The palm pillar in Saint-Séverin (probably a symbol of pilgrimage to the Holy Land and of the interior pilgrimage everyone should be making in church...if they're paying attention...)

Saint-Séverin, exterior (I like the flame motif in the window).

The mysterious Kalibhakta outside the Cluny Museum.

My Compass and Square

I just now thought of this: miraculously, I only bought two books while in France (if you don't count the pamphlet on the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries)...and it wasn't for lack of visiting bookstores (tho I forced myself to walk past the Brentano's on Avenue de L'Opéra)...

I didn't notice the significance before, but I bought Le Dictionnaire Erotique and Les Anges: Messagers Divins. That about sums it up--the two sides of the Möbius strip of creation, the lemniscate my Kali has wrapped round me... but they aren't opposite sides, and there's not even two of them, for the strip has only One side...

The Paris Working, Part 3 (more horrific Oprah stuff)

Advice for those going on a pilgrimage:

Stay home.

And if you must go:

at least make a pilgrimage to someplace cushy like France. Paris is pretty plush next to Angkor Wat or even the Camino de Santiago (which I used to think I wanted to walk)...but if your Higher Power figures out what you're up to, He or She or It or They are still going to start shoveling manure into the fan as fast as their divine Hands or heavenly minions can go...

It wasn't that bad. It was actually good. But...my patience was tried, and my insecurities confronted, and my limitations pushed, and...let me give you some examples.

Patience: bad weather makes me miss my connection the day I'm supposed to leave. So I have to leave a day late, and I'm scrambling on the phone with the airline and the hotel: "Heyyyy. Ugly American here. Can you, uh, hold my room for me? Greeeeeeaaaat." The day I do leave, I get to DC and find the flight to Europe and get on the plane and the plane just...sits there. Why? Well, for our safety, they have to fix the onboard PA system. Which isn't working. And is going to be working any minute, they keep telling us every 90 seconds...and how do they keep telling us this? Over the PA system.

It was like Kali wasn't even bothering to make up good reasons to try my patience any more...like She said, "To hell with this Matrix stuff, the play of my maya, we both know the game, so...do you trust Me yet?" So I missed my connection in Munich and did end up trusting Her and even being grateful...for the delay, for the privilege of being a child of God, for a cup of mediocre German coffee...grateful, I guess, for being thrust helpless into Her arms, as weird as that sounds.

Insecurities: I don't like asking for help or, Goddess forbid, being presumptuous, and--I speak French on a sub-Borat level and since I was traveling alone and had to eat and stuff, I had to speak a lot of French. Every time you walk into a store or deal with someone in any capacity, you have to talk to them in a certain pre-set, polite manner or you aren't going to get what you want, and so I had to keep trying to squeeze out all these impossible vowel sounds and...contrary to the French stereotype, everyone I met (with two exceptions) was extremely nice and helpful and kind, sometimes to an extraordinary degree, like the woman in the shop at the Cluny Museum who turned the place upside down to help me find a gift... and who then apologized and offered me a discount when she had to sell me the display item...but she wouldn't have been that way had I not sucked it up, talked français, and acted like (tho not in an arrogant way) someone who deserved the whole Cluny Museum to come to a halt for him...

this lesson of acting like a person who deserves good stuff was impressed upon me mightily when I ate at Taillevent, where I could easily have felt as at home as a Dianic High Priestess at a Promise Keepers rally had I not acted like I belonged there. As I puffed on my after-dinner Cuban cigar, it occurred to me that in my life I had managed to feel ill-at-ease in places far slummier than this one, and that other times I'd felt perfectly at home in some of those same places... and that, in the immortal Twelve-Step slogan, if I was going to make the world my gourmet restaurant I was going to have to "Let it begin with me." (It was tough, dammit, but someone had to do it.) Tantrikas in India go to the cremation grounds and eat human flesh to overcome some of these feelings, and I'm really hoping Kali is going to let me slide with canard cooked à point.

Limitations: I wore good walking shoes and tried to get enough sleep...but there came a time when my legs and feet hurt so bad, and I was so tired that I didn't know if I was speaking French or English or Spanish or pig Latin. Part of me was back in the USA, painfully, while part of me was in Paris, also painfully, too sore to walk, but standing was worse... a big part of me was loving Kali in Her guises as the Virgin of Paris, the Virgin of the Pillar, Isis and Nepthys in the Louvre, La Madeleine, La Dame and her Unicorn...

OK! I know you're thinking, the wuss thinks he was weepin' by the rivers of Babylon...in %#@*ing Paris!!!! But no, Dear Reader...despite my angel-mania and Goddess-lunacy and propensity for seein' the future and past in comic books and wine bottles, I have a grip...on some kind of reality. Since I blessedly have not been asked by my Divine Mother to become a wandering mendicant or celibate novice, I have to surrender where I can find it, and you try walking six hours a day in not-yet-broken-in Vasques on cobblestones and up and down stairs and stairs and stairs and it's 80+ degrees in Paris and there's no air-conditioning anywhere and what's up with that &$#@!?!? and...well, I can't really complain. Really. Not at all.

The secret of this pilgrimage, I figured out surprisingly early on (for me) was, wherever you go, there you are. I could have stayed in my hotel room and watched the BBC and CNBC and been bored &$#@less; I could have dawdled in the Galeries Lafayette or the passages, spending money on crap I didn't need or want; I could have haunted the Hard Rock Café and Harry's Bar and Shakespeare and Co. and felt like I'd never left home...but I was doing what I wanted to do and paying the price for my desires and so...not really hurting...for the diminution of leg pain would have meant one less church that day (and no one has heard of St. Anne's but it was so, so lovely)...or one less trip to Notre-Dame or the Cluny (and they sustained me)...or not walking down to that cheese shop on Boulevard St. Germain (and that would have been tragic)...

What It Was Like

The Paris Saga, part 1 of 63.

Beautiful...scary...elegant...impersonal yet welcoming...unexpected moments of grace...of Her light, seeping 'round the edges of phone booths and spring flowers...

it was made clear to me some time ago, first by my guru and then by my dear Guardian Angel, that my spiritual path was not to be one of mountaintops, loin cloths, ashrams, cat-o-nine-tails--you know, the whole bed of nails trip. Which I'm not complaining about! But... my guru warned me that while pretty much anyone could feel holy when withdrawn from the world, it was going to be a different matter to try to stay in Kali's lap while working, loving, eating chocolate, etc. ... that I wasn't going to have the reassurance of saffron robes or vespers, that my mind was going to produce demons that told me I was doing it wrong, couldn't ever do it, wasn't ever going to feel at home anywhere ever, wasn't lovable, didn't know how to live in either the realm of heaven or the realm of earth...

and Kali has dealt with me on these neuroses ever since...a lot of this blog has been about that. I knew that my pilgrimage to Europe's Goddess Capital was supposed to be some kind of exam on this whole tantric deal of living the embodied, "mundane" life while loving the Divine Mother in all Her creation...and it was, and I hope you won't be disappointed to hear that there was no Damascene donkey derailment, no Temple of the Golden Pavilion bursting into flames...but... as Laura said before I went, I had to be there... sometimes, with a glass of absinthe on my hotel balcony, watching the sunset gild Notre-Dame, that was not at all difficult...sometimes, for reasons I may go into later, it was hellishly, itch-you-can't-scratch difficult and I wanted to quit and that is exactly where God likes to get us so She can cook us a little more, like those chickpeas Rumi wrote about.

Sometimes it was difficult when it shouldn't have been...those mornings I was alone with The Lady and the Unicorn, for an hour or more, and I was washed in that impossible beauty and that impossibly elegant spiritual allegory...that was also exactly the story I was living, of finding Her through the senses as well as the Spirit...and I would get restless, scared the spell would end and someone would enter the room, that kind of thing, but I kept coming back to the tapestries, the story, myself, the moment...until it didn't matter that the room filled up and people were coughing and taking flash pictures...and now that I'm back, Stonewall feels as exotic as Paris, and the fried chicken from the BiLo down the street is better than the delicacies from the épiceries of the Latin Quarter...for this is my Latin Quarter, and my house is my Notre-Dame...and there is even a Chartres nearby...

The Paris Working, Part 2

I'm going...

where???

My god...don't I have to pack? Isn't that really far away? Isn't it going to cost a whole humongous buttload of money???

And I'm leaving...Monday?????????

The frontiers of typographic anxiety...how else can I format this text? If I do get a chance to post a dispatch or two from Paris, it'll be on a French keyboard and it'll probably lòök lìké thîs...

and apparently you're only supposed to hold the fork in your left hand...there's faux pas number 1...'cause I'm not going to, 'cause if I did I might drop my bite of cuisse de grenouille and dishonor America. But...I'll have the fork in my right hand, which is probably bad enough. And Sophia made some joke about my eating at Taillevent that was so funny that, though I have striven to suppress it for the nonce, I am going to remember it as I sit there with six waiters standing at attention around the table, and I am going to start laughing and wine is going to come out my nose and...serai l'americain laid.

You don't diss their wine. Especially not by nasally divesting yourself of it. And you don't act all friendly, either. Which will be another downfall, as I habitually greet even strangers with a little smile or nod, which is an American thing and in particular a southern American thing but you don't do it over there because it's weird and people could even think you are coming on to them, which is so totally totally totally not going to be the case but...el americano feo, otra vez...wrong language. And I'll probably speak Spanish by mistake once or twice and since France probably had a war with Spain 800 years ago that everyone is still bitter about, the espanol will be the final nail in my touristic coffin.

So I may as well go all the way and start when I get off the plane, greeting the City of Light by pumping my fist in the air and chanting "Bush, Bush, USA, kick ass!!!"...

And they've already had riots over the election that is going down right in the middle of my visit, on my birthday in fact, and so I can see myself living to "rue" that "to the barricades" remark in the previous post and being forced to camp out in the Arènes de Lutèce for two weeks or, if I'm lucky, the airport...at least I'm prepared for that eventuality with my iPod and my secret weapon...

And... I asked my Guardian Angel what my task was, what Grail I was supposed to seek in Paris...what awful dark rite I was supposed to enact (the day I get there is a dark-moon Tuesday, probably the most sacred day in the Shakta calendar)...

and do you know what this Angel, this praeterhuman intelligence, this holy dove of divine wisdom...

said?????????

"I want you to be there."

Hm.

"Well, I can be here. And save a whole lot of money."

"You're going to be homesick, but I want you to be homesick while still being true to yourself."

"So--I can't sit around and cry in Notre-Dame?"

"Just don't make it a habit."

"Be there." [snort]

"Are you making fun of me?"

Awakening Osiris

So...I was telling you that Kali is doing something to me.

What?

%#&@ if I know. But it's one of those awakenings...some of them, to quote the old druggie adage, are long, strange trips, others are like being shot out of an atomic cannon...I've struggled like Hell to deprogram myself from that abrahamic idiocy which proclaimeth that I am fundamentally screwed up and so all spiritual growth must come from self-sacrifice...and from that western intellectual idiocy that says "they" already know all that's worth knowing and so it's all about me and the random experiences I can accumulate before my neurons blink out from oxygen starvation...so in this cannon-shot phase I feel like I am finally living the full antithesis of those old mind-cancers, feeling myself becoming lovable, beginning to see my own beauty...it sounds horrifically Oprah, I know, but it is so bitterly hard-won no earth-made blade could scratch it...

and all this from my attempts to create a life based on the dubious sometimes, still, notion that there is some big, nice Girl up there in the sky who loves me and watches over me...but damned if She doesn't infiltrate my reality in the most startling ways. Spring, here in Stonewall, is always dramatic, but I've never felt it the way I've felt it this year, and I've never been so alive to the Divine Mother's upwelling presence in the world. I've never been so conscious of an intelligence outside myself that is somehow orchestrating my life without my consent or understanding, like Martha Beck's Bunraku puppeteers. I think I'll just quote from my journal for a bit:

This springtime...has bloomed within me as a warm, languorous jungle of sensuality. I see Kali blooming in every flower, in spiral psychedelia of pollen in parking-lot puddles, in the pollen-hazed light, in emerald green of trees, in amethyst wisteria drooping like exhausted lovers from aching branches...Laura calls this "the Vision of Love."

"You've had the Vision of Sorrow," she said, "and now the Vision of Love, and both are equally valid--but which do you prefer?"

Obviously Love--but Her point was, "You have to stay in this. You can't go back to love as insecurity or selfish desire. You can't go back to trading love for acceptance and validation. You have to live in this Love as all there is, you have to participate in it. If you do, the Vision of Love is its own reward."

Kali prompts me: I get in the car yesterday to go have lunch with a co-worker, and music from Parsifal is on the radio; on the way home it's a pop song about angels and letting love in. I grab a cup of coffee after a sleepless, visionary night, and Laura's kabbalistic number is on the receipt, along with the cashier's name: Angel. Except I glimpsed the cashier's name tag, and it said Carolyn or Catherine or something, not Angel.

And, oh Goddess, right now I am listening to the most dramatic Sarah McLachlan song and feeling the most impossibly dramatic shakti surges within...I've joked with Sophia about spending most of my Paris sojourn weeping in some cathedral pew, bow'd before a rose window of Her unfolding, beautiful in its grace and terror...this is such a random post, I know, and in a way I wish it were simpler, that my life, that I were simpler...but I guess I need all 69 dimensions. All the ocean spray, tang of blood, sting of bourbon, cushiony soil flavor of truffles...bitter herbs, chocolate macaroons...all of She Whose love is better than ice cream...