It seems a strange way to honor my friend Isis—cleaning the house, because she was arguably a worse housekeeper even than I am, if such a thing is possible. But that’s the thing about death, especially when it comes suddenly and unexpectedly. It’s not just the sorrow and the grief, but that it seems to suddenly remove the ground from beneath your feet, leaving you hanging in a kind of vertigo, like those cartoons where the characters run off a cliff and hang in the air, legs pumping, for a long, long minute before they fall. You need something to ground you, something simple and achievable, like doing the dishes and sweeping the floor.
Isis was my friend since we were both in high school, when she was Becky and I was Mimi. For some reason, when I think of her in those days I always see her in a tree, hanging out in the branches on the grounds of our high school. We were fifteen. I had a pack of Tarot cards and a book I’d gotten at henna-haired Mrs. Larsen’s Bookstore down on Hollywood Boulevard. Isis had a pack of cards, too. No one ever taught us to read them—we just did, and then we got ourselves a booth at the Renaissance Faire. It was a camping tent, really, hung with some filmy cloth, and I made myself a princess dress with a high waist out of iridescent gauze, and we told fortunes for days, and hung out with Witches and beadmakers and potters. Isis was smart and funny and cynical and fearless, a round, bossy girl with milk chocolate skin and a huge smile—a smile that always made you think she knew some
Isis went off to college at Antioch and I somehow ended up stuck in LA, going to UCLA and living in a frat house turned commune, in one big room with nine people. My boyfriend and I shared the closet together. Isis came to visit once; I could tell she didn’t approve of my lifestyle, which really had little about it to approve of. We didn’t talk for a long time, but finally reconnected, I think, at our High School 10th class reunion. By then I had cleaned up my act, ditched the drugs and the boyfriend and actually had a book scheduled to be published. I had also become Starhawk, and she had become Isis. We’d each found our way to the Goddess, on separate paths, but we became friends again. I remember walks in the park when her daughter Morgan was a baby, with our big dog Arnold washing Morgan’s face with his tongue as she sat in her stroller. The baby didn’t seem to mind, and neither did Isis. Isis came to Witch camp–the first we ever did. Morgan was around four, then, and we went climbing on the rocks to look at the tide pools. “Hold my hand, and you won’t fall,” Morgan told me.
Isis own mother died that summer, and she got the news at camp. I remember her heartfelt grief, I see her crying with a wail that was like the essence of mourning. And then she found solace with a hot naturopath, making the tent shake as she reconnected to the life force. Isis didn’t hold back—neither her grief nor her love of life.
One thing I loved about Isis is that she never hesitated to tell me the truth. She was one of the few people I let read my novels in draft, and I knew I could count on her to let me know if I went off track. Johanna, in Walking to Mercury, is not Isis—that is, the facts of her relationship to Maya are not the facts of our lives. But something of the emotional truth is there. Once Isis had a draft of the book in her car, and her lover read it and got furious at her.
“You never told me that you and Starhawk were lovers!”
“We weren’t!”
“Don’t lie! This is you! You can’t tell me it isn’t you!”
I took that as a compliment. We weren’t lovers, in the physical sense, but Isis is one of the people I dearly love. I learned so much from her. I learned to walk down the street and look people in the eye and smile and say, “How ‘ya doin?” I learned how someone could face years of illness and pain with optimism and grace, and still take so much pleasure in life, even as her life grew more restricted. She’s one of the people in my life who made me who I am.
I’m looking at one of her last Facebook Posts:
“I found out today that I’m happy. No matter what happens, under it all, I’m just happy. How great is that?!!!!”
Be happy, Isis, even as we are sad, so sad that you are no longer here to laugh with and scold us and give us that look. Go shed that body of pain, and get ready for the next adventure.
Weaver, weaver, weave her thread
Whole and strong into your web.
Healer, healer heal her pain,
In love may she return again.
Venus Transit and Recall Elections
A beautiful, wild and windy day here in the Cazadero Hills—the day of the Venus Transit when Venus passes directly in front of the sun, a sort of Venusian solar eclipse. It’s an alignment that happened eight years ago—and not again for another century or more. Coupled with a lunar eclipse last night. I’m not much of an astrologer, but those who are say this is a potent moment for calling in the energies of harmony, nurturing and love, the return of the Goddess.
Goddess knows, we need those energies! For today is the day of many state primaries, and the kickoff of the summer election season.
Whatever your politics, whether you vote or don’t vote, whether you register Democrat or Republican, Green or Libertarian, you are about to be subjected to a barrage of negativity that will go on for months and months, fueled by the deep pockets of billionaires who are now free to spend as much as they want to buy elections. The Republicans alone have a war chest of a billion dollars! Think how many mortgages in trouble that money could save, or how many students could get a free college education! Instead, it will be spent to blanket the country with a miasma of negativity, and the Democrats will be scrambling to do their own counterattacks. Energetically, we can prepare to live under a kind of gray miasma, a kind of psychic smog. Yuck!
There are some things we can do about this in the practical realms—ranging from contributing money to good causes to getting out in the streets and staying there, as the students and workers in Quebec have been doing for weeks. A good, loud casserole—that means banging pots and pans each night as a political protest—might help drive away some evil spirits.
But I want to talk about what we can do energetically. If you are an ultra-rational sort who doesn’t believe in the woo-woo stuff, here’s where you can stop reading and go do something productive with your day. But I will say this—whether or not you believe this can influence the larger world, this kind of magic will help shift your own energy. If you find yourself spinning off into cycles of fear—anquish—despair—fear, this will help! And if you have more positive energies of your own available, you will be more effective at all the practical things you do.
So if you’re with me, let’s work on shifting the energy around all this. Why should we quietly lie down and suffer under the toxic thought-blanket the political fabricators are laying over us? What would happen if a whole lot of us used our intention and focused imaginations to shift the energies? And why not use some of the energy of this Venus transit—energies which will continue to flood in over the next weeks.
So here’s the idea—a simple meditation you can do alone or in groups, when you have a spare moment or when you find yourself spinning off into those vortexes of impotent rage, stop and do this:
Visualize drains for all the negativity, the fear-mongering and the lies. Like little spinning whirlwinds, spinning counterclockwise, dust devils sweeping up the miasma of the psychic smog, spindles gathering the toxic wool and spinning it down back to earth, down to the fiery magma below us to transform back into pure energy.
Then visualize a clockwise spiral, a rising vortex of compassion, love and hope. You could imagine spinning it around some symbol of justice and freedom—personally, I find the Statue of Liberty to be a potent Goddess symbol.
Release that energy, and ground. Touch the ground, absorb some good, healing energies from the earth, and draw in what you need for your own work and well-being.
Today, June 5, I and Selena Fox of Circle Sanctuary invite our allies to focus on Wisconsin, using the Goddess atop the State Capitol as a beacon to rouse the forces of truth and justice. For today is vote on the recall of Scott Walker, the union-busting governor who was the focus of protests and a sit-in in the Capitol in January of 2011, at the same time as the Arab Spring. Republicans are spending millions to defend him. Democrats—not so much. But this election isn’t just about Democrats and Republicans, it’s a test of whether or not massive amounts of money can determine who gets into office or who stays. Generally the answer to that is ‘yes’—whoever spends the most wins the race. Money is one form of energy, and most of us don’t have a lot of it. But we have other forms of energy—let’s see what we can do!
Wisconsin State Capitol buidling with the Goddess on top!