God, maybe

I didn't get down to the Don this weekend, in part because the weather was awful, and in part because I was very much otherwise occupied. It's too bad, because I'm pretty sure the trout lilies are out right now, and they never last long. Next weekend. Assuming it's not raining again.

Last weekend, though, before the gods remembered that this is supposed to be The Year the Weather Sucked, and it was accordingly sunshiney and beautiful and I rode my bike down for a quick stop by the river, I sat on the boulders--the water level seemed down, I couldn't get quite as close as I usually do. It looks so natural, it looks real, but if you know anything about the history of the river at all you know that its current naturalized state is completely constructed. The boulders I sit on at the river's edge are gabions, placed there to protect against erosion as part of a restoration project to return the river to something like its natural state. It's current health is a conscious plan; first it was broken, seemingly beyond repair, the water too polluted for living things and its banks too channelized and manipulated to provide habitat for anything. But they didn't just let the river go to make it beautiful again; people intervened. It was fixed.

What it is isn't anything like what it would have been if it had always been left alone, most likely; but its post-broken state is still pretty impressive. It looks authentic. I wonder if the river has a memory that carries scars?

In any case, I sat on the boulders, the ones that are quickly becoming "my boulders" and watched the water play with the rocks, and turned myself into a tree. Roots all the way down to the earth's core, branches and leaves all the way up to the sun--it's a witch thing--and then the moment where it clicks, in the way I imagine a more standard meditation clicks for other people, and where I used to end I didn't end anymore (in the lingo of the meditation experts, the boundaries of the ego dissolved). Instead, there were the trees across the river, the water swarming the stones, the trilliums pushing themselves up into the scattered sun. There was everything; and you'd think, having done this since I was seventeen, that it might become normal; instead it is a surprise every time. "I'm a part of everything," I said, the walkway far enough behind me that I felt safe in being largely unobserved.

So of course, I'm putting it on the internet.

I couldn't tell you what I think god is, except that I think there is something I call god. I can tell you it doesn't have anything in common with the christian god I was brought up with, not anymore, except for smidgens of passages in the old or new testament; "I AM," for instance. I can tell you it's not really anything like the wiccan god/dess as typically described either; no two faces, no million names. That's too anthropomorphic. Surely if there is one god and if there is any conscious life elsewhere in the universe, it would be unimaginable hubris to give god two human eyes, two human hands, a human mind, two human sexes, human familial relationships, human language. All of that could only be true in the sense of metaphor. On some other planet where maybe they have three sexes, or none, who would god be?

But I think when those walls come down, whatever god is can be touched. Not talked to, not reasoned with, bargained with, pleaded with, not understood, grasped or seen. Just touched. And--this is the part that makes me wiccan--part of what I'm touching is in me, and the trees across the river, the knuckles of the trilliums pushing through the dirt, the water and the stones; and in the keyboard, the seventeen photographs of Frances tacked up to the cabinet, the yellow chipped tea mug given to me ages ago by someone who doesn't like me anymore. All of it, everything. For a moment, it's not an intellectual abstraction, it's a seen thing, in the same way my own two hands in front of me are seen things.

A few minutes later I got up to go home. While I'd been sitting there, a middle-aged couple had come to sit down on the bench near "my" boulders. As I walked to my bike they gave me these very odd, strained, genuine smiles. I smiled back.

It was only the next day that I thought they might have heard me.

I wonder sometimes what it's like for people to walk through the park seeing only the river.

Posted by Andrea at May 5, 2008 11:15 AM under Witch

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