I am struggling not to remove the idea from its context. Early in the morning I take my dogs down to the beach to run in the summer fog. The ocean whispers; all is soft, gray, and silver-blue. A line of birds skims the waves, winking out of sight as the crests hide it. The tide is running out. There are sand dollars at my feet and the fossils of sand dollars embedded in black rocks.
The thought-forms of immanence are embedded in context; they are context and content, as this fossil is now also rock.
Let me try again.
Let us imagine that we live in a culture where time is a cycle, where the sand dollar lies beside its fossil (as it does). Where everything is seen to return, as the birds return to sight with the movement of the waves. As I return to the beach, again and again.
Imagine that in that returning nothing stands outside; the bird is not separate from the wave but both are part of the same rhythm. Imagine that I know—not with my intellect but in my body, my heart—that I do not stand separate from the sand dollar or the fossil; that the slow forces that shaped the life of one and preserved the other under the deep pressure of settling mud for cycles upon cycles are the same forces that have formed my life; that when I hold the fossil in my hand I am looking into a mirror.
Or better, imagine that you are with me on that beach; that we are together (as we are); and that when we look into each other’s faces, we see (as light is both particle and wave) ourselves mirrored and yet transformed by each other’s unique, independent being; that we value the mystery of each other’s being, which can never wholly be known, that we honor in each other the richness of our difference, honor that which we cannot predict in each other, that which makes us free.
And let us imagine that we are not alone, that we are together with our friends, our children, the people we love. And because we are aware of the world as returning, the forms of our thoughts flow in circles, spirals, webs; they weave and dance, honoring the links, the connections, the patterns, the changes, so that nothing can be removed from its context.
Even God.
Let us imagine that these children, at least, have never known a God who stands outside the world, that nothing in their minds is receptive to the principle of power-over. That as infants, they learned that the demands, the pleasures, and the innermost beings of their bodies were sacred because these children were honored by their parents; they were fed when hungry, suckled, held close to the bodies of both women and men.
Imagine that their mothers were not—by virtue of being mothers—expected to stay separate from the enterprise and activity of the world; that their fathers also cared for their infant bodies with all the tenderness we expect from women. Imagine that these children were never taught to separate flesh and spirit; never trained to view themselves, their bodies, their excretions with shame; that to their parents, even shit was something sacred, something to be returned in the cycles of returning.
When these children learn, they sit in circles; they move, they dance, they explore, they question, they teach other children what they themselves know. When they grow up to work, their work is not separate from their lives. Because they have no way to hold in their minds the absolute value of an abstract, they do not work for money as if it were a God. Because they themselves are not strangers in the world, they cannot hold the illusion that individual gain is possible at others’ expense. They know—in their bodies, in their hearts—that what goes around comes around, that what is taken from the earth must be given back. Though they know that each one of them will die, they do not expect life to end. In their minds there is no Cosmic Referee to blow the whistle and yell “Game’s over!” They cannot stand outside the world to own it, to profit from it. They cannot isolate themselves from the pain of other people; they are of the world, of each other.
The vision is not hard to construct. It comes clear on the beach, perhaps because this beach I return to is where I gather, together with my friends—the people I love—each year on the eve of the Winter Solstice. We meet to teach our bodies, our hearts, what we have come to recognize with our minds: that we do not stand separate from the cycles, from the seasons. So we chant, we hold each other, we light a fire. And as the sun descends to the water’s edge to begin the longest night, we strip off our clothes and plunge into the cold waves. The water burns our skin to numbness, and we scream and yell and bellow, making deep, deep sounds as each wave hits, shocking us with our mortality, the vulnerability of our flesh. And as we let go, as we stop trying to hold out against the cold and the ocean’s force, as we let ourselves feel and then feel again, deeper and deeper, there rises from under the shock and the cold a great exhilaration. We are alive! We sing it, chant it, shout it out; the moans change to sounds of power, the power that rises from within, from the springs of our lives that we greet as sacred.
The vision rises with that power, forms in the dark and appears in that moment when the splits are healed. Yes, say our bodies, our hearts, that is what could be. We could make a culture based on this power, this union. We feel so strong in the ocean, with our arms raised high to feel the wind on our skin, and the moonlight on the napes of our necks. We feel so close, as we emerge, hold each other, dry each other off. From that strength and that closeness, we could weave something healing.
Sometimes that vision is almost unbearable. It seems like a taunt, a mirage flung up to tease us as we march down the road to holocaust. And should we find within ourselves the hope and courage to work toward that vision, how do we bring it into focus when our own consciousness, our beliefs and plans, and the very ways we go about working are themselves molded by institutions of authority that are so much a part of us we that we cannot even see them?
Yet we can see. It is an underlying principle of magic that consciousness itself has structure, and that structure manifests in the forms of the physical world. Not the contents of our thoughts but the patterns by which they are connected are revealed everywhere around us.
This room in which I sit, for example, with its solid walls and concrete foundations, is a product of all the unspoken assumptions our culture makes about how we live. It is fixed, solid, filled with heavy furniture; a product of a world-view that sees things as fixed and solid. It is different from a house belonging to one of the Dogon people in Africa, where every space has a ritual, symbolic meaning as part of a mythic human body, and different from a tepee of the Plains Indians, built to be transported as part of the cycles of migration. This room is an object in a world of separated, isolated objects. The Dogon house and the tepee are sets of relationships in a world of interwoven processes.
Nothing is easier to see than consciousness once we recognize that it is embodied in the forms and structures we create. This point seems so obvious that it is almost embarrassing to present it. Yet I suspect that most of us have never quite looked at the world this way. We are easily confused by content, so the Communist Party and the Catholic Church seem very, very different to us. And yet their underlying structure, one of hierarchical tiers with each rising layer composed of fewer people who exercise power-over those below them, is very similar. Similar too, are the structures of the United States Government, of companies and corporations, of armies and universities, and of many groups that claim to be working toward a new consciousness, a revolution, or a new age.
Structure, not content, determines how energy will flow, where it will be directed, what new forms and structures it will create. Hierarchical structures, no matter what principles they espouse, will breed new hierarchical structures that embody power-over not power-from-within. A spiritual organization with a hierarchical structure can convey only the consciousness of estrangement, regardless of what teachings or deep inspirations are at its root. The structure itself reinforces the idea that some people are inherently more worthy than others. It doesn’t matter what guru we follow. The fact that we are following anyone else will prevent us from coming to know the spirit, the power, within.
In the same way, political groups based on hierarchy and levels of authority inevitably breed new power-over structures. A revolution that challenges estrangement, that confronts the inherent violence of the few having power-over the many (or, for that matter, the many having power-over the few) cannot come through a structure that itself gives power to some over others.
We could say that culture is a set of stories we tell each other again and again. These stories have shapes. The shapes of the stories—not the characters, the setting, or the details—shape our expectations and our actions. It may be helpful to look at some of the stories that underlie modern Western culture, for only when we recognize them and see their implications, the structures they create in us, can we be free to change them.
Apocalypse. This is a story about time. It tells us that time is a thing, not a set of relationships, somewhat like a one-way street, that history is a story with a beginning, middle, and end, and that the end will be a big bang, a grand climax.
The main character in this story is a God who stands outside the world. The assumption is that after the bang, we too will get outside the world to something better. The story teaches estrangement. This world is only foreplay; this life is only a prelude.
Another version of this story could be called Revolution.
This story underlies the shape of most of our stories, our drama, our music, even our orgasms. It shapes the way we view death. And it creates a structure in our minds that allows certain absolutes to stand outside the world, where they take precedence over the values of the world, so that the state, which makes a law against murder, can manufacture weapons and go to war. So profit can be accorded a value that stands outside other values, can itself become a transcendent, absolute, final value.
Apocalypse often shapes the very way we work, driving ourselves to the utmost for a deadline or a crisis and then crashing, exhausted, feeling dead. It is hard, when expecting looming destruction, to pace ourselves. The crisis mentality keeps us from thinking, planning, working, and building for long-term change. It keeps us from being able to say, as my friend Alan Acacia is fond of saying, “I have a twenty-year commitment to the movement—so I can afford to take a rest.”
It also keeps us expecting change to be swift, absolute, and clearly defined. We feel today that we are on the brink; and certainly we are in danger of making Apocalypse a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yet if we “win,” if we succeed in changing consciousness and culture and preventing destruction, the change will not be immediate or sudden. It may well be a subtle shift, a different balance, a long-term change in relationships rather than a particular moment when we can say, “Here the change occurred.”
The Good Guys/Girls Against the Bad Guys/Girls. This story is about values, and it too is a theme that shapes our culture. The Good Guys fight the Bad Guys: who will win? This story represents the thought-form we call dualism: all qualities can be broken down into pairs of opposites—one is good, idealized, and the other is bad, devalued. Psychologists call this thought process “splitting”—the inability to see people or things as wholes containing both desired and undesired elements.
In the split world, spirit wars with flesh, culture with nature, the sacred with the profane, the light with the dark. Men are identified with spirit, culture, the sacred, and are idealized; women are identified with flesh, nature, the profane, and are excluded from culture. Or woman is herself seen in split terms: virgin or whore, madonna or slut—not as a whole person in whom virtue and sexuality can both reside. Women’s bodies and human sexuality can be redeemed only when they are controlled by men, or through the transcendent value of profit. So women become commodities, and sexuality becomes something to be marketed.
Light is idealized and dark is devalued in this story that permeates our culture. The war of dark and light is the metaphor that perpetuates racism. The metaphor itself derives from Indo-European mythology, and Merlin Stone argues that it originated as religious propaganda that justified the conquest of dark-skinned peoples by light-skinned Aryans.1 The Indo-Europeans carried it to the East, where they conquered the darker Dravidian people of India. In the West, it filtered through Persian and Greek thought leaving its traces in the Old Testament. Finally it molded the imagery and symbolism of Christianity. It provided justification for the murder of women. (Witches met, after all, at night, and were charged with worshipping the Lord of Darkness.) It legitimized pogroms against dark-haired Jews, and gave a religious justification for the conquest and enslavement of Africans, Native Americans, and other dark-skinned people, whose color was seemingly, proof of being cursed by the God of light. The light/dark metaphor was the underlying theme of Nazi propaganda extolling the virtue of the pure, blond, Aryan race and warning against the threat of pollution by the dark Jews. We are taught the symbol system early: in how many fairy tales is the light-haired sister pure and good, while the dark-haired sister is jealous and evil?
The same splitting of light and dark buttresses the splitting of spirit (light) and body (dark), of male and female, of culture and nature. The split becomes the metaphor of hierarchy, of high (up, out, away from this world, this earth, out-of-body, spiritual, good) and low (base, beastly, bodily, earthy, animal, evil). It supports power-over.
Beware of organizations that proclaim their devotion to the light without embracing, bowing to the dark; for when they idealize half the world they must devalue the rest.
The Great Man Receives the Truth and Gives It to a Chosen Few. This story is about knowledge. Knowledge is given to a Great Man and passed by him to a select group, such as a Chosen People, a psychoanalytic society, or a cadre. Often the Great Man must suffer terribly to pay for receiving this knowledge. Sometimes he must merely defend it from those who would change or otherwise pollute the doctrine.
The Great Man, call him Moses, Jesus, Freud, Buddha, or Marx, writes a book, or his words are written down by others. His words now become the source of authority, of truth. All other knowledge is invalid unless it is based upon, or does homage to, the works of the Great Man.
This story legitimizes the authority of the select few who have received the one truth. It supports the illusion that truth is found outside, not within, and denies the authority of experience, the truth of the senses and the body, the truth that belongs to everyone and is different for everyone.
It also breeds the lie that there is only one truth, a lie that has destroyed more movements than the secret police. From that lie spring endless, fruitless, brutal debates over who is a true _____. (Fill in Christian, Marxist, feminist or another group of your choice.) The women’s movement early saw through the story about the Great Man getting the truth—perhaps because Great Men are never women. (This is no accident, nor is it because women are less worthy of truth than men. It is because the Great Man story is always intertwined with dualism; women must be devalued in order for the Great Man to be so elevated.) Yet it took many years of painful struggle, of trashing and bitter debates, to see through the second level of the lie, to accept that there may be many feminisms, many truths, and that all may have important parts to play.
Making It/The Fall. Another name for this story might be Saved/Damned. This is a story about success and failure. The older religious version has given way to the secular American version. At first. Making It and The Fall seem like two very different stories. In the first—a person of lowly birth is discovered (for some virtue or talent) and welcomed into the circles of the elect. In the second, a person who is a member of the elect, an inhabitant of the garden, owing to some weakness, some inherent evil or personal flaw, falls, and is cast down into the ranks of the ordinary.
But looking closer, we see the two are the same story in reverse. A person who lacks value gains it; a person who has value loses it. Both reinforce a consciousness and a power structure in which some people have value and others don’t.
Often the two stories play together. A person makes it but then falls. Or a person falls and then is redeemed. Or one person makes it as her/his lover falls; as, in the movie “A Star Is Born,” Judy Garland climbs to fame as her alcoholic husband slips from favor into suicidal despair.
What this story does is to keep us busy trying to make it, to push our way into the circles of the elect, looking for our personal salvation instead of challenging the consciousness that devalues what we already are. In this story, individual gain is the goal, and that purpose determines our values in the economic realm.
Those of us who don’t make it are left with a sense of personal failure. Another name for this story could be The Garden of Eden, and yet another name is The American Dream. The story tells us that there is or was a perfect place, from which we have been cast out for our own sins, or to which we are denied entrance because of our own flaws and shortcomings. It supports “the individualist ethic in the American society which fixes responsibility for any failure to achieve the American dream on individual inadequacy. That same ethic . . . breeds a kind of isolation in American life that is common in all classes but more profoundly experienced in the working class, partly at least, because they have fewer outside resources.”2
These are the stories of estrangement. You may think of others, but these four seem primary to me. They are the structures that shape our thoughts, our images, our actions. We have named them now, and it is a magical principle that knowing something’s name gives us power—not over it, but with it. What we name must answer to us; we can shape it if not control it. Naming the stories, we can see how they shape us, and awareness is the first step toward change.
When we talk about stories, we are talking about language. Language shapes consciousness, and the use of language to shape consciousness is an important branch of magic.
Language both embodies and shapes our cultural thought-forms. “I am trying to write a noun-less novel,” poet Meridel LeSeur said at a private reading. “Nouns are patriarchal. They separate us from things, naming the thing and making it an object. The American Indian languages have no nouns, only relationships. We won’t get there for maybe a thousand years, but we can make a start.” The language we use creates the context for whatever we say. A rose by any other name would not smell as sweet. If I call it a Rosa rosaceae, I have removed it from the context of gardens and moonlight, and placed it in an atmosphere of files, charts, test tubes, and botanical classifications. If you tell me I seem miserable, you do so in a different context than if you tell me I have an anaclitic depression stemming from deficiencies in gratification in the symbiotic subphase of development.
Language distributes power. The word miserable is a word I can use about myself; it gives me power to name, and so to own, my own feelings. Note that it is an adjective. It describes something I am doing (feeling). It is relational. The phrase anaclitic depression is a term used by professionals when speaking about persons other than themselves. It may be useful. It conveys, perhaps, a more precise diagnostic category, a fuller implied history, than miserable. But it is useful to professionals, not to me. It gives me no power to connect with my feeling because it turns my feeling into an object, a condition, something I have and so am distanced from, alienated from, as I am distanced from those who use the term about me.
There is a corollary to the principle that knowing something’s name gives us power-with it. It is this: that the names we choose, the language that we use, also have power-with us, and shape us. Names embody thought-forms. They carry both the idea and the context. When we choose a false name, we place an idea in a false context and its shape changes, becoming, perhaps, something we do not intend. And because our language has itself been shaped by the culture of estrangement, whenever we choose the names that make things sound comfortable, acceptable, respectable, academically sound, scientific, we are almost always placing the thing we name back into the context of estrangement—removing its power and our own, alienating ourselves yet again. The names for the thought-forms of immanence, the names that carry power, often sound simple, childish, or threatening; sometimes they sound funny. They are uncomfortable words—take Magic, for example. Or Witch.
The term Witch, people tell me over and over again, has negative connotations. It is a word that scares people, a word that shocks or elicits nervous, stupid laughter.
“If you’re a Witch (heh, heh) turn me into a toad.”
“Why be redundant?” I sometimes respond.
Yet I prefer the word Witch to prettier words, because the concept of a Witch goes against the grain of the culture of estrangement. It should rub us the wrong way. If it arouses fear or negative assumptions, then those thought-forms can be openly challenged and transformed, instead of molding us unseen from within our minds.
Language also conveys metaphors; these metaphors, the images we use, shape our thoughts and our actions. The thought-forms of estrangement become bound into our language as metaphors, and the metaphors reinforce the thought-forms, the constricting patterns in our minds.
So, for example, the counter-culture of the mid-to-late sixties—which was, in spite of its flaws, a movement based on the restoration of value to sexuality, sensuality, the body, feeling, nature, and joy in sensual life—became subsumed under (among other things) a search for spiritual enlightenment. And enlightenment (a noun) is a metaphor that skewers us firmly back into the story of duality; it negates the dark, the earth, the body, the dark cunt, the dark womb, the night. And so the same voices that, in the sixties, cried out for autonomy, spontaneity, and freedom, for a new culture based on nature, found themselves in the seventies extolling the virtues of silent meditation, of celibacy, of submission to a new set of male authority figures in more exotic drag. Others, who were not so caught up in the succession of cults, found themselves oppressed with a dreary sense of sameness, asking themselves, “Haven’t I heard this before?” It was like hearing the same comedians retelling the same jokes, and they began to feel with a growing cynical despair, that nothing ever does really change.
Nothing does change, unless its form, its structure, its language also changes. To work magic, we begin by making new metaphors. Without negating the light, we reclaim the dark: the fertile earth where the hidden seed lies unfolding, the unseen power that rises within us, the dark of sacred human flesh, the depths of the ocean, the night—when our senses quicken; we reclaim all the lost parts of ourselves we have shoved down into the dark. Instead of enlightenment, we begin to speak of deepening, of getting down as well as getting high. We remember that in the old myths, the entrance to the realm of spirit was through the fairy mound, the cave, the crack, the fissure in the earth, the gate, the doorway, the vaginal passage. We call it the underworld, and we go within for our visions.
The magic that works is itself a language, a language of action, images, of things rather than abstracts. These things are seen not as objects but as consciousness-manifest. Magic speaks to the deep parts of ourselves that were formed before we knew abstractions.
While the language of words, of abstracts, of concepts, is shaped by culture and tends to move in the thought-forms of culture, the language of things, of images, can, if we open to it, take us deeper. The contexts of the images, the stories, have been twisted to tell the stories of the patriarchy, but if we let the things themselves, in all the richness and complexity of their existence, speak to us, we reverse the reversals,3 or more—we dive below the cement-banked channels of consciousness and reach the underground rivers that are its source.
Take, for example, this cluster of things: a naked woman, a snake, a tree, an apple. Let us forget that they are the icons of The Fall, and consider, first, a real snake, perhaps the one that lives with me. I watch her slow movements, feel the strength in her long body, see her skin grow dull, her eyes cloud over until she looks lifeless—and I wake one morning to find her old skin crumpled like a discarded nylon stocking. She has slipped out, her scales iridescent, her eyes bright; she is hungry now, on the prowl, new again. And I could say that to me, the snake as a symbol now means, not The Fall, but renewal, resurrection. Yet that also would be false, because in the language of magic the symbol has no intellectually assigned meaning; it is a pointer that says, “Look. Pay attention to this thing.” And in giving my attention to the living being of my snake, I learn—not just with my mind but with my senses, my experience—about renewal. Yet you might learn something else.
Perhaps the snake, with her slow cycles, her once-a-month meal, elimination, shedding, would tell you a new story about time—that time flows differently for her than for us, that time is not a thing but a relationship. Or perhaps she will tell you a story I cannot even imagine, because the richness, the mystery of her being is not exhausted by one story, or two stories, or a thousand insights. Revelation is continually happening.
Or I give my attention to the tree. I see the leafless winter sticks of its branches sprout green buds, leaves, blossoms; I see them swell into this fruit that I hold in my hand, this fruit that is itself a seed. And so for me the constellation of things becomes an experience of renewal, and I feel it in the flesh of my own woman’s body, which seems so vulnerable, so mortal; yet I can know, with a sense deeper than words, how it renews itself. But for you the experience might be something else. Perhaps the woman and tree and fruit offer shade and nurturing and comfort. Perhaps, on another day, that is what they would offer to me.
The magic that works is a very concrete language. To change consciousness, to move out of the thought-forms of estrangement, we begin with what we can see and touch and hold, and we return to what we can see and touch and hold, knowing that what is concrete reveals what is intangible: the energy, the process that forms what can be seen, whether it is a snake, or a woman, or a tree. Things reveal, in their forms, in their movements, the processes that shaped them, as the rocks reveal in their roundness and their crevices the movement of water. That is what we mean by immanence.
Learning to work magic is mostly a process of learning to think-in-things, to experience concretely as well as to think abstractly. All of us begin life as young children thinking concretely, but this ability, instead of being developed and refined as we grow, is devalued in our culture in favor of abstract reasoning. Though abstractions have their uses, they separate us from the deeper levels of our feelings. Relearning the language of things requires that we reconnect with our emotions. Although it sounds almost ludicrously simple, it can be a long and difficult process.
“Ask for something you need from the group,” we say to a circle of women, “something tangible—something we can give you.”
“Inner strength,” says one woman.
“Not tangible enough,” we say. “We cannot see inner strength—we cannot hand it to you. We could rub your back, so that your body relaxes, so that your muscles feel our caring; we could bring you a cup of tea, offer you vitamins. But if you insist on inner strength, do a spell for it, make yourself a mojo bag. But then you must know these things: What color is it? What does it smell like? Is it a fragment of granite from the Sierras, or a pebble of California jade? When you collect the things that embody strength for you, when you put them together, when you open yourself to let each speak, you will know something about the sources of your strength.”
The concrete reveals the unseen; the microcosm is shaped by the same forces that shape the macrocosm. As above, so below. And so the personal is political: the forces that shape our individual lives are the same forces that shape our collective life as a culture. Feminist consciousness-raising is a process based on sound magical principles. If we speak to each other as equals, not about abstract theories but about the concrete realities of our experience, we will see the common forces that have shaped our lives.
If we speak honestly. The magic that works is not the magic of lies, of illusions. Especially dangerous are the lies we tell ourselves, because they keep us separate, cut off from the power of what is.
What is (things, feelings, images) embodies energy, which physicists now tell us is not separate from matter. The magic that works is the conscious movement of energy causing change in accordance with will. Just as tangible things reveal the unseen energies that shaped them, the shapes and patterns that energy takes in its movement become manifest as things.
This is where our language begins to break down—or maybe where all language breaks down. Even if we were to speak of ch’i or ki or mana, or the force beloved by the Star Wars generation, perhaps any name, any noun, would be a lie, because energy cannot be separated. If we say that energy runs through things, we imply that energy is separate from the things that it runs through. Perhaps this is where thought itself breaks down. If we say that energy is motion, and follow the physicists in their pursuit of what is moving—we do not find any things, only patterns of probabilities. Magic reverses the processes of mechanist thinking, wherein we think in abstracts to control and manipulate objects. In magic, we think in things because they reveal underlying patterns, they tell us how energy is moving. We use things, images, and metaphors to shape the movements of energy, to change probabilities. So I will now speak in these metaphors, as if energy were a thing rather than moving relationships, until we evolve the nounless language that would let us speak more truly.
Shaping energy is surprisingly easy, almost instinctive. We move energy with our breath, our voices, with the movements of our bodies, and by making pictures in our minds. There are, however, a few basic principles.
The first is always to begin where you are, not where you think you should be. Even the states and the places we feel as negative, as painful, embody energy. Anger, rage, depression, cynicism, fear/resistance, are all sources of power when we use them as pointers rather than blocks.
Another principle could be phrased: start grounded; end grounded. To ground ourselves means to connect with the earth, with what is, to start where we are, to root ourselves. The earth is energy congealed; we could speak of it as a great storehouse of energy. When we move energy, when we raise power, we draw it up from the earth and let it drop to the earth. We never try to hold on to it, because energy always cycles and returns; as it moves in cycles, in waves, it rises and falls. It cannot move indefinitely in only one direction.
Like water, energy remains clear as long as it keeps moving. When it stops, it stagnates and dries up, leaving us with the scum as residue. And, like water, when energy sinks down through the earth it is filtered, purified. And when we draw it up again, it comes in its clearest state.
Energy binds groups together. We connect when we share energy through a common vision, a common task, through sharing in tangible forms, such as food, touch, song, and work.
But all of this remains abstract. Instead, let us think in things, and imagine ourselves meeting on the beach (or in your room) to do the magical work of changing thought-forms.
We take hands, and breathe together, making a circle.4 We move our bodies; we bend and stretch and rock until our tight places relax and we can stand with our knees loose and feet planted firmly on the ground.
We breathe deep, from our bellies. In and out. Our bellies fill with air with each breath, blowing up like little balloons as we inhale, softly falling as we exhale. We draw the air in deeply until it fills every cell, until it blows through our bones and sinks through our feet.
We root ourselves. We imagine that our feet have roots that go deep into the center of the earth herself, and that we can draw up the power from those roots, as a tree draws water from the earth. And slowly, slowly, we can feel the energy rise through our feet, through our legs, through our thighs and hips. As it” rises, it warms us, it relaxes us, so that we feel ourselves loose and glowing with it. And the energy rises through our genitals, and we feel them grow warm, we feel pleasure in them. It rises into our bellies; it glows in our bellies like the moon, like the sun. And our spines grow tall like the trunk of a tree as the energy rises. It fills our lungs and our hearts, and from our hearts it spreads out through our shoulders, down our arms, through our hands. From our hands the energy passes from each of us to the others. And it rises up through our throats, with our breath, through our heads and the centers of our foreheads, and it bursts out of the tops of our heads like branches that reach up into the sky and then sweep back down to touch the earth again, creating a circuit, making a circle. We can feel how the branches surround us and protect us.
And we feel the wind in our leaves, feel the sun, the moon, shine down on our leaves; and through our leaves we take in the light and draw it down through the twigs and branches into the trunk—and down, down to our roots, down into the earth. And we feel the light push our roots deeper, we feel them grow deeper into the earth.
And we feel how beneath the earth all our roots intertwine, how they draw power from the same source.
And we feel above our heads how our branches intertwine, how the same wind moves through them all, and the same light shines down on them all.
And we feel the energy pass from hand to hand, linking us in the circle. And we feel our breath mingle in the center of the circle and become one, so that as we breath together, in and out, we become one—one living, breathing organism.
We begin where we are. Each one of us chants our own name, and the circle sings it back to us. The sounds, the harmonies, are gifts. They call to our own awakening power.
We sing the names of those who have done this work of changing consciousness before us, and as we speak them, name them, something of their being enters the circle. “Harriet Tubman—woman of indomitable courage.” “John Muir—man who was not afraid to love nature.” “Isadora Duncan—who loved her body.” “Emma Goldman—fiery spirit.” The names continue.
When they die away, we look into the center of our circle. We envision all our images, all our energies running together, swirling and flowing, brewing like soup in a cauldron, until a new vision takes form, until we can see the thing that embodies the change we want to make.
When it comes clear, when we can each see it before our eyes, we breathe deeply again; we draw the power up; we let it flow with our breath, in our voices—as sound, a deep, wordless sound that makes the vision glow, that fills it with energy. The power builds and builds. It moves through us clearly; we feel our arms rise up with it, and we are there, in the vision. In ecstasy. Strong.
Then it falls. In silence, we drop down, press our hands, our bodies, against the earth, and let the power drain from us, back to its source, leaving us empty, relaxed, peaceful.
We ground it into our lives, into what is, when each of us envisions, and says one real, concrete thing we will do to realize the vision. Small or large, alone or together, it will be a step, a small change. We may write a letter, plant a garden, make compost out of garbage, write a book, organize a food co-op or a union—have an honest conversation with our parents. We sing each other’s names again. We say, “You are the Goddess. You are God.” And we mean it.
And so we open the circle, and we each go and do what we have said we will do.
And already the change is beginning.