Sanctuary

Back at Nancy Rigg’s house in Camarillo where Jean and I were staying, a fire was crackling in the fireplace and a bottle of rare forty-five-year-old port sat on the table. Jean and I walked in around midnight, after a quiet moonlit drive along the Southern California coast. The night was easy, the sky clear. The full moon gleamed sweet and strong–another sister, singing. Unlike the hour-long drive north along busy Route 1 to Santa Barbara, filled as we were with details and preparation for the evening program, we slid back towards Nancy’s house like riding a gentle wave. To our right out the window, the mother ocean eased in and out of the shore, illuminated by a flute of moonlight sluicing through the ocean like a beam.

We traveled through the gorgeous hills of the Santa Susanna Mountains to lovely Camarillo, and to Nancy’s street, tiptoeing up to the door. We imagined she’d likely gone to bed after the long night, and planned to slip into her spare room with little fanfare. How sweet to be met at the door by Nancy and her beloved dog Fiona, the fire crackling and the brandy glasses waiting. And oh, who indeed could truly sleep? As we settled into the generous armchairs by the flames, each with our small glass, Nancy poured from the bottle of expensive port that her father, dead six years, had himself purchased fifteen years before--a rare treat they keep for special occasions.

It was indeed an evening worthy of ceremony, and we sat back to revel in our Sisters Singing readings in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. Nancy had invited her friends and family to the Santa Barbara reading that evening, and in the front row her 84-year-old mother had sat beaming happily, along with several friends. Nancy's mother was once a concert violinist, before marriage to a gifted, unique man who brought his family to an abandoned western town in Colorado to work his own mine. Nancy grew up high in the mountains, watching her father go off to pull gold, copper and silver from the land. Her mother never seriously played the violin again, a story heartbreakingly familiar to many of our mothers. Yet the family instrument, over a hundred years old, is still with Nancy. And as is probably not surprising, she can play. At the reading that night she opened the second half with a melancholy Celtic tune, so that we were brought all the way in to the soul, as if deep on our knees.

Nancy's mother, despite a recent stroke and its many hearbreaking repercussions, was there to see it all: her violin brought out and played before an audience, Nancy reading about her healing journey after the loss of her fiancé to flooding whitewaters almost thirty years ago. And how lovely it must have been to beam upon her daughter, to admire Nancy's work in the years since then creating the Drowning Support Network for families whose beloved ones die in water-related accidents. Over the years Nancy has witnessed and carried countless stories of shattering grief, including people who lost family in the 2004 Indonesian tsunami and Katrina. Our last morning there, she emerged from reading her email with tears in her eyes. Families members had written about the loss of their beloved ones, and how difficult it was, even after long periods, to believe their daughter or father was dead and not on an extended journey. Nancy told us about some of the stories, her voice breaking. “I’m not usually like this,” she said, wiping her eyes. “It must have been the poetry last night, and just, oh, everything.”

Yes, everything. I embraced her then, for a few long moments, and we were both held within the sweet sanctuary of her profound good heart. Here, I think, is the currency in all of the Sisters' networks. Sanctuary. Nancy’s spare bedroom, a glass of fine port, a hug, the many support networks we all carry, a poem read over breakfast, a meal, a place to sit and rest. This is the sweet, unexpected blessing that Sisters Singing has given me. I don't think I knew the world could be so welcoming. Again and again, those who only know Jean and I slightly have housed and fed us and treated us like kin. Gifted people with ordinary life foibles and difficulties, yet a true generosity of spirit that holds hearts and feeds lives and saves the soul.

Several years ago I wrote a vision which become the Afterword for Sisters Singing. It envisioned a web of safe houses in which we all nourish, hold and heal each other. A web that is invisible, world-wide, and netted together into one organic whole: each personal web connected to the next, and the next, and so on throughout the planet. What I did not know is that the process of bringing out the book would require me to enter this web as traveler and guest. We have accomplished a national book tour with few monetary resources; the gift of this is that we had to rely on the kindness of friends and the help of the Sisters.

One sister who first heard me read the essay "Safe Houses" aloud and encouraged me to publish it was Ayelet Berman-Cohen. Ayelet saw in that piece some essence of her own life vision: to provide a safe house for visitors, children, guests and travelers. And though she and her family were away the weekend of our visit to Los Angeles, they generously opened their home to us–a true safe house indeed.

Again and again, it has been the same. Good people, solid lives, safe houses. The worldwide network of Safe Houses is as strong and indelible as the vision suggests. Our existing connections and generosities have created a web that is held together by good, good hearts. There is nothing in the universe stronger than this.

And that night by the fire, Nancy, Jean and I sat re-visiting it all, like fingering prayer beads, beginning with our luminous evening at the Unitarian Universalist Church in LA in a sacred sanctuary, 150 people with us, such celebration, such applause! The sanctuary had a glow at the end, as a dozen of the Sisters stood before the audience and bowed together. Deena Metzger and Jami Sieber had just finished their set of joint poetry and music, Deena reading poems from Sisters Singing and her new collection Beauty and Ruin, Jami doing what only she can do, snaking her luminous cello through the poetry so that the words and the music dance together. Deena’s poetry, Jami’s music, two gifted women who love each other beaming their love like starlit galaxies across the stage.

Oh, the goodness of it all. Deena and Jami followed an already full evening of women's sacred writing. There was Danelia Wild, who was at the core of creating the reading itself—finding the venue, handling details, and in her usual way, creating a wonderful spread of flowers and food–then reading beautifully of her mother leaving Ireland as a young woman, yearning and longing dancing through each lyrical line. And Lawrie Hartt standing before the audience with her great and glorious resonant voice, sharing her poetry of journey, spiritual insight and reconciliation. Deborah Edler Brown, stunning the audience with her reading, including the searing “Women’s Work” which broke open everyone’s heart. Reem Hammad and her lovely piece about her grandmother and the care with which she’d been tended and raised by strong and caring women’s hands. Carmen Rita Menendez opening the evening with “Beets of Life”, with the wisdom and rare wit that is hers alone. Sharon Simone giving a beautiful reading of her ethereal poetry in the hushed and expectant room. Lori Levy, who I met for the first time that night, reading her poem “The Blue Embrace”, clear and lovely. And ending with the shaman Valerie Wolf/Grandmother White Bear, reading her dream “The Peacemaker’s Gift” about grief and hope, and the work we must all do to bring forth a peaceful future.

Yes, the room glowed and our ancestors hummed through the centuries as we stood together that night at the end of it all. It was the same on Monday evening in Santa Barbara, where many of the same poets read their work. And we were joined by two new voices that night. The luminous Holly Metz and her family joined us, her young sons running up into her arms after her beautiful reading of her piece "Owl." And Maria Papacostaki, poet, healer and racounteur, had traveled from Philadelphia to Santa Barbara, where she studies depth psychology, to read with us that night–her poetry beautiful, melancholy, juicy as ever.

It was Maria who brought us to Lori Pye and the Institute for Cultural Change, who had sponsored our reading, found the venue at the Montecito Library, and spread the word in Santa Barbara. It was a real delight to meet Lori, to turn again to find a friendly, intelligent and wise sister, to see that there truly are sisters and brothers all over the world. I had marveled at Lori's work fostering inner change and cultural transformation on the Institute's lovely web site. Hand to hand to hand, one to one, we find each other.

Around the fire long into Monday evening we lingered quite a while on one other gathering: a Sisters circle on Sunday at the quintessential safe house: Deena Metzger's home. The Sisters shared a meal and spoke our stories, doing as we do, carrying the thread. How luscious to introduce Nancy Rigg and Reem Hammad to the community at Deena’s home, to see Reem slide into the group as if she’d always been there, to hear Nancy and Deb Brown jamming on guitar and violin like old friends. And then that next night, sitting with Nancy in another Safe House friendly by the fire. Oh the moon, oh the ocean, oh these worlds of Sisters. And at the essence of it all: sanctuary. That is what our book provides, and what our extended community offers. Together, we are learning how to walk another way, hands extended, arms open–the body, the home, the pages of a book becoming sanctuary, safe house, that embrace that flows through all human meaning and warms us, the wise grandmother in the center of the web, dreaming us all.

Home Stream

There are blessed, unending cycles in this world. We leave and return to the same places again and again, as if we are called by some force greater than we know. Perhaps we can't help it–we are a round planet traveling a circular orbit around a great spherical Sun. Every day we live cycles deep in our bones: day and night, moon waxing and waning, we slip in and out of the dreaming and non-dreaming worlds like a seal diving into the waves and splashing up for air. We leave home and we return, like whales traversing great oceans, or winged creatures traveling hundreds of miles each year to track light and warmth. When it is time to make new babies, salmon leave the ocean to swim upcurrent through rivers and streams, precisely back to home stream, the place where they were birthed.

Returning. The year I turned thirty, I met a woman. I had heard her name years before, because someone had mentioned intimate letters that this woman and a friend had written to each other over many years. One day they brought their intimate lives public and read these letters to an audience. This woman and her friend, as young mothers and emerging writers, would squeeze hard-won writing time together–and then go into separate rooms to write to each other. Something about this writerly intimacy, this act of breathing a letter out onto the page in a way that brought out the truth more deeply than anything that could be said, cut deep into my young heart. Here lie the essence of what written language could do to bring us together, cutting past the mundane world to touch what is authentic, melancholy, true in the soul. This is what that woman knew.

One night I saw her read her poetry, and sat dazzled. And in a rare moment after the reading when everyone was talking excitedly to each other, I turned to find her standing alone, a smaller being than she had seemed at the podium, suddenly stranded and a little shy. It was as if the waters had parted unexpectedly, and only momentarily– and though I was young and unformed and entirely undone by life and injury–I found it in myself to do the thing that would utterly and irrevocably change my life. I walked up to the poet Deena Metzger, stuttered a greeting, and told her I wanted to write.

So many of us have these stories. I think they are creation myths, stories of how our births came about, how we found the person fated to provide a signpost, saying Here, come this way, look up the canyon into these hills, see the light moving across the land. Look. It is possible to see, to look, to truly be alive. This is my writer's birth story: how I came to find Deena--creation-woman, animal dreamer, wise healer, luminous poet riding the night sky. For fifty years she has sought and created beauty in the written word, tracking like a lover the great language-song floating all around us on streams of pure air.

Deena. She is my home stream, that place I return seasonally in the endless cycles of growth and death. She is the place I come to as I wend my way through life's tempering dance, the spawning of what is new and laying down what is old. It has been two decades since the night we met, and we have become teacher and student, beloved friends, kin, and colleagues. And each year, like a magnetic pull, I follow the night stars, or my sense of smell, or some pulling force like tides at the new moon, and ride the waves towards her. Home stream, where I learned anything that mattered to me, and found the Self who could live this life and bear it. Deena activated and sheltered my writing and my soul for years, then when it was time for me to leave her town, like any good mother she gently released me into my life and work and ancestral destiny. And still, always and everywhere, every year: I return.

This first week of June is like any other week in these Sister-filled days: I check email and affirm details and gather people and poets and musicians and plan like a weaver our Sisters Singing gatherings. The river I am in is rushing wildly, great fast-moving Sister-tides sweeping me along, and I am tumbling and exuberant and managing to stay afloat and ride it all. But too, this week is not like any other week, for in three days I will enter again my own beloved, constant cycle: I will travel south towards home stream. And I will land at the home of Deena Metzger.

How many times have I done this? How many journeys have there been, packing the car and traversing the waves southward, following the scent that was imprinted on me twenty years ago when we first met and I sat haltingly– quiet girl with quiet pen–in a circle in her home and began to write? Who could have known, then, what was to come? But we cannot imagine our fates, and our futures are as unwritten and even unlikely as the future that young girl is now living. We simply cannot know, in any way, what is coming.

Some time in 2006, when I began to have a sense of the marvelous book we had in Sisters Singing, I wrote to my beloved Deena and asked if she would read the manuscript and write a Foreword. I left a huge binder at her home, and one day, in the weeks that followed, on my screen in that great transmission of electric wires and pure love, it arrived in my lap. Her Foreword is a stunning piece of writing about women and the sacred and the beauty of our book. It was one of those moments when perhaps I glimpsed the future that Sisters Singing would necessarily have. I sat back, in silence. Sucked in my breath. And prayed.

Now this: the joy of reunion. Sisters Singing moving into the world with great light and happiness, me gathering up the Sisters where I can find them so that we can be together and continue to thread the web that the grandmothers want us to weave and live. Here is the woman who showed me the way, who first taught me that the ancestors and grandmother spirits are not just stories or hopeful dreams. They are real and they have intentions and we are their partners. She taught me how to do what I do, and in that, Deena is the original blessing of Sisters Singing, and the reason the book exists.

I sit in my little upstairs room and gaze at the redwoods out the window. A moment ago as I was writing a great black Crow flew by. A squirrel family lives in these trees; baby squirrel yesterday was hopping our fence and checking out our garden. This is a sign of the newness of the spirit, I think, the possibility of the coming time. Soon Jean and I will pack ourselves and our things, put some books in the trunk, point our hearts and steering wheel southward, and make our way towards home stream. And on Saturday June 6 in LA, in my great happiness I will stand before an audience and welcome Deena Metzger and her poetry and her light and her great, astonishing heart. And together with Sisters Singing, we will introduce to the world her new collection of poems, Ruin and Beauty–dazzling pieces of vision of which the beloved writer Susan Griffin says, 'If as a poet I have long believed that poetry can save the world, what I want to say now is: this poetry can save the world.'

This poetry can save the world. This is the landscape we have entered. All of it: these praise songs to the divine in Deena's language and in our luscious book of Sisters prayers. I think of June 6 and am thrilled: so many beloved poets and writers will read that night that I can hardly imagine the joy of it all. And so I prepare, keep things in place, navigate details and flyers and books and sound systems. But in my heart, there is a great tingling. I often say that Sisters Singing is a great gathering of community. The home stream where I am going is one of those places where community hums and the great heart at the center of the world pulses with love.

Soon I will look out on the hills of Deena’s land, hold her beloved self. She is, always, smaller in body than I expect, and for all her largeness of mind and heart, she is still a little shy. I like to sweep her up in my arms and hold her close. And this I will do, in just a few days.

There are moments in our lives that are made of universal breath, when our eyes are opened and we awaken to ourselves, and to the pure Beauty at the core of Creation. Deena provided such a moment for me. Some debts are unpayable, except to be named as such. Or, the way to pay the debt is to fully live the gift. So here I am. I fully live what you offered me, my Deena. There are cycles in this world, over and over, around and within. In this life, my beloved, wherever you are, I will find your scent, I will follow your imprint, in whatever realm you reside, I will always return to you.