My friend Raena Shirali was in town this past week, and it was such a joy to spend time together. I’m pretty sure we haven’t seen each other since she graduated with her MFA in 2015, and we haven’t been particularly good about keeping in touch, but when we met up for lunch we talked for an hour and a half, picking up the thread as if we’d just set it down last week. It’s strange to need to catch someone up on the better part of a fairly tumultuous decade of your life, but not to feel awkward about it, and instead to just laugh and joke like the old friends you are.
Raena was in town as a guest of the department, to give guest feedback on graduate students’ manuscripts. As is usual for visiting writers, she gave a reading on Friday from her 2022 poetry collection, summonings, which investigates the practice of witch hunting in certain regions of India. The collection is complicated, polyvocal, rigorously researched, meticulously crafted. It’s also gorgeously rendered, deeply humane, and profoundly affecting. Raena’s reading was a reflection of the work of her book: she was prepared and rehearsed, with a planned arc to introduce us to her subject matter in a deliberate, paced fashion. This sounds almost cold in the description, but she was relaxed and personable, and animated with a passion that made every line crackle with energy. In academic poetry circles, we typically don’t applaud until the very end of a poet’s reading; usually you get at most an appreciative “hmm” in the quiet after a poem’s close. But at Raena’s reading there was applause after the very first poem, and after each poem thereafter. The work was too good to hold it in.
So: consider all of the paragraph above not only as sincere admiration, but also as background for this one. I have a complicated relationship with poetry, with my formal training, with the art that I now make, in part because it’s not what I was ‘supposed’ to do, and in part because it’s so very specific to a rather tiny religion. I sometimes feel like a hothouse plant: I’m thriving in my particular specialized environment of pagan liturgical and devotional composition, and I’m proud of the work I’ve produced. But when you take me out of my greenhouse — when I go to dinner with my wildly talented friend and a few colleagues who teach or study in the same academic/creative discipline that I studied, and then somebody asks me what I’m working on — the air feels cold, and I shrink. My work feels small.
But here’s the most beautiful thing: not a single person at the table expressed that sense of smallness. Instead, they all expressed interest and curiosity about the work I do, because writers are — we writers are — generous and engaged by default. The world is large and full of possibilities, and we want to know about them. And I know that, but it’s so easy to forget, to feel like you’ve laid aside (even forgotten, or lost!) the tools of your trade, when in fact you’ve honed and repurposed them. So to interact with a friend’s work, to feel amazed and impressed by her skill and artistry, and then to also feel so generously drawn in and lifted up…it was a true gift.
This was going to be a purely personal post, without any real druid content, but as I was closing out the above paragraph I remembered the cards I’d pulled on Friday morning. I’ve been doing occasional readings with Jane Brideson’s Wisdom of the Cailleach deck this winter season, and to be honest I’ve been very close to putting that deck away for a while: it’s been depressing. Over and over A’ Chailleach has given me gloomy cards without respite: “you stand at a crossroads, you must make the hard choice, you have a long, toilsome road ahead of you.” Great, wow, thanks for this actionable information. I know very well that I’m in the middle of a years-long struggle wherein I try to balance on the knife’s edge between financial, professional stability and artistic development and fulfillment; I don’t need the perspective of a goddess older than bones to see that.
But Friday morning, at the end of a grueling week, I still asked Her for whatever blessings or wisdom she might hold for me. I pulled first the Sun: its joy, its light and pleasure. And I drew the Deer Mother: her protection and support, and even more her solace. And I pulled the Fire Pit, the burning fire of creativity and vigor.
I’m still in the struggle; I still need to work quite hard and purposefully to create balance. I have to be my own protective Deer Mother and carve out space where my art can, to paraphrase Brideson, travel a twisted track to the wild, sacred places where it can thrive.
But today, with inspiration and the buoying of friends and the joyful light of the Sun, that twisted, thorny, terror-strewn track feels ever-so-slightly more passable.
Cardinal & Locust 