Being Present, Being Change
On the new year
Dear Friends,
Blessings to you in this last week of January. Before I share my new essay, “Being Present, Being Change,” I want to let you know that in the midst of everything, I am thrilled to announce my beloved friend and long-time teacher Deena Metzger will be coming to Santa Cruz on March 16 to read from two of her novels (more details below.)
I also want to note that we are entering the great holy time of my spiritual year, Imbolc, the feast day of goddess and saint Brigid on February 1. Imbolc is an ancient Irish festival, and the cross-quarter day between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. It represents the nascient beginning of Spring, as we start to feel the light returning, slightly longer evenings, a sense of new life rising from the earth.
It will be a much-needed gift for me to be with others in ritual and community this weekend, honoring the Great Mother in the form of Brigit. The Irish have long believed that Brigit walks the earth on the eve of her feast day. They put out a piece of cloth or a scarf for Brigit to bless, and through the year these are considered healing cloths. So if you feel called, particularly during our current political times, put a piece of cloth outside this Friday, January 31 and invite Brigit’s blessing.
And, SAVE THE DATE! On Sunday March 16, 2025, 3-5 pm Deena Metzger will read at the Resource Center for Nonviolence in Santa Cruz from two of her novels: her most recent book La Vieja: A Journal of Fire, written during the Pandemic, and her classic What Dinah Thought about a Jewish filmmaker in Palestine, which was published in 1989 and reissued in November 2023. More information to follow.
To say the obvious, the past week has been a lesson in treachery and increasingly urgent crisis. And this I know: we will hold on to each other, and to ourselves. We will walk these times together.
Blessings always,
Carolyn
Being Present, Being Change
On the new year
It was New Year’s morning, and we were sitting around the breakfast table in a sweet, rare moment of having all of us together: Jean and me and both our daughters and their young families. Like everyone I knew, we were spending the winter holidays attempting to be present with the people before us, doing our best to keep at bay the dread and heartbreak of the November election. I was wearing a necklace with three small gemstones representing each of our grandsons, a gift from our daughter, beautifully set in the shape of a silver seed pod. Jean had also received a similar necklace from her only a few days before. The stones were for each of the grandson’s birth months: amethyst for the one who is almost five, aquamarine for our toddler (soon to be three), and tourmaline for our one-year-old.
Gorgeous! I loved the elegant necklace immediately and since then I have rarely taken it off. My grandsons are one of the great, lush, unexpected gifts of my life, and they are now with me in a daily way. I have the privilege of seeing our irrepressible toddler grandson regularly as he and his mother live in Santa Cruz near us. But our second daughter and her husband and two sons live in Eureka seven hours north. I only see them a few times a year, so this presence around my neck and on my skin is utterly life-affirming.
And the stones! Amethyst with its rich lavender tones and ancient connections to healing and wisdom, sea blue Aquamarine holding one’s deep soul and the sea, and Tourmaline, a stone I have long loved, with energies of cleansing and balance in tones that are sometimes salmon pink, sometimes sage green. All of this set in a natural form of a one-inch seed pod. These stones—each formed within the Earth, and millions of years old—hold ancient wisdom from our essential mother, the Earth herself.
As we sat together on New Year's morning in the companionable pandemonium of cute and cranky little kids, I held my one-year-old grandson in my lap. A supernaturally friendly young being with two dimples and (I swear) a twinkle in his eyes when he laughs and chortles, I was doing what mammals do: breathing in the essence of new life, his light, his smell, his freshness. As we ate, our daughter mentioned that she didn't believe in New Year's resolutions, but every January she liked to choose a word as a touchstone for the year ahead. What would our words be? she asked. I didn't have to think long, because one word appeared rather quickly: presence.
I told them that this was my touchstone, what I wanted for myself: to be present to the world, to devote myself to staying awake to it all—the beauty and the terror—for beauty can be thunderous and sometimes hard to fully take in, as are life’s desolations and devastations. It was a good conversation around the table, hearing a bit about each person's word and what they were thinking about in their lives. I took my own word with me and tucked it within, and then found myself bringing it out only a few days later at a gathering with dear friends, when the idea of a touchstone word for the year emerged yet again. Presence, I told them, was my word for 2025.
I sit in my study now and watch the low winter sun stream in, illuminating the tall bookshelves crammed with another of the great loves of my life: books. I breathe deep. What a gift this is: life. What a privilege it is to have the life force moving through me, to sit quietly, to have space to think, to write, to breathe. I have silence, I can gaze out at redwood trees across the way, drink in the powder blue sky which was salmon pink at dawn this morning, and of course, glory in the light, the light!
I’m here. And—I am utterly aware that no one is bombing my town. No fire is burning through my home. No flood is ripping through these books. This current moment of safety is temporary, as all moments are, and I would be a fool not to be aware and humbly grateful. For I know, we all know, that the world we have constructed is not sustainable and cannot continue. That all of these moments are temporary.
Oh, life. The day after I gathered with my friends, I drove down to Big Sur to New Camaldoli Hermitage for a four-day silent retreat. Before I left, I pulled out a deck of small, square cards which had been hand-made by a beloved young writing student of mine 25 years ago. Each card has one word on it. When I received it, I was just about to teach a writing retreat, and I pulled one card. It said: retreat. Since then I've known that this is a very special set of cards.
So that morning as I packed for Big Sur, I put my hands into the bag of cards, and pulled one small card, with one big word: change.
Ah. Ok.
I knew immediately that this was referring to things in my life that I am aware need changing, which I have been thinking about for some months. Yes, yes, I thought. It is time to finish that work. To complete those inner and outer personal changes.
Still as I drove south to Big Sur, I realized that the word meant much more than changes in my own life. It meant change in the largest sense—all the change that is coming and that we are living now. It means being nimble, being able to meet change with resilience, and with the absolutely ferocious and epoch-changing force of love.
Obviously there is all the technological change at the very center of our current world. There is political change which we all can see right before our eyes. It is totally clear: forces are gathering worldwide that represent the worst in human nature—fear, walls, protection, attack, win, kill, annihilate, take over.
But human nature has many aspects. Each and every human is a whole universe. Or as Walt Whitman put it, "Do I contradict myself? Yes I do. I am vast. I contain multitudes.” One aspect of human nature was at our table that New Year’s Day. It lived in the fierce love we felt for our young ones—a love that does not want to wall them away from others, or to teach them to ignore or fear things and people that are different. We do not want to ensure their success at the expense of others in our country and the world. We love them fiercely, above all others, but not at the expense of other people’s well-being. This understanding lives firmly in us, in the midst of all this vast change.
Presence. Change. Living with both words as touchstones, I began to think about presence as both verb and a noun. To be present as a verb can be seen as an active choice to slow down, to breathe, to look, to bring one’s full self to the world. Presence as a noun is something we give and offer to others and also to the natural world.
Change, too, is both a verb and a noun. For many years I had a quote on my refrigerator: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” That is, don’t wait for others. We mirror the world and echo back to it. When we change, the world changes. This quote is attributed to Mahatma Ghandi, the great Indian lawyer, anti-colonial activist, and Hindu spiritual leader. I hear in this teaching that in order to be the change one wishes to see in the world, one must be awake, aware, nimble, resilient— present to what is. To be present to the fullness of the world, and to one’s self, to one’s dreams and inner voice, to the call of Spirit, to the holiness of all things, to understandings and knowings that don’t come from our digitally-dominated world, but from the Earth, and our bodies, and the cosmos and all living beings.
As I was driving back from Big Sur, I heard for the first time about the LA fires. When I had a phone connection again, and Jean and I could talk, she told me about the great inferno, which had been burning then for three days. She was worried for our beloved friend Deena Metzger, who was threatened by the Palisade fire that had annihilated an entire community that ranged from Pacific Palisades through Topanga to Malibu. I was able to establish that Deena was evacuated and safe, but it was not clear whether her home and the sacred land where she has lived and offered sanctuary for forty years had burned. I learned later that the fire had been close enough that firefighters also fought it from the meadow adjacent to her land.
For several days we did not know which way the Santa Ana winds would blow, or if an ember would make its way to Deena’s house. She has been evacuated due to wildfires many times, sometimes several times a year, as the climate catastrophe has changed our world as we know it—and this time it might have taken it all. It happens that it didn’t, and she is home now. Blessings and thanks to the Divine Mother for this.
But nearby, in Pacific Palisades, in Altadena and other LA communities, there was only: fire, fire, fire, fire. Houses, medical centers, schools, churches, stores, gas stations, cars, apartment buildings, telephone lines, busses. Coffee shops, grocery markets, clothing stores, offices. Domestic animals, cats, dogs, birds, and wild creatures, squirrels, bees, songbirds, rabbits, raptors, and all of these creatures’ nests—all burned or displaced or incinerated. It is biblical. It is the costliest natural disaster ever in the United States.
A week later, it was announced that across the world Israel and Hamas had signed a cease-fire agreement. In my car, driving to the store on January 21, I happened to hear this report on NPR’s Morning Edition: “Palestinians are starting to return to their homes in Gaza now that a temporary ceasefire is in place… Rafah in the south is nothing short of apocalyptic - gray mounds of rubble far as the eye can see… We can see that the infrastructure - the streets, roads, water pipes - every single thing that's needed for a human in order to inhabit a place is lacking here in Rafah…. Buried below all its rubble are the memories and lives of its people who once lived here.”
Then the journalist reported, “A woman looks with disbelief at the mound of concrete and twisted metal under her feet. This was her home.”
Her home and everything around it for miles: bombed, charred, exploded. Houses, medical centers, mosques, stores, gas stations, cars, apartment buildings, telephone lines, busses. Coffee shops, grocery markets, clothing stores, offices. Domestic animals, cats, dogs, birds, and wild creatures, squirrels, bees, songbirds, rabbits, raptors, and all of these creatures’ nests. All bombed or displaced or incinerated. It is biblical. Gaza is the worst carnage from human violence in one place in more than a generation.
Reading about this in The Guardian, I came upon an image of Rafah in the south of Gaza last year, when more than 1 million Palestinians were sheltering there as protection from Israel’s bombing campaign in the north. Only months later, Israel turned its bombs to Rafah itself in a massive attack of genocidal destruction. A busy, full metropolis, now turned to utter carnage.
This is what I must be present to, alongside my lovely necklace, and my young boys, and the sweetness of this room, and the light streaming in. I want to be awake to it all.
In my grief and love, with all the massive changes happening in the world and obviously in our country, I remember too that change is always within us. And thus, there is always a path to newness. In essence change is one way to define what it means to be an organic being. To be alive is to change. I eat, I sleep, food comes in and makes its way back out. My cells are always reproducing themselves, again and again, following patterns encoded in my DNA, until they will eventually tire out and stop. Whatever change is wending its way through and towards us just now in our human world is essentially and always part of a larger story. Vast destruction happened last week and last year, and will keep happening far away and near to me, due to our current climate catastrophe and our violent world.
During this era of urgent societal and political turmoil, living as we are through truly unprecedented planetary and environmental breakdown, for me to be present and awake to this moment is, at times, to let the weeping come. It is also to remember to seek out the joy in any given hour. And to allow myself the grief and hope of change itself. I find myself asking, what do I want to send down to the worlds and cultures that will evolve from our current time? Didn't I always know that our unsustainable culture would likely have to fall apart or implode in order to truly change? What dreams, what prayers, what visions do I want to bring through to the coming generations? What family stories, ancestral wisdom, animal connections and love of the land and the natural world have deeply mattered to me? What stories, what books and manuscripts, what myths and folktales, what dances and songs can I pass down, both physically and in my memories and in my heart? As things break down and reorganize themselves at the cellular and human level, as organic change continues on and on—what do I want to save of the current world with all its beauty, brilliance and pathos? What do I want to carry through to the coming time?
As I sit with these questions, I know that three young boys and my love for them are my touchstone. My knowledge of love as an unconstrainable force that one can ally oneself to and live within is my touchstone. My alliance with beautiful and wondrous people, and powerful social change movements, is my touchstone.
May I be present to it all. May I weep when the weeping comes, and may I still dance. May I remember again that our story is much larger than it appears just now. May we each hold fast to all we can save and bring through to the future. And may we each find our own ways to listen deeply to each other and within ourselves, to be present to our inner and outer lives, to become able to truly be the change we want to see in the world.
You are allied with the light, and it makes all the difference. Thank you for sharing your touchstones!
Stunningly beautiful!
BT