May The Goddess Guard Her. May She Find Her Way To The Summerlands. May Her Friends And Family Know Peace.

AP reports that: In a statement Monday, Obama called Horne a most cherished entertainer who warmed hearts with her beautiful voice and dramatic on-screen performances. The president also hailed her efforts to promote justice and equality.

Horne was the first black performer to tour with an all-white band, and she refused to perform for segregated audiences while entertaining soldiers during World War II.

Obama said he and the first lady join all Americans in appreciating the joy Horne brought to their lives and the progress she forged for the country.

Horne died Sunday in New York at age 92.

Horne was an important voice for civil rights for African Americans:

In 1945, during World War II, Horne was scheduled to perform at an Army base in Fort Reilly, Kansas. Horne, unyielding in her stance against racism, refused to perform for the segregated military audience in which German POWs were seated in front of African American servicemen at a USO sponsored show. Horne immediately left the stage headed to the local NAACP office to file a complaint. MGM yanked Horne from the tour, forcing her to use her own money to travel and entertain the troops.

Horne, an outspoken advocate during the Civil Rights Movement and an active member of the NAACP once worked with Eleanor Roosevelt to pass anti-lynching laws and [was present] at the March on Washington, and spoke and performed on behalf of the NAACP. She marched alongside Medgar Evers in Jackson, Miss. at an NAACP rally the weekend before he was assassinated, joined 250,000 Americans in 1963 on the March on Washington when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech and met President John F. Kennedy at the White House two days before his assassination.

By the 1960s, Horne was one of the most visible celebrities affiliated with the civil rights movement. It was reported that the feisty diva once thr[ew] a lamp at a customer in a Beverly Hills restaurant after the customer spouted a racial epithet.

Horne's dedication to the Civil Rights Movement and tenacious fight against racism came as no surprise to many who knew Horne, the granddaughter of a freed slave and a descendent of the John C. Calhoun family. Calhoun, the seventh Vice President of the United States, was a writer, orator and nationalist who began his political career as a politician from South Carolina during the first half of 19th century who made his name with his redefinition of republicanism to include the approval of slavery and minority rights.

Calhoun's concept of concurrent majority, that a minority had the right to object to and even veto hostile legislation directed against it, secured his name within American history when it was later incorporated into the American value system.

More here.

Lena Horne had that almost indefinable quality: real class. It's what makes her rendition of "That's Why the Lady is a Tramp" so deliciously ironic.

Witchy Work

I've been thinking a lot about this post, in which an African Witch blogs about preparing for Winter:

As I weed and rake leaves, I spend some time recalling my animal companions who gifted me with their presence so briefly and from whom I have learned so much. It is a time of the year when seeds are sown in darkness, a time of dying and gestation. In preparation for the coming winter, I store firewood and sacks of charcoal, make sure that the guttering is not choked with leaves, lay down mulch on beds of pak choi seedlings. garlic chives and broccoli. Since this is a winter rainfall region, steps need to be taken to ward off damp or mildew, the loft checked for leaks, electrical connections kept dry and insulated. Some of this may not sound very witchy, but it is practical magic, burrowing down for the dark months ahead. Out here the wind blows from the north strongly enough to uproot unstaked trees and I have some young olives and pecan nut trees as well as a pomegranate that need extra protection. And I keep a watchful eye out for birds who may have chosen to over-winter here rather than flying south.

My first reaction, upon reading it, was, of course making sure that the rain gutters are clear of leaves is the work of a Witch. Of course mulching vegetable beds and staking trees is witchy. Of course feeding birds is a ritual of the Goddess. Maybe we tend to see the work of Spring -- planting seeds, enjoying flowers, watering plants -- as more witchy. But only if we're fluffy bunny witches and, well, we're not.

I was thinking about it this morning, as I pulled out of the fridge all of the veggies that my CSA has delivered and concocted a stir-fry with them. I don't pretend that belonging to my CSA is the same in terms of, for example, carbon footprint, as growing my own food. But it's closer to local and, IMHO, better than the grocery store. Not the least because my CSA knows from where they've gotten the food. Thus, this week, when there was a recall of some tainted lettuce in the US, my CSA was able to tell us: Please be assured that none of the Romaine lettuce that you would have received from us is affected in any way by the recall. All of our Romaine was sourced from one farm.

But it is work belonging to the CSA. I sometimes work some long hours, have to eat out with clients, etc. And, somehow, I have to cook and either eat, freeze, or give away what the CSA delivers. It's different from the standard American method of meal planning: "Let's see, I'd like to have grilled tilapia, asparagus, and a pear tart so I'll go buy ingredients for those things." Instead, it's: "CSA delivered carrots and fennel and oranges this week; I'll go on line and look for a recipe for fennel and orange salad to which I can add grated carrots." Or, "If I make tuna salad for my bag lunch tomorrow, I can use up the celery from the CSA, add some grated carrots and leeks, throw in some brocco sprouts." That's, to my mind, the work of a Witch. You can do it while working at being fully present and in relationship with the food that you're preparing. You can spend time sending blessings to the people who grew it, picked it, delivered it. You can do it with intent, imbuing each meal with health, vitality, strength. And, then, there's the waste. You can't chop up a bunch of vegetables without making a lot of compost. My compost bin is one of the most serious magical sites on my property and Goddess knows there's scraps of paper, poppets, egg shells, and other things in there that I've magicked with stuff that I want to go away, stop being harmful, be transformed. And, after a marathon peeling and chopping session, I'm left with a delicious stir-fry and a paper bag full of peels, ends, etc. I take a minute, imbue them with something that I want to see transformed, and into the Sacred Compost Bin of Transformation they go.

Is it the work of a Witch? it must be. I'm a Witch and it's my work.

It's Almost As If Everything Were Part Of Some Great Big Whole

It's become rather fashionable to poo-poo the notion that was popular for a while that some of the theories of quantum physics "prove" what many Pagans believe: that everything is connected, that magic works, etc. And, I get that, in the sense that some of that discussion may have been a bit simplistic. And, Goddess knows, I am not a girl with a mind for the maths. Still, articles like this one always make me smile.

ERWIN SCHRÖDINGER called it the "defining trait" of quantum theory. Einstein could not bring himself to believe in it at all, thinking it proof that quantum theory was seriously buggy. It is entanglement: the idea that particles can be linked in such a way that changing the quantum state of one instantaneously affects the other, even if they are light years apart.

This "spooky action at a distance", in Einstein's words, is a serious blow to our conception of how the world works. In 1964, physicist John Bell of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, showed just how serious. He calculated a mathematical inequality that encapsulated the maximum correlation between the states of remote particles in experiments in which three "reasonable" conditions hold: that experimenters have free will in setting things up as they want; that the particle properties being measured are real and pre-existing, not just popping up at the time of measurement; and that no influence travels faster than the speed of light, the cosmic speed limit.

As many experiments since have shown, quantum mechanics regularly violates Bell's inequality, yielding levels of correlation way above those possible if his conditions hold.

. . .

Or is there really an influence that travels faster than light? Cementing the Swiss reputation for precision timing, in 2008 physicist Nicolas Gisin and his colleagues at the University of Geneva showed that, if reality and free will hold, the speed of transfer of quantum states between entangled photons held in two villages 18 kilometres apart was somewhere above 10 million times the speed of light (Nature, vol 454, p 861).

Magic happens. When we move between the worlds, (Hel, even when we don't) what we do in one, affects them all. Welcome to what lots of native peoples and mystics of every time and culture have always known. And it's not "spooky" at all; it's glorious.

Hat tip to Moonbotica in comments at Eschaton.

Picture found here.

My Japanese Maple

Goddess Sexuality

I blogged a while ago about a festival in Kerala, a monthlong festival that begins in Kumbha (February-March) and finishes in Meena (March-April). It’s . . .the annual gathering for thousands of largely lower caste, practising oracles (among whom women appear to lead) from Kerala and Tamil Nadu. At the Bharani, old oracles offer themselves to the goddess again and new ones are chosen.


Here's an interesting discussion of the cultural issues inherent in the festival.

And, some additional information about the festival:

The festival is also unique for its ‘Bharani pattu’ – sexually explicit songs, meant to appease the Goddess. These songs deal with the sexuality of the Goddess and humans and emphasises sex as part of natural life, while deriding sexual hypocrisy – especially of upper caste women. The songs make it clear that sexuality is not only natural, but is also present everywhere. In a place like Kerala, with itfrighteningly crude mechanisms of sexual repression, the Bharani provides a venue for people to be freed of the need to pretend that the sexual does not exist.

Picture found here.

Um, OK

The ever-controversial Kevin Carlyton, who is now, apparently, not only the "High Priest of British White Witches," but also "The Official Protector of Lock Ness and the Loch Ness Creature," is is organizing an event to "show" that Nessie is a ghost.


The High Priest of British White Witches, Kevin Carlyton - who calls himself "The Official Protector of Loch Ness and the Loch Ness Creature" - is organising the one-off psychic gathering and is hoping to prove the monster is in fact a ghost.

The white witch, who claims to have thwarted the plans of "monster hunter" Jan Sundberg from Sweden coming to Loch Ness to attempt to capture Nessie a few years ago, believes the monster will never be caught, because she's not actually alive.

Kevin explained: "The creature is a ghost from a bygone era and its image has been captured by the surrounding landscape. On certain weather conditions, particularly very warm or thunderous with a lot of static in the air, images of the creature are 'replayed' and people who are slightly psychic see the creature as if it is here now."

Now the white witch hopes to prove his point about the monster, which drums up hundreds of thousands of pounds in tourism business every year for the area, by organising the coming together for those who have psychic abilities.

He said: "I predict there will be at least 200 people present at the event. I've only mentioned a small bit about the event on my website and the interest so far has been phenomenal.

I'm sure the lovely people from the Loch Ness Tourist Association will welcome the visitors.

Picture found here.

Are You A Good Witch Or A Bad Witch?

Here's an interesting discussion about the difference between witches and witch doctors in African tradition. Interesting contrast with European traditions, as well.

Old map found here.

Thursday Garden Blogging

Blue barlow columbine.

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

Thursday Poetry Blogging

A Mermaid Questions God by Kelli Russell Agodon

As a girl, she hated the grain of anything
on her fins. Now she is part fire ant, part centipede.
Where dunes stretch into pathways, arteries appear.
Her blood pressure is temperature plus wind speed.

Where religion is a thousand miles of coastline,
she is familiar with moon size, with tide changes.
She wears the cream of waves like a vestment,
knows undertow is imaginary, not something to pray to.

Now her questions involve fairytales, begin
in a garden and lead to hands painted on a chapel's ceiling.
She wants to hold the ribbon grass, the shadow of angels
across the shore. She steals a Bible from the Seashore Inn;

she will trust it only if it floats.

Picture found here.

Forty Years? Where Are Ms. Krause's Grandchildren?

Where the Hel did the time go?

Why the Hel aren't we farther along?

And, Right Away, I Know: My Pipple

Four horses passed us, their riders cloaked in maroon blankets, their faces painted black. At the top of the hill of Uisneach in County Westmeath there is a vast saucer-shaped meadow, of more than 40 acres, which was dotted with wicker huts, wigwams, and sculptures of horses and other creatures, made from willow rods. There were stalls selling cider, and roasted pig, potato cakes and rashers. There was a vegetarian soup, a bouncy castle, and hundreds of people eating sausages, and listening to Sharon Shannon.

. . .

Everyone was unwinding. Phoning each other. Eating bacon. Looking for music sessions. There were ribbons on a hawthorn bush in the middle of a clump of stones.

. . .

Summer had been inaugurated. People sat around the fire as if some fragment of eternity had broken through the night, for everyone.

Teenagers wrapped in blankets, gazed at each other, full of desire, as if they had stepped, not just into summer, but through a portal to some magical “now”, where they were about to enjoy the time of their lives.

Being old, I left them there and walked back down the path, where sculpted angels stood in line with outstretched wings. I passed a boy and girl hugging each other at an upturned barrel of flames, their faces lit like something from Carravaggio’s dreams.

Read about the whole thing here.

PIcture found here.

Tuesday Poetry Blogging

A reader sent this to me and it seems quite appropriate as we all focus on the Gulf:

BY JACK SPICER

Any fool can get into an ocean
But it takes a Goddess
To get out of one.
What’s true of oceans is true, of course,
Of labyrinths and poems. When you start swimming
Through riptide of rhythms and the metaphor’s seaweed
You need to be a good swimmer or a born Goddess
To get back out of them
Look at the sea otters bobbing wildly
Out in the middle of the poem
They look so eager and peaceful playing out there where the
water hardly moves
You might get out through all the waves and rocks
Into the middle of the poem to touch them
But when you’ve tried the blessed water long
Enough to want to start backward
That’s when the fun starts
Unless you’re a poet or an otter or something supernatural
You’ll drown, dear. You’ll drown
Any Greek can get you into a labyrinth
But it takes a hero to get out of one
What’s true of labyrinths is true of course
Of love and memory. When you start remembering.

We're Witches. Maybe We Can Do Something About This.

As noted below, the Moon is currently waning (in Sagittarius, today), which makes this a good time to do magic to decrease the flow of the oil well that is threatening the Gulf of Mexico. I'll be at my altar tonight; please join me if you feel moved to do so. This sort of disaster seems to me to be ideal for knot magic, but whatever works for you works between the worlds. And, what we do between them, affects them all.

Here's a short list of Goddesses and Gods associated with the Ocean:

Yemaja - Goddess of the Ocean

Mama Cocha - Inca Goddess of the sea and provider of the sea's bounty. She is a favorite of sefarers and fishermen.

Enki - God of Water

Branwyn - Goddess of love, sexuality and the sea

Latis - Goddess of Water and Beer

Morgan LeFay - Goddess of Death, Fate, the Sea and of Curses

Aegir - God of the Sea

Njord - God of Fire, Wind and Sea

Oceanus - Produced the rivers and the three thousand ocean nymphs with his wife Tethys

Tethys - Produced the rivers and the three thousand ocean nymphs with her husband Oceanus

Poseidon - God of Horses, Earthquakes, Storms and the Sea. Brother of Zeus

Naunet - Goddess of the Ocean

Nun - God of Water and Chaos

Namu - Goddess of the Sea

Since the oil is gushing forth from the Underworld, here's a list of Goddesses and Gods associated with the Underworld:

Cernunnos

Hades

Persephone


Dress your altar with shells. Go skyclad or clad in shells. Burn candles of blue and green. Wear water and fish, listen to the sound of waves, burn incense related to water.

Call the Elements, with an emphasis on Wind and Water. Invoke the Goddesses and Gods of your choosing and cast your circle with salt water and visions of dolphins.

Meditate on your objective: seeing the gushing of oil from the Underworld stopped, capped, undone. See the proper seals between the Worlds restored.

Raise energy. Raise it by dancing, swimming, singing, chanting, floating. And, then, release the energy into the Gulf.

Ground. Thank Deity. Thank the Elements. Open your circle. Enjoy rum and seaweed crackers or water and shrimp skewers or margaritas and cerviche for cakes and ale.

Ground again.

Blessed be.

Picture found here.

I stole the title from a comment by Mr. Penzack.

Waning Moon

Good time to do some magic to decrease the flow of oil in the Gulf. You in?

Sunday Dance Blogging

My State Has The Stupidest Attorney General In The Entire Country

No. Really. We do.

Good thing there's no crime or consumer fraud or anything here in the Old Dominion and we've got tons of tax dollars to spend on making colleges discriminate against gay people and covering up the Goddess on our state seal. Oh, wait.

I have come to understand that xianity is about nothing -- and I do mean nothing -- so much as control of sex and the female body.

May the Goddess Virtus (lovely naked breast and all) guard us.

Picture found here.

Sounds Like Fun

Now here's a book I'd like to read with G/Son. Positive children's story about witches, plus, you know, raspberry pie.

Picture found here.

Local Coverage

Here's a nicely-done article about Ontario Pagan groups and how they practice and perceive Beltane. It avoids the usual, "And they really don't eat babies or worship the devil!" trope and includes some interesting discussion of volunteer burn-out.

Now if only they could manage to capitalize the name of a religion. I don't suppose they'd write about catholics at xmas, jews at Passover, or moslems at Ramadan.

Oh, Yes, I Know It Well

You know that feeling you get after dancing around a great bonfire with drums melting your bones and the stars burning in the shining black sky, and there’s a kind of green wick blazing inside your stomach and your heart, and you feel like at any moment you’re going crack wholly open, and all the love and joy and the sobbing sobbing laughing laughing because of life life will pour out of you and flood the gate and wash the wood clean and you welcome it and you can’t wait and the wind rips through your hands and says yes do this do this now this is the moment and then laughs like a maniac and then you laugh like a maniac and then the drums start again and the night goes on and on and you are the most beautiful thing dancing in the whole of the shocking, gorgeous and perfect world?

More here.

Picture found here.

Poetry For A Beltane Morning

On May Morning
by John Milton

Now the bright morning Star, Day's harbinger,
Comes dancing from the East, and leads with her
The Flowery May, who from her green lap throws
The yellow Cowslip, and the pale Primrose.
Hail bounteous May that dost inspire
Mirth and youth, and warm desire,
Woods and Groves, are of thy dressing,
Hill and Dale, doth boast thy blessing.
Thus we salute thee with our early Song,
And welcome thee, and wish thee long.

Beltane's Coming!

The month of May was come, when every lusty heart beginneth
to blossom, and to bring forth fruit; for like as herbs and trees
bring forth fruit and flourish in May, in likewise every lusty heart
that is in any manner a lover, springeth and flourisheth in lusty
deeds. For it giveth unto all lovers courage,
that lusty month of May.
- Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur, 1485

Picture found here.

Wholesome or Un

Vanessa's whisper to the horse, "Proper . . . or im" gets me every time. I do think this may have been as close as the mainstream culture of my girlhood came to acknowledging my religion.

If you're going to make a mistake, making a "divine mistake" makes more sense.

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.

May It Be So For You

A blessed Beltane to each of you.

Here's my second favorite Beltane ritual. Go out in the morning and get your hands wet in the early morning dew. Scrub your face. The legends say that it will make you appear beautiful all year.

Dance the maypole, jump the fire, wear the flower crown, watch both the Moonrise and the Moonset. Fertility (in all of its forms) to you and yours.

Picture found here.


Go give Thorn's good efforts a push by donating here.

And, per Sia, help out animals hurt by the oil disaster here.

Here, Approve This.

A scheduled pagan festival is under the scrutiny of the Livingston Parish Sheriff’s Office.

“Obviously, we don’t like this type of activity, but if they are following all of the laws to the letter of the law, then we can’t do anything about it,” Perry Rushing, chief of operations for the Sheriff’s Office, said Thursday. “We vehemently oppose this type of activity in Livingston Parish.”

The festival is being held at a Pagan campsite. The campground’s website describes the campground as Louisiana’s only “dedicated pagan camp” and says the campground will be celebrating its grand opening concurrently with the festival.

Here are the "type of activities" that Sheriff Rushing "vehemently opposes":

Among other things, the festival will offer nightly drumming circles, bonfires, Celtic music, pagan spiritual music, belly dancers, fire dancers and authentic voodoo rituals, according to the website.

I don't suppose some enterprising reporter bothered to ask Sheriff Rushing why he "obviously" doesn't like "this type of activity." One wonders what's wrong with drumming, bonfires, music, dancing, and religious rituals. Would a xian group engaging in the same practices face "vehement opposition"? If not, how does the sheriff's office justify its attitude in light of the, you know, First Amendment?

And we won't bother to mention the failure to capitalize the name of a religion.

More here.

Picture found here.

Oak and Tarragon on the Beltane Altar

Starting to get set up.

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

Not Here, Not There

When I was trying to grow up both female and Catholic, the church kept telling me about "the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost." And when we uppity women got too '"hysterical" to ignore, they threw us a bone and said, "Oh, yeah, well, the Holy Ghost? That sexless, inhuman dove or flame or whatever the fuck it was? That "thing" that gets so much less attention than the sexed, humanized Father and Son? That's you. That's the "divine feminine," or "wisdom," or "Sophia," at least to the Greek Orthodox, or something; can't you shut up now?"

Well, no.

And, so I was ready-made to be attracted to Wicca, with it's real trinity of Maiden, Mother, Crone. Now that's a trinity that I can understand and one that has nurtured my spiritul development for nigh on a quarter of a century, and it's the spiritual truth that I expect will be on my lips and in my heart when I dance across the river between my garden in Virginia and the orchards in the Summerlands (it's a thin border and a river full of crossing stones. I can see it, once it a while; I think that I'll be good at making that crossing, even as rooted as I am to this particular place.)

And, yet, like so many symbols, that trinity glosses over a lot of subtelties. And, especially as women live longer and fulfill more roles within the world, we're finding that there are a hundred different variations and subcategories between those three markers/archetypes. One of the most discussed, within the feminist Pagan community, is a fourth stage sometimes called: Queen. This is the woman whose family is raised (or who has mothered a creative project, social justice movement, business, work of art, or garden (hell, sometimes all of those) to fruition)and who is, in this day and age of modern medicine and preventive health measures, still sexual, active, vital, alive, able to create and grow quite a lot before she goes off (as I am beginning to long to do) to sit by the fire, dispense wisdom when asked, nap, and reflect. She's what I think that the Empress card was really meant to show and she's a combination of the Queens of Swords, Wands, Cups, and Pentacles. (We all wind up knowing at least something of all of them, by the time we get to be 50/60 something.)

Another, it occured to me today, is the Mature Mother. I was sitting in my garden and thinking about Ruby Sarah's recent post about Beltane being the holiday when the Kore laughs birds and flowers. And realizing that, for many, if not most, women in our society, Beltane sex, the kind that impregnates you (and any child or project born in late February/early March is counted lucky, as "Beltane got"), is often not quite the experience of a Kore, the young maiden just experimenting with sex. She's not Persephone, gathering flowers with her girlfriends and caught, all unawares, by Hades. She's more likely to have already gotten her education, learned to enjoy and use sex, started her career, traveled a bit (if my own acquaintances are any indication), sown some wild oats, had some fun, and then decided -- deliberately -- to have a child (birth a business, found a movement, etc.). Which is the great blessing that birth control allows to those of us living in the late 20th/early 21st Centuries. And, for that woman, that Mature Mother who is no longer a Kore, but not yet a Queen, sex -- and pregnancy and motherhood -- is likely to be quite different from those same experiences when had by a Kore, who can sometimes find herself (Goddess knows, I did) torn a bit unexpectedly and unprepared from her girlhood and into womanhood/motherhood, from nurturing herownself into nurturing a child, project, cause.

And, for me, gardening this year -- just after a once-every-several-centuries Winter and in the midst of both warming spells that have oak pollen falling two weeks before its normal Beltane fall and cooling trends that threaten with frost seedlings put out after our "normal" last frost date -- calls to this Mature Mother, this woman who has learned how to manage the changing weather of lovers (human, weather-got, Herne, or Greenman), my get (children, projects, briefs, art, businesses, etc.), myself. I'm not the Kore, rocked and challenged by pregnancy and parenting. I'm not yet the Queen, ready to rule based on all that I've learned. I'm still in the final stages of the Mature Mother, working now on giving birth to Myself, that person who may have gotten lost a bit, (primordial soup, the stuff of Hecate) but also created, in between Maiden and Mother.

May it be so for you. Blessed Beltane.

Picture found here.

Duh.

Surely no one is really surprised?

Park officials had separated Pansy from the other chimpanzees for treatment when she became ill in November 2008. But when her breathing became erratic a few weeks later, the other three chimps were allowed to join her.

In the 10 minutes before she died, the three animals – an elderly female named Blossom, Blossom's adult son Chippy and Pansy's adult daughter Rosie – frequently groomed and caressed Pansy. They crouched in close, and Chippy shook her arm, apparently testing for signs of life.

When they got no reaction, "they appeared to arrive at a collective decision that something had changed, and she was no longer the same as she was beforehand," said lead author James Anderson, who studies primate behavior at the University of Stirling. "It seems they are clearly able to distinguish the difference between being alive and unresponsive."

Soon, both Blossom and Chippy left Pansy's side. Even though it was not her usual sleeping area, Rosie stayed by her mother's corpse almost the entire night, sleeping fitfully.

Sixteen hours after Pansy's death, zookeepers removed the body, with the three chimps watching quietly. For several days afterward, the group was subdued, refusing to make a nest on the platform where Pansy had died. They also demanded more attention from the keepers.

Picture found here.

May The Goddess Guard Her. May She Find Her Way To The Summerlands. May Her Friends And Family Know Peace.

Alice Miller died earlier this month. As the NYT reports:

“Humiliations, spankings and beatings, slaps in the face, betrayal, sexual exploitation, derision, neglect, etc. are all forms of mistreatment, because they injure the integrity and dignity of a child, even if their consequences are not visible right away,” she writes in an explanatory essay on childhood mistreatment and abuse on her Web site, alice-miller.com. “Beaten children very early on assimilate the violence they endured, which they may glorify and apply later as parents, in believing that they deserved the punishment and were beaten out of love.”

She took child abuse seriously and, for that, she deserves our thanks.

For Fun

Native Child

The Fires Of Beltane: Nearer And Nearer, Every Day

Relevance

My New Name For A Blog

Or imagine if it were women protesting male politicians. Nah.

Education for Women: Acts of Rebellion

Via BBC:

None of the symptoms experienced by the girls are reported to to be serious.


And, indeed, they never are. Women's symptoms are, by definition, not serious.

Education is a weapon that the Patriarchy wields against women. Just like poisoning wells of water, poisoning education is a way that the Patriarchy makes what is necessary dangerous for those of us with two X chromosomes.

Bite me, assholes. Bite me.

Picture found here.

Why I Garden

You can find witches and environmentalists who say that gardens are bad; gardens change the ecosystem and require too much [water, compost, weeding, mowing, take-your-pick]. And, I get all of that. And I can get pretty rhapsodic in the woods, on a river bank, up in the mountains, at the liminal space between water and sand at the shore, in places that haven't been gardened.

And, yet. And, still.

For me, gardening is a way of being in deep relationship with the land. Gardening Hecate is as much a part of the land as is Bossy Cardinal, Gentle but Gigantic Bluejay, Ancient Oak, the Fireflies that Eat the Mosquitoes, and the Moss That Grows Between the Patio Stones. I dig my fingers into the soil, I place seeds where I want them to grow, I sit and listen to the land and figure out what it wants. And, then, we cooperate.

I can, all these years later, be moved to great, heaving sobs by Mary Lennox's simple request in The Secret Garden: Please, May I have a bit of Earth?

My garden does for me what Ram Dass' book did for so many of my generation: My garden calls to me to Be Here Now. I can be thinking of work, family issues, politics, the frustrations of Living While Female in the Patriarchy, and then go out to sit with the maple, and the ostrich ferns, and the Japanese Temple Pines and, all of a sudden, a few hours have passed, I'm completely at peace, and I've engaged in a spiritual practice as old as womankind. I can go out to weed the herb bed and the containers of mint, and bergamot, and lemon grass, and, somehow, I come away feeling as if I've wreaked at least a bit of order (such as it is) in this tiny corner of a universe constantly balancing between mad, creative, chaos and lovely, secure, order. I can walk around and smell the lilacs, the just-about-to-bloom sage, the tarragon ("dragon's wort" to my witchy mind), and the French thyme, and come inside high as a kite, as mad as any worshiper of Dionysus, intoxicated by the simple over-stimultion of the connection between the cells on the inside of my nose and the neurons in my brain.

And, so, I am a gardener.

May it, if you wish it, be so for you.


Photo of tarragon in the herb bed by the author. If you copy, please link back.

Sunday Poetry Blogging

ROBERT HASS
Spring Rain


Now the rain is falling, freshly, in the intervals between sunlight,



a Pacific squall started no one knows where, drawn east

as the drifts of warm air make a channel;



it moves its own way, like water or the mind,



and spills this rain passing over. The Sierras will catch

it as last snow flurries before summer, observed only by

the wakened marmots at 10,000 feet,



and we will come across it again as larkspur and penstemon

sprouting along a creekside above Sonora Pass next August.



And the snowmelt will trickle into Dead Man’s Creek and

the creek spill into the Stanislaus and the Stanislaus into

the San Joaquin and the San Joaquin into the slow salt marshes

of the day.



That’s not the end of it: the gray jays of the mountains

eat larkspur seeds which cannot propagate otherwise.



To stimulate the process you have to soak gathered seeds

all night in the acids of old coffee



and then score them gently with a very sharp knife before

you plant them in the garden.



You might use what was left of the coffee we drank in Lisa’s

kitchen visiting.



There were orange poppies on the table in a clear glass vase,

stained near the bottom to the color of sunrise;



the unstated theme was the blessedness of gathering and the

blessing of dispersal—



it made you glad for beauty like that, casual and intense,

lasting as long as the poppies last.


Picture found here.

Sunday Dance Blogging

She's A Witch

Yep, a witch.


Picture found here.

Half Sick Of Shadows

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.

My New Name For A Blog

What Starhawk Said

Pagans have a multiplicity of opinions on almost any subject, but if there's one thing we probably all agree upon, it's sex. Sex, in Pagan "thealogy", is a Good Thing, a gift of the Goddess, a way we connect deeply and intimately with one another and with the great creative forces of life. Sexuality is sacred. "All acts of love and pleasure are my rituals," says the Charge of the Goddess, one of our most beloved liturgies.

Our religious view of sexuality is an alternative to both sexual suppression and sexual exploitation. The prevailing culture sees sex either as an evil to be controlled or as a selling agent and profitable commodity. Neither view makes for healthy relationships or sacred connection.

We teach our young people to practice sexual responsibility--to be kind and respectful to one's partners, to protect themselves and their partners from disease and from unwanted pregnancies, to listen if someone says 'no' and to respect each person's boundaries and choices.

The whole thing is well worth a read.

Picture found here here.

Beltane's Coming

All acts of love and pleasure are rituals of the Goddess.

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.

Eternal Haunted Summer

Sounds worth checking out.


1. What are your aims in Eternal Haunted Summer?
My aim with Eternal Haunted Summer is four-fold. 1) To provide a venue for authors to publish original Pagan-themed poetry and short fiction. 2) To provide a venue in which authors can have their Pagan-themed works reviewed. 3) To expose as wide an audience as possible to the talent and diversity of Pagan authors. And 4) To connect with other Pagan publishing ventures by posting calls for submissions, contests, et cetera and so on.

2. What do you do that other people don’t?
Eternal Haunted Summer is unique in that it is explicitly a Pagan site. There are several ezines and magazines out there that specialize in fantasy- or occult- or science fiction-themed works (Goblin Fruit and Mythic Delirium being two of my favorites). And Scarlet Imprint has released several limited run collectable editions, such as the brand new Datura: An Anthology of Esoteric Poesis. But there is no one else publishing poems and short fiction about the Gods and Goddesses and Heroes of old from a Pagan perspective.
Plus, I pay

More here.


The ezine is here.

Picture found here.

You Had Me At Denzel

May The Goddess Guard Her. May She Find Her Way To The Summerlands. May Her Friends And Family Know Peace.

Dorothy Height, a leader of the African-American and women’s rights movements who was considered both the grande dame of the civil rights era and its unsung heroine, died on Tuesday in Washington. She was 98.


More here.

What is remembered does not die.

This Cannot End Well

Demonizing witches. Gee, what a creative concept.

Solomon's Seal

The people who lived here before me planted Solomon's Seal in the woodland garden and it's been slowly and gracefully spreading, ever since. It tolerates the shade and blooms now, when the daffs and crocus are done and most of the other Spring flowers are still to come. The legend says that King Solomon had a ring, with a star formed of an upwards-pointing triangle (for fire) and a downwards pointing triangle (for water) and that it allowed him to command genies. No idea why the plant has the same name. It's had various medicinal applications throughout the years and reportedly can be eaten, like asparagus, for its starch, but I just like to grow it for its pretty leaves and white flowers.

What's spreading in your living space?

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

Transition Town: I'd Expect To Find It Where Three Crossroads Meet

In Transition 1.0 from Transition Towns on Vimeo.

Spring Poetry Blogging

Emily Dickinson


A little madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown —
Who ponders this tremendous scene —
This whole Experiment of Green —
As if it were his own!

Photo by the blogger. If you copy, please link back.

Retrograde Mercury -- Just Saying

NYT: A cloud of ash from an Icelandic volcano shut down much of air travel to and from Northern Europe for a third straight day as a massive transportation gridlock spread around the world. Actual evidence of the ash was being detected in Britain, where air travel was likely to remain shut down until Monday.

Scientists were uncertain when the ash, reported to be drifting at altitudes commonly used by civilian jetliners, would dissipate.

Liminal

Who can say how one Goddess or God chooses a person or how one person chooses a Goddess or a God? I've long been a devotee of Hecate, and she's confirmed for me that I'm "her girl." I don't think that it's entirely (hah!) a rational process, nor one that can be explained "logically."

But I do know that a huge part of the attraction that I feel for Hecate is due to the fact that she's the Goddess of liminal spaces (crossroads). Wiki says: Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold"). The liminal state is characterized by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy. One's sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation. Liminality is a period of transition where normal limits to thought, self-understanding, and behavior are relaxed - a situation which can lead to new perspectives. In my own limited experience, liminality is necessary for magic (aka, change in accordance with will) to happen. Liminality is not always, or even generally, comfortable. Ambiguity and indeterminacy can feel a lot more scary than good, a lot more uncomfortable than supportive. And, yet, even with my Moon in Taurus, I head like a salmon upstream for that liminality. Like Rumi, who says: I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.
Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
What a bargain, let's buy it, I run to Hecate, all aware that the security that I've created at great price will likely dissipate at her crossroads.

Who can say how much of it is due to this extreme winter (which was due, at least in part, to global climate change) and how much of it is due to global climate change, but the micro-eco-system here in my tiny bit of Earth in Northern Virginia, is in the middle of a liminal shift. We're about a week-and-a-half to two weeks ahead of where we should "normally" be. This is generally true all over Columbia's district. It's always been the weekend of Beltane when I'm out sweeping strands of oak semen off of my deck, but I'm doing that now, a good two weeks before Beltane. It's generally Beltane when my lilacs bloom, but they'll be in full bloom on Tuesday or Wednesday of next week, and that's only due to a late cold spell; otherwise, they'd bloom this weekend. I could go on and on.

It was the early "gardeners" (generally women), trying to grow food, rather than lilacs, who paid so much attention to the seasons and determined what we gardeners consider "normal." Now, we're gardening in liminal times. Landscape Guy tells me that he no longer believes the "zones" established by the U.S. Department of Agriculture; they've shifted due to global climate change, although admitting that would commit our government to admitting that global climate change is real. He grows things in his yard that "should" only grow down in the Carolinas.

I don't know any other answer than to pay attention. I sit out in my bit of Earth, watch, listen, communicate, and pay attention. I listen to the birds who are courting and nesting a few weeks early, I shift into the v slow attention span of the trees and hear what they are saying, what their roots are doing, the direction in which their new sprouts are growing. I work v hard to be the "witch of this space," which is how I announce myself to the Elements when I cast a circle. If I am to be the witch of this space, then I am the witch of a liminal, shifting, disoriented space. SomeWitch has to do this. It's my job because I live here.

What's your job?

Picture found here.

Reiki

This evening after dinner, as he was getting tired, G/Son complained that his arm hurt. Nothing had happened, he was just tired and having, IMHO, a bit of a growing pain and, as much as anything, he wanted some attention. I said, "Show me where it hurts," and, when he did, I said, "Can Nonna give it a bit of reiki?" He nodded, and, so, I did. In a minute he moved his arm to show me that it was better and said, "Why is that 'reiki'?" I said, "Well, that's just what we call it: 'reiki'." G/Son remembered an animated movie we'd watched, where a mouse checked a bird's broken wing and held her hands out over the wing in the same way that I held my hands out over G/Son's arm. And he said, "Remember when Cornflower did reiki on the sparrow's broken wing?" and I said, "Yes, that's right. I do remember that." And then we went on to something else, about Superman and Green Lantern and Iron Man. Damn, I love that kid.

Picture found here.

Hecate

When I read Tarot, I'm a big believer in paying attention to the card that "jumps out." You know, the card that somehow, improbably, falls off the top of the deck after the Querant has carefully cut the deck and dealt the required cards. The card that sticks to the bottom of another card and only shows up when you begin to turn the cards over to read them. That card. Heck, if there's a clearer way for the Universe to say: "OK, now pay attention," I don't know exactly what it is. (Well, I do, but I don't know any other way for the Universe to say this that doesn't generally involve pain, loss, a kick in the pants.)

So, when a book falls off of one of my bookshelves, all unasked, I pay attention to that, as well. It's tricky for books to fall off of my bookshelves, which have glass doors that, you know, tend to prevent "falling off." But when I open a bookshelf to get one book, and another "jumps out," I pay attention. Now, one of the earliest, truest, and most important magics that I ever did, all unknowing, as a young pentacostal catholic who would have been horrified at the term bibliomancy, was to open a book, read the top of the page, and take it to heart. To womb. To life. And that has made all the difference.

I'm not as young as I was, not all all pentacostal or catholic, nor am I at all horrified by any form of divination that does not involve live sacrifice. But I'm still often amazed at what bibliomancy can teach me. Ellen Cannon Reed's The Heart of Wicca, which I haven't opened or thought of in years, hopped merrily off of my bookshelf and onto my floor, open to the section where Ellen discusses the importance to her practice of relationship with divinity, particularly in its more personal and specific forms, and sent me an important message.

And I intend to pay attention.

Hecate, Guardian of the Crossroads

Lend me your dagger to cut away the unnecessary to find my true power
Lend me your rope to hold fast to that which I still need
Lend me your torch to illuminate the shadows
Gift me with the sacred key to unlock the mysteries of life
Show me my choices and give me the insight and strength
to always choose the right path

To which particular deity do you pay attention? Why? What have you lately heard?

Picture found here.

At The End Of All Desire

Sunday Dance Blogging

Sunday Poetry Blogging

The Worship of Nature by John Greenleaf Whittier

The harp at Nature's advent strung
Has never ceased to play;
The song the stars of morning sung
Has never died away.

And prayer is made, and praise is given,
By all things near and far;
The ocean looketh up to heaven,
And mirrors every star.

Its waves are kneeling on the strand,
As kneels the human knee,
Their white locks bowing to the sand,
The priesthood of the sea!

They pour their glittering treasures forth,
Their gifts of pearl they bring,
And all the listening hills of earth
Take up the song they sing.

The green earth sends its incense up
From many a mountain shrine;
From folded leaf and dewy cup
She pours her sacred wine.

The mists above the morning rills
Rise white as wings of prayer;
The altar-curtains of the hills
Are sunset's purple air.

The winds with hymns of praise are loud,
Or low with sobs of pain, --
The thunder-organ of the cloud,
The dropping tears of rain.

With drooping head and branches crossed
The twilight forest grieves,
Or speaks with tongues of Pentecost
From all its sunlit leaves.

The blue sky is the temple's arch,
Its transept earth and air,
The music of its starry march
The chorus of a prayer.

So Nature keeps the reverent frame
With which her years began,
And all her signs and voices shame
The prayerless heart of man.

Picture found here.