Knowing Your Landbase In The City

There's another article in the current issue of Sage Woman that goes to my points about the importance of grounding your practice in your own landbase and watershed. Tchipakkan writes movingly of the differences between her practice in New England and the traditional Wheel of the Year Sabbats.

The things [that] we celebrate here in New England are usualy the same as other people: harvest, the land going to sleep for the winter being with our friends in snug homes, the say the gods show themselves in the turn of the seasons But we do not celebrate at the same time as those in warmer climes our local strawberries come in regularly around the Summer Solstice, so to us strawberries are intimately linked with Litha (what many Pagans call Mid-Summer). But I think of June s the beginning of summer; not its middle. Nor is Yule "Mid-winter" to us; at the Winter Solstice the snow has barely begun to accumulate if it has even started falling yet.

and

It seems to me that almost all Pagan holidays must be essentially local. . . . If our Pagan practice is truly earth-centered, then we ought to celebrate the land spirits on our land, the bounty they nurture for us[,] not someone else. In the fall, we bring in apples from the orchards and celebrate the bounty of nature with a huge apple pie. If the cat do their job and keep away the mice, those apples will last until spring in our cellar, feeding us all winter long.

All great advice and good insights.

And yet, as I noted in my first post on this topic, today, many Pagans live in urban environments. The author begins her essay by explaining that: My husband and I decided to live out in the coutry where we could have a garden -- goats, chickens, rabbits, bees, the whole "back to the land", Mother Earth News, crunchy granola thing. I love it.

Our eldest thrives on the energy of cities, and moved away right after finishing high school, but the rest of us resonate to the rhythms of this land.

And that's lovely, except that even those who thrive on the energy of cities or who find themselves required to live there due to jobs or other arrangements also need to be able to resonate to the rhythms of the land. Yet one gets the impression reading Pagan journals and books that almost all Pagans live out on the land, practice permaculture, and raise bees. They don't. And our American Pagan practice won't mature until we admit this and quit writing off those who live in cities. Sure, cities could be better designed to give their residents better opportunities to be in touch with their landbase, Goddess knows, but that's no help to the urban Pagan attempting to have a Pagan practice more in touch with 21st century America than Iron Age Britain.

In fact, the author, herself, offers a few suggestions that can work for city dwellers:

The first step is to step outside and inhale -- smell the air. That will tell you a whole lot about what the [E]arth is doing where you are. Is it growing? Is it thawing? Is there rain or snow on the air? What's the appropriate clothing to wear if you go out? What wild plants grow near you? Even in the city there are plants that want to be our friends -- dandelions, burdock, clover, plantain, mullein, even nettle (which is a nourishing plant if you know how to gather and prepare it!)

For rituals and pot lucks, use locally-grown produce as the center of your celebrations. . . . Take the time and effort to communicate with the spirits in your house and yard; they're there, you just need to start listening to them! You may also be able . . . to learn to speak to the Spirit of your town. I've found that when one pays attention, and particularly [when one] makes offerings -- whether a pinch of grain or a song -- the spirits of place begin to bless us with their presence[,] as well. (Town and road spirits respond especially well to picking up roadside/parkland trash.) Fell and follow the energies in your area and you may find a spring or grove where you'll want to speak to the local deities of place and season. It doesn't take elaborate rituals or expensive supplies to communicate with the divine; all it takes is the sensitivity to listen, learn, and love where you are.

I'll add that many cities nowadays have a weekly or biweekly farmer's market where farmers from within the same watershed as the city can come and sell their produce. When I lived in an urban apartment surrounded by parking lots, streets, and shopping malls, going to the farmer's market once a week was a way for me to stay in touch with the seasons. Strawberries for only a few weeks in June, corn in late July and early August, apples in September.

How do you stay in touch with your landbase?

Picture found here.

And Every Breath We Drew Was Hallejuha

I moved in you, and the Holy Dove was moving too.

Picture found here.

I Am Still In Love

A Song About A Sense Of Place

Invocation To Hecate

Goddess of the cross-roads,
Goddess of Manic-Depression,
Dweller in the deep places of the earth and mind,
Traveller in the land between worlds!
Torch-bearer! Protectress of the very old and the very young;
Protectress of those used and abused;
Healer of those who are torn apart;
She will be there for us when we call on her and at the end.
Grandmother to lost children and to the downtrodden.
Nurse to the suckling infant,
Comfort to the lone man or woman in the darkest night.
She who seeks vengeance for her children who are wronged!
Wanderer and prowler!
Sorceress who lives at the edge of the mind.
Drawer-up of the secret compost from the unused internal well.
She who has no relatives on the earth save for her children.
Without Mother or Sister.
Lady on the brink, both bi-polar and uni-polar!
They call her mad, and it is she who terrifies the disbeliever and the
unworthy!
Bringer of nightmares!
But she it is who sooths the sleepless and disheveled spirit.
Mother of night!
Dark Power of the moon!
Keeper of the shadow!
Walker of the endless highways!
She unites those who follow her as her children; the Hekite.
Bearer of the sacred poppy.
Shape-shifter, Transformer.
Keeper of the hounds of Hel and the three-headed dog Cerebus!
She walks abroad in the hour of the wolf and under the Dark Moon!
Hear my call O Lady and cover us with your starry cloak.
Let the unborn moon seed in my heart this night.
And let her growing light shine upon our intention;
That she be at our full deliverance,
So Mote it be!

Erhard Hans Josef Lang

Picture found here.

Grounded In The Land

Yesterday, the latest issue of Sage Woman arrived and it's got several articles that touch on my earlier point about the need to ground your practice in your own landbase, watershed, space. In particular Leni Hestert writes:

My awareness of the Wheel, coupled with knowledge of the landscape in which I live, forms the foundation of my magickal practice. An intimate relationship with Land, Climate, and Weather is rewarding, but requires real work and presence. I began practicing Wicca when I lived in North Carolina, a temperate, densely wooded, damp environment. Later, I moved to Denver and found that this move created corresponding changes in my practice. . . . In order to stay connected to the Wheel, I had to shift and adapt my previous observances of the Eight Sabbats to match the conditions of a vastly different ecosystem and climate.

and

Whenever I find myself getting ungrounded flighty or disconnected, I merely go back to basics, think about where I am on the Wheel, and ground into that. It never fails to bring me back to connection with the world around me.

I think there's a tendency, when adapting "traditions" concerning the 8 Sabbats to our own environment and landbase to worry that we "r doin it wrong" as the LOL cat would say. That's a mistake. What's "right" is what works in terms of your relationship with your bit of Earth, not what used to work in Iron Age Ireland or wherever.

Picture found here.

For Mark Sanford

Would the white male Republicans who have been faithful to their wives please stand up? Thank you. Now, slap your own faces, grab your pee pees, and sit the fuck down and quit telling the rest of us how to have sex and how to deal with the results.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Tarot

POEM
Having My Cards Read

BY W. S. DI PIERO

Hobos wail a garbage can against
the cyclone links. The monkey puzzle tree
droops its scaly tails above our heads
as she sets up near the zoo’s bonobos,
humping happy in their cages close
to chimps ripping off each other’s ears.
And in the cloud reposing on the sky,
cut by an F22’s long hookah puffs,
the cyan atmospherics rupture into
solarized platelets: her Ray-Bans foil
my own face back at me:
A time of renewals
though somewhere
dark cold woe
You won’t know what’s what
Comes a taste of sea to make her pause,
and marine gusts slice and spook her cards, my cards,
that flurry to the sidewalk, near the barred gate,
breaking fortune down faster as she speaks.
Source: Poetry (June 2009).

Picture found here.

We Are Everywhere!

Here's a lovely article on the growth of Paganism in the UK. It completely manages to avoid the usual "they don't even really worship devils!" schtick, while employing a bit of humor. Interesting discussion of the role of pop culture in the growth of Paganism. I always wonder which is chicken and which is egg. The interesting popularity of Morris Dancing among young Brits seems a long way from watching Harry Potter movies.

Paganism is casting its spell over more people now than ever before in the modern age. There are said to be a quarter of a million practising pagans in this country, double the number of a decade ago.

That would make them more numerous than Buddhists (of which there are 144,500, according to the 2001 census) and almost as numerous as Jews (259,000) - and it doesn't even allow for the growing tribe of unofficial, instinctive pagans such as my friend Cath, who planned to celebrate the summer solstice in the early hours yesterday by "going out into the garden at dawn and just tuning in". At Stonehenge at least 30,000 people were expected to watch the sun rise in the company of the druids who see themselves as practising the ancient faith of pre-Christian Britain.

Hat tip: Moonbotica.

Picture found here.

Ground

Now, as the light begins to decline and we head towards Mabon and then Yule, is a good time to recommit to a daily practice, even a short and simple one. Sit (in nature, if at all possible) and ground. (See an earlier post on grounding here.) Light a candle or some incense or simply breathe in the smells of dirt, plants, water. You are part of Mother Earth. You are part of your landbase. You are part of your watershed. What are they telling you?

Picture found here.

Litha's Harvest

Here's a nice article that explains the science behind the old Pagan custom of harvesting herbs on the morning of the Summer Solstice


And there's another factor with herbs. Many of them hold their highest oil content at this time, before the heat of summer causes much of it to evaporate out of the leaves.

A cool, still midsummer morning is the traditional time to harvest herbs for drying and storage to use in winter. If they are cut all at once, quickly, before the rising sun hits the leaves, the maximum amount of oil is retained. Both sun and wind can cause oils to evaporate out of freshly cut material very quickly. For this reason, you want to cut herbs and get them into the shade before sunrise. The goal with herbs is to move them inside to dry right away. It's far better to cut some and move them indoors, then go back out and cut more. Otherwise, the herbs are likely to wilt as they build up in your cutting basket.

The entire article is well worth a read.

I will harvest mint and distill it in vodka for a full moon, then chill the vodka for drinking from glasses of ice on Yule morning. What will you harvest tomorrow?

Photo found here.

Parsley, Italian Flat Leaf And English Curly

About the only thing in my herb bed that's really loving all the rain we've been getting is the parsley. Parsley will grow for almost anyone and it's great in salads, green smoothies, chopped and sprinkled on peas or sugar snap peas, on new potatoes.

Summer Solstice by Donna Kane

The light stretched and tangy, up on its horse
and riding through the ripening meadows,
buzzing the leaves and the
birds who’ve been at it for hours.
Light that in its excess has become something else.
The way Cranberry Falls is so frothed with runoff
it doesn’t look like water anymore. The way you look
from a hill’s highest point, your head full of chlorophyll,
heart shucking winter like a clayload of guilt,
like pollen with its open fire policy
compensating loss. You exceed yourself,
tanked on the light and the birds
who’ve been singing forever.


Poem found here.

Picture found here.

A Sense Of Place

To add an important point to my post below about Stonehenge. I think that a certain bit of nostalgic romanticism is fine -- a good thing in fact. And it's certainly to be expected, in a religious movement that is, at least in part, about attempting to reanimate religious ideals that are centuries old, that its adherents will look to the past with a certain amount of longing and reverence.

But Paganism is, at least IMHO, a religion of place. It's wonderful to love Mamma Gaia and the entire planet, but the daily practice of Paganism is hugely involved, I think, in the business of being in deeper and deeper relationship with one's own particular landbase/watershed/genius loci. It's largely about becoming familiar with, listening to, doing right by, and helping to turn the wheel in concert with the particular spirits of your particular place. And that's something that I think that American Pagans, especially, haven't yet done or learned how to do, which may partly explain our longing for (insert your spot here) Stonehenge, Avebury, Bridget's Well, the Caves in Lascaux, Crete, the Parthenon, ancient Egypt, etc.

Part of it is that most of us are relatively "new" here. There is no "place" in America where my ancestors worshipped from time immemorial before me. My ancestors showed up here in the late 1800s, after Sweden experienced both a drop in infant mortality and bad harvests. They landed in NY and kept moving, often more than once in a generation. There are sacred spaces here in North America, (indeed, some of which are as sensitive to the Summer Solstice as Stonehenge) but they belong to the First Nations, and there's a large sensitivity to the issue of appropriation. Who are the American Goddess and Gods? I invoke Goddesses from ancient Sumeria and Greece in my daily practice. So, we tend to look back.

Part of it is that most of us now live in urban areas. It's difficult in the extreme to be in relationship with the large Slurpee-cup-littered concrete parking lot between your 8th floor apartment and the strip mall that borders the interstate. (Although it's needed there, maybe more than anywhere else.) Urban pagans can get away, sometimes, to more rural areas, but finding a way -- whether it's creating a balcony garden or adopting a nearby park or abandoned lot -- to be in regular, daily communication with the land is enough of a challenge for urban pagans that it can be easier, at times, to simply dream of living in a wattle hut near a sacred spring somewhere in Scotland.

Part of it is that many of us travel a lot. What's the point of investing in a relationship with a watershed that I know I'll be leaving in a year, next month, next week? What relationship does one have with interchangeable airports, hotels, conference centers, streets? Easier to avoid the whole problem on a daily basis and just return every year to the same 4-day festival held at a campground that eventually becomes holy ground (as if there were any other kind!). And there's nothing wrong with that, except that it can leave daily practice drained of an essential element of communication and working with the land.

And part of it is that I think modern Pagan training fails to provide enough focus on the nuts and bolts of how to listen to land, how to be in relationship with the spirits of a place, how to work to turn the wheel along with those spirits, rather than simply alone or with other humans. Some of us get some of it intuitively; that may be part of what attracted us to Paganism in the first place. And some of us are lucky enough to make some contact and to then receive instruction from the land itself. But we could and must do a better job of teaching ourselves this essential skill, far more essential than learning herbal and color correspondences or learning which incense to burn with which spell.

I hope to blog more about this in coming months, but I'll make a few suggestions that I've found to be good beginnings. First, ground. Do it daily. Second, consider paying more attention to the land than to all the books in Llewellyn or to some teacher. We've all learned that the element of Water corresponds with the West, and if you live in England (or San Francisco), that makes sense. But here, on the East Coast, not so much. My brilliant friend E associates the element of Water in her daily practice with wherever the closest body of water is to where she lives at the time. Do you know where the closest body of water is to the place where you do you daily practice? How would you find out?

Photo of the SE corner of the author's garden

Unmanned Drones At Stonehenge Solstice Celebration

Summer Solstice (Litha) occurs here in the nation's capital at 1:45 am on Sunday, June 21st. Litha is one of my favorite holidays and one that, I admit, makes me a bit "homesick" for a place I've never been. Long before I knew that I was a witch, the Summer Solstice was firmly associated in my mind with Stonehenge. Pillar of the Sky, which I read in my twenties, is still one of my favorite books. I am sad to see how England plans to police this year's Stonehenge celebration.

A big police operation involving an unmanned drone, horses and drugs sniffer dogs will be launched at Stonehenge tomorrow as huge crowds descend on the ancient site for the summer solstice.

Because the celebrations fall over the weekend and fine weather is predicted, bigger crowds than usual are expected and Wiltshire police have said they will clamp down heavily on antisocial behaviour.

Restrictions are being placed on the amount of alcohol revellers can bring in and police have said they will not tolerate illegal drug taking or unlawful raves.

The force's no-nonsense approach, after a more relaxed feel in recent years, has raised fears that there could be clashes.

Some peace-loving druids have told the Guardian that they will be staying away because they fear the combination of large crowds - possibly more than 30,000 ‑ and the police's stance could lead to trouble.

Can you imagine any religious group other than Pagans that the British government would dare to police on a high holiday with unmanned drones, for the love of the Goddess?

The local police don't have a great history of dealing with those coming to Stonehenge.

Picture found here.

Go! Listen!

Katrina Messenger once told me a story about a time when she saw a beggar on the street. The man was wailing and complaining of his misery and, Katrina believed, probably putting on something of an act. And yet, coming upon this archetype of suffering, Katrina was forced to realize something not about the beggar, but about herself: She couldn't, being who she was, walk past someone in that much apparent pain, and do nothing.

I'm not sure why, but I was reminded of Katrina's story last night as I listened to this very inspirational podcast of a discussion between T. Thorn Coyle and Selena Fox. I am someone who can't listen to Selena's invocation without sobbing and recommitting to the cause, just as I cannot read the inscription "Equal Justice Under Law" on the SCOTUS without sobbing with love (professionally embarrassing on more than one occasion), or vote in the smallest local election without holding back tears. (Maybe the message is Katrina gives alms and I blubber, I don't know!)

You should listen to the entire discussion; it's well worth it.

It's awfully easy to get activists' fatigue, and I find that now, having worked like hell to elect a president of whom I can only say, this week, that he sucks less than McCain would have sucked, activists' fatigue is waiting for me around a lot of corners, ready to pounce at every opportunity. Listening to the work that Selena's been doing for years, as well as to her successes, is an incredibly good talisman to carry around in defense of activists' fatigue.

Of course, we witches say that the best spell for getting a job is filling out a job application. So one of the best magical talismans against activists' fatigue is taking some small, positive action.

Good talismans available right now include Sia's current post about micro-loans and my brilliant friend E's post about, inter alia, the D.C. Central Kitchen. And if you won't even, as Susie says: Call Them you've got bad activists' fatigue. And here's a great idea for simple activism in the waning part of the year.

Hail Libertas! Hail Justica!

Picture found here.

Daylilies

Almost no flower says Litha to me the way that daylilies do. They show up, on schedule, and brighten things up just as a lot of flowers are disappearing. They're wonderful symbols of impermanence. And they're good to eat, too. You can scatter the petals in a spinach salad to brighten it up, or you can stuff the blossoms with almost anything.


DAYLILIES STUFFED WITH ORIENTAL
CRAB SALAD
1 cup fresh bean sprouts
2 medium cucumbers, peeled, seeded and
sliced into matchstick-sized pieces
1/2 pound crab meat or crab substitute*
1 tablespoon sesame oil
2 tablespoon light soy sauce
1/2 teaspoon sugar
* Blanche the bean sprouts by dropping them in
boiling water for about a minute. Then cool nder cold running water. They should still
have a crunch.
* Combine all ingredients thoroughly and
refrigerate. You can even make the crab salad a
day in advance. *When you are ready to serve,
spoon several tablespoons of the salad into the
center of each daylily flower. You may also top
each filled daylily with a scattering of toasted
sesame seeds or finely chopped scallions for a
more colorful presentation.
* Smaller daylily flowers require less crab
salad, so this recipe makes enough to stuff two
dozen large daylily flowers or 30 smaller
flowers.












Recipe found here.

My New Name For A Blog

What Gus Said. Maybe it helps to have a background in working magic to understand Gus' point.

Back in a Minute

Normal blogging to begin again shortly.

We're Just You