The Twelve Wild Swans Read online

  Is there a place in your body you can identify as holding this state—or a posture you can take, or a gesture you can make? Touch that place and breathe into it.

  Pick one image, one thing you can visualize from this place. Hold it in your mind’s eye as you touch that special place on your body.

  Find a word or phrase you can say that reminds you of this state. Say the word, touch the place on your body, and hold your image in your mind.

  When you do these three things together, you have created your anchor. You can use your anchor anytime to bring you into this core state of being. Breathe into your anchor; tell yourself that the more you use it, the stronger it will become.

  Now let go of your anchor and come back, or go on to the following:

  Inflated/Deflated Self

  In sacred space, use your anchor to your core worth. Take a moment to notice how your body feels, how you’re breathing. Open your eyes and notice how you perceive the people or scene around you.

  Now drop your anchor. Shake out your hands, close your eyes, and let yourself begin to spin the most inflated, puffed-up vision you can invent about yourself as a leader, teacher, healer. Really let your ego run wild here, and don’t censor yourself.

  What are you wearing in this fantasy? How does your body look? How do you feel inside it?

  What situation are you in? What are you doing or saying? Who is around you, and how are they responding to you?

  What thoughts go through your head? What is your inner dialogue?

  What energies do you sense around you? Directed at you? Coming from you?

  What emotions are you feeling?

  What are the benefits you receive from this state of being?

  Is there a price you pay for being in this state?

  In this state, what choices do you perceive that you have?

  Are there people or situations in your daily life that pull you into or toward this state of being?

  Open your eyes for a moment. Look around you. How do you perceive others from this state?

  Now close your eyes, shake out your hands, and drop this state. Use your anchor, breathe deeply, and bring yourself back to your core worth.

  What has changed? What do you notice that is different?

  When you’ve firmly reestablished your core worth, close your eyes and let your anchor drop. Shake out your hands, breathe deeply, and now let yourself move into your most deflated state. You know—that state you’re in when you look in the mirror and gasp, when you can’t do anything right. We’ve all been there; just take a moment and find it. Breathe into it and let it fill you.

  What are you wearing in this deflated state? How does your body look? How do you feel inside it?

  What situation are you in? What are you doing or saying? Who is around you, and how are they responding to you?

  What thoughts go through your head? What is your inner dialogue?

  What energies do you sense around you? Directed at you? Coming from you?

  What emotions are you feeling?

  What are the benefits you receive from this state of being?

  Is there a price you pay for being in this state?

  In this state, what choices do you perceive that you have?

  Are there people or situations in your daily life that pull you into or toward this state of being?

  Open your eyes for a moment. Look around you. How do you perceive others from this state?

  Now close your eyes, shake out your hands, and drop this state. Use your anchor, breathe deeply, and bring yourself back to your core worth.

  What has changed? What do you notice that is different?

  Now relax, and come back into your ordinary consciousness. Take some time to talk over this exercise with your partner and then with the group. If you are alone, get out your journal and write out what you remember and what insights you may have received.

  When we first did this exercise in the Vancouver Witchcamp many years ago, I had a truly life-changing experience. My inflated self was a fiery, spiritual/political revolutionary: slim, gorgeous, dressed in torn jeans, and making a speech to a large crowd that was inspiring them to action. All eyes were on me: I was the center of attention and yet essentially alone, all my personal needs subsumed to my total dedication to the cause.

  To my surprise, I found that my deflated self was very similar. I was physically puffier, more sluggish, and not nearly so gorgeous, still dressed in ragged clothes and this time making a speech that no one was listening to. I was still utterly alone, isolated and lonely, marked by a tragic sense of grief.

  But anchored to my core sense of worth, I was a friendly, gregarious, social person who had lots of friends. Not a noble or tragic figure, just an ordinary human being who was actually more interested in the people around her than concerned about how they saw her. My anchoring phrase was I can love and be loved.

  The exercise shook my self-perception. My life had been colored by the sorrow of my father’s death when I was five years old and by my mother’s ongoing grief and depression. In fact, I had always secretly felt that underlying grief was my true core.

  The exercise revealed to me that the opposite was true. Grief was something that had happened to me—but it was not me. My mother’s life had been lonely—but mine, in reality, wasn’t. At my deepest level, I had strong needs for real, vitalizing connections with others, and great abilities for making those connections. Not only that: I tended to be happy, cheerful, and optimistic. What a blow to the ego!

  It was, however, a lifesaving blow, part of the work that allows me to keep some semblance of sanity while leading a life as a public Witch. Many people find that their inflated and deflated selves are mirror images of each other. And they both are often characterized by disconnection and isolation, while the core worth state allows us to bond with others.

  The key to inflation/deflation is the inner state, not the outer circumstances. Some people find that their inflated fantasy is an indication of some valid, real-life dream or goal. In the years since we first invented this exercise, I have lived out both my inflated and my deflated fantasies: that is, I’ve given fiery speeches that moved people, and other talks that fell flat. I’m not always aware of when I’m being pulled into inflation or deflation, but I use my anchor constantly, and I work on it.

  The more you use your anchor, the easier it becomes to move into your state of core worth. A strong, well-developed anchor is also a necessary safety line when practicing other advanced techniques we will explore on this path. As Pagans practicing an earth-based spirituality in North America, we inherit a deeply painful contradiction. The very core of our spiritual life is our bond with the land, yet the land we live on was stolen from its original people. Their bonds were too often forcibly ruptured; their sacred places continue to be desecrated. Most of us come from ancestors that originated elsewhere. Yet this is where we were born; this is the land we know and love. How do we even begin healing this wound?

  Like Rose, we must begin by facing the reality of our situation, unearthing the hidden histories. But Rose does not wallow in guilt, nor does she remain fixed on the past. She sets out on a quest. We must do the same. We can resolve the pain of the past only by looking toward the future, asking, “What work do we need to do to make our communities ones that can foster diversity and resilience? How can we learn to know and begin to heal the land we live on? How do we become indigenous again?”

  In the Goddess tradition, the community we serve is not limited to those who are alive today. We serve the unborn, those generations who will come after us, and we are constantly called to think of their interests, to create and preserve a world that can offer them a vibrant and healthy life. Our community also includes our beloved dead, our ancestors, those who have gone before us, who may be a source of both wisdom and challenges. The world we come into is full of the consequences of ill wishes, greed, and shortsighted decisions. We inherit the resulting injustices and imbalances. Yet we also inherit a wo
rld of skills, knowledge, and material goods that are also gifts of the ancestors.

  In the Craft, the traditional time for working with the beloved dead is around Samhain or Halloween—when, we say, “the veil is thin that divides the worlds.” In many other indigenous traditions, however, the ancestors are honored on a daily basis.

  “In West African tradition, we address the ancestors every day, as well as at specific times of the year,” says Luisah Teish, author of Jambalaya and Carnival of the Spirit. Because she comes out of an unbroken tradition that has preserved knowledge long lost to the Craft, her insights and perspectives have been a strong influence on the development of the Reclaiming tradition.

  Teish is a big woman in every way—tall, charismatic, bighearted, with a loud, deep voice and a striking presence. When she enters a room, every eye turns toward her. A trained dancer, she moves with sensual grace and contained power. She wears bright clothes and head wraps that reflect her African heritage and the Yoruba religious traditions in which she is an initiated priestess of Oshun, the orisha or spirit power that rules love and sexuality.

  Teish describes how, in West Africa, the largest yam is saved back after the harvest to become the ancestral yam. Honor is paid and ceremonies are performed, and then it is broken into pieces to provide the seed for the next year’s crop. “We are like the pieces of that ancestral yam,” she says. “We each contain all the knowledge that was coded into the original, and we can draw on that knowledge when we need it.”

  For many of us, calling on our ancestors is not easy. Our ancestors are inevitably entwined with our families, and for many of us our families have been a source of wounding as well as strength. And most of us have come to the Goddess tradition from some other religious background. Our immediate ancestors may have been Catholics, Jews, Protestants, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, or staunch secular humanists, but few of them were Witches. They may have been people whose values we have rejected. How then, can we call on them as allies and helpers?

  The work of coming to terms with our heritage can begin, very simply, by naming our ancestors.

  Naming Our Ancestors

  Many years ago, at a feminist conference in Barcelona, I was invited to be part of a panel entitled “Reclaiming Our Ancestors.” We were an eclectic group: besides me, there was a Frenchwoman discussing forgotten women authors, a Spanish woman historian, an Australian aboriginal woman, and a Maori. The Maori woman began, with a smile, by saying that the title of the panel didn’t apply to her. She had no need to reclaim her ancestors; she had never lost them, and indeed could recite their names for twenty-five generations back. The aboriginal woman chimed in to agree. She, too, knew the names of her ancestors back to the dawn of time.

  Few of us can say the same. The simple challenge of naming our ancestors may make us aware of just how limited our knowledge is. As a nation of immigrants, we tend to cut off the past.

  If you are adopted, you may wish to name both the lineage of your adoptive family and that of your biological family, if you know it.

  If you are working alone, you can write these names out in your Book of Shadows. If you are working in a group, ground, create sacred space, and go in a circle clockwise, naming yourself and your lineage as far back as you know names—first your mother’s side, and then your father’s. You might also use this exercise as a way to cast a circle.

  “I am Starhawk, daughter of Bertha, daughter of Hannah Rivkeh, daughter of Fanny. And I am Starhawk, daughter of Jack, daughter of Mordechai and Fanny.”

  Name your biological ancestry: “I am Starhawk, daughter of Ukrainian Jews.”

  As simple as this sounds, in a group it can become profoundly uncomfortable and therefore illuminating. In one recent ritual, it must have taken at least forty-five minutes for a group of forty people to simply name themselves in this way. As we went around the circle, people hemmed, hawed, and resisted. Our instructions had been clear—to name one’s biological ancestors—but many people instead named those whom they considered their spiritual ancestors, as if sticking with their biological heritage was simply too uncomfortable. While our circle appeared to be almost all “white,” naming our ancestors brought out the hidden heritages in our group. A third or more of the people there, for example, claimed some Native American ancestry. This exercise is probably most valuable when time is set aside for discussing the emotions it evokes.

  Name those you claim as your spiritual ancestors.

  “I am Starhawk, daughter of Enheduanna and the priestess/poets of ancient Sumer, daughter of the Witches, daughter of Emma Goldman, daughter of the redwoods.”

  In Teish’s tradition, every ritual includes the naming and honoring of the ancestors. She has created a simple chant: “Mojuba O” (moh-yoo-BAH-oh), “love and respect to you.”

  “When we address the ancestors, Mojuba is the first word that is spoken. In Africa, the chanting and naming can go on for hours, or even days,” Teish says.

  In Yoruba ritual, each villager would have an ancestor stick, tied with strips of cloth from the garb of those who had died. The stick is pounded on the earth in rhythm to the chant. When Teish and I work together, she often has people imagine the stick, and we stomp our feet as we do a simple dance around the room. The chant and the pounding of our feet create a base rhythm, above which we call the names of our ancestors, and then Teish begins calling the unknown ancestors by the ways they have died:

  “Those who died on the slave ships, those who died in the concentration camps, those who died in the Witch burnings, those who died in war…”

  She also calls the ancestors in by the qualities of their lives:

  “Those who were fighters for justice, those who were dancers, those who were poets, those who were midwives…”

  We can name the ancestors we don’t know by naming their gifts and legacies as well as their sufferings. In so doing, we acknowledge those “pieces of the yam” that still exist within us.

  “I call those who spoke up for the rights of women.”

  “I call those who struggled to feed their families.”

  “I call those who made people laugh.”

  Besides naming your ancestors, you may want to create an altar, a special place where you can work with them and honor them regularly.

  Ancestor Altar

  Create an altar for your ancestors, where you can place their pictures and set out offerings of food, drink, or flowers. Include some of their favorite objects or symbols of your relationship to them. Traditionally, we do this seasonally, around Samhain or Halloween. But if you are doing serious ancestor work, you might want to create a permanent altar—or even a picture wall with a small shelf for a vase and candle.

  When we take on roles of leadership in our community, we also take on the responsibility of shaping our vision of what that community can be. If we truly open ourselves to learning from the elements, we will realize that, in nature, an ecological system that is highly diverse is more resilient than one that is not. A prairie, with hundreds of different plants in every square yard, can resist disease, pests, or climate change far better than a monoculture field of hybrid corn. In human communities, too, diversity can be our strength. Reclaiming has a strong commitment to openness and inclusiveness, and we recognize the gifts that people of varied backgrounds, heritages, and perspectives can bring.

  But too often in our larger culture, our differences divide us. The work we do to foster diversity can be exhilarating, but it can also be awkward and even deeply painful. To embrace diversity, we must first come to terms with our own identity, with the heritage we carry of gifts and burdens. And that heritage always includes pain. For some of us, it may be the pain of our people’s history of oppression, of enslavement or poverty or massacre. Just as Rose cannot enjoy the castle when she learns the price her brothers paid for her birth, others among us carry the pain of descent from the oppressors and the guilty knowledge that we inherit privileges and wealth gained through others’ suffering.

&
nbsp; If we could know the full truth of our ancestry, all of us carry both gifts and pain. No heritage is free of oppressors; and no heritage is devoid of those who resisted oppression, who stood up for freedom, tolerance, and compassion as best they could.

  Reclaiming communities are full of many sorts of diversity: age, gender, class background, religious and geographic background, sexual orientation. But often we are not nearly as diverse in terms of ancestry and race as we would like to be. Over the years, we have explored many approaches to the challenges that arise when we attempt to broaden our diversity. One of the most powerful bridges we have found is to simply tell our stories.

  Telling Ancestor Stories

  For many years in the early 1990s, Reclaiming sponsored a Multicultural Ritual Group that planned an annual ritual honoring the ancestors of many cultures. The group was a rich and fruitful gathering of amazing people, and the issues that came up in the course of our ritual planning sparked intense discussions, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes painful. One of the most important things we did was to take time in the group to tell our own stories and the stories of our families and ancestors.

  Each of us is a rich and complex being. Our gender, our ancestry, all the ways in which we can be described and labeled make up aspects of who we are—but they do not fully describe us. I am a woman, a Jew, a Witch, a bisexual married woman with a hearing loss—but neither the terms themselves nor any list of them really conveys who I am. If I’m seen in a community as The Jew or The Witch, I feel diminished, unseen in my fullness.

  Hearing each other’s stories allows us to more truly know each other in our full complexity. Remaining grounded in our roots, we can each express something of our multiple dimensions. We can identify and honor our differences and also see the common threads that weave through our tales.