Yet More Friday Fun

More Friday Fun

Friday Fun

Friday Cat Blogging

Miss Thing lives to be admired.

Thanks, Obama, For Giving The Christianists Another Win. And They Won't Vote For You, Anyway.

Now what is it about this that is so difficult to understand?

At the risk of heresy, let it be said that setting up the two presidential candidates for religious interrogation by an evangelical minister -- no matter how beloved -- is supremely wrong.

For the past several days, since mega-pastor Rick Warren interviewed Barack Obama and John McCain at his Saddleback Church, most political debate has focused on who won.

Was it the nuanced, thoughtful Obama, who may have convinced a few more skeptics that he isn't a Muslim? Or was it the direct, confident McCain, who breezes through town-hall-style meetings the way Obama sinks three-pointers from the back court?

The candidates' usual supporters felt validated in their choices. McCain convinced and comforted with characteristic certitude those who are most at ease with certitude; Obama convinced and comforted with his characteristic intellectual ambivalence those who are most at ease with ambivalence.

The winner, of course, was Warren, who has managed to position himself as political arbiter in a nation founded on the separation of church and state.

The loser was America.

In his enormously successful book "The Purpose-Driven Life," Warren begins: "It's not about you." Agreed. Nor is this criticism aimed at Christians, evangelicals, other believers or nonbelievers -- or at Warren, who is a good man with an exemplary record of selfless works. Few have walked the walk with as much determination or success.

This is about higher principles that are compromised every time we pretend we're not applying a religious test when we're really applying a religious test.

It is true that no one was forced to participate in the Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency and that both McCain and Obama are free agents. Warren has a right to invite whomever he wishes to his church and to ask them whatever they're willing to answer.

His format and questions were interesting and the answers more revealing than what the usual debate menu provides. But does it not seem just a little bit odd to have McCain and Obama chatting individually with a preacher in a public forum about their positions on evil and their relationship with Jesus Christ?

The past few decades of public confession and Oprah-style therapy have prepared us perfectly for a televangelist probing politicians about their moral failings. Warren's Q&A wasn't an inquisition exactly, but viewers would be justified in squirming.

Go read the whole thing here.

I'll just add that I blame Obama even more than I blame Warren or McCain. Obama's the Democrat. He's supposed to fucking know better.

Maryland Ren Faire

I'm going to take G/Son. I used to take another little boy.

How many tarot cards can you spot? I see the six of wands, the Fool, the Lovers, the Emperor, the Hermit, the three of cups, the six of cups, . . . .

Don't Tell Me Prachett Was Never In A Coven

How our planning meetings generally go.

Listen To The Wind

It's mid-August, just past the full moon between two dark moons in the same month. It's that point on this whirling ferris wheel of a planet when things seem to pause, just at the top of the wheel, although the wheel is really moving madly along.

Here in northern Virginia, it's been v, v dry, no rain for weeks. I'm back into the triage watering of last summer, when we were in a deep drought. The first v few green acorns have already started falling off the oak trees and hitting my roof. They scare Miss Thing now, but, by September, she'll ignore them.

There's something about the beginning of Autumn, even the Indian Summer of early Septembe,r that instills a sense of purpose, that gets me motivated. When I was in school, I loved the fat new notebooks, the sharpened pencils, the sense of possibility that came from cracking the spines of brand new textbooks. I make new year's resolutions at Samhein, and the time from Lughnasada, through Mabon, on to Samhein is time to get serious; time to dig down and try to accomplish whatever's left undone.

It's coming. If you listen, you can hear the cold wind blowing leaves in swirls around your feet.

Picture found here.

My New Name For A Blog

What Jason Said:

The post-Christian era is upon us, and the longer the two major political parties court 25% of America's religious adherents to the near-exclusion of nearly everyone else, the sooner they experience irrelevance as that demographic becomes just one voice in a cacophony of faiths and philosophies.

I hope Mr. Purpose-Driven (as if life were something to be "driven" ick!) Warren adopts a vow of silence tomorrow. Mr. Obama, every time that I'm about to open my checkbook, you find a way to make me close it. Just saying. You can balance my money v all those donations you think you're going to get from fundies and make your own determination.

Art found here.

Yes!

So this morning, in spite of not getting to sleep until 11:00 last night, G/Son rolled out of bed at 7:00 am and announced, with a satisfied smile, "Nonna! I waked up!" We should all approach the day like that!

We had some breakfast and played around in Nonna's yard and then, in Nonna's neverending effort to educate, we went to the lovely Whitman Walker garden and fed the koi fish and walked the labyrinth. "Nonna! I'm walking the path! Nonna! I got to the sitting rock!" Not meditative, but good.

Then, Nonna's plan was to find the nature center with the bee hive under glass, and the slice of a big tree showing all the rings, and some turtles. But Dinoysis, whom I believe guards this child, intervened. Nonna took the wrong entrance into the park and there, instead of a nature center, as G/Son immediately noted, was: A carousel!

Nonna: Do you think we can ride it?

G/Son: Yes, Nonna. We can!

When we went to buy a ticket for the carousel, there was a small locomotive that goes all around the park. G/Son adores trains above all else and he said: Look! Nonna! A train! A red one!

Nonna: Do you think we can ride it?

G/Son: Yes, Nonna! You and I can ride the train!

And, so, we did. We were the last pair to get on the train for this ride and we sat directly behind the conductor. Waiting in line, G/Son was literally jumping up and down and saying, "I'm happy! I'm happy!" He held my hand all the way through the park and periodically looked up at me to say, "Nonna, we're riding. We're riding the train." I don't know if it gets any better than this, and here's my admission against interest to Life, but, you know, for me, at least, it doesn't have to. If this is the apogee of how good it gets, well, it got better than I ever had any reason to expect that it would.

After we got off the train, we rode the carousel. Because, as Auntie Mame famously announced, life's a banquet and some poor suckers are starving to death. Not G/Son and me. Not us.

Sunny Summer Saturday.

I drove past the beautiful Potomac River Saturday morning and it was the exact shade of bottle-green jade that can only be described as Summer River Green. Of course, it made me remember this poem:

Nymph, nymph, what are your beads?

Green glass, goblin. Why do you stare at them?

Give them me.
No.

Give them me. Give them me.
No.

Then I will howl all night in the reeds,
Lie in the mud and howl for them.

Goblin, why do you love them so?

They are better than stars or water,
Better than voices of winds that sing,
Better than any man's fair daughter,
Your green glass beads on a silver ring.

Hush, I stole them out of the moon.

Give me your beads, I want them.
No.

I will howl in the deep lagoon
For your green glass beads, I love them so.
Give them me. Give them.
No.

-- Harold Monro


I went to a knitting class at Stitch DC; all of the knitters there were far, far better than I. Interesting group of women, all ages, various ethnicities, sitting on Capitol Hill, comfortably silent for long stretches, with only the clack of knitting needles. Of course, we sat in a circle. It's what women do, and it's powerful. I learned a new way to cast on stitches and a new way to increase a stitch. We'll see if that's enough for me to make my first pair of mittens w/ a thumb.

I drove back home past the beautiful Potomac River. By late afternoon, it was giving back to the sky the same lovely blue color that the sky was giving to the river. Boats dotted the river just as fluffy clouds dotted the sky. I could only think: As above, so below. It's all real; it's all metphor. There's always more.

I stopped on the way home for more of the free mulch that Arlington County gives away. All of the lovely, dark leaf mold was gone, but I got two big bags of wood mulch.

Spent the evening w my G/Son. We read Mother Goose. Life is good. May it be so for you.


Green glass bead found here.

Yet More Friday Fun

More Friday Fun

Friday Fun

The Time Of Picking Apples, Of Rendering Goose Fat

She said nothing. Her eyes were black as coal, black as her hair; her lips were redder than blood. She looked up at me and smiled. Her teeth seemed sharp, even then, in the lamplight.

"What are you doing away from your room?"

"I'm hungry," she said, like any child.

It was winter, when fresh food is a dream of warmth and sunlight; but I had strings of whole apples, cored and dried, hanging from the beams of my chamber, and I pulled an apple down for her.

"Here."

Autumn is the time of drying, of preserving, a time of picking apples, of rendering the goose fat. Winter is the time of hunger, of snow, and of death; and it is the time of the midwinter feast, when we rub the goose-fat into the skin of a whole pig, stuffed with that autumn's apples, then we roast it or spit it, and we prepare to feast upon the crackling.

She took the dried apple from me and began to chew it with her sharp yellow teeth.

"Is it good?"

She nodded. I had always been scared of the little princess, but at that moment I warmed to her and, with my fingers, gently, I stroked her cheek. She looked at me and smiled -- she smiled but rarely -- then she sank her teeth into the base of my thumb, the Mound of Venus, and she drew blood.

I began to shriek, from pain and from surprise; but she looked at me and I fell silent.


~Snow, Glass, Apples, written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Julie Dillon.

Picture found here.

And The Debate Goes On (W/ Apologies To Sonny & Cher)

Faced with several possible interpretations based on the evidence we correlated, it became clear that although it remained possible that Gerald Gardner may have created the tradition, it was certainly not that plausible in comparison to some of the other conclusions that we reached. In fact, at this stage of our research we feel that it is most likely that Gardner was not that much of a charlatan after all, but that his accounts of initiation into an existing tradition, upon which he later expanded, were truthful. When stripped right back, without the many additions and evolutions it has undergone since the 1950’s, Gerald Gardner’s ‘Witch Cult’ appears to predate him by at least some years.

~Sorita d’Este and David Rankine discuss their book, Wicca, Magickal Beginnings.


Perhaps more interesting to me than the ever-debated question of whether (YES!) or not (YES!) Gardner created a "new" religion (is there such a thing? YES! NO!), is d'Este's and Rankine's discussion of Wicca as a mystery religion:

Whilst debating the possible starting point of this magickal tradition, we realised that all the evidence being presented was focused on the people who were the early public face of the tradition and their contemporaries. Yet this is a tradition which is also called a ‘Craft’ and which is an experiential tradition where personal experience is paramount for the understanding of the practices and beliefs. So why were we debating the origins of the tradition in terms of who said or did what?

. . .

Having asked ourselves all these questions again and again over the years, . . . we found that ultimately Wicca remained a mystery tradition at its heart. The practices and beliefs could only be fully understood through direct experience thereof and it was through this that the tradition could be best defined, not through the endless debates about lineages, initiations and personalities!

The definition of a mystery religion (or "tradition" as the authors would have it) as one that can only be understood through direct experience rings true for me; Wicca is what you do. I've been reading The Wiccan Mystic: Exploring a Magical Spiritual Path (religion, tradition, path, we're a confused people; I love us that way) by Ben Gruagach, who spends considerable time trying to define what a mystery religion is, and then determining that, even though Wicca fails to meet several prongs of his definition, it still meets the important prong, so it must be a mystery religion!

Gruagach says that mystery religions:

*require formal initiation

*have secrets shared only with members of the group

*focus their worship (bad word, IMHO, practice would be better) on communion with divine.

As examples of true mystery religions, he lists Eleusinian "cults" (v. bad word, IMHO), worship of Mithras, and the "cults" of ancient Egypt.

Gruagach says that Gardnerian Wicca was definitely a mystery religion: initiation by a "high degree" witch was required, secrets were shared (BoS!) only with members, and communion w/ the divine was sought through ecstatic practices, including flagellation, chanting, dance (if he were more thorough, he'd have added sex) (and drugs, including alcohol).

Yet, when he looks at modern Wicca, Gruagach finds initiation is often lacking; even in Gardner's day, there were certainly Solitaries who were never initiated by anyone (except, perhaps, by themselves. And, Deity. Which, would, you'd think, do the trick.) Similarly, there are, today, few Wiccan secrets not for sale in the aisles of any Barnes and Noble. (Except, of course, for the one that can't be printed in any book, posted on any website, or told by even a Ninth Degree witch to an Initiate: And you who seek to know Me, know that the seeking and yearning will avail you not, unless you know the Mystery: for if that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without. For behold, I have been with you from the beginning, and I am That which is attained at the end of desire. And that's where Gruagach concludes that Wicca does measure up to the most important prong of the mystery religion test:

Wiccans often perceive even mundane [now there's a word I hate] life as flooded w/ the Divine presence. Wicca is an experiential religion where one is expected to [I'd have said, "where one does" . . . "expectations" (of others) play so little a role in the religious life of most witches. You either do experience the divine or want to or you don't.] to actively seek out contact with the Divine [maybe "awareness of unity with" is better than "contact."] Concluding that it is likely that this characteristic [direct experience of Deity] is the essential core, the mystery of mystery religions Gruagach determines that Wicca is a mystery religion.

Does it matter? Probably not. One could live (and, certainly, through the centuries, many have lived) with intimate awareness of unity with the Divine, do magic, perform ritual, dance the Spiral Dance, and be in every way a witch without ever having heard of mystery religions or considering whether Wicca is or is not one. As d'Este and Rankine note, Wicca is called The Craft for a reason and a craft is something one does, not only a body of intellectual knowledge.

But I like Gruagach's discussion for this reason: it highlights what I believe to be an important distinction between Wicca and many of the "accepted" world religions. In what I find to be a rather icky attempt at "inclusiveness," xians, in particular, often talk about "people of faith" as if that somehow included all (real) religions. But it most emphatically does not include a mystery religion such as Wicca, where faith plays no role at all and experience is everything. (And you who seek to know Me, know that the seeking and yearning [and having faith] will avail you not, unless you know the Mystery: for if that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without. For behold, I have been with you from the beginning, and I am That which is attained at the end of desire. ). Other religions, xianity, Judaism, Islam, Hindus, and even Buddhists may have their occasional mystics, the Levi Yitzchaks of Berditchov, the St. Theresas, the Rumis, etc., who directly experience union with Divinity, but one can be a full-fledged leader of, say, Catholicism, without ever having had such an experience. As long as one has faith, (OK, and for Catholics, who, perhaps more than Protestants, retain a few mystery traits, as long as one is baptised (initiated)) one is "saved," a complete member of the faith. Me, I find everytime that someone wants me to take something on faith, they're trying to sell me something, put one over on me. You gotta Deity? Show me. Otherwise, meh.

This focus on experience may be why the concept of S/he's a witch but doesn't know it is common among many witches. We can recognize people who aren't Wiccan, would recoil at the suggestion that they're witches, but who clearly live in touch with Divinity, do magic, have found the Mystery within themselves, with them from the beginning, and attained at the end of all desire.

May it be so for you.


Art found here.

This Has Been . . . Drinking With Twisty

There are v few people with whom I would rather.

Whoooosssssssshhhhhhhh!

The Magical Tools Of The Twenty-First Century

Here's Angela, using her cell phone as a magical tool:

And then I woke up — with the song still in my head. I sang it to myself several times, hoping to remember it the next morning. I tried to go back to sleep.

But my bladder thought differently, and I realized if I didn’t record the song now I would not remember the tune in the morning.

So, I grabbed my cell phone and went to the restroom. Afterward, I called my voice mail at work and sang the song.

Art found here

Burning Person

Burning Man 2008.

Still ignoring half of the planet.