Last night was our first hard freeze. The summer plants are done.
This year, for me, the end of the summer garden is very clearly the beginning of Crone season. The moon last night, not quite full, was a Crone moon. My Crone guardian has been guiding me through some difficult conversations in these last few weeks: conversations about accountability, power relations, containment.
This year, as these conversations unfold, as these leaves yellow and these waters freeze and this year’s harvest is weighed and measured and put up, I’m putting a Crone face on.
Sometimes—like in the dream I described to Larissa Kaul during our conversation on “Disintegrating Empire,” the dream where evil magicians were flying in the streets of our city, a dream that feels, today, too close to waking life, like many of my dreams lately—the right face to wear is the face of the one who has seen it all before.
When the corn is dryand there’s ice in the airwe count what can be stored.The face to wearis the face of the onewho has seen it all before.
As I’ve moved in and out of tough conversation lately, I’ve been trying to walk myself back from dysregulated moments via orientation to the same guiding question: how can my next action serve my most aligned intention?
If my intention is to serve the strengthening of this container, serve the purposes of (re)building trust, facilitating repair, getting everybody’s needs met (including my own), what then shall I do, now, next?
That’s a weaving.
And then there’s another question that arises: how will I know when to let go of what I’ve woven?
To give it away? And/or—to lay all that work down on the ground and trust that it will fall apart and darken and mix and shapeshift into something else, nourish something else, when spring rolls back around?
I’ve lately sensed into the hunger trees feel for the mulch their fallen leaves will make.
At a song circle on the fall equinox, I talked with my friends Bobby and Brosnan and Meadow about the basket they’ve been weaving this year as part of their Wild Blues artists’ residency.
The basket is made of dogbane hemp, a beautiful plant whose soft, strong fibers used to be the cordage material of choice in our part of the world, until settlers did their damndest to extirpate the plant because its sap is toxic to cattle.
I can’t possibly do justice here to all the stories—all the messy and beautiful and painful truths and life histories and expressions of life—that must exist side by side in order for a basket such as this to be made in a time like this.
I got to see the basket on Saturday night. It’s the first basket of its kind to have been made here in a long long time. Brosnan held it up, beautifully woven and full of dried cous. Their family spent a year weaving that container together; and they gathered those roots together in places where their community’s ancestors were massacred, not very many generations ago, while peacefully gathering roots; and that cous will keep better than it would in another kind of basket because of the antimicrobial compounds in that “toxic” sap.
When we were gathering up for the song circle, I asked Bobby what they were going to do with the basket. Of course, he said: “We’ll give it to somebody.”
At that song circle I shared the song I’m sharing with you all today, a simple song that has come to me in recent weeks in the mix of all these conversations and (re)turnings and unfoldings—a simple song that honors complex Crone remembering of the hard things and the true things and the simplest clearest things.
Crone has seen all the shenanigans and all the barriers and all the failures and and all the misjudged reactions and mistakes—and all the gifts that have been given, and all the gardens mulched with what we’ve been able to let go of. Crone has hangups and baggage and a long-burdened lots-lost body—and deep down she knows what she needs, and so knows that we know what we need, if we can just remember.
So, here’s my prayer for myself and for us today: may our hard conversations with one another, our hard histories, our hard feelings, our beautiful intentions, be not wasted but woven as true threads into strong and beautiful containers. May those containers hold what we love and what we know is precious. May we weave when it’s our time to weave, and when it’s time to let go, may we let go. May our lettings go be gifts. May the time be the right time. May it be so.
