My deceased husband was a hoarder. He was a garbage picker. He would bring home all sorts of weird finds and put them around the house. One day I found a broken picture frame, empty of whatever picture it once held, by the chair on the porch where I liked to sit in the mornings and write in my journal. It had Simba from the Lion King in one corner of it and across the bottom it said "Remember Who You Are". I never commented about it. Maybe he was leaving me a message. Maybe it was just one of his odd, random gifts. I left it there. After the house burned down, it was still on the porch.
Anyway, it was actually good advice. At the time I was doing my best to forget who I was. It was enough to just sleepwalk through the day and live in dreams at night.
Now I am really remembering who I am and it's all good. The circle of life is closing around me in a lot of ways. I like to think of it as a spiral, not really a circle. Sometimes, though, the loops close in a loving embrace around us before the spiral flows out into another round of the dance.
There is role reversal going on with my sister and I, with our parents. We must now become the caretakers, the teachers, the watchers, the advisors, and they have become the wide-eyed innocents, sometimes as careless as little children, sometimes as defiant as rebellious teens. We have to make sure their zippers are up and their shoes are tied. Yesterday my sister had the heartbreaking duty of taking the car keys from Dad. He responded like an angry sixteen year old deprived of his driving privileges. Worst of all, we often have to remind them of who they are.
In reminding them of who they are, we are at the same time forced to remember in much more detail then ever who WE are. We pretend to listen intently as my dad tells the same stories we've heard a thousand times, not cutting him off because we are happy he still has breath in his body to speak with us about anything. Stories about our great-grandfather, lately embellished, as if they've ripened with age. Stories about when he was a kid or when he was in the Air Force. He is living in those times more than in the present day. He's reminding us of who we are, in his own way, consciously or not.
And more clearly than ever I am seeing my roots, as I've returned to the neighborhood where I spent the first dozen years of my life. I realize, as I look back, how upsetting it was to be uprooted when I was 12, away from my grandparents' home into a completely new environment where I never really felt like I belonged. My parents' bought their own place, a house I always hated. It felt cold and sterile (yes, plastic covers on the couch and those plastic mats on the floor!) and alien to me. I still went "home" every weekend to stay with my grandparents. Finally I left my parents' house five years later for good, coming back to live with my grandmother from time to time until she passed away. My sister lives in her house now, around the corner and one street down from here.
I paid off my mortgage at the end of March. This place is all mine. I'm really home again. Another circle closes.
Which leads to the point of this blog entry. Lately through the World Wide Web I've discovered the sphere of "bio-regional animism" which seems to have taken hold on the West Coast and is moving eastward. I guess it's a response to how the internet has effectively gutted what we once called "the Craft" as folks are looking for new titles for the old religion, and don't want to be known as Wiccans anymore. I like the bio-regional animist's outlook. It's where I've been all along, and I'm happy to remember who I was, am, and shall be!
What does the bio-regional animist do? Make a map of your area marking out a five or six mile radius. Learn local flora and fauna. Geology too, because animists honor the life in stones and rocks as well. Do research and find the oldest trees. Be outside every day and bond with the birds and other wild things. Observe the cycles of nature and seasons. Take on the role of steward of the land within that radius. Keep it clean and healthy. Celebrate nature.
This is more or less what I did when I was a kid. I had tea parties with the fairies on the big stump in the wild backyard. I sang to the sky and especially the moon and stars, and they sang back. I watched the trees bloom leaves, lose them, go to sleep and wake up again. If I didn't know the names of trees, birds, animals or rocks, I made some up or they told me who they were. Bio-regional animism is as good a label as any. Or "witch".
I am so happy to be home again, back to the beginning of a circle. In many ways, I carried a lot of things with me in my heart and soul while I was elsewhere, and now I can bring them out again, like little gems unearthed from the spot where I left them years ago, and let them shine in the April sun.
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