A week ago, I found myself at that hard moment of freeing my eighteen-year-old cat from a body that was failing her. From the moment of her choosing me at a California animal rescue, our lives have been a dance of longing and fulfillment, of joy and loss. My dogs come to me outstretched and quivering, waiting for my approval, the “house broken, domesticated deities” that never demand anything from us that Belden Lane decries in  The Solace of Fierce Landscapes . Mia was innately unbroken, deeply wild, and full of a superb indifference.  She not only resisted being sentimentalized, she outright refused it, often with something that amounted to a glitter of humor at my insecure need to gain her approval.  She never sought mine. But every morning, as the first shards of light began to pierce through my curtains, she would jump lightly on my chest, purring me awake.  I learned to move slowly (if at all) in response to her, gently reaching a hand up to pet her.  If I moved too fast or loved too hard, she would slip flame-like to the floor and be off on her morning adventures.  But if I moved quietly, and offered myself to her rather than trying to take her, we could lay for hours, until our breath became fused and I would be stilled into patience at the wonder of it. Those moments of grace were both of fierce joy and discipline, and began to teach me about the nature of wildness. We cannot want too hard. If we wish too noisily, we scare the fish, the deer takes flight, the clouds scud in heavy over the moon.  We cannot actively seek the moments where our longing for oneness with Nature is fulfilled; we can only place ourselves in the ready, to receive the grace when it comes. In those moments, Mia would become a flash of Artemis herself, seen from the corner of my eyes but never fully realized, stroked but never clutched. Wolfgang Geigerich’s exploration of the myth of Actaeon and Artemis at the bath in  The Soul’s Logical Life   defines the story as a metaphor for joining the Other and the Self: becoming one with the wildness.  Geigerich suggests that to know that wildness, one must be destroyed in the process, as Actaeon was, but I have not been certain that the gap between what is human and what is wild could ever really be bridged, even with destruction. But there is another lesson: whether inside ourselves or in the world around us, wildness itself insists upon our commitment to metaphor.  We can never bridge the gap literally, not through taming, or destruction, nor any kind of dominion. We can find it, in a sideways glance, through the metaphor itself, and through the mythopoetics of love. That connection invites us not only to breathe into paradox but to celebrate the divine, complex innocence of losing Self and Ego through loving the wildness without expectation.  It is, perhaps, the only way that we can find that oneness. And in the paradoxical manner of the universe, I learn this lesson not by the spectacular, grandiose nature of Nature, but instead the quietly wild nature of a small gray cat.

We are all familiar with the trope of St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland, but the real St. Patrick was even more remarkable in real life than the pied piper we have come to know through a rather casual relationship with March 17th of each year. Patricius was kidnapped by Irish pirates sometime in the 5th century from his home in Great Britain when he was 16, taken to Ireland where he became a shepherd-slave to an Irish chieftain, Miliucc, and charged with the bitterly lonely, excruciatingly hungry life of guarding his master’s goats or sheep. He took this opportunity to return to, and deepen his Christian faith, becoming, I think, something of a mystic. After six years of isolation and hardship, a mysterious dream voice told him, “Your hungers are rewarded; you are going home” ( Confessio ). He arose, made a long, treacherous journey to the Irish Sea, found passage on a ship, and sailed back to England. After finding himself comfortably at home and reunited with his family, he has another vision in which he is handed a “letter,” the heading of which simply says, “ VOX HIBERIONACUM ,” the voice of the Irish. He develops a desire to return to the pagus , the uncultivated Irish countryside, and walk among the pagans who, to civilized Romans such as Patricius’ family, were the uncivilized, unreliable, threatening inhabitants of the pagus . He is ordained a priest and later a bishop and becomes, in all probability, the first missionary bishop of the Roman Church. Once he returns to Ireland, Patricius finds that he loves this place and these people, these raucous, crude, exuberant Irish; he refers to them lovingly as his “warrior children.” He became one of them, he identified himself as Irish and felt his Irishness down to the depths of his soul. And while he never did, in fact, drive the snakes out of Ireland, he did almost singlehandedly transform Ireland in other ways. He attacked the slave trade with a passion that only a former slave could possess, and by the end of his life (or shortly thereafter) slavery was no longer an undisputed reality, and in fact murder and other forms of violence that had been commonplace in Ireland greatly declined. The important thing for me, contemplating the life of Patricius, is not the mythology surrounding him; driving snakes out of Ireland, using a shamrock as a parable, or even his walking stick growing into an Ash tree. What’s important to me is understanding that sometimes, while in the midst of living one’s familiar, commonplace life, we can be abducted by our own life’s purpose and subjected to hardship and grief. These violent psychological, and sometimes physical tribulations, while presenting us with all sorts of problems, are perpetrated upon us by our own futurity—our own life’s purpose or meaning—reaching back to us, manhandling us, and roughly placing us upon our own life’s path. I don’t think it would be wrong to think of this as one of the modi operandi of bliss.

In Ovid's  Metamorphoses,  we read story after story of a human (or demi-human) encountering the gods and being literally transformed by the experience. The stories generally come in one of two flavors: the human is ready for the experience and transcends his or her mortal bonds, or isn't ready... and is destroyed by the transformation. You can see the same pattern in stories told around the world and across the ages. Though we don't always recognize them as such, we still tell those stories. I've been thinking about this recently, because I've just finished editing a book about Arthurian romances — stories that feature knights and ladies bashing up against divine forces and either rising to their challenge or being destroyed by them. It's easy to see the stories of the Holy Grail as picking up Ovid's themes: they are explicitly stories about heroes' quests for apotheosis — about human knights like Galahad and Parzival struggling to and ultimately succeeding in coming face to face with transcendent power. These stories differ: the Galahad quests are explicitly Christian, while Parzival's is humanistic. Nonetheless, each is the tale of a mortal meeting the divine and surviving. The romances that we'd sooner recognize as  romances  usually tell the other kind of story: the terrible, beautiful story of Tristan and Isolt is about a young couple who drink a magic love potion and are consumed by it. And yet it's interesting to wonder whether this couple — like Romeo and Juliet — would have chosen not to have their lives destroyed, if the price were to give up their love. There's a reason that the ancients identified Love as a powerful god — Plato claimed that Eros was the eldest of the Olympians. We like to see love as a positive, comforting force. Yet in order to understand it, we have to embrace the idea that, like all transcendent forces, the flame of Love can be as destructive as it is empowering. The Sufi poet al-Hallaj expresses an image that unites the two experiences. He said that the mystic (like the lover) approaches his divine Beloved like a moth to the flame. He knows that the experience will destroy him, but it will unite him with his love: "The light of the flame is the knowledge of reality, its heat is the reality of reality, and Union with it is the Truth of the reality." ( The Tawasin of Mansur al-Hallaj ) He is echoing Tristan's declaration (or rather, Tristan is echoing al-Hallaj): "What the death of which you tell is to be, I do not know; but  this  death suits me well. And if delightful Isolt is to go on being my death this way, then I shall gladly court an eternal death." ( Tristan & Isolt , lines 12463-12502).

Shivaratri , The Great Night of Shiva, is celebrated this year on the 24th of February, the 6th night of the  Phalgun , and devotees fast and maintain vigil all night. This, the largest of Shiva celebrations, centers on the tradition which allows that on this night, Lord Shiva performed the  Tandava , the dance that is the source of the cycles of creation, dissolution, and destruction. Tradition also holds that it was on this day that Shiva and Parvati were married. Religious penance may be found during  Shivaratra  through a night long practice of meditation and yoga. Various scholars have noticed similarities between Shiva and other Greek deities; even Alexander the Great called Shiva the “Indian Dionysus” and his phallic symbolism is shared by Nordic, Irish, and Roman gods as well. In Vedic scriptures, Shiva is very much like Rudra, the god of the storm. The Rigveda says that Rudra has two natures, one destructive and sometimes cruel, the other peaceful and kind. Shiva, as we have come to know him, may be a conflation of Rudra and many older gods into the single figure familiar to us today as a god of paradox, a god of mystery, and a god of, perhaps, unlimited power—a power to create as well as to destroy.The familiar image of four-armed Shiva dancing within a ring of fire perfectly captures all the paradoxical oppositions that are unified in the contemplation and understanding of this image: creation-destruction, temporality-eternity, masculine-feminine, and more. This image of Shiva, Nataraja, is known as The Lord of the Dance, specifically the dance of the energies that create, preserve, and destroy the universe. The ring of fire surrounding him is representative of the cosmic fire that creates and annihilates everything and incorporates the cycles of reincarnation governing human existence as well as the cosmic cycles of the Yugas, the ages of time that are also repeated. The fire also represents the evils and joys—dangers, knowlege, and warmth—of daily living. Nataraja is also possessed of a Mona Lisa like smile connoting his calm pleasure at finding himself in the center of the sublime forces of the universe swirling around, in, and through him. Living a human life well inevitably requires us to dance with the vicissitudes of existance, pressing our limited human will as far as we are able and then, when we find we are at the edges of ourselves, to let go and allow ourselves to be led in the dance until we find another path to follow, taking the lead once more and following that new path as far as we can and submitting once more to fate, to the inescapable cycles of life and the demands of living. Living life this way, in full relationship to the nature of existence is demanding, rigorous, and exacting, but the more one enters the dance, the more one may experience the difficult pleasures found therein, and people just might wonder what you’re smiling about.

The origins of Valentine’s Day are a bit murky, but they seem to reach back far into the early Roman celebrations of Romulus and Remus and the fertility festival of Lupercalia celebrated at the ides of February, or the 15th of February. Lupercalia was itself a modification of another, even older (dating back to Etruscan or Sabine cultures) springtime cleansing ritual, Februa, which lent its name to the month of the year. Later, as Christianity was emerging in the Empire, there were several Christian martyrs named Valentine or Valentinus in the first few centuries of the early Church and one of them, perhaps even all of them, were remembered in the celebration of a feast day named in their honor and placed on the 14th of February in the familiar modus operandi of the Christian Church to coopt venerable pagan celebrations, rename and redefine them in Christian terms and significance in order to make the new celebration seem familiar and facilitate a broader acceptance of Christianity. I am particularly fond of one legend that describes an imprisoned, and doubtless soon to be martyred, Valentine sending a greeting of love to a young girl with whom he fell in love while he was incarcerated, and he signed the missive, “From your Valentine.” Not only is this a sweet story that explains the continued use of the phrase, but it also points out the rather painful aspects of love (I recall Joseph Campbell remarking in Reflections on the Art of Living, that romantic love is an ordeal), aspects one would rather overlook in exchange for contemplating the more exhilarating, self-affirming, blissful aspects of love. Loving another, and communicating that love, is often not easy; especially if the thrilling, enthralling, novelty of love has settled into a predictable familiarity, and perhaps just such a communication is something that Valentine’s Day affords. Among the modern symbols and images of Valentine’s Day, one in particular stands out: the honeybee-winged, infant Eros clumsily holding his wee bow and tiny arrows, arrows that should they find their mark, one wouldn’t notice any more than the sting of a mosquito. This image of Eros—infantile, small, impotent, speechless, dependent, and incapable of adult, especially sexual, relationships—may well represent an unconscious, neurotic orientation to love that is gaged by the value of the gifts bestowed and the hackneyed, greeting card folderol that passes for poetry, and alerts us to the fact that, culturally speaking, we don’t want to work too hard at love. Compare the Valentine’s Day Eros to the Eros depicted in ancient Greek culture: Eros was among the oldest of the gods, fully mature, robust and muscular, bearing angelic golden wings, and as sculpted by Praxiteles, heart renderingly beautiful. Hesiod, in his Theogony, writes that it is the influence of Eros—of love—that first gives form to the universe. His arrows also wound, and thereby give form to the human heart, sometimes causing an aversion to the beloved, other times kindling love, and even the greatest of the gods were not immune to his influence. This Eros is hardly a powerless child, and one must wonder how ideas of love would change if this was the image of Eros we were faced with each February 14th. Encountering the Eros of Hesiod or Praxiteles, one encounters the often disorienting, disturbing nature of the sublime, and the difficult pleasures of the sublime are never more present than when one becomes vulnerable enough to love deeply, unhesitatingly, and wholeheartedly.

New Year's is, traditionally, the time set aside for reflecting on the year just past and setting goals and making resolutions for the year to come. It is a curious emotional position in which to find oneself, not quite out of the old year and not fully engaged in the new, a liminal space leaving one betwixt and between, attempting to resolve the conflict between past memory and future ambition--just the thing New Year’s resolutions ideally do if we can realize them. The month of January was named for Janus, who was the unique (he had no Greek precedent), ancient (some scholars find a relationship to Romulus), and very important Roman god whose numerous and elaborate rituals acknowledged his influence over thresholds, transitions, endings and beginnings, gateways, passages, and time. His two-faced image was what one first saw in preparation for entering the most significant gate to the Eternal City, Rome, called the Ianiculum, the old face of Janus looking into the past, into death, even, while his young face is turned to the future and possibility. One might think of his domain as eternity itself, replete with births and deaths, beginnings and endings, and all varieties of psychosociomorphic possibilities. In fact, Janus may may be thought of as the god of the gap, occupying the liminal space and offering solace to those of us caught betwixt and between. Thanks for taking the time to read this MythBlast.