Make Believe

Gaia Needs Good Media Relations

Here's what looks like a pretty neat film.

I'd like to use it to make another in my regular series of points about dealing with the media. Observe the difference in how Francesca De Grandis and Joan Marler come across. Both women make incredibly valid points, but Marler looks directly into the camera while De Grandis is often looking off to the side or at the person holding the camera, rather than into the camera.

It's a fairly common trait to look off to the side when you're thinking of what you want to say, but people who do research on jury reactions will tell you that most people subconsciously think that you're looking away because you're prevaricating, that there's a reason why you won't "look them in the eye." My bet is that, in person, De Grandis doesn't come off this way, as she fairly often does look up and into the eyes of the person to whom she's speaking. The problem in this case is that "that person" is the one holding the camera, not the camera. And her real "audience" is inside the camera.

This isn't something that you're likely to "get" without someone showing it to you, but it is an easily mastered skill once you're aware of the issue and spend a bit of time practicing, even with a friend who has an iPhone that takes video. If you're planning to be taped, or if you're making your own videos for youtube, it's really worth spending some time practicing, critiquing yourself, and then practicing again.

Gaia can use all the help she can get.

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.

Dancing with Shadows

It can be difficult, as I discussed recently, to find good Pagan books. This week, I've begun reading -- and am being blown away by -- David Abram's Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. Abram, to my knowledge, doesn't self-identify as a Pagan, although his bio at The Alliance for Wild Ethics says that Abram is:

An accomplished storyteller and sleight-of-hand magician who has lived and traded magic with indigenous sorcerers in Indonesia, Nepal, and the Americas . . . .

and he's certainly studied and written about magic. Becoming Animal is, in any event, a Pagan book, in the true sense of the word. The Politics and Prose write-up says:

The shapeshifting of ravens, the erotic nature of gravity, the eloquence of thunder, the pleasures of being edible: all have their place in Abram’s investigation. He shows that from the awakened perspective of the human animal, awareness (or mind) is not an exclusive possession of our species but a lucid quality of the biosphere itself—a quality in which we, along with the oaks and the spiders, steadily participate.

I'm particularly struck by Abram's discussion of shadows. Having worked with James Hillman, it's not surprising that Abram writes about shadows in ways that have multiple meanings. Although he's ostensibly talking about the kind of shadows we cast upon the ground when the sun is shining, I find some of his passages to be equally applicable (and I can't believe Abram isn't aware of what he's doing) to Jungian shadows, as well. Here's a small example:

One of the marks of our obliviousness, one of the countless signs that our thinking minds have grown estranged from the intelligence of our sensing bodies, is that today a great many people seem to believe that shadows are flat. . . . We identify our shadow, in other words, with that visible shape we see projected on the pavement or the whitewashed wall. Since what we glimpse there is a being without depth [heh], we naturally assume that shadows themselves are basically flat -- and if we are asked by a curious child about the life of shadows [again, heh] we are apt to reply that their lives exist in only two dimensions [ok, I'll stop with the "heh"s, but I think you see my point].

. . .

[M]y actual shadow is an enigma more substantial than that flat shape on the ground. That silhouette is only my shadow's outermost surface. . . . [The] apparent gap between myself and that flat swath of darkness is what prompts me, now and then, to accept its invitation to dance, the two of us then strutting and ducking in an improvised pas de deux wherein it's never very clear which one of us is leading [heh; can't help myself] and which is following. It is now obvious, however, that that shape slinking along on the pavement is merely the outermost edge of a thick volume of shade, an umbral depth that extends from the pavement right on up to my knees, torso, and head -- a shadow touching me not just at my feet, but at every point of my person.

Or maybe I'm completely wrong and Abram, trying heroically to get us back in actual touch with the physical shadows cast by our bodies, would berate me for needing to find verbal twists and psychological constructs literally breaking through his words. Indeed, in the essay on magic, linked above, Abram says:

For it is likely that the "inner world" of our Western psychological experience, like the supernatural heaven of Christian belief, originated in the loss of our ancestral reciprocity with the living landscape. When the animate presences with whom we have evolved over several million years are suddenly construed as having less significance than ourselves, when the generative earth that gave birth to us is defined as a soulless or determinate object devoid of sensitivity and sentience, then that wild otherness with which human life had always been entwined must migrate, either into a supersensory heaven beyond the natural world, or else into the human skull itself--the only allowable refuge, in this world, for what is ineffable and unfathomable.

At any rate, it's a meaty book (odd choice of words, perhaps, for a book entitled "Becoming Animal") and one full of the Pagan understanding that EVERYTHING is alive and longing to be in communion, that, "it's all real; it's all [heh] metaphor; there's always more."

If you've read it, or Abram's earlier book, The Spell of the Sensuous I'd love to know your reactions.

Update: As the stumbling oral reading above makes clear, this is a book written to be read, not spoken. The language is lush, almost rococo, and one needs to remain fully present to read it. I'm reading it, as a result, as a series of amuses-gueule, and not in one or two "swell foops," as my grandma used to say.

Taking Allies Wherever They Are Found

Genius Loci

Place is what takes me out of myself, out of the limited scope of human activity, but this is not misanthropic. A sense of place is a way of embracing humanity among all of its neighbors. It is an entry into the larger world.

~Robert M. Pyle

Picture found here.

Ritual Often Enacts Story

Sounds lovely

So the young High Priestess will wear a green gown trimmed with leaves, and call the spirit of Gaia, whom the Greeks honored as the Mother of All Things. The young High Priest will wear a green vest, furry trousers, and suede boots to call the spirit of Pan, Greek God of rustic people and places.

The four classical elements, Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, will be honored. I asked Martha about the role Water will have.

Martha said the young man calling Water will talk about how our bodies are mostly water. And that the same water that is in us falls to the earth, flows into streams, and into the ocean, then back again as rain. That it connects us all.

. . .

And so, the young people of Four Winds Fellowship and anyone who wants to join them will link arms Saturday afternoon. And they will roll their bodies forward at the waist, around in a circle, as the Na’avi did when beseeching their own Goddess for aid. And the prayer will go out that we all can begin to feel the invisible cords of energy that connect all living beings. And that somehow, the hurts of Earth, Ocean and Sky can be healed.

Picture found here.

Pagan In The City

If you read this blog even periodically (for which, thank you!) you know that one of my themes is the need to incorporate into Paganism and Witchcraft the reality that most Pagans and Witches now live in urban areas.

A chunk of my heart -- and there's not a day goes by that I don't dream of being there, building a cabin, watching the sunlight make dappled shade among the trees -- lives in the mountains of West Virginia, but an even bigger part of my heart dances daily upon the shores of the Potomac just before it reaches the Lincoln Memorial, upon tree-covered Spout Run, upon the weeds that grow along the ramp from the GW Parkway up to the Roosevelt Bridge. I work in the city and live just outside it and I can't be a Witch only once or twice a year when I get up into the mountains. I'm a Witch every day and I'm the Witch of "this" place and that means that I need to be in relation with the natural world here. Here, among the tall buildings, metro stops, museums, cafes, fountains, statues. I'm the Nonna of a G/Son who's spent his whole life in a urban area and for whom, I truly believe, being in relationship with the natural world will be even more important than it's been for me.

So, I'm always delighted to find resources for connecting with nature within my shining city upon a swamp and a hill. Here are a few:

The Natural Capital, (a word play on The Nation's Capital) is a celebration of the wealth of nature right here under our noses in the Nation's Capital. We aim to open your eyes to the amazing plants, animals, and scenery in our region – much of it accessible by public transportation.

Natural Capital is also a concept in environmental economics: the concept that the ecosystem that sustains and surrounds us has inherent, but tragically overlooked, value. We need trees, for example, because they provide clean air and clean water. They are also beautiful, and the beauty of nature has value as well. Which brings us back to the purpose of this blog: getting outside to enjoy it all.


A DC Birding Blog is written by a birder who lived for years in DC. He currently blogs from NJ, but there's a significant bit of overlap.

Mountain Beltway got its name because [i]t turns out that a mountain belt runs right under the Beltway! The Appalachian mountain belt includes the modern-day Appalachian mountains, but also includes the hilly terrain immediately east of the mountains: the Piedmont physiographic province. Beneath these gentle hills are metamorphic rocks, granites, and a wealth of deformational structures that speak of a time when the Appalachians were young. These mountains were formed in the Paleozoic era of geologic time in a series of tectonic pulses called “orogenies.” The mountain-building culminated about 300 million years ago, when eastern North America collided with northwestern Africa. The story of how the Appalachian mountain belt got put together is a primary interest of the author of this blog. Lots of photos to help those of who who only took Geology 101.


Not specific to DC, but worth checking out if you are an urban Pagan: The Vigorous North, a field guide to inner city wilderness areas, is well-written, thorough, and explains "scientific stuff" in ways that even an amateur will find interesting.

It's not a blog, but the website of the United States Botanical Garden, smack dab in the middle of Capitol Hill, is chock full of information and events, including: Please join us for Yoga in the National Garden 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. starting June 9th and information on how to Green Your World: Big changes start with small steps – individuals, families, businesses, and governments can all make a difference in improving our planet’s potential to provide for generations to come.

One of my favorite places in DC, just a bus ride and a jaunt from the Capital Dome, is the National Arboretum. They do monthly Full Moon hikes that will warm the cockles of any Witch's heart: Four-mile-long, mildly strenuous hike through moonlit gardens, meadows and woods. Your guide will share several points of special interest and seasonal highlights. The two-hour walk over hilly and uneven terrain is more of a brisk hike than a tour so wear good walking shoes and dress for the weather. Please, no pets or children under 16. Fee: $22 ($18 FONA) Registration required. They do a lot of programs on bonsai, which can be a great way to bring a tree into your apartment, duplex, or office.

You may need either a car or bike to get there, but the DC Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens are truly spectacular, especially this time of year, and are great for making you feel as if you're a million miles away from the pavement and concrete. I've been there when DC cops were just chilling during their lunch hour, trying to get away from it all for a few minutes. I've seen beaver dams and dragon flies and lotus pods as big around as five dinner plates. The website explains that: Like a time capsule from the past, one finds remnants of Washington's natural past here. There are plants that fed the local civilization for thousands of years, mink skitter on the islands in winter, and colorful summer butterflies feed on wetland plants preserved here. By preserving a part of the flood plain of the Anacostia River, Congress authorized a park that serves the public by filtering water, reducing flood damage, and preserving the biological and cultural resources that let us see from the past into the future. A haven for artists and photographers.

TR Island, within a stone's throw of the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Memorial, and Red Cross Headquarters, is one of the best places I know to disappear into nature in the middle of the city. It has several walking trails. I've seen beaver, deer, eagles, and hawks.

Rock Creek Park has a number of programs designed for kids.

National Capital Astronomers can help you to focus on what's going on in the heavens (as above, so below), including Exploring the Sky . . . an informal program that for over sixty years has offered monthly opportunities for anyone in the Washington area to see the stars and planets through telescopes from a location within the District of Columbia, which sounds great for kids. Astronomy in DC has a calendar of local events, as does DC Astronomy. Our area suffers from a lot of light pollution, but these sites can help you see the planets and stars in spite of that.

You might also check out DC Nature, Trail Voice, and Potomac River Keepers.

What resources help you connect with nature in the city?

Picture found here.

Seriously. This Is One Of My Main Missions As A Nonna.

"As basic as reading, writing, and arithmetic." I'd argue: far more.

Also see, e.g., Gus.

Earth Day

Blessed Earth Day

Forty years ago, I did not know that I would live each day a priestess to Mother Earth. But I would not have turned away from that future. Indeed, I would have set out running, stumbling, in awe of the notion that I might get here.

May it be so for you.




Perhaps he would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fulness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humourously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.

'Rat!' he found breath to whisper, shaking. 'Are you afraid?'

'Afraid?' murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. 'Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet— and yet— O, Mole, I am afraid!'

Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship.

Sudden and magnificent, the sun's broad golden disc showed itself over the horizon facing them; and the first rays, shooting across the level water-meadows, took the animals full in the eyes and dazzled them. When they were able to look once more, the Vision had vanished, and the air was full of the carol of birds that hailed the dawn.

As they stared blankly. in dumb misery deepening as they slowly realised all they had seen and all they had lost, a capricious little breeze, dancing up from the surface of the water, tossed the aspens, shook the dewy roses and blew lightly and caressingly in their faces; and with its soft touch came instant oblivion. For this is the last best gift that the kindly demi- god is careful to bestow on those to whom he has revealed himself in their helping: the gift of forgetfulness. Lest the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the after-lives of little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that they should be happy and lighthearted as before.

We Can Love The Land And It Can Love Us Back

In our language, the word for our bodies contains the word for land. Everytime I say that word . . . I'm saying that I'm from the land and my body is the land.

What our grandparents have said is that the land feeds us but we feed the land as well. We live on the land and we use the land and, in so doing, we impact the land: we can destroy it, or we can love the land it can love us back.

~Jeannette Armstrong, quoted in We'Moon 2012.

Picture found here.

Yes, Yes It Is

Go look at the picture at the end of Reya's post. Just go do it and then come back and tell me the world is not en-chanted. I dare you.

Listening To The Land

I particularly like this description of developing a relationship with a landbase from Derrick Jensen's new novel because it's so realistic. Sometimes I read about Pagans (nb: Jensen doesn't claim to be a Pagan) who have a relationship with nature and it sounds so effortless. It's not like that for me, at least not most of the time and it certainly wasn't in the beginning. I can be left feeling dejected: I must be doing it "wrong." Maybe I just lack the ability to do this, maybe I'll never be good at it, maybe I should go throw in a load of laundry. Jensen describes the incremental steps by which someone serious about having a relationship with the land can work past some of the obstacles that I think almost all of us face but that few of us discuss in such detail.

I lie face down in a small patch of forest behind our home. A fire swept through maybe a dozen years before we moved in, and the new trees have grown tall in the time since. I smell small plants, and soil and the calming brown smell of duff. I feel plants on my face, and a small stone against my cheek. I shift slightly so it doesn't poke me.

Almost immediately -- literally within two or three seconds -- I have to fight an almost frantic boredom. For all I've written about a relationship with the land, and for all I've tried to live in relationship with the land where I live, I still feel an overwhelming urge to get away to do anything but stay where I am, to do anything but touch the ground. I want to go back to the house, play some poker online, check my e-mail, call a friend. I think about the sound of distant cars on the interstate. I think about the phone bill I need to pay. I think about the celery I need to buy. . . .

I am anywhere but where I am.

It shouldn't be so hard to stay where I am, but it is. What am I afraid of?

I try to bring myself back. I'm not trying to meditate; I've never really liked meditation as such. People ask me if I meditate, if I sit silently with my breath and try to still my mind, and I always tell them I live with trees and butterflies, and I like to sit with them.

That's true enough, so far as it goes, but all of my time touching trees now seems superficial to me, as though I was looking at them and even seeing them as well as I could, but still not seeing them at all.

Lying here, I realize how very scared I am. My frantic boredom is not really boredom, but fear. Of what?

I hear a voice. Not Allison's, but the voice I heard in the forest when I first fell through time. The voice says the same thing it said then: "Don't fight it."

I want to feel Allison's belly against my back, her warmth and wetness against my him She doesn't have to move. I just want to feel that skin to skin contact

The voice says, "Come closer."

I want to feel my face tight against her skin, buried anywhere she can wrap around me, between her neck and shoulders, her arm and chest, her breasts, her thighs. I want to feel my cheek against her belly.

"Come."

I know what's wrong. I don't know what's right, only what's wrong. I remove my clothes, lie flat on my stomach. I hold my arms and legs tight to keep my weight from fully pressing on the rough surface of the ground and the sharp pine needles.

"Come closer."

I do. I open m arms and open my legs. I press down my hips, no differently, and no less gently, no less intimately, no less invitingly that I would with Allison.

If I am expecting some miracle, it doesn't come. I merely feel myself flat against the ground.

But I do begin to relax, starting with my shoulders, then m arms, then my back, hips, belly. I'm less stiff, more smooth.

I smell the soil, I smell the old needles, I smell the plants. And now mixed with all that are the intimate smells from between my legs, front, back.

And then? Nothing. Not yet.

I see the sun glinting off the torn leaf of some plant whose name I don't know, and hovering near my face I see a tiny gnat whose name I also don't know. I see a fly crawling on a rotting log not far way, and farther off I see a chipmunk take three lightning steps, then stop, tail flicking, then take three more, then stop.

I relax more. My face falls into the ground. I open my legs further.

It's quiet. I hear a blue jay calling as it flies overhead. In the far distance a hawk. In the small slice of sky I can see without moving my head, I see two crows dancing with each other.

I close my eyes. I don't know if I sleep.

When I open then I see a snake. It is maybe five feet from me. It is a garter snake. It doesn't move.

I watch it for a while, then close my eyes again. When I open them the snake is gone.

Finally, I know what I need to say to the land. I say, softly, yet out loud, "Tell me."

It doesn't. I know that it doesn't yet trust me that much. I don't blame it.

I go back every day. Every day I see more, every day I presume more sees me. Every day I lie body pressed flat against the earth and every day I say, "Tell me. Tell me who you are."

I think it's partly that listening at all, even to other humans, isn't a skill that we're taught or that's given much importance in our culture. And, I think it's also, as Jensen asks, a matter of Why should the land trust any of us?

Picture found here.

As Good As It Gets, And, Really, I'm A Mystic. I Would Know

I picked G/Son up this morning and, on our way out, I asked Son if he'd come over and help me take my old hose off the spigot, put a new hose on the same spigot, and pick up a box of day lilies. As we were pulling out, G/Son said to me, "Nonna, you need some help?" I said, "Yes, Nonna's an old woman and sometimes she needs help with hard jobs." G/Son's response, as are most of his responses these days, was: "Why? Why you are an old woman and need help, Nonna?" I said, "Nonna's 53. She needs help sometimes." G/Son said, "I'm not 53; I'm three." I said, "Yes, you're three; next year, you'll be four." G/Son said, "Nonna, I told Mommy and Daddy that I want to be three for my whole life."

I had to pull over for a minute to wipe the tears from my old eyes.

I said, "Well, there's a lot to come before you have your next birthday and turn four. In September, Pop Pop will have his birthday, and then, in October, we'll have Halloween and you get to dress up like Batman and go trick or treating. In November, Daddy has his birthday and Mommy will cook Thanksgiving. Then, we'll have Yule when Santa comes." G/Son said, "Yes, and he will bring me a real toy T Rex with big teeth. Will we write Santa a letter?" I said that we would and then we had a long discussion about how the North Polar Bear always messes up Santa's plans. I said, "And then, in February, Mommy will have a birthday, and only then, after all that, we'll have your birthday and you'll turn four. And I bet four will be a lot of fun."

G/Son thought about all this and he said, "Nonna, it's like a circle." I said, "Yes, it is. It's like a wheel that keeps going around and around." G/Son said, "Will my birthday keep going around?" and I said, "Yes, it will. It will come around for as long as you live and, then, for as long as your loved ones remember it." G/Son said, "My loved ones will always remember my birthday."

Once again, the old lady is on the side of the road w/ the watery eyes.

So mote it be. May they call you at Samhein as far into the future as either of us can see, Dear One. What is remembered does not die.

We went to the park and rode the train through the woods. I said to G/Son, "I love the woods. Thanks for coming on this ride with me," and G/Son said, "Nonna, you don't want to be lonely in the woods, " and I said, "No, no I don't, but I am never alone in the woods." G/Son said, "We can ride in the woods together." We rode a tailless horse on the carousel, we climbed over a dead tree and, then, we rode a different horse on the carousel. We took a picnic lunch to the Nature Center and we discussed whether Batman is stronger than Spiderman or whether Spiderman, at his strongest, might actually be Batman dressed up as Spiderman. We concluded that sometimes, Batman dresses up as Spiderman. And we acknowledged that Shawney, G/Son's best friend, really, really loves Spiderman.

We went to the Nature Center and took a class on honeybees. G/Son explained to the v nice lady who taught the class, and to the other members of the class, six and seven year old girls all, that bees are helpful because they help us make pizza, which must have spinach which is good for your muscles, and tomatoes, and we need bees to pollinate all of those. And, we did a bee dance to show: the flowers are nearby, and we did a bee dance to show: the flowers are a long way away. We looked at a dead bee and we tasted clover honey, wildflower honey, and buckwheat honey. The witch's grandson asked, "Which is better for you when you are sick?" and the v nice lady said, "Any kind of honey will make your throat feel better when you are sick," and G/Son said, "Mommy gives me honey if I am sick. Not the buckwheat kind." We climbed over a lot of rocks and we learned that smoke makes honeybees think that a forest fire is coming so they eat a lot of honey and get sleepy.

G/Son's takeaway: Honey is "bee puke," but we say "regurgitation" instead of "puke."

On the way back to his house, G/Son "read" me the book on bees that the nice nature center lady gave to him. Next weekend, we are going to the firefly teach-in and the firefly picnic at the local nature center. I imagine that this is all pure grace; I can't believe that I've ever done anything, in any incarnation, to deserve this.

I am blessed. May it be so for you.

Nonna! Did You Know???

Son and DiL took G/Son on a hike today on the Rachel Carson Greenway.

My phone rang this afternoon and the most excited little voice said: "Nonna! We're in the WOODS! And, hey, Nonna! Did you know that frogs can SING?"

Swear to Goddess, this grandparent thing is the best thing, EVER!

And, thank you, Ms. Carson, that all these years later, there are still frogs to sing to my G/Son

More info: here and here.