Essais: A Pagan Blog

It's so bright out here in the darkness

2011-12-22T05:30:00.002-06:00

So I see that I managed to keep up my one-year project for a good...five months. Not too shabby. My excuse is this: My theme for the month of June was "Hearth and Home," and I was going to work on getting my apartment closer to the kind of environment I really want to live in. And then I had a job interview in the beginning of June, and it went really well, and I thought, How great would it be if I could move in my Hearth and Home month, and set up a whole new apartment? Well, I didn't get the job - they called me on my birthday to tell me they'd offered it to someone else - and I was a little crushed.

I did the same thing last year. I had an interview I thought went well for a job I was sure I was qualified for, and I would have ended up starting right around Samhain. Perfect, I thought; a new start for a new year. Talk about things coming to fruition. I didn't get that job either.

Well, I managed it this year. After a year and ten months of job searching, I've finally gotten a position as an Adult Services Librarian - exactly what I want to be doing! - starting on All Soul's Day. Talk about things coming to fruition.

If I've been absent from here, it's because of a combination of fairly crippling depression and my work on my professional blog (which, you will understand, I am not really inclined to link up to this blog at all). Now, of course, I'm moving and settling into a new job. I doubt there's anyone out there still paying attention. I thought for a while about closing down this blog, but I just couldn't make myself do it. This is my safe space. This is where I can talk about depression, and magic, and the gods, and anything else I need to talk about sometimes, without having to worry about coming out to anyone. I'll still be here, sometimes. I hope to be here more often. But my life is so full right now - We'll see. We'll see.

I'm in a much larger city than I was before - greater Chicagoland versus Madison, Wisconsin - and as I sit my traditional Longest Night vigil, I really don't know if I'll be able to see the sun come up. The light from the city reflects off the haze and the low-hanging clouds. It could be discouraging if I wanted it to be (it's true I can't see very many stars) but I actually find it a little reassuring this year. Even if I did not sit vigil, there would be light enough to entice the sun back, if only so it can prove its superiority.

Less than two hours left to go. We'll see.

Blessed Solstice, everyone, and welcome the light back.

The Virtue Project: May - Work

2011-05-17T09:26:00.000-05:00

There is a passage in Little Essays Toward Truth where Alestair Crowley talks about how the point is not just to learn the qabbalah, it is to learn the qabbalah so completely that it becomes part of everything, so that everywhere you look you see the connection between one thing and another. I think I am reaching that point with this project. Good. (I suppose.)

I had decided that May would be the month of Work. I took this on two levels; first, May marks my year and a day from graduation. I've been looking for a library-related job for a year and more, and while one is still not forthcoming, I refuse to give up. Second, work has always meant to me much more than the thing you get paid for; it is also The Work, that thing that is most important to you, your purpose in this world. I am not so confident as to imagine that I know what that is, but it clearly cannot be ignored. I am trying to figure out what I can do for it.

And then, because I was discouraged at having received three job rejections in quick succession, and because they asked, I volunteered to take on some more hours at my current job to help cover the summer rush. I figured I could use the extra money, and it couldn't hurt anything. I was wrong. I was immediately shifted from 20 hours a week starting at ten in the morning to 40 hours a week starting at 6:30 or 7. (Add in a half an hour drive to get to work, and you begin to see my problem.) Oh, and swing shifts for the day I couldn't get in in the morning because I was volunteering: working until 10 PM and then back at seven the next morning.

I panicked. This was NOT OKAY. And after a week of utter anguish, I told the scheduler that I couldn't do it. I think that was one of the hardest things I'd ever done, telling someone I couldn't follow through on a promise I'd made. But I was rapidly reaching the point where calling in for mental health days would not be optional -- and that was after only a week. I used the D-word, told her that my depression was getting worse and I just couldn't cope, and she's pared my schedule back down to 9 AM start times and no more than 30 hours a week. That I can manage.

So due to no particular plans of my own, I have learned something about myself this month. I cannot work for forty hours a week in a call center. I lose all respect for myself and for the rest of humanity. And I cannot get up at five in the morning, no matter how early I go to bed the night before, and stay sane. In fact, I am happiest when I have a couple of hours in the morning to myself before going to work, so long a those hours aren't before sunrise. I may not always be able to convince my employers to give me that ideal schedule, but at least now I know what it is and can try.

And The Work? Right now, it is keeping myself sane and not giving up on all my other responsibilities while my schedule straightens itself out. My goals from the previous four months are slipping a little, and I never have managed to write every day. But I am still looking for that other job, and I have some ideas about working for myself, ideas that make my heart beat a little faster every time I turn them over in my mind. I am taking the long view, for now, largely because I can't do anything else. But I have managed to carve out enough space in my life to allow for regular glimpses of that long view, and that means a great deal.

The Virtue Project: April - Art

2011-04-27T15:44:00.002-05:00

I have hit my first real slump. It's April, the proper beginning of spring in the upper Midwest, and National Poetry Month besides, so I decided that April's goal would be to work on my art. Every day, just a little bit of art. I have a lot of things I do - tapestry, embroidery, sewing - but it's my writing I've been wanting to work on the most.

I stumbled over an answer when somebody asked me the other day if I was a writer. I finally spat out a yes, and explained that I've been trying to convince myself that I could call myself a writer even when I haven't finished anything in years. He agreed that that was difficult, but said that he thought it still counted.

I stopped writing for a couple of years. Writing fiction, that is; I've been writing blog posts and analysis and journals for ever. But it's fiction that I think of as "real" writing, and I hadn't been doing any. When I first went to therapy and the therapist asked when I would feel that I wasn't depressed any more, I said, "When I start writing again." And I haven't been writing regularly since then, although I have been doing more in the past few months than I have for years.

Planning to write, though, is not writing. Sketching outlines is not writing. Research is not writing. Setting up a writing-only computer and workspace is not writing. Only writing is writing, and I haven't managed to write so much as a hundred words a day three days in a row.

I have managed more than half the days in the month, though. Well, almost. I have made progress on three big projects, which is more than has been happening. And just because it's difficult doesn't mean that's a good reason to give up on the goal.

My inspiration lately has been an interview with, of all people, Tim Gunn. A little snippet of it appeared in a Smithsonian magazine last year, and I've been thinking about it ever since. I won't let my students give up on something they don't like, he said. I tell them, make it work. You learn more from trying to fix the parts of it that don't work than you would from only ever finishing things that seem to be going well.

So that has been my watchword for the month. "Make it work." I'm forcing my way through last November's NaNoWriMo novel, even though it seems to be stumbling along helplessly through the second act, and I am still trying to write every day.

The Virtue Project: March - Money

2011-03-27T16:46:00.002-05:00

I've edited my plans a little bit and designated March the month of money. I've already received my federal tax return, after all, and I still have to file my state taxes. More than that, since I'm working only part-time now but looking for more work, I've been worrying quite a bit about just what I can afford. It seemed like a good time to pay a little attention to that worry.

Money is a terribly fraught topic in our society. There's a little bit of that Victorian attitude still clinging to the subject, the sense that it is something that We Do Not Talk About, while at the same time money is the primary goal of huge parts of our society. That's what capitalism is, after all. And then there's that peculiar American belief that there's no such thing as class.

That's been bothering me a bit, lately. Socially I'm most definitely upper-middle-class, while financially at the moment, well, I could apply for all kinds of government assistance if I wanted to, and I might get it. I'm lucky enough - extraordinarily lucky, I know - to have a family that is helping to support me and can afford it without too much difficulty. As it is, I didn't owe anything in taxes for last year; I didn't make enough.

But between the help from my family and my generally frugal tendencies, I'm ending up with a little bit of a surplus every month. Not much, mind, but enough that I can spend a little money just for fun and not worry about checks clearing before I pay my rent. I still worry. I keep enough of a cushion in my account that I don't have to fret about the balance, but I worry about having to dip into my savings account. I worry about my long-term prospects. I worry about doctor's bills and the fact that I need new eyeglasses and the fact that I haven't been to a dentist in years.

I could probably afford to go. I can afford to pay the urgent care bill from the morning I woke up terrified I had appendicitis. It won't be fun, but I can do it. So I'm trying to teach myself to stop worrying. What else, indeed, is money for?

It's tempting to look at pagan societies' attitudes toward money, but that can only be misleading, because pagan societies were not really capitalistic. Which is not to say they couldn't have been, simply that they weren't, and trying to make a comparison can be treacherous. In modern paganism, money is often looked down upon; one is not supposed to pay for teaching, or supplies, or one is supposed to pay directly without any haggling. I can never keep the rules straight.

The rules do seem, as far as I can tell, to be aimed at reducing the influence money has over the magickal experience. Like any other rules, they can only work that way if the practitioner applies them with that intent, otherwise they're just details that are getting in the way.

My goal for the month has been getting the details out of the way. I don't know that I've succeeded - a month is a short time in which to do a lot of work, after all. I've spent most of the month fiddling around with this post, trying to make it say what I want it to say. This time, I generated the goals after the fact, because I needed a month to get them all lined up. I need to make more money than I do now, certainly. But I also need to remember what it's for: so that I can live contentedly the kind of life I want, now as well as in the future.

One of the points of this project is that the goals should be concrete, so here goes: By the end of the year, I will have another source of income. I will manage my budget so that I put money away in savings every month, so I stop worrying about the future. And I will manage my budget so I spend a certain amount -- a small amount right now, but more when I get that second income -- and no less on things I want rather than things I need. If that means going out for dinner on the last day of every month just to spend out my "wants" budget, well...it's a hard life, but somebody has to live it.

February: Energy

2011-02-15T19:47:00.001-06:00

But first, the January wrapup

If I accomplished nothing else in January, I figured out what I was doing with this whole year-long project. I want to improve my status quo, to make the baseline of my life a little bit better than it is right now, and I wanted to do it in a way that integrated all of these parts of my life so that these new habits would stick. This has given me some excellent insights into planning out the rest of my goals, and I'm excited to see how it keeps going.

So how did I do with my January goals of daily recordkeeping? Pretty well, actually. Not perfect -- I didn't manage every single day -- but perfect isn't necessary. Trying is. I admit, the past few days have been an exercise in giving myself permission to fail, between two fourteen-hour days in a row, an appendicitis scare (fortunately it was nothing more serious than a strained muscle), and the resulting complete breakdown of my schedule at home. But I will start over again, and that will be enough. (Is it terribly cliché of me to admit to an Alanis Morissette song as my mantra?)

February: Energy

Although it starts with the festival of Brigid, February is, in the Upper Midwest, the absolute depths of winter, and for me usually the hardest month of the year. It's brighter, but not bright enough; still freezing cold and snowing; and spring seems forever away.

Usually, anyway. This year we had our January thaw just this past week, and they're predicting temperatures in the fifties tomorrow and Thursday. But I planned for the usual February, so that is the work I am doing anyway.

If the first component in achieving anything is optimism -- the belief that it can be achieved -- the second step is energy, the power to make it so. I thought about including the Magick 101 kind of energy work in my goals for this month, but that just wasn't what came to mind when I contemplated what I needed in order to make my life work. I have tried, in the past, to set goals like "honor the full moon every month" or "work through the exercises in The Inner Temple of Witchcraft" but they all fall apart when I get home from work and don't have the energy to do anything but cook dinner and collapse on the couch.

We are creatures made of meat, not just spiritual beings, and the body needs just as much attention as the soul. So my goals for this month are all very physical ones, the mundane list of things they always tell you to do to be healthier and have more energy: at least eight hours of sleep every night and get up at the same time every morning, a good breakfast and a snack midday to keep me running, and exercise at least three times a week. (Daily would be better, but let's be realistic here.) Since I also tend to get hit pretty badly with seasonal depression, I've added sitting under my daylight lamp for at least half an hour a day to my regimen. It does indeed seem to help.

And since it's already halfway through February by the time I've gotten around to posting this, how have I been doing? Not as well as January, I admit, but not too shabbily either. It does seem to help to have a list of things I need to do and a place to check them off. I've been using a little web widget called Joe's Goals to track my daily goals, and there's something very satisfying about a row of little green checks all across the screen. I shall keep my mantra in mind, and work on improvement rather than perfection. Perfection is boring, anyway, right?

The Annual Brigid in Cyberspace Poetry Reading

2011-02-01T11:18:00.002-06:00

(Are we doing this again this year? Why not.)

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.
Crowned with lilies and with laurel they go: but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains - but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,-
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

--Edna St. Vincent Millay

It's not very springlike today here in the upper midwest as we buckle down for what the weather service is calling a "historic snowstorm," but that doesn't mean it's not coming. Happy Imbolc, everyone.

The Virtue Project: January - Optimism

2011-01-06T16:06:00.000-06:00

I chose to start out my Project with optimism because it seemed to me to be the one thing absolutely necessary to making this happen. Optimism means the belief that things can change for the better, the sense that there are good things out there even if you can't see them yet. I suppose the more traditional word to use is hope, but I think there's a distinction there that I want to draw. Hope, to me, does not necessarily imply that you will ever get any closer to those good things, while optimism seems to contain more motion, more actual change. I need actual change, not just the promise of change to come.

I picked the Dagda for this month because he is, quite literally, the Good God - the caretaking father, the provider. And in most of the stories about him, he has a damn good sense of humor about things, which is a necessary component to optimism. I've been looking forward to reading up on more stories about him, and catching up with the great and glorious backlog of the Celtic Myth Podcast.

One of the things I'm focusing on with this project is having concrete, achievable goals to help me actually apply the principles I've chosen to focus on. (This is where the Happiness Project model is really useful, because there are so many good examples to draw from.) So I have three main goals for this month: to keep a daily journal, to stop reading things I've come to refer to as "Schadenfreude porn," and to visualize success.

First off, the daily journal. I started doing this when I was really depressed a couple of years ago, in an attempt to track my mood, and discovered that it was a great motivation. Basically, at the end of the day, I would write down everything I had accomplished. My goal was to have done at least three things. What "doing something" meant might change from day to day - on a good day, I might write a story or a blog post, finish a piece of embroidery, and clean the living room. On a bad day, getting out of bed, making lunch, and resting might count. But I always had at least three things I had done that day that were of value. I'm adding a component to it this time: a reason to get out of bed in the morning. It is a terrible thing to wake up in the morning and realize that the only reason to get out of bed is to go to work, so that you can afford to pay the rent so that you have someplace to keep your bed. Not worth it. So I've been adding a list of things happening tomorrow to the daily journal. I find this really helpful, because these aren't necessarily goals, just things I'm looking forward to doing (or sometimes, things I'm looking forward to getting over with).

Schadenfreude porn. I read a lot of complaint logs -- The Librarians Who Say MoFo, Customers Suck, Not Always Right, The Art of Trolling, to list just my daily rounds. But you know, reading a lot about how people suck and are kind of stupid is not the most encouraging daily entertainment. Time to switch the blogroll bck over to Cute Overload and away from this kind of negativity, which is realy the last thing I need right now. It's also generally a pretty nasty form of gossip -- I tell myself never to say something behind someone's back that I wouldn't say to their face, but it's pretty easy to tell yourself that when you know you would never meet these people face to face.

Visualizing success. I waffled for a while about including this as a goal, because it seems so froofy The Secret kind of thing. But then I realized, there's nothing wrong with visualization per se; the problem with The Secret is that it stops there. Visualization is not enough, but it is necessary; it is impossible to achieve success if you don't know what the victory conditions are. When I first graduated in May, I had all these ideas about where my life was going to go next. And as I continued to not get a job, I slowly stopped making those plans. I want to go back to planning agan, to having real goals for myself and my life. I've been working on the actual stereotypical five-year-plan, as well as a more self assessment-based set of goals for the year and a much stranger, larger, and more exciting list of things I would like to be able to say about my life at the end of it.

My original thought for choosing optimism for January was that it was not only a necessary precondition, but a nice internal sort of thing to be focusing on here in the depths of winter. I expected it to be much harder than it's turned out to be, actually. I'm finding it a little bit like writing turned out to be during NaNoWriMo -- scary to start with, but the more you do it, the easier it gets, until you're drowning in ideas and have to start organizing in self-defense. It's an encouraging way to start out the year, I must say.

Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight

2010-12-21T03:53:00.000-06:00

It's never really properly dark when it snows, not in a city. You get the street lights and the house lights and all the other little light sources and they all reflect off of a billion billion snowflakes lying in treacherous heaps out there in the driveway, and the whole world seems to glow, even in the middle of the longest night of the year, even as the earth casts a shadow over the moon and the only light from the sky is ancient star-light years out of date. There's something I like about that paradox. It seems reassuring.

I like to sit vigil on the Longest Night, to keep a light burning and make sure the sun comes up like it's supposed to. It's important that the sun comes up, someone should be paying attention to it. Some years it's easy to do, and some years it's hard, but it's one of those things I have to do. It seems necessary somehow.

It's not an easy year, this year. Not quite four in the morning and my bed is looking reeealy comfy right now. I haven't gotten the work done on my Christmas-related projects that I'd hoped to. But you know, I really only have one thing to do tonight, and that is to keep an eye out for morning.

I like to think of this time as the opposite of faith, which isn't skepticism or denial, but stubbornness. Faith would be going to bed and trusting that the sun would come up in the morning; skepticism would be double-checking to make sure this thing is really going to happen. That's not really what I'm doing here. I'm more...willing the sun to come up. Or else. I mean, I'd get by if it didn't, if instead of the sun rising a mere ball of burning gas appeared over the horizon, but that is not the kind of winter I want to have. So I'll sit here, and yawn, and light one candle off the end of another, and wait for the sun to come up. It had damn well better.

The Virtue Project: An Introduction

2010-12-12T17:17:00.003-06:00

It's getting to be that time again, time to think about the next year and what it might bring. While theologically I've always thought of the year ending at Samhain and beginning again at Yule, with the Dark Time in between as a period for reflection and meditation, there is something compelling about that new calendar, isn't there?

For 2010, I had three goals: get a professional librarian job, get a new apartment, and get a cat. Unfortunately those were sequential goals -- I couldn't move until I knew where my job would be, and until I had a steady source of income and a relatively permanent residence, I could not take on responsibility for another life. Well, I didn't get a job in 2010. Most of this is due to the economy, leaving me competing with 200+ people for every job opening, many of whom are laid-off librarians with more experience than I have. Still, it's a little discouraging.

I'm not abandoning those goals. They're good, valuable goals, and they're things I want deeply. But for 2011, I'm doing something a little different.

Earlier this year, I read the book The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. It's an account of how she set out to spend one year pursuing definite, quantifiable goals to help herself be happier. I'd been reading her excellent blog for a while, and playing with the Happiness Project Toolbox, and I found the book an excellent addition to those resources. It inspired me to start making notes toward my own Happiness Project.

Last month I ran across those notes in my everyday notebook, the little blank book I carry with me everywhere to store ideas and plans in. And I thought, why not? Why not do this? As I reflected on the idea, though, it occurred to me that what I was planning wasn't really a happiness project, because happiness wasn't specifically my goal. What I wanted was to inhabit my life more fully, to become more certain in myself and my goals, and to deepen my understanding of myself and the world around me. What I wanted was to become more virtuous.

I have to thank Brendan Myers for giving me that word back. I grew up in a fairly Puritanized culture where "virtue" was a code-word for sexual abstinence and pious humility, holier-than-thou confessions and an overwhelming lack of fun. But I read The Other Side of Virtue last year, and it too gave me all kinds of ideas for where to go with my life and my plans. I wasn't equipped to do anything with those ideas at the time, but I think I'm ready for it now.

So my goal for 2011 is my Virtue Project, modeled very closely on Gretchen Rubin's Happiness Project, where she picked a particular aspect of her life to work on each month and chose direct and quantifiable goals to help make her happier with that aspect. I decided to add a patron deity to each month as well, as one of my ongoing goals has been to become more familiar, both intellectually and personally, with the Irish deities and mythology I feel such a strong connection with.

My tentative outline for the year looks like this --
January - Optimism - the Dagda
February - Energy - Brid
March - Health - Dian Cecht
April - Money - the Morrigan
May - Work - Lug
June - Indulgence - Finn
July - Creativity - Ogma
August - Freinds - Ferdia
September - Family - Anu
October - Love - Bres
November - Mindfulness - ?
December - Perspective - Nuada

My next project, to start after Yule when the sun returns and offers a little boost to this ambitious project, is to start writing out the individual goals for each month. The tricky part will be making them concrete enough to follow through on, yet realistic enough that I can get them done while working, volunteering, and applying for jobs like a crazy person (and hopefully interviewing, moving, and starting a new job!). And I'll be blogging about it all, of course.

In the meantime, I've been thinking about rereading The Other Side of Virtue, and if anyone has any recommendations for other Pagan books on virtue, ethics, or the good life, I'd love to read those, too. (I could have sworn I saw mention of a couple when Myers' book came out, but I can't find them now.) And if anyone has some suggestions for an Irish patron for that tricky mindfulness month, I'd appreciate it.

Little Epiphanies

2010-12-01T15:14:00.001-06:00

One of the things I enjoy about reading so much is being able to get little moments of epiphany from just about anywhere. I was reading the first Cadfael book a couple of weeks ago, for instance, when an offhanded remark managed to highlight for me the important distinction between a worldview based on hierarchy and a worldview based on community.

The Cadfael books are a series of murder mysteries by Ellis Peters, which are really just as much about medieval monastic culture in England-almost-Wales as they are anything else. Cadfael, played brilliantly by Derek Jacobi in the TV adaptation, is a former Crusader who joined a monastery when he decided he was too old to go about soldiering any more, and now he's the go-to guy for mysteries, interpersonal politics, and forensic investigation.

Cadfael was born Welsh, and in the first book, Prior Robert (a Norman by birth) has decided that what their monastery needs is a saint to look over them, and he's decided upon a little Welsh saint from just over the border, so Cadfael goes with him to keep an eye on things, and to translate. This is just as well, since Prior Robert runs into some resistance from the locals, including Rhisiart, the most prominent landowner in the area.

And there's this little aside in one passage -- I don't have the book to hand, so I can't quote it directly -- about how Rhisiart and Robert are just never going to understand each other, since they're driven by such separate things. Robert comes from a world of hierarchy, where what he wants is to be more important than someone else, which he's trying to do by acquiring a saint to bring honor to their monastery; Rhisiart comes from a world of community, where what he wants is to play his particular role to the best of his abilities, because it doesn't matter if a landowner is more important than the man who drives the cattle or the woman who makes the honey or the priest who tends the church, because the community can't work without all of them doing their jobs.

And I realized, that is what I want out of my life. I want to be the person doing my job to the best of my ability, because it doesn't matter if someone else is more important, the whole system falls down if I can't do my job. Now, the world is a bigger place than it used to be, so one person not doing their job isn't as big of a disaster, but it all contributes. Every little bit helps. And I don't have to be hierarchy-important, I just have to be community-important.

Which is just as well, because librarians don't get paid much, and out-of-work librarians get paid even less. I'm still waiting for a job -- well, working for and waiting for, I'm writing job applications like crazy again. I'm not completely unemployed, I did manage to find a job that actually manages to be somewhat relevant in addition to paying my rent, but it's not quite the same. And it's hard, in this world where "what you do" means "what your job is," to keep doing your work when it's so hard to find someone who will acknowledge you for it. But every little bit helps, and every little epiphany puts me a few steps closer to being able to stand up on my own, to hold up my end of the community even now, in the darkest times.

Samhain

2010-10-31T18:07:00.001-05:00

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

A blessed Samhain to you all, and as we move into the darkest part of the year, may you carry your own light with you.

More Useful Than You Think

2010-10-27T11:05:00.000-05:00

I think the Tarot is vastly underrated as a tool for dealing with depression. After all, the most popular form of therapy right now for depression is called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, in which you learn not what deep childhood trauma influenced your depression but how your day-to-day thinking influences your depression. It's about spotting irrational thought patterns and changing them, heading off a bout of depression at the pass, as it were.

Take me. I interviewed for a job on the first of October, and I haven't heard back from them yet. I know it's a city position and city governments are notoriously slow, but I get a little neurotic about waiting to hear back from people about things like this, plus my new part-time job is asking if they can move me on to the next level of training. I decided that if I hadn't heard from them by Friday afternoon, I'd call and see what was up.

And then I started thinking. The whole application process has been a little weird, because I submitted my application just before the city turned over their application submission software, so I don't show up on the website, even though they not only received my application, they interviewed me. What if, I thought, they sent out rejection letters via that software, and I just haven't gotten it yet? What if, horror of horrors, they sent out acceptance letters via that software, and I haven't gotten it?

This is clearly insane. No one would do that. But I sat there last night in front of my loom, thinking these thoughts, and I could feel my chances of sleep ebbing away. And then I glanced over at my altar, where I'd drawn a trio of Tarot cards a few days ago, as I was trying to decide what to do about November when I didn't know if I'd be moving or not. (The Knight of Swords; the Seven of Pentacles, reversed; and the Three of Cups. Encouraging, to say the least.) And I cut the deck halfway through and found The Hierophant staring back at me.

Does it get a lot more obvious than that? Let the goddamn bureaucracy do its thing, woman, and stop worrying about it. And you know, I did. I went to bed and have decided to stick with my plan of calling Friday rather than freaking out and calling today. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in action, with a little assistance.

Do I think the Tarot really knows what's going on, or is it just a convenient way of externalizing my own internal processes? Hell if I know. I've never been good at "yes, but what do you believe reeealy happens?" questions, because I don't particularly care. What "really" happens is such a weird question anyway -- even science isn't particularly good at it, for all they thought Newtonian Motion was an accurate description of the universe for so long, and I am far from the Isaac Newton of magick. What I know is the Tarot is a useful little thing, sometimes a useful big thing, and it helps to make me less crazy. That's good enough for me.

Break

2010-10-16T11:59:00.000-05:00

It's been a long and bitter summer, and I haven't been online for much of it. In some ways that's good for me, handwork keeps me occupied and gives me something productive at the end of the day, and I've been able to turn some of it into the seed of an online business which is keeping me busy if nothing else. (Really nothing else at this point, but you know. I haven't actually listed anything for sale yet.)

I read a post on someone's livejournal a long time ago now, long enough that I can't remember who it was, but it stuck with me. They were leaving their Feri group -- not because Feri wasn't right for them, or because they didn't love the group, but because they didn't have the energy right now to put into it, and rather than cutting out something unimportant, they were leaving the group because it was too important to them to do it badly.

I've been feeling like that lately, I suppose. Working on my religion is too important to do badly, but I have nothing left right now but desperation and need. I'm waiting to hear back from a job I interviewed for a couple of weeks ago; I got a rejection yesterday from another interview. I'm working part time in the meantime, but taking claims in a call center is not the most fulfilling work in the world, and I'm spending a day's worth of pay every two weeks just on gas to get there.

I have found myself praying often, in that way that Pagans tend to say they don't, asking for help when I have nothing left to offer. And, well burying coins at the base of a tree in the backyard. (I can't get at the city well to leave offerings there.) And I'm still getting up in the morning and going to work, going to the library to volunteer, writing job applications and sending them out although I've stopped expecting to hear back. So I suppose it's working. But mostly, I've been taking a break. I finished school at Beltane, and I had hoped to have a job by Samhain. And I suppose I still might, but it depends on that call I'm waiting for right now. If it doesn't come, I'll have to start shoring myself up for a very long, cold winter.

Warning: Incredibly stereotypical girly pagan-blog post topic ahead

2010-08-20T11:27:00.000-05:00

I'll say this about menstrual cramps, they are wonderfully focusing. When I went to bed last night (or rather, this morning at 5am, thanks to a combination of hormones and too much caffeine) my mind was racing, full of things to do, plans to make. When I got up this morning, I was nowhere but right here and now. In pain.

I need a little bit of this, honestly. I've been living in the future for the past couple of months. Unemployment will do that to you -- "Ooh, a new book by my favorite author -- oh, I'll buy it when I get a job." "You know what I really want? A Guinness stew from the Irish pub downtown. Well, that will be my celebratory dinner when I get a job." "I hate my dresser. Oh well, I have a bigger one that doesn't fit here, but will go in the new apartment" (and all together now:) "when I get a job."

The worst part is that all of this is good advice. When you're not working and your parents have offered to help you out with the rent until something turns up, buying new books and having expensive dinners and contemplating furniture purchases are all bad ideas. And it's probably better, too, to tell myself that I can have these things when I can afford them rather than just saying no. But that nebulous future of "when I get a job," which could be anywhere from two to six months in the future, is eating up my life.

Except this morning, when I woke up, instead of looking around my apartment and thinking, "I can't wait until I live alone in my new apartment and the fact that no one washed the dishes is entirely my fault and has nothing to do with anyone else," I just picked up the broom and started sweeping. Because thinking is too difficult when I hurt this much. "When the Midol kicks in" has become a future as hoped-for as "when I get a job" (and seems about as likely right now, dammit).

There is also something kind of...relaxing? About physical pain after months of mental anguish. I just turned down my second job. Both of them were terrible -- one of them was in an area I couldn't have lived in, the other didn't pay enough to live someplace I would have liked to live -- but that's a lot of guilt anyway. At least when my uterus hurts I know what to do about it.

If the Universe wants me to focus more on the here and now, though, there have got to be more pleasant ways to go about it.

Letting Go, Looking Back

2010-07-23T20:41:00.000-05:00

It seems like every time I have a spiritual crisis I respond by getting rid of things. This time, I finally admitted to myself that I'm never going to be an herbalist. It's something that seems like it should be ideal for me -- handcrafting magic, making something out of nothing, plus a solid tie to centuries of casual household magic -- but I just don't have the patience for plants. They don't do it for me. I emptied all of the apothecary jars full of rosemary and peony and jasmine leaves into the back yard and sent the jars over to Goodwill; my collection of herbal references went to the used book store. I have much more space now, and I feel much happier with that, but that still doesn't solve the original problem.

Perhaps it has something to do with something I've been reading about elsewhere in the blogosphere -- intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is why you do the things you love. It's the reason why the thing itself is enjoyable, rather than something you do because you ought to. Eating food because it's tasty, not because it's a part of your new diet plan. Shooting archery because it's fun and challenging and an excellent form of active meditation, not because I feel like I should exercise.

Praying because...?

I think the urge to get rid of things is a sign that I've lost track of that intrinsic motivation; it's been buried under a pile of books and paraphernalia and, more importantly, that which those things represent. A sense that I am obligated to practice, rather than doing so because it brings me joy, because it is the right thing to do.

I have been feeling, increasingly, that I have no right to call myself Pagan if I don't do something about my practice, and yet this thought is crippling my ability to practice. I love the idea that orthopraxy, rather than orthodoxy, is what unites modern Paganism, but somehow this has morphed into a subconscious sense that I'm doing it wrong.

I wish I had an answer to this problem, but an easy answer would be a cheat, because it's a real difficulty. I do need to practice in order to fulfill myself as a witch and a Pagan; feeling like I need to practice is crushing. Part of the problem is, doubtless, in the overly-broad term "practice;" what does that include? Do I need to perform devotions every day in order to feel right? Every week? At the dark of the moon? Is it devotions, or spirit travel, or divination, or what? I've never quite worked these questions out for myself. Now appears to be the time.

This week I visited my parents for my mom and my sister's birthdays. I slept in the room I grew up in, the room I first cast a circle in, the room I became who I am in. I can remember my first Samhain ritual, and I remember that I had a very clear sense of otherworldliness, and how it filled me with delight. I cannot remember that feeling itself anymore.

Finding the Time

2010-07-16T18:09:00.001-05:00

The second time I went to therapy, in the beginning of my second year of library school, I expressed the frustration that I wasn't able to do everything that I wanted to -- it wasn't that I didn't have the time, just that I couldn't make myself do it. I would spend my free time reading Cracked.com or playing video games instead of doing these other things that were more important to me, like writing or practicing my religion. And the therapist said, well, you need to set some priorities; you can't do everything, so decide what is most important to you. And she probably offered some other suggestions, too, but I'm afraid I can no longer remember what they are. I can remember whether or not they helped (hint: no).

Not being able to get anything accomplished other than sleep and video games is a symptom of depression, of course. (I'm not sure if the video games are part of the official diagnosis or not, but they should be.) It was earlier this week, when I decided that my major accomplishment for the day would be a shower, that I realized how depressed I'd gotten again. Unemployment will do that to you, but I was in denial. I always start out my vacations -- and I'd been thinking of this summer as a vacation, at least until August -- intending to do all kinds of wonderful things that I didn't have time for while I was in school or working, and it never quite happens. Do I just get depressed when I don't have something that needs to get done, some external motivation? Possibly.

When I sat down to start writing a new blog post, my first inclination was to say that I hadn't been able to find the time to update. Which is both true and not true. I have had more time than I know what to do with; I have, at most, two (completely voluntary) obligations a week, for a total of four hours. But I really haven't been able to find the time -- or perhaps it's the mental space I haven't been able to find, because all too often the thought of writing something, anything, for public consumption has been overwhelming.

I lost the habit of daily prayers and readings when I went to a professional conference in DC at the end of last month, and I haven't been able to pick it up again. Last night I wiped a thick layer of dust off my altar. I haven't been able to find the time. Time is not an objective measure, an arc of numbers on a clock, but an experience. When we're enjoying ourselves, we say that time flies; at ten minutes to five on a Friday afternoon, it crawls. In a hot July in the midst of one job-hunting disappointment after another, it seems to vanish altogether until everything runs together in a long string of sticky afternoons and inadequate resumes.

I know -- I know, in a deep part of myself -- that I could make time come back if I worked at it, if I spoke to my gods again and traveled to their secret places and paid attention to my own mind. The thought is, actually, a little frightening. The sense of time passing may only enforce how long it's been that I've been unemployed, how much longer it might be, how much trouble I could be in if I can't get a job soon. Or it may help cement my sense of self, give me an anchor even if I can't make the rest of the world acknowledge my skills and talents.

I got up before noon for the first time in a week today, ate breakfast and lunch and took the bus downtown to work in the library, where I wrote so many blog posts during the school year while avoiding my homework. I haven't dusted off the altar yet. We'll see. We'll see.

Bealtaine

2010-05-10T11:25:00.002-05:00

Happy Bealtaine! Yes, already. Amazing, isn't it? And I'm more than a week late again, but what can I say, I don't tend to spend a lot of time on my computer on holidays.

In the Irish tradition, the year is divided into two parts, summer and winter, the heat and the cold. Bealtaine is the transition from winter to summer -- when our lives expand a little more into the outdoors. (I've already started drying my laundry on the line in the backyard.) It's the end of the storytelling season -- when all you can do at the end of work is sit by the fire and tell stories -- and the beginning of the season of action, when the work at the end of the day is done and there is still light to do something else.

It's also the traditional day for spring cleaning. I got the rest of my end-of-semester frustrations out by taking the rugs outside and beating them, scrubbing out the bathroom, and generally polishing my apartment until it shone. It was remarkably satisfying.

Not half as satisfying, though, as the other thing I managed to get accomplished for Bealtaine: I finished all of my final projects. Yep, I am now officially done with grad school -- and as of this Sunday, I will be able to put on my job applications that I have a Masters in Library and Information Studies, rather than that I'm working on one. Woohoo!

I'm ridiculously pleased that I managed to get everything done for Bealtaine, since all of my official due dates were actually after the fact. It was very important to me, though, to get it all finished before summer started. This is a major turning point in the year, and it's a major turning point in my life, and matching them up just made sense. I, too, am turning from studying to working -- at least I hope to be working soon -- and having that transition also seemed to help smooth my way through this psychically dangerous time of year. I always get depressed around Bealtaine and Samhain, but it wasn't nearly as bad this time around as it has been before.

So although it may be chilly outside right now (it certainly is in Wisconsin), happy summer! What are you doing this summer?

News of the Fail

2010-04-09T13:50:00.003-05:00

Um. An entire article on Christians and Jews adapting yoga to their spiritual practice, an article that actually admits, for once, that yoga has a spiritual component, and not one quote from someone using it as a Hindu spiritual practice? Fail, LA Times.

Spring Cleaning

2010-03-22T15:23:00.003-05:00

I've got a new look for the blog, what do you think? The black was getting a little oppressive. I can't completely abandon my morbid side, though, so there's still a raven. I stumbled on this free layout completely accidentally, and I love it.

Spring is really hitting me in my happy place right now. A couple of weeks ago we had seventy-degree weather -- unheard of in Wisconsin in March! -- and although it snowed on the equinox, it's warmed up a little again and the grass is still green and the lilies are starting to pop up out of the ground and yes, even the rabbits have moved back into their home under the trailer that's been sitting in our front yard for the past several years. (Don't talk to me, talk to my landlord.) As far as I'm concerned, it's spring now, and anything else is backsliding.

Unfortunately I still have a month or so left of classes. I didn't know you could get senioritis in a two-year program, but here I am, itching to be done. And I keep writing job applications, even though I've heard back from only two of the ones I've sent out since February. Hope springs eternal. It's all more than a little stressful, but I keep telling myself that this is good change. It doesn't stop me from wanting it to be over.

At least in this way the academic calendar matches with the turning of the seasons pretty well; unlike the beginning of the semesters, in the Spring when everything else is lurching toward change us poor graduates are being thrown out into a wider world that actually seems pretty welcoming, even if the economy hasn't shaped up enough yet and the job market is a little thin. At least it'll be summer, and few things are as bad as they could possibly be in summer.

on the Internet you are never alone

2010-03-14T18:14:00.001-05:00

The Wild Hunt has been keeping us updated on the story of Dale Halferty, the Iowa schoolteacher who refused to let a student build a Wiccan altar table in shop class and is now under suspension for his refusal to back down from his statements that "This witchcraft stuff - it's terrible for our kids."

I'm not sure why this story hit me so hard; perhaps it's because I was a teenage Wiccan in small-town Iowa. I know where Guthrie Center is; I know people who live there. I could have been this kid, if I had been brave enough to attempt to tie my religion into my class projects.

Seventy of this guy's classmates signed a petition saying that they didn't want witchcraft practiced at their school. For a sense of proportion, Guthrie Center High School has a student population of 185.

As far as I can tell, both the school and the media have been handling the story pretty well. The teacher has been put on unpaid leave, and the media are addressing this as a civil liberties issue with very little scaremongering about Wicca. (Well, the Guthrie Center Times article is a little shakier, but really very good for a small-town Iowa paper.)

As is right and proper, we don't know the student's name. I'm sure everyone in Guthrie Center, and probably most of the people in central Iowa, know who he is, but in no way do I think his name ought to be thrown about on the Internet. Still, I wish I could send him some support.

I wish I could say, I know just how you must feel. I feel a little bit of it right now, remembering being in high school, remembering how it feels to know that people don't want you there because you're Not Their Kind Of Person. Remembering the social isolation that comes of not having a church when church activities take up at least three days of the week. Remembering people shrugging your weirdness off as just a fad, something you'll grow out of when you stop trying to shock people for fun.

I wish I could say, my sister cried for an hour when I told her I was Pagan, and her church group prayed for me for a year, until she finally decided that a church that told her that I was going to hell wasn't worth her devotion. I wish I could say, my mother still doesn't quite understand what I do, but she's come to accept it. I wish I could say, I still don't even know if my father knows what I do, and I'm afraid to ask.

I wish I could say to this unnameable high school student, good for you for standing up to yourself. Dale Halferty thinks he's a good person and doesn't see what he did wrong, and you have to fight to get people to understand things like this sometimes. I wish I could say, it's only four more months until graduation. Hang in there.

I wish I could say to him, the whole world isn't like this. There are places you can practice out in the open and most people won't blink, and if they do the community will have your back, not just in apathy or condescension but in honest truth. You can cut your ties with the place you grew up in and try to scrub out the culture that shaped you and edit your conversations with your extended family and be, really, pretty happy in your practice and in your life. You lose things. It's hard.

Or you can be the kind of person who fights tooth and nail like this your whole life, and makes the world a little easier for the rest of us to live in. You lose things that way, too. It's even harder. I'm not that kind of person, but maybe you are.

I wish I could say, whatever path you choose, whichever way you go, I wish you only the best. You have the support of the whole Pagan community behind you, and I hope you know that. I hope you vanity Google this story every day and see how we're standing behind you, even though this may seem like a small thing in the grand scheme of the universe. Because so many of us know that feeling, the cut of ignorance combined with disdain, and we wish we'd done enough so that no one else ever had to feel it again. We're not there yet. Not yet.

May your gods protect you, and support you, and hold you in the light.

Reading sticks

2010-03-05T10:59:00.005-06:00

I really have to thank Feithline for her suggestion of daily divination as part of a spiritual practice. I was working with Tarot cards for a while, but the other day I remembered that I'd bought an ogam set last year, and I pulled that out of the drawer.

Ogam is an ancient Irish alphabet, probably dating to sometime in the Roman period -- that is to say, when the Romans settled in Britain and had the most extensive contact with insular Celtic peoples. It's most often found on single standing stones which are not grave markers, so the suggestion is that the inspiration for them came from inscribed Roman monuments. The manuscript tradition, though, implies that ogam was a sacred alphabet associated with the druí and the filí, the priests and the poets.

I am hugely indebted -- as is the rest of the Pagan and Celtic Reconstructionist community -- to Erynn Rowan Laurie for her work in turning the ogam into a divination system. Her book Ogam: Weaving Word Wisdom is absolutely invaluable to anyone working with ogam, Irish traditions, or the difficulty of reconstructing an ancient belief without falling into the same fluffy Wicca-101 systems that do no justice to the original. Yes, I really love this book.

On a personal note, I'm finding the ogam speaks to me much more clearly than the tarot does -- which is hugely desirable for a one-draw-a-day reading, although I can definitely see reasons I'd still use the tarot. I've always been drawn to tarot over other divinatory systems because it's so rich in symbolism, but ogam has that too -- it's just not visual symbolism. There are three distinct kennings that still exist for the ogam. They're not explanations of the system, they're more like mnemonics or koans. I think they read like prose poetry if you read them from beginning to end. But what this means for divination is that each fid -- each symbol -- has at least three more-or-less cryptic associations to draw from, not to mention the literal meaning of the letter name as written in the manuscript (some of which are untranslatable). That's a lot of symbolism to dig through every morning.

And there's another aspect of ogam I've always wanted to poke at, one that Laurie doesn't go into in her book, but that I'm starting to wonder about again. You see, ogam is made up of four sets of five, sets of hash marks really (there is another theory that says that ogam is derived from Roman numerals -- you can see why), distinguished by which way they run across the center line: to the left, to the right, straight across, or across at a slant. I'm discovering a pattern in my draws. (I took this picture yesterday. And this morning, what did I draw? Yep, lus, the last of the two-mark letters.)

Three is a hugely important number in Irish mythology, of course. One is also relevant -- one-eyed figures are very powerful, and often can see things that others can't. Some spells are done with one hand, or standing on one foot. In this context, I think that two might represent a whole -- not a pair or a balance, but a symmetrical unity. That would certainly make sense for my life right now, but I think I need to do a little more work on the subject. (Oh woe, a new topic for research! Whatever shall I do? *hand to head in a dramatic fashion*)

Daily Practice

2010-02-13T23:31:00.000-06:00

listening --
I drew the Seven of Swords the other day. (I keep meaning to draw a card every day, but I don't always make it. Of course, when I leave it sit for a few days, sometimes I find that it means more by the time I get around to properly doing an interpretation.) I read it first as "getting away with something," but although that was the interpretation that stuck in my head, I didn't know quite what it meant. Today, while I was sitting in the library working on some homework, the card popped into my mind again and I looked it up. One of the interpretations was "lone wolf." I thought about how disappointed I was that my roommate has all but lost her job because it means that I don't have any time in the apartment by myself any more, and I knew what the card meant.

light --
The light coming in through the dining room window when I was making lunch was so vivid today. It looked like the light you get in the summer, at around 10:00 in the morning when I've just come back from the huge farmer's market downtown, hot and bright and molten, almost like something living. It's the only kind of light that makes my kitchen look big. It isn't spring yet in Wisconsin, but the light is back.

expression --
I wrote a poem during Imbolg, when I kept Brigid's flame lit for two nights and a day. (I wrote two poems, but one of them is terrible and I don't know how to fix it.) It's too much about me right now, so I keep poking at it, to make it about something else. It's also about the light in the dining room window, and food fresh from the farmer's market, and spring after a long winter. But there's also a person at the middle of it, and I don't quite know who she is just yet. I haven't figured out quite how to be quiet and let her speak through me.

offering --
I don't give up very much, it's true. Sometimes I think of May Morrison saying, "You will never understand the true nature of sacrifice." (Don't worry, I have no intention of murdering local policemen in the name of it.) Besides, the lakes are too frozen to drop anything into them right now, and clogging up the locks with gold jewelry is probably a bad idea. I share a lot, though. A view of the barren treetops with the full moon, a fresh snowfall with the frozen earth, a warm patch of sunlight with a lush green houseplant. And I say hello to everything I pass, and I speak to the gods as though they're always listening, even though they're probably not. Perhaps in some ways my attention is enough.

Happy Imbolg

2010-02-01T11:29:00.002-06:00

For an Imbolg present to me from the Universe, I got over my cold. Yay!

For an Imbolg present from the Internet to you, through me, I'd like to link you to one of my favorite new poems. I'd hate to repost it here, as it was a personal gift, but you can read it here, deep in the discussion threads of Making Light (which is a regular source of excellent poetry).

The Brain and the Soul

2010-01-30T12:10:00.000-06:00

I want to recommend an article to y'all before it vanishes behind the NY Times' newly-reimposed pay wall: The Americanization of Mental Illness. It's a great article overall, but it's the bit on the last page that realy grabbed me: the bit about American view of the self, the one that relies on self-determination and free will. They contrast this in the article with kinship groups and ancestry, but I don't think that quite gets at it (or at least, it doesn't get at all of it). The American (modern/Western/whatever) focus on self-determination rules out a view of the world that says that some things, you can have no control over.

This is not an uncommon observation in social science circles, or in political commentary; because we want to believe that we are masters of our own destiny, we pretend that horrible accidents can't happen to us, and that's why people don't want socialized medicine. But this article made me think -- what does that do to our selves? What is the impact on the soul when we assume that we are responsible for everything that happens to us?

This article argues that the disease model doesn't actually improve the situation, because "I have a brain disease" becomes a kind of identity, something you can never escape. But in cultures where the spirit-possession model of mental illness still holds forth, it's something entirely outside you: you've been attacked, and when it goes away, you're not just better, you are without its influence at all.

I'm not saying that spirit possession is an inherently better way to view mental illness; there are certainly situations where that model has resulted in horrific abuse. I know people for whom it has. But it does make me wonder. I have recurring bouts with moderate depression -- never bad enough that I can't get out of bed, but I'm aware that kind of despair may lay in my future -- what would it feel like if I could think of the depression as something that was not-me? Something foreign, that could be banished entirely instead of kept under careful control? Would that really help?

This is, by the way, something that has always bothered me a little bit about modern Pagan magic, at least the way I learned it, through 101 books and websites in the 90s. It may have changed since then, and I know I've seen other takes on magic that don't bother me as much. But when I learned magic, the focus was very much on personal power, the sense that you, alone can make things work the way you want them to. And I've led a pretty priviliged life, and I know the world doesn't work that way. Some Things Just Happen. It's like playing chicken with trains at a railway crossing: the Universe is bigger than you, and it packs a bigger punch.

(It took me until the second edit through this post to realize that my point has already been summed up much more elegantly in an episode of Babylon 5: "I used to think it was awful that life wasn't fair. And then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the Universe." That quote's been a favorite of mine for a long time.)

State of the Witch

2010-01-16T11:14:00.002-06:00

I haven't written anything about myself in ages, not here or on any of my other blogs, or even in a journal at home. I'm feeling a little stuck. So here I am, in bullet points.

I've started working at a second job, which is really less a job than a favor for a friend that I'm getting paid for. Raven of Ravenworks, the most awesome Renaissance-metaphysical-and-associated-shiny-things store in the southern Wisconsin/northern Illinois area, is on holiday in Florida until March. Therefore, I get to help people play dress-up until then, and occasionally take their money when they decide to take their dress-up clothes home. Easily the most fun I've ever been paid for, even if it is playing merry hell with my last semester schedule.

This is my last semester of grad school! Oh my god. Attentive readers will recall that I'm in library school, so I don't have to write a thesis or anything, and but so therefore most of my stress lies in trying to find a job this spring. In this economy. In a library. Oh, dear.

I don't want to leave Madison, and I'm going to have to. I didn't realize how much I've established myself here, how many relationships I've made and groups I belong to, until I started thinking about how I'm going to have to leave. But at this point, it's probably move halfway across the country or stay here and work in a pizza joint. And to make it worse, I don't actually *have* that job halfway across the country yet, so I can't bring myself to start pulling up roots. This is not going to be fun.

I am having what is easily the best winter I've had in years. Antidepressants are a wonderful thing. (I'm well aware that most of the effect might be due to the placebo effect, but that's fine with me. I don't care why I'm better, only that I haven't spent most of this winter in a black hole, able to see the sky but unable to climb out towards it.) That said, I can't wait for it to be spring. Imbolg is coming, but this is Wisconsin, not Ireland, and a January thaw isn't spring.

I miss blogging. I've been working with Tarot again, and moving through the SpiritsCast 101 projects, and doing a lot of kitchen witchery. I'll work on keeping you all more informed.

So what's going on with you?

Practice Every Day

2009-12-03T11:19:00.001-06:00

Thanks to Feith and SpiritsCast 101, I've started to pay a little more attention to what I actually do for my daily practice. I was surprised to find that actually...I do a lot. Somehow, without really meaning to, I've become much more attentive to the world around me, much more joyful in my responses to it, and much more attached to my own spirituality. And yet, I still don't feel that I do enough for my daily practice, and while I was walking home the other day, I realized why.

I've identified for some time now as a Celtic Reconstructionist, not because I want to be pedantic about research (although that is a part of my personality I can't get rid of) but because I love old Irish mythology, I feel a connection to the worldview and the history there, and as difficult as it is, I get a huge spiritual kick out of working in that framework. And yet this hasn't made its way into my daily practice in any substantial way.

The gods I communicate with every day are Irish, but my communication with them isn't. My daily worldview is still largely shaped by Wicca and American cultural and spiritual traditions. There's nothing particularly wrong with this -- it works -- but it isn't quite what I want for myself.

Of course, my life is entirely too modern for an exclusively Celtic daily practice. I'm writing this sitting in a tea shop that originated in Prague, drinking fermented Chinese tea with chrysanthemum blossoms. I could add a Celtic referent there, but it would feel very pasted on.

Sometimes that's valuable, that pasted-on feeling; it gives you a sense of separation from the rest of the world, which is one of the things that "sacred" means. But as a pantheist, an important part of my practice is being in the world, existing wholly present in the moment. Showing up. Separation isn't a goal, for that practice, it's a barrier.

I've always struggled with establishing a daily practice, in part because I've felt I ought to have a liturgy, and I'm not satisfied with anything that exists, but I'm not satisfied with anything I write either. Now that I've been reflecting on what I do use for a daily practice, and have been working on putting more energy and effort into it, and getting so much benefit from it, I'm working on that liturgy again. I feel tremendously happy when I put energy into my daily practice -- it really is one of those things that returns exponentially -- but I don't get that kick out of anything that isn't Irish.

I suppose that's how I know I'm on the right path: that kick I get, the feeling of being plugged in to something so much more expansive than myself, and of feeling that I have a place there where I can do good work. I want to be able to work that feeling in every day, above and beyond the practice that allows me to feel I've done my duty and exercised my skills, as important as those practices are.

SpiritsCast 101

2009-11-25T18:06:00.001-06:00

I've just started listening to Feithline Stuart's new SpiritsCast 101 series of lectures on deepening your daily spiritual practice. Longtime readers of this blog (if there are any of you still around) will recall that this is one of my long-term goals, and one of the ones I have the hardest time with. A new year-and-a-day program on exactly that subject, starting at roughly the same time that I realize it's happening? Genius.

I already enjoy it. I'd always meant to listen to Feithline's old podcast, Dark Side of Fey, but the files are still sitting on my hard drive, unlistened-to. She's got a friendly voice, which is always key for a podcast but especially for one that's asking you to do spiritual work, and the audio files are of good quality. The first episode was mostly introductory stuff, as you'd expect, but she offered a list of four elements she tries to incorporate into her daily practice: light, listening, expression, and offering.

I love this idea of having approaches to daily practice instead of single activities. My difficulties always arise from the fact that I don't have a set schedule, so I have a terrible time doing the same thing at the same time every day. Thinking of daily practice as an approach instead of a task eliminates that problem -- and it feels better to me, too. It incorporates a little more creativity into the process, which can only be a good thing.

And, to be honest, it bears no small resemblance to what I've started to do myself in the weeks since Samhain. This time of year my thoughts always turn to my old association with Macha and the war goddesses; their birds, the ravens, have taken over the bare trees everywhere I go, and I feel their protection when I walk home in the dark. I started dedicating my archery practice to Macha a few weeks ago, and it's a remarkably satisfying feeling; each arrow that strikes home carries just a little more weight with it.

But I think the best thing Feithline is doing with this series is encouraging a community to build around it. In addition to the podcasts themselves, there's a discussion forum, and she's encouraging everyone who participates to blog about the process as well. The community-building makes it a shared project, not just a lecture from authority -- and Feithline emphasizes that the only authority she has is experience, and all of us have at least a little of that, too. I'm just getting started blogging about it and playing around in the forums, but I'm very much looking forward to seeing how this all plays out.

Connecting

2009-11-12T15:07:00.001-06:00

I've recently discovered that my school library has the full run of the Irish Texts Society, and I've been enjoying having the actual texts in front of me, something I've found hard to do with Irish mythology. It's a little late in the season for Cath Maige Tuired – the battle happens on Samhain – but then, timing has never been my strong suit. Turns out most of what I kind of generally know about Irish myth comes from Cath Maige Tuired (what isn't from the Táin, of course) – Dían Cecht and his son; Núada Argetlam; the Mórrigan and the Dagda; Balor of the Evil Eye; and, of course, Lug.

For some reason I find Lug very compelling. When he comes to Tara, he is asked what his art is, for no one feasts at Tara who is not the master of some art. Lug tells the gatekeeper his talents, but for every art he lists, Tara already has a master. Finally Lug tells the gatekeeper to ask the king if they have one who is a master of all these arts, and he is admitted.

I wrote last year at Lugnasadh about learning that I do not have to be all things to all people; Lug already has that covered. Reading this story again I found myself thinking about the other side of that equation. Tara is a community where every member has a place, a role, a task that they and they alone fulfill for the community. Everyone has something that they contribute, without which the community would not function (or at least wouldn't function as well).

I have never thought of myself as a person with a community; I'm an outsider at the best of times. But in the past year, I've found myself settling in more and more. I have friends in the SCA who will offer me places to stay and loan me gear and open up their homes for parties or house-sitting or just casual time. I'm making inroads into a professional community that I really, really love to be a part of. It's not something I'm used to, and it's making me think about my responsibilities to the people I surround myself with. My community. My people.

And part of that, of course, is trying to figure out what I have to offer these different communities. At a student organization meeting last week, we got to talking about religion (which is what happens when your student organization meetings are Friday afternoons in the bar), and I explained Paganism to three very interested technology librarians. I'd never dream of casting myself as an expert on the subject within the Pagan community, but this was something I could happily share with my fellow students, book recommendations and all. It was a bit of a pleasant surprise, to find my interests accepted and valued, and it started to make me wonder about what else I have to provide to the rest of the communities I belong to. This blog is something, surely (even if I don't manage to update it as often as I'd like). My skills in the job market are something else (which turns out to be a much less stressful way to think about jobhunting than the traditional desperate panic). And utility to the community is something to think about when I start to expand my skills and research. Turns out that's a whole lot easier when you actually have a community to begin with...

Climbing

2009-08-17T03:01:00.000-05:00

I have been climbing a mountain. Not one of your old-worldpiles of rock, either, your seasonally-appropriate Croagh Patrick, your Appalachians. No, this is a big, pointy fucker, new and still harsh, rough and dangerous.

It starts out broad at the base, as mountains do. As you come up from the plains, you can hardly tell the difference as you get going. It starts as little hills, things you climb every day without noticing. I can't. I shouldn't. Oh, it's fine. It takes a long time to get past the foothills and onto the mountain itself. Whatever made me think I was worth... I don't deserve... I never have and I never will... It's a hard climb, but it's worth it. There's a sense of accomplishment, getting over each little ledge.

And then, sometimes, there's the plateaus. They're the worst part. Wide, flat and safe; a cosy little cave with a fire, and the promise of no more climbing. I'm a good person, really. I'm fine just the way I am. But I'm not racist. Everybody else does it, too. By the gods, that's a nice place to lay down and rest. Sometimes you have to. And sometimes you have to creep by on the edges, clinging to the sheer cliff face, still moving upwards with your eyes fixed on the ledge like you can absorb some of that comfort while not being taken in by it. Sometimes, that works.

I don't know what's at the top of the mountain. I don't know if there is a top. I don't know if anyone knows. But climbing is better than resting, even if sometimes it's a very close call.

Book Review: An Altar In the World by Barbara Brown Taylor

2009-08-08T18:15:00.002-05:00

I spotted this book in, of all things, an Internet sidebar ad, and when I clicked on the ad it took me to the Harper-Collins website where I could read the prologue in PDF. Now that's how to advertise online. I put a hold on it at my local library right away; it came in last month.

The introduction made it sound like, well, the most pagan "Christian spirituality" book I've ever come across, and I'm pleased to say I wasn't wrong. Oh, it's still a very Christian book; Taylor is a former Episcopalian minister, and she writes as though to a universally lapsed-Protestant audience, supporting her ideas with Biblical scriptures and stories. But the Christianity she's advocating in An Altar In the World is not the kind of "reward in Heaven" Christianity that's chased off so many people; in fact, she's not necessarily advocating Christianity at all. (She makes clear in her introduction who her audience is -- that large population that self-defines as "spiritual not religious.") What Taylor is advocating here is love of the world, and love of God through love of the world. Pagans should be familiar with that.

Each chapter of the book focuses on a single practice that is designed to enhance what you do in the name of religion rather than what you believe -- another popular Pagan idea, but one that I've heard people advocating in all kinds of paths. The first four chapters, in fact, are exactly the practices that always appear in Paganism 101 books. These are Vision (seeing the divine in everything), Reverence (often described in Pagan books as Attention), Incarnation (seeing the divine in yourself), and Groundedness (a walking meditation). I loved reading about these in this book in a way I don't in Paganism 101 books, possibly because Taylor writes about these practices in terms of how she discovered their value, rather than writing about them because that's what you put in this part of the book. Taylor gives a wonderful sense of revelation -- she's not teaching you what to do as much as she's saying, "Look at this nifty thing I found!"

Later chapters are even more interesting, because they address issues that don't come up in the Pagan literature, or they come at them from a different way. Wilderness, for example, smacks a little of the traditional "God works in mysterious ways" line, but also addresses the importance of failure. Sabbath is a reminder of the difference between "not doing work" and "doing nothing." My favorite chapter is the second-to-last, Prayer. I'm not sure any description could do it justice; Taylor's descriptions of her prayers, candlelit, wordless, and heartfelt, are immensely powerful.

In many ways this book has helped me a lot in the project the Universe seems to have decreed for me this summer; the project of learning what orthopraxy really means. It's been a hard lesson for over-intellectual me, who spent her whole life with everyone believing she'd have a career in academia because, well, I'd just fit. I probably would. But I've been learning (slowly, but learning) that ideology is pretty cold compared to actions, and that ideas are still awesome, but they don't have a lot to do with ideology. Taylor absolutely puts that into practice here -- while she quotes Christian scripture to support her arguments, one doesn't get the sense that she's arguing that Christianity contains the best or most truthful realization of these practices, but that look, here is something many people including probably you agree is important that says this too. I aspire to one day be able to use the structures of my own religion in the same way.

I'd recommend this book to just about anyone.

I aten't dead

2009-07-16T11:18:00.001-05:00

I have instead been synthesizing -- which is unfortunately a very boring process to write about, because while I could explain for you all the things I've been reading and listening to and thinking about, I can't replicate the ah-hah moments that keep coming closer and closer together, and anything less seems woefully inadequate. (I do, however, have a couple of book reviews and other posts ready to go up in the next few days.)

One of my primary life strategies seems to be this thing where when something in my life feels inadequate, I try to add to it. Unfortunately, when what seems inadequate is time, this strategy doesn't work very well. On the plus side, I've gotten some good things out of adding this time around; new friends, exercise, maybe even a local Pagan community that I can really be a part of.

It's almost Lammas, Lugnasadh, which in addition to being the start of the harvest season is also a big community gathering. It's also the start of the part of the year that makes least sense to me, as I've written about before; summer is great, but fall has always been a beginning time for me. Somehow all of these things seem to be coming together this year, though. Last time this year I was laid up trying to pretend I hadn't seriously injured myself, afraid of what this was going to do to my first semester back at school. Now I'm healed, looking forward to one last year full of volunteering and studying before *gulp* heading into the job market, knowing I have people to lean on if I need help along the way. It's been a long, hard year, but it looks good from here.

Pagan Values Month

2009-06-21T23:19:00.001-05:00

I've been trying to write a post for a while, wrestling with my ideas and my experiences and trying to turn them into words that mean something to someone other than myself. But words are sometimes superfluous.

A woman died yesterday in Tehran. And, because of the wonders of modern technology, we can all watch her die. This is not voyeurism, or shock drama, or sensationalism. This is important. This is the difference that the new world makes: that in a theocratic dictatorship, in a country where protesters are shot and killed, they can deny it all they like, but we all watched her die. The news stories all say she was "allegedly shot," but we can all see her blood on the ground.

In the drafts of my Pagan Values Month posts, the emerging theme was action. It's not enough to believe something in Paganism, you must do as well. In Iran, people are trying to change the world, and I am humbled next to that. From where I sit I cannot do much, but I can bear witness. I can say, I see you. I hear you. May your gods protect you, and may the new world show you better justice than this one.

(You can watch the video at Jezebel's post here. Read the rest, too, and all the links.)

Celtic Witch

2009-05-12T09:52:00.004-05:00

I really enjoyed the Point of View column by Wood Stone in the current issue of PanGaia on being a Christian Witch. I know such a combination is less unusual in my corner of the blogosphere than it apparently is in other places, but it was a nice, well-articulated explanation of how the two fit together. She talks about wandering around in "the truth outside the walls" of sect and religion, a liminal place that's very near and dear to my heart as well.

I wouldn't call myself a Christian Witch, but I wouldn't call myself a Recovering Christian either. I gave up on Christianity when I graduated to the Bible Study classes that actually taught you what the Church believed -- when it started being obvious that "love thy neighbor" wasn't really the central point here. I dropped it all and I dropped it hard, and I found Wicca a much better fit for my beliefs, so I've never really looked back and I wouldn't feel comfortable identifying myself as any kind of a Christian today, or probably ever again. But I've found myself reading more and more about Christianity, its history and its variations, its sources in Judaism and Hellenicism, and finding it fascinating.

It was getting deeply into Celtic Reconstructionism at last that really pushed me in this direction. It seemed paradoxical at first, because Reconstructionism so often seems like "hardcore Paganism," but the more I poke at it the more I find I can't separate the Christianity out of it. Ireland was Christianized by the time we get any written records (including the still cryptic ogam stones), and even throughout most of the rest of the Celtic world, well, I'm a little skeptical about the accuracy of Greeks writing about barbarians. But in Ireland especially, Christianity and the existing paganism merged fairly smoothly, leaving us with no real way to disentangle them now.

And besides, what good does it do to ignore fifteen hundred years of history? Christian mystics shaped our understanding of the esoteric, and for most of us, our understanding of the universe is filtered through a hugely Christianized culture. While it's sometimes interesting to see if you can pick the Christian bits out of everything else...well, culture doesn't really work that way, and I don't think it's very helpful.

...sorry, let me restate that, slightly more emphatically. Culture really doesn't work that way. Christianity -- and everything that comes with it, binary dualism, strict concepts of fault and evil, organizational hierarchy, in addition to all the obvious bits -- has been a part of the way we think and live for a millennium and a half. Capitalism developed out of the interactions of state and Church. Heck, the whole pattern of the week and weekend has a connection. Obviously all of these things are tempered by other factors, but that's part of my point; you can't unpick it and expect it to make any sense.

(Halfway through writing this post I went back to reading the magazine, though, and ran into the Satanism feature. There are a million things I could say about that piece, but most of them come down to ur doin it rong. Maybe in another post.)

All of which is, of course, easier said than done, and easily confused by the fact that it's impossible to tell if two people mean the same thing when they say "modern Paganism" without a half-hour conversation on nuances. What it comes down to for me is that I want my Paganism to be part of my life, all the time, which includes the parts of my life that I can't bend into a shape more amenable to Paganism. It takes effort to understand my whole life as one entity instead of dividing it off into little compartments, but I do think it's worth it in the end, even if it means looking at some things bleeding together where I'd rather there was a line.

I learned something about myself.

2009-05-10T21:19:00.000-05:00

When I was a little girl -- like, seven or eight -- I wanted nothing more in the universe than for magic to be real. I already loved science fiction and fantasy novels (the first thing I ever saved up for was a box set of the Chronicles of Narnia) and I wanted oh so badly for my life to be like that.

I knew it couldn't be, of course. I was well aware that I was not secretly a fairy princess and wizards and dragons did not exist and the books were as close as I was going to get. But oh, I wanted.

And I was a genre-savvy little kid; I had realized that even in books about a world like our world where magic did exist, the protagonists never already understood how it worked. But because the protagonists, like me, wanted magic and dragons and fairies to exist, I reasoned that they would have read the same kind of books I did, books that explained how magic worked and what to do if you met a sphynx and so on. So logically, I figured, if magic does exist, it can't be anything like it is in books. And, somewhat less logically, I decided that it couldn't be like anything I could imagine and put in a book, either.

I wish I could explain the feeling I got then, and every time after, imagining some new way for magic to be real and then realizing, by my own logic, that I had negated that possibility. It was like a door closing -- no, slamming shut in my mind. I can still summon up that feeling that's less like a feeling than a real sense of the universe closing itself to me. It's still so vivid because it's never really gone away.

I don't know what it was that made me remember this train of thought, but it hit me last night like a hammer. This is why I'm terrible at magic, at ritual, at meditation. This is why I always stare agape at potential employers when they ask in interviews where I see myself in five years. This is why just suck it up and say it I've never dated, because all that time imagining myself in someone's arms meant I had convinced myself it would never happen, and never imagining myself in his arms meant I didn't notice when he expressed his interest. This is why I've never really had a plan for what to do with my life (although I have to say I haven't noticed any serious detriments yet). This is why I have such a hard time writing fiction. There's a broken switch in my imagination.

The nastiest part is I know I did it to myself. No one else ever told me this (although my general social ostracization probably contributed to my wanting a different life when I was eight). To the contrary, I was always encouraged to be imaginative. What I wasn't really encouraged to do was to want something so hard, but then, I always knew that what I wanted was impossible anyway. But it bled over, somehow, into being afraid to want anything at all.

Knowing what it is doesn't immediately make it better. I broke myself when I was small; it's a way of looking at the world, now. I have no idea how to change it. I think maybe, now that I know what it is, I have a chance. I hope.

celebrate spring with a crazy little thing called...

2009-05-03T18:29:00.003-05:00

Happy springtime, everyone! (Okay, I'm a couple of days late for Beltane, but it's still the weekend, that has to count for something, right?) While this winter wasn't as crushing as last year's, it's still always a relief to see the trees blooming again. Which they seem to be doing just for the holiday -- last week it was all bare branches outside my window, and now it's tiny green buds and a carpet of green, yellow, white and purple on the lawn. I'm so glad my landlord isn't interested in a tidy green suburban lawn; the weeds are so much prettier.

I didn't do anything for Beltane this year (maypole dancing at dawn? no thank you), but I don't feel too badly about that. It's the end of the semester, and I've canceled all my other social obligations in order to get my papers finished while still showing up for work on time. On the other hand, I've started to notice a pattern of emotional problems recurring at the Beltane/Samhain poles of the year; probably I ought to do something about that. (It's a terrible curse of the way the universe works that you tend to forget you need to do something about your emotional problems until you're in the middle of the emotional problems and therefore not really thinking clearly enough to do anything about them.)

I say I didn't do anything for Beltane; that's not really true. I didn't go out and join any community celebrations, but I've pretty much come to terms with my solitary religious existence. I didn't hold a ritual or cast a circle or write a liturgy, but I've also come to terms, repeatedly over the years but apparently it's something I still need to really absorb, with the fact that not everyone is cut out to be a priestess. I can know and honor my gods in my own way, but liturgy is not my thing. I love a good ritual, but it's work to create ritual, and I have other, more immediate work to do -- homework to earn my degree, work to earn money to pay the bills, work to keep my creative brain functioning while I'm doing the rest, work to maintain my friendships, work to maintain some kind of emotional equilibrium. And all of those things are things that my gods are already a part of, so ritual falls by the wayside. And I'm working on being okay with that.

(Okay, to be honest, I've got gods poking around in everything except the MLS degree. Anybody know of a God of Librarians? I'd like to say hi.)

Documentation

2009-04-08T22:32:00.002-05:00

I came to a realization last night about why I've not been meditating. I was lying in bed, not tired but knowing I had to get up at six in the morning and so really ought to sleep. My breathing had started to slip into a pattern, my mind starting to slide into an altered state, when I thought, I should grab a pen. Somehow I had acquired the idea that if I meditated -- and especially if there were visions or messages involved -- I had to write it down.

I say 'somehow,' but I know exactly where it came from. It's from that epic pile of 101 books I've read over the years. Every single one at some point indicates that if you're going to be meditating/astral traveling/spirit guide contacting/whatever, you should keep a written record of the thing. And boy, did I absorb that one. Thing is, it didn't make me keep a record; it made me not do it in the first place. (I'm sure this is not a universal problem. Then again, at the same time, I'm sure I'm not the only one.)

The thing I can't figure out is why. I am a particularly word-oriented person; I keep three blogs and a series of personal journals in addition to a latent pile of fiction mss. Writing down spiritual experiences does not help me at all. If it made an impact, I remember it; not always consciously, I admit, things do sink and resurface, but they're there. And this is experience, not academia, goddammit. We're not doing Science when we talk to the gods. And any written record I did produce would be entirely useless to anyone but me (and I can tell you, from rereading notes I wrote myself in high school, they're not very useful to me, either).

Now let's see if I can convince my academically-oriented brain of this in practice.

madness doesn't frighten me

2009-03-26T15:18:00.003-05:00

I can never see my own depression clearly until I'm walking out the other side of it. In the middle, it's all made up of maintaining, keeping myself together enough to get through the day. I've been depressed enough that I've had to spend all my breaks crying uncontrollably in the bathroom at work, but never enough that I couldn't get out of bed in the morning. That would be too much like letting other people know something about me.

Once I'm getting better, though, I can look behind me -- brief glimpses, lest like Orpheus I lose whatever it was I went down there for in the first place -- look back and say, "Wow, that was bad." In his book The Noonday Demon, Andrew Solomon says that most suicides happen in this place; not in the depression, which is too black and smothering to permit any action at all, but in the walking back, when you look behind you too long and realize you'll end up back there again someday. I've never been suicidal either, but I can see why you might.

Depression isn't madness, it's the place on the other side of madness, the dark mirror of the daily world. And I don't mean dark in a mystical, romantic sense, either; dark in the sense of bleak. Grey. Dull. Not even dead, but in limbo; the misery of existence without any of the spark of life.

The madness on the way back. Somewhere in between the everyday world of friends and lovers and jobs and passions, between that and the black sucking hole of depression, is the misty, colorful place of poetry and visions, of hallucinations and paranoia, of dreams and truth and ecstasy. It's not really a place you can stay for very long, and it can be hard to traverse, and sometimes you don't make it. I can't imagine seeking it out intentionally, because the boundary between that and the black hole is less a boundary than an invisible, sudden drop. But it isn't frightening.

when the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away

2009-03-02T10:48:00.002-06:00

I don't have anything to say, I just wanted to check in, really. (I aten't dead.) February didn't quite turn into the sucking black hole it usually does, but it was a near thing, and now I'm desperately waiting for spring to happen (properly, this time) so I can get on with my spring cleaning. There's just no point in spring cleaning if you can't have the windows open while you work.

I've been in a fallow period, reading and absorbing a lot of things, a few books, all you guys' blogs, and all the rest of the Universe as well. I've been doing some exploring of my inner landscape, finding it much more rich and varied than I'd thought, and finding myself much more open to contact with others, as well. Nothing solid yet, nothing that works outside of my own head, but it's early days.

More like a tentative hop, really.

2009-02-07T12:15:00.002-06:00

You know, I've been spending the past few years convincing myself that Imbolc is not first spring here in Wisconsin. Early February is more like the latter part of midwinter, here, with temperatures still in the oh-goddess-it's-cold range and ice to scrape of the windshield every morning and long underwear to be worn.

But... but...for Imbolc this year we had a January thaw. And now we're having another one. And today it's fifty degrees outside and I can hear the snow melting off the roof and I haven't had to turn the heat up yet. The official policy chéz Jen is that if this goes on for a week or more, it's become Spring, and anything else is just backsliding. Looks like we might have an early Spring this year.

blogging psa

2009-01-23T12:15:00.003-06:00

Just a note to let you know, faithful readers, that I've done some shuffling around of accounts associated with this blog for personal reasons (ie, I clicked on the wrong authorization link sometime a long time ago and finally got around to fixing it. I obviously have too many e-mail accounts).

I don't think it should actually change anything on your end, but if you've been following this blog using Blogger's tool and it suddenly vanished, or anything else like that, well, that's the reason, go ahead and put it back in.

Outgrowing? Really?

2009-01-12T22:19:00.003-06:00

It seems everyone who is anyone is still exploding over the end of deo's shadow and, more importantly, deo and Mandy announcing a conversion to atheism. And since part of the reason you start a blog is to stake out your own little soapbox to say whatever you want, I see no reason why I shouldn't contribute (although I certainly don't consider myself "anyone" of note).

Here's the thing: I've tried to read their relevant blog posts, and I just can't. It causes me too much emotional anguish. Possibly some would say that this makes me one of those people who is just in denial about their true rationalist nature, but that's not it at all. Quite the opposite, really.

It's all this talk of "outgrowing" that gets me first. However well meant, and however well it may describe personal journeys, it's condescending. Just like the conversion story, it's a cliche that carries more baggage than most people probably intend it to. Mostly, though, it's just condescending, and I've been paring condescending crap out of my life for a while now. Good-bye hardcore feminist blogs, political opinion columns...and atheist conversion stories.

Just like Jeff at Druid Journal, I am Pagan not in spite of its irrationality but because of it. And this is not in contradiction to my scholarly self: The more I learn about my brain and my culture and the world I live in, the more that irrationality seems to be supported. Discussions filled with anecdotes about why magic does or does not work seem to me to miss the point. The Universe, left entirely unobserved (if that were even possible), does not make sense. We, as living, thinking, spiritual beings, can make it make sense, with physics, with anthropology, or with religion. All of these things make sense in different ways. You can't travel to Mars with anthropology, but you can't talk to the Martians with physics. And I don't want to say there are things in this world you can't do without religion, because there's a quality of mind that atheists have, too; and I don't want to call it spiritual, because that has all the wrong connotations, but it's what gets you through three o'clock in the morning on the longest night of your life, and what carries the conversation at three o'clock in the morning when you're surrounded by friends and don't want to go to bed. And that thing, whatever it is, is important. It needs to be acknowledged, and spoken to.

I have a secret to tell you: I've never had an earth-shattering Mystery Religion Moment. I've had many small ones, but never That One that so many people seem to have. So that's not why I'm Pagan, either. It isn't because I was raised in it, or because I want a comfort zone of undemanding spiritual fluffiness, or because I'm immature enough to believe in magic (please, dear readers, read that last clause as full of sarcasm, because it is). I believe that the gods are real, although I cannot pin down a definition of "real" that works in that sentence. And I believe that I owe them something.

No, modern Paganism is not really very like ancient Paganism, nor could it ever be. I don't know that I could ever spill enough pixels on how much I dislike the idea that ancient Paganism is the authority for everything we do. No, modern Paganism is most often not rational or scientific. There is nothing wrong with rational and scientific, but that is not what we do. We do that stuff that happens at three o'clock in the morning, and we do it the best we can with a little history and a little imagination and a framework someone patched together about a century ago, because there is nothing wrong with irrational either, and we need it, too.

I celebrate myself and sing myself

2009-01-03T14:11:00.004-06:00

One would like to demarcate clearly the boundaries of the self. In fact, no essential self lies pure as a vein of gold under the chaos of experience and chemistry. The human organism is a sequence of selves that succumb to or choose one another. We are each the sum of certain choices and circumstances; the self exists in the narrow space where the world and our choices come together.

--Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

I want to print this out on a poster and put it on the wall I look at when I wake up in the morning. I want to write it in little gold letters on something I see every day. I don't know what it is about our lives, our culture, or our brains that make us think any other way, but we are not a single pure entity covered up by layers of distracting crap. We are what we are, at any given moment, doing whatever it is that we do. If I change the way I think, if I shake off old ways of being, if I improve my lifestyle and do everything I want to do, I won't be any more myself. I'll be a different me, when I change, as I always will. But I am myself right now.

2008-12-21T08:28:00.003-06:00

It never ceases to amaze me, when I do finally pull off an all-night vigil, how different the world seems when the sun really does come up in the morning.

Happy Solstice, everyone.

Atonement

2008-12-12T13:54:00.002-06:00

What do you do when you've fucked up?

Doing wrong isn't a very popular topic in Pagan circles; I have to agree with Brendan Myers when he says that all too often, we gloss over the idea of what is and isn't right and we end up with a morality that doesn't have anything to say about our everyday lives.

I pretty well bombed a presentation yesterday in class, and it was my fault. Well, partly -- the professor was pathetically unprepared to teach the class she was supposed to be teaching, and was using someone else's projects as assignments, and did a piss poor job of explaining her expectations and offering support to us as we worked. But because the professor was so unprepared, I let my standards slide farther and farther, and by the time the project was over yesterday I knew that I could have made it a lot better without a lot more work, but I didn't.

One of the things I've always held as a virtue is doing my best possible work. Even when I was working at my horrible soul-sucking job, I was better at it than a lot of people there because it was wrong to me to do a bad job just because I disliked the work. And I've never slacked off on schoolwork this much before, so it was a little shattering when someone asked a question that I was completely unprepared to answer.

My other problem here is that I have very little faith in my own ability to determine responsibility for these sorts of things; I know I have high standards for myself, but are they unrealistic? Should I cut myself some slack because it was a group project, and I probably did more work than anyone else in the group and it still wasn't up to my standards? Should I cut myself some slack because it's my first semester of grad school and I've spent the whole term fighting with my foot injury and the weird wavering boundaries of depression on top of it? Probably. But it was honestly a little bit of a relief to take responsibility for the part of it that I am undeniably responsible for: I knew there was more work to be done, and I chose not to do it. I did wrong.

I made offerings last night in atonement (and who is the God of Library Students, after all?), and now I'm doing what I can to make it better -- that class is over and done with, and there's nothing I can do about that, but I still have one more paper to write, and at least I can feel good about that one.

What do you do when you've done wrong?

(happy) winter

2008-12-03T12:07:00.002-06:00

I have this problem where the longer I go without posting the more I feel like the next post I make has to be really profound to make up for the gap. I'm trying to get over that. This is not profound at all.

I've been joking with people that I don't want winter to start, I feel like I have PTSD from last year (104.5 inches of snow, breaking a local record of some decades, not to mention a few delightful days of blizzards and/or freezing rain). It's getting less of a joke as the snow keeps falling, especially as this year I've quit my horrible job but I have finals stress to deal with instead. Oh, and thanks to the surgeon not warning me ahead of time what my followup surgery would entail, I'm back on crutches for a week. Yep, crutches. In the snow. help.

Which I think is why I was struck by a quote from a Vodou priest that The Wild Hunt posted a couple days ago:

This year, they spent what they could to honor the dead, while still trying to support the living, Josue said. 'I don't think the Gede [the spirits of the dead] will be offended,' Josue said. 'They will be concerned about the condition of the world, because they have a lot of work to do now.'"

Which I think gets at why I don't like the religion-only-in-a-crisis mode that I (and I think a lot of other casual-religious folks) was brought up with: if you only turn to your gods when you need them, you feel like you need to do a lot of work to earn that help, at a time when that work is hard/expensive/impossible; but if you've been keeping up the relationship all along, you just all pitch in together and pull through. Rather like humans do. All of which is to say that while the snow is still mildly traumatic, I'm in a much better place this winter than I was last winter.

Now if only I could walk.

Welcome to the political post of this year.

2008-11-03T18:55:00.002-06:00

You know, I'd never thought before about how close the US election date is to Samhain, but it feels very appropriate right now. You know how sometimes, when the veil is thin and everything is just right, you can feel the world changing underneath you?

Right now.

If you can vote tomorrow, do.

Meme!

2008-10-29T08:20:00.003-05:00

I'm swamped with schoolwork and Samhain preparations right now, so in lieu of actual content, I'll finally respond to the Six Random Things meme Livia tagged me with...er...last week?

1. I currently have approximately two dozen books checked out of two different library systems. I will never in my life find the time to read them all before they're due. But I just can't stop.

2. I really like making things, mostly fairly useless things unfortunately. Right now it's mostly cross stitch, but you should see the handbound book of the Shadow Unit finale I'm working on.

3. I am absolutely shit with romantic relationships. I've been asked out a grand total of twice in my life, and the second time I didn't even notice until I'd accidentally shot the guy down so hard he hardly ever talked to me again. (I am still really, really sorry about that, Rob.) But I never get bent out of shape about it unless my mom asks me if I have a boyfriend yet, so I try not to worry about it too much.

4. I'm getting a Master's in Library Science because I was too scared to go for my Master's in anthropology. That and I couldn't find an anthro school that did what I wanted to do, but let's face it, I didn't look very hard.

5. I only realized once I'd started at the library school that just because I'm getting a professional degree now that doesn't mean I can't get an academic one later.

6. I'm in fandom, and I honestly think it's the single greatest thing to come out of the Internet. (I know fandom didn't really come out of the Internet, but it did for my generation.) I almost linked to the Wikipedia page here for those of you who don't know what fandom is, but I read it over and decided I didn't like it. In brief: fandom makes stuff out of other peoples' stuff. Intellectual recycling. Reclaiming popular culture. And, okay, a significant amount of well-intentioned copyright infringement. But I love it, and it's awesome, and the people I've met through fandom are some of the best people in the world.

I'm not a fan of tagging myself, but if you read this, I'd love to see your responses, too. It's strange to think how much of myself I don't talk about on this blog, really, and I'm sure that's true for other people as well.

Back together again

2008-10-26T12:23:00.003-05:00

Oh crap, it's happened again. My Genius Idea sat and festered too long before I wrote it down, and now it's gone all moldy and pretentious and no longer useful for anything but rearranging furniture in my head. Oh, well, it was getting a little stale in there anyway.

Instead I want to talk about how much better I feel about the world now that I've got my kitchen under control again. From the middle of July, when I tore the ligament in my foot, until just a couple of weeks ago when I got stable enough to stand for the length of time it takes to make dinner, my roommate had to deal with the kitchen. And I love my roommate dearly, but she is not a kitchen person. She knows it, and it shows. She doesn't particularly like to cook (although she's better at it than she thinks), and she has an even harder time keeping up with the even-less-fun kitchen things, like dishes. (Let's not talk about the state of the refrigerator, shall we?)

I've always thought of the kitchen as the heart of a home. When I was growing up, we didn't use the front hall entrance to our house but the kitchen door, so coming home always meant walking into the kitchen. It was where I got to spend the most time with my mom, who worked until she got too sick to keep working, helping her make dinner (although my most vivid memories are still of baking Christmas cookies, her absolute favorite). It's still where we spend the most time together, when I go to visit for holidays. And in my current apartment, the kitchen is literally the physical center of the space. I step out of my bedroom in the morning straight into the kitchen (and over to the coffee pot).

And yeah, it's still a strain to stand for an hour to cook or bake. But I've finally got the dish situation under control, and I've consolidated recipe boxes with the one I inherited from my grandmother earlier this year. Friday night I made Korean barbequed beef and gai lan for dinner, and last night was this year's inaugural Teresa Neilsen Hayden Savory Pie. (The leeks were a little bland, but the next one will be better.) And now the world seems to have sorted itself out into its proper place again. I must be more of a kitchen witch than I'd thought.

where I'm coming from

2008-10-18T17:41:00.003-05:00

There are a lot of things going on in my head right now. (It's fall, that happens to me a lot.) I'm looking at Celtic Reconstructionism again, as I do every once in a while. It's inevitable for me -- I'm never satisfied with just learning something, I want to know who came up with it and where it comes from and what it meant to someone other than me, and since my abiding interest is in Ireland, I always circle back around to CR.

I'm taking a history class right now, too, and history always makes me think about the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we tell one another. That's what history is, after all, is stories. Humans are storytelling, pattern-making animals, and we turn our world into stories. That's what the gods are, too. Stories, and patterns. And gods.

I read this book for my history class this week, The Cheese and the Worms, about a miller in the sixteenth century who was tried for heresy. Twice. His heresy was so strange, though, that the first time around the Inquisitors stopped trying to convert him and started going, "Sorry, go back. You believe what now?" And Ginzburg, the researcher who put this together, thinks that part of the reason this guy believed such weird things was he got them from the oral culture of rural Italy, that they represented this pre-Christian ideology that still survived in the countryside.

I got really, really annoyed by that idea as I was reading the book (and subsequently writing the paper, which, guess what I'm supposed to be writing instead of this post?). Partly it's the vaguely condescending tone, but partly it's the recurrence of the phrase "pre-Christian." I think I'm sensitized to that phrase or something, whenever I see it I'm ready to be angry about the way it's used. And I've been trying to figure out just why that is, and I think for once I'm starting to get somewhere. And unfortunately it's long, and complicated, and I do still have that paper to finish. (And the other one for next week, and the draft for the week after that...)

A lot of people around the Pagan blogosphere have been talking about feeling the veil growing thin a little early this year. Yeah, I get that. It feels a little treacherous, a little brighter and clearer than it's really supposed to be. It's making it a little easier to see. (Now let's see if I can make it easy to explain.)

Watch this space.

Things that apparently take a long time to learn.

2008-10-06T12:51:00.003-05:00

What comes to fruition in the harvest season is the results of your actions.

What happens when I feel myself come alive in the fall is thoughts.

It seems a little obvious in hindsight, but I've always wondered why I never felt the way I "should" about the autumn festivals, Samhain in particular.

(I have been Thinking Thinky Thoughts today. I think they will be interesting, once I have a chance to turn them into an argument and post them here.)

Book Review: The Other Side of Virtue

2008-10-04T12:16:00.005-05:00

I finished reading The Other Side of Virtue by Brendan Myers sometime in August, and I just couldn't write it up at the time. Now I'm back in school and back into the swing of writing about difficult things, so here goes.

I'd heard good things of Brendan Myers before in my poking around at various forms of Celtic Neo-Paganism, so when The Wild Hunt did a writeup of this book, I was intrigued. For people who want books that go beyond Paganism 101: this is one of the guys to keep your eye on. (Though you could argue that an ethical structure ought to be part of 101, in reality, it pretty much isn't.)

What Myers has written here is more a theoretical book than a practical guide: not a criticism, but an observation, for people who might want to pick it up. It's a work in progress, a starting point for other Pagans to look at and start figuring out how to make it work in real life. Fair enough. I hardly expect any one person to come out with a synthesized Theory Of Pagan Ethics just like that.

I'd caution against using it as an only source for an ethical system, though. (I'd caution against using anything as an only source for anything.) The first section of the book is dedicated to historical examples of how people have theorized ethics and virtue, from the heroic model of chiefdom societies like the Celts to the social model of Classical Greece and Rome, up through the Romantics and Humanist ideas of The Good Life. It's an impressive span to cover, and you can see where his specialty is -- that is to say, it's not in anthropology, which is my specialty, and every once in a while Myers makes some broad sweeping statements that made me cringe. Overall it's a pretty good analysis, but it's better if you keep in mind the idea of ancient Greece instead of trying to equate Heroic Greece with Celtic society in general.

This is also not, I repeat, not the book to read if you're currently struggling with depression. "I recognize that depression is a medical condition," he writes on page 222, "not a deficiency of character. But I do wish to suggest that an ability to imagine a future, an ability to discern a purpose for one's life, can have a therapeutic effect on those who find their lives very difficult to bear." I've never been suicidal myself, but I have been profoundly, awfully depressed, and that sounds a lot like "just snap out of it" to me. That, coupled with the "Spirit" passage starting on 193, was what put me off this book for several months.

That said, what I do think Myers does very well is present a vision of virtue that doesn't exclude people. That doesn't mean he's come up with a way to look at the world that means that everyone is virtuous: far from it. But he's come up with a way to look at the world that means that people who disagree, people who are in active opposition, hell, even people who flat-out hate everything that the other stands for, can both be virtuous at the same time. Virtue, in Myers's conception, is in the way you look at the world, not in the ideas you have about it. Virtue is when you look at the world and think, "That is so fucking awesome. I have got to be a part of that." And that, I think, is an excellent place to start.

Harvesting

2008-09-21T13:58:00.003-05:00

It's a terrible shock to look back at this year and realize that yes, my plans really did come to fruition. I quit the job I hated that was causing me so much grief, I started school, I've got two new part-time jobs to back me up, and the world is a much brighter place than it used to be.

It's strange to think this, as I'm still recovering from a broken foot, as one of my friends struggles with replacing most of her worldly possessions lost in a flood (while still unemployed) and another is fighting depression and a terrible economy in an attempt to get out of her horrible job situation; as the economy falls in on itself and the Republicans field what might be the worst possible ticket imaginable and still their poll numbers don't go down...but I'm doing okay. I can feel the rest of the world holding its breath, but I know I can weather it.

Strangely enough, I almost feel like this is a result of feeling more connected to the world, not in spite of it. It's as if by taking my place among these events, by taking some responsibility for them, they become less scary and uncontrollable. Not because I feel like I can control them, but just because I don't feel like they can control me. We're all part of the same system, pushing and pulling one another, but I've got my claws in deep enough that nothing's going to shove me out of my place in the world. Not just yet.

It's the Equinox, and things are turning over. Time to hold on tight.

Tell Me a Story

2008-09-11T10:34:00.001-05:00

(This post has been brought to you by the winning entry for PanGaia's Pagan Fiction Contest. You're kidding me, right?)

If I read one more Pagan conversion story, I am going to scream. "Once upon a time I was not Pagan but I was unhappy and then I discovered Paganism and everything was WONDERFUL." Oh, the Augustinian conversion story, how I loathe you.

I'm not saying that story isn't true for the people who tell it. (I've told a similar one before, and I stand by it as my lived experience. It was indeed what happened.) But – it's like this. When I was in therapy, one of the questions on the entry form was about your religion, and I put "Pagan." The therapist asked me about it – I think her exact words were something like "Tell me about that." And I started telling her my conversion story.

I think a lot of people do this; it's a way of explaining process, making our Paganism seem less strange to cowans because we give them logical reasons for every step of the way. But I've started to wonder if it's really the best model at hand.

For one thing, it's also a hugely familiar story, particularly to the kind of people who like us least (Evangelical Christians). Now, I don't mean to say that something is bad just because Evangelical Christians do it (I for one enjoy oxygen, for example), but I do think there are some theological underpinnings to the conversion story that make it, at best, questionable for Pagans.

The key event in the conversion story is the conversion. It's the climax of the narrative structure: the narrator's dissatisfaction with the religion of their birth is the plot, the conversion is the climax, and the description of their current belief the denouement. This structure makes the religion – the Paganism – the least important part of the story, the aftermath of other, more exciting events. It's a happy ending, but how much do you care about a happy ending to a story other than that it's happy?

Conversion makes sense as a central point for a Christian, because Christianity has a focus on salvation. For Christians, the moment of conversion is a moment of grace, the point at which not only their life changes but literally their entire existence, their afterlife, the fate of their soul is determined. There's not a lot of theological unity among Pagans, but I don't know of any who consider the salvation of their soul to be a key aspect of their conversion.

Sure, the point of conversion is an important time for a Pagan too. It's a moment of self-realization and epiphany, and it often comes with an amazing sense of freedom. But most Paganisms are mystery religions; most of us have other stories of personal epiphanies that are much more meaningful to us than our conversion. Not all of them are suitable for sharing, certainly, but some of them surely are.

There's a lot of talk about Pagans genericizing themselves into meaninglessness in order to "fit in" with the mainstream. And while I'm uncomfortable with the idea of public circles that look more like church meetings than anything else, I'm even more uncomfortable with the idea that the stories we tell about ourselves don't mean anything, either.

Back to school

2008-09-03T12:19:00.003-05:00

It would be that the year I finally seem to be emotionally in tune with the season change is the year that I go back to school. Most of me is winding down for the autumn and winter, and the rest of me is going, "Readings! Classes! Work! Think! AAAAH!" Wow, going back to school after two years off is harder than I thought it would be.

On the plus side, I'm now at a huge university, and working in the central library (in the reference department, no less!), so what does that mean? Oooooh, research. I am delighted to discover that we have not only a giant stash of books that seems to cover most of the CR FAQ reading list, but also delightful things such as the minutes of the Gaelic League from the late 1800s on microfilm. Which, okay, is less of Pagan interest than of general geeky interest, but my god, this collection. As soon as I get off my crutches I'm going to just go play in the stacks for an afternoon.

In the meantime, injury recovery time seems like a good time to be doing research. I've been having strangely vivid and unusual dreams lately, and I've discovered I know very little about the role of dreams in a traditional Celtic system. And now, I have the resources to help me find out...

A post of links

2008-08-20T20:09:00.001-05:00

I don't usually cross-post from my Livejournal, but this is driving me crazy.

So. This thing happened recently.All about asking the presidential candidates what they think about, y'know, Jesus and stuff.

(Including questions like "The Bible says that integrity and love are the basis for leadership" and "You've made no doubt about your faith in Jesus Christ; What does that mean to you?" To draw from the first couple pages of the transcript.)

And the liberal blogs think Obama shouldn't have done it, because evangelicals are McCain's base, donchaknow. Or maybe he should have, to prove that Democrats Are Religious Too.

Aren't we all missing something here? Some larger issue beyond Who Loves Baby Jesus Most?

Oh, yeah.

(Thanks, Jason.)

Book Review: The Shark God by Charles Montgomery

2008-08-18T11:44:00.001-05:00

I bought this book – it must have been June, because I'd decided to buy myself a book for my birthday, and after I'd picked something out from the highly unsatisfactory collection of Patrick O'Brian novels, I wandered back into the history and travel section. This is always a bad idea for me. I have a terrible weakness for good history and travel memoirs. So when I saw The Shark God on the shelf – memoir, travelogue, and Melanesian syncretism – what was I supposed to do?

The Shark God is the story of Charles Montgomery's search for adventure, magic and family history in the chaos of culture, religion and politics that is Melanesia. His grandfather had been a Protestant missionary there in the late 19th century, and as a boy Montgomery had invented great stories about his grandfather's exploits, risking life and limb to bring Christianity to the poor, brown natives of these islands. As an adult, Montgomery knows that his childhood imaginings are probably unrealistic and definitely more than a little bit racist – and he's left Christianity in the meantime – but he feels a connection to the place and wants to learn more. So, as a travel writer, he does the only reasonable thing: he gets a contract to write a book.

Montgomery admits that the thing that intrigues him most about Melanesia is the apparent paradox of Christianity and native belief still existing side by side. Although almost all Melanesians are Christians of some stripe, a number of pre-Christian traditions and beliefs still have a great deal of influence on peoples' daily lives. They believe in witches and curses, in magic stones and dances, in ancestor spirits and shark gods.

I think my favorite thing about this book was that Montgomery never really seems to get it. He has a genuine interest in the religious situation, and he does his best to empathize with the people and understand what's going on. He learns that his English Protestantism is far from the only valid form of Christianity, and he really believes in at least some of the magic that he meets. But he never gets syncretism, never seems to be able to move beyond “but that's not how Christianity works” and “but that can't really be real,” even though he obviously really, really wants to. The epilogue tries to come to some kind of conclusion, but it's patently false and too much like a moral.

There are no morals through the rest of the book, just stories that mean something. Like the Anglican Bishop who lives in a house with a constantly shifting population of locals who refuse to let him live alone, because that's no kind of life at all. The priests who use the magic of Christianity to fight the magic of evil sorcerers and exploitative criminals alike. The spectacular moment when, having talked a group of rebellious young men to take him to see the famous thunder stones on an isolated island, Montgomery makes it rain.

Overall, I think what makes The Shark God a success is that (excepting that awful epilogue) it's a book written with compassion, respect, and a genuine attempt at understanding. Montgomery knows that he doesn't know better than the people he's talking to – or the people he's writing to – and while he's looking for answers that makes sense to him, he doesn't discount the answers that seem to make sense to everyone else.

unbreaking

2008-08-10T18:47:00.004-05:00

The sprain is a break after all, and a serious one at that -- so instead of spending Lugnasadh doing nothing, as I'd planned, I spent it unconscious, having foot surgery. I'm no longer in much pain, just frustrated from being unable to move the way I want to. Disability activists refer to the rest of us as "temporarily abled" people, and you never really realize how true that is until you're faced with a flight of stairs to get into your apartment and only one functioning foot. On the plus side, it looks as though I'll be walking again by mid-September, instead of Samhain as they originally predicted. Whew. (That's in time for PPD! Woohoo!)

I went to visit a friend a couple of days ago, once I was able to get around a little bit again, and she hugged me and said, "I'm sorry you're broken." My first reaction was denial -- I'm not broken! it's just my foot! -- but as I turned that idea over in my mind I realized it isn't quite right. The idea that "I" is something different from my body is part of this Cartesian dualism thing that I am actually just not in favor of. I am the person who inhabits my body right now, and my body and my mind are part of the same system, not to be ripped apart and talked about as if they were totally separate things.

Injury can really bring that into focus, actually. I've been working with attention a lot lately (based on some exercises from Evolutionary Witchcraft, which I cannot recommend highly enough), and it's been interesting to see where my attention goes on its own. Except for the part that's writing or watching TV or stitching (most of my activities these days), it's mostly divided between my foot and my back, which is impossible to get straightened out what with the having to sit with my foot propped up all day. It's an improvement, though. Last week I couldn't think about anything but my foot.

So yeah, I'm a little bit broken right now. But it's doing okay, and I'll get better. That's the best part about bodies, they fix themselves remarkably well, all things considered.

Breathing.

2008-07-28T15:23:00.003-05:00

I can't do magic when I'm injured.

I'm not sure what it is -- a combination of things, most likely. My focus is bad, because I'm thinking about the pain/trauma. I'm pretty self-centered naturally, but when I'm injured it gets even worse. I feel bounded by my body, stuck in a malfunctioning machine with no connection to the wider universe. And there is that tradition, that the High King had to be physically without blemish in order to rule. It isn't the same thing, but the connection tugs at me.

It shouldn't feel quite so much like a loss, I keep thinking, because I haven't done magic in months. My job was busy sucking my soul out through my eardrums, and when I did have days off, either I had people visiting or I was too busy catching up on sleep to do much of anything else. So I quit my job a month and a half before school started so I would have a chance to catch up. Breathe. Enjoy all of the things that my work was making it impossible to enjoy.

And then I fell, and the doctor is giving a three-month recovery period and possible surgery. (Probable surgery. I need to stop pretending I know more than the doctors about whether or not I should have surgery and just prepare for it.) So much for enjoying.

I saw the Dalai Lama speak last weekend, and he said the way to deal with problems is just to breathe. Meditate. Let your mind calm down, and look at it from all possible perspectives. Don't panic. Deal with as much of it as you can...and then blame the rest of it on the gods. Makes sense to me. (But if I find out someone did this because they thought it would be funny to watch me hop around on crutches for three months, I am gonna be pissed.)

To-do list

2008-07-26T12:59:00.002-05:00

Let's see...I've quit my job, finished my class registration, sent out resumes for fellowships, set up my hospital appointment so I can make sure I didn't break my foot falling down the stairs last week...don't I have something else to do? Surely I have something else...

I've got a blog. When did I update that last? Wait...what do you mean, April??

Ugh. I really didn't mean to go on hiatus there. (I never do, did you notice?) I just...well...haven't had that much to say. (I wonder if this makes me a bad Pagan. I mean, I tell people that I consider myself a very religious person, but that's mostly because I know my worldview gets filtered through something that most of the rest of the world considers insane, and that's the socially acceptable term for that kind of worldview. "Very religious." It doesn't seem to mean that I can think of something to say every day, and I sometimes wonder if it should.

Forget that parenthetical, then, and let's talk about Lugnasadh. It's coming up soon, you know. I've never quite known what to do about it as a holiday. I mean, I don't live in a farming community, so the harvest aspect of it doesn't seem to have a lot to do with me. (Well, except for the fact that I can get sweet corn 3/$1 at the farmer's market. Woohoo!) It's named for the god Lugh, who some people associate with Apollo, but aside from Greek and Celtic gods having pretty much nothing to do with each other I don't think that gets at the whole of it.

Lugh did everything. That was his thing; when he showed up at Nuada's court and asked if he could see the king, the gatekeepers asked him why the High King should bother with him. Lugh responded that he was a great warrior, but they told him they already had the best in the land. Lugh said that he was also a great harper, but no, they already had somebody for that. Poet? Yep. Goldsmith? Yeah. Sheep-shearer? Uh-huh. And so on down the list, until finally Lugh said, "Well, do you have anyone here who can do all these things?" And the gatekeepers admitted that they did not, and let Lugh in to meet the king.

I tend to not have formal rituals for most holidays, but to put into work some aspect of my own life that has to do with the mythology I associate with it. So for Lugnasadh, I tend to do a little bit of everything that I do -- I cook, I sew, I write, I code. Honestly, I'm having trouble with that right now. Even with a computer in front of you, there's only so much you can do when you're stuck on a couch with your foot in the air, waiting for a sprained muscle to heal.

And like a lot of women, I have this problem where I try to be all things to all people, and when I can't do it, I feel like a failure. I've been apologizing to my roommate for not cooking this week. See above, I can't even stand. But I'm home all day and she's not, so I feel like I should be contributing more, even though the best thing for me is to stay right here and heal.

So for this Lugnasadh, I'm going to honor the holiday by not doing everything. Maybe I'll write a little, just to keep up with the daily goal, and maybe if I feel up to it I'll cook some of that amazing sweet corn (in the microwave, so I don't accidentally pour boiling water all over my unbalanced self). But I don't need to do everything; we've already got somebody who does that.

Gloominous Doom

2008-04-29T18:44:00.003-05:00

I have learned the name of my Nameless Anxiety.

That's what I've been calling this creeping feeling that I get, the certainty that I've forgotten something important, the worry over things out of my control, the knot at the pit of my stomach that appears for no reason at all. The result of spending too much time with my own brain and not enough with anyone else's.

It's a hard feeling to dispel, when you place a lot of faith in your own intuitions. The difference between Nameless Anxiety and intuition is actually pretty stark most of the time, but a part and parcel of the Nameless Anxiety is a little voice that says that ignoring this feeling is just wishful thinking, pretending that my fears aren't true. Even with the little voice I can usually distinguish between that and proper intuitions. But the voice is still there.

In Faerie to know the name of something is to have power over it. I actually just finished reading a book on the subject; The Mind and the Brain by Jeffrey Schwartz. Dr Schwartz, trying to find a treatment for OCD that didn't rely on drugs or on traumatizing the patient out of their obsessions, found an answer rooted in the Buddhist philosophy of mindfulness. He taught his patients to recognize that their compulsions came not from their selves but from faulty brain wiring, to name OCD thoughts as OCD thoughts instead of as truths about the world, and to act on these thoughts by specifically turning their minds to something else and doing something more productive. It worked, to the tune of producing brain changes demonstrable by MRI, and he cites similar treatments working similarly well for sufferers of clinical depression. To know the name of a thing, even of a thought, is the first step toward binding it, or banishing it.

"Don't be ridiculous," I told my Nameless Anxiety -- the Gloominous Doom, and isn't that a ridiculous name -- "there are three more days in April, the papers from the grad school are not late yet. It doesn't matter if you miss your first bus this evening, you don't have a curfew. Your landlord thinks you're awesome and will not throw a fit about something that you did not break in the first place. And what do you really have to be worried about, anyway?" And he looked at me with sad, fishy eyes and slunk away.

image by Brian Froud

A quick link, and a ...something

2008-04-19T17:04:00.002-05:00

I found this post linked from a political blog today, and I really think it ought to be required reading for everyone; it expresses eloquently many things I've been thinking about religion in the news lately. (Those would be the small, "bad" religious things; not the big, "political" religious things. The things I think about having a "Presidential Candidates Forum On Faith" are really not suited to public airing.)

It's spring, and I've been reading more, thinking more, and writing less. I'm not sure if it's an aspect of depression, this form of uncertainty that makes me unwilling to post freely about my own opinions, or if it's just part of the cycle of things that I have to absorb a lot before I can put myself out there again. At any rate, know that I've not abandoned this blog, and I'm still reading other peoples' writing, I just...don't have a lot to say at the moment.

Not like I have an answer or anything.

2008-04-02T11:24:00.002-05:00

This weekend the news was all full of the story of an eleven-year-old Wisconsin girl who died of diabetes, untreated by traditional medicine because her parents were Christian Scientists and believed in healing through prayer. They were discussing it on NPR the other morning -- with a pediatrician as a guest, possibly not the best choice there guys -- making this the second NPR show in a month I've had to turn off to make the stupid go away.

Stories like this make me hugely uncomfortable, and it's hard to explain why without people assuming that I think parents have the right to abuse their children in the name of religious freedom, which I don't. By the gods, who would?; children don't get to pick their parents' religion, and there are some things that just cannot be condoned under any circumstances.

But not taking a child to a medical doctor isn't abuse. It is neglect, although it's also worth noting that it's entirely legal in the state of Wisconsin to rely on prayer instead of medical attention. Mostly what this is is a violation of social norms: our society places an extremely high value on medical science and a relatively low one on the efficacy of prayer, and when presented with people who not only feel otherwise but act as if their beliefs are really true, there's a bit of an outcry.

I'm not saying the values of our society holds about healing are arbitrary; they're supported by a good deal of experience and trial-and-error. They're also values I agree with and support myself. It's not so much that I'm on the side of the Christian Scientists as that I'm put off by the people who are against them. The NPR callers were going on about how irrational this decision was, how it showed a lack of common sense. Look, people. Their daughter died. I doubt that they didn't consider the possibility. Maybe they have a different definition of common sense.

I don't want to dismiss the fact that this isn't just a theological dispute but one that has -- had -- very real consequences, but that's part of what gets under my skin. Why is it that so few theological disputes do have consequences? And I definitely don't want to make it a noble-sounding thing to let your child die of diabetes; there's an air of martyrdom that can creep into the discussion there. I just don't find the parents' decision particularly irrational.

All it is, is here's a minority religious group with some fringe beliefs (and some very mainstream ones; they are Christian Scientists after all) that a lot of people, myself included, believe ought to be legally prevented from following all the tenets of their religion. And that makes me uncomfortable.

Happy Equinox

2008-03-20T20:13:00.002-05:00

From here on in there is more light than darkness. Until September. And unless it rains. You know what I mean. Yesterday I was starting to believe in Spring again -- actual belief, that is, instead of just a faint, vague hope.

So far today here in ~~sunny~~ Madison, Wisconsin we've gotten a good four to six inches, with another one or two overnight. And then maybe a little more on Sunday. Because really, we haven't had enough yet this year.

If you need me, I'll be in bed with a cup of hot tea, pretending this isn't happening again.

Book Review: Savage Breast

2008-03-19T13:15:00.000-05:00

Savage Breast is a complicated book to describe, part personal revelation, part historical and archaeological description, part feminist theory and gender studies. It was a book that obviously took a lot of personal courage to write, and for that Tim Ward deserves praise; I couldn't write something like this on my Livejournal, much less publish it as a book. The book follows Ward and his girlfriend (later fiancee, still later wife) through a trip around the ancient Mediterranean civilizations, Greece and Minoa, Turkey, and even a bit up into Central Europe, while Ward attempts to relate to the Goddess in all her forms and try to understand just what's wrong with the way he relates to the human women in his life.

First off I want to apologise for the archaeology rant I had in my last post; while I stand by my theory, I don't really think it had anything to do with Savage Breast in the end. By the time I reached the end of the book, I realized Ward had repudiated most of the arguments I was disagreeing with so vehemently while I was reading the first half of it. That said, I do still think there's a problem with the structure of the book in that sense. Savage Breast is a story of personal revelation, but where that structure works brilliantly -- and very subtly -- for conveying opinions about gender, social status, and one's own shortcomings, it works less well when discussing scientific and historical theories.

Might as well get my issues with the science out of the way, then; I do still have some problems with the way the archaeology and history are treated in the book. Ward has, for one thing, an overwhelming tendency to universalize that I think does a disservice to the cultures he's writing about. Again, this isn't key to the book but it's a pet peeve of mine. People are always using the past to validate themselves and their ideas, but every time the past is simplified in order to make a point it makes understanding what *really* happened that much more difficult. It boils down to a philosophical question of science: would we rather be able to decipher the genuine past or just use it as a metaphor for contemporary life? As I said, this has hardly anything to do with the actual content of Savage Breast and isn't nearly as drastic as I'm making it out to be here, but it did distract me enough that it was practically all I could think about until I sat down and got the rant out of my system.

Now for the book itself. This was a hugely difficult book to read. It is fundamentally a very personal book. Ward isn't addressing just a generic male relationship to the Goddess, here; he's addressing, directly and sometimes with uncomfortable frankness, his own relationship with women in general, one woman in particular, and Goddesses both generic and specific. And sometimes that's just profoundly depressing. When he contemplates joining the monastery of Athos (so sacred to Mary that no females are allowed on the island) in order to escape the troubles of (sigh) women, I considered doing the same myself. I'll move into Macha's caves in the west of Ireland, I thought, and pray for the Curse of the men of Ulster to fall on the whole world. The book is written toward men, to a certain degree; particularly in the Hekate and Artemis chapters, there's a kind of boy's-club, conspiratorial sense of, "Aren't women weird and scary?" Well, no. But it's never meant meanly, and though there's real hostility there's also an understanding of the unfairness of it all that makes it bearable most of the time. As someone who's never come face-to-face with a lot of sexism in my own life, maybe it was exceptionally shocking -- not surprising, but really like feeling a physical blow -- to hear a man articulate some of these things. Maybe it would always hurt to hear ideas like that expressed. I don't know.

Because it's so personal, there are a lot of points of view missing from this book, and it can sometimes seem a bit gender-essentialist, but after all, two people (really, mostly one) can only give so many perspectives. That's not a failing of this book so much as a failing of the general lack of books like this in the world. And as I said, I still take serious issue with some of the historical and archaeological information. But despite and because of its failings, I do think this is an important book, although I shy away from actually recommending it on a Pagan blog. (Were this a feminism blog, I'd be bashing you all over the head with it telling you to read it.) If nothing else it provides some serious and occasionally profound food for thought.

Please, not that again

2008-03-01T16:33:00.006-06:00

I'm trying to read Tim Ward's new book, Savage Breast. (I even got my library to buy a copy!) It sounded fascinating when I heard of it: a man with a personal history of mysticism and religious seeking tries to unpack the problems with his relationships with women through attempting to understand the Feminine Divine. And as far as that part of the book goes, it's great. Unfortunately, he's using as a basis of the book something that's driving me insane. Let me try to explain it without sounding like an anthro term paper.

Although Ward does admit that the actual evidence for ancient matriarchies -- that's societies ruled by women, not egalitarian ones or ones where women bestow lineage -- is scant to nonexistant, he nonetheless uses this theory as the dominant paradigm throughout the book. (Of course, he is focusing on the Hellenic pantheon, which is a great example of goddesses being shoved aside in favor of gods at a later date -- but that's not evidence of a matriarchy, just evidence of more patriarchy.)

What always annoys me about the matriarchy hypothesis, though, is that it feels like giving in. I mean -- rule by women is not inherently better than rule by men. (Look at Margaret Thatcher.) Matriarchy is just patriarchy in reverse; you're still keeping somebody down. Assuming that there must have been a matriarchy before there was a patriarchy, to somehow "balance things out," is dualistic and wrong-headed, and it sounds to me like a theory made up by people who can't think of any other reason for the patriarchy to exist: either men really are better than women, they seem to think, or there had to be a matriarchy first. Why else do all societies that exist today or that we have any evidence of at all tend to privelige men above women? (They do, unfortunately. Even in societies where there are practically no stable status differences, men have higher status than women as a general rule. Sad but true.)

Okay, so how does that make sense, if no one is inherently better than anyone and it's not a matter of men banding together to overthrow a vast feminine monopoly of power? Well, how about this -- In waaaay ancient times (possibly, based on recent evidence, going back as far as Neanderthals and early Homo erectus), there's no such thing as permanent status. If you're good at one thing, you become the Important Person for that one thing, say you're a good singer so you always lead prayers and dances and things. Doesn't make you a priest, just means you're the best at it so that's what you do. Similarly, there's no difference between men and women, so far as status; everyone does what they're best at.

Probably the women take care of childcare. After all, a child definitely belongs to its mother, but only maybe (or probably, if you're monogamous) belongs to its father, and besides, the bottle and formula hasn't been invented yet and Mom has a better shot at breastfeeding the kid. So women are handling the children. And one of the fundamental tasks in a society like this is to gather food; you need to eat. You're probably omnivores, you eat lots of plants and nuts and growing things but also some game. Gathering growing things, that's safe, predictable work, not necessarily physically easy, but not hugely dangerous either. Hunting, on the other hand, is high-stress, high-danger, relatively low-yield work -- it can involve staying away from camp for a long time, and you run the risk of being attacked by whatever you're hunting (or whatever else is hunting it). It makes sense for the women to gather plant food, which they can do while taking care of the children who depend on them, and for men to do the more dangerous stuff; after all, the men are slightly more expendable. Of course, some women might have been hunters because they were good at it, and some men might have been gatherers because they were good at that. But as a general rule.

But then, as the society grows more complex (for whatever reason, environmental change, population growth, charismatic leadership, there's a whole body of literature on the subject of why complexity happens) status becomes more sticky -- instead of just being the Important Person for what it is you do well, doing something well causes you to become an Important Person. And as previously mentioned, gathering work is predictable, varying little from one instance to another -- it has to be, otherwise you'll deplete all the resources and starve to death. So while one person might be better at gathering than another, there'll never be a huge difference between them. One hunter, though, might come back with a squirrel while another kills a mastodon that'll feed the clan through the whole winter. A hunter might kill a dangerous predator and save dozens of lives. The potential status differential in hunting is huge.

And over time, since the majority of hunters are men, the few high-status female hunters lose their importance, and then finally the direction status flows switches again: instead of men being high-status individuals because they're good hunters, hunting becomes a high-status job because men do it (and gathering becomes low-status because women do it). Ta-da! Patriarchy -- and we haven't even gotten to agricultural societies yet.

This status-flow switching, the change between what just is high-status and what bestows high status, isn't necessarily hugely logical -- but it is how our brains work. Language evolves in exactly the same way; we see a pattern and we continue it, and we don't much care whether we're extending it in the right direction or not. (Yargh, now I can't find the citation for the book I recently read that made this point. I'll get back to you on it.)

So patriarchy isn't about fairness, or about who's "better" than who; it's about uncertain parentage and who's more likely to get stepped on by a mastodon. I'm not necessarily attacking Ward specifically for espousing the ancient matriarchy theory, because it's been pretty popular, with everyone from Victorians fond of trying to prove that society is constantly improving to modern-day feminists who are more interested in politics than evidence. (I have nothing against feminism! I am a feminist! But like all other movements, some of its adherents are silly.) I do think that the ancient matriarchy theory is damaging, because it skews our view of both history and the future. Does one gender really have to rule over another? Is the only way we can manage rights for women to put them in charge of everything? Status, remember, is not a finite resource: you don't have to be stepping on someone else's neck to have status and power. If we're going to idealize any ancient practice (that may or may not have existed), let's go back to the free-floating status model, not one that's just what we have now only backwards.

Pretty Important .3%

2008-02-26T19:01:00.001-06:00

I saw similar stories in both of the daily papers today (alas, not a statement I'll be able to make for much longer), reporting the Pew Forum's new U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. And I gotta say, at least they managed to escape sounding panicked about the results.

Researchers also found such a sharp decline in American Protestantism that "the United States is on the verge of becoming a minority Protestant country."

Barely.

As Jason at Wild Hunt points out, the survey is good news -- or at least interesting news? -- for Pagans in that it's the first formal survey to estimate our population at over a million in the United States. Maybe next time around, if we're lucky, we'll have demographic results of our own, instead of just as a chunk of the "other" category. (Although I have to say, the demographic breakdown of the "other" category is pretty interesting.)

My social sciences training was in anthropology, where we sneer at surveys as tools of the weak -- after all, people lie on surveys. Admittedly, religion is a hugely personal thing and I'm not going to accuse anyone in particular of lying on the survey because as far as religion goes, what you say you are is pretty much what you are. But anthropologists like to study how what people do conflicts with what they say they do, so from an anthropological standpoint -- How many of those people who marked themselves affiliated with a particular church really spend a lot of time with that institution, and how many of them are what my grandma used to call Christmas & Easter Christians? Does that break down differently over denomination? And does that have any impact on the way people live their lives? Anthropologically I'd be willing to bet America is already a minority Protestant nation. (I wish there was a good way to study that, but ethnography requires spending time with a particular group of people, and it'd be hard to find a group of Christmas & Easter Christians. Unless...no, I could get very insulting there, and I won't.)

I hate to get into a debate over who's a Real True Christian and who isn't (especially as I no longer have a vested interest in the argument) but surveys always raise these questions in my mind, even though I know there's no good way to answer them and it's not like the answers would prove anything anyway. Maybe it's because I feel guilty. My therapist asked me how important religion was in my life, and I said "pretty important" -- what does that mean, that I meditate every day, that I turn to magic and the gods to help me with myself, that I celebrate the quarter days and give little offerings every once in a while and always say hello to the crows in case Macha is watching her children today? Is that what other people mean when they say their religion is "pretty important," or do they mean something else? That's a question that a survey can't answer, but without that answer, how do those numbers mean anything beyond the broadest possible strokes?

This is why I tend not to take surveys, myself. I think about them too much.

Oh, wonderful timing.

2008-02-08T20:35:00.000-06:00

I don't read through my Pagan blogroll as often as I would like, whereas I read my political blogroll every day. Apparently I like the intellectual rush that comes from reading someone saying something really stupid and then dissecting (usually very vocally, to my unsuspecting roommate) how stupid that just was. (I use NPR in the mornings for an adrenaline rush in much the same way.)

But today I got that from my Pagan blogroll too, as a series of links led me to an article that managed annoy me about watered-down mainstream 'spirituality' (It can be embarrassing sometimes, when you've got everything but what you really want you don't have.), anti-religion bullshit masquerading as atheism (Westerners tend to “revere" Eastern religions as a reaction to Western colonialism, and that some readers, “will be shocked to learn of the existence of Hindu and Buddhist murderers and sadists."), and completely gratuitous anti-feminism (Why is it that women, in overwhelming numbers, are now indulging in this silliness in a way that men are not?). So I had a very theraputic ranting diatribe at my roommate, then went back to reading my Pagan blogroll, only to discover that Dianne Sylvan had already said it, and with much more wit and economy, as usual:

My conclusion: there is nothing spiritual about an asshole.

Brigid in Cyberspace

2008-02-02T13:05:00.000-06:00

And in honor of Brigid, the third annual Brigid in Cyberspace Silent Poetry Reading -- a small favorite.

A Drinking Song, by Yeats.
  WINE comes in at the mouth
  And love comes in at the eye;
  That's all we shall know for truth
  Before we grow old and die.
  I lift the glass to my mouth,
  I look at you, and I sigh.

Imbolg

2008-01-30T18:57:00.000-06:00

Imbolg has always been my favorite holiday. (Well, other than before I was Pagan when it was Hallowe'en, of course.) There's no equivalent Christian or secular holiday that really gets any acknowledgement, so it feels a bit like an extra excuse for a party in the middle of winter. And, of course, it's the feast day of Brid, Lady of the Flames, the triple goddess of healing, smithcraft and poetry; a goddess who made a really remarkable transition to a Catholic saint and whose Pagan and Christian identities are so intertwined there's no real way of separating them.

Like Brid, Imbolg is liminal -- in celebrating Brid's aspect as a fire goddess, it carries on the Festival of Lights from Yule, but its name ("in the belly") and the timing in its climate of origin ties it to the first lambing in spring. Not to mention that around this latitude Imbolg is about the time you can start to really notice how much earlier the sun is coming up, and how much later it's going down. Winter might not be over in February in Wisconsin, but it's backing off at last.

My practice seems to be in a constant state of flux from one year to the next, and I'm terrible about getting anything resembling a liturgy written (although I would like to give it a try, I always seem to remember about it two days beforehand...), so I don't have a strong sense of ritual continuity. Except with food.

I don't remember where the recipe came from anymore -- off some defunct mid-90s website, I'm sure -- but the loaf of thyme bread I've always baked for Imbolg is seriously one of the tastiest things I make. I always tell myself I'm going to start baking bread at the beginning of winter, when it's no longer insane to have the oven on for that long at a time, but I never get around to it until it's time for the Imbolg loaf. The smell of it is as powerful a reminder of the holiday as gingerbread cookies are for Christmas. (And I rather like the terrible pun involved...Brid is the triple-goddess of healing, poetry, and smithcraft, that's a lot of multitasking, she must have a great deal of thyme on her hands...oh, I'm sorry.)

It's Brid's aspect as healer I have been focusing on this season, as I fight my way through depression that's gotten worse and worse as I tried to pretend it wasn't happening to me. Of course, one of the weapons I've been using to wage that war is the pen, as I go back to writing for the first time in too long...and with spellwork, as I search for ways to bring more energy in my life when I've run out of my own. Brid always seems to have a finger in every aspect of my life, and I thank her for it.

[Other Imbolg posts in the pagan blogosphere --
Wild Hunt's overview, great as always; Fiacharrey's done a Youtube video; Cosette posts about making changes in this time of year; Inanna posts about her annual poetry reading. Let me know who I've missed!]

Quietude

2008-01-19T18:37:00.000-06:00

Winter causes all of us to draw inwards a little, I think; it's a fallow time, after all, aided by the fact that it's not really advisable to leave your toasty warm apartment when the windchill is fifteen below. (Hey, it's warmer than it was earlier this afternoon.) Since the brief burst of activity that is Yule and the associated holidays, I've been feeling that a lot more. It isn't, for once, seasonal depression (and I've been seeing a therapist for the more longstanding kind) but more a sense that I ought to sit back and absorb things for a while instead of shooting off my big mouth. Watching instead of doing. Waiting, it feels like.

It's two weekends until Imbolg. I wonder what will happen then.

the sky spoke to me

2007-12-27T11:14:00.000-06:00

...the sky looked at him. He felt the earth shrug because it felt him upon its back.
The sky spoke to him.
It was a language he had never heard before. He was not even certain there were words. Perhaps it only spoke to him in the black writing the birds made. He was small and unprotected and there was no escape. He was caught between earth and sky as if cupped between two hands. They could crush him if they chose.
The sky spoke to him again.
"I do not understand," he said.

I was driving home from family Christmas Wednesday(Pagan or no, you can't avoid family Christmas), enjoying the drive between my small hometown and I-80, where you have to take these winding country roads that all go in strange directions to avoid cutting farms in half. The roads were clear, just a little wet, so I had plenty of attention to spare for the fields, which were beautiful, the couple of inches of snow we'd gotten last weekend melting away enough to see the rich, dark Iowa soil. I was reminded suddenly that in ancient Ireland, the combination of red and black and white was a sign of the Otherworld (which might explain some of the unholy love I have for Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd, really); once I remembered that, I couldn't stop seeing it. Red barns and black soil and white sky and red signs and black horses and white snow.

It stopped once I got to the Interstate; it's a much more impersonal landscape from there. Or conceivably it's just that I don't know it quite so well; it isn't part of my bones the way the other is.

I've been moving away from the nature-based traditions lately, more toward my Celtic roots and the cultural knots to get twisted up in on that side. It's been a long time since the purely astronomical Sabbats -- solstices and equinoxes -- really called out to me to be celebrated, although I always know when the winter solstice is because I can't wait for the light to come back. But driving through those Iowa fields reminded me that while it's true that I'm not a farmer, I'm not tied to the cycles of the land directly, I did grow up in a farming culture. I mean, I lived in town, and most everyone I knew did, too, and it isn't as though we started seeing people missing from school during the harvest or anything. But we were all very aware of the harvest cycle, if only because you can't avoid it -- drive ten minutes in just about any direction in Iowa and there's a cornfield to remind you. And after all those years, the sight of a field lying fallow in winter does mean something.

I've been reading books on urban Paganism for years, and more so since I actually moved to something I could call a city without laughing, but they've never really seemed to sink in. Then again, I spend almost all of my time within the city limits and I still don't feel like I'm in a city as much as I'm in a vast green space subdivided by buildings and streets. Granted, Madison is a very green city, but I feel like I'd have to be in New York City before I'd really get that glass and concrete feeling. (Even in London, for the whole day and a half I was there, what I mostly got was "river.")

I suppose this is what I mean when I say I feel like I always exist in a liminal space; I'm not a country person, but I'm not a city person either. In point of fact, I never feel very comfortable in one identity, because it always seems to leave something else out, or to require something I don't have. I'm working, though, on remembering that I can still keep the parts that are mine without having to take on the parts that are not. (Such a simple concept, so much grief to figure out...) And working on learning to listen to the sky.

quoted from Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke, p 503

A thing with feathers

2007-11-21T11:22:00.000-06:00

Life changes so fast. (My life does, anyway, I don't know about yours.) One minute you're trying to crush a panic attack by telling yourself it'll be okay; it'll be okay, and the next minute, something in you says, Yeah, it will. Somewhere around 3:35 last Thursday, actually. I've been nervous and anxious and worried about this fucking graduate school application since then (which I have just mailed omygod), but I haven't been that strung out any more. I wish I could figure out what did that and do it on purpose; it would make my life so much easier.

My life does this all the time, actually. I am a naturally solitary person and I have a mindbogglingly mindless job, and I always have been inclined to living the majority of my life inside my own head. I'll be sitting there, doing my own thing, following a train of thought as far as I can without falling off, and all the sudden something goes click and it's like someone has...I don't know, changed the color filter or the resolution or something. Everything seems different. I seem different.

All of which means that while I feel right now like this particular instance of Getting My Shit Together is different, that might be an illusion. But it might not. I have a grad school application in, I have a therapy appointment for the end of the month, I have plans for the future that are not based entirely on a script of What I Ought To Do Next. And I feel rather competent about it all. (Competency is one of the values I most highly praise, and I think it's why I've always identified with Brighid so much. To be able to do a thing, and do it well, without throwing up a big fuss about it seems to me the height of talent.) This is slightly new, of late.

Perhaps it's just the season, and in February I'll be sitting around the house, incapable of imagining doing anything but going to work and playing video games and sleeping for the rest of my natural life. But this winter isn't getting me down like last winter did, and I've pulled through worse before. I may not have much consistency in my life, but I do have hope.

2007-11-10T12:54:00.000-06:00

I wish I knew what to say about my life. This is, of course, a blog about paganism, and not my life, but the two can hardly be separated in my mind right now.

This time, the space between Samhain and Yule, has always been hard for me; the light is going away and there aren't any holidays to break up the monotony (Thanksgiving does not count) and all my motivation for the Work breaks up and floats away. I stripped down my altar to reflect this; it's beautiful in its simplicity, and looking at it makes me happy. I wish it did a bit more.

I have been distracting myself from existential angst with a much more immediate angst -- I'm applying to grad school. This is much more painful than it ought to be. I am, at this moment, avoiding working on my application letter by writing this post. My self-imposed deadline is a week from today. Oh dear.

I have rather given up the hope of finding a coven I fit, at this point I'll settle for a teacher, but I can't seem to find one of those either. I am not a very social person, you see. I don't network well. If people are not on the Internet, I am not going to find them. ...and around here, they're not. I feel very alone, despite the e-mails from two different people in my inbox that I have not gotten around to replying to yet. I simply don't know what to say.

Last week I had a dream that I have not had since the week before my last finals in college; I dreamed that I pulled my ribcage apart like a birdcage to give my heart more room. It felt much too crowded in there. In my Samhain ritual, I had a vision of Macha touching my heart to ease it and then licking the blood off her fingers. It's scary to feel this strongly and not know what I feel it about. Last month I felt like I would never feel this strongly about anything ever again, and that was scarier.

With any luck, I will have more time to think properly after my application is in and the holiday plans are all settled. Hopefully. We'll see.

Pimp My Altar

2007-10-08T19:19:00.001-05:00

As usual, September has been a whirlwind of activity. My best friend and my parents visited, I redecorated my livingroom and bought myself a new bed for the bedroom and I dug more seriously into my Irish Gaelic studies again. And I finished my altar.

This is the first non-formal altar I've ever had; when I started practicing seriously I worked out of fairly traditional books, and that and my love for Victorianism in all its forms meant I had a really, really stiff altar that never did see a lot of use. It was very proper and thorough, though. It had a wand, and an athame, and a Goddess candle, and a God candle, and a pentacle, and a cauldron, and a bowl of salt and a bowl of water, and all those other things it's supposed to have. I'm pretty sure it looked exactly like the diagram in Wicca for the Solitary Practitioner, actually.

So I went a bit more freeform this time. I knew I had to keep the three-pronged candlabra; my grandmother bought it for me, probably without knowing really what it was for, but it was the first piece I acquired specifically for my altar and I love it. And since my patroness is Brighid, one of the Celtic triple goddesses, that suggested a layout. The altar is kind of roughly divided into three sections, for Brighid's three aspects as Poet, Smith and Healer, and everything else I felt needed to go on there got put wherever it seemed right. The candles are in the colors of fire -- red for the warmth of the hearth-fire, blue for the middle heat of a cooking fire, and white for the power of the forge. The gold chain is for Ogma, who according to legend invented the Ogham alphabet which continues to annoy archaeologists to this day.

And most of the rest of it just feels right. I no longer really remember where the shell came from, but it's always been on my altar and it wanted to stay there. I always buy new pencils in September, it's like a disease; I'm using them for wands. And...I'm wandering over and touching it every day, not necessarily working with it in the way I used to think of working with my altar, but just going over and saying hi. And that's great.

Autumn Turning

2007-09-12T10:27:00.000-05:00

I woke up this morning with the most unbelievably genius idea for a post. It had nothing to do with either of the things I had been meaning to post about, but I didn't care, because it was genius. Now, of course, I can't remember what it was...

Not that it really matters, because it's Fall, guys. I had been thinking it was fall since the floods that swept through southern Wisconsin in August, lowering the temperatures and filling water-type people like me with a reckless glee, but that's just because I had forgotten what Fall feels like. On Monday it rained again, but it was cold and drizzly instead of cooling and heavy, and there was no lightning, just the steady sound of rain on the windows all day long. Fall, finally.

Every time a real seasonal change comes around, it feels like it's been centuries since it happened last and it feels like every other time it's ever happened. I had been looking forward to Fall, but I'd forgotten the change in the smell of the air, the way the trees shake in the wind like they're trying to make themselves change color faster, the way the lakes start spreading out their color palate, too. (Last night on the way home from work Mendota was black, really black, with little whitecaps. Against the bright green grass and the brilliant blue sky it was startling to look at.)

And Fall always makes me think of being a little kid going back to school again. The most vivid Fall memory I have is of walking home from school one day -- I must have been quite young, because I didn't walk that way past about the fourth grade -- and as I neared home, found my mother and my grandmother up on ladders, painting the side of the house. We had a big, beautiful Victorian home, up on a hill, that just had too much wood siding for my dad to justify paying anyone else to do it, so we did it, every year or two. I scraped old paint off everything I could reach and painted the porch and the lower windows, and the grownups got up on ladders and did the upper stories. I don't know why this stuck in my head; I think it might have been one of the first times I realized that grownups had lives of their own that did not involve catering to my needs all the time. I definitely remember they were having the time of their lives.

Last weekend I went out to the Madison Area Pagan Pride Day (hour and fifteen minutes by bus, someone has got to do something about that). I am glad I went -- which doesn't sound like a glowing recommendation, does it? Well, I am. I am, you see, not a social person. I've known this most of my life, but it's only throwing myself into social situations that shove it into the forefront of my brain. I don't crave the company of others (excepting my very few close friends). I don't enjoy crowds. It takes me much longer than a day-long festival to feel comfortable enough with a group of people to really be myself.

I've kept saying that I want to find a coven, but it occurred to me while I was sitting in the last workshop of the day that maybe I just want to see if I'm solitary by nature instead of just by necessity. I've never had a chance to have a coven, and I don't honestly know if it would be a good idea. I suppose the only way to find out is to try; I did meet one group I might contact and another person who's trying to start a group based on campus. I'm nervous, though, about introducing myself to a group with the knowledge that chances are good I'll be leaving it soon.

But aside from a slightly melancholy introspection that always seems to hit me in the late afternoon of a busy day, the festival itself was terrific. I made it in time for the opening ritual (I have never seen anyone with more ridiculous energy than Selena Fox, my gods) and sat through an elders panel that was interesting not so much for what was said as for what wasn't (or maybe I just enjoy watching other people watch someone talk -- after all, eight witches couldn't all be expected to agree, could they?). Lots of music, lots of talk, and the joy of being amongst like-minded people. I am glad I went. I'm also glad it happens once a year.

hmph.

2007-09-02T20:26:00.001-05:00

Cosette really needs to stop posting my posts before I get a chance to. Last week she posted on Beliefs and Practices, cutting off at the knees a half-formed post I'd been thinking about on Doing versus Being, and today it's the joy of Autumn, which I too have been feeling rather ridiculously due to the freezing-cold air conditioning at work.

Like she says, even though Autumn is the winding-down part of the year, there is something about September that I find hugely inspiring in a much more new-beginnings-type way. I've always blamed it on all those years of going back to school (yes, I am one of those freakish kids who loved going back to school at the end of the summer). The Autumn bug hit me last week, just as the sun broke out after our week of truly ridiculous flooding and all the sudden the weather was amazing. (Alas, the rest of the universe does not love Samhain as much as I do and my craving for candy corn has yet gone unsated.)

It's always vaguely irritated me that no matter how many urban or modern Pagan books I read, I've never found an actually thought-out reinterpretation of the Wheel of the Year that does not assume that you're pulling in three crops every fall. (I tend to forget about Mabon for precisely this reason...) Surely there's a way to work in that September schoolgoing thing as well; it's something nearly everyone has nowadays, after all, and I for one feel you can never have too many New Beginning-type markers in your life.

This is rapidly becoming unacceptable.

2007-08-28T18:32:00.000-05:00

I have got to find a way to make work and the Craft compatible. At six o'clock in the morning, a formal full moon ritual sounds like the best idea in the world. At six o'clock in the evening, I can barely summon the energy to order pizza online. (I should have known that the day I have officially designated as "takeout day," due to it being the end of a work-week for me, is not really ideal for ritual...)

This morning, though, was astonishingly wonderful. As I walked from the kitchen into the dining room, packing my lunch for work, I smelled roses for no reason at all. I wasn't wearing any floral perfume, I hadn't bought flowers in weeks, and besides, we're well past rose season...until finally I spotted the bouquet of dried roses that has been sitting on the ledge there for, oh, nearly a year now.

I can't recall ever having smelled them before. They were my grandmother's funeral roses from last Samhain; yellow roses were her favorite flower, although I can't recall her ever having any (she didn't have the patience to grow roses, and she was far too practical to buy them for herself), and the casket and church were covered with them. My cousin had rose petal beads made of the casket flowers, and the rest of us all took a bouquet home.

It was a strange sort of reminder to have that early in the morning, on a beautiful morning like this, one of the first without rain in weeks, still cool from the evening but with the promise of heat to come. It is still painful to think of my grandmother. I can't help but feel that I neglected her in the last few years, so desperate was I to find a life for myself apart from my family. But it's hard to be depressed for long about yellow roses, and I found myself thinking of all the time I had spent with her -- plenty, really, she lived ten blocks from my house and I practically lived there when I was a kid. Our birthdays were around the same time, and we had huge family summer birthday parties for all of us. All the parade routes went right by her house, so we watched them from her bedroom balcony. And whenever there was family from out of town, it wasn't long before we were all there, causing no end of chaos to Grandma's usually tidy home (and her the happiest of anyone about it).

I felt like my eyes were open in a way they hadn't been in quite a long time, this morning; it lasted almost until lunch. On the way from the bus stop to the office, I saw two ravens picking through some litter in the parking lot. There used to be quite a flock of them around there, but I hadn't seen any all summer; I had been wondering where they'd got to.

Starting Over (part two)

2007-08-25T14:25:00.000-05:00

Last month, in a fit of frustration, I tore down my old altar. (The fact that I haven't much missed it in a month is not a good sign, I think.) Today, I got me a new altar table.

It didn't cost me anything; I got it from Freecycle, an amazing email barter system. Have something you don't want, you send an email to the list. See something you want, you email someone about their post. Need something in particular, send an email, go out two days later to pick up your brand-new altar table. My old altar table is getting scrubbed down and moved to the living room, and the table it's replacing will go back on Freecycle. It's the new urban ecosystem -- take something out, put something back in.

It's round! I've never had a round altar before; I'll have to rearrange some things. I've always had quite a formal-looking altar, actually, and I think it's time to mix it up a bit. And what shall I do with the top? Shall I paint it? Finish it? Engrave it? Cover it with an altar cloth? Oh, I have so many options, for my current plan is to have it ready for its first dedication on Samhain. It will (hopefully) see use before then; I see no point in making a commitment to something you haven't tried out first.

I'm looking forward to remaking it immensely, actually. I remember the first time I put an altar up properly, and how wonderful it was, and how it felt like an entirely different world from the rest of my bedroom in my parents' house in the middle of nowhere. But I'd been basically moving that altar around ever since; I'm far from the same person I was when I was sixteen. It's definitely time for a change.

If you can see the fire, the meal was already cooked a long time ago

2007-08-11T18:56:00.000-05:00

Some days I think I should go into the business of koans. I mean, the little bits and pieces I scribble all over my work papers and write "Essaie!" next to don't quite qualify as bumper-sticker wisdom, and they certainly aren't blog posts on their own. Then again, they're probably not confusing enough for koans either.

I have, for instance, the sentence fragment "As an anthropologist, I know that meaning is acquired, not inherent" written on one page of my little notebook that I carry with me everywhere. (Yes, I do sometimes think in words like that, to my own unending astonishment.) These notebooks remind me a little bit of the diaries of my grandmothers that my mom kept lying about, tiny leather-bound records of weather, births and deaths, and occasionally something a particularly notable calf born. My grandmother was a farmwife; she didn't have the time nor the inclination to write pages about her thoughts every day. She kept track of what was important. Okay, so my books are more self-indulgent and certainly less orderly than her diaries, but I like to think of my relations in future years looking back on them and thinking..."Why would you write all this down? And then why would you keep it?"

I know that meaning is acquired, not inherent. I remember surprising myself when I thought that, which must be why I wrote it down. I must have been reading Crowley at the time, then, because I wouldn't be surprised by that thought if I was reading something anthropological. It's a controversial statement in the magickal world, though. Why else all those charts of correspondences? Why lists of the properties of herbs and stones? It's become more popular of late to say that correspondences are what is meaningful to you -- Crowley says the same, actually -- but there's still a niggling sense in the back of my brain that surely some things really do mean something, on their own.

Meaning is acquired, not inherent. Anthropology says yes. Hard science says no, but only for concepts like "one" and "zero," which are not particularly useful in day to day life. Religion says a loud no -- but everyone disagrees on what that meaning is, and which parts of it are important, so that's not extremely helpful either.

Acquired, not inherent. I do believe that, I guess (and I must have believed it when I wrote it down, or there'd be huge question marks all over the page next to the sentence). And not just in a scientific sense, but in a theological sense, too. Life is a journey, not a destination. Stop and smell the roses. A soul is made, over lifetimes, not born and then done. And yet somehow, it still seems contradictory to me. Contradictory to what, I'm not sure. To something.

Obviously I shall have to think on this more. Also, I need a new little notebook.

The Internet Is Smarter Than All Of Us Put Together

2007-07-27T10:54:00.001-05:00

(The aforementioned idea might be the subject for dystopic science fiction, but it's also part of the basis for the collective model of the universe -- like the one central to many forms of pagansim, that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I love both of these ideas deeply, and the inherent self-contradiction never ceases to amuse me. That said --)

I started this blog, like the subtitle says, to fill the gap of what I wanted to read in the Pagan community. Unfortunately, that's not always enough. The motivating factor was a book I read for my religious studies class -- Crabcakes, by James Alan McPherson. I didn't actually like it all that much, although I liked the concept: a long, rambling memoir about life and what it looks like looking backwards, and how the way your perceptions change and how that changes the meaning of the story of your life. It was only nominally religious, I don't think I would have thought it was if not for the context, but it awakened in me a profound yearning for Pagan-type books like that. (Other books we read that I'd kill for Pagan-type versions of: Meeting Faith, The Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God, The Jew in the Lotus. All highly reccomended on their own merits, of course.)

I own and have read Phyllis Curott's Book of Shadows approximately one billion times, and I think The Red-Haired Girl From the Bog was what I was looking for, too. Does anybody out there know of something else like what I'm talking about? Memoir-ish, thinky, personal -- I don't care if it's a focus on a tradition I don't do, so long as it has something to say. So many Pagan books are how-to manuals, it's hard to find something different.

starting over

2007-07-26T20:41:00.001-05:00

I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but I'm not really a religion-in-a-time-of-crisis person. I think it's partly because I resent the idea that any religion works as a self-help program. Surely there's something more to it than that. Then again, a relationship with the gods is, like any relationship, made up of give and take. Then again, I'm horrible at human relationships, why should I be any better at divine ones?

I took apart my altar today, and it didn't even feel like disassembling something. It needed to be cleaned anyway -- dusted, tidied up, wicks trimmed and wax chipped away, things like that. I'd let the water bowl dry up and it was coated inside with the crap that the city just can't get out of our well. I took the altar cloth outside to shake it out, wondering what it meant that this didn't seem to mean anything to me, and when I came inside I liked the look of the empty space so much I left it that way.

To tell the truth, I can't be positive I ever properly consecrated half the stuff on my altar. It migrated there, for one reason or another, some for good reasons and some for bad, but right now it looks like a pile of stuff. Five minutes after I left the altar table empty, it felt like a hole in the world, but I knew I couldn't fill it up by piling that stuff back on it. Five minutes after that I was all wrapped up in the Plan, thinking, I'll clean what I have, and decide if I still want it or need it, and then I'll reconsecrate it and build a better altar, and it will be Great, and I knew I had cut off whatever emotional reaction I had been having to it, but hell, you can't feel that much all the time or you'd go insane. Right?

I have epiphanies like this at least twice a year, and they never seem to stick, so I hardly think this is going to be earth-shatteringly revolutionary or anything. But I guess you never know.

Thanking Eve

2007-07-25T09:53:00.000-05:00

I really did mean to post about how the Jehovah's Witnesses went. They showed up a couple of weeks ago -- just when I'd decided I didn't want to deal with them and was running off to buy groceries. But no, they were early. And once faced with a bald-faced assertion of God's Plan, I just can't walk away. No, I have to argue.

Truth told, it was quite civil (I never did mention which other religion I was...) even if most of the debate was not only pretty standard but downright cliche. I did manage to shovel in my college lit professor's argument about the Garden of Eden story, though, which I've always liked. I doubt it'll ever convince a Christian, but it makes the story a hell of a lot more compelling for someone with no investment in the idea of Original Sin, so I thought I'd share.

We were in a Gothics class, discussing the concept of veiling. The Veil is a big thing in Gothic novels; in the earliest ones, it's the point of the whole book. When you draw the veil aside and see what it is you've been scared of this whole time, the story's over. Or, a personal illustration my professor told: She was a kid, maybe five or six. Mom always let her play in Mom's room when Mom was getting ready for work -- which is a special treat when you're five or six, all those shiny pretty things you aren't allowed to touch when Mom isn't keeping an eye on you while she's putting on her mascara. Just, Mom said, don't open that box on Mom's nightstand. It's private.

What's that going to do to a six-year-old? Of course. One day Mom leaves the room for a minute, and the temptation is just too much. What might be inside? Candy? More pretty jewelry, or perfume, or makeup? Something good, obviously, or you wouldn't be told not to open it. My prof was always very good at describing her disappointment upon finding a box full of individually-wrapped balloons. And not very good balloons, either. All the same color! (Yes, this is indeed the Bluebeard story but with condoms. I loved my lit prof.)

Mom, of course, was mortified, and six-year-old lit prof still couldn't figure out why she'd gotten in trouble. All that fuss over a box of balloons. The moral of the story, of course, being that the only interesting thing about the box was the fact that she wasn't allowed to open it. If Mom had shown her what was inside when she asked, she's have been bored and gone away.

The parallel to Genesis is obvious, although unfortunately we have to lose the condoms. "Here," says God, "Have anything you want. Except this, a huge and impressive tree smack in the middle of everything else, which you can't touch because I said so." Well, what's that going to do to a newly-created sentient race? Note here that when you argue about this point with JWs, they remind you that God also said "lest ye die," and invoke him as a watchful-parent figure. This is, of course, a perfect opening for the condom story. I have never been brave enough to tell a condom story to visiting JWs; maybe someone else will be.

So of course Eve does what any kid does when faced with an overprotective parent, and God shrugs his shoulders in a remarkably calm way for the Old Testament version of that particular deity, and Adam and Eve go out into the wide world and start making curious kids of their own. All of which just doesn't sound like the story of The Entering of Evil Into The Heart of Man, not really. It's more like a coming-of-age story. One day God looks down and notices his kids are kind of outgrowing the Garden, it's not got much interesting in it after all, and darn it, they no longer accept Because I Said So as a reason. Time to buy them a microwave and some milk-crate furniture and let them out on their own.

Like I said, you'll probably never win over a JW with this argument -- it's just looking at the same story from a vastly different point of view, and it's point of view they're trying to convince you on. But then again, if you're arguing with JWs with the intent to win, you're doing it wrong.

my name is hope, luck just ran out

2007-07-16T06:49:00.000-05:00

this is my day, this is my song
i am alive... what can go wrong?

Some days I think the problem isn't that working forty hours a week is tiring, it's just that sitting for eight hours in a grey cubicle -- even if I'm lucky and get a seat where I can see a window if I crane my neck when I'm not busy -- gives me this slow creeping tension that, by the time I'm done, makes me just want to bash my head into a wall until I can relax. It's not the best frame of mind for magick or religion, and it means that it's hard to even remember that I had something wonderful in the morning to post about.

If only I could blog from the bus...my bus goes right by the lake in the mornings, twice on Sundays, and the colors it can turn never cease to amaze me. I've never lived by a large body of water before, and I knew that theoretically it changes colors, but every day! Yesterday it was bright cerulean blue with darker patches scattered through; a couple of days ago it was flat grey even when the sky was bright and cheerful; a few days before that it was so dark it was almost black, with little whitecaps thrown up all across the surface. The bus does not go past the lake on the way home, more's the pity.

It's like some kind of superpower.

2007-07-02T19:00:00.000-05:00

Well, I've done it again. Yep, I've gone nearly a month between posts, not because I don't have anything to post, but because I'm too lazy (and/or busy, take your pick) to type up the post I already have written. And since I already have a post written, this somehow prevents me from writing anything else. No, it doesn't make sense to me either.

But now I'm faced with a conundrum. Fellow Pagans, Witches, blasphemers and other Internet lurkers, I think I'm being stalked by Jehovah's Witnesses. She was at my door when I came home from work today! I find that a little excessive.

Unfortunately I am entirely too nice. I mean, I don't actually want to be horrible to her, she seems like a perfectly nice woman, I suppose it's not entirely her fault her faith requires proselytization. That and I really genuinely believe that the only good thing that can come of proselytization is some kind of interfaith dialogue, even if one side doesn't think their job requires any listening at all.

So what do I say to her (when she shows up again on Saturday like I told her, like a fool, would be okay for her to do) without being really horrible yet still getting across the impression that I'm not going to just sit there and listen to her talk about Jesus? I have a niggling desire to tell her that I feel a kinship with her as a member of another marginalized religion, but I'm not sure that's a good opening gambit...

2007-06-09T15:44:00.000-05:00

So the second part of my paganism and feminism post is taking a little longer than I thought it would (that's always the way, isn't it; the rant comes easy, but the thinky bit is hard) and then I also realized that I had read Patricia Monaghan's The Red-Haired Girl From the Bog ages ago and never properly wrote a review of it like I intended to.

It's a hard book to classify; part travelogue, part memoir, part mythology and folklore. It's very much a book about Ireland, but at the same time, she covers a lot about how we relate to our world and how people live their lives and their religion in general. It was also hugely moving; I only have notes on the first half of it, because by the second half I was so wrapped up in the stories she was telling and the images she was invoking that I just completely forgot. (I had to stop reading it at work because I hate crying in front of people.)

Monaghan divides the book into five sections, one for each of Ireland's provinces, and digs into the local mythology, history, politics, and people in each one. A couple of months later, many of the details of the stories are escaping me, but I remember two very vividly -- her chapter on Brigid and the Brigidine Sisters of Kildare, with the story of how Brigid's Flame was accidentally relighted at a Candlemas ceremony, and the mention of this stone in Loughcrew Cemetary.

That stone right there -- the pointy one in the middle foreground. The memory of the afternoon we spent at Loughcrew came back with a really shocking vividness at her one-sentence description. I could pick out the stone she mentioned immediately; I remember sitting next to it to take pictures of the cairn. (I also have a picture of a Goth girl standing in that stone circle that's one of my favorites from that trip, just for what it represents.) I remembered hiking up the long hill path, observed by uninterested sheep. I remember looking out over the countryside, modern farms on one side and old stone fences on the other, trying to spot the Hill of Tara. I more than remembered it, it was like a gut-punch, a flood of emotions and a sense of connection -- we had touched that same stone, she and I, and wondered about the people who put it there. This must be what the big deal is all about, I thought.

The main focus of The Red-Haired Girl From the Bog is locality -- what it means to be from a particular place, to know it intimately enough to recognize that particular stone from one sentence on a page and a year's distance in time, and not just that stone, but every stone and tree and hill. In Ireland, Monoghan describes, everything has a name. That bend in the road, that tree on the hill, that stone circle, that well, that grassy spot that doesn't look like much of anything to outsiders. It makes the landscape...not bigger, but more. It gives it depth and shape in directions that storyless landscape doesn't have.

I've never really felt that way about a place. Oh, I get a little thrill of recognition when people mention my hometown, and for a week I told everybody about the Harlan Ellison story where he mentions the town I went to college in, but it never really meant anything to me. I think that's why I've always been a little blah about this talk of connection to the land that crops up so often in Paganism. I understand it intellectually, but it doesn't have a lot of emotional resonance for me.

Except, apparently, for Loughcrew Cemetary.

Monoghan actually confronts that issue reasonably well; she talks about how Americans -- or rather, all non-Native-Americans -- have a tough time relating to land in that way because we don't always feel like we really belong here. We don't know the stories about every nook and cranny of land, because they've never been told to us, and even if they were, they would be slightly alien, because stories that old come from a culture that is not ours. She skips a point that makes me feel uncomfortable about both her book and my reaction to that Loughcrew stone, though. Modern Irish culture is, quite possibly, just as alien to me as pre-colonial Native-American culture. To say that I "naturally" have a stronger connection to the Irish landscape because my great-great-grandfather emigrated from there is nonsense. I know more about it, and I know it in a way that makes sense to me, but that's all.

Besides, I'm not so sure a lack of that kind of deep connection to the land is an inherently bad thing anyway, or a thing that is lacking in spirituality. There is something to be said for abstraction, too. No, not abstraction -- I'm looking for a word that isn't liminality, but it's such a good word, you'll have to keep it. :) A state of not-belonging, of not-knowing, of being questionable and questioning and having one's relationship with the Universe being constantly negotiable. When Victor Turner first coined the term he didn't think it was possible to exist in a liminal state for long periods of time, but he's been shown to be wrong. (Maybe the time frame is off and we're looking at a society in a liminal period?) But I have that kind of emotional connection to liminality that so many people seem to have to land and place and locality. I can't articulate it, but it makes me happy, and it makes the world seem like a bigger place, in much the same way Monoghan describes that kind of locality doing for land-based people.

Religion In the Media

2007-06-04T19:59:00.000-05:00

Yesterday morning, as usual, I listened to On the Media while getting ready for work, and there was a segment introduced as "religion in the media." And I, foolish Pagan, had a brief thought that maybe, just maybe, someone was going to talk about something other than Christianity.

I was, of course, wrong; it was a segment on whether the Religious Right deserves all the media attention it gets. It's a fair point -- the vast majority of American Christians are not right-wing nutbars, but the media makes it sound like they are, which causes both people who already dislike right-wing Christians to dislike all Christians and causes moderate Christians to become more right-wing because of the impression they get that only right-wingers are real Christians. It's a problem, and more media coverage of non-lunatic-fringe people would help solve it. But.

But. I just wish that for once, for the love of the gods, someone in the media would remember that religious and Christian are not interchangable words.

Paganism and Feminism: long time coming

2007-06-02T16:39:00.000-05:00

One of the many things that continue to saw away at the back of my mind as I attempt to work modern Paganism as I understand it into a religion for me is this niggling conflict I've always felt between Wiccan and ceremonial symbolism and feminism. I used to be able to ignore it, but as feminism has become more important to me, the issue has been increasingly shoved forward.

It's this gender association thing, you see. Look up any table of magickal correspondences, page through any Wiccan ritual, and nearly everything there will be assigned to either male or female. Fire and Air are masculine; Earth and Water are feminine. Swords and Staves are masculine; Cups and Coins are feminine. The Sun, nine times out of ten, is masculine and the Moon feminine. And why?

The feminist part of my brain recoils at all this gender-labeling, saying, so why are femininte things always passive/reflective/yielding/receptive and masculine things are always dominant/assertive/aggresive/powerful? Is that really such a good idea that things always get divided up that way? (Not to mention -- isn't it redundant? If what you want to say is that a thing is aggressive, say it's aggressive. It reminds me of an archaeological survey of a graveyard once. This is a female's grave, it was labeled; we know this because it has female things in it, like pots and spinning tools. We know these are female things because they are always found in female graves. Well, lovely. Did you look at the bones? No, they didn't.)

Now to be fair, Wicca and modern Paganism do avoid associating women exclusively with feminine things and men exclusively with masculine things, both with the gods and with practitioners. But, well, it's still an association, and it's still there. Maybe if that same set of associations weren't so destructively pervasive in the wider society it wouldn't bother me so much, but they are, and for all practical purposes they always have been, and I'm wary of letting yet another religion perpetuate them unquestioning.

(Well if you don't like Wicca, don't practice Wicca, you might say. All right. How? Short of going the strict reconstructionist route -- and that won't get rid of the gender roles problem, just move it around a bit -- you won't find a modern incarnation of Paganism that isn't influenced by Wicca at least a little bit. Gender roles are pretty basic, and thus pretty widespread.)

Truth told, I feel very freed by my realization, upon reading Hutton, that there's nothing fundamentally feminist about Wicca at all. (And like Deborah Lipp posted ages ago, worshipping a Goddess doesn't necessarily make you feminist. It doesn't even necessarily make you not misogynistic.) I feel like I can stop trying to justify things I don't like about it so much because no, there was no chain of logic I would have agreed with behind it, so I can stop trying to look for what isn't there and just work on what works for me. One of the benefits of a young religion, I suppose; it's possible to do enough research to know when to stop.

None of this is news to people interested in feminism, I know. There's a second half to this post that I'm working on; it's a little more productive, I think, in looking at alternatives but as such it's taking me more time to work out...

Magickal Thinking, Magickal Community, Magickal Games

2007-05-27T20:18:00.001-05:00

You would not believe the number of awesome posts y'all are missing out on. I continue to be inspired at work, and I manage to scribble two or three pages worth of fascinating stuff before I things get too busy in the middle of the day, and then I get home and I'm entirely too tired to type them out. But I've written stuff about gender roles, about personal practice, about the ritual calendar and pagan stereotypes...and maybe one day I'll even get them posted. *sigh*

On a purely personal note, the latest incarnation of my magickal practice appears to be coming up with increasingly twisty and complicated sets of symbols. See, it all started when I got to rereading Crowley's Magick Without Tears again (for about the fifth time; we'll see if I finish it this time), hit the bit where he recommended learning the entire Qabbalistic system of correspondences by heart, and bought a copy of 777 and of Not Your Mama's Tree Ogam. Then I bought Christopher Penczak's City Magick and was inspired with the genius idea to create sigils out of the sudoku puzzles I do on the bus, via a complicated numerology system involving ogam and fractions. (I thought I forgot how to do fraction math years ago.)

You see, I used to hate things like that. Or rather, I used to think I hated things like that. After all the Wicca 101 books I consumed for several years straight, I developed the idea that magick ought to be simple, straightforward, and indeed somewhat childishly obvious; complicated magickal systems were either a relic of a time when such things needed to be concealed or were a takeoff from a patriarchal system where knowledge needed to be hidden from the masses. All these books recommended making your own symbols, but the examples they tended to use were things like dollar signs and little drawings of a house or a car. Which, I guess, works, but probably not if you're rolling your eyes somewhere inside at the simplistic nature of it all.

I've always loved overly complicated things. Rube Goldberg machines, clock innards, circuitboards, invented languages, and, apparently, numerologically inspired sigils. It gives me a feeling of immense glee to look at the sigil I designed for keeping my energy up for after-work concertgoing; remembering all the clever meanings I came up to the elements of its design makes me feel sneaky and subversive and accomplished all at the same time. It's fun, mainly, as all good magick should be.

ps: Pandora's Bazaar tagged me for the Thinking Bloggers' Award! I blush with pleasure, because I'd tag back if it weren't slightly unkosher. Anyway, the rules are:
1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the 'Thinking Blogger Award' with a link to the post that you wrote. (I'll get it up here soon, I promise; must finish blogging before dinner.)

I'll tag -- Songs of Unforgetting, Turtleheart Cove, Letters from Hardscrabble Creek, Never Say Never..., and Slacktivist. Great bloggers the lot of them.

No way has it been over a month.

2007-04-20T11:42:00.000-05:00

Sometimes when you're learning, you get stuck in this rut of self-doubt, sure that if you don't understand this simple thing there are millions of other things you don't understand either; in fact you don't understand anything at all, and there's nothing you can do about it. And sometimes when you've grasped something completely, you become so certain of your own intelligence that you don't feel as if you'll ever need to learn anything ever again, and you miss the obvious (and necessary) lessons that come in the meantime.

And sometimes you strike just the right balance between the two, where you can feel yourself growing every day, building on what you already have with things that are new and exciting and wonderful. I've been hitting that stride for a couple of weeks now, working on a couple of projects I've been thinking about for a long time and generally figuring out a lot of things about myself. It's an introspective kind of place, and one that's hard to articulate, which is one of the reasons I haven't been posting. (The other one being sheer lack of time to type up posts...) This is what spring is all about, what it does for me. I was afraid it wouldn't do it anymore now that I'm out of school, but I'm thrilled to see I'm wrong.

Be Careful What You Wish For

2007-03-10T14:30:00.000-06:00

I honestly never expected that sentiment to be a relevant part of my life. Sure, it's great for plots for fantasty stories, but I never thought I'd be playing with magick tetchy enough to make it relevant to me, at least not in the forseeable future. But.

February was awful for me, as it frequently is. I had no planned days off -- just one for the blizzard that snowed me in -- and nothing exciting going on. Just the daily routine of work, television, books and sleep. I was going nuts and had no motivation to work on any of my multitudes of creative projects. Then one morning I very nearly missed the bus, and found that the adrenaline surge that gave me kept me going through the rest of the day, and I got some writing done at work and some sewing done when I got home. I jokingly remarked to my roommate that I thought these little crises were good for me, really.

Then I found out from Blogickal that not only was there a full moon on, it was the Hare Moon, an excellent portent of fertility and productivity. Aha! I thought to myself, a wonderful excuse to do some magick. I stitched together a little spellbag with rosemary and sage and a piece of jasper and some sigils for Mercury, left it out under the light of the full moon (metaphysically speaking; we had full cloud cover and didn't get so much as a glimpse of the eclipse), and stuck it in my purse the next day, pleased at my own initiative.

And in the week since then, I've nearly missed the bus (again), got my car stuck in the snow in my own driveway (embarassing), lost and rediscovered some insignificant amounts of cash, and forgotten my keys. And written something on the order of 3,000 words, not counting blog posts; designed a pattern for my new purse; finished a skirt I've been working on for over a month; and cooked several new and intriguing recipes. The February blahs are completely gone as we head into spring thaw (or what looks like it -- it might be faking us out again) and I feel a million times better.

Even if I do have to be extra-careful about remembering my keys from now on.

Bridget Cleary part two: The Insult of Belief

2007-02-26T18:52:00.000-06:00

Part one is here.

In writing about Bridget Cleary's death, Angela Bourke is obviously working at least partially within an anthropological tradition which tries to establish the validity of all the beliefs involved in a situation, while explaining why they were incompatible, which makes each side seem irrational to the other. To Michael Cleary, who had gone to the physician and the priest to look for help for his sick wife, and been basically turned away by each of them, an older tradition of healing would have been the only sensible option left; to the police and the magistrate, holding a sick woman over the fire and forcing her to drink medicines of herbs boiled in milk would have only looked like torture. Unfortunately, Bourke doesn't quite manage to be as even-handed as she might have liked: while she is generous towards the fairy beliefs of the townspeople, she doesn't seem to be sympathetic to it, and in fact gives the impression that she doesn't think they really believed in fairies at all.

It's a problem I had with plenty of my anthro classes (though not, to her credit, with the professor teaching them), that while we were expected to treat all beliefs fairly and with as much objectivity as possible, there was always this undercurrent of "but we know their magic doesn't really work; we know they're just justifying it to themselves when it doesn't; we know better, because we are the scientists." Bourke's book is particularly blatant about this, especially when discussing why people might participate in fairy exorcisms even if they don't believe in fairies (she actually states early on that she isn't sure that anyone ever truly believed in fairies or the supernatural, which is pretty drastic even for a skeptic to claim). She talks about how such rituals are acts of social condemnation, reinforcing ideas of conformity and "keeping in one's place;" and while it's true that lots of communal rituals and beliefs, particularly those dealing with creatures or people who live on the boundaries of things, do serve a social function like that, it's stretching it quite a bit to say that anyone was acting out these rituals with only that in mind -- putting an uppity woman in her place -- while not really believing in any of the supernatural elements.

There's a passage toward the end of the book where Bourke talks about how the case was discussed in official police documents, and how the word "superstition" was thrown around. When used between equals, she says, "superstition" can explain away personal quirks and beliefs we don't necessarily share with one another, but when used from a person with power against someone without, it's an insult, and frequently dehumanizing -- "they're so stupid they don't even know that fairies don't exist; obviously we shouldn't let them govern themselves." In her eagerness to disassociate herself from this position, though, Bourke seems to go too far in the other direction, as though she thinks that saying they believed in fairies would be an insult, when of course it's the attitude one takes towards their belief in fairies that makes it insulting or not.

As to Bridget Cleary's death, Bourke eventually says that she doesn't believe that it was malicious, that Michael Cleary merely snapped under the strain of his wife's illness and the attitude of the villagers toward them (they were not well integrated into the local society, for a number of reasons I've glossed over in order to not make this any insanely longer than it already is) and fell back on an older pattern of belief. Even with just the evidence prevented in this book, and apparently this is a case that has been written on extensively, I can't agree. Firstly, I find it interesting that Bridget's death actually occurred after the ritual of the exorcism was over, when Bridget's health was improving and everyone else who had been participating was getting back to normal. Also, as Bourke points out through the book, of all the people involved Michael Cleary was the most modern, the most literate, the least likely to retain what was considered an old-fashioned and dangerous form of belief. It looks to me much more like a man taking the opportunity presented to him by others, particularly the fairy doctor who seems to have been the first to suggest a changeling, to find an excuse to murder his wife.

Reading this book gave me one of what I call my "worldview instances:" moments in time when I realize just how differently I look at the world than whoever I'm talking with or reading from. Not so much involving the murder case itself -- although I did disagree with Bourke's reading of the evidence -- but in her general assumptions about mystical belief. Bourke really does seem to feel that saying that these people took action on a real person because they believed in fairies, an Otherworld, and in changelings would be insulting and demeaning to them. She comes, really, from the same basic assumptions as the colonial administrators who thought that belief in fairies showed signs of a childish mind: belief in magic is childish, but these people were rational adults, therefore they could not have believed in magic, her train of thought seems to go. I'd like to say this train of thought is unusual in anthropology, but I think it's just more blatant here than elsewhere. It's one of the reasons I find myself reluctant to look at graduate schools in anthropology. I'm pretty sure searching for a department based on "is not atheist to the point of religious intolerance" would be more than a little difficult.

Book Review: The Burning of Bridget Cleary

2007-02-25T16:24:00.001-06:00

I've finally started to get to work on my amazingly long to-read list, and yesterday morning I finished up The Burning of Bridget Cleary, an immensely complicated book by Angela Bourke about an immensely complicated situation in an immensely complicated time. (Please, don't let that sound as if it's hard to read: it's delightful, particularly if you like social history. But there are a lot of threads going through this narrative, and it hasn't got easy answers.)

Even the original story itself isn't all that straightforward, partially because of the layers of interpretation that get built into it. At the turn of the twentieth century, in Co. Tipperary in Ireland, a young woman named Bridget Cleary fell ill, possibly with pneumonia, and suffered for about a week and a half before her husband, who had become convinced that the dying woman in his house was not his wife but a fairy changeling left in her place, organized a ritual to drive the changeling out. Almost a dozen people were involved, including a fairy doctor from the region and friends and relations of the couple, and most of those people seem to have participated in questioning the woman (she was asked to swear her identity three times, on two separate occasions) and in holding her over the grate of the fire to drive out the fairy. The next day she seemed to be improving, got out of bed and dressed herself for the first time in over a week, but after an argument with her husband, with most of the previous days' participants still in the house, he became enraged, threw her down on the floor and threatened her with a burning stick from the fireplace, and finally threw paraffin oil on her and burned her alive. He buried the body in a bog nearby and told his friends that he would be waiting at the fairy hill with a black-handled knife to cut his wife's bonds and bring her back from the fairies. He served fifteen years with hard labor for murder, and most of the others served somewhat shorter sentences as accessories to.

Bourke takes this incident and ties it into the changing cultural landscape that was Ireland at the time -- one of a long series of Home Rule bills moving through Parliament; tensions between laborers, tenant farmers and landlords still high after the recent Land War; colonial and Victorian rationalist rhetoric in opposition to the local and Catholic ideals of much of the population; and, of course, the long, slow death of the pre-literate Irish oral culture that the fairy belief seems to have come from. (One problem, of course, with discussing the origin of these beliefs is the simultaneous Irish Renaissance, in which Yeats and Lady Gregory were making fairies popular again. The oral culture which does still exist has assimilated a lot of the later material, too, and it's almost impossible to tell what is genuinely ancient or pre-literate and what comes from a later, more romanticized origin.)

The first thing that struck me about this was its similarity to an exorcism case in Wisconsin we discussed in one of my anthro classes when it happened -- an 8-year-old autistic boy named Terrence Cottrell died during an attempt led by a local minister and some of the parishioners and his family to drive the demons out of him. And I have to admit, I found it easier to consider Bridget Cleary's death in a more sympathetic way, a function of my own biases. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that deaths caused by religious practices shouldn't be prosecuted as murder -- only that the fundamental difference in worldview between the religious practitioners and the law is important, and ought to be looked at.

The second thing this reminded me of was the fate of the attempted regicide Damiens in 1757. (No, wait, there's a connection, I swear.) Foucault gives a rather grotesque description of the punishment for regicide in the decades just before the French Revolution; I'll spare you the gory details (though they're in Discipline and Punish if you really want them), but basically, he was drawn and quartered, badly; pulled with pincers; hacked to pieces; and finally burned. It was an insane amount of overkill, even for people who wanted to make an example. And that was what they were doing, of course: no one had been drawn and quartered in decades, possibly centuries, because a more modern form of law-enforcement made it easier to punish more criminals more leniently than a few criminals more strictly, as used to be done. But the possibility that someone might try to kill the king was so frightening that the establishment reacted by reaching into their past for the most socially condemning punishment they could find, even if they didn't quite know how to go about it. Even in the days when people were drawn and quartered, Damiens' death would have been considered grotesque.

Bourke tells us that, although changeling belief has been recorded in Ireland since such records were kept, very few deaths were ever recorded as consequences of trying to get rid of changelings, and Bridget Cleary is the only adult ever recorded to have died from a fairy exorcism. Bourke doesn't make much of this point, but I think it's key to her entire argument. When the old order runs up against the new, something has to happen, and it's usually when worldviews are dying out that they become their most damaging. When a belief is common, it doesn't need to be reinforced in order to be effective: it stands on its own. When a belief is dying out (like a belief in changelings, or a belief in the moral necessity and superiority of a king) it needs that extra power of blood and death in order to really stick. To say that Bridget Cleary's death is a result of fairy belief isn't an insult to people who believe in fairies, it just shows how beliefs were changing at the time and to what degree they were coming under stress from Victorian rationalism.

For all her attempts to treat the fairy beliefs with respect, Bourke ultimately comes down against them, more often implying that no one actually believed that they were driving a changeling out of Bridget Cleary's place. But this stance seems to me to be even more disrespectful: while I can understand (if not condone) torturing a changeling to force it to reveal itself, I have a harder time with the idea that nearly a dozen people tortured a woman in order to impress social conformity upon her.

And now this post is getting ridiculously long, so it will conclude (with more of the meat of the point I wanted to make) tomorrow.

Religious Insomnia

2007-02-24T01:44:00.000-06:00

At nearly two in the morning, in the middle of a blizzard, after reading some very challenging things entirely too late in the evening, I think I've managed my very first round of religious-anxiety-induced-insomnia.

Questions keep chasing themselves around in my brain. Am I for real? Do I really believe all this? Am I the only one; is my religion really horribly passe and everyone else has moved past it into something more "mature"? Am I really just a fluffy bunny at heart (and is that just a word we use when we're too attatched to our scientific viewpoint to give it up) (and who am I to be dismissing a scientific viewpoint, anyway)? Am I turning into some kind of mad Pagan fundamentalist who other people look at with a combination of awe and surprise and oh-my-god-sane-people-aren't-like-that-are-they?

Does it really matter what anybody else thinks? (Of course it does. And of course it doesn't.) Am I really just doing this to watch what other people do? Do I really believe any of it myself even, or is this all some kind of grand wish-fulfillment that comes of reading too many fantasy novels as a preteen? And what's so wrong with that, anyway? Why do we all have to take ourselves so seriously all the time?

Rinse. Cycle. Repeat.

I read somewhere once that skepticism and self-doubt are a sign you're doing magic right, that it's just your empirical training kicking in in self-defense, which seems a little pat to me. And I read somewhere else once -- it was Harlan Ellison, I'm sure -- that you never like the people who make you ask real questions. Which is true. I don't like anything about this right now.

To Flourish

2007-02-14T15:10:00.000-06:00

I normally don't put much stock in astrology -- not that I'm skeptical about it, at least not more than most things, it's just not really my thing -- but I am a firm believer in Mercury retrogrades. Most people seem to hate them, turning inward-looking and trying to avoid starting projects, especially communication-based projects, because Mercury retrograde is supposed to make communication go haywire.

But me? I always feel full of motivation in a Mercury retrograde period. I start things, I finish things (an astonishing task for me) and I feel my writing become much more eloquent and easier to construct. Maybe it's because I usually feel no fear about communicating: not only do I love to write, I also love public speaking, a real rarity. Maybe it's because I tend to have a very good relationship with the gods of communication (Mercury himself's a little haughty for me, but Ogma seems to enjoy my current job enough to stop by from time to time). Maybe it's because I was born in a Mercury retrograde, so this is just my natural state of being. I don't care why; I'm just happy that time of year has come round again.

Of course, other people feel differently -- you have my sincere sympathy if this period is going to be hard for you. But forewarned is forearmed, and all that.

Happy Global Warming Season

2007-02-05T18:49:00.000-06:00

The Witchvox description of Imbolg seems pretty typical, so I'll use it as our example for the day --

The earliest whisperings of Springtide are heard now as the Goddess nurtures Her Young Son. As a time of the year associated with beginning growth, Imbolc is an initiatory period for many. Here we plant the "seeds" of our hopes and dreams for the coming summer months.

And I and our current twelve below windchill have this to say about that -- "earliest whisperings of Springtide" my arse.

Normally I would take this opportunity to yammer on delightedly about the origins of these festival dates and associations, and how insane it is to take what are obviously, ancient or modern in origin, seasonal festivals and celebrate them on fixed dates when what is first spring in the UK is most definitely not first spring in southern Wisconsin; about how when I was in Ireland I finally realized that the date of Imbolg is appropriate after all when I went to the edge of the city and saw the new lambs playing in fields that were green and not covered in snow; about what this means about modern Paganism and if we really qualify as nature-based at all if we're going to do things like this and if the community-building you get from having formalized dates is a decent tradeoff for having holidays that make no sense.

But this unbelievably frigid Imbolg came after an equally unbelievably warm Yule, and a January with the second-latest freeze dates in recorded history for Madison's two lakes, and the implication of global warming continues to gnaw at my brain. (Not that I'm alone. After all, Al Gore got nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for giving us all this entirely justifiable paranoia.) I found I couldn't enjoy the unseasonably warm weather earlier, and I hate the arctic blast even more, knowing that they are both probably symptoms of something much, much more wrong.

I have a hard time getting activist about global warming, not because I don't think it's important, but because it freaks me out so much. If I think about it for too long I fall into a strange spiralling paranoia about the state of the planet and the nature of humanity, and frankly it's much easier for me just to take the bus to work and call that enough. Some days I tell myself every little bit helps and it seems like it's true, and some days I tell myself every little bit helps and it seems like an excuse.

Even so...even so, Imbolg is that time of year when leaving work no longer means walking into the pitch darkness of midwinter, and that isn't spring, but it's something. Happy Imbolg, everyone. Spring won't make everything better, but it might make it easier to bear, and maybe then we can figure out what to do about it all.

I Have No Totem

2007-01-19T10:08:00.000-06:00

I am a white man.
If I say I have a totem I steal
someone else's myth. But, in a hard
time, when I walked among spruce
and hemlock down to the alders
on the bank of the Indian River to pray,
a kingfisher chattered at me
from a dead branch above
a clear, green pool.

by Peter Munro, from "A Fisheries Scientist Sights a Large School of Myth Swimming in Shallow Water in Southeast Alaska" from the archives of the Beloit Poetry Journal

Mark this down as a good day.

2007-01-15T18:48:00.000-06:00

The Trance may be continued for weeks or months, and the most ardent devotee of Tahuti, searching his Magical Record with the most conscientious acuteness, finds it impossible to indicate the onset of the Vision. In fact, it may be surmised that the Vision arises not from any given action but rather from a subtle suspension of action. The conflict of events has ended happily in a state of serenely perfect balance, in which, though energy continues to manifest, its issues have become without significance....[I]n this vision all conscious magical effort ceases, although the practices are continued with all customary diligence, and the whole of the Adepts's impressions, internal as external, are suffused with the glow of beauty and delight. The state is in many respects closely akin to that sought by the smoker of opium; but it is natural and requires no artificial regulation.

It will appear from the foregoing that nothing could be more absurd than to attempt to give instructions for the attainment of this state.

To aspire to it (still worse, to seek to regain it after it has passed) must appear the climax of bad logic. Nor, delectable and blessed as it is, can one call it actually desirable.

We need not assume that it is in any way deleterious, that it exhausts good Karma, or that it wastes time and damps aspiration. It should be accepted, when it occurs, with calm indifference, enjoyed to the full, and quitted without regret.

from Crowley's Little Essays Toward Truth, "Beatitude"

Today felt like Sunday morning. Not like Sunday mornings now, when I have to get up and drive to work because the busses aren't running that early and then I sit there and drink coffee and distract myself with entertaining novels and the impossibility of the New York Times Sunday crossword; no, today felt like this particular Sunday morning I remember from when I was a child. I couldn't have been more than eight or nine, and all I remember is sitting in my room after church one day (it must have been Easter, I had a nice dress on) with some sort of Sunday School something-or-other and a box of crayons, and it was perfect.

It's something about the light I remember most; the light came through the window in a particular way that I couldn't describe if I tried, but it happens still sometimes when I'm not looking for it. That particular late-morning light, the light of the sun bright behind a bank of very dark clouds, and today, the glow of mid-afternoon snow showers, all seem to hit me in exactly the same way.

When I first came across this passage from Crowley, I thought, Yes, I know that state exactly. When the universe seems to be all okay for a while. Sometimes it lasts for just a couple of minutes, sometimes it lasts all day. (Today it got me through an eight-hour shift when I had to use voice-recognition software with a head cold, for which I am immensely grateful.) Sometimes I wish I could induce it, by seeking out or recreating the right kind of light, but would it be quite so wonderful if you could do it on purpose, instead of it just coming on all unexpected like this?

Happy Yuletide

2006-12-22T10:53:00.000-06:00

I believe I can honestly say that I have never looked forward to Yule this much in my life. I've always been rather intrigued by that dark part of the year in between Samhain and Yule -- Samhain is supposed to be the end of the year, after all, but none of the rebirth imagery starts until Yule, leaving the months of November and most of December a kind of cosmic no-man's land, which I usually adore -- but this year Samhain was just dark enough, and the intervening months just hard enough, that Yule was both a relief and a wonderful celebration. And, yesterday, finally, my scheduling changes went through at work and I've gotten enough time off to go home for the holidays. It was a near thing there, for a while.

I continue to be unable to find convenient community celebrations (until after the fact; apparently there was a bonfire down by the lake last night, which I didn't find out about until this morning), but my roommate and I had quite a wonderful impromptu celebration of our own, featuring a bottle of red wine, a gallon of wassail, and large amounts of freshly baked bread. And frozen pizza for dinner. Look, there's only so much effort I can reasonably make on a Thursday night.

And, impossibly, the weather has finally turned a reasonable degree of cold for Wisconsin in December -- starting today all that rain they predicted for the next week is turning to snow. Call me old-fashioned, but I love a white Christmas.

Hope everyone else's celebrations were wonderful, and enjoy the sun if you're getting it!

Hutton and Duotheism

2006-12-09T19:31:00.000-06:00

I rather thought that once I finished Hutton's Triumph of the Moon I'd be able to write a review post about it, but I've been trying and it turns out there are just too many things I want to say about it. So. One thing at a time --

One of my favorite things -- well, two, technically -- were the chapters entitled "Finding a Goddess" and "Finding a God," in which Hutton describes how a religion claiming to be a direct continuation of pre-Christian polytheistic religion came to be duotheistic itself. I admit, having never worked in a formal tradition myself, I never really thought of Paganism as being duotheistic. I guess I tended to see all the references to a single Goddess and God as an unfortunate shorthand of the way different pantheons sometimes get squished together in the search for the deity most suited to this week's magic spell. But then, I came to Paganism through a love of mythology, and I was always enthralled by the idea of an entire pantheon of gods to get to know.

Hutton does a brilliantly detailed job of knitting together the history of literature, anthropology, religion, and history itself to explain how the Victorians came up with the idea of a worldwide, pre-Christian Goddess culture -- it was, after all, the predominant popular and academic view of ancient religions for quite a long time. Hutton explains the development of this theory in terms of romanticism and over-generalization, based on things like the Venus figurines and ideas that people like James Frazier had about the importance of fertility to early religions.

In my History of Anthropology course, we took a cultural-religious perspective on the same thing: the Garden of Eden myth was so firmly entrenched in the cultural subconscious that it was generally assumed that degeneration was the only way most cultures changed, and since monotheism was seen as the highest, most philosophically sound form of religion, it was decided that all observable polytheisms must have degenerated from an early monotheism that was, nonetheless, inferior to Christianity: a Goddess-centered religion. It was, of course, all these factors and more that contributed to the Goddess-culture mythos, which was actually still a reasonably popular idea in the culture when Gardner pulled it out of its theoretical setting and made it a practice.

The distillation of a Pagan God, as Hutton describes it, is something I know less about -- he finds the process mostly in literature, as the Romantics appropriated Pan as their particular patron. (Of course, Romanticism has a cultural component, too -- massive industrialization made the idealization of a rustic country life much easier, and closer to Gardner's time, the effect of the Blitz on London probably contributed significantly to the idea of the countryside as a place where nothing ever changes.)

Like I said, I never particularly thought of Paganism as duotheistic, but Hutton makes it pretty obvious that duotheism is one of the primary characteristics of Wicca, and almost all forms of modern Paganism owe at least a little something to Wicca. And also like I said, duotheism has never really done it for me. I find this culture's love of binaries a little annoying, really -- and while Wicca gains a few points over Christianity for placing the binary of Goddess and God at the center instead of the binary of Good and Evil, it's still nowhere as interesting as having a multitude.

Which means that now I've identified this niggling problem I have, I now feel obliged to fiddle with my carefully-constructed eclecticism again, throw a couple more ropes around the wobbly bits, and see if I can find another solid place to nail some bits on. (Tangentially, have y'all seen Howl's Moving Castle? I only just did, and Howl's castle is a brilliant visual metaphor for my religion. If only I could find a way to incorporate hydraulics --) Because there are a lot of lovely Wiccan rituals that I quite like and have been using for quite some time. Full moon rituals are easy to change from the generic to the specific, but what about the Charge of the Goddess? Do I have to abandon the entire idea of drawing down the moon? What about initiation rituals -- addressing only my patroness seems excessively specific there, but how to generalize within a pantheon?

I appear to have some fairly significant rewriting to do. Fortunately I have never been one of those people who has a problem with paradox, so I suppose it's entirely possible I'll continue using duotheistic Wiccan rituals because they are beautiful and they are a part of a common culture I do want to belong to. I have, after all, been trying to squish a polytheistic worldview into them for several years, while I didn't understand why it didn't quite fit. Who knows, maybe now that I understand what the problem is I'll be able to make it work. Or eventually I'll accept that Paganism is even bigger than I thought it was, that even paradoxical eclecticism can only stretch so far, and I'll have to give them up. Still, it's nice to finally know what the problem was.