windinthemaples

Friday, after our sessions and lunch, we had the afternoon to ourselves to explore the land and try to find respite from the summer heat. Sarah and I were of a mind, so we changed into lightweight clothes and headed to the creek. The water level varied from a few chilly inches to a couple feet, so we found a comfortable little dip mid-channel to plunk ourselves down in to cool off, chat, and let the currents sweep our troubles downstream. It was a decadent experience. Little fish started congregating around us, hiding out in the shade under our legs, darting impishly away from

mermaiden's attempts to pet and hug them underwater.

(This photo was taken the day before, but I don't care! :D It's

mermaiden, working her Earth Goddess mojo. :D)
~*~

We showered and dressed and got all sparkled up and jewelry-laden for ritual. The ritual began in the barn, where we met in the moonlight clutching our love letters to Life. We were back into Psyche's story, her choice to follow the Song of Life and to exit the Underworld. At some point, most of the ritual staff disappeared from the barn and we were instructed, at long last, to begin our silent journey from this dark Underworld and back into the full riot and color and light of Life. We were told to go out into the world and to listen to the love songs, the songs of Life that were so audible in the night-dark woods and grasslands. Singly and in unintentional pairs and triplets and small groups, we left the drumming of the barn behind us for the dirt and gravel footpath outside, flanked with occasional tiki torches, as it wound through the bottom of the meadow for some long minutes to an area of the Grove that is called the Water Path, a clearing with a firepit near the creek bed. In the woods, here and there, there were snatches of an instrumental guitar and maybe the call of a pipe or flute. The ritual participants walked in silence, scattered along the path, the crunch of feet and the rustle of robes the only counterpoint to the roaring cry of the cicadas. At long last, I turned a corner in the darkness and the ritual site came into view--a vision of priestesses waiting to welcome us in white dresses and capes and an abundance of candlelight and tiki flame. A ring of chairs was open on one side and in the opening, priestesses there to give us cups of cool water and bid us relax and rest ourselves after our journey. I found a seat in the circle and was sipping my water as other journeyers arrived from the dark path. Whispers and clumped ritual staff members around the circle edged into my awareness. There was something strange in the chaos and I cast my eyes Sarah's way to see if she was catching on to the unsettled feeling in the circle. The hair on the back of my neck stood up and the welcome I'd felt at the lights of the clearing dissolved away into a sense of uneasy tension and squirminess. I didn't want my cup of water anymore. I didn't want to be sitting in that chair. At last, all the journeyers arrived and Patricia, one of Diana's Grove's founders stepped into the center of the circle and announced, with great calm, that one of the ritual staff members, intending to aspect Pan, had been bitten by a snake and was going to be carted off to the hospital. There he sat in the center of one of the whispering clumps, his instep in his hand and several staff members crouching by his legs. Patricia assured us that everything would be fine, that the snake had been asked to leave and had (without harm) complied and then River stepped into her priestessing role to resume the ritual.

The thread was snapped for me. Growing up in South Florida, snakes are serious business. There are coral snakes, rattlesnakes, and cottonmouths. We have six poisonous snakes and they are all pretty serious business. I wanted to know where the snake was when he was bitten, what kind of snake was involved, if it was poisonous, how long it would take them to get him to a hospital, how the snake had been asked to leave, how far away that snake had been compelled to leave, and what would keep him or her from returning. I'm an air sign, I wanted to intellectually exhaust the topic before moving on and instead, here was the ritual team getting us to start tonal singing work while the guy is actively being loaded into a hastily rounded up car directly behind my chair. I found it physically impossible to harmonize. Everything was coming out in minor, dirge-full moans.

The ritual text moved on to talking about the life around us, the songs of Life around us, and all I could do was creep and shiver and suppress nervous giggles about hearing the songs of snakes all around me, twining silently up my chair legs or sidling ever closer to my feet in their totally-impractical sandals. At one point, we were each invited to the fire pit which had been transformed into a candle-studded altar where we were each able to retrieve a lit votive by which to read our Love Letters to Life.

As we reread the words we'd written, in a fabulous twist, we were told to mentally replace each instance of the word "you" in the letter with "I". For, in truth, we'd not written love letters to Life as we'd thought--we'd written love letters to ourselves. My love letter had been in poem form, so the cool and fabulous twist didn't work nearly so well. And really, I was all out of joint and off-step and thinking of snakebites, so maybe nothing in ritual was destined to work well for me that night. Here I'd gone out of the safety and comfort of the Underworld into the challenge and sensation of Life and this snakebite had me feeling completely unsafe, exposed, imperiled. I thought to myself during the ritual, "Why do I need this message? Couldn't I have babystepped into a welcoming world? Instead I'm sitting in the dark and practically barefoot with snakes?! Who would be so cruel to me when I'm already feeling vulnerable just in rejoining life?"

At some point, we moved to our chant for the evening and clustered around the firepit-candle altar to sing it.

Let the beauty we love
be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways
to kneel and kiss the ground.

I was forcing it, unfortunately, while others genuinely seemed moved by the chant and the ritual and were even physically kneeling and kissing the stones and logs and earth circling the many-candled altar. Meanwhile, I'm safely perched up on my chair or standing back three feet and thinking to myself, somewhat obsessively, "Snakes live in woodpiles and they live in rock piles and what are these people doing on the ground? Holy crap they're crazy!!"

After ritual, we had a short little jam session, pulling chairs up or sitting on the ground directly around the altar area and having a little re-sing of the main (Rumi text) chant. Sarah was sitting on the ground, I think, sorta in front of my chair and she lifted one hand, mid-note, and pointed to a spot between candles. There, a couple feet away from a dozen singers and weaving swiftly between the votives and pillars and other candleholders, was a two foot patterned snake. Right under her silently pointing finger.

I, and my lawn chair, was ten feet back from the firepit within two seconds. The song halted and singers scattered back, particularly when the words "Copperhead" and "poisonous" were sounded by someone in-the-know. The snake moved quickly, unpredictably, and someone said we should clear a path out of our circle for its safe exit. Well, I didn't want to let that snake out of my sight, it was in the only area of light in a hundred acres of darkness, so I watched it like a hawk and jumped up onto my chair for good measure. I can't believe I was the only person who didn't want my bare feet so close to the ground but really, I think I was the only one up on a chair and I got some good-natured ribbing for it later.

Some people came up with the grand idea of making a break for the barn's safety and so whole groups of ritual-goers abandoned their chairs and headed for the gravel path. Never has a long, dark path seemed so sinister and dangerous to me. I was watching my feet in the feeble moonlight and praying, really, really praying, that I would not accidentally step onto a snake. It seemed like a real danger--two snakes in one ritual! Maybe the whole Grove was writhing with poisonous snakes and the small one we'd seen eating a fish on the banks of the creek that afternoon was, with some reflection, a third copperhead.

OMG. OMG. OMG. OMG. OMG. OMG. OMG.

(illustrative photo by TomSpinker of Flickr)

I have no animosity towards snakes, you must understand, but I don't know them. Their habits, their moods, their signals are alien to me and so they seem unpredictable. I'm snake-dumb. I'd rather avoid a miscommunication entirely by not running into any and not, please Goddess help me, force one to bite me by stepping on them, unintentionally hurting them, or making them feel endangered by my presence. I've never been bit by a snake, never known anyone bit by a snake, so it all seemed pretty overwhelming and horrible. Walking back there was a lot of laughter and snakes-are-good conversation around me and I was wound tighter than a spring, praying to every Deity I have ever served to protect my naive, blundering self from crossing the path of all the snakes laying invisible on the path.

I didn't much feel like the after-ritual dessert party at the barn. I was feeling shocky and ungrounded and bizarre after the interrupted and reinterrupted ritual energy and wanted nothing more than to reset myself, and my outsized fears, with the remedy of a good night's sleep. (I'm a Libra--given time the scales always settle down into calm, even-keeled, rational thought and big-picture perspective.) The dark minute or two's walk into the woods to the outhouse at night felt like blindly praying my way through a minefield. The Grove felt dangerous for the first time ever and I felt stupid for not having respected those dangers in the past. Following the call into Life wasn't looking so attractive anymore!

(Don't worry...by the end of my next installment, I get a grip on myself but in the dark of night, with copperhead snakes afoot, I was a mess. An "I don't even know what to do with myself because there isn't even an emotional label to put on this" mess. :D)