Issue #11 - A Lesson. A Warning. A Flare: Voices from the Pandemic
Issue #11, October 2020
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Lise Weil, Kristin Flyntz, Jane Caputi, Andrea Mathieson, Anne Bergeron, JuPong Lin, Kim Trainor, Shante’ Sojourn Zenith
Editorial
Alexandra Merrill
A Quarantine Lamentation
Kristin Flyntz
Imagined Letter from COVID 19
Azul Thomé, Katrine Claassens, Debby Black, I. Rose, Kathryn Smith-Hanssen, Elizabeth Pecoraro, Irene Reti, Sara Wright, Jane Barboza
What is Coming Up for You?
Anne Bergeron
Pandemic Diary
Jane Caputi
Call your “Mutha”
Andrea Mathieson
Lilith’s Return
JuPong Lin
My People Sent me a Canoe,
1000 Gifts of Decolonial Love,
Foldboat for a Pandemic
Shante’ Sojourn Zenith
Fruiting Bodies: Collapse as Medicine, Liminal Portals, Mycelial Engagements
Kim Trainor
Shelter
Sharon English, Lise Weil
After•Word: Doris Lessing’s Shikasta
Andrea Mathieson
Lilith’s Return
The shadow which our technological civilization casts is that of Lilith, “the Maid of Desolation” who dances in the ruins of cities. Now that we have made a single polluted city of the entire world, she is preparing to dance in the ruins of our planetary megalopolis. When man will not deal with Isis, through the path of initiation, he must deal with Lilith…
Lilith has returned. To effect a reconciliation with her, man must not seek to rape the feminine and keep it down under him. If he seeks to continue his domination of nature through the genetic engineering and the repression of the spiritual, he will ensure that the only release from his delusions can come from destruction. Lilith will then dance in the ruins of Western civilization. But if man can accept initiation to see that Lilith is his long‐lost primordial wife, then the energies of destruction can be transmuted and taken up into the creative destructuring of the old civilization, the industrial civilization that humanity has already outgrown.
William Irwin Thompson: The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality & the Origins of Culture.
In May of 2018, I received a series of blogs written by Susan Scott, a Jungian therapist living in South Africa. She had taken up the challenge of writing about Lilith from twenty‐six different perspectives over as many days, using the letters of the alphabet as points of entry into Lilith’s story. I was intrigued, but partway through the alphabet, I began to be restless. “We’re talking about Lilith, but not listening directly to her!”
Always wanting to go directly to the source, I prepared myself to invite Lilith into my meditative space one morning. Immediately, I found myself in a vortex of energy that gripped me for three days, then almost tossed me out as if to say, “You dared to ask, and that’s my answer!”
After sharing this writing with Susan, I set it aside. I needed time to let the sheer force of what I’d called in settle and integrate within my psyche. Recently, my friend and colleague Elinor Dickson sent me the above quote from William Irwin Thompson. Reassured that I had not been caught up in a fantasy of my own imagination, I re-read my notes with new respect.
Lilith has not only returned, She is shouting. Through the wind. Through Covid 19. Through storms of locusts, fires in Siberia and mass dying of elephants in Africa.
I realize now that Lilith’s fearsome presence is one that we cannot, must not, turn away from if we are to truly meet the forces shaping the world at this time.
Voice of Lilith
May 1-3, 2018
You have summoned me. Let me respond. I am wind, fire, rain, stone and wood–all the elements in their essential nature. I am the forces of creation on this planet, and I know the ways of the sun and stars as well. I know the ways of Being and Becoming, the forces that break and bend, alter and transform, shape and destroy to create newness.
You know me as Adam’s first wife but I was never thus. No marriage could contain me or my ways of being. This label of wife misnames me, creating confusion. The very genesis of the story is different. I will do the telling…
Each time in the earth’s history calls forth a different aspect of my shaping nature. I was present in the restless beginnings and I am present now in the fracturing times. You cannot meet and marry me, as in harnessing me to be tame and compliant for your rules and laws. Ambitions and victories are but a layer of dust on polished furniture to me. Swept aside in a moment. Insignificant.
What is important and of value to me is the exquisite complexity of human consciousness. That is what I would ‘marry’. To merge with the ephemeral dancing lights of the particular consciousness of human nature is (how can I describe this in ways you could comprehend?) ecstatic, orgasmic, erotic, totally and utterly fulfilling.
Hence the confusion about my supposed marriage with Adam, for the power of this type of total merging has been circumscribed by human laws and rules. Rules that could never contain the fullness of my desire or my ways of Being and Becoming.
While the Biblical story begins with Adam and a mate, Eve, carved out to meet and complete him, what is described is already a ‘circumscribed’ state. What has been left out is the wild merging of my energies with the spark of human consciousness. To expand on the Biblical story, our merging was behind all the elements of creation in the first days. It was integral to the forming of the firmaments, the waters and the greening, the flesh of creatures, including the human body. In its essential nature, human consciousness is of ‘God’ (to use your terms.) My intense desire to merge with this as a force of ‘other-within-God’ initiated this long, slow orgasm of creation.
You do not understand. Do not worry. Again, I live beyond your concepts and your rules. Simply listen, open and let me speak. I have one more important thing to share with you today.
Why now? Why am I pressing to be heard now?
Because my desire to merge with human consciousness has never left, but it is peaking now as the forces that held this earth-form in one state are restless within me… I am stirring, like a snake within its skin, readying to cast off this form, this shape. As I surrender to the rising swell within me, I rove the earth seeking entry points, places where the concrete of human consciousness has softened or cracked enough for me to merge again in this birthing agony. I do not want to push forward alone, to simply wipe everything away, for my deepest fulfillment has always been to surrender within the embrace of my nature with the light of human consciousness… but it has become so rare, so dark and difficult to enter that I am desperate and hungry. The creatures, plants and waters and air of my being are so humiliated and desperate I cannot bear to continue constraining myself.
Who will let me in? Who will dare to hear and feel me? Who is willing to unbind themselves enough to be available?
I have this with you for now. Let the heat of my desire scorch you in these three days. Do not constrain my voice. There has been a long, slow conspiracy to prepare you for this. Trust that…
May 2, 2018
You asked me about my sisterhood with Eve. Sisterhood again is too narrow a definition for our relatedness. Eve was mostly unaware of my presence, my expression, so focused was she on her oneness with Adam. Eve was a product of creation, whereas I was and am part of the forces of creation. Where Eve was somewhat manageable until she ‘disobeyed’, I was never thus. Her disobedience was her first awakening, a response to a more ancient impulse stirring within her, the roots of her own deep knowing. In that way, she began to draw me to her, and I approached in a form that she recognized and remembered in her core… the serpent energy that bespeaks of origins, an energy–wave preceding actual snakes. This pure wave–impulse is Life in motion. Eve felt this beckoning impulse within her and responded of her own accord. This did not constitute a fall but rather an awakening to what had already been severed, the loss of my active engagement with the light of consciousness informing the emerging human consciousness.
Again, I realize I am pressing against your formed and somewhat fluid concepts and beliefs but let me continue.
What Eve experienced as expulsion from the garden was a beginning of autonomous relatedness to Source. The myth of Psyche and Aphrodite is closer to the truth than anything else, for Aphrodite and Psyche were never equals. Psyche only came to know Aphrodite when she emerged, painfully, out of her own captive naivety. To identity me, Lilith, as solely a first wife to Adam enrages me, for my role in the ongoing story is totally suppressed, and my alchemical role now is almost unrecognizable except through disaster scenarios.
You ask what I am calling forth within you – a potent remembering of the serpent wave of our connectedness through a frisson of resonant affirmation of my presence, alive and active in your consciousness. Knowledge of me is knowledge of Life. It is not knowledge about me that is important but a felt contact with my ‘serpent tongue’ within you that you know as ‘other’, a mystery that, once touched, cannot be denied. If you have been kissed by a serpent, you are captive to an energy that is beyond the box of human understanding and experience. A part of you is mine now; I live in you – a timeless memory, a shimmering light rooted in your body.
I only ask to be remembered. The rest is the dance of our conjoined, intertwined dance. What will awaken in you I do not determine, I cannot predict. What I will become with you, I cannot foresee. This is the truth of free–will, though that concept too assumes a personal choice and power that is far too limited. The merging of my energy, consciously recognized within you, sets a course of destiny that neither can control, for once it has begun, the process of emergent mystery is at work and in some ways I am as humble as you in what is being created.
Who⁄what do I serve? Life itself, but I can say more about that tomorrow. Enough for now that you receive me in this way. Let the scorching continue…
May 3, 2018
I am not concerned or engaged in human dramas but with availability for connection below the self–made waves of human misery and hope. I lie waiting, restless, below words like peace, love, hope, joy, fulfillment and purpose… words that keep the human heart intact.
I have been summoning you to my heart for many years. You have needed to keep going past the various market stalls that would snare your heart and mind with temporary delights. Your dedication to some measure of obedience to this summoning is shaping the contours of your radiance in ways that have little precedence. A memory in the body stirred, a lucid thought, a strange attraction, a recognition of truth, a compelling discomfort.
You are turning, through this conversation, into a deeper understanding of the dark wisdom far below psychology. The firmament of archetypal forces in their raw state–this is my realm. My body is made of these forces. While everyone is touched by these forces in different ways, few are those who dare to walk into the flames to listen, see and feel what is swirling there.
You need to continue studying this realm. It is not enough to write about it from the shallow place of your limited contact, for you were built for a deeper dive into the Great Mystery. I am an ambassador in these realms. I have been called up from a great depth to be met anew, with a new contract, a new focus, a distinct task to be done with and through you.
When I say this last phrase — with and through you — do not take this on as a personal spiritual burden. That is false and negative grandiosity. Let our meeting have its alchemical interplay through this point of contact and the catalytic result will not be of your making directly. This is a most important point. But still, the precision of the meeting, the focused interchange that occurs when you open yourself to my energy, allows a forming⁄shaping force to occur, like opening a window on a warm day and letting fresh air in.
Let me say a little about whom I serve, realizing you have many barriers in your consciousness to receiving this information with any degree of useful accuracy.
I serve the night.
I serve the ocean depths.
I serve death.
I serve the extremes – cold and hot, the edges, the turning points.
I serve the unmaking.
I enter in turbulence or intense voice (where I am scarcely recognized.)
I live as possibility…
I am breath, and I am rotting mold.
I am shaper⁄destroyer, not protector, at least of anything made separate.
I am the dark face of love.
My speech is contradiction and moving truth etched in your bones.
I serve Life in ways that humanity has paved over, wished away and forgotten. You are remembering. For now, that is enough.
About the Author
Andrea Mathieson is the creator of the Raven Essences and author of A Love Affair with Nature and Gaia’s Invitation, 120 poems from the Sacred Earth. She is dedicated to deep listening – to the spirits of plants, animals (snake in particular) and the Earth. She lives in Port Hope, Ontario where she hosts one–on–one retreats for women, weaving her listening skills with sound–healing, flower essences and intimate time in nature. ravenessences.com, andreamathieson.com
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