A few years ago I wrote a piece for a little journal my husband and I produced (Doubly Mad) called "The God of Serious Excitement." I am still serious, and still following my excitement (also known as bliss) as my religious path. These are things I want people to know who might seek or stumble across my blog. Other than spiritually and imaginatively, my life is lived within fairly serious limitations. Not physical or mental ones, but more of the "chosen" variety. I have been married to the same man for 32 years, not all of them tranquil. I have lived for all but about 7 of my 58 years in the Mohawk Valley of upstate New York, and for the last 19 years in an unpretentious 2-story house in a "borderline" neighborhood in Utica, a post-industrial city ill served by the global economy but still fighting for life. My husband and I, assigning the cause of our not robust financial condition in part to the fact we are both children of artist fathers, have never attained secure middle class status. We are, however, as comfortable as one can be when depending upon natural gas for heat, a car to get over to the shopping areas that have left the city, computers to make at least necessary communications, and a few other percs of the famously non-negotable American lifestyle. A long time ago, although we are not against having money, we decided we would place the basis of our marriage "community" upon spiritual foundations, rather than a strictly material one. I like to think of our situation as having a smaller economy than many of our friends, like the Czech Republic as compared to Germany or France; not inferior, just smaller, and in some non-material ways, perhaps richer. But who's comparing?

Living outside mainstream values and materialism puts us decidely on the fringe with little to crow about here in upstate NY, where corporate-capitalist-sibling-TV-chainstore culture rules relatively unchallenged. A woman from Northampton, MA, who I met once at a homeschooling conference in the Boston area, when I described where we were from said, "Oh, you live in the real world." So these are some of the limitations we live within, not to mention a solid 4 months of winter.

But here's what we have done to turn limitation into abundance: For 7 and a half years, I have co-owned a coffee shop business with my husband, who runs it with our daughter. It is named "Cafe Domenico," but everyone calls it simply "Domenico's." Three years ago, I launched my own "pet" project, The Other Side, in a storefront adjacent to and in the same building as the Cafe. This non-profit was set up as a space for encouraging community and local culture, and has become a site for lectures by local scholars, reading and discussion groups, performances, informational talks and panels, activism, and more. My idea was inspired by archetypal psychologist and author James Hillman's Institute for Culture and the Humanities in Dallas, which I had read about and wanted such a place to exist in my city. The idea sprang more immediately from a conversation at one of the monthly salons we held in our living room for 8 years, when people voiced the need for a place to go for information about things the mainstream media does not inform us well about, such as climate change.

Today, we are a tiny space that holds 50 comfortably. We have established a partnership with nearby Hamilton College that brings lecturers in the Humanities to Utica, and just received a NYS Council on the Arts grant to produce a year-long monthly jazz series featuring guest musicans from out-of-town. This means I guess that we are "on the map." For me, however, the entire project is about the space I keep there for meeting with groups with a spiritual focus. Originally, I called it the Utica Gnostic Society (UGS). It is a space for continuing the Western Wisdom (esoteric) Tradition by various means. For me, it is the reason for everything else, but it is the aspect that most people do not get at all, and some, even some on our Board, are uncomfortable with. I am committed to the Divine Feminine, to making it possible for this energy to be manifest here where I live, and to keeping a space (temenos) wherein it is safe for one to be one's full self. It is medicine for healing the world and the relation to nature, and it is magic as I understand magic.

The "UGS" came together last spring in a new way while reading Clarissa Estes Women Who Run With the Wolves, and is now reading Robert Bly's The Sibling Society. Currently we are coming to grips with the degree to which "the sibling society is a functioning and self-consistent structure whose principles have not yet been fully observed or articulated." (The Sibling Society, page 131) In other words, we are coming to grips with the degree to which our (unconscious) participation in a society without initiation expresses "disdain and contempt for children." To me, the book is important because it addresses the need for individuals in our society to learn again to live with, and within, the limitations imposed by "tradition, religion, devotion" in order precisely to defend the divine feminine, the sacred dimension of each human soul and of the world. It sounds lofty, but believe me, on the ground in Utica such ideas do not raise one's status.

To conclude this first ever blog, I come back to the word "useless" that appears in the title of the blog and on this post. Useless, for me, is a trickster word that allows me to enter the sacred space of the divine feminine. It deflates the fear residing in me that I am, in my being, worthless, bad, useless, like WilliamBlake defuses the accusation of being just a "fool." ( "If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.") In our group someone offered the phrase "creative indolence," which points to the same paradoxical idea. Devotion to the useless is the defiant cultivating of a space for divine creative energy right within the mainstream consensus consumer culture. I hope everyone who reads my blog will do so in the spirit of uselessness, as I will do as I write. If I have left you puzzled, I expect to say more about the uses of uselessness in the next blog.