Crone in Corrogue: Wild Wisdom of the Elder Years

Glorying in the elder years, a time of spirituality, service and some serious sacred activism

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Unfreezer Spell

Even if you avoid a lot of print and social media. Even if you don't own a television with cable news. Even if you have wifi at the whim of the fairies who ration your streaming. Even if, with all these provisos, you would have to live in an underground bunker to have missed the terrible news that the solar eclipse is bringing into the light.

And if you care about the treatment of children. Or if you just care about human beings. If you are a woman who has learned that certain powerful people who are employees of a government department are creating memes where a Member of the House of Representatives is felating them...because humiliation is what really rocks their rocks off in a secret Facebook group.

Anger may be the first response.It seems reasonable if you live by a moral code. Or even outrage. Living as I do in bucolic splendour in rural Ireland I listened to a friend who has sought three weeks refuge from the maelstrom that is the United States. And she said, "I hate him." Well, I knew who she meant. And she is a gentle person who is a reiki practitioner,grounded and centred in her elderhood.

And then I understood. I had to unfreeze my freezer spell.

Back in September in my rage at injustice during the Kavanaugh hearings I flung a lot of names in a plastic ice cream box and put them in my freezer. Along with He Who Does Not Need to Be Named, and now Justice Kavanaugh, I put in a few Senators, Teresa May, Arlene Foster of the DUP and several Brexiteers. (My setting may seem bucolic and untouched by global tremors, but I live on the Irish Border where the Brexit deal is being fought and the Belfast Treaty may die on. So...not so out of touch with world altering events.)

But here we are in an even deeper and more unholy mess of hatred. He Who Does Not Need to Be Named has held up a mirror to us. How much will you tolerate? Child cruelty? Withholding medication and medical treatment? Death in captivity? Where does your morality draw the line and your comfort zone end? Think it could never happen again? We live in the age of re-branding. How does Nazi-ism sound as Make America Great Again. Let's isolate and weaponise fear. Do you trust your neighbour? How's this all going down in your small town?

Ironic that the nation which was instrumental in founding the jurisprudence format that created the International Court of Human Rights to indict and try government officials for human rights violations, is now likely to be put in the dock. If anyone in the world has the nerve to call the United States government out. There is certainly plenty of evidence. Just as the private companies who manufactured Zyklon to commit genocide made huge profits during World War II, so today many private companies are pocketing $750 a day for corralling people, depriving them of soap, shower facilities, water (drink it out of the toilet -said in front of Congressional visitors). toothpaste, tooth brushes, beds, changes of clothing for weeks on end, prescription medicine - the list goes on.  It can't be all spent on wages for those officials who are maintaining these captivity conditions.

No, this unholy mess of hatred has to stop. It has grown like a pernitious weed. It is the goose grass that sticks to everything, leaving its pollin on your clothes, on every passing dog or cat. And so it persistis and spreads.

So I unfroze the Freezer Spell last night. Every name is gone. The ink bled out. I would wish instead for them to grow a heart that has empathy. And kindness. That looks at nature and wants to preserve and conserve instead of seeing a profit to be exploited. I would wish that they would once again fall in love with the sun rise. That the tremors of the earth quaking would send them to their knees praying for preservation instead of glorying in destruction and disruption.

I shall save my spells for imagining a child drawn on to a loving lap and held as they cry. I shall save my spells for their release to those who belong to them and love them tenderly and dearly. I shall save my spells for the sick so they may be healed and for the despairing to be raised up by hope. I shall draw a protective bubble around AOC and pray that she continues to speak truth to the powerful and that they learn how to see.

As I said to my friend. Love is the only thing that will save us now. We need to sow love and kindness as profligately as a shopaholic spends with an unlimited credit. We need to unfreeze our hearts. Yes, even to the monsters. There are no monsters. There is only us. And no them. This is all us.

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Bee Smith has enjoyed a long relationship with SageWoman as a contributor, columnist and blogger. She lives in the Republic of Ireland, teaches creative writing and is a member of the Irish Art Council's Writers in Prisons panel. She is the author of "Brigid's Way: Celtic Reflections on the Divine Feminine."    

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