Lightly, my Darling

Monthly Newsletter | May 2024

Nausicaa and Her Maidens Brought Him Food and Wine, W. Heath Robinson (date unknown)

The monthly newsletters are an amalgamation of musings and two poems (one by another poet and one by me, as per a practice introduced to my master’s cohort by poet Alice Oswald).

Please scroll down for upcoming online courses and event announcements.

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Stories have a way of rousing a deep inner faculty that helps us see ourselves more clearly. They offer a map of meaning into both our psyche and the soul of the world.

In Greek, psyche and soul were the same thing, and stories are their language. They are the language of Soul.

I often find stories find me at particular times in my life. It’s like they have an intelligence of their own, and they spring up in the psyche in response to whatever we are currently kneading in the dough of our lives.

This is why I think it’s important to expose our imaginations to myth. So we build a repository inside ourselves of images that have served humans since our earliest beginnings. The dawn of human consciousness was fully equipped with the imaginative faculty.

Ever since we have existed, we have imagined. Isn’t that a lovely thought?

That just as we have our senses to respond and participate with the world of matter, so we have the imagination to engage with the world of image.

To find our way into stories, or perhaps better put, to let them illuminate the truth of who we are and where we are in our lives, there are often particular images that rise up, quite organically, in the psyche. A particular part of a story that speaks to us directly.

Last week, a dear friend and guest teacher on one of my online programs taught a class on the Odyssey. And so my imagination has found itself infiltrated by this particular tale once again. (You can find Ben the bard and his new Substack over on A Bright Ship).

About nine months ago now, I went to my old mentor Martin Shaw’s first telling of the Odyssey in the wilds of Dartmoor. It was phenomenal. For three days and three nights, our souls journeyed in the great tumbling waves of the old sea god Poseidon’s initiatory tasks that hone the mortal man, Odysseus. A quintessential story of ultimately, nostos, the Greek notion of homecoming.

And it was a time of small miracles. Martin began the story with the Iliad and the Judgment of Paris. It was after all, the great Trojan War that set Odysseus on his journey home.

We began with Eris, goddess of discord. And in the way of small miracles, it so happened that that very day, the asteroid Eris was travelling through our skies. And a great discord was roused in the hearts of so many of us.

On a global scale, this was also bang on October 7th. When Hamas fought back. And the world was catapulted awake. And we saw all eyes turn - for the first time since the apartheid began - on Palestine.

Chaos in Gaza, chaos in the West Bank, chaos in Jerusalem and in Tel Aviv itself. Chaos in Lebanon and Yemen and Syria. Chaos in the West. In American soldiers setting themselves on fire in protest and in the current student demonstrations opposing their university’s investments in weapon manufacturers that make money off Israel’s butchery.

Eris was evoked in our story by its teller, knowingly or unknowingly, while she traversed the stars and initiated the start of what would become the most gruesome event in modern history: the genocide of the Palestinian people, one of the oldest bloodlines on Earth.

In the story, there is a wedding. And Eris is not invited.

Why? When all the gods and the mortals alike received an invitation?

This brings to mind the story of the Thirteenth Wise Woman in the fairytale of the Sleeping Beauty. More popularly known as the Wicked Fairy, she too was not asked to join the guests at the christening of the princess Aurora.

These women were not invited because we have a way of trying to keep chaos at bay. It was feared that wherever they went, they would bring trouble with them.

But these women are not the “evil” counterpart of some “good” pantheon. As P L Travers says, their power is equivocal. It is dependent on circumstance.

Stories show us that we cannot exile the forces of discord. In the Greek creation myths, it is from Chaos that life emerges. They are one.

Both women, in response to their lacking invitations, unleash their wrath. The Thirteenth Wise Woman puts the kingdom to sleep. And Eris inscribes the words “To the Fairest” onto a golden apple and casts it into a fountain, knowing the three most beautiful goddesses of Olympus will fight to the death for that title.

And so these forces weave in and out of our human lives. And instead of exiling them, the students of Psyche like Freud and Jung and Hillman tell us we must integrate them.

I don’t know about you, but I got pretty roughed up this past April.

Seven months after Eris crossed through our skies, the stars have been in a particularly dense dance again. I’m no astrologer. I am simply aware of the stars magnetism and influence on our lives, and I keep an eye to them like I keep an ear to the ground and the earthen.

It looks like we’re only just emerging out of their pandemonium. Between the eclipses, the last Full Moon in prickly Scorpio (I say this with no disrespect, my Moon is in Scorpio!) and a bunch of planets in retrograde, April was a bristly month.

I’m coming to learn that there is a marriage of wisdom and cunning necessary to move through life’s challenges. In ancient Greece, this quality was known as metis, after the old goddess Metis. Mother of Athena, she was one of the Oceanids, nymph daughters of Tethys and Oceanus.

Metis is a cunning in service to holy things. It is based on the understanding that the highest human experiences aren’t all love and light - as the modern spiritual movement would have us believe - but a willingness to drag ourselves through the dirt.

I think the soul of the world is ultimately compassionate, but she demands a robustness of us. To step up and into who we came here to be, and be willing to roll up our sleeves and get dirty in the process. Or remove our sleeves altogether! Like Inanna in her shedding of a piece of clothing at each of the seven gates of the Sumerian Underworld. Until she arrives in the Great Below with nothing but herself.

Emptied. And therefore spacious. Receptive to something a little more true.

Odysseus was an embodiment of metis. His strategic responses to challenges bid we remember the cunning of the fox, the craftiness that Athena so favours in Odysseus and that she herself wields, an inheritance from her mother Metis herself.

It is, after all, Odysseus’ metis that gets him home.

What I personally gather from these images is that we can’t shun discord or exile chaos. Nor can we move through it with the infantilizing naivety intrinsic to the modern spiritual movement.

To reintegrate ourselves into the Soul of the World there seems to be a requirement to draw up a seat at the table for Discord and bring her food and wine. When we do, the gods of strategy, guile and old forest wisdoms of the fox take a seat too.

NB I found myself writing and writing and writing. And suddenly, this piece got much too long for a single entry! There is much more I would like to share with you as a commentary on the Odyssey, so I will post the next as a part 2. Xox

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Poetry Offering

This poem is a regular go-to for me. I find it offers a much needed reminder to soften during times of hardship, when everything in us screams: Harden! Walls up! I shared it recently during one of the online monthly rites and thought those of you reading it might reap some goodness from it too.


Lightly, My Darling
by Aldous Huxley
It’s dark because you are trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and 
lightly cope with them.

I was so preposterously serious in those days, 
such a humorless little prig.
Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me.
When it comes to dying even.
Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic.
 
No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious 
persona putting on its celebrated imitation 
of Christ or Little Nell.
And of course, no theology, no metaphysics.
Just the fact of dying and the fact 
of the clear light.
 
So throw away your baggage and go forward.
There are quicksands all about you, 
sucking at your feet,
trying to suck you down into fear and 
self-pity and despair.
That’s why you must walk so lightly.

Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage,
not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.

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And as usual, here is one of mine. 

Lament on a Saturday
The only treasure worth gathering today
is a stone the colour of grapes pressed
and sticky.

I don't want to know about another bomb 
and yet I can't not hold my ear to the ground
like a mother bound to the cries of her babe.
Can't not listen for the rippling terror 
and the groaning gulps of so many last breaths.

"Don't look away now", says the mud
as it dries into dirt under my nails. 
The world soul shrieks like a banshee 
at the petrol station and in the supermarket and in every email
I hear her, in the howling wind 
the wrongs puncture everything.

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Upcoming Events

Please note, all these events can be attended live or via recording.

This Friday, May 9th | Women’s New Moon Rite | 8-9:30pm UK

May 22nd | Next online lecture series: When Women Were the Shamans | 7:30-9:30pm UK - All past lectures are accessible via my website

May 26th | Dismemberment Ceremony | 8-9:30pm UK

I also have some new openings for 1:1 mentorship sessions. Please see my website for the next openings.

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