Bad Week for Pagans in DC

Jason Pitzl-Waters has an important and well-reasoned post at the Wild Hunt concerning The Washington Times' (known throughout DC as The Moonie Times) attempts to smear Pagans. If you haven't seen it, you need to go read it now. As Jason notes, just when you think the paper may be running out of bad things to say about Pagans:

they quickly turn to environmentalism, portraying it as a stalking horse for Paganism.
“Such [environmental] questions can only be raised in a politically correct military that may actually contain more Earth worshippers than imagined. Though cloaked in scientific terms, the tenets of global warming are essentially pagan. [Not going to even mention rules of capitalization.] This belief system, which cannot be questioned, [??] holds that material sacrifice – turn down your thermostat and trade in your light bulbs – will result in a change in the weather. It is the modern equivalent of a rain dance.

I have to say, that's a level of stupidity that simply boggles my mind. You don't have to be Pagan to believe that if you stop adding carbon to the atmosphere, global climate change can be ameliorated. It's as if they said:

Idiot Pagans! They think that putting seeds into the ground will make food grow! They think starting a fire will keep you warm! They think that drinking wine will alter your consciousness! Only crazy people imagine that making material changes in the material world will cause material changes in the material world [And I am a material girl. Sorry, can't help myself.] Duh, Pagans probably think putting pins in a poppet will cause someone to feel pain, too! Pagans are dumb.

And, as Jason's commenters point out, the Moonies have honestly not got much room for calling other religions weird.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post (aka The Kaplan Test Prep Rag) is busy trying to screw its Pagan employees:

The [Washington Baltimore Newspaper Guild Local 320350] also criticized a management request to ease restrictions on layoffs and reduce severance pay while eliminating a provision that allows employees to trade a traditional holiday for another recognized holiday if they choose:

Not Christian? Too bad. The Post would eliminate an employees' right to substitute a traditional paid holiday, such as Christmas, for another recognized holiday of their choice. This from a company whose editorial page often lauds the importance of diversity.

A Post spokesperson declined to comment on the raise, the proposed severance, and layoff changes or the holiday provision.

/hat tip: Atrios

I'd imagine the Post would be glad to get some folks who'd volunteer to work the Xmas shift (because they run ads publish 365 days a calendar year) in return for getting Samhein or Beltane off, but apparently not. Lally, one imagines, may take off whenever she likes.

Some days, the stupid, it burns.

Picture found here.

Earth Hour

At 8:30, I will turn off all of the lights in my home, shut down my computer, go off the grid.

I will go to my altar and chant for a future that conserves energy and that gets energy from clean, renewable resources, that consciously honors its sources of motive power. Is Earth Hour the complete answer? No. But any time that millions of people work together for a better world, I want to add my body, as a Witch, to the cause.

You come, too.

What Literata Said

And I can’t find a way to understand my relationship with the earth that makes styrofoam carryout containers a worthwhile thing.

You need to go read the whole thing right now.

Picture found here.

Serendipity

There's this:

Premises 1 through 10

and, this:

As the current round of catabolism picks up speed, a great many jobs will go away, and most of them will never return; a great many people who depend on those jobs will descend into poverty, and most of them will never rise back out of it; much of the familiar fabric of life in America as it’s been lived in recent decades will be shredded beyond repair, and new and far less lavish patterns will emerge instead; outside the narrowing circle of the privileged classes, even those who maintain relative affluence will be making do with much less than they or their equivalents do today. All these are ways that a society in decline successfully adapts to the contraction of its economic base and the mismatch between available resources and maintenance costs.

Twenty or thirty or forty years from now, in turn, it’s a fairly safe bet that the years of crisis will come to a close and a newly optimistic America will reassure itself that everything really is all right again. The odds are pretty high that by then it will be, for all practical purposes, a Third World nation, with little more than dim memories remaining from its former empire or its erstwhile status as a superpower; it’s not at all impossible, for that matter, that it will be more than one nation, split asunder along lines traced out by today’s increasingly uncompromising culture wars. Fast forward another few decades, and another round of crises arrives, followed by another respite, and another round of crises, until finally peasant farmers plow their fields in sight of the crumbling ruins of our cities.

That’s the way civilizations end, and that’s the way ours is ending.

The Arch Druid and Derrick Jensen have more.

Picture found here.

Synchronicity, You're Soaking In It

I love the artist's discussion of how her childhood spent in Nature influences her art.

*****************************************

[H]ealing the broken bond between our young and nature—is in our self-interest, not only because aesthetics or justice demands it, but also because our mental, physical, and spiritual health depends upon it. The health of the [E]arth is at stake as well. How the young respond to nature, and how they raise their own children, will shape the configurations and conditions of our cities, homes—our daily lives.

~Richard Louv
More here.

Hat tip to Margaret Roach, in A Way to Garden.

Well, Ignoring the Problem Doesn't Seem to Be Working

Monday Poetry Blogging

They Sell You What Disappears
~Hoa Nguyen

They sell you what disappears it’s a vague ‘they’
maybe Capital T who are they and mostly
poorly paid in China

Why does this garlic come from China?
It’s vague to me shipping bulbous netted bulbs
Cargo doused with fungicide and growth inhibitor

What disappears is vague I can’t trade for much
I can cook teach you cooking ferment
bread or poetry I can sell my plasma

They are paid poorly in Florida
picking tomatoes for tacos
Some CEO is surely a demon
in this poem

Need to buy need to buy or else
you are always paying rent one month away
from ‘the street’
3 neighbors asked for money this week
We are guilty
bringing in sacks of food bought on credit

Trademark this poem mark this poem with a scan code
on the front and digitally store it somewhere
not to be memorized “by heart”.

Picture found here.

Turn, Turn, Turn.

Merlin's Time

You should go read The Arch Druid Report.

No One Should Be Allowed To Make Poisons For Which There Is No Antidote

My New Name For A Blog

What Wendell Berry Said.

In "Word and Flesh" Berry wrote, "The great obstacle is simply this: the conviction that we cannot change because we are dependent on what is wrong. But that is the addict's excuse, and we know that it will not do." Or do we? The Gulf of Mexico is currently experiencing the human equivalent of metastasizing cancer, and the governor of Louisiana proposes that the activities which resulted in that cancer be resumed immediately even as BP's underwater gusher continues to flow into the gulf. The picture that comes to mind is one of a smoker who, having had his cancerous voicebox removed, immediately resumes smoking through his tracheotomy, a permanent opening in the throat made necessary by the operation. It is a repulsive, grotesque, and yet darkly humorous image.

More, here.

Picture found here.

My New Name For A Blog

What Cat Chapin-Bishop Said.

Here's how you begin: Breathe. Ground. Center. Take one action.

Picture found here.

My New Name For A Blog

What Athenae Said.

Yeah, everybody's losing their jobs, there is nothing the boss man can't do and walk away from scot-free, your years of service to a company barely get you a shrug when you're shoved out the door, so far, so good.

Yeah, the rule of law's been destroyed, we basically live in a police state, Miranda rights no longer mean all that much, there's nothing the authorities can't do and walk away from scot-free, so far, so good.

Yeah, it's getting harder and harder to breathe, the ocean is filling up with oil, nobody gives a fuck about the polar bears, everyone has asthma, there's something in the drinking water the town said was safe and now the kids have cancer, so far, so good.

Yeah, the guy we elected to end the wars and close the torture prisons isn't doing that so much, Congress is still full of assholes, our state legislators are too busy gobbling corporate knob to take our calls, our school boards want us to worry about if Jesus rode a dinosaur and if our kids can't read it's because they just don't want to enough, so far, so good.

Yeah, poverty and ignorance have been institutionalized, walled off, and called the acceptable price of living the way the top five percent live while the parts of the city the tourists don't visit might as well rot for all anybody gives a damn, so far, so good.

Go read the whole thing.

Picture found here.

The Other Side Of Sacrifice Is Blessing

Reducing reliance on corporate food is probably going to mean you’ll spend more time cooking and preserving food, and that you might not be able to eat strawberries in winter or oranges at all.

Reducing fossil-fuel use might mean you’ll have to spend more time walking, or that you’ll give up some of your freedom in order to carpool. Or it might mean you won’t just ask what BP the corporation is doing about the oil spill, but what we the people are doing about it.

Fortunately, the other side of sacrifice is blessing, and the journey away from corporate-reliance toward self-reliance and local-reliance, though I have barely begun it myself, seems full of blessing.

Anyone who grows their own food or who has gotten to know their farmer at the farmers market knows this.

Anyone who has done without a particular technological gadget knows this.
Anyone who has organized to protect the interests of small farmers from the greed of corporate agriculture businesses knows this.

And anyone who has looked into the course catalogue of the Driftless Folk School — which is educating our community about everything from blacksmithing to mowing with a scythe to pickling to soap-making — sees how delightful the journey toward self-reliance can be.

This reminds me of something that Derrick Jensen, I think, once wrote. Which is that, yes, the move from consumer culture and big oil is going to involve sacrifice. My G/Son won't live the hedonistically creature-comfort-loaded life that I've led. But he might gain something, as well. If our children and grandchildren gain an increased closeness to the Earth, to the seasons and cycles and processes of Gaia, well, then, they will, indeed, be blessed.

Of course, Jensen also posits our descendent, starving to death on the banks of Yukon River, cursing us for killing off the salmon in return for cans of corn syrup that we could throw away. Cursing our great grandparents for killing off the buffalo for sport and the flocks of passenger pigeons so large they darkened the sky for days at a time for no reason at all other than the love of destruction.

And, yet.

Read the whole thing here.

Picture found here.

We finally really did it. You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!

The World Below the Brine
~ Walt Whitman


The world below the brine,
Forests at the bottom of the sea, the branches and leaves,
Sea-lettuce, vast lichens, strange flowers and seeds, the thick
tangle openings, and pink turf,
Different colors, pale gray and green, purple, white, and gold, the
play of light through the water,
Dumb swimmers there among the rocks, coral, gluten, grass, rushes,
and the aliment of the swimmers,
Sluggish existences grazing there suspended, or slowly crawling
close to the bottom,
The sperm-whale at the surface blowing air and spray, or disporting
with his flukes,
The leaden-eyed shark, the walrus, the turtle, the hairy
sea-leopard, and the sting-ray,
Passions there, wars, pursuits, tribes, sight in those ocean-depths,
breathing that thick-breathing air, as so many do,
The change thence to the sight here, and to the subtle air breathed
by beings like us who walk this sphere,
The change onward from ours to that of beings who walk other spheres.

Picture found here.

The Obligation To Endure Gives Us The Right To Know

Rachel Carson's homepage credits her mother with instilling Ms. Carson with a life-long love of nature. I'll die happy if I'm able to give G/Son such a love.

She wrote pamphlets on conservation and natural resources and edited scientific articles, but in her free time turned her government research into lyric prose, first as an article "Undersea" (1937, for the Atlantic Monthly), and then in a book, Under the Sea-Wind (1941). In 1952 she published her prize-winning study of the ocean, The Sea Around Us, which was followed by The Edge of the Sea in 1955. These books constituted a biography of the ocean and made Carson famous as a naturalist and science writer for the public. Carson resigned from government service in 1952 to devote herself to her writing.

She wrote several other articles designed to teach people about the wonder and beauty of the living world, including "Help Your Child to Wonder," (1956) and "Our Ever-Changing Shore" (1957), and planned another book on the ecology of life. Embedded within all of Carson's writing was the view that human beings were but one part of nature distinguished primarily by their power to alter it, in some cases irreversibly.

. . .

Rachel Carson died in 1964 after a long battle against breast cancer. Her witness for the beauty and integrity of life continues to inspire new generations to protect the living world and all its creatures.

Wikipedia says that the title of Ms. Carson's masterpiece, Silent Spring, was inspired by a poem by Keats:

The book argued that uncontrolled and unexamined pesticide use was harming and even killing not only animals and birds, but also humans. Its title was meant to evoke a spring season in which no bird songs could be heard, because they had all vanished as a result of pesticide abuse. Its title was inspired by a poem by John Keats, "La Belle Dame sans Merci", which contained the lines "The sedge is wither'd from the lake, And no birds sing."

Tomorrow, May 27th, is the 103rd anniversary of her birth. And, a full Moon. As we contemplate the full catastrophe that is the Gulf of Mexico, I intend to invoke Ms. Carson on the full Moon and call for her aid. You come with me, now, won't you?

Picture of La Belle Dame sans Merci found here.

The Gulf

What Thorn said.

Picture found here.

Pissing Off The Witch: Never A Good Idea

Ruh Roh. It's no surprise to me that this is all happening during a retrograde Mercury.

The worry for Icelanders is that each time Eyjafjoell has erupted over the last millennium, Katla, named after an Icelandic witch, quickly followed.

Explosive percussions heard every few minutes here testify to lava explosions inside Eyjafjoell, a few kilometers (miles) to the west, and the threat that Katla might be awaiting its cue. "There have been three Eyjafjoell eruptions and Katla has followed each time," said geophysicist Sigrun Hreinsdottir, [I love Scandanavian names] at the Earth Sciences Institute. "They are very close."

Some believe the volcanoes are directly linked underground so that magma from one can flow into the other. Hreinsdottir said that what happens inside volcanoes is largely a mystery. What's known is that Katla has erupted approximately every 80 years since Vikings first settled this island nestled under the Arctic Circle more than a thousand years ago. The last eruption was in 1918 and "it's the longest pause of Katla on record, which is why we are monitoring it very carefully," Hreinsdottir said.

An eruption from Katla might not necessarily be dangerous. But it has the potential every time to repeat the 1918 scene when a wall of melted glacier water swept down, bearing ice chunks the size of houses, and blanketing southern Iceland in thick ash. What effect a monster eruption would have on a Europe [already] crippled by the much milder Eyjafjoell can only be imagined. Much would depend on wind direction, the type of ash and height of the ash plume.

. . .

All the same, Katla -- known with the volcano Hekla as Iceland's "angry sisters" -- looms darkly in [local residents'] life. "We were brought up on this," Gudmunsson said. "In school we were told stories about Katla and we trained to evacuate." In case of a major eruption, a towering wave of melted glacier water could rush from the mountain across the narrow, flat coastal strip and, potentially, into Vik. "I live in a house on the flat, so when Katla goes and the eruption starts we have to move up the hill," Gudmunsson said. "The odds are not very high but it can happen and it has happened."

Better to just not piss off the witch!

In the Saga, Katla is a sorceress, a witch who at first with wit and smart magick hides her child from the men who want to kill it. But the magick isn't all perfect: the men always return after having had to give up the search in Katla's place at Holt. Each time they return, they will look exactly in the very spot the child was hidden before.

Katla expects that to happen and hides her child in a different place and in a different manner every time and she knows to work a different magick too. Thrice her strivings succeed, but the fourth time the men learned to expect magical illusions and brought with them another witch for help. This time, Katla didn't see them coming soon enough to prepare another new perfect hideaway for her child, the magick doesn't work this time. The men find and kill her child.

In her grief and anger Katla curses the men, they should stay in bad luck from now on. After that, the men kill Katla too.

The case is brought to the Thorsnes-Thing. All who parttook in the murders are taken away their property, and banned from the country for the rest of their lives. The buy a ship and sail away from Iceland, and there is no trace left of them after that.

More about Katla here.

Picture found here.

Earth Hour And A Little Bit More

So, I've been thinking a lot about the whole Earth Hour thing and about whether it's better to participate or to not participate, and, then, this afternoon, I remembered something that I once heard Christopher Penzack say about Witches who complain about some problem or another. He said that he always wants to respond, "Well, gee. You're a Witch. Why don't you do something about that?"

Which, you know, is a good point.

So I will be participating in Earth Hour. I will turn off all of my lights as well as all unneeded appliances that use electricity. But I will also spend that hour doing magic to help those who are searching for way to save this lovely Planet that is both deity, home, and source of magic to me. I'm a Witch. I can do something about the conflict between a media-driven-feel-good event and the need for real and serious change that actually helps Earth.

******

As a postscript, I'll add that the whole notion of turning off our lights at night just implicates so many of this society's issues with darkness, night, etc. It's got to be good for us to delve into that, even a little bit.

Picture found here.

Earth Hour

I get, I really do, all of the progressive objections to an event such as this one. I get that it can be viewed as a meaningless gesture, one that took more carbon to organize and publicize than it saves, one that lets people feel as if they've "done something" and then go back to driving Hummers and throwing away plastic bottles, one that cannont, by itself, change what politicians or corporations do. I get it. I get that we can't consume our way out of our global crisis and I get that the American military consumes so much carbon that it can seem pointless to worry about what I do.

And, yet, I will be turning off my lights and other appliances this Saturday. I will be doing it because I can and because this Planet is my deity. I will be doing it because every time that the people of the Earth work together to do anything positive, the noosphere gets stronger and the good goes beyond the immediately measurable. I will be doing it because I have a grandson.

What about you?