Yule 2011

Our yule celebrations begin with the Agonium on the 11th of December sacred to the indigenous sun. We went in for La Souvenance and did some noel shopping before having coffees and then returning home for shamanic rituals. It was a low-key but pleasant day, and we later climbed up the mountain to watch the sunset. Depending on where we are, the sun goes behind the Petit Bessillon and re-conveys the active volcano it once was, but a cloud bank did not allow us viewing on this occasion. All the same, as we were starting up the hill from the village, the sunlight illuminated the old fountain in what once must have been the market area outside the original medieval town – providing for me a moment of darshan.

An email that day from Michael in Glastonbury informed me that Willa Sleath had gone into the hospital for continuing hip problems, was discovered with inoperable cancer, was now declining fast and could no longer speak. As it turned out, she passed around 0500 the following morning. She and her husband Leonard were the Guardians of Chalice Well when I first met them – a wonderful, kookie couple with whom it was always dynamically fun to interconnect. They became devotees of Sai Baba. Leonard succumbed a number of years ago to prostate cancer. He had reminded me of Donald Lipper. Willa foraged on with her nonchalant devil-may-care wave-of-the-hand demeanour. Always full of information and sound advice, it has been strange adjusting to the reality that she is no longer with us.

For the Ides, we rose early and headed to Aix-en-Provence since we finally had an auto that worked. On the way, we stopped at the Chateau Vignelaure to purchase some more wine. The lad who served us was utterly charming, engaged and delightfully playful. He virtually made our day. In Aix, we did almost all the shopping we had wanted, lunched at Redemeier and then saw Roman Polanski’s Carnage based on Yasmina Reza’s play God of Carnage, and we roared with laughter throughout the film.

The next day, Pascal had to be rushed to the hospital with a suspected heart attack. Adelaïde informed us later that his heart is fine; it was instead his circulation. Otherwise, she said he is fine. Antoine has chosen to fly back from Dharamsala because of this. Late afternoon, we went for a meadow walk during the last forty-five minutes of sunlight. It being Wednesday, we had whisky in the evening – a lot of it.

The news of course is relentlessly depressing. I tend to listen to it at 0500 in the morning, but with it being so repetitively and boringly catastrophically monotonous, I have developed the unwanted tendency to fall asleep during it. By the time I do awaken, Richard is almost invariably in a high state of agitation because of what he has been hearing through the radio. The Consualia on the 15th were one of these days. We buried the year at sunset. Robert and Don phoned from San Francisco; Adele called later. And with some dry vermouth finally – purchased in Aix, we had martinis for the evening’s celebrations.

The 16th we called Gin in London to wish her a happy birthday. In my mind’s eye she is at least twenty years younger; sometimes even forty years younger when I first met her. Since no one else was available, we were the ones to drive to the Nice Aeroport to fetch Antoine. We stopped at Cap 3000 beforehand and even found cranberries. That evening we went with Penny and Hamish to La Table for a fine dinner and time. Daniel was at the restaurant with friends as well. While waiting at the airport for Antoine’s delayed flight, I had a cappuccino and then difficulty sleeping that night. But the clarity of the stars before going to bed foretold the likelihood of a sunny day to follow.

The 17th is the Saturnalia. I shopped at the marché as soon as I could. Later we went back to town for coffees and then home for trance voyaging – somehow managing to cook during all of this. We went for a long, mostly brisk, walk thanks to the cold and winds. The sunset was another darshan moment of seeing deity, and I came to understand how deity similarity might come about when one god uses the vehicle of another – such was Saturnus in the stunning and lingering setting sun, a portal to the god’s golden otherworld. There were of course things we forgot to prepare even though they had been intended, but our Saturnalian feast included roast turkey, stuffing (for which I forgot initially to add the walnuts), parsnips/turnips, roast potatoes, cranberries and blueberry pie. We began with a hot rum toddy, then wine with the meal and concluded with some Ledich. Retired relatively early and actually had lost weight by the following morning.

Our Sunday to follow was a cold one ranging from -1/-5 Celsus to nothing higher than three degrees. But it was a good work day and one in which I was able to do a fair amount of writing let alone correspondence. On Monday’s Opalia, we sat on the earth to invoke the goddess Ops. Celebration on this occasion consisted of continuing with our ongoing Saturnalian banquet. But on this day I always remember the infamous ‘Bambi’ party that John Daly and Peter Carey organised now many a year ago in Rome.

Tuesday we were to go the Aix with Barbara and Natacha, but as we were about ready, Barbara phoned to say that it was snowing. We looked outside, and it was. The mountain had disappeared, and we were suddenly surrounded by white. It was at least beautiful, but Barbara was not sure she could descend to the village and, if she did, that she would be able to get back. So the excursion was cancelled, and we had a work day instead. The snow did not last, at least at our level, and the day became sunny though cold.

Wednesday the Divalia, Penny and Hamish had a shepherd’s pie buffet. 92 year old Mary was there sparkling away. Also her former yacht captain Tony with whom she had sailed around the world twenty-one years ago and during which Tony said he found both a daughter and a wife. I enjoyed also talking to Hilary, Mel and Janet among several others. It was a good gathering. Since Penny had provided Richard and me a bottle of Scotch, we were not much good for anything else the rest of the day. We began our midwinter’s fire at sunset, continued with some malt and other things. Woke about 05:00 and had the outside fire blazing in time for the solstice at 05:30 and then again later for the sunrise. The following, however, is my solstitial contemplations:

“I have been increasingly struck by how relatively powerless we are vis-à-vis circumstances, politics, the geophysical and wealth. This is something that is augmented even further with age and the loss of youth and flexibility, endurance and strength. Much of existence – and mine perhaps in particular – depends on luck rather than what one has done personally. Part of that luck is not being in the wrong place at the wrong time – like in southern Mindanao for the recent floods, or southeast Asia for the Boxing Day tsunami, or in Christchurch at the time of the earthquakes, or in a Baghdad market when the bombs are detonated, etc. But likewise, one’s financial circumstances can be a matter of fortune and opportunity. Most of us acquiesce to our conditions. Some may be able to take advantage of belonging to the right club; others may resort to industrial action; some of us scrounge and eke out a minimal subsistence at best; some us by belonging to the 1% or 10% pursue such extravagant luxuries as yachting, going on safari, skiing in the Alps, engaging in three-star dining and so forth. In America in particular, we have been taught to be enterprising, individual achievers encouraged by a belief in a sky’s-the-limit libertarianism. And maybe Ann Rand’s objectivism and rational selfishness constitute a legitimate and traditional American way to change circumstances and not be daunted by whatever odds seem to be in one’s way as an unmovable impediment. In our dog-eat-dog world, it could be that the ruthless and dedicated entrepreneurs are those – and those alone – who design their own lives in a manner reminiscent of Nietzsche’s superman/overman hero and succeed. The rest of us must simply accept whether we are have-nots or whether we are the well-off through good fortune, inheritance or knowing the right people at the right time. Is our world so hopelessly huge now in numbers and so stymied by natural division and, short of dictatorship, democratic-administrative deadlock that it is only the corporate capitalistic devil-may-care and cleverly strategising individual who is to be applauded? We complain, we strike and cause nuisance, we demonstrate and occupy until a militia removes us, but do we amount to little more than collateral damage? Even though by numbers perhaps some sort of vast majority, are we nonetheless fundamentally marginal to the central narrative of success and achievement belonging to an elite few? Are we now to the best of our abilities or circumstances of luck merely to carve out our private spaces – whether caves, dens, meagre huts, gated communities or isolated villas – and pursue our own immediate and survival interests within a world otherwise out-of-control? These are only questions on my part, but more and more any dream of a socialist anarchy of self-sufficient and self-determining local communities within a global network of harmony and collective terrestrial/ecological management seems unlikely and foolish given the way things actually are.”

The Larentalia on the 23rd conclude for us our yuletide celebrations. Richard was not feeling well, but we tranced all the same. The day was gloriously beautiful – full sun and comfortably warm. The property remains all-embracing and surprisingly private considering all that has grown up around us over the nearly past forty years. That raging insanity is still there underneath it all, and for the rest we weave our fabric, our superstructure, over it. If we have done our rituals correctly or with good intent, we have succeeded.

The distaste of most world politics still surrounds us, and the gentle warmth of the Midi oasis that manifests through both her inhabitants and landscape is yet what sequesters us. We walked through the village after dark on the Larentalia, and we attended the midnight mass in the church the following day. The community life with its organic naturalness remains for me a grounding inspiration. It was in large part because of the Nurenberg trials that I voted for Barack. It is now because of them again that I cannot do the same. Even if this means President Gingrich, unless Private Bradley Manning is released and exonerated, I will not vote again for Mr. Obama. Under his leadership, American shame is no different than it was under his predecessor. In some ways it is worse. We were offered no false illusions previously; we knew what we were getting.

But to return to the Midi, we are now packing and closing the house and farm down. Melancholic scarcely describes it. The geographic auras that delineate our locale continue to emanate their enchantment. One continues to feel the Romans in this area. They worked for the most part on a basic local intuitive rapport – an empathetic recognition – to what would now be called pagan. They may have fused this talent with political administration, but the political and ecclesiastical institutions that came to follow produced their own narratives concerning ‘indoctrination exposure’ and, unfortunately, often without retaining that organic understanding that first linked, here, the Oxybii-Ligurians with the Romans. My own approach has been to seek out the linguistic roots of our theological/spiritual inheritances. It is through the afforded insights that come with this approach that the sacred telluric may be reinforced as both informing and comforting in our individual and collective quests. Perhaps the most lovely moment in Christian services of our day occurs when we are asked to greet those who are around us in the church. It is that shaking hands and the like with strangers that touches the humanistic chord that is both the environmental and magical heart of natural religious practice. And following those routes to our telluric roots I believe that it is in laughter that we connect the most to the pure primordial will that gave rise to the cosmos.