Nonaligned faith and practice in the present
Who is Walhydra?
Walhydra became a storytelling alter-ego for me in the mid-1990s on the Crone Thread, an email listserv of mostly Pagan, mostly women elders, folk who understand, revere, and emulate the crone aspect of the Goddess.
The Crone is that feminine aspect of the Divine which, in the form of a human being past childbearing age, strives on behalf of the race to learn about and teach the terrors and blessings of mortality. She does
…It’s so ridiculous,
comes over me suddenly
like a storm.
I want to fight with someone,
shout at them
to give him back.
Intimacy
on the order of
another husband lost.
…
When the body fails the person
What are we doing, what are we witnessing, when a dear one’s body fails?
Today we ended our cat Shadow’s life.
Since January he had been struggling
…
I’ve been trying to be immortal.
Now I can’t pee right,
and my foot is swollen.
Friends have died recently. Others are facing it first hand. My younger siblings have already experienced the death of a spouse or a stroke or
…There is a grave error in the penitential notion of “mortifying the body.”
It replicates the false dualism of “spirit versus matter ” that crept into and overwhelmed the Jewish faith and practice of Jesus as his followers spread out through the Greco-Roman world.
A truer practice is to “affirm the body,” to affirm it as a mortal yet sacred part of the divine whole.
When I allow myself to suffer the large or small sufferings of my body,
When Dad died
I could
let him go
because
we had gone to McDonald’s
together.
Double cheeseburger,
shake, and fries.
Watching him
climb on the exercise bike
as soon as we
got back
to the nursing home,
I saw him at peace
with
Our notion of insect life cycles
is upside-down.
We watch the adult stage
and mourn.
Such a short life.
But nymphs live for
years. Then
one brief moment for sex
and egg laying.
care (v.)
Old English carian, cearian “be anxious or solicitous; grieve; feel concern or interest,” from Proto-Germanic *karo- “lament,” hence “grief, care” (source also of Old Saxon karon “to lament, to care, to sorrow, complain,” Old High German charon “complain, lament,” Gothic karon “be anxious”), said to be from PIE root *gar- “cry out, call, scream.” —Online Etymology Dictionary
Our hyper-connected media world forces us all to wrestle with an extra layer of emotional suffering: that
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Occasionally people wonder where I got the totem name Bright Crow that I use in my email address. Here’s the story I wrote to explain it in the voice of Walhydra’s amanuensis in 2008.
Walhydra likes to tease her amanuensis about a typo he makes occasionally with his totem name, Bright Crow.
Since he’s been typing for forty years, often to earn a living, he just shrugs and laughs. Nonetheless, she thinks the question
…Introductions: Mom died with Alzheimer’s in 2011. In Fall of 2009, we had moved her from assisted living to skilled nursing due to fall risk and escape seeking. “Howling,” from my blog Walhydra’s Porch on 11/9/2009, tells of our last coherent conversation about death.
Walhydra is one of my storytelling alter-egos: a grouchy old witch unhappily reincarnated as a gay male would-be writer.
When things with Mom
…
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