Saturday Poetry Blogging

The Geese

slicing this frozen sky know
where they are going—
and want to get there.

Their call, both strange
and familiar, calls
to the strange and familiar

heart, and the landscape
becomes the landscape
of being, which becomes

the bright silos and snowy
fields over which the nuanced
and muscular geese

are calling—while time
and the heart take measure.

~JANE MEAD

More poems found here and here.

Picture found here.

Bite Me

The guest was Eliot Spitzer, and while maintaining that the Democrats would hold the Senate in November, he referred to an offhand remark by Christine O’Donnell, the Republican Senate nominee in Delaware, that she had “dabbled in witchcraft.” [The remark was hardly "offhand." She said it and went on to defend it.]

“There are a substantial number of safe Democratic seats since the Republicans nominated, you know, some folks on the fringe that, you know, witches,” Mr. Spitzer said. “I mean, since when do you nominate a witch?”

More here.

I don't know, Eliot, apparently New York nominated and even elected a whore-monger. I'll take a Witch, any day.

Picture found here.

Everything Old Is New Again

England recognizes Druids! Actually, the Druid Network, which represents Druids in England, obtained official charitable status, which entitles it to tax breaks.

In its ruling on the group's application, the commission said it accepted that druidry was an "ancient pagan religion" in its own right involving the worship of nature, particularly the sun and the earth. [Could we get a capital "D" and a capital "P" please?]

Druid rituals involve "commonality of practice" across the faith including solar and fire festivals, ceremonies at various phases of the moon, seasonal festivals and rites of passage in life.

There had also been some official recognition already, it added, including a provision by Britain's Prison Service for the practice of druidry and the attendance of a pagan chaplain at services.
"The board members concluded that The Druid Network is established for exclusively charitable purposes for the advancement of religion for the public benefit," the Charity Commission said.

Druidry emerged in ancient Ireland and Britain and spread further afield during the Iron Age, especially into France, but became largely supplanted as Christianity took hold across Europe.
It has gained recent popularity because of its pantheistic nature and concern with ecology.

To reiterate my position: No religion should receive tax breaks. But as long as governments are going to subsidize the Abrahamic religions, Pagans should be getting the same treatment. And, you've just gotta love that it took England several thousand years to recognize its own indigenous religion. ;)

Picture found here.

First of the Month Bazooms Blogging

Ladies! Listen up! Detecting breast cancer early is the key to surviving it! Breast Self Exams (BSEs) can help you to detect breast cancer in its earlier stages. So, on the first of every month, give yourself a breast self-exam. It's easy to do. Here's how. If you prefer to do your BSE at a particular time in your cycle, calendar it now. But, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

And, once a year, get yourself a mammogram. Mammograms cost between $150 and $300. If you have to take a temp job one weekend a year, if you have to sell something on e-Bay, if you have to go cash in all the change in various jars all over the house, if you have to work the holiday season wrapping gifts at Macy's, for the love of the Goddess, please go get a mammogram once a year.

Or: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pays all or some of the cost of breast cancer screening services through its National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program. This program provides mammograms and breast exams by a health professional to low-income, underinsured, and underserved women in all 50 states, six U.S. territories, the District of Columbia, and 14 American Indian/Alaska Native organizations. For more information, contact your state health department or call the Cancer Information Service at 1-800-4-CANCER.

I know that a recent study indicated that early detection via breast self exams might not be "cost effective." I'm not a scientist, but when I read those studies, they appear to be saying that sometimes women find a lump during the BSE that turns out not to be cancer. Those women have caused some expense and have gone through some discomfort in order to find out that the lump wasn't cancer. I don't know about you, but when that happens to me, as it has a few times since my first mammogram found a small, curable, cancerous lump, I go out and buy a new scarf, take myself out for a decadent lunch, call everyone I know, and declare it a good day.

Send me an email after you get your mammogram and I will do an annual free tarot reading for you. Just, please, examine your own breasts once a month and get your sweet, round ass to a mammogram once a year. If you have a deck, pick three cards and e-mail me at hecatedemetersdatter@hotmail.com. I'll email you back your reading. If you don't have a deck, go to Lunea's tarot listed on the right-hand side in my blog links. Pick three cards from her free, on-line tarot and email me at hecatedemetersdatter@hotmail.com. I'll email you back your reading.

Picture found here.

Synchronicity: You're Soaking in It

Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki:

People often say to me, "You're 81 years old; where do you get the energy from?" and I say, "I get it from that wholeness." I move out in my mind into that immensity of space and there is that, that warmth, that sense of welcoming. And I imagine myself there. I place myself there and I say to this wholeness, "I'm part of you. I came out of you. I'm going to go back into you. And I love you. I really do love you, in the deepest sense of that word, because I'm part of you. And at this moment, I could do with a little bit of you, a little bit more of you. I need some of your energy." And Thorn, I can feel it filling me up, and then, when I come back, it's there for me to use.

~Talking to T. Thorn Coyle in a podcast dated September 13, 2010.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau:

For the more sensitive the soul of the observer, the greater the ecstasy aroused in him by this harmony. At such times his senses are possessed by a deep and delightful reverie, and in a state of blissful self-abandomentent he loses himself in the immensity of this beautiful order, which which he feels himself at one. All individual objects escape him, he sees and feels nothing but the unity of all things. His ideas have to be restricted and his imagination limited by some particular circumstances for him to observe the separate parts of this universe which he was striving to embrace in its entirety.

~quoted in Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future by Bron Taylor. (Listen to Anne Hill interview Taylor here.)

Picture found here.

Rain, Falling Leaves, Woodsmoke, Stones

Now that I've been home for (almost!) a week in my snug little cottage with the bricks, and river stones, and lanterns interposed between me and the chilly, Autumn rain, and now that my old body is beginning to remember what time zone and what season this is, I am almost incandescent with joy. Ever since I was a teenager (maybe before!), I have adored Autumn. And I adore it still, and I am addled enough to imagine that the feeling is mutual.

What I love best about it, at least now -- at this stage of the amazingly fun game that I showed up here playing -- what I love best about it now, is the incredible sense of deshabille in the garden. There's no point going out and spending an evening or a weekend "straightening" and "fixing." The garden just now is a familiar lover, the kind willing to let her breasts spill out of her bathrobe while eating Chinese take-out w/ chopsticks on her side in bed, the kind who will go into the bathroom while her lover is shaving and pee, the kind who will go for a walk with her lover's friends with her hair pulled back in a pony tail and her face free of make-up. (The other morning, I sat at a stoplight and watched a young woman jog past me with full make-up (eye-liner! you know that's going to run!) and color-coordinated jogging clothes. All that I could think was: "Your life is going to get a whole lot easier for you as you age. So mote it be.")

I sit here and watch the hostas turn yellow and die, I watch the toad lilies bloom, I watch the Japanese Maple leaves turn copper as a mere precursor to the brilliant scarlet that they will eventually turn, I email back and forth w/ Landscape Guy about what to plant this Autumn, and I love being the Witch of This Place even more than I can ever begin to say. There's an old saying in "Chop Wood, Carry Water," that goes: "I have always known that I would come this way. But, yesterday, I did not know that it would be today." It's actually wrong. I have always known that it would be today.

May your Autumn be a mess of messy age and may all of your ancestors show up and bother you. So mote it be.

Picture found here.

My New Name for a Blog

What Crabby Old Lady Said.

hat tip/Diane in comments at Eschaton

Picture found here. Warning: Lots of ads.

Elements: Water

Why We Love Men

Really Knitting

Giving Back

I make a nice living working for The Man and I haven't (yet) had to do a fundraiser here on the internets. But if you do enjoy my blog and you have a bit of money energy that you'd like to send back into the universe, you could donate it to Athenae's First Draft. I'm a pretty good writer and I can produce some decent prose, but, as I've said before, I'd chew off my right arm to be able to write the way that Athenae writes.

hat tip/ watertiger.

Picture found here.

Sunday Garden Blogging

Toad Lilies blooming in the woodland garden. These show up when almost all the other plants are through flowering. Grow well in shade. Completely poison. And, of course, "toad." Perfect plants for a Witch's garden.

Photo by the author; if you copy, please link back.

Sunday Dance Blogging