"Dust in the Wind" went out the door with all the groaning dark German pessimists I'd been reading. So too went Davy Lee Roth. I found a new album: Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" that spoke of not being afraid to care. That life's summary was smiles and tears, all, but ONLY, what could be touched and perceived immediately in this Veil of Incarnation.

The matrimonial association did not work out, which was probably just as well. Instead I finished my undergraduate degree in History, then went to Grad School and got through that. I was briefly married, a huge mistake and I was miserable; at the same time I was diagnosed with cancer. I fought my way clear through both. I battled it out as a single person, then as coming Out as Bisexual.

By the time I got to 40, I realized that I had wound up -- by accident! -- involved with living and being involved with not just my own life, but the lives of other people who had grown in importance and even priority, past my own immaturity and narcissism. When people died, I grieved. When my four-legged companions lived out their lives and were "called home to Egypt," I started to understand that the Past begins the moment of life's cessation. There's no controlling it, no negotiating, only an end of a timeline, and all that is left is memory.

I'm 52, and my CD-alarm clock wakes me up in the morning with one of the albums I recall fondly from my second year of college, before everything fell horribly apart. The album is "Saturday Night Fever" and the tune, "Stayin' Alive."

Because as I stay alive, so do the memories, the smiles, the tears, and all intersections of this one life that I have.

Then last week at practice I drew my beloved Blackhawk Yellowjacket -- like I've been doing for almost a year now -- and heard a terrifying "snap-click." And that was the death of my first real grown-up "serious" bow.

On this particular Wednesday, the First Day of Summer 2012 (oddly enough, also the anniversary, St. Alban's Day, of my Confirmation) it was sunny and beastly hot. We were having a "supplemental" practice so we could just get some shooting in. I'd been using this bow downstairs in my basement, always feeling a little like cheating, like maybe I was "using it up." I needed a "basement bow" and one was in the works. But we had a chance to sling shafts at a real 20-yd. outdoor at our usual range and we took the opportunity.
It could have been the heat ... the 45 years of the bow's lifetime ... the times I, in my ignorance, left it out in the direct sunlight at practices, or at events when I couldn't find shade for it. Maybe the extra trauma of practicing in my basement; and maybe it sensed that I knew it was almost as old as I was. To be sure, over the course of the winter I'd paged through various catalogs looking for shiny new bows. But I always came back to the one I was given. But it WAS given to me, in very special and unique circumstances.

"When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall; and down will come baby, cradle and all."

The baby falls but the grown up makes the Save by growing up and being there. Saint Paul notes this when he talks about the mature Gospel: it's too much for "babies" so he has to dole out "baby food." Joseph Campbell says, tigers eat tiger-food, not goat-food, and when you're ready to be a tiger, you're going to kill and eat and learn to like it. Dragons live forever, but not so little boys, and that's a good thing even though it hurts to grow up. (Dragons NEVER outgrow the little boy in all of us.)

My dad's last words to me were good advice for situations like this: "Have a beer, and relax." It was a Friday evening and I was fretting about driving a big rental truck the next day, for all day, in support of a 1800-rider organized bike ride. He was going in for a "simple cardiac procedure."

I will let the past be the past, and have a beer, and relax. And then I will buy SUCH a bow ...

"I know a place where no one ever goes
Where there’s peace and quiet, beauty and repose
It’s hidden in a valley beside a mountain stream
And lying there beside it
I find that I can dream ... "

Mental imagery is a crucial component of meditation and what I will call "liturgical magick."

The feminist spirituality classic Motherwit by Diane Mariechild and The Spiral Dance by Starhawk both introduced me to creative visualizations long before my ordination studies in 2005. And I've always been a strongly visual (even slightly eidetic) person. So I often take refuge in visualizations of one kind or another.

[The role of meditation and visualization both in target archery is so well-reported that I'll pass on adding my amateur's perspective.]

When I need the refuge of that place that no one (but me) ever goes, I have a mental Rollodex of favorites:

When I need grounding/Centering/Shielding: the Temple Church in medieval London. I enter between an armed Saracen knight on one side, a Templar knight on the other. These two "opposites" are reconciled in single duty, and walking between them I know I enter in to a secure place of quiet and safety. They will keep "intruders" (thoughts & distractions) out.

When I need a big fresh lungful of settled-down calm-mind air: Imagining any of the shores I've been to, but most especially Lake Michigan at Point Betsie or at Old Indian Trail in the Sleeping Bear Lakeshore area. The waves pound in, the wind streams past, tears come to my eyes. I hear the roar of water striking sand and the call of gulls. There's nothing and no one else.

When I need to block voices and distractions in settings of crowds and chatty colleagues:

I am in a crowded shopping mall with music blaring, merchants in front of their "storefronts" trying to outshout each other regarding the quality of their wares ... I'm being jostled and harried. But then I see a dark entrance that has a simple sign, "ROSARIES," and when I go in, it's quiet and smells faintly of incense. There are counters full of display cases of rosaries, from all lands and all eras. There are only a few other people in the shop, and the Keeper is a woman who looks like the character Guinan from Star Trek: Next Generation. I know that I am welcome to breathe in the incense, spend as much time as I want looking, praying, handling the beads.

I think this last image is probably my most powerful.

I *do* know a place!

And I thought it only meant inspecting bows and arrows and other tackle. Heck, you didn't even have to, you know, be able to score 20 pts. at 20 yards with six arrows. NOW there's this fine print about "How a Marshal shall behave."

WHAT? You mean I have to [Austin Powers accent here] BEEEE-have?

More recently at a youth event where archery was a major component, it was a matter of first, fitting bows to young people who'd never drawn a bow before, and then showing them how to nock an arrow. Several times a right-handed archer pivoted right to nock (on the left of the shelf, which is correct) but then nocked pointing TOWARD the archer on the right. It's an easy, natural, first-timer thing to do. (In fact I catch myself tending that way when I nock, even now.)

So the Marshal-In-Training (me) has to be gentle but firm and encouraging but specific that please, nock your arrow pointing toward the target, thank you.

I can manage this with grace and good cheer with the under-age-16 crowd, but my palms start to sweat in anticipation by roleplaying Lord Dungsschmertz and his atomic crossbow, and he has an ISSUE.

I was awfulizing this empitheatre with myself when I realized that in fact, I had all sorts of attitudes that I was going to have to "own" and face before I could ever be alone at the Line with archers to facilitate. It's not just what the archers bring with them, eyesight or tackle or hopes/fears/frustrations/dreams. It's my attitude as a marshal that I need to consider as well, what I'm bringing with ME.

Right Attitude and the discipline of Loving Service. (The spirit of Chivalry.)

The wind blew. My arrow went sideways and stuck pathetically in the wooden frame of the target. The next two disappeared into the leaves behind as they floated up and over. The next draw I pulled back way past my anchor point (to put a little more OOMPH! into the shot and speed it up a bit) and pulled a shoulder muscle. Only true Christian temperance prevented me from unleashing oaths, blasphemies, and other unladylike verbal tropes.

With traditional (SCA) archery, here are your starting points:

You're probably using a bow that can only handle Dacron B-50 bowstrings. Dacron B-50 is notoriously "moody."

You're using wooden spines, which are notoriously inaccurate.

You're not allowed stabilizers but you *can* have a wrist sling. Oh whoopee.

And THEN the wind starts blowing.

And the wind blew for practice on Sunday; it was still blowing for practice on Tuesday, and it was positively gleefully punitive on Thursday, when we were tired and beat-down, bankrupt in spirit and completely convinced of the futility of the whole archery endeavor. Our helpful Forester was there to console us by honing his skills left-handed, when he's a right-hand shooter. He totally whupped our barnacles.

When we got home, we burst into one of the worst domestic disputes I've ever experienced. Outside the backyard fence attempted to unravel itself from its supports. It was all going horribly wrong.

Two days passed. The mood in the household improved. We went downstairs the following Saturday and plinked away at our state-of-no-art 11-yard basement target. There was no wind.

There was a smile in my release again.

:)

Like three Bad Practices never happened.

It's a year later and I am a real, paying member of the SCA and, by golly, learning to be an archer. Bahhhh, youth! I have no time for nostalgia ... there's an event coming up and I need to MAKE ARROWS!

As of July, 1972 I was decent enough with a bow to win two Camp Archery Association medals at Timbers Girl Scout Camp as a member of the dreaded Fern Grove archers. There were about six of us from Fern Grove and we were way better than anybody from Shadow Ridge or Whispering Pines! We were even allowed extra after-dinner practices at the range that was set up by the old barn near the main headquarters of the camp. Normally you'd just get archery as part of your daily physical activity, like swimming and boating and so on. Fern Grove was about half a mile down the access road from the barn so we'd leave the unit in formation chanting a cadence. (I won't repeat it. What's composed in Girl Scout Camp, STAYS in Girl Scout camp, and twelve-year-old girls can be pretty colorful, out of earshot of counselors.) With the additional practice we got even better and were invited to take part in a national competition organized by the CAA (as it still does, I find), to submit scores during a supervised and scored shoot. The Fern Grove Archers cleaned up.

On the last day of camp the two medals I won -- Yeoman and Jr. Bowman -- slipped into the tall grass by the same barn, never to be seen again. (I had the bad habit of carrying the medals around with me in my shorts pocket and fiddling with them. Served me right.) I rode home to Flint with my parents, heartbroken. I didn't pick up a bow again, "seriously," until May of 2011, when I joined the SCA.

At that time I had attended a couple of the business meetings of our local barony. The SCA had changed since I last knew it in 1979: now there was a lot of emphasis on Arts and Sciences as well as fighting. There were rapier fighters now, too, and the Pennsic War was two weeks long! -- NOT just staged over one weekend. And our barony had an archery resource. In fact, the SCA now formally supported archery, target and combat archery. Archery had always been a "bucket list" item for my un/spouse. We dithered, we worried: who WERE these people? Would they accept us? -- and then we just showed up to practice about mid-May. She was starting from scratch while I had a lot to remember as well as learn to do right. But we were hooked.

Some of the dreaded Fern Grove charm was still with me, but I had never had "lessons" as such. I'd had a father who was an outdoorsman, a West Virginia Mountain Man through and through (even if he had been born and raised in Michigan). He was also left-handed. One of the first things I found out was that I naturally nocked my arrow on the right, i.e., left-handed ... the legacy of my dear dad trying to teach his right-handed daughter to shoot.

All sorts of other learning opportunities and refinements came along in due course: building arrows, including cutting feathers for fletching; leatherwork for arm guards and gloves; care of the bowstring, with beeswax. This all in addition to the actual practice of archery itself. I look back from the perspective of a year later and realize that I know even less now, given what I now know that I never knew there WAS to know. Just yesterday I experienced my first 3-D roving shoot at a sportsmen's retreat not too far from home. I didn't even realize such things existed until late last year. They're always talking about "holo-suites" on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I know what MINE would look like, if I had a chance to design one ... !

I find, a year later, that I am no longer nostalgic for the youthfully inebriated and dissolute melodramas of my first SCA involvement so long ago. If nothing else, SCA archery is itself something of a newcomer (is my impression) and certainly was not an option in the "old days." I can say with sincerity that at practice or any SCA archery event, you may lose [loose] six arrows (or more!) ... but you may find friends and your life, too.

THEN, a few days ago, I contacted the Webmaster of this Blogging service and said, Well, gosh, I think I've missed blogging, but I'd really like to change the title, how do I do that ...

And THEN I couldn't even bring myself to change the title.

Ex fide, pax: "From faith, peace" -- something I cobbled together from the remnants of Jr. High School Latin I remember and a lot of help from Internet translation utilities. And I'm still interpreting what exactly it all means to me.

I never called myself "the Mad Poet." Back when I was more formally NeoPagan, a friend just blurted it out, referring to me as his token mad poet friend. Well gosh, voila, there was my "Magickal" or "working name." I've never forgotten and I won't give it up. Too bad I can't have it printed on my St. Andrew's Episcopal Church nametag, because it's probably more exact than just my given name.

And because Naming is a significantly magical/religious act on the part of shamans and heroes throughout history and literature, putting on the Mad Poet for me is shapeshifting into a shamanic identity.

At church, when I'm Acolyte, I put on garb (an alb) and light altar candles. These are the instruments of Magick, where "magick" is changing consciousness at will to undertake personal transformation.

And WHERE are we transforming to? To find the Treasure of the Templars? All those past lives you can't remember, but were necessarily more fun than the one you've got now? Fame? Immortality?

For me, Peace.

Ex fide, pax.

So we got in the 9.3 on a Saturday morning and drove nearly 700 miles to Grand Rapids, Minnesota, for an overnight before the same distance drive the next day, and then the next.

It was a LONG drive, all told ...

(Well, indeed, MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!)

I know I know: the easiest high-percentage shot in hockey is a daughter blaming her mother. It's a bona-fide Empty-Net sure thing. So enough already.

But I had the good fortune of growing up with a real gangbuster older-sister role model in my familial sphere, my cousin "Kep," to use her Girl Scout camp name. I know from her own testimony that Kep found me a "holy terror" in my rugrat stage (her words, and I accept them). But we have always managed to stay within the general orbit of our kinship solar system. She went West and married, and had a wonderful daughter, and they are BOTH Amazons, my cousin now "retired" (sort-of) from being an NPS Ranger/Interpreter at the Grand Canyon and North Cascades, among other places. Now she and her husband live in a little town in far western Montana, about 30 miles from Idaho. They live quite literally on the knees of two mountain ranges, the Cabinets and the Purcells, with the magnificent Rockies a mere hour and a half to the east, where endures Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park.

Every so often I still catch myself, almost two months later, wondering: DID we really do that? Drive two nights/three days/1900 miles there, hang out for three days, then drive two nights/three days all the way home? Why, yes we did! More to the point, Kep and her family have done this quite often, because they are real travelers and real outdoorsfolk and backpackers and EMTs and rangers, not to mention world-embracing courageous, compassionate people.

And oddly enough, part of my own pilgrimage this late summer was also homage to Lewis and Clark. Over the last fifteen years, as I've visited Monticello twice, and driven two days and one night to Spearfish, South Dakota, I've become a big fan of Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and the Corps of Discovery. Alas, my interest piqued about a year AFTER the big bicentennial of the expedition in 2003-2006. (This is always my luck.) But just driving through the West, along the Mississippi Trail in Minnesota, and then most overtly in North Dakota and Montana, along the Missouri trail and the historic network of forts and outposts, the legacy of the Corps is evident in 2011.

These were real heroes, not just made-up characters out to destroy an Evil Ring, etc. (Don't get me wrong -- I LOVE LOTR!!!!) When Sergeant Charles Floyd dies of appendicitis/peritonitis in August of 1804, he dies in the middle of nowhere, the outcome of the journey uncertain.

We went a long way, even by modern standards, although I know of people who have driven to Oregon and California and even Alaska from the Midwest. There are decent roads: Hwy 2 out of Minnesota into North Dakota and Montana is a very decent four-lane divided near-expressway that avoids the challenges of driving two-lane high-speed roads (that is, having to pass trucks and slower-moving RVs, etc.). It's a nice trip to Montana, although we spent 10-12 hours *a day* on the road, for three days, getting there and coming home. Ten-twelve hours a day of anything can be challenging.

But we would not have seen half the wonders that we did, had we simply flown to Kalispell or even taken Amtrak's Empire Builder, which we easily could have done.

How distance and topography become the tapestry of reaching toward a farther personal horizon: the upper great lakes forests changing into Minnesota broken-forest prairie ... then into North Dakota prairie ... then into the high plains of Montana, and then finally the Bear Paw Mountains south, the Sweet Grass Hills north, and the Rockies filling up the windshield from mirror to mirror ahead. Big Sky Country. Yes, we really did that, whether it was "undaunted courage" or not. We drove. We overnighted at a BNSF crew motel in Glasgow, MT, and listened to the wheels and horns thunder through all night, the tracks two blocks away, hundred-car intermodal drifts on their own passage and pilgrimage across the wide Missouri.

We drank only shallowly from that cup of restless motion. It was sweet.

I went into St. Andrew's yesterday to be a LEM with my heart broken. Our rector Alan asked me how I was ... and I tried to give him the steely-eyed Templar Can-Do description I had rehearsed on the walk downtown. Not a chance. I finally had to say, "And now I have to stop talking about it, because I have to be a LEM and I have to get to where I can do that this morning." Tears welled in my throat and my already swollen eyes started to burn again.

Almost like losing a child.

In fact it was bad luck that took our little Squeak from us, way too soon. Coming up on four years old, barely out of kittenhood, as far as we knew from the adoption agency, she had never lived a happy, fully adult cat life in a "forever home."

Yesterday we received a sympathy card from our Vet hospital, and all the signees acknowledged that t was too soon to lose such a sweet girl. The only "comfort" that salvages anything from eith of these situations is knowing that whatever time my cousin had with his son, or we had with our Squeak, though way too short, was filled with the purest love.

And that is the best luck of all. Having a heart that can be so desperately broken is in fact the true blessing of the Creator. My cousin said: in his son's memory, live life, grab it with both hands, don't let go, be in it every minute. Having to make the terrible decision regarding the Final Intervention on the part of a beloved companion is full-spectrum Life.

As for our Squeak: through tears we rejoice that she has been called home to Egypt to serve the Great Goddess in her temple, as was revealed in that movie long ago, The Three Lives of Thomasina. She will stand in the mighty company of her ancestors the great cats and, we hope, give testimony concerning the two silly middle-aged women who gave her the "forever home" she finally knew. We will not fear that judgment.