to cut up. All the while I listened to Wendy’s Persephone. I just love Wendy Rule, not only for her weird, powerful, haunting voice, but because she’s my kind of polytheist.
I recently ran into a group, this one dedicated to Ariadne which thrilled me because not many of us worship Her. This lovely group has Mysteries, Ariadne’s but inspired by Eleusis, right up my alley, right?But the description includes something along the lines of ‘But what if the story you’ve heard isn’t how it really went’ and goes on to outline it as a coming-into-your-power romance, with no abduction, rape, abandonment or mourning.
I mean, I get it. That stuff is SO hard. But for me, if you can’t accept that pain, grief, loss and terror are part of what comes with Them, it’s hard to see how deep you can go with Them.
So few people, and no other Demetrians that I know except Wendy and my young priestess friend, accept that the ancient tale even has any validity. It’s been spun as an invention by modern feminists (really!), a patriarchal revision that should be denied by all True Feminists, and historically incorrect as ‘women would never have stood for a story that treated them so terribly.’ (My paraphrase from a popular book about Demeter.)
I love that people see the Two as strong, indomitable, no bullshit and brimming with power. But They are also the Goddesses of the bleakest and most terribly used.
Can you go deep with Ariadne if She was never abandoned? If She waltzed happily from Theseus’s arms into Dio’s? Well, perhaps some can. What do I know?
Anyway. Off my soapbox. I spent the morning with Wendy, the afternoon in the writing studio, and then some glorious time sitting in the sun on the bench of the Demeter shrine.
The house next door is brilliantly lit all round most nights, but last night the back, at least, was dark, so I made my way, with Marley, in the wonderful misty almost-full moonlight, to the Louhi shrine by the back woods, carrying ice cubes and hard egg nog. I pay seasonal cultus to Louhi, from the winter solstice to the spring equinox. I love Her hard. I had hoped sacred Winter would return at the end of the Lenaia, but Louhi has withdrawn Her mantle, and there was no need to ‘Wake the Green’ this year even if I could have. But despite not doing any of the official recon stuff, and staying away from priestess Work, I so enjoyed the Lenaia this year.
Went for a walk wth the husband and Delilah today and we saw a SWAN on the Antietam Creek! I’ve never seen a swan there before. Io Apollon!
Pretty shitty pic, but I couldn’t get very close.
Well, this was a rambly incoherent blog post, but then, it’s winter and even if it’s unseasonably warm, I’m fuzzy and sleepy most of the time from now until spring.
May the Bullroarer bless you, dears. Despite the awfulness of so much of the modern world, it’s good to have the intrawebs to stay in light touch with other folks who walk the Paths of Weird.
Actual photo of me after latest dive into Poseidon Work.
I didn’t realize until I got home late last night that the Lenaia begin today. The whole start of this year is a blur. So, I’m going into another festival unprepared.
That being said, I’m not really doing the Lenaia this year because, once again, I’m deep in miasma. Shrines are covered for at least the rest of this moon phase due to recent aching losses, so my celebrations are muted. I’m not doing any specific priestess functions, but I’m allowed to do a few things.
Purifications, libations, offerings and prayers are always on the table, at least in my odd little cultus, so I started off with a lovely look back through my notebooks at previous celebrations, blessing my Younger Self for keeping good notes for lo these many years.
Then a purification shower, and dressing in clothing and jewelry for Dionysos and also for Persephone. She doesn’t always come through strongly on the Lenaia but sometimes She does, and today She’s been all over.
Took my dog for a walk up on the battlefield. The terrible cold of the weekend has evaporated and it was a balmy mid-40s, but deliciously dark and overcast and ominous, perfect for the misty Lenaia. A little snow lingered on the path and between the trees. Don’t you just love winter trees?
It was really pretty soggy, and I couldn’t help but feel the wavering, barely perceptible limnades, rising from puddles and soaked earth, watching us squelch along.
Hi!
I love how bright the sky is beyond the woods, because as soon as you’re over the rise and can see farther, the sky was Ragnarok dark. I kept hustling poor Delilah along as I was worried about us getting caught in a cold squall.
The snow highlights a little deer path.
Having just read Mycogenous (twice) earlier this winter, on this Lenaia I’m profoundly aware of the life right underneath the layer of winter grass, the fungus on the tree bark, the hum of not-heard communications along pathways we’re only just starting to dream of.
In the muted browns and greys and whites of winter, there was no color at all on this walk, so this little twig of berries leapt up from the ground at me. Just like pomegranate seeds, ruby, blood, fire.
I love the woods in winter.
The fields seem to stretch so much farther than in any other season. You can see how the path bends off to the right. The snow got almost 6 inches deep through there, and you could see the footprints where people turned back. But one set of boot prints and one set of pawprints went through, so Delilah and I forged on, me stepping in the footprints of the other guy, Delilah burying her nose in every bit of discolored snow.
It was a good walk but I was glad to get home.
At sunset all the girls came with me to make offerings of chambord and pomegranate candy. I sharply felt the loss of Ivy, who always came to rituals and offerings and was usually disrespectful. Marley will crone up to Ivy’s level eventually, but for now it felt like a huge gap in our erratic little circle.
The bright moonlight was completely obscured behind thick, heaving clouds. By the time I went to bed the whole farm was wreathed in mist. Otherworldly. Beautiful.
About two decades ago, a litter of kittens was born on Red Hill, Sharpsburg’s only ‘mountain’, at a log cabin overlooking the valley. The cabin belonged to the Bell family, where Lynda Bell taught a wild bunch of homeschoolers science and music. Lynda Bell, a NASA scientist, had created the Log Cabin Science School and it was a noisy, creative, glorious place to be.
So thought the mommacat, Maz, a semi-feral who found the cabin a soft place to land and have her babies. The litter, known as the Mazlets, quickly found homes among the kids whom Lynda taught. Two of them, Ivy and Luna, stayed with the Bells.
Don’t have a picture of the babies. Believe it or not, that was before cellphone cameras were widespread.
Here’s one of the oldest pics I can find of her, buried in the ivy and grapevine on our deck.
All the Mazlets were eligible for the title, but when anyone referred to THE Mazlet, it was Ivy.
When the Bells split up, Lynda had to find somewhere to house herself, her three boys, their two dogs and the cats. We agreed to take Ivy, since we knew and loved her. She was a year or two then, I think, no one can quite remember when the Mazlets were born.
Foo was our only cat at that time and he liked it that way. I thought he’d be pissed at having another cat move in, and that Ivy, after her busy, noisy, populated start in life, would be lonely living with a curmudgeon like Foo. I kicked him out while Ivy explored the breezeway, to give her an hour to acclimate before dealing with him. (Today I’d have extended that to a few days, but this was decades ago.)
How surprised I was when Foo, catching sight of the calico beauty from the other side of the patio door, began pawing frantically to get inside and take a closer gander. Ivy took one look at him, swelled up to twice her already considerable size, and hissed like a furious dragon.
She did that pretty much every time she saw Foo for the rest of their years together. He was a tough little guy, snotty and cocky, and he didn’t back down from her.
Didn’t challenge her either. Not many challenged Ivy in her long, glorious prime.
Lounging in the yard with Jasmine and Bo, not long before we lost Bo. She had zero fear of horses.
She and Foo got into something, about 8 or 9 years ago. Foo had already come in a year before with a swollen head, having encountered something as mean as he was. We were shocked when they BOTH came in with head and face injuries. The vet said they looked like defensive injuries, the cats facing something they didn’t dare turn their backs on. We’ll never know just what happened, and it’s possible they fought each other. The antagonism was certainly there for it. But it’s odd that in all their years together, it never went beyond hissing and swatting, not where we could see. I like to think that they briefly banded together to face down a mutual threat.
She tolerated a lot from us. I think she kinda grooved on it. Sometimes when she complained the loudest she was also purring madly.
Helping Daddy read the paper was one of her principal jobs. And she shredded it helpfully when she was done sitting on it. She really seemed to hate the NYT crossword, to my frustration.
She loved few things more than shoes. The smellier the better. The only way to improve on smelly shoes for Ivy was to sprinkle catnip in them.
When Ben Bell came to live with us, he brought Ivy’s sister Luna. We were so excited. We all anticipated the happy reunion of the Log Cabin Mountain Mazlets. It was gonna be so great.
It went like this.
The two most people-oriented cats I’ve ever known hated each other’s guts. More even than Ivy hated Foo. After one screaming fight in the basement there were blood spatters. Zero tolerance.
When Ben left, Luna stayed with us until my son Dylan moved out and took her with him. My husband suggested she stay with us. For being known as ‘the sensible one’, when it comes to cats he’s a warm marshmallow.
The day Ben left we all cried, but no one was sadder than poor Luna.
Seeing her grieving on his bed still makes me tear up. I wasn’t sure she’d recover, but Dylan loved her through it.
Luna loved being an indoor/outdoor cat, but was so oriented to humans that she adjusted to being an inside cat in a house full of college students, a hedgehog, and a neurotic beagle to bully. She left us a couple of years ago, after being pampered and adored by Dylan and his cat-crazy wife, Kailee, for the rest of her life.
Ivy loved all humans too, and assumed mostly correctly that they all loved her back. But she had a very special soft spot for my older son, Brian.
He used to get her to yodel. It was awesome. Wish I could find the video.
She also loved it when Ben came back to visit.
Then we really farked up her world. We brought home a kitten. OMG, Ivy felt SOO betrayed. I put tiny Marley Maia in Ben’s old room so Ivy wouldn’t kill her, but Ivy smelled her and followed me around screaming irately for what felt like two days. SCREAMING. Livid. Furious. I slept with the kitten for two nights, not only to keep her company but to soothe her when the terrible growls and yowls started up outside the door.
Ivy never hurt her, but she never liked her either. Poor little Marley came from a big litter, in a big cat household of cats and cat-crazy people, to Moonshadow where neither of the other cats did anything but hiss and swat at her. Fortunately she too is people-oriented and adjusted quickly.
This was about as close as Marley could get to Ivy. Please note the vast expanse of pure white, cloud-soft belly. That is some primo belly. Ivy’s belly was heaven, and she was so generous with it. I’ll miss that belly every day of the rest of my life.
Eventually there was armed neutrality.
I thought when this happened that we’d made progress. It wasn’t so, but look at my Ivy. Look at the magnificent bulk of her. The sheer gargantuan voluptuous mass.
What a cat.
She LOVED to sleep in this chimnea. I had to evict a black widow as neither of them would quit the place.
She lost her mind when there was digging going on. She loved new trees, but I think it was really the turned earth that got her. She was a gardening cat. For all of her bristling vitality, she had a cthonic side.
Always so helpful.
Twilight brings all the girls to the yard.
She nursed Daddy through back spasms.
And helped him lift weights.
And supervised doggy belly rubs.
She was convinced that she had total camouflage.
She did have a lot to manage.
But she dealt with all of her many duties with style and poise.
And I cannot tell you how many times I had to scour the whole farm to find her for a vet visit, only to discover her up in the hayloft. Ever try to climb down a ladder with one arm full of squirming howling 13lbs of indignant calico? I don’t recommend it.
Surveying her realm through those oddly cold gold eyes. For all that she was pure love and snuggle, her eyes almost never warmed.
A good roll in the catnip should never be passed up.
This is probably my favorite picture ever taken of her, just a few months ago, by my brother Keith.
During the last couple of years, Ivy shrunk from her Jabba the Hut 13lbs to barely 6. She quit hunting, to everyone’s relief. She was a champion mouser in her prime, and my barn was mouse-free during the Foo and Ivy years. But she also loved nothing better than a baby rabbit. We knew spring had sprung when Ivy began disemboweling them slowly on the patio, with screaming and trauma all round. I’m dumbfounded at how stupid mama rabbits are. Like, maybe hide them? Just a little?
This summer I’d still find her in the barn sometimes, or wandering in the locust grove or the faery garden or the orchard. But mostly ‘going outside’ for her meant heading to her favorite spot under the table on the deck, or in the sun on the patio. When it started to get chilly, she opted for the sunspot inside the dining room. It’s all the aminerds’ favorite cold weather spot, but we saw to it that she always had first dibs.
She liked just about everybody, but in addition to Brian and my husband, she had a few favorites. She and my MIL were besties, Ivy bullying Ma into getting the right blanket, the right treats and the right positions for long happy afternoons watching The Crown.
Her Herculean appetite had shrunk, and for several weeks we’d been giving her half a teaspoon of canned food whenever she yelled for it (about 20 times a day, no lie), as she couldn’t keep down any more than that. And she liked her water cup to be held for her. Still made it to the litter box like the champion she was. Puked a fair bit, but no accidents. Lots and lots of sleeping in the sun spot, or her heated bed, or a lap if she could get one.
Her last day was so good. It was cool but not cold, with golden sunshine and no wind. She ventured outside and sampled one of the few surviving sprigs of catnip. Then she made her way onto the bench in the sun. I brought her blanket out for her, and she stayed there for hours. She was there when Dr. Lori came to set her free, and she went out of this world sitting on my lap in the sun. She flinched a little at the sedative, then fell immediately to sleep. I swear that as the euthanasia drugs went in I could feel her little body vibrating just a little, a whisper of the monster purr of her youth. She had barely been able to purr for weeks. But she did as she left.
When Foo died, I found a mouse outside the garage. No wounds or signs of any trauma, just a nice fat dead mouse. I put it in his grave with him.
As I was getting out the shovel for Ivy’s, in almost the exact same spot there was one of Artemis the Kitten’s green toy mousies, tattered and torn. Ivy didn’t like toys, but this one went with her into the good earth. Maybe it was a last gift- or a welcome- from Foo.
Foo is an elusive ghost, never coming when I call. He slips through and around the shadows, gray and stripey and glimmering. I doubt he and Ivy will hang much in the next world either, but I hope I can still perceive her, roaming this sacred space with the rest of our beloved departed, keeping an eye on us, knowing that she’s loved for as long as we’re here.
Here’s my wee little home. My Bermuda. Such a tiny little speck in the midst of the huge, green sea. So insignificant in the vastness, but so huge in my heart.
I lived here from infanthood until I was fifteen. That’s half a century ago, but on our trip there this September, all those long decades fell away. I was a little kore again, feral and bright and naughty and energetic, occasionally vicious, sometimes tender, all about myself. I haven’t seen much of that self lately, through the Pandemic Years and the Cancer Ordeal. It was nice to see her again.
I’m not up to writing about the cancer ordeal yet. I will. But not yet. Boy, did that take it out of me. I’m fully into cronehood anyway, but that tipped me right the fuck into the depths of it. It sucked away a lot of my sense of humor and it’s only returning slowly. And the only way for me to tackle the Cancer Story is through humor. It’s just too grim otherwise. For the nonce, I’m in remission and if I stay here for another 3 1/2 years I’ll be ‘cured.’
But in the warm, humid, sweet airs of my home, that give delight and harm not, even though I’m too old and fat and stiff to gallop wildly down hills and along leaf-spattered trails, I remembered what it felt like to WANT to. To have that surging energy racing through my veins like heady drink, to run so far and fast that I skimmed the earth, to suck air deep into my lungs and never feel as if I had to stop. To become a horse, or a dragon, or a cheetah, or a cowgirl, or an international jewel thief, or a wolf queen.
I shapeshifted effortlessly when I was a kid.
If I had friends to play with, it was fantastic. If I didn’t, I didn’t care. I had my imagination and endless freedom, and it was all I needed. By today’s standards my parents were incredibly neglectful and I’m so very grateful for it. I walked a mile to my best friend’s house at age 4, walked to school along busy roads with no sidewalks by myself at age 5, and swam from sunup to sundown off the North Shore rocks without an adult in earshot from 7-9. If my dad got up at 2 and found me coming in the house at age 11 and asked what I was doing, “I felt like going for a walk” was an acceptable answer. No one helped me with my homework. It was my job to get straight As and be at the top of my class, and I usually was. (I liked school.) No one showed me how to floss my teeth, or use a tampon, or coordinate an outfit, or have table manners.
It’s not surprising that I was totally unfit for American adulthood, but boy, fuck, what a great way to spend a childhood.
I could be sad about it. My mother died when I was 10, leaving 5 kids, including a newborn, with an alcoholic workaholic father, and I got bullied in my posh British school for being unkempt and probably smelly. But I kept getting straight As in everything but Math and Needlework (yes, it was mandatory at my posh school, with sewing machines with foot treadles—there weren’t electric ones, at least not in my school. I sucked at it.) I had no idea that I was feral.
And right before my mother died, she finally relented in her ongoing battle to make me forget about my all-consuming passion for horses, and let me take riding lessons.
Anyway, that wasn’t what I came here to talk about. This post is really just for me, to have somewhere to go and remember this last trip home, the one where I rediscovered my childhood relationship with Amphitrite, and a core of innate sweetness inside the hard, foul-mouthed, mean little bitchy teenager I became. I’m an asshole—my Poseidon Work showed me that in all too stark terms.
But Amphitrite, the Mother figure of my enchanted childhood whose name I never knew, has showed me the other stuff, the buried stuff, the stunted roots of kindness and goodness that got mostly choked off as I grew up, but still exist.
I remember lying in the grass of our front yard at Chequers, the house by North Shore where we lived from when I was 7 to 9. It was night, and the moon was up, and ambient light wasn’t too much of a thing then in the mid-60s, when Bermuda’s population was about 20,000, and the stars were hanging like ripe bright fruit, practically pickable. I remember looking at the moon with eyes of worship, just as I do know, and wondering, even then, if I’d been a Moon Priestess in a previous life.
I remember jumping off the rocks into the little lagoon where we swam and fished, and diving right down to the bottom, clearly able to see, even without a mask, the purple and green and blue fans, waving their lace in the current, and the inky spines of sea urchins, which we’d pluck heedlessly from the coral and leave in the sun to die and stink. Once the little animal inside had rotted away and the spines fell off, a beautiful patterned white shell would remain. We never thought they’d disappear, them or the gorgeous pink coral reefs with vast herds of parrot fish and bream and sergeant majors and grunts and the occasional huge black snapper, the reefs that make Bermuda’s enchanted sands so vibrantly pink.
The reefs are bleached white now, and finding an occasional peacock-hued parrot fish or bright silver bream is cause for great excitement. When I was a kid, we’d dive and turn the mossy rocks over for the parrot fish, and they’d graze, their beaks making scraping sounds on the rocks, brushing against us like impatient cats to feed them more. Sergeant majors would nip until we were frantic. Every now and then a big barracuda would come hang in front of us, watching us with a big round eye as we levitated out of the water.
But even with the waters so sadly depleted, Amphitrite gave me magic. Twice, once on a snorkel cruise and once off the little beach next to our rental house, I encountered curled cuttlefish, bobbling upright in single file, almost at the surface, following each other blithely past me, gently dodging my outstretched fingers. I don’t remember ever seeing them before.
Somerset Long Bay was practically our own private beach, even though it’s public and attached to a nice little park. The big South Shore beaches are rightly listed as some of the most beautiful in the world, and we swam in ’em, but our best beach days were at our little beach, and the old NASA beach were my dad worked at the tracking station in the Apollo days. Cooper’s Island, its official name, is thankfully a wildlife refuge now, and few people even know about the beach let alone make the trek back to it—you have to hoof it almost half a mile, lugging all your beach crap, but it’s so worth it.
I show you.
David was overboard before we could unpack our beach bags.
Happy Suz
I left some of my dad’s ashes out there, where an obliging school of parrot fish showed me a nice little ledge. The bottle didn’t stay on it, but danced through the shafts of sunlight down to the sandy bottom, where it sat upright, still corked, right there where the cahows’ protected nesting area sits out in the water. He’d like that.
This is beautiful little Jobson’s Cove, by Warwick Long Bay (Bermuda has too many Long Bays, a ridiculously prosaic name for some otherwordly wonderful beaches), where I learned to scuba from cute Ronnie Linley when I was 16 or 17 and back home for a visit. Being there with my husband, kids (my younger pictured here smooching my head) and daughters-in-law, was priceless.
Dylan, Kailee and I stayed on and swam at Long Bay, where it was rougher, wilder and even more beautiful. Lots of sargasso weed washed ashore by the recent hurricane. Even that crap feels nostalgic.
But the only sea urchins I saw were in the Aquarium.
The sunset over ‘our’ beach, before a night swim that was so exquisite I can’t even put it into words.
Io Amphitrite.
I was for sure more myself there than I’ve felt for a long time. Too long. The ol’ man found some of his carefree spirit on this trip too. We both needed it badly.
Now I need to learn to find it without having to physically go home. To find that within myself, where clearly it still lurks underneath the crusted layers of age, and experience, and disappointment, and adulthood, and cynicism, and hardship, and rot.
A little girl who flings herself with heedless gaiety into life, morphs into a horse at a moment’s notice, and can’t wait to get home and find some notebook paper and write down a story she’s just thought of. Gods, I miss her.
It’s actually been out for a couple of weeks, and I’ve been twitching to announce it here. But it felt weird to post since I haven’t updated this blog since the Cancer Episode and I felt like that had to happen first.
Only I’m not quite ready to discuss that journey yet. And…..well, the book is out!
I’m really happy with it. Dver did a spectacular job of book creation. I think it’s just beautiful. It’s a bit of a potpourri—it’s got some essay-style pieces, a lot of creative non-fiction, some straight up recounting of events, some myth re-tellings. Some are relatively recent, some stretch back to my early days of Hellenic polytheism. All have been published before, and all have been edited and polished up for this release.
I’d be so appreciative and overjoyed if you gave ‘er a whirl. Even more so if you’d take the time to leave a review. I’m not asking for hot air- honest reviews and opinions are what I seek.
I hope with all my heart that something I’ve experienced and written about in this little volume will touch you, or inspire you, or excite you, or spark something in you. That’s really what I live for.
As is appropriate after making such major life changes as I have recently, especially moving to a new home in a new landscape* with a vastly different climate, I have been reevaluating pretty much everything I am doing religiously, from the smallest devotional acts to festivals to trance and oracular work and more. I have also become, if it’s possible, even more solitary in my life and in my practices. Therefore the only considerations I have to make regarding rituals is what my gods and spirits want, what’s magically effective, how to incorporate the sacred landscape and wights respectfully, and what suits me personally. So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my evolving ritual style.
On the one hand, for me ritual is very much an art, perhaps in fact my primary art form when it comes down to it. Not just because it incorporates so many aesthetic…
suzsmuses 