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

TaliChristians

/Hat tip Susie Madrak

More Muir Woods

For me, as for many modern Pagans (most of whom live in urban areas), a trip to a wilderness spot such as Muir Woods is a once-in-a-lifetime event, a pilgrimage to a sacred site, a "Journey to the West" in search of wisdom. Such pilgrimages can be life-changing events, and, certainly, I will never forget my trip to Muir Woods. (And, of course, Wilderness spots can only take so many of us traipsing through.) I brought back a tiny, carved, wooden tree to put in the NorthWest on my altar, to help me to connect to the larger spirit of North America, the North America beyond my Potomac River watershed and the red-clay-amended-with-acorn-shells-built-on-a-swamp-landbase upon which I live, garden, and priestess. A small sign in Muir Woods taught me that deer depend upon the Vitamin C from maple leaves to get through the Winter and I'm considering now how to get the falling leaves from my ancient maple to the nearby woods for the deer who live there. I used the word "privileged" in my post about Muir Woods and that word was chosen deliberately. For most of my life, a trip to a place such as Muir Woods was simply out of the question and I'm grateful for the opportunity that my job gave me to visit.

And yet -- despite all the dreams that I've had, ever since my trip, of a Chapter House in Sausalito, dreams of denim-and-cotton-garbed priestesses and priests spending their lives entering the woods and doing reiki for the ferns, and redwoods, and condors, and chipmunks, and moss -- despite those dreams, when I got to the lower level of National Airport and could feel that familiar swamp dirt beneath the floor, leaching LANDBASE up through the soles of my feet and into my solar plexus, I knew that I had come home to my own true work. I am the witch of THIS place and my pilgrimage has only made me more so. Those of us who live in urban areas are called to as sacred a task as are those someone(s) whose reiki I sensed in Muir Woods. Muir Woods is threatened and needs magical care, but so is the strip of land between the parking lot of your apartment complex and the interstate. So is the pocket park located a block away from you in the city, the one where people come to let their dogs run. So is the tree growing through the sidewalk outside your office building. So are the weeds growing in the alley behind your condo. It's all sacred. It's all Goddess pouring Goddess into Goddess. It's all in desperate need of priestessing, in need of reiki, in need of loving care, in need of relationship.

What are Witches for?

Photos by the author. If you copy, please link back.

The Fifth Sacred Thing

Poem (the spirit likes to dress up)

The spirit
likes to dress up like this:
ten fingers,
ten toes,

shoulders, and all the rest
at night
in the black branches,
in the morning

in the blue branches
of the world.
It could float, of course,
but would rather

plumb rough matter.
Airy and shapeless thing,
it needs
the metaphor of the body,

lime and appetite,
the oceanic fluids;
it needs the body's world,
instinct

and imagination
and the dark hug of time,
sweetness
and tangibility,

to be understood,
to be more than pure light
that burns
where no one is --

so it enters us --
in the morning
shines from brute comfort
like a stitch of lightning;

and at night
lights up the deep and wondrous
drownings of the body
like a star.

~Mary Oliver

Picture found here.

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

Cathedral

Let the trees be consulted before you take any action
every time you breathe in thank a tree
let tree roots crack parking lots at the world bank headquarters
let loggers be druids specially trained and rewarded
to sacrifice trees at auspicious times
let carpenters be master artisans
let lumber be treasured like gold
let chainsaws be played like saxophones
let soldiers on maneuvers plant trees give police and criminals a shovel
and a thousand seedlings
let businessmen carry pocketfuls of acorns
let newlyweds honeymoon in the woods
walk don't drive
stop reading newspapers
stop writing poetry
squat under a tree and tell stories.

- John Wright.

Yesterday, I had an amazing experience; I was privileged to visit Muir Woods, just outside of San Francisco. What I imagine a devout Muslim experiences when visiting Mecca, or a Christian feels standing at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem must be somewhat similar to what I felt the moment that I began to come into contact with these ancient trees, many between 500 and 800 years old. Maybe I would feel the same feeling at Stonehenge or Crete or the Caves at Lascaux, but I don't think so because, although I am the Witch of a tiny place all the way across the continent, a place with a different watershed and soil and trees, this forest is much more my native place than anywhere in Europe and, for me, as a Witch, communication with "place" is a very important component of my spiritual practice. This place felt to me like one of the strongest living expressions of the meaning of North America.

I've found that there are certain places with deep and old magic that simply will not photograph or video well and Muir Woods, from the pictures that I've seen and from the video and pictures that I took, is one of those. (Have you ever had this experience? I find that it's also true of my beloved Potomac River.) You really can't communicate the scale and presence of, not just the trees, but of the overall entity that is "The Forest" with cameras.

I've been in larger forests before, but never one that began communicating via scent quite some time before you even arrive at the edge of the forest. The scent of the redwoods, which drifted up the valley and onto the sun-warmed air of Mount Tamalpais was like nothing else that I've ever experienced and, oddly, the entire time that I was there, I was aware of it, even though olfactory fatigue often leaves me unable to detect scents after only a few seconds. If sanctity and the holiness of Earth have a scent, this was it, although my strong feeling was that it is also a form of communication and a deep act of daily blessing.

While I was sitting on a bench, sobbing and in love, the branch of a redwood waved back and forth against my neck, almost as if the Tree and breeze wanted to say, "Oh, lighten up, Little Sister. You're here for such a short, short time; you should laugh more, like the ephemeral thing that we know you to be." I twisted and reached out my hand to a few inches away from the branch and began to do reiki. The forest smiled and took it in, and then I became aware that some one(s) have been coming to the forest regularly to do reiki. And I had to wonder how there are not several temples full of priestesses and priests devoted just to this practice, and to hope that, some day, there will be. What a deep and sacred calling. What a holy and magical life that would be.

Later in the day, I noted to my delight that Sia's back and blogging, and she reminded me, in that new magic that seems to have been waiting since the world's beginning for the internet to come along, of one of her earlier posts in which she explained that:

The central question in my tradition is this: "What are Witches for?

And, you know, on this day that is all about balance, that seems to me to be an excellent question to ponder and upon which to meditate, especially as we head towards Samhein when, for many of us, it is traditional to set new goals. It's a good question for circles and covens and it's a good question for individuals. What are Witches for? What are we Witches, in particular, in this circle or coven or group, for? What am I, as a Witch, for?

I'm going to be doing a lot of work with these questions over the coming weeks, myself. I'd love to hear your answers to them, as well!

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

Blessed Mabon

Hurrahing in Harvest

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, willful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And, eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world wielding shoulder
Majestic as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet! –
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet

~Gerard Manley Hopkins

Picture found here.

How It's Done

Here's a good article about an interview with Washington, D.C. witch, Katrina Messenger, concerning Christine O'Donnell's claim that she "dabbled into witchcraft" during a picnic on a bloody, Satanic altar. This is one of the few times that my "don't think of an elephant" rule, about not launching into a discussion of what Witches "don't" do, deserves to be ignored. Here, there's a well-publicized charge that conflates Witchcraft and Satanism, along with some real misrepresentations about the nature of our religion.

Katrina's kinder than I am; I believe the young woman was lying. There's a common xian trope that involves having gotten mixed up in Satanism and then being saved by faith in Jesus. It's apparently OK for xians to lie when it suits their purposes. Whichever, Katrina does a good job of quickly turning the interview to what Witches actually do and who we really are.

It's sad that O'Donnell's nonsense eclipsed what was, by all accounts, a quite successful DC Pagan Pride event, but it's a good thing that some members of the media are seeking out credible Pagan sources to counter O'Donnell's slanders.

/hat tip to Capital Witch for the video and to Katrina for the email notification about the interview.