September 22, 2009
Ah, the autum equinox is upon us! Mabon, when our day divided equally into day and night. A rare and perfect balance.
Last night, I slept for twelve hours – six of daylight, six of darkness. I dreamed that my bed was covered in a canopy – a luminous, opaque grey cobweb, and there were thousands and thousands of spiders and their babies clinging with ferocious delicacy to its threads.
In my dream, I believe I watched it, assessed its woolen thickness and its close proximity to my face, the mother and child spiders cleverly plucking their way along their creation with the inspired sensibilities of lute players.
And then I began to utter some archaic, primitive form of understanding-of-you-if-it-brings-deliverance-from-you incantation.
In my dream, this chant summoned the twenty one artists who live in the neighboring rooms. They came in, aghast and yet delighted at the panorama that lay before them.
Some commented that the spiders seemed gathered for a festive meal – the Thanksgiving Day of spiders, where they celebrate whatever it is towards which their society directs most of its gratitude (for the United States, apparently, it’s when those you plan to destroy feed you an grotesquely large meal right before you kill them. So pleasurable.)
Being eaten is growth, right? All part of the cycle of life. Nothing to be frightened of. Well, that’s what we say apologetically to the cows, averting our discomfort as we drive past their slaughterhouses – Cow-schvitz, as E.G. calls that notorious stockyard between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
A meal for spiders. A feast. Would they pick it straight through to the bones? Do spiders ever actually eat humans?
To some of the other artists gathered to the scene, they said I looked like a larvae within a beautiful cocoon – a small pale thing within an enormous white milkweed husk, being watched over lovingly as I grew to maturity.
With all the spider women guarding and protecting me. They pointed to all the other stinging and biting creatures the spiders had captured in their web of protection. See? they are keeping you safe! What shall you hatch into?
And yet a third contingent – the smallest – said, oh, look, they just want to sleep near you! When you wake up, they’ll be gone!
For the past week, we watch the local Mexican men on ladders with their clippers. Snackity Snak. Snakity Snak. Laughter in Spanish that reminds me of home. They are harvesting the tips of the 25′ tall antebellum boxwood hedges.
The hedges are enormous, and now they are tip-less, in sequential order as one comes up the long serpentine drive to the top of the hill.We hear the men plan to sell the tips at Christmastime for wreath-making.
But it’s September now, and the hedges are full of creatures. Since they’ve begun harvesting in the middle of last week, the spiders suspend their hunting hammocks in the empty pockets the men created, and they trap all night. By dawn they are gone, but the mist and dew coat their empty webs, making them hang heavy in silvery white pools.
Another group of onlooking invoked dream-artist witnesses had another theory. Clearly, we are all living in a colony of spider artists! They are harvesting our dreams as we sleep! Our thoughts are their food! In the morning, when they are gone, they tucked away within their secret places, creating art from our lives!
They continued to discuss amongst themselves. From beneath my canopy, my incantation of deliverance continued itself while I fell back to sleep. In this new dream within a dream, I found myself swimming in a river, heading upstream towards its source.
I recognized this river – it is connected to the James River (incidentally, the very same river along which the first Thanksgiving took place). It runs behind the Adaduth Sholom Synagogue in Lynchburg.
We walked to this river on Rosh Hashanah to perform and observe and create the Tachlich ritual – casting away our shortcomings, our insecurities, our ruts and our self-limiting habits and our weaknesses into the water. Deciding not to carry them with us into the new year.
The Hebrew word tashlich means “you shall cast away.” What you decide to cast away is entirely up to you.
This year I learned that for Tachlich, water with fish is optimal – since fish do not have eyelids, their eyes are always open. Thus, they are not subject to evil, which sneaks up whilst we are (in one sense or another) sleeping. As such, they are excellent witnesses.
In my dream-within-a-dream, I was an open-eyed fish swimming in a sea of cast-off sins, beneath a canopy covered in spiders.
Within the nesting dream, the spiders above me are playing celestial music of the webs, the cobweb their harp, their lyre, their lute.
Since the Jewish calendar is lunar, the celebrations follow the pagan observations – this time, Equinox, or Mabon. A time to celebrate mystery. A time of prosperity in the harvest, of security and self-confidence. Go out into the fields, under the sky, and find courage.
Again, let us take this opportunity to say: fuck housework.
Enjoy the fruits of our personal harvests. All the energy containing within these fruits will nourish us in winter.
Where in days gone by, people had to protect themselves for a long winter of hardship ahead, we are liberated from the cycles of survival. We can begin to connect ourselves for a winter of intimacy and community in the months ahead.
When the urge arises to protect, choose connect instead.
It’s overcast, with a dramatic topography of cloud crawling over the Blue Ridge Mountains. The sky looks rather like the cobweb canopy of my dream. It’s cool, and very wet. Everything is muffled, but far from quiet – crows, crickets, the usual rusty-throated crew are celebrating.
And so shall we – with an equinox dance party tonight here at VCCA.