The year I turned 40, I disappeared.

It had been coming on gradually, this “fading,” but I waved it away as the mere product of an over-active imagination or peri-menopausal anxiety. The atmosphere in several areas of my life was shot through with an unsettling chilliness and the earth seemed to be holding her breath; waiting for something.  Then, one night, frost hit. The next day, I was “middle aged.”

I began to notice magazine covers in bookstore racks. There were articles about how to be a sexy lover; how to be a beautiful bride; how to be a happy mom-to-be; how to be a good mom, how to pay for college and then, that was it. There was no sign life existed after 35.

I would pick through the mall attempting to dress a body that was betraying me, not shedding the creeping weight gain, shoving me toward the women’s sizes.  “My size” clothes were now located deep in the innards of stores hidden well away from the “career” misses and miles away from the uber-trendy petites on the highly visible outer aisles. Clothes after 35 were cheaply made, boring colored and fashion null. The personnel in my favorite stores began to ignore me and I sought solace in new boutiques especially for “my size”.

The changes growing older brought frightened me. Every year something that to my mind affirmed my identity as a woman, as a mother, as a productive member of society, dropped away. I shriveled inside like leaves denied the summer sun. At the point I thought that there was no more purpose for living and no more reason to expect anything but to blow away, I turned 50.

My gardens and all the earth became my professors. I began to listen and examine closely the lessons about living they were teaching. The first, most important lesson is that each season has its own specific work. Autumn is the season of harvests. The work of autumn is to gather in– whether for dinner, for preserving, or for next year’s seed. So, with same the purposeful energy that I harvested my peppers and tomatoes from the gardens I gathered in the produce my soul grew in the summertime of my life.

At 40 I was examining the early fruit harvest of my poison beds (habitual negative thought) — lack of self esteem and depression. However, by 50 I had learned that there were several more harvests to come before the killing frost that signals the beginning of winter. Now was the time of the fruit harvest of the more prosperous intellectual groves of beautifully ripe love for art, literature and spirituality. Not only that, the grain harvest of the second career 30’s and 40’s was standing in the field, ready for the scythe. That meant the half-century mark of my life was no time to mourn the passing of life’s summer. There was still work to do.

Most mind bending of all, I discovered an “interim” planting time—a time to sow the seed of a third career. Then I really began to appreciate the benefits of the season when the oppressive heat cools into twilight glow. The invisibility of the autumn woman came as a surprising blessing. The pressure was off to be pretty, perky and cute. People would carry home my words like prized cuttings because I was now someone who would be seriously listened to. Some of “Mami’s wisdom” gained from living would be preserved, not in Mason jars, but in scrapbooks and the memories of those who heard the stories.

This was not a time to categorize myself as “lost potential.” It was not a time to envy the energy, smooth skin, and toned muscles of youth. I began to notice more positive—even sexy– images of autumn women boldly looking out at me from magazine stands and more stylish clothing in stores as I turned 56 last month. However, there is still resistance to full acceptance and understanding of the seasons of adulthood after summer. I disappeared as a customer to the media and businesses that pandered to the youth market. Yet because of this, I entered a new season of freedom where I did not have to cater to images of how I should look or behave. There indeed was life—a new adventure– after 35. I embraced the crone and danced into the autumn life.

Edia Stanford-Bruce is a freelance writer and the Vice President for Public Relations, Booz-Allen Hamilton Toastmasters Club in Tyson’s Corner, VA. She earned the BA from Norfolk State University School of Journalism and also holds a M.Ed. in early childhood education from Rutgers University, specializing in literacy. Currently, she volunteers with Reston Interfaith as an administrative assistant supporting Stonegate Village Residents Services Office in Reston, VA. She and husband, retired pastor Rev. Dr. George Bruce, are happily empty-nesting in Reston’s Historic Lake Anne neighborhood. Her commentary about searching for work in the second half of life, “Victoree’s Blog: No White Flag”, is available on wordpress.com.

When I get up before five these mornings, I sit by my window and I feel the fall moving toward me. Outside, there is no wind; the yard is quiet. The trees and flowers are motionless. The early summer chorus of birds has almost ended. Only a cardinal and a bullfrog sing off and on. Sometimes, the jays are nervous and whine in the trees. Sometimes, I hear crows across town. The katydids stopped calling in the middle of the night. It is too early in the day for cicadas and bees. The August crickets are still growing up; they won’t chant for a few days.

I can’t decide whether the shift in the season has followed the silence or preceded it. I don’t know if my perceptions are real or imaginary. Maybe I’m just restless. It’s been hot since the end of May. The heat wears me down like it wears down the plants and animals, draws life from the garden, the pond, and the brain.

Of course the varieties of flowering plants are different now from what they were a few weeks ago, and the tint of the leaves has deepened in some places, faded in others. There is a haze to the sky; it builds up through the sluggish fronts of middle summer. Maybe that lack of purity is what tells me the earth has shifted on its axis, that it is turning back toward the sun for winter, that I have run out of summer one more time without having kept the promises I made to myself in April.

I have often tried to list the births and deaths of plants, insects and animals that define the shift to autumn. But I have never looked closely enough, have not watched or listened or thought carefully enough, and so the emotions of late summer can comer over me quickly and hard, and I listen to the stillness, trying to understand what has happened, wishing I had paid closer attention, thinking maybe if I really understood the process better, then I wouldn’t feel so bereft at the end.

But no matter how many notes I take, I know that when the birds are quiet in the morning and the wind stops blowing, I am at the end of one more cycle of planning and longing and then I can’t help repeating the same questions I asked a season ago. What next? What should I do now? Will there be enough time? Where do I go from here? How can I make amends for what I haven’t done? Whom should I still love? What does it matter?

The beautiful photo of a haybale on a hazy day was taken by Cate Kerr of Beyond the Fields We Know.

Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature,–daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,–rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Henry David Thoreau

Lately I’ve been forgetting the names of some of the wildflowers I’ve identified through the years. I’ve also been forgetting the names of a few of my old acquaintances.

“Hey, how ya doin’?” I greet them, adding a soft mumble for the person’s name. Sometimes the other people remember who I am. Sometimes they mumble the same way I do. Sometimes a bob of the head is part of the ritual as though the person were choking on something or about to cough.

It’s easy to look up the forgotten flowers in my botanical references. Since I don’t have a people reference with photos, however, it often takes me a while to figure out the name of the man or woman I have just encountered. And even the momentary loss of a name is disconcerting in that the cerebral landscape suddenly becomes less familiar than it was seconds before. In some ways, the experience is like one of my repeating dreams in which I walk lost down a familiar childhood street on which everything has changed.

As I am accustomed to making much out of little, I worry that I’m losing my grip. After all, the process of taxonomy (naming things) is the way of the scientific world, the business world, the academic world, the broad world of social intercourse. I remind myself without names, there is no language and no human identity.

I weigh options and choices. Should I really bother to take the time to distinguish between silverweed and a flower that looks a little like wild strawberry? I always have. Is my acquaintance with what’s-his-name superficial, and that’s why I don’t recognize who he is? Am I simply forgetting, with good reason, the unimportant people in my life? That is also possible. Perhaps I do not recognize so-and-so because I have no need or desire for significant intimacy with her. That is likely.

Or maybe these aren’t the real issues at all. Maybe my organism is simply shedding its skin and preparing me for the great winnowing, the long oblivion. Is this intermittent forgetfulness, I wonder, the ante-room of a final metaphysical and psychological journey, the onset of dementia, incipience of Alzheimer’s? I ruminate and pick the scab of my memory lapse, trying to make sense of my aging.

Then, finally, I have it. I conclude that my anguish is merely a kind of disorientation caused by the perfidious Platonic Fallacy. That philosophic error was spawned by several of Plato’s dialogues in which Socrates encouraged people to think that ideas and their names were more permanent and ultimately more important than material objects, that the idea of a chair, for example, was more durable than the transitory, material chair from which the idea came.

Silly Plato! Silly Socrates! The truth is that any theory of ideas is useful only if you can remember. Once you forget the name of what’s-her-name, then her physical presence is much more significant than any conceptual shenanigans. My body, then, is simply telling me to get real. It is telling me that what’s-her-name simply is, and that, as Sartre said over half a century ago, existence indeed precedes essence.

And so I embrace the existential wisdom brought on by changes in my brain, allowing expedient insight to shatter arrogant and youthful concepts about high reasoning and subtle wordsmithing. I embrace the consolation of my friend, Henry what’s-his-name, his talk of mysteries, “daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,–rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense!”

Bill Felker observes nature in Yellow Springs, Ohio and records his observations in Poor Will’s Almanack. This is a reprint of the essay he wrote for June in the 2005 edition.

In January of this year, I celebrated my fiftieth birthday in India. Ten years earlier, my Zen master told me I needed to go to India. But I had resisted, mostly due to my fear of being overwhelmed by the place, the people, the sensations. But as my fiftieth birthday approached, I decided the second half of life needn’t be lived in fear. So my husband and I set forth on a month-long journey to India that included the ancient Hindu pilgrimage to the Ganges, the world’s largest religious festival – the Kumbh Mela, a tiger safari, a tour of Rajasthan, and an ayurvedic spa in Kerala. We were immersed in an experience beyond our ordinary minds, a journey so very consuming, that our practice became keeping our eyes wide open, and dissolving our beliefs about ‘how things should be.’ When I returned to Seattle, I wanted to stay inside the intensity of the way of life, and so I began a hundred-day practice of bhakti, the way of devotion.

India is a country of contradictions, a sometimes chaotic place where people manage to infuse every task, every day and every relationship with bhakti, a word that can be translated as devotion, although it means much more than that. Bhakti comes from the Sanskrit bhaj, to belong to, to be a part of. To express bhakti requires a fully engaged relationship with the Divine, one beyond ritual and tradition.

Bhakti is the essence of life in India. From the dawn bicycle ride to the temple and back each day before work, to the flower-stacked altars in homes, shops and even parking lots, to the mala beads worn smooth through fervent wear, devotion is as much a part of the day as the coffee break is in America. Bhakti emphasizes practice, a kind of participation with love. Bhakti brings one liberation through action. Bhakti is worship that has flooded the banks of the river of love — devotion as madhura bhava, the lover and beloved, a metaphor for the relationship between the individual and the divine. It is Radha and her love for Krishna. For me, it is Johnny Cash singing “Would You Lay With Me? (In A Field of Stone)” to his beloved June Carter.

I had heard that one hundred days of attention toward any practice would change one. I would start with a daily sitting meditation practice and then see where bhakti led me. I thought I would find answers but instead the practice offered me a wealth of questions.

1. Ever since the Bhagavad-Gita spoke of bhakti as a service to God, religious texts have referred to the devotee’s transcendental state as brahma-bhuta, somewhat like a consistent state of joy or bliss. If I practice bhakti, will I increase my capacity to live in this state of bliss?
2. Bhakti is about relationship, those between beloved-lover, friend-friend, parent-child, and master-servant. Bhakti practice can be in devotion to a spiritual teacher as guru-bhakti, to a personal form of God or Goddess, or to divinity without form (nirguna.) The idea is to illuminate the devotional energy within you, to see what arises, and to come into relationship with the Divine. If I don’t believe in God, can I use a form that represents the Divine for me, such as a relationship, nature, art, reality?
3. I chose Kali as my object of devotion. In truth, Kali chose me years ago, when I lived in a cancer center for a month while my husband recovered from a rare disease and debilitating treatment. In India, Kali and her devotees are everywhere. I realized I could embrace her openly. How will my life be impacted by inviting in the fierce Mother Goddess? Could this experience bring the kind of death and destruction that Kali is famous for offering to Her devotees?
4. I spend part of each day bringing Her an offering – flowers, songs, stories, candles. She says nothing. My life heats up, in a necessary, honest way. I’m clear about beginning a new novel. I speak my truth, even when difficult, to my kindreds. I stay silent and alone when it hurts. Still, I wonder about my offerings to these spirit teachers: If bhakti is about devotion, does it matter whether there is an object of that love?
5. I decide that my husband is going to become the benefactor of my bhakti practice. I do the little things quietly. I do the grocery shopping. I fold the laundry. I clean the urine spots around the toilet. Usually hated tasks that I let my husband know about, loudly. If I’m doing this as a bhakti practice, isn’t this less about my husband though, and more about wrestling with where I refuse to offer actions with love?
6. Einstein said, “Nothing truly valuable arises from ambition or from a mere sense of duty; it stems rather from love and devotion towards men and towards objective things.” Was Einstein cleaning the toilet?
7. What happens when we make a devotional offering of something we detest? I decide to find out by offering doing the taxes as bhakti. This results in offerings of fine chocolate to my belly. Stat.
8. Eventually I notice that when I devote myself to my husband’s desires, I feel submissive yet happy. Does this make me a bad feminist? Or a good kinkster?
9. If happiness depends at least partly upon our decisions (and scientists say 40% of happiness is based on voluntary choices that result in fulfillment or pleasure; the rest is genetic and based on conditions) then can I create happiness for myself by making choices that make other people happy? Is my devotional practice a great big boomerang of happiness?
10. In week four, I decide to offer all my cooking to a bhakti of my body’s desires. I enlist my friend Kathryn to help me discover what my body finds truly nourishing. I set out to prepare and eat delicious, nutritious food with gusto and pleasure. Is this body bhakti revelatory? Or is it merely self-indulgent?
11. Is it really possible to be anything other than self-centered? Try.
12. I notice how much gratitude my husband has for all these quiet practices. His precious thankfulness makes me want to do something every day, just to experience his pleasure, and the effects of it in my life. Does that make me manipulative?
13. On day fifty-six I read Krishnamurti. “You spend several hours a day in what you call the love, the contemplation of God. Is that devotion? …And the man who worships his work, his leader, his ideology, is also consumed by that which he is occupied…A man is devoted to his wife for various gratifying reasons; and is gratification devotion? To identify oneself with one’s country is very intoxicating; and is identification devotion?” I realize how identified I am with being the spiritual one, a holdover from the good girl archetype who slyly insinuates herself into my wild life as a way to keep me ‘safe.’ I want to release the concept of being the devoted one, to see what happens when my bhakti becomes messy and spontaneous. I wonder if I will continue practicing at all in this freedom, and whether that even matters. I am not interested in being accepted by a Zen master or a lover or my audience. I’m after the liberation that the truth brings.
14. Within Hinduism the powerful bhakti movement began in the middle ages, with the great mystical poets known as the saint-singers. They did not consider Brahmanic rituals necessary for salvation, and thus made self-realization accessible to all. Yet, despite masses of devotional literature, music and art, why hasn’t bhakti liberated India’s lower castes?
15. Anti-caste bhakti movements, including those of Mahatma Gandhi and the Dalit Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar remain popular, yet the caste system has shifted very, very slowly. Some say the bhakti movement developed its own hierarchies that kept people submissive. Does great fervor translate to real revolution? Inside either societies or myself?
16. My practice moves from sitting in the room to walking alone in the wilderness. I begin to realize that the lost relationships in my life have been dissolved on my behalf, because they needed to transform, not because anything or anyone was imperfect. Was Krishnamurti right? Is there love when sentimentality and emotion and devotion cease? Is devotion really a form of self-expansion?
17. On day sixty-three, I sit with Kali and simply stare. I argue with my husband about the chores. I am reluctant to declare this path a ‘failure’ and abandon it entirely, however, the process is more of a stripping away than I imagined. India as a whole had this effect on me too. Has this bhakti path been an illusion? Has the illusion been harmful to my husband and community? Am I worshipping an illusion, and in doing so, clinging to my own gratification?
18. Blind devotion doesn’t lead to God. There is no devotion without self-knowing. When I worship another, am I worshipping myself? Am I devoting to an image of my own thoughts?
19. Billions of people are following bhakti yoga: sravana (listening to scriptural stories), kirtana (praising/ecstatic group singing), smarana (remembering/fixing the mind on God), pad a-sevana (rendering service), arcane (worshipping an image), vandana (paying homage), dasya (servitude), sakhya (friendship), and at ma-nivedana (complete surrender of the self). Is devotion actually a description of the search? And, as such, is bhakti leading me farther from simply loving what is? Or have I reached the final stage of bhakti, the surrender of the self?
20. Day ninety. I sense that there isn’t any need for me to make offerings to Kali. Unless I find myself doing so. I see that my husband requires no tending in order for his gratitude to emerge – he is natural in his loving. My practice has resulted in more open-ended questions than answers. I feel I must live into them rather than force awareness. I’m not sure if India would like this way of bhakti, yet this is the teaching that has arrived. The questions pour forth: Is devotion an escape from reality? Has reality any symbol? Can a symbol ever represent the truth? Can we love without a desire to be in devotional pleasure or divine dissatisfaction?

Sonya Lea is writing a novel set in India and New York City. She has written for The Southern Review, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Tricycle, and for films and television. Her essays have won an Artist Trust award, and her work can be found at her blog Working Wild.

A guest post from my favorite almanack maker, Bill Felker.

And so we see in Plants and all of Nature the Word of God.  Like any Scripture, Earth’s Matter is subject to our Doubt.  But to the one who listens closely to its Cadence, it reveals the sweet hidden Truth.

Reginald Johnson, On the Shapes of Leaves 1697

For the past 25 years, I have kept track of the waves of barometric pressure that pass over my Ohio home.  I have compared their configurations on my graphs and have found similarities in the rises and the falls of the pressure from year to year.  These resemblances are consistent enough to produce reliable weather history forecasts, which can predict likely conditions on any day of the year.

While I have done little with my graphs but reinvent the wheel first discovered by 16^th century almanackers, I have been surprised that modern meteorology has been so reluctant to embrace barometric regularity as a means of long-range forecasting.  Recent research on the El Nino phenomenon is the first sign that academic meteorologists are beginning to take atmospheric rhythms seriously.

Post-chaos theory physicists (who belong to what has been called the “Universal” school) are also looking at patterns in nature and have come up with notions that support the ancient use of barometric patterning in tracking and predicting likely weather scenarios.  In the late 1970s, an IBM research scientist named Benoit Mandelbrot looked at fluctuations in all kinds of phenomena, from the stock market to cloud formations.  He came to the conclusion that these very different occurrences were related to one another, and that they revealed an underlying force that pervaded every aspect of life on earth.

In each of the events he studied, Mandelbrot found “self-similar” systems, which he called fractals.  It is probably easier to picture a fractal than to define it.  Imagine an electrocardiograph analysis of your heartbeat.  The ups and downs are arranged on the paper in an orderly fashion, but never at exactly the same intervals.  Or picture a month or two of a graph of the Dow Jones averages.  That’s a fractal pattern.

Although a weather graph of temperature or barometric pressure may chart very different activities and show much greater variability than the electrocardiograph record (and is much less depressing than a stock market graph), Mandelbrot would posit that all of the records are showing us a life principle, not unlike a yin-yang law, that underlies not only weather, stocks, and heartbeats but almost everything from the shape of ferns and fiords to the filigree in lungs and leaves.

That there is a relationship between heart rhythms, barometric rhythms, temperature rhythms, and the patterns of clouds, the stock market, and even shape of frost on the windshield of my truck in winter, is apparently not a matter of too much debate, at least among post-chaos theory physicists who belong to this “universal” school.  All of the systems mentioned can be charted as fractals, and a visual analysis of their designs reveals their broad similarity.

The real issue, however, is whether the designs have meaning.  If fractals reflect some universal designing set in nature, and if they are, in fact, the signatures of nature, then what are we to make of them?

During the Middle Ages, the Doctrine of Signatures held that the shape of any natural object, such as a leaf or root, held the key to its medicinal use.  Thus, the hepatica leaf, reminiscent of the shape of a human liver, indicated its application in the treatment of liver ailments.  Modern fractal theory posits a not so dissimilar view—that patterns observed in such diverse phenomena as the stock market and barometric pressure might not only hold the key to understanding the rhythm but also the ultimate meaning of those phenomena.  Some analysts believe that fractals could hold the secret key to the universe, explain the causes not only of our personal decisions but also of the outside forces that influence them.  Science writer Mark Ward even conjectures that fate itself might be fractal.

In organizing barometric patterns from the past quarter century, I have found that my charts allow for weather predictions which are unavailable from any other source.  This practical aspect of fractal records is intriguing to me less for its meteorological implications, however, than for its psychological implications.  Always eager to jump to conclusions, I wonder what new fractal highs and lows remain to be discovered, and I wonder if they will really tell us the “sweet hidden Truth” promised by Reginald Johnson in 1697.

Bill Felker studies his barometer, writes essays and creates almanacs and hand-bound journals, great for keeping track of natural changes, in Warm Springs, Ohio.

When I mention the word “Lent” around my pagan friends, a curious thing happens. I watch as their faces go blank, they look away as if to say, “That’s not for me. That’s something Christians do to mortify the flesh.” Certainly this was the flavor of Lent as it was practiced in the late 1950’s when I was attending St. Bridget of Sweden Elementary School in Van Nuys, California. We gave up a favorite food for six weeks and saved our pennies for the “heathen babies.” But since I’ve been studying seasonal celebrations, I realize that the roots of Lent reach far back in time and are deeply aligned with the energy of spring. So I propose taking another look at Lent, its roots and its potential as a spiritual practice.The very name of Lent is synonymous with the season, for it comes from the Anglo-Saxon lenctene, meaning the time when the days lengthen. Lent is the 40 days before Easter. Since Easter always falls on a Sunday, Lent always begins on a Wednesday, Ash Wednesday. During the church services held on Ash Wednesday, we listened to a reading which reminded us that we would die “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust”) and then the priest marked our foreheads with a smudge of dark ash (on the third eye chakra, a place also marked with sacred ash in Hindu devotions).

For the next six weeks we were required to give something up, something which was precious to us, that we would miss, something that would build character, for we would have to struggle against temptation as Christ struggled against temptation in the desert while fasting for 40 days and 40 nights. The 40 days of Lent are a significant period. Forty is a magical number which recurs throughout the Bible (Noah floated in his ark for 40 days and nights, the chosen people wandered in the desert for 40 years, Jonah led the citizens of Nineveh through 40 days of penance). But forty is also a magical number in other ways. I’ve heard that it take six weeks to break a habit (or establish a new routine). Six weeks times seven days equals 42 days, almost exactly the same time period as Lent.

But it’s not just the number of days that are significant but their conjunction with the season. In Chinese medicine, spring is the time of the liver, whose energy is change. Haragano, who teaches Wheel of the Year classes in Seattle, says that treatment centers experience higher success rates in spring than at any other time of the year. She attributes this to the incredible energy for change which courses through the earth at this time, the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, as Dylan Thomas put it. The sap is rising in the trees, which are budding; the green stalks of crocuses and snowdrops are pushing through the frozen ground. There’s an incredible shift happening which — in those parts of the world which are frozen — manifests in the spring thaw, the breaking up of the contraction of winter.

Lent is the time for making auspicious changes. It doesn’t have to be about deprivation, although that pattern is deeply ingrained in me from my Catholic childhood when I usually gave up cookies or candy for Lent. As an adult, I’ve used Lent as an opportunity to experiment with my patterns with other substances. Giving up alcohol for one Lent eventually led to giving up alcohol altogether. Giving up dairy products, however, did not lead to a permanent change, even though I immediately noticed the return of a certain amount of congestion (which I had previously considered normal) when I began eating dairy again at Easter. Two years ago, I gave up coffee entirely (although not caffeine — my consumption of Darjeeling tea shot up in proportion). Again, although I went back to drinking coffee (hey! I do live in Seattle), I weaned myself from daily coffee consumption and now have a latte only once or twice a week. Last year I gave up sugar, probably the most difficult of all. The effect on my energy level was drastic and shocking. The few times I ate sugar (jellybeans at Nawruz, desserts at a Victorian ball), I binged and then felt sick for days afterwards. Now although I’ve put sugar back into my diet, I’m much more sensitive to its effect on my body. I no longer buy cookies or ice cream for late night snacks and I discovered an organic Earl Grey tea that’s so sweet and delicious I can drink it without sugar.

The emphasis on giving up a rich or luxurious food item has deep historical roots. The day before Lent is often called Mardi Gras, which translates as Fat Tuesday, because people gorge on rich, deep-fried foods like doughnuts and pastries on this day. In Russia, the week before Lent is the time of the butter festival when everyone feasts on blinis, pancakes wrapped around fillings. In England, the day before Lent is Pancake Tuesday since pancakes are the food of choice. The recipe for pancakes published in The Compleat Cook in 1671 includes a pint of cream, six new-laid eggs, a pound of sugar and nutmeg or mace. The previous Sunday is Colop Sunday, the last chance to eat collops (chops) before Lent begins. Carnival, another name for the period right before Lent when people splurge on the rich foods and outrageous behavior which will soon be prohibited, comes from Carne (meat) vale (farewell) because Catholics give up eating meat for Lent.

A friend of mine who is a member of a Russian Orthodox church tells me that their restrictions on food during Lent are even more severe than those I experienced in the Roman Catholic church. Lent is like a six-week progressive fast, in which people give up first meat, then a different food item each week, until the week before Easter they are eating only bread and water. This reminded me of the diet I followed (in reverse) the second (but not the last) time I quit smoking. I was following a program outlined by the Seventh Day Adventists which prescribed a strict diet during the first week of not smoking. We were supposed to eat only fruit and fruit juice the first day, then add in vegetables, then grains. Sugar, alcohol and caffeine were all forbidden–triggers for nicotine craving. I was so obsessed with figuring out what I could eat and doing all the preparation involved in preparing fresh fruit and vegetables that I barely missed cigarettes. If you have been considering trying an allergy elimination diet this would be a great time to try it.

If you think about what’s going on in the natural world, these food deprivations make sense. This part of early spring is the most hazardous time of the year for people living close to the earth. The first bitter greens (so prominent a part of spring equinox feasts like Passover and Easter) are just emerging. Fresh eggs, also associated with these feasts, are not yet available; birds are just beginning to nest. The foodstuffs, particularly the salted and smoked meat, that were stored to carry the family through the winter may be giving out. The potatoes and apples left in the cellar are getting soft and of dubious quality. The deprivation of Lent may not be voluntary but a necessity imposed by nature. As Caroline Walker Bynum points out in Holy Feast and Holy Fast, “Fasting is in rhythm with the seasons, scarcity followed by abundance.” By choosing lack, people believed they could induce God to send plenty: rain, harvest and life. As Gregory the Great said, “To fast is to offer God a tithe of the year.”

There is a long tradition of spring purification. Cleansing is part of the action of the tonic herbs of early spring on the body. Also think of spring cleaning. Those who planned to be initiated during the Eleusinian Mysteries in the fall participated in purification ceremonies in the early spring, which included bathing in the sea. When the world is being made anew, we wish to make ourselves new. Yet any change is fraught with danger and difficulty. As a friend of mine said while we were on our way to a ritual, “There is no transformation without change.” Gertud Mueller Nelson in her wonderful book on Catholic ritual comments, “which of us…does not know we must change and fear it, and in that fear come face to face with the mystery of death.” She believes that “conscious engagement of suffering and death forces us to take stock of our gift of life and consider ways of reforming and living our lives more fully and passionately.”

Nelson mentions that a banner displaying the words Vacare Deo (meaning to empty oneself so God could fill one up) was displayed in her childhood home during Lent. Brooke Medicine Eagle assigns the same value to fasting when she describes vision quests in Buffalo Woman Comes Singing.. She writes that when we fast we refrain from taking in on the right side of our experience, thus creating a vacuum in our consciousness. “By our very nature, something else will come in to fill that space.” For Brooke, the vacuum was filled with dreams, visions, clairvoyance, astral travel and revelation, all left-sided events. “The fast,” she writes, “seems to work the same way with all people. It is a brilliant tool for opening ourselves to the Great Mystery and to the Source of Life within our own being.” In discussing how to fast, Brooke Medicine Eagle recommends checking with you“not as a punishment or a sacrifice, but as a joyful way to call upon another part of yourself, a way to awaken to Spirit’s voice within you.” Although you can simply move through a regular day without food, Brooke suggests taking a day off, going to a beautiful spot in nature and creating sacred space there where you can spend your time in meditation or centering. “Whatever holes in your life you fill with food — or anything else you’ve included on your fast — will become very obvious when you begin to do without them.”

I know how powerful this practice can be from my experience with another kind of fast: the week of reading deprivation which is part of the twelve-week program described by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way. For reasons similar to those described by Brooke Medicine Eagle, Julia Cameron recommends abstaining from reading for one week. For those of you who get your daily dose of words from NPR, listening to talk radio is also forbidden. “Reading deprivations casts us into our inner silence,” a place where we can “hear our own inner voice, the voice of our artist’s inspiration.”

The effects of reading deprivation have been dramatic for me and my students The first time I did reading deprivation, I got sick. I was indignant and frightened. How could I stay in bed and rest without reading? As a way to soothe my sore throat and get to sleep at night without the soporific of a bedtime novel, I sipped at the lavender brandy I had in my cupboard for medicinal purposes. Since I hadn’t drunk alcohol for several years, I was shocked when I realized that I had replaced my addiction to reading with alcohol. The second time I did reading deprivation, I found myself spending hours obsessively planning: rewriting to-do lists, making ten year plans, elaborating all the tasks necessary to carry out complicated projects. I had never noticed before how much time I spent planning to do things as compared with actually doing them. It was another revelation.

I do reading deprivation every time I teach an Artist’s Way class, which is every spring and autumn, nicely aligning with these transitional seasons. Subsequent experiences have not been so dramatic but they have been gratifying. I now look forward to reading deprivation as an oasis in my life which is crowded with things to read. One time while standing at a bus stop, restless and impatient during a reading deprivation week, I went into the nearby florist’s shop and began sniffing all the flowers, trying to come up with words to describe their various scents. I have done some of my best writing during these weeks, which are also usually times of particularly vivid dreams.

This sort of sensory abundance and sensitivity is one of the rewards of the deprivation or purification process of Lent. Lent begins with the excesses of Carnival. It comes to an end with an outburst of joy and indulgence. The Easter feast is a banquet of rich foods, the bounty of spring. The mood of Easter is one of gaiety and celebration–it derives from a Roman festival in honor of the resurrection of Attis called Hilaria.

If you find it difficult to contemplate giving something up for six weeks, just remember that you can indulge at Easter. Knowing that you are abstaining for only a limited period of time makes exercising restraint easier. Plus you can look forward to the excess of Easter. After six weeks of soy milk lattes the year I gave up dairy, I had my first latte breve (made with real cream) on Easter.

For pagans who don’t want to align with Christian holidays, a more natural time for celebrating Lent would be the six weeks between Candlemas and Spring Equinox. In fact, you might work it into your Candlemas pledge, taking a new name which symbolizes the change you want to make.

I’ve focused on giving up substances, but there are many other kinds of changes you can make. Process addictions like planning, worrying, obsessing about love, watching TV, overeating, overworking, are all good candidates. For instance, if you tend to overwork you might want to set some bottom lines ; no working overtime, no working on weekends, no work phone calls at home. I usually try to make a change in a behavior as well as giving up a substance. One year I gave up criticizing (not an easy task for a Virgo). Another year I gave up nagging.

I’m really looking forward to Lent this year because I already know what I’m giving up: self-deprivation. Mostly through working with The Artist’s Way, I’ve identified a pattern which Julia Cameron calls artistic anorexia which also applies to other areas of my life. I am constantly denying myself simple pleasures with the excuse that I can’t afford them, either financially or in terms of time. Perhaps this is a remnant of m Catholic childhood; certainly it’s a prevailing theme in our Puritan culture. This Lent my commitment is to indulge myself every day.

A Gathering of Ghosts and Demons: Generosity and Realization in Tibetan Buddhism

by Karma Norjin Lhamo

Show me a culture without ghosts and spirits, and I’ll show you an alien culture—something not of this Earth—because stories of things spooky and strange, seen and unseen, are found everywhere, in all belief systems. And the explanations of such haunting phenomena are as varied as the cultures that give birth to these magical stories.

The banshees of Ireland and the Scottish highlands, who warn families of impending death with otherworldly cries and laments, are thought to be the ghosts of women who died in childbirth. The Japanese yurei, also female ghosts, are trapped by powerfully gripping emotions in an intermediate state between life and death. In the Voudon tradition of Haiti, zombies are acknowledged to be reanimated corpses brought back to a kind of life by skilled magicians. And of course, there are the countless stories of vampires who suck the life force from their victims—perhaps a reflection of the universal experience of being around people who drain us of our energy?

So it comes as no surprise that the world of Tibetan Buddhism is populated with its share—if not more than its share!—of ghosts, demons, ghouls, and otherworldly beings. What is different in the Buddhist tradition, however, is the explanation of these phenomena.

One of the best windows into the sometimes-spooky world of Tibetan Buddhism was opened to us by the Tibetan woman, Machik Labdron (or Machig Lapdron), who lived in the 11^th century.  Machik, whose name means “One Mother,” fused the Indian Buddhist tradition of chod with her own visionary experiences to create a special practice, the Chod of Mahamudra.

The most spectacular part of the practice, lu jin or “charity of the body,” is an eerie visualization that involves offering one’s own body as food for worldly and otherworldly beings—an extreme, supreme act of generosity. The aims of the practice, however, are eminently practical:  to benefit other beings and to overcome the self-fixation that Buddhists hold to be the source of so many of our problems.

Machik herself is a magical being, a wisdom dakini—a human embodiment of the essence of enlightened mind. And her popularity in modern times begins with a ghostly story. Here is how Tsultrim Allione, the author of Women of Wisdom who has recently been recognized as an emanation of Machik Labdron, describes one of her first experiences with this dakini.

…I was in California at a group retreat given by Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche. One night we were doing the Chod practice, and at a certain point, when we were invoking the presence of Machig, visualizing her as a youthful white dakini, a wild-looking old woman suddenly appeared very close to me. She had grey hair streaming up from her head, and she was naked, with dark golden-brown skin. Her breasts hung pendulously and she was dancing. She was coming out of a dark cemetery. The most impressive thing about her was the look in her eyes. They were very bright, and the expression was one of challenging invitation mixed with mischievous joy, uncompromising strength and compassion. She was inviting me to join her dance.  Afterwards I realized that this was a form of Machig Labdron.¹

Machik advises us that the best places to practice chod—also known as severance, as in severance of self-fixation—are the wild and haunted places that create an atmosphere of isolation and fear. Among the guests we invite to the practice are more than a few terrifying apparitions.

Who among us would not be frightened by the antagonizing enemies, those “unembodied gods and demons who manifest sights and various weird apparitions to the eyes and cause fear and terror and then alarm and horror, with trembling and hairs standing on end”?²

Who wouldn’t feel intimidated by the body demon, an entity that connects with us in the womb and remains with us until our skin and bones separate after death? “It is the lord or owner of this outcaste body made of flesh and blood, a vicious inhuman spirit that says, ‘This is I,” Machik explains. “That bad spirit leads us around by the nose and makes us engage in bad karma.”³

Which of us would not be chilled by contact with nagas, snake-like animals who inhabit waterways and springs, or the eight classes of gyalsen, male king spirits and female demonesses who together symbolize attraction and aversion, two of the Buddhist poisons?

Who wouldn’t be scared silly by the sight of various male and female devils, planetary spirits, death lords, harm-bringers, belly-crawlers, personifications of types of disease, lords of epidemics, and black magic spirits?

And perhaps many of us have felt the unease that comes from bad spirits of haunted places, those spirits who dwell in unsettled places where we may visit or live.

But if we could help them, who among us would fail to offer sustenance to all sentient beings, from beings in hell where they experience unimaginable torture, through the realm of the hungry ghosts—with their huge bodies and tiny throats that deny them the sustenance they crave—up through the animal and human realms to the realms of the gods?

All these frightful and awe-ful beings, and more, are the guests Machik Labdron urges us to invite to the feast of severance.

This emphasis on demons and ghouls in Machik’s practice is no accident—it’s quite deliberate, because directly facing what terrifies us is one way we can awaken from our ignorance, one way we can realize the unbounded wisdom and compassion that are our birthrights as beings who possess, hidden deep in our hearts, the very same nature as the buddhas.

There is a famous story about Milarepa, another Tibetan Buddhist saint who was, coincidentally (or not!), a contemporary of Machik Labdron’s.

Tseringma and her four sisters were female deities. When they first met Milarepa they tried to scare him and they did all kinds of magic tricks to try to frighten Milarepa, but Milarepa was never frightened. He knew that these demons were like demons in a dream when you know you are dreaming. He did not take them to be truly existent and so then they were so impressed with Milarepa that they developed faith in him. They became his students; they became his Dharma Protectors, the protectors of his teachings and they also offered Milarepa siddhis, special powers…

But that is the difference between demons when you don’t know their true nature and demons when you do know their true nature. They go from being malicious to being protectors.

In the end, in fact, there is no such thing as a demon. That is what you recognize in a dream when you dream of a demon and you know you are dreaming. You recognize that there really is no demon there. That is the ultimate nature. There is neither any deity that helps you nor any demon that harms you. Sometimes these supernatural beings are called god demons because if they like you they are like a god and if they do not like you they are like a demon. They can decide. But when you recognize you are dreaming it does not matter what they appear to be. You know their true nature.⁴

So in the Vajrayana—the form of Buddhism taught in Tibet—we learn that the appearance of demons and ghouls, when not seen through, is a mara or obstacle to enlightenment. Seen through—when we experience our minds directly—these same demons and ghouls become protectors (dharmapalas) and sources of spiritual powers (siddhis) and realization.

Apparitions of male and female demons and ghouls
For as long as your guise has not been seen through are maras.
Obstacle-makers who nothing but trouble spell
If their guise is seen through obstructors are dharmapalas
A hot bed of siddhis of such a variety
In the end, in fact, there are neither gods nor goblins.
Let concepts go as far as they go and no more.
This is as far as they go and no more, he said.⁵

The appearance of demons and ghouls is, finally, revealed as nothing other than the self-projection of our own minds.

How precious now the idea of seeing a ghost.
It reveals the unborn source, how strange and amazing!⁶

So this Halloween—when numerous ghouls and devils and demons and ghosts appear at your door—recognize these frightful sights as reminders of your own mind’s clarity and spaciousness. And then—in the generous spirit of Machik Labdron and Milarepa—offer them some candy.

Sources

¹Women of Wisdom, Tsultrim Allione, Snow Lion Publications, 2000, pp. 28-29.
²Machik’s Complete Explanation: Clarifying the Meaning of Chod, translated by Sarah Harding, Snow Lion Publications, 2003, p. 141.
³Ibid., p. 141.
⁴Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche, Tampa, Florida, Halloween 2005 (private transcript).
⁵“Distinguishing the Provisional from the Definitive in the Context of Mahamudra,” a realization song that was taught by Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche in Tampa, Florida, Halloween 2005 (private transcript).
⁶Ibid.

Karma Norjin Lhamo is a student of teachers affiiliated with the Tibetan Karma Kagyu lineage. She has recently had the good fortune to attend a series of teachings about Machik Labdron given by her refuge lama, Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche, at Karma Triyana Dharmachakra in Woodstock, New York. Halloween has always been her favorite holiday. Writing as A Word Witch, she blogs at: http://awordwitch.blogspot.com. She urges people who are interested in learning about Buddhism to seek out a qualified teacher.

By Waverly Fitzgerald

Years ago as I was deep in the lore of holidays, I came upon one of those nuggets of information that answer a question you didn’t know you had. The question was: “Why are there so few significant major Christian holidays in summer?” And the answer was that summer was thick with saint’s days, which provided an opportunity for people to gather at the fairs and festivals held in the saint’s names.

For instance, St. Peter’s Day (a sort of midsummer celebration) is widely (and wildly) celebrated on June 29 in Spain and Portugal. And Ellis Peters describes another St. Peter’s Fair in her highly successful series of mysteries about Brother Cadfael. This rights to hold this fair were given to the Benedictine abbey of St. Peter in Shrewsbury by Henry I around 1100. And the fair was held on the 3rd of July (don’t know how they picked that date). The founder of the abbey, Roger de Montgomery, the first Earl of Shrewsbury, also gave the monks of the Abbey the right to hold a Lammas fair on August 12.

Fairs were also held throughout the year. In the same document from which I gleaned the information above, I found references to fairs around Easter and Christmas, but obviously summer, with its promise of good weather is the best time for people to gather outdoors. Country fairs, the descendants of these fairs, are still generally held in the summer, at least they are in Seattle. The Washington State Fair is in Monroe in mid-July. The Puyallup Fair (famous for its scones) is held in mid-September (July and August are usually our sunniest months).

Summer is the time of festivals. Here in Seattle we have outdoor concerts (at the Zoo and at the Pier), outdoor movies (the modern equivalent of drive-ins, where the movie is projected on the wall of a building), and outdoor dances (in the parks). I’m especially fond of the outdoor milonga (tango dance) held in a pavilion on the shores of Lake Washington during our big Tango Magic festival. It feels truly magical to be dancing in the warm night air, while the sun sets over the lake and the people passing by stop to watch for a while.

Summer is the season for camp. I do not have fond memories of my early experiences at Girl Scout camp (Camp Osito in California). I was just was not an outdoor, sleep-in-a-tent, make-friends-with-a-bunch-of -strangers sort of person. When I was in my thirties, I attended a new kind of camp: the Witch Camp in British Columbia sponsored by the Reclaiming community. That was also difficult for a shy person but the size of the camp (around 100 campers) was great. I could find time to be alone and ways to connect with others within the framework of activities (meals, rituals, meetings, workshops) provided.

In Seattle, our summer is book-ended by two big music festivals. Folklife on Memorial Day weekend celebrates the folk arts, and offers opportunities to learn and listen to music from many different cultures, while Bumbershoot on Labor Day features more popular music, and also a smattering of cultural events. And I have many friends who make a pilgrimage every year to the Vancouver Folk Festival in mid-July.

Summer is the time for family reunions. Four years ago I was in Milwaukee for a family reunion for my mother’s family, the Wittaks. And I have two relatives on the Fitzgerald side who organize gatherings in the Seattle area every summer. Sister Anna Burris gathers together the Burris family for a week at a lake and Roger and Rosemary Enfield usually play host to a whole tribe of Enfields who gather in a nearby park.

And let’s not forget Fourth of July, a holiday which cries out for barbecues, parties, picnics and crowds (not to mention traffic jams). This Fourth of July, as I was heading down my usual lookout, a street above the freeway where I stand with hundreds of strangers to watch the fireworks bursting over Lake Union, I passed a seven story apartment building which was buzzing like a hive of bees. Every balcony that faced the lake was full of onlookers.

So the spirit of summer to me seems to call for being outgoing, for assembling with others in groups, for finding a place in your tribe. Maybe that is why I am launching this magazine now rather than in the spring as I originally planned, as it is my attempt to create a community dedicated to the concepts of slow time, sacred time and seasonal time.

I’m wondering if summer is a time of socializing, of finding community, of gathering your tribe for you. And if so, what experiences and opportunities are the most nourishing?

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