It Could Lead to Dancing

Tra-la, it’s May. I’ve been preparing for May First—which is a calendrical cross-quarter day, a Friday, and also the Full Moon—by taking the day off and dropping hints to Mark that the weekend could be extra amorous. Western traditions for this time of year include driving cattle and kine between two bonfires for purification prior to driving them to the summer grazing lands; prancing around a Maypole, boys with red ribbons going clockwise and girls with white ribbons going widdershins; and outdoor sex in the woods. Add the Full Moon for extra magical energy; I wasn’t following the moon’s position astrologically, but it was a Scorpio Full Moon, so it would be secretive, regenerative, energy of a sexual nature.

A few days prior to May First, I posted a photo of a bundle of dried grape vines in a small copper cauldron to Instagram with the caption, “I will not light giant bonfires in my backyard on the Beltane Full Moon so that I can be ‘rescued’ by hot firemen.” I followed it up with the comment, “It could lead to dancing.”

One wrinkle in my domestic Pagan praxis is that Mark’s always described himself as a “religious non-participant.” Ahead of schedule, the oak, cottonwood, and willow trees filled the air with mucus-inducing pollen. And Mark’s never been a fan of flames larger than the ones on candles, indoors or out. So hot, throbbing, man-on-man sex between two bonfires in our backyard was definitely off the table. Probably to the relief of the neighbors. And the fire brigade.

Thursday night I watched a very close to full moon. The moon was lower and more southerly than I expected, and it skimmed over the tree tops east of our southern neighbor’s house. If I held my head in just the right position, I could frame the Rabbit of the Moon within an equilateral triangle of tree branches. I wanted to just look at the moon inscribed by branches and at the same time run over to a silver working bench and design a triangular bolo tie of silver with a jade disk displaying a rabbit. Since I don’t have a jewelry studio, I remained looking at the moon before heading inside to hide from pollen with Mark.

Fireman fantasies aside, one of the intentions for this seasonal station was to be more balanced with eros, agape, and amore, which means listening more closely to Mark. I may or may not have visualized cosmic erotic energy flowing through my second chakra during (ahem) certain parts of the night.

The plan for Friday was to hike up Spencer Butte and watch the sunrise. This was tricky because the parking lot for the park doesn’t officially open until 6 am and sunrise was 6:04, and also the low, overcast clouds enveloped the peak. So no rising sun in the east and no sinking moon in the west; only wildflowers, trillium, poison oak, cedar, iris, sword ferns with their sea-horse heads, and an ambiguous homo-social group of men (and their two small dogs) with sage (Mark thought it was marijuana) at the peak (I am uncertain if they were having a ritual of some sort or if we came across the aftermath of a group hug).

My favorite place to stand on Spencer’s Butte is a triangular slab of concrete where an observation station used to be. Mark noticed there were a lot of peanut and pistachio hulls littered everywhere, so I made an informal, impromptu ritual of gathering up the hulls while humming “Bring from the center of the sun…” under my breath. I may or may not have taken off my shirt at Mark’s request.

Back at home, Mark had to work, so I left the house and visited friends at the Cascades Raptor Center. Nike the Gyrfalcon had her back to me, which showed off the circular geometry of her feather pattern and wing arcs, so I took some photos to use as a design study. An elementary school group was also visiting, and I found myself explaining that one of the turkey vultures’ names, Lethe, was the name of the underworld river of forgetfulness from ancient Greek myth. As one does. The symbolism of teaching children about mythic forgetfulness in a bird sanctuary is left as an exercise for the reader.

Afterward, I had an early lunch at The Community Cup. I pulled out my Book of Art and wrote down some highlights of the day, and also did a kind practice-pull-no-specific-question of Tarot cards. I’m thinking the cards didn’t want to practice, because all five cards were reversed: the Ten of Cups, The Knight of Cups, the Seven of Swords, Strength, the Three of Pentacles. I suppose one interpretation is “pretending not to ask a question may hedge you from answers you don’t like, but it’s a bad way to practice discernment and divination.” I guess next time I’ll just pull cards from the top and review meanings flash-card style.

I got back home just before solar noon. By this time the clouds had lifted and most of the haze had burnt off, and the sun cast shadows through the branches of our backyard cherry tree.

There are four metal shepherds’ crooks staked around the circle of paver stones in our backyard. One, with wind chimes, is for the Moon’s South Ascending Node; another, opposite the circle, with a bird suet cage, is for the North Descending Node; a third, holding a sun-dangler-and-wind-chime, I moved to the southwest portion of the circle; and the fourth, with its crescent moon decoration, I moved to the northeast position. I put the Labyrinth Stone onto the north paver stone. I went to the south paver stone in the circle, placed the cauldron and grapevine bundle there, and tried to light a fire with the large magnifying lens.

After lots of white smoke, charcoaled burn marks on the vines, and some dark spots in my vision, I concluded the grapevines were too green to catch. I swapped out the grapevine for a beeswax candle and after a few moments had Cross-quarter Day Fire dancing on the wick. I pulled out two new candles and lit these; for an Instagram Moment I had three flames burning against the greeny grass. Eventually, I moved the newer candles into a glass lantern, but I kept the old candle in the cauldron in the station of the south, burning, burning all through the afternoon and into the early hours of moonlight.

Seated on blankets and pillows in the center of the circle, I harped a while, running through the regular store of Child Ballads and Filk, cobbled together Monteverdi, a mishmash of contemporary and improvised tunes, and tried to catch the wind in the harp strings, which is very cool when I’m able to manage it. The chimes tinkled and the fountain’s water babbled over its basalt column. I may or may not have woken up the three arbor vitae trees east of the circle.

Clouds rolled in. Mark and I laid down on the deck’s couch and spent the evening looking for the moon to rise (I swear!). The candle in the south twinkled in the grass, and the candles in the lamp melted down. Sometimes I thought I saw Arcturus, other times, maybe Spica; but all times there were clouds and no time was the moon visible. We rested. The south candle went out. The lamp candles went out. By city light reflected from clouds’ undersides, I gathered up the cauldron and lamp and harp and pillows and blankets, and shrouded the deck furniture with its covers.

Controlling the Vertical and the Horizontal

Whew. After days and days and days of unpacking, cleaning, and reshelving the books, the newly repainted North Bedroom is finally presentable. The shelving is not perfect, and I imagine that I will be making slight alterations in how the sections are working.

On one physical level, the only way to get (most) all of the books onto the main shelves was to switch from vertical shelving to horizontal stacking. I’m not sure how functional horizontal stacks will be for a semi-regularly referenced library. It works best when there are many books by a particular author or in a subject matter. It also means that the larger books, which may or may not be the books I’m more likely to consult, form the base of the stacks—consulting them will be like that magic trick where one pulls a tablecloth out from underneath a set of dishes. Hey Presto!

The fiction paperbacks have, alas, been double-shelved on some separate modular shelves. I am going to see if I can purchase some additional planks and brackets and increase the linear shelf space.

There’s no rest for the wicked, however. Now that the books (and the banker’s boxes they were stored in) have been put away, I have to move onto restoring the bedroom closets, which will involve finding brackets for the very long closet rod and installing them before I can transport the costume and prop department lurking in the North Bedroom and Main Hall closet into the new bedroom closet.

It also means figuring out where some other objects are going to live. There were a number of tchotchkes interspersed throughout the books and I’m resisting the urge to return them to the shelves. The chief of these is my Writers of the Future award from 2006, which inspires the joke about the person who goes to a costume party as a Gifted Child, and when asked “What are you supposed to be?”, replies, “Oh, I was supposed to be so many things.” Mark has already moved the trophy, which is a sharp prism of about seven pounds of acrylic, from one end of the modular fiction shelves to another end, where it will be less likely to kill me when The Big One hits and the trophy does a Sword of Damocles impression.

Unfortunately, I can’t make the closet in our new bedroom behave like a TARDIS, and there simply isn’t room for the Old Burridge Chest of Drawers and Portable Stonehenge and my clothes. And my Doctor Who Scarf. And the giant, wool, double-breasted Pegasus Ranger army greatcoat. And my necklaces, talismans, and amulets. And the crowns (plural). Or the file cabinet of critiqued manuscripts.

Or the banner with a full length Cicely Mary Barker Cornflower Fairy on it. I like it because it reminds me of my Anglophile Aunt Margot, and because I like cornflowers; and the over-the-top pose of the young male fairy with his hands to his cheeks and one leg bent up screams, “OMG! You want to go to the fancy dress ball with me?!” Whether it’s Too Much Old Lady or Too Much Twee I can’t say—but it’s so “Too Much” that it’s funny. I’m not sure why Mark hates it and calls it scary. Okay, we did hang it up behind the door of the bedroom just before The Child's temporary return between college academic terms in a decor move that Mark calls "weaponized;" so there may be a residual Grandma-Jumpscare element involved.

Mark also does not care for the large, sixty-year old, touristy temple rubbing of a bunch of bright blue Hindu women playing instruments. I’m sure my parents purchased it on their travels overseas when they were sophisticated almost-thirty-year-old Americans in 1962. It used to be a central image in the downtown house I lived in before I was seven—I thought the figures were pointy-eared extraterrestrial ?women? wearing space (or diving) helmets, with alien devices; avatars of celestial mystery casting a spell; or possibly space sea-monkeys having a party. What I took for either a lap-sized crystal ball or else some sort of space communication device in one woman’s lap in real life is actually a tambour, seen drum-head on. The air-tubes connecting their helmets to the geometric space suits that I saw as a kindergartener are actually chunky necklaces draped strategically over bare, spherical breasts. Perhaps it is Kama-Sutra-adjacent. I suppose I find it compelling and oddly comforting in a “the party’s still going” kind of way; Mark thinks it’s poorly executed.

Finally, there’s the small bronze unicorn bust on a pink marble plinth. I bought it when I first moved to Eugene to live with Mark. It’s fine art that doesn’t look like a bunch of scrap metal and gears glued together, nor does it look like a twee citizen of the Glass Menagerie. Nor is it Eugene Hemp Macrame with Driftwood and Beads. I’ve always thought it might be fun to make the piece a gnomon for a sundial board, but mostly it’s lived here and there in the house in the shelves or by the Portable Stonehenge or on the mantle or the dining room table. Apparently Mark doesn’t like it (and never has)… not because it’s nauseatingly cute, but, I think because a gay man owning a cast bronze unicorn bust is fence-sitting in the way a gay man owning a scaled-down replica of Michelangelo’s David or a reproduction of a sexy, Pre-Raphaelite Saint Sebastian isn’t. Also, being just the head and neck, the unicorn is slightly reminiscent of “The Godfather.” (“Nice bookshelves. Shame if something happened to them.”)

When I get a little overwhelmed, I go into the North Bedroom and look at the main, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves: vertical shelving tidily interspersed with horizontal stacks. Dusted. Clean. Accessible and not double-stacked. The hardback novels; the Arthuriana next to the Dion Fortune next to the Ronald Hutton; the gay history running into the gay spirituality; the divination section just beneath the poetry section; the astronomy section and the folklore section and the gardening and herbal section—and along the entire length of the main shelf is the art and the history and the art-history running from the Paleolithic to the Egyptian to the Greek, Roman, and Islamic; to the European Mediaeval and Renaissance; spanning to the Pre-Raphaelites, Escher, Mucha, and the Impressionists; ending with Barbie and Art Deco and New York Gargoyles.

I suppose the books spanning time and space are as close to the TARDIS as I’m going to get.

The Holy City of What ?

The latest idea I’ve been pursuing is an exploration of sacred place.

When I attended my cousin Anne’s memorial a few weeks ago, there was a reference to the Heavenly Jerusalem. The words “Heavenly Jerusalem” almost always conjures William Blake in my mind, and the vision the Heavenly Jerusalem revealed gives me a Close-Encounters-of-the-Third-Kind-esque image of a great mothership descending over Devil’s Tower. Beyond that, my understanding is that it’s a kind of holy city, or polis as an axis mundi.

The notion of a holy city struck me, both as a city dweller and a 21C contemporary Pagan.

I’m not sure exactly what happens in a holy city; my sense is that holy people go about the holy business of the city, living holy lives there as they do holy work and holy play in holy homes among the holy streets. Perhaps there’s a holy library, and holy parks, and a holy discotheque. And holy sewers, and holy infrastructure. I think the idea is to be in communion. With something. Since the Heavenly Jerusalem is part of the Judeo-Christian tradition with a transcendent deity, I’m not sure how it would map into an immanent deity spiritual structure. And then William Blake’s voice rings out, “…bring me my arrows of desire!”

In contrast to Heavenly Jerusalem is Babylon. I want to say that the Jerusalem / Babylon dichotomy is an indicator of the spirit / body dichotomy.

Thinking a little bit more, it seemed that there would be more types of city or polis and I added additional sites from history, myth, and legend. I started with Camelot, because it was a shining city on a hill, a beacon of civility, chivalry, lawfulness, and magic.

Then I realized I needed to add The Fabled Library of Alexandria (the extra cool one reimagined in Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos”, not the underfunded, dingy one that collapsed through lack of funding and papyrus rot); how could a bibliophile not include a shrine to learning illuminated by the light of reason? (Plus it’s in Egypt, and Ancient Egyptian things are cool!)

And if I was going to add The Cool Version of Alexandria’s Library, it was a pagan hop-skip-and-a-jump to Atlantis, even if it had been coopted by 19C, colonial, Western European occultists (hey, at least it’s the basis for Tolkien’s land of Númenor, so it can’t be all bad). If I had Atlantis, then I might counter-balance it with real places like Stonehenge and Glastonbury Tor (oops, that’s Avalon, isn’t it…).

If I was going to have Stonehenge, then I needed Göbekli Tepe and the Chauvet Cave in France as examples of archeological spiritual places. When I started to add the Hanging Garden of Babylon, I realized I was running the risk of building a catalog of UNESCO world heritage sites. So I stopped.

Aside from being constructed sites, I’m still trying to find the common thread running through these sites: “wonder” is one; “sanctuary” may be another; not all are temples or sacred spaces, nor are they all cities. I think they are all places where an acme, whether in knowledge, governance, communion, art, or some other field was reached. I’m aware of the Wile E. Coyote sense of the word “acme” as I use it.

Moving out of the polis suggests Eden, the primal garden and the birthplace of names. This sets up another dichotomy, the urban / rural dichotomy, with Arcadia and the Elysian Fields at one end and archetypical poleis at the other. Of course, thinking of nouns and Eden reminds me of Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story, “She Unnames Them,” which is an exploration of how names can separate one communion with other participatory creatures. So sacred space is somehow an intersection of logos, gnosis, and communion.

Sitting between Eden and the Heavenly Jerusalem is the portable Tabernacle, a negotiated meeting space between Yahweh and the Hebrew people. The Tabernacle is a tent shrine for deity to appear (epiphany!) instead of the top of a mountain, volcano, or burning bush; it’s a purified tent that can travel with pre-agrarian, nomadic herders, used to commune with deity. I think the concept of Tabernacle would be akin to the Pagan pre-ritual of casting a protective circle and inviting the four cardinal powers to participate in the creation of sacred space and sacred time. (Obligatory distraction as I try to spell “Yahweh” with a J and auto-correct suggests “Jawas” and suddenly I’m re-envisioning the Tabernacle as a Star Wars sandcrawler cruising along the sands of Tatooine… which, I think, would make R2-D2 a kind of Ark of the Covenant.)

Placing all of these different sites onto a map is where I currently am. I’m wanting to apply this map to 21C Contemporary Pagan praxis: if I’m an Information Technology worker who lives in a city, and not a farmer in an agrarian society, how much sense does an eight-fold Wheel of the Year make? Is there really such a thing as an “Urban Shaman,” or is that a category error? Looking at place, it feels like there’s the permanent / temporary axis, the urban / rural axis, the natural / constructed axis, a spiritual / physical axis, and a Good / Evil axis.

I’m still puzzling over all of the pieces. Whenever a bunch of dichotomies band together like this, my instinct is to step away from either/or and try both/and. Maybe the sacredness of place is not so much about specific places, but that spiritual place is more about one’s frame of mind. At the risk of being too reductive, maybe spiritual place is about the building of it, or the journey to it.

“…Bring me my Chariot of fire!”

…Wait, where’s the map?

Bedroom Swapping

The last few weeks our house has looked like a packrat’s nest as we swapped bedrooms. When we moved into the house decades ago, we put The Child into the bedroom that overlooked the back yard and ourselves into the bedroom overlooking the sidewalk and street. The bedroom swap prompted a thorough cleaning of The Child’s room and a repainting of ours. During all of this painting and cleaning, the beds, the desks, the chairs, the dressers, the rugs, the paintings, the bulletin boards, and the tapestries had to be schlepped into the garage or the living room. Including The Books. About thirteen banker’s boxes filled to bursting with books have blocked off the fireplace mantel, and about thirteen more have crouched in front of the front window during this whole operation.

Whether it’s through childhood exposure to expansive family libraries, or a past life at the Library of Atlantis, I have a large number of books. It’s not a problem at all—I have managed to refrain from procuring a wheeled library shelf ladder for the purpose of reenacting Belle’s opening song from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. It does, however, provide a friction point between Mark and myself, and sometimes I think it motivates Mark to outlive me for the sole purpose of disposing of all my books, books, books, books, books. Obviously, I will have to secure a fortune so that I can be interred in a mausoleum/library (pause to imagine writing workshops in “The Dead Writer’s Library”).

The Child’s old bedroom had been repainted when he left for college, so it was mostly a matter of dusting and scrubbing at the more curiously persistent blemishes to prepare it for the switch. Our bedroom still had the original paint job we did when we moved in.

Before we bought the house, the owners had painted the walls a color best described as sandstone meets khaki. I could never decide if it wanted to be dull yellow or olive drab—but what I could tell you was that it sucked all of the light out of the air; we toured the house on a rainy June day and it was like stepping into a dark, dismal, dingy cave.

I told Mark that we’d have to repaint because if the darkness was this bad on a rainy June day, I’d want to slit my wrists from February seasonal depression if we didn’t. We ended up choosing colors from a French Art Nouveau book of patterns that went with the oak floor: sunflower yellow for the walls, red-orange for the window trim, and a pine green for the door trim. Mark liked it for about a month, and then said that our house looked like, “The Honeybun Café.” I will admit that there were times when our home’s interior put me in mind of a high-end McDonald’s. Over the years, the living room, the kitchen, and the bathroom got repainted in much less saturated versions of yellow and green.

In our old bedroom—which we’re beginning to refer to as “The North Bedroom”—we replaced the pine green trim on the windows, doors, and bookshelves from twenty years ago with “aurora brown,” a chocolatey color, and the wall color with what looked like white when it first went on but turned out a light lemon color. (Afterward, when I compared the new yellow with an old patch, the old yellow looked dirty.) For some reason, the colors make the room look like an Edwardian room that Eliza Doolittle would practice her diction in. We’re thinking the Edwardian style will dictate some sort of motto in the corner above the windows: “memento mori” seems a little dark, but E.W. suggested “sic itur ad astra.” Now, of course, I want a sarcastic version of something like “live, laugh, love,” or maybe a PDQ Bach quote like, “Donna nobis pacem cum what mei”. Or maybe something about finding the grail in the Castle of Aaargh.

I really do want to get the books back onto the shelves. I used to have a string of white LEDs snaking along the front of the shelves, and I think I might re-affix them along the back of the shelves so that they provide a more indirect backlighting while avoiding a cantina aesthetic (they are currently strung over the living room window, which makes it look like we’re living in a department store diorama). After that, the trick for The North Bedroom will be to get a floor lamp, a writing desk that’s large enough to accommodate a workstation on it, and some more book shelves into the room without crowding it. I had a vague notion of moving a Stickley Chair from the over-furnished living room into The North Bedroom for a formal reading room feel, but it’s looking like both it and The Child’s bed won't fit. (I’ve always loved the Stickley Chair ever since I first encountered it in my Grandpa Burridge’s home; however, it really wants to be on a short dais, like the throne of Brian Rose’s father in the painting by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, which can be awkward.)

Our new bedroom (The South Bedroom?) has our bed and some minimal furniture in it: a small, medieval style chest for laundry, a narrow secretary desk for Mark to work from, and a glass mosaic night lamp. Mark is aiming for an Arts and Crafts/William Morris look for the room, so if we still have some money left after all of the painting, we’ll purchase a long, Morris-inspired tapestry to go along with a smaller one already hanging in the room. Mark has forbade me from placing glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling (although he is open to a projection of stars for the living room ceiling), and a (ironic) Cicely Mary Barker Cornflower Fairy tapestry has been excised from the room. The string of multi-color LEDs under the bed has, however, been approved and acts as a handy nightlight.

The final round in this game of House Tetris will be reorganizing the closets. We decided that we should each take one closet; Mark didn’t care which, and I’m thinking I’ll consolidate all of my clothes and costumes and props and files into the closet in our bedroom. Mark will combine his clothes and toiletries into the closet in The North Bedroom. This will free up a hallway linen closet.

I’m not entirely sure what will happen to the Old Burridge Chest of Drawers. It was sitting in a corner of our old bedroom. If I put it into a closet, it won’t exactly be the most efficient use of space. If I banish it to the garage, I’ll need to find a new place to put my personal altar and Portable Stonehenge. If I get rid of it entirely, it will make my ninety-year-old father sad (pause to wonder exactly why I still store a Scottish sporran and garb for a three-year-old me in the bottom drawer—I’m never going to fit into those clothes again).

Unfortunately, what is also falling out of all of this house reorganization is dedicated craft space and storage space for filing bills, correspondence, and old manuscripts. I suppose if we really wanted a room for crafting, writing, costuming, and archiving, we’d move or convert the garage into living space (considers old plans to extend the one-and-a-half-butt kitchen into the garage and give it a pantry).

I’m pretty sure Mark would chime in here, “or you could get rid of half of your books.”

Valentine's Day Flying Yoga

On what I think counts as a Valentine’s Day Date, Mark and I went to a Flying Yoga class. This is where one goes to a yoga studio at the local YMCA that has reinforced girders along the ceiling where one can use carabiners to hang silk ribbons or TRX suspension exercise equipment or, as in our case, little short hammocks with side stirrups for one’s hands or feet.

I went into the class expecting it to be more like silk flying than it actually was. While I do some yoga-inspired stretches—I’m a “yogi-by-marriage”—I’d much rather do something like tai-chi. It’s a safe bet to say that I’ve got some of the world’s tightest hamstrings and hips. It was probably a good thing that the instructor reminded us to breathe.

There was an erotic (and distracting) moment seeing Mark swinging in his hammock, and I had to think unsexy thoughts and remind myself that a Y studio wasn’t an appropriate space for a visual orgy of passionate, tantric yoga. We did a few showy power-lunge swings, but no fear that things got out of hand: I had a protein bar snack about ninety minutes before class, and I had sipped some tea about an hour before; this combined with some of the rotational swinging and extended periods upside-down was nauseating. In retrospect, I should have stopped all consumption two hours ahead of time.

Hanging was more comfortable once I unraveled my hammock from a rope into more of a stretchy band. Meanwhile, Mark was hanging upside-down, back arched, holding both feet behind his back. I think my best stretch was a hanging moment early on with my left ankle on my right hip. Mark’s best stretch was a “cheating crow stand” that the instructor was ecstatic about. I would try Flying Yoga again, on an emptier stomach and with the recognition that it’s still yoga, and not an intro to Cirque du Soleil Power Silk Moves.