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A Message from Death at All Hallows/ Samhain

10/30/2020

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From out of the mouth of Autumn (when they say the living and the dead are so close, we can hear each other breathing on either side of the veil), a bear came like an angry spirit and snatched one of my goats over to the other side. My youngest female, a virgin sacrifice. Blood on the wall in the morning, her body uneaten, the other goats huddled wide-eyed in the the corner. I had never expected it, the gate broken, the fence ripped out. And maybe the bear needed her over there, on the other side, for some reason. Or maybe the bear was just angry, like those bear hunters all around us, with their vicious dogs, or like the humans who are angry all around the world, all the time lately, making violence without rites. 

I haven’t learned yet about anger, or evil, or why. Or how to understand bears differently (who came to me in nightmares all my life but whom in real life I always loved and never feared, until now). I will soon learn, perhaps, how to properly electrify an old and awkwardly built barn. But what I first learned is, where we are trapped is where we die.


For seven years, it felt so cozy, as darkness fell, to know the goats were locked up safe. This was my evening ritual, before I could go out, before supper could be finished: get the animals in, lock up the barn, check the latches. They were safe, and I felt safe. Locked up in the innermost stall, the room they were born in, the place they always ran to, their only concept of home—we all breathed a sweet, hay-scented sigh of relief. 


Now every night, I just let the goats out. I open the barn doors. I open the gates to all the pastures. Sometimes I see them looking back at me, eyes twinkling in the flashlight glare, huddled high on a rock across the field, the vastness of the cold night their only security. And I can’t tell them, ever again—you’re safe now, you’re safe here. They are never safe. But I tell them, you’re safer than you were. Because now you have your senses and intuition joined together with your long legs and sudden leaps. You have your running and the space to run in. Your freedom is your safety— that’s the only safety you’ve ever had, only I didn’t get that until now.


So I don’t feel any better, and I dread every night, but I’m grateful for the lesson. That all this time, maybe I’ve tried to stay safe by building walls. By trying to control and enclose and hold tight what is precious. But really, I made myself a death trap. Really, living without fear means walking into the night accepting the unknown, without limit or security, and trusting only to my own capabilities in the face of whatever happens. Abilities which I only have access to, it turns out, if I am free.

Last time I posted about the sacred hunger of gods. But this turned out not to be a story about hunger, or even about predation. The bear, stuffed with corn, wasn’t hungry enough to eat her kill. She came for curiosity. Then she saw, and heard, those trapped things panicking. It got her blood going, triggered a frenzy within. Unnatural containment triggered unnatural violence. She felt she was called there, to set something loose, to break up an illusion of safety, to shake things up. Well I feel shaken up. Good. So I feed the goats at dusk and let them go. The bear took the youngest, shiest one. The innocent. I walk with a prayer for her. I walk back up to my house with nothing separating me from forest but a thin sliver of autumn wind. 

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When Our Gods Were Tigers

10/1/2020

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​Remember when somebody hunted us? Remember when we paused in the forest to listen, with awe, because we had to? Remember when we walked among gods, secret and deadly, whose inexplicable and unpredictable power haunted us all our lives, and gathered us home unto darkness at the end?

I don’t really remember. It was hundreds, millions of years ago, and I was dead. But now I’m alive and I pause in the forest to bush-wack my way out of my own vining thoughts, reminding myself to appreciate birdsong. And I can imagine—what it was like to live with tigers, wolves. Remember? We used to listen to the birds with unbroken attention, because their tones and silences told us what lurked unseen. Every voice, every breaking twig, every scent signified something about what we hungered for and what hungered for us. Everything meaningful, everything necessary. We could never lose ourselves. We were bound by life and death to all the beings. 

But now, civilization. Now we have done away with the old gods. We have fought so hard to preserve life at all costs. 

Now we are so mighty, our death can only come to us in forms too small to see.

Now that we refuse to fear any gods greater than ourselves, whom else can we fear but ourselves?


We don’t recognize the new predator, which evolves out of our new, invincible humanity, our going everywhere and populating everything and laying waste the old—the virus of the moment, unknown and alienating. Our new death doesn’t connect us with the living world. Our only safety is to mask our faces and keep our distance, because what we fear now is each other.


But remember when death was conscious? Remember when it knew us, and watched us with eyes as feeling as our own? That contract was so ancient. And our lives were at risk, all the time, but we were alive. Surviving was a privilege, not a right. It meant not only a listening, a humility, a knowledge of community, an attention so profound there are no words or even thoughts to describe it—it meant also such intimacy. 


What if death were still so pure, so boundless, so beautifully inevitable—whiskered and pawed, with eyes of laughing darkness, sides sleek with stripes of fire? What if its constant possibility awakened us to every subtle thing, so that instead of locking our doors, holding our breath as we walk past another masked human, hiding our smiles, we got bigger in our souls? What if death were a noble adversary, and trying to outwit it made us beautiful, the way the deer evolves to be beautiful, instead of making us small, conflicted, and alone?

They say the old gods are never truly dead, only awaiting the honor that is due them. Maybe like the grizzled heads of prehistoric creatures now rearing up from melting permafrost, our gods come back to haunt us now, in these days of strange reckoning. Maybe they slip into our bodies in a piece of stray DNA, on the breath of a forgotten animal in the last remnant of some forgotten forest across the world. Let us not, by trying to be greater and better than death, make ourselves so small. Let us, instead, make for these ghosts a temple. Fill it with levels of tangled greenery, raptor talons and python jaws, night-light eyes and shadow tails. Most of all, let us fill it with space. The kind of space a predator needs to roam.

And if we cannot imagine where to begin, if there seems no place left in this world for such a temple, then still we honor the old gods in the best way we know how. 


We build the temple where the fear is. We build it within.
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    We ask

    what it means to be human, we mourn being human and yet we forgive and we hope— we want a mythology of belonging. These are my dreams, tell me yours.

    All writing here copyright Mindi Meltz

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