Silent
Silent provides the tools for seekers to recognize their path and enables self-reliance for spiritual and magickal growth.
Seekers gain insight from his work and find their inner calm from his ability to listen and help others reflect.
Lessons of the Priest
Silent • April 18, 2017
Living in the now
At Pantheacon 2017, I was fortunate enough to perform sacred service in the hospitality room hosted by a Pagan church. Shrine scenes for Hestia and Aphrodite were held by different priestesses. I held my Patron, Eris.
Of course, the details of what happened during this sacred service are private. It's between the pilgrims who came to visit and Eris. But, I'd like to share what happened as O/our time of service was coming to an end.
The High Priest entered the room where Eris was receiving pilgrims. He informed U/us, "Great lady, you have 10 minutes more." Time, and for that matter distance, are concepts that Eris seems to have a loose or at least very different understanding of we mortals.
Eris left me with a message to convey. "Priest, for Eris, there is only now and later. She has a limited and different concept of time."
"What about before?" he queried.
I didn't have an answer.
I didn't think about it very much at the time. But, admittedly, I was a bit euphoric from this session of service. In my life, it's been not often that I have been able to bring a message from a god to pilgrims in a very tangible way. For a deity so often associated with discord, Eris has a profound way of pulling on the one thread that brings simple questions, with complex answers, to the foreground. Understanding Her lessons takes much time and reflection.
I keep a journal of my lessons from Eris. Whenever I work through a task, I try to reframe it into the form of a question. What is the problem or question I am trying to answer? In this instance, I concluded I wanted to know, "What does now really mean? Is it simply a point in time or something more?" Hence, mediation, and I've written this article with Her guidance.
I've concluded that now is the culmination of every
- Past choices and decisions we make
- Conscious choices made by others that directly affect us or our environment
- Influence (s) from things in our environment (a bird flying past that causes us to turn our head, a tree/building/obstruction we go around, an apple in the path of the protagonist)
Now is a point of arrival. Now is a series of intersecting waves of Influence that emanate from events and choices. It's a rich and complex state of being to be studied and appreciated. Bad times come, too; those are lessons for us that may serve us later.
Much of the studies, rituals, and general work we do in our spiritual and mundane lives involves being in or getting to the now. Being mindful and understanding our surroundings or circumstance of who we are at a given moment is something that every witch or Pagan appreciates. We've learned or been taught to ground before, after a ritual, or when doing spell work. Times of stress or other deep emotions are other good candidates. At those times, we're brought back from the loss of being the now. Being mindful and in the now are possibly the best things we can do for ourselves and maybe everyone else.
There is a timeless quality and a deep sense of connection to all when invoked with Eris. There is a profound awareness of everything around me, and the feeling of everything is reduced to a single point within me. I am often blind yet keenly aware (Others who have been within the sphere of Influence while invoked with Eris have experienced this as well) of my surroundings.
Now is a single point, the apex or perhaps an all-encompassing sphere of everything around me. Everything I am, everything I touch, and everything that's affected by me have significant and profound consequences in the here and now. Everything you do or are in the process of doing at some point becomes your past and everyone else's past. Eris's important lesson is about self-control, mindfulness, and minding what you do and to whom. As witches, we are constantly taught that our intents, thoughts, and actions make the world around us. As within, so without.
There's an adage, "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." While that's true, being mindful that this now will become everyone's past gives you the one and only opportunity to change or affect it. Standing on this horizon, you can anticipate the changes you will make in the future and alter them. This is, perhaps, the only tangible form of time travel that exists. You must recognize that every action, every intention has a lasting effect in ever-widening spheres of Influence. What you've done to arrive at the here and now is more important than the past lesson. As with any line, it's made of a series of now points. You don't move through time; it is time that moves around us.
Steering vs. Navigating
One thing that I've learned is to steer and not try to navigate the currents. Let things be and happen in their own time and accord. The advice I most often get from my guides is the same. Stop trying to force life into happening. That doesn't mean you shouldn't prepare or have prepared yourself through discipline, education, practice, and training. It does mean that trying to force things is less likely to get the result the universe needs it to have. Be in the now instead of trying to make it happen.
Imagine being dropped into a rushing river. There are many things you can and can't control on the river. You can't control the current; you can't control obstacles or other obstacles in the river. But you can reach out to them. You may alter your course with the right effort, but you're still in the river. All you have is your emotional state of being. Your mental health, level of physical performance, stress level, and mental preparedness for how you make it downstream.
What of Later?
Later is the apex of choices made (the latest now you can see/touch). The intersection or merging of the lines of choice that passed through your life. In some traditions, these are sometimes called threads.
Somewhere in all of this is a lesson about the Wheel. If you go far enough into the future, perhaps we end up in the past or a past somewhere else along the spiral; circles within a circle.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Walk into any forest in the Cascades and you are standing on the dead. The fir that fell forty years ago is now the nurse log feeding a row of saplings. The salmon carried uphill by an eagle became the nitrogen in the cedar's needles. Nothing in that forest is wasted, and nothing in it is afraid. We have built an entire industry on pretending we are exempt from this. We drain the body of its blood, fill it with preservatives, seal it in lacquered hardwood, and lower it into a concrete vault—as if the earth were a contamination to be defended against rather than the place we came from. Cremation, for all its simplicity, burns fossil fuel and sends the body skyward as carbon. There is another way, and it began here in Washington. Human composting—the law calls it natural organic reduction—was legalized in this state in 2019, the first in the nation. The process is unhurried and honest. The body, unembalmed, is laid into a steel vessel and surrounded by wood chips, alfalfa, and straw. No chemicals are added. The microbes that already live on the plant material, and on us, do the work they have always done. Over eight to twelve weeks, the body becomes soil—about a cubic yard of it, dark and alive. Families may take some home for a garden or a tree, or donate it to forest conservation land. What was a person becomes, quite literally, ground for new growth. I have sat with the dying, and I can tell you that the question underneath most deathbed fear is not what happens to me? It is did I matter, and will anything of me remain? The Hávamál answers plainly: cattle die, kin die, the self dies too—but what one leaves behind endures. We usually read that as reputation. I have come to read it more literally. A body that becomes soil leaves something behind that you can hold in your hands. Something that feeds. For those of us who keep the old ways, this is not innovation. It is restoration. Our ancestors were returned to barrows and bogs and burial mounds, given back to the land that fed them. The vessel and the alfalfa are new; the covenant is ancient. The earth gives, and the earth receives. Every harvest festival we keep is built on that exchange. It would be strange to honor the cycle all our lives and then opt out of it at the end. This choice is now legal in a dozen states and counting. If it speaks to you, say so—out loud, in writing, to the people who will one day carry out your wishes. Death plans left unspoken become burdens; death plans spoken become gifts. A leaf falls. A seed sprouts. The tree does not grieve the leaf, and the soil does not refuse the seed. When my own time comes, I intend to be useful one last time. That, too, is a kind of prayer. —Silent
For the Pagan and Contemplative Community
There is a grief that arrives before the death. It does not announce itself. It does not have a name that anyone uses at the dinner table, or in the waiting room, or in the parking lot of the care facility where you sit in your car for a few minutes before going in, gathering yourself. It lives in small moments. The first time they didn't recognize you. The day you realized you were making decisions for them that they would have hated. The night you caught yourself hoping — just for a second, just once — that it would be over soon, and then spent the next three days punishing yourself for the thought. This is called anticipatory grief. And it is real, and it is heavy, and almost no one will name it for you while you are living inside it, because you are the strong one, and the person you are losing is still here, and grief, we have been told, comes after. It doesn't always come after. Sometimes it comes alongside. Caregiving is one of the most demanding things a human being can do. It asks you to be present to someone else's diminishment, day after day, while managing your own fear and your own exhaustion and your own sadness — and while the world around you continues as though nothing unusual is happening. You go to the grocery store. You answer emails. You show up. You are praised for your strength, which is a kindness people offer because they don't know what else to give you. What you actually need is someone who will let you put the strength down for an hour. Not fix you. Not give you a plan. Not tell you that you're doing a great job, or that they couldn't do what you're doing, or that everything happens for a reason. Just someone who will sit with you in the weight of it. Who will not be frightened by what you are carrying. Who will let you say the unsayable things — the anger, the ambivalence, the love that is so tangled up with loss that you can no longer tell them apart. That is what I offer. I am a death doula and spiritual director. I work with caregivers who are in the middle of it — not at the end, not after, but now, in the long middle stretch where the grief has no official start date and the world has not yet given you permission to feel it. We meet, usually by video, for an hour at a time. I listen in a particular way — not for problems to solve, but for what is actually present beneath the exhaustion and the competence and the careful management of everyone else's emotions. You do not have to have it together when you come into this space. That is the point of it. A few things I will not do: I will not tell you how to grieve correctly. There is no correctly. I will not rush you toward acceptance or silver linings. Some things do not have silver linings, and pretending otherwise is a small violence. I will not give you more to manage. You are already managing too much. What I will do is be present — fully, unhurriedly, without an agenda — for whatever you bring into the room. If you are a caregiver and you are reading this and something in you recognized itself in these words, that recognition is an invitation. I have a small number of spaces available for caregivers who are navigating the approach of death alongside someone they love. The intake questions at tokeepsilent.me are where we begin. Or you can reach me directly. There is no script for this conversation. We simply start. — Silent