Cycles of Trauma and Beauty

This piece was originally posted in The Way of the Rose Facebook group. I’ve been working on it in my head for a couple of years. It has been modified a bit for a different audience. For information about Way of the Rose please check out : www.wayoftherose.org

AFTER READING LUCRETIUS, I GO TO THE POND — Mary Oliver

The slippery green frog
that went to his death
in the heron’s pink throat
was my small brother,

and the heron
with the white plumes
like a crown on his head
who is washing now his great sword-beak
in the shining pond is my tall thin brother.

My heart dresses in black
And dances.

Smyrna, daughter of the king of Cypress, fails to honor Aphrodite and so the goddess curses her to fall in love with her father. After an incestuous union, Smyrna flees and prays to the gods to make her invisible. The gods answer in typical, mischievous style, and transform her into a myrtle tree. Months later the tree splits open and Adonis is born; the most beautiful child to ever live. Aphrodite in turn falls in love with Adonis who is eventually gored by a boar and dies in her arms. As he bleeds out into the river water, his blood turns into the anemone flower.

Myth is riddled with cycles of trauma and beauty. One cycles into the next in a wheel. Nature does this too. The pine barren burns so the seed pod can open. The flood makes the river bank fertile.

In Missing Mary, Charlene Spretnak identifies the Crusades as the traumatic seed that grew into the European Renaissance. The returning soldiers brought back numerous statues, prayer beads, practices and the rose. We know some of these statues of Isis holding baby Horus as black Madonnas. This resulted in an explosion of Marian devotion, and a consequential return of the Divine Mother to Europe. Spretnak draws a direct line between the trauma of the Crusades and the explosion of art that Europe has not seen since.

The returning crusaders brought back to Europe, beginning in the early twelfth century, numerous Near East goddess statues, prayer beads, and the rose, all of which influenced the creative burst of new religious imagery and practices. Yet the impulse for the great medieval honoring of Mary — at once intensely spiritual and physical — was indigenous. It burgeoned forth from a profound correction, in all quarters of medieval society, of that which had been denied for several hundred years by the grimly misogynist Early Church Fathers in the era that used to be called the “Dark Ages.” This pall was replaced by an extraordinary flowering of creativity. The breadth and depth of aesthetic brilliance evoked by communion with the Maternal Matrix during the Middle Ages in art, architecture, and religion has never again been experienced in the West. (Missing Mary: the Queen of Heaven and Her Reemergence in the Modern Church, Charlene Spretnak, pp 208-209)

Many of us experience what is going on with the environment and the planet as trauma. I went through a period of grief about this and I came out the other side with a faith that everything is going to turn out okay. I don’t know how, and I might not see it in this body, but stuff will work out. I can’t be responsible for the behavior of the entire human race. I can be responsible for mine, and I can try to plant seeds that will grow into something more.

I think one of the best ways we can honor the world right now is by learning how to get along; learning how to listen better. As long as as there are bombs dropping on children anywhere on the planet, it doesn’t matter how many solar panels I put on my roof. The proof that we don’t currently, as a species, have the mindset to do the work before us is in the quantity of military explosives currently dropping on land, trees, animals, and children. So long as we see other lands and other children as less important than our own, we do not have the capacity of care required to do the work that needs to be done.

Every bomb is a sword in the heart of the world.

The idea that we can have unlimited, exponential growth on a planet with limited resources makes no sense. The idea that the entirety of the environmental challenges in front of us are solely related to carbon makes no sense. We keep hearing about carbon because manipulating carbon is very profitable for certain people. The oligarchs who rule us fly around in carbon spewing flying machines while lecturing us about the carbon impact of our herb gardens. I will say it now: planting an herb garden is always good.

The challenges in front of us are too complex for us to even understand. Science can only make general guesses about manipulating complex systems. One small change in carbon over HERE can have devastating effects over THERE. Every lever science moves in this situation can only create unknown outcomes.

In the math of complexity theory, the farther out we try to predict the behavior of a complex system, the more likely we are to be wrong. The so-called “butterfly effect,” is just a metaphor for the fact that a very small variability at point A can turn into a catastrophic event at point B. A complex system is a delicate balance of inputs and new energy. Too much ‘newness’ and the system disintegrates into fragments and chaos. Too little newness and the system stagnates and fades into nothing. The collapse of species diversity creates a situation in the system where there is too little information, too little ‘newness.’

Mathematically, the fact that we are alive depends on things collapsing. It depends on things falling apart. If this didn’t happen we would just fade into shadows and be nothing. I think to some degree that our modern obsession with avoiding adversity has cost us dearly.

At some point Adonis needs to die. At some point, beauty is turned to blood in a river somewhere or, if we zoom out the perceptive lens of Kali, She eats it all in end. She eats Time itself. Aphrodite holds her lover in the river and then Kali eats Beauty itself. And then … what? A big …

Bang?

Consider that the universe may be just a pile of dimensions stacked on top of each other. Mathematically, a plane is not perfectly flat but has a very slight curve to it. If you extend that plane in all directions far enough, it starts to curve. Extend it to infinity and it wraps back in on itself in a toroidal shape. If you could get in a spaceship and fly in a straight line long enough, you would return to where you started.

So it goes.

Not all circles and cycles are easy. Cycles of violence, war, disease and abuse all exist simultaneously with art, poetry and music. In the story of the Great Peacemaker, the Haudenosaunee people were at war with each other for generations. Cycle upon cycles of war, violence and abuse ended only when the people, guided by the vision of the Peacemaker, became so exhausted with those cycles that they finally stopped.

Humans have never existed in a state of pastoral utopia. Adversity exists and has always existed. It will find us regardless of how hard we try to avoid it. Prior to modern medicine a great many of us died before we were 12. Now we have the diseases of our success: obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer … all diseases of corruption and excess. Not so much the corruption of the individual but the corruption and excess of a system that presumes to be the very Mind of God.

And so, I think the true path forward for us starts not with the head, but with the heart. We are not going to think our way out of this. Something needs to change, desperately; everyone feels it. There will be no peace in the world until there is peace in our hearts. So long as bombs rain down on children, the last thing we need to work on is our head. The last thing we need is another Science Solution that will eventually be weaponized and turned against us.

The idea that we as humans are capable of destroying Her, in all Her glory, is the height of our arrogance. To quote George Carlin, “The planet is fine. The people are fucked.” Perhaps, yes, we are capable of destroying ourselves and laying waste to vast chunks of diversity and complexity as we go. She remains. What is extinction when my own body is a complex collection of systems and organisms who are distinctly me, and also not me? As writer Sophie Strand points out, the moment of death is also a singular explosion of new life, as our rotting body becomes home and food for bugs, birds, mushrooms and germs.

Mythology is often violent because Nature is often violent. The hurricane that rips the trees out of the ground and tosses them like toothpicks is violent. The lion’s teeth, piercing the neck of the antelope is violent. But look at that antelope, she knows what this is. There is look of rapture on her face even as she is consumed. This is the truth of bliss, it contains within it the knowing that we too, are food.

I believe with all my heart that She want us here with Her for the long haul. All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again. Our Lady of Woodstock calls on all people to be mothers to the world. The Garden of Eden is all around us and we are its guardians. Men, women, and children can all tend the garden. We need to mother Her as She mothers us.

The Moon is only full or empty for a short time. Most of the time the Moon is flowing from one state to the next. The truly ‘good’ and the truly ‘bad’ are both fleeting moments, and always the galaxy spins, the solar system spins, the earth spins and we? We go here, we go there, we worry, we fret and eventually She comes and takes us home.

A Monarch butterfly
travels 1000 miles and

Lands in a meadow,
on the branch
where he was born

No great mystery,
He felt the tug of
his tiny, fluttering heart
Pull him into a

Vast, whirling
unknown

Cast about, flung and spun
only to return, softly
where he
began