Rivers are the life-giving vessels of our planet. They bring water to nourish plants, animals, and birds, are a home for fish, algae, and water plants, provide travel and communication, and so much more. I have been blessed to live between two great rivers for more than 30 years now. From my home I can walk five minutes in just about any direction and come upon a river’s edge to sit quietly beside as it flows or find a bridge and witness its rushing below me.

I grew up in the midwest where the Great Lakes and other lakes shaped my worldview of water as deep and peaceful with gentle rhythmic waves keeping constant time, like breathing the landscape into being. I came to think of the lakes as the eyes of Goddess, watching and welcoming the ducks and loons, minnows and trout. Now, having lived by these rushing rivers for so long I have found many gifts in them also.

If you want to feel women’s power, sit by a river. For millennia, people all over the globe have associated rivers with goddesses and female divinity. The Celtic goddess Boann was worshipped as the power of the rushing river, as were her sister goddesses Coventina, Belisama, and Sinann, all associated with specific rivers. When the land was parched with drought, the Hindu Ganga became the Ganges river that now flows through India, blessing all those who bathe in it. 

If you wish to create, sit by a river. River goddesses are often associated with creation, fertility and inspiration like the Roman Castalia and the Finnish mermaid Avfruvva who led fish upstream to spawn. The Indian Nimadi goddess was a goddess of fertility who filled all the rivers with a pitcher. The Celtic Sequana, goddess of the seine, was a goddess of healing. Oshun, worshipped across Africa and Afro-Carribean nations, is a goddess of passion and beauty, among many other attributes.

If you need to see your life beyond the present moment to solve a problem or gain new perspective, sit by a river.  River and water goddesses are sometimes associated with prophecy, such as the Italian Camenae, a collection of a number of river and spring goddesses who were known as “foretellers.” I’ve often thought of rivers as a means of gaining the broad view necessary for seeing our lives with clarity and coming up with visions, plans, or solutions to problems. When we are in a river, swimming along, we only see a few feet ahead of us and nothing behind us. If we just step out of the river, we can view the length of the river and see where swimmers were and are going. To me this is much like life. Most of the time we plod on, seeing only the short term ahead and unaware of the vastness of possibility in front of us or of long eras of natural history behind us. When we think of ourselves as witnessing ourselves from the shore, we can imagine a clearer truth of this moment among millions in our lives, offering both solace and inspiration.

I used to cross a small bridge over a brook on my daily walk to work. Some days I would throw a rock into the water and watch it sink to the bottom, and there it stayed.  Other times, I would drop some water from a bottle into the stream and watch the drops meld with the flow on their way down to the river. At one time I wanted to be the rock – strong, immutable, unmoving.  As I have grown older, I am working on becoming the brook and its river. May you be blessed with the flow, the energy and power, the creativity, and the prophecy of the river nearest where you live.

In the beginning was primordial chaos, a soup of the pure essence of reality, and from this arose a goddess who created order, and thus the universe and the world came into being.  Myths and stories from all over the world tell similar truths about how our universe began, whether it is in the form of the Greek Eurynome who came up from the chaos, created a snake out of a whirlwind that formed as a result, transformed herself into a dove and laid the cosmic egg, or the Tibetan Klu-mo who emerged from chaos to create the world from parts of her own body, or the four Egyptian snake goddesses who, with four male frog gods, made order through their movements in the primordial morass, or many others. When these and other creation goddesses bring order out of chaos, they make different entities from the unity of chaos or their own being and calm exuberant energy into stability and harmony.

At this time of year when many think about how to make a positive start to the next twelve months, how to re-create themselves just as the universe was created, perhaps this is a good moment to look again at these goddesses and our perceptions of order and chaos. I have always thought that these stories were telling me that order naturally progresses out of chaos and that order is better than chaos. But as I have gotten older, I think maybe the message is more complex. 

Is the progression from chaos to order really the way of existence? Now we are finding out more and more that our universe is actually still a quite essentially chaotic place. One primary way of creating order out of chaos is through time and space. Reality gets laid out along the track of time and it happens in regular doses like minutes and hours, up to millions of millennia. Similarly, space helps everything stay in order, each place occupied by one being only. But we now know that time and space are really space-time, and not rigid but rather bendable and all intertwined with matter and energy. 

Where once we thought of ourselves as individuals separated in an orderly way into one body and soul per person, disconnected from all other beings, we have now begun to understand that we are all interconnected genetically and in many other ways. We share genes with animals and even fruits. Trees and other living beings in the forest are all connected underground by fungi, even different species, and not just communicating but also helping one another to live. While we may not be physically connected like the forest, I think we have all experienced those moments when we feel we are a part of a larger whole, whether we feel an identity with nature, or part of a human movement towards a better world, or something else.

Creation itself requires some element of chaos. One of the most essential ways to generate new and innovative ideas is to free associate, especially with other people. In other words, instead of moving slowly along well-ordered mental tracks, the more your mind wanders, energetically skips and jumps, and seeks association between ideas and things that are usually considered to be in impenetrable compartments, the more creative you will be. The more you open your mind to possibilities outside the usual order of things, the more likely you are to see both truth about your world and new ways of being in it.

Yet, order is also necessary for creation. As any musician knows, the drummer who marks out the time, who creates order out of the chaos of timelessness, is essential to harmony, to the integrity of the music, whether of a symphony, a band, or one musician. Without ordered time there would be no music, just as without ordered space there would be no dance, no sculpture, no painting. I find in these stories the enabling of a fuller creativity by creating a balance of order and chaos. For example, when we seek to create a planet where we can all live in peace, justice, and sustainability, we must welcome the uncertainty that must accompany positive change while holding fast to our ideals and values that create necessary order.

All of these ideas — space/time/matter/energy, our essential interconnectedness, and the importance of both chaos and order to creativity — make me think that the stories aren’t about the universe’s creation happening in the distant past and then ending, but rather are a description of what is happening now, all around us, all the time. Every day we emerge from the primordial chaos of dreaming, whether asleep or awake, into the order of our perception of everyday life, but then at times we consciously re-enter that spaceless and timeless place of not just chaos, but unity, passion and essentialness to be re-energized and create ourselves and our planet and communities anew.  We find ways to live in both chaos and order to fulfill our own human mission of creation.

One creation story, perhaps my favorite, comes from the Canadian Athabascan people for whom the animals in the world were created by the goddess Asintmah. She arrived to find nothing but ice and snow on Earth. Our planet was empty of animals.  So, she wove a blanket of fireweed blossoms and spread it across the land. She began to sing, and animal life came into being, with each species born to the beauty of her song under the blanket. To me, this story makes me think of the original force of the universe in the blanket of blossoms with living beings emerging from it, coaxed by song and by love of life, chaos and order expressed in terms of nature’s magnificence and joyful creation of animals. 

Maybe next time you are feeling isolated and alone, you can remember that having been created as an individual human being doesn’t mean you are separate, but rather than you are extraordinary and unique, yet connected  to all other beings as well as to the very essential of existence. When you are frustrated in your creating, you can find inspiration and guidance in the duet of both chaos and order. As our world enters a time when what we do now will reverberate down through many generations, we can realize that we must be artists with both chaos and order, knowing when to have one and when the other, in order to create our artistic masterpieces, or lives and communities, or the just, peaceful, and abundant planet we all want to live on.

Illustration: Orphic egg, James Basire, 1730–1802 (engraver), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Photo of fireweed at Glacier Peak Wilderness: Walter Siegmund, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

For many years I watched the dawn of the Winter Solstice over an 18th century cemetery that was on my way to work. No one else was around at that hour and I always felt a sense of awe seeing the mystery of the coming of the light over the granite reminders of death. It was as if the story of life’s regeneration was being played out in a most majestic way just for my benefit.

Of course, I am not the only person to see the rise of the Winter Solstice sun in a place of ancestral burial. For thousands of years, people have gathered at Newgrange, in Ireland, which is a monument and burial place with a passageway lit up every Winter Solstice by the rising sun. 

This year, as the Winter Solstice creeps up on us (in the northern hemisphere, and the Summer Solstice sun in the southern hemisphere), I have been thinking about the people who built and came to Newgrange in ancient times, what their lives were like, and what they may have been thinking as they waited for the light to enter the passageway. What an amazing act of hope that was.

For those people, the Winter Solstice must have been a time of some fear, as the winter with its cold and looming famine took hold. The return of the sun was a matter of life and death to them. If the sun did not return and the crops failed, they would starve. They probably had enough food stored till late winter or early spring, but the time of hunger until the first foraging filled their larders was not far off. Their round homes with the central fire were snug and warm, but they were at risk of freezing to death if they ran out of fuel. 

Yet, also, to them, the whole universe was alive. The sun, moon and stars were deities. The stones and rivers had souls. The ground below and the heavens above were filled with spirits, fairies, and goddesses and gods seen and unseen. At Newgrange, they were participating in a great cosmic turning for which they were contributing hope.  They were offering to the dawn their faith that the forces of the cosmos would offer life for them for another year, guiding the sun’s rays down into the home of their ancestors and of themselves, bringing it to them and themselves to it. They had come to experience the love and protection of Divinity as the sun rose and they were not disappointed.

We now have the tools to overcome many of the things that were their worst fears. We are able to feed everyone on the planet if only our social and political systems would make sure all have what they need. We know how to make sure that our homes stay warm with renewable energy even in the bitterest cold, though so many among us are deprived of even the most basic shelter. Even many of the illnesses that cut short their lives are preventable or manageable now to those who can afford health care. Life on Earth could be a paradise if only we would use our will to make it so. 

But yet, we are facing ecological and other catastrophes and the people on our planet face the same uncertainty as to whether we will have a future as those who gathered at Newgrange did, but for different reasons. We even have the physics to explain to us why the sun will always come back. What we can’t answer is what kind of Earth will it come back to? 

People are still deeply moved by Newgrange, by that image of hope. Thousands apply to be one of the lucky few who are able to be present in the passageway when the Winter Solstice sun rises and thousands of others watch it livestreamed on the internet. How amazing that an experience that was only witnessed by a few hundred who lived close by in ancient times can now we shared by people all over the planet in real time!

Perhaps this Solstice we can remember what those people so long ago faced and how we, as a species, have developed the technology to solve what to them were life-threatening problems, but we have not created the spiritual maturity to make them work. This is the task we must take up when we rise from watching the Solstice. 

Perhaps Newgrange itself can help inspire us to find the wisdom of that spiritual maturity. The earliest people of Newgrange, and many other cultures like them, seemed to value their place in the chain of generations and expressed this in ancestral burial monuments like Newgrange. As our part in this chain encompassing all humanity, we need to make sure the sun rises for all those who live now and all those who will come after us. If we determine to take this responsibility seriously, we can, metaphorically, be the ray of light that shines on the passageway between our generation and future generations.

As we each celebrate the Solstice in our way, we can be each other’s rays of light, each other’s love and protection coming down to illuminate the future we must all share. May we all shine like the sun.

Photo of Newgrange credit: Dentp, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

You are welcome to just enjoy it, or if you would like an excruciatingly detailed explanation, including how it relates to Sappho and some music theory, read on!

It is written in the Locrian mode, also known as the Greek Mixolydian mode (not to be confused with the modern Mixolydian mode, which is completely different… wait, that’s very confusing in itself). As you probably know, a mode is a scale that progresses with set whole and half notes. You are probably familiar with the modern major mode that sounds happy (the Happy Birthday to You song) and minor modes that sound sad (the House of the Rising Sun). The Locrian mode is considered a minor mode, but to me it sounds both sad and happy and also full of Mystery. To help you get a sense of what the Locrian mode sounds like, here is The Water Is Wide in its usual major mode:

Here it is in played it in Locrian mode:

The Locrian mode was invented by Sappho, the ancient Greek poet who led a circle of women poets (it may have been a school) and was devoted to Aphrodite. Her poetry was written to be sung, but no one knows what the melodies were. So, out of curiosity, I decided to write some music in the Locrian mode and use electronic instruments that may sound something like the lyres and drums that may have accompanied Sappho’s songs.

As I kept going, the piece evolved into trying to evoke a performance by Sappho and her poets of songs to Aphrodite. I certainly don’t claim to know what Sappho’s songs sounded like, so it’s really just a work of imagination. So, Imagine yourself sitting in an amphitheater in Lesbos, where she lived. You hear Sappho and her poets approach singing and playing a lyre and drums. That’s the first section, which is in the Locrian mode. They enter the amphitheater and take their places for the second section, which is the poets singing. They are younger than Sappho and sing in a major mode, denoting their more carefree and certain view of life. Their song brings Aphrodite, whose response is the next section which is supposed to sound kind of deity-like and show that Her presence creates an epiphany in Sappho and the poets. Sappho responds with her lyre and drums in a short song that is slower and more resolute, expressing the wisdom of her life experience. The poets then repeat Sappho’s original Locrian mode song with their voices in celebration of the lessons about Aphrodite and life that Sappho has taught them. Finally, Sappho, the poets, and Aphrodite all sing together in a song that has elements of both the Locrian and major modes, showing that they have all joined their elder wisdom, youthful joie de vivre, and goddessy divinity into a unity of beauty.

The piece could also be seen as an allegory of modern people discovering female divinity. First we have the ancient goddess cultures re-arising from silence as their first song in the ancient mode grows stronger. Then the modern people sing in their major mode with amazement and joy at discovering the power of the goddesses and their stories to bring wholeness to themselves and the planet. The goddesses respond by speaking to modern people in their divine voices to show that they are always here for us followed by a new song, still in the ancient Locrian mode, to reflect that they still have much to say to us. The 21st century people sing their own version of the first ancient song to explore what guidance the goddesses have for us. Finally, the ancient, the modern, and the divine all sing together to bring into being a future world that reflects the best of both the ancient and contemporary.

I wonder if maybe you don’t hear something completely different when you listen to it. That’s the joy of music – one piece of music can mean so many things to people. What do you hear?

Photo credits:

Photo of bust of Sappho: Capitoline Museums, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Woman playing lyre on Greek vase: Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

A few weeks ago I was tending to my garden and found that Earth stars had come to my yard. Earth stars are mushrooms that look like stars. The insides of the little ball are filled with spores and when it rains, they open up and scatter their offspring to their fates.  The Blackfeet Nation said they were stars that had fallen to Earth and foretold miraculous events.

The fact that the Earth star is a mushroom makes me think of the recent discoveries that many different species of life in the forest are connected through fungi, especially as discussed in Suzanne Simard’s book Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. According to Simard’s book, in the forest, the Mother Trees, the elders, send nutrients to the young ones even as they are dying so that the next generation may live. My little back yard is halfway between yard, garden, and forest, and we have a very old Mother Tree in my yard and another in the yard right behind ours, near whose border I found the earth stars. 

Perhaps my little Earth stars are telling me that, just as life in the forest is connected by fungi, we humans are connected to all beings, whether we consider them alive or not, in the cosmos.

Many people across many cultures and times consider every element of the universe to be alive. The stars and planets, the stones, mountains, oceans, rivers, landscapes, elements, and all else have a presence and a soul, are powered by the same life force that keeps our own hearts beating. Our era’s view of the universe as dead chunks of this or that burning, revolving, exploding, coming into being and disintegrating, exploitable and for purchase by the highest bidder is an anomaly in the history of our species.

Perhaps the old ones of our galaxy, the stars and planets billions of years older than our own sun and Earth, and even the dying stars about to explode are sending energy and nourishment to our souls, we young ones who know so little of how to care for our own planet. Perhaps they know we can grow up to be all we are meant to be, so that we can be the next generation of wise ones in a few million years. 

Maybe the Earth stars, not only in my yard, but present on every continent except Antarctica, are one way the cosmos is telling us that it is on our side, that it will give us what it can to help if we will just look up in awe at the magnificence of the night sky, focus our time on healing and revering our Earth and all the beings on it, and learn to be content with having enough so that our planet can continue in its course. This idea makes me think of the landscapes that have been ravaged and laid bare by humans but come, almost miraculously, back to life in a couple of years.

But we are running out of second chances, environmentally and in other spheres. Being part of a living universe means we have more responsibility than if we were simply causing our own destruction in a void empty of other life. Being part of a living universe means we deprive all existence of the amazing feats of creativity and compassion that humans are capable of if we do not do what is needed to bring the Earth and ourselves back to the beauty and abundance of what should be life on our planet. I am taking my Earth stars as a sign that the universe still has faith we can do what we must and is willing to keep on sending us “nutrients,” whether that be inspiration from nature’s mystery, or new scientific or spiritual knowledge, or just comfort to keep going from a walk in the woods until we succeed in bringing our planet and species into harmony and wholeness. 

As I rake my leaves over the next couple of weeks and break the pods to release their spores to fly free to their next destination, I will look up into the sky, wave and say “I see you! I hear you! Thank you!”’

And poetry is music beyond tones and rhythm. When I was in elementary school, I wanted to play the drums in the school band, but I was told “girls don’t play drums.” So, later I learned guitar, piano, and Appalachian dulcimer, but I didn’t play drums for many decades. In the meantime I had read Layne Redmond’s When the Drummers Were Women and learned that girls definitely do play drums! So, about five years ago, I took an African drumming class at a nearby music school, and then switched to a full drum set. 

I had originally taken the classes for fun and because of drumming’s relationship to women’s spiritual history. But soon I was reading about the healing aspects of drumming and how it is essential to the practice of traditional healers in Africa and elsewhere. Healing has always been an aspect of my writing and I was excited to find my writing and music shared this connection.

I was also finding that I was increasingly frustrated with the inability of the words I wrote to fully express what I wanted to say, and suddenly the fact that Sappho wrote her poetry to be sung to music made a lot of sense.  Now, no one wants to hear me sing, believe me, so I began to compose little instrumental pieces of music to go with poems and stories I was writing to more fully convey their meaning and emotional tone. I also began to explore writing little pieces to go along with how I interpreted some of my favorite traditional myths and stories.

I found that, whereas I had been venturing into the fusion of spirituality and words for years, both words and spirituality become much richer when they are in a triad with music, and music also gains a greater voice when brought into a circle with words and spirituality. To me, this is especially true for percussion because rhythm is so integral to the cosmos, which is alive with vibrations, and our own bodies that are dependent on our heartbeats and breath. 

As life becomes more complex in this time when we are facing such daunting challenges, I think we will increasingly find music, words, and spiritual ideas to be more meaningful in their combination and complementary relationships rather than appreciated alone. I also believe that music’s healing properties are especially essential now when so many are feeling trauma. And, I’m having a lot of fun playing with my drums and home computer recording software!

Here are three pieces that I have finished in recent weeks. The first is Seven Gates, about the soul’s descent into the Underworld to meet one’s own mortality and the truth of one’s life, and the ascent back up into the everyday world, based on the myth of Inanna. Even if this type of experience isn’t what the piece makes you think of, well, maybe it brings up something else for you! Here it is:

The second is titled January, 1900. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the region where I live was home to mills and factories and hundreds of people who came from many nations, especially Ireland, to work in them. As I wander the streets of my neighborhood I sometimes wonder what these people thought about their new home, especially in our New England cold and icy winters. It is in mixolydian mode, which many traditional Irish songs are in, to evoke their heritage.

Finally, here is just a short rhythmic piece to get you moving!

I hope you enjoy them!

A quick note: Yes, that’s me playing all the instruments, but no, I don’t know how to play bass, flute, clarinet, or string ensemble. That’s the magic of computers that can take what I put into a keyboard and make it sound like just about any instrument I like! It is actually me playing on real percussion instruments, however. And sometimes the keyboard acts like a real electric piano or organ, and that’s me, too.

I’m thrilled to announce that I have a new post up at Feminism and Religion about finding spiritual power in everyday objects and actions. You are invited to read it by clicking here. I hope you enjoy it!