Go Vote; It's A Lovely Way To Cast A Spell

Deborah Oak explains something v. important about magic:

And when I say praying, I mean that thing we witches do of interfacing with the elements and the Mysterious Ones and asking for the energies of life to come into alignment with our vision or will. I’ve learned by experience to be both specific and broad in my spellcasting. What I truly want is neither Obama or Hilary, it’s healthcare for all, peace on earth, everyone fed, a sustainable relationship with nature, and a graceful transformation from empire to a collaborative nation amongst collaborative nations.

It's no secret that I'm a big fan of Hillary Clinton and I do hope that, in the end, she's the nominee. I think she'll do a better job than Barack Obama will do at this stage in his life. But Deborah does a v. good job of reminding all of us caught up in primary fever what it's really all about. It's really all about

*healthcare for all

*peace on earth

*everyone fed

*a sustainable relationgship with nature

* a graceful transformation from empire to a collaborative nation amongst collaborative nations.

The wonderful news, and it is truly, transformatively wonderful, is that the Democratic nominee will be, and the next president of the United States may very well be, a woman or an African American. Both groups have been too long denied the job.

Now, those suffragettes didn't endure force feedings, beatings, and riducule all of those years so you could sit home and not vote. Go vote in honor of your great grandmother who wasn't allowed. Carry your ancesstress with you into the voting booth. It's a lovely way to "interfac[e] with the elements and the Mysterious Ones and ask[] for the energies of life to come into alignment with [y]our vision or will.

Let's Play Something Else

Well, No, They Don't Necessarily HAVE To Be . . . .

A couple of years ago, I was discussing politics with my housemate Bill, and Kore, my Goddess-daughter, interrupted us.

“Who is Barbara Boxer?” she asked.

“Why Kore,” I said. “She’s our Senator!”

Kore’s eyes lit up. An expression of amazed delight stole over her face. “We have a Senate?” she said. “Like in Star Wars?”

I assured her that we do, albeit without those really cool floating chairs. Then I tried to explain to her the Senate, the House, the system of checks and balances.

“Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein are our Senators,” I told her, “And Nancy Pelosi is our representative.”

“Do they all have to be girls?” she asked.

Damn. Just, damn. I am with my mother's mother's mothers. And I am with my great-granddaughter's granddaughters.

Stay Healthy

Susun Weed discusses simple, practical steps for dealing with late-winter colds.

I try to make Susun's breast-cancer prevention cabbage once or twice a month.

Chop up cabbage, onions, and garlic and saute in olive oil. Meanwhile, soak seaweed in warm water. Add seaweed and soaking water to the sauteed vegetables. Add grated carrots and tamari sauce. Sprinkle sunflower seeds on top and serve. It's delicious.

I just wish the stores sold smaller cabbages.

Signs of Spring

Daffodils pushing up on the western edge of the woodland garden. Yes, I need to do something about the ivy.

My New Name For A Blog

What res ipsa loquitor said.

[Evangelicals, such as Robertson and Falwell and Dobson, have spent the last thirty years demonizing liberals.] Why in Jesus or Allah or the Buddha's name would I reach out to anyone who's been kicking me for three days, let alone three decades? And don't tell me, "Those guys are the old guard." Instead, show me that they're not [still in charge] by laying off your efforts to control my body, my mind, and my wallet (by agitating for my tax dollars to funnel toward your unconstitutional "faith-based initiatives) and by halting your Thirty Years War against liberals. That means, among other faith-based initiatives, taking on esteemed evangelical "opinion leaders" like the Parshalls, the Parsleys, and Pastor-I-Have-A-Weekly-Call-With-The-White-House Dobson.

If evangelicals think it's time for a group hug, let them do the reaching out for once. But don't be surprised if I'm wary, dirty fucking hippie that I am. Because when people spend thirty years telling me I'm going to hell for everything from not having whatever the hell a "personal relationship with Jesus" is to enjoying sexual communion with the occasional libidinous liberal lad to whom I happen not to be married I tend to be a little suspicious of their embrace.

You know, when I was in grammar school, this miserable little bitch used to give me no end of shit for doing everything from reading on the school bus to wearing the "wrong" sneakers to living on whatever passes for the wrong side of the tracks in one of the toniest suburbs in the northeast. It wouldn't have occurred to me to "reach out" to this little shit until she'd learned some manners, shut her mouth, and got off my back, my idiotic teachers' suggestion to "be the bigger person", notwithstanding. Just saying.

So Evangelicals, you come to me and you be nice. Bring some coffee (I take it light and I don't do artificial sweeteners) and a couple of Krispy Kremes (the chocolate frosted ones, please) from the franchise at your megachurch. Then we'll see if we have anything in common.

Actually, though, res can have my doughnuts. There isn't anything those creepy evangelicals could do to cozy up to me. I wish they'd all just find another planet to go to and practice their weird, sick, unhealthy religion. I'd always be waiting for them to drop the nicey-nice routine and tie me to a stake.

My New Name For A Blog

What Barbara Ehrenreich Said. Go read the whole thing.

But you can't jump-start a car that lacks a working battery. We need less titillating talk about "stimulus" and more commitment to some fundamental repairs -- higher wages, a real safety net and a return to progressive taxation among them. The challenge isn't just to prop up stock prices but to rebuild an economy in which everyone shares the good times -- and no one is consigned to a permanent recession.

Third Annual Brigid in Cyperspace Poetry Slam

This is one of my all-time favorite poems. I've changed "God" to "Goddess" and "Holy Ghost" to "Sophia" and used it to call East a number of times.

Hopkins' description of the Earth, upon which "Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod," evokes the way things look in February when our feet, being shod, don't get to feel the Earth. But, he assures us that: "There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went , Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs-- Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings!" Spring is coming. Look to the East.



"God's Grandeur" (1877)

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings!

Third Annual Brigid in Cyperspace Poetry Slam

Here's another poem by Galway Kinnell that I think is good for Imbolc; it's about flames.

Another Night in the Ruins
BY GALWAY KINNELL

1
In the evening
haze darkening on the hills,
purple of the eternal,
a last bird crosses over,
‘flop flop,’ adoring
only the instant.

2
Nine years ago,
in a plane that rumbled all night
above the Atlantic,
I could see, lit up
by lightning bolts jumping out of it,
a thunderhead formed like the face
of my brother, looking down
on blue,
lightning-flashed moments of the Atlantic.

3
He used to tell me,
“What good is the day?
On some hill of despair
the bonfire
you kindle can light the great sky—
though it’s true, of course, to make it burn
you have to throw yourself in ...”

4
Wind tears itself hollow
in the eaves of these ruins, ghost-flute
of snowdrifts
that build out there in the dark:
upside-down ravines
into which night sweeps
our cast wings, our ink-spattered feathers.

5
I listen.
I hear nothing. Only
the cow, the cow of such
hollowness, mooing
down the bones.

6
Is that a
rooster? He
thrashes in the snow
for a grain. Finds
it. Rips
it into
flames. Flaps. Crows.
Flames
bursting out of his brow.

7
How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren’t, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,
that for us
as we go up in flames, our one work
is
to open ourselves, to be
the flames?


Galway Kinnell, “Another Night in the Ruins” from Three Books. Copyright © 2002 by Galway Kinnell.

Third Annual Brigid in Cyperspace Poetry Slam

Blessed Imbolc to you!

Today is the day we witches celebrate the clear movement towards Spring that we've made since Yule. The sun gets up earlier, stays up later, shines a stronger and different quality of light upon us these days. On Imbolc, we honor the Goddess Brigid, a goddess of the fire of inspiration, the well of creativity, of smithcraft and of poetry.

Reya started, and Deborah Oak has continued, a great new tradition: blogging poetry on Imbolc to honor Brigid. And, so, in between getting ready for a houseful of witches this evening, spending some silent time at my own altar, and standing in a sweater on the porch, letting the firey sun shine through my closed eyelids, I'll share a few of the poems that I love.

Hail, Brighid, the Bright. Hail and Welcome!

St. Francis And The Sow

The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on the brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as St. Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch:
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of
the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

Galway Kinnell

Blessed Imbolc To You And To Your Daily Practice.

One of the best-kept secrets about being a Wiccan is that it's really important to "pay attention" to the changing seasons. Sure, everyone knows that Wiccans "worship nature" and "celebrate seasonal holidays." But the actual practice of being a witch involves paying daily attention to small (but vastly important) details such as the quality of light, tiny buds on trees, the smell of the night air, the color of clouds, the first bold bud to push up from underneath the frost-hardened ground. If you only notice the changes 8 times a year, you're missing out on the other 357 days of wonder and amazement and calm and excitement and tiny changes and pure, unadulterated attention.

I was reminded this week of the importance of daily practice. Without warning and in a v. hectic and crowded situation, at the end of a long day and too much stress, my brilliant friend E and I were asked to do some v. important magic. We stood in a strange, crowded kitchen, with strangers going back and forth for ice and wine and Goddess knows what, and quickly pulled together an important spell with salt, and water, and a plastic bowl. No athames. No oils. No incense. No robes. No dancing drums. Surrounded by strangers who, open and receptive as they were, had never, ever experienced magic, ever before.

And, as E began the grounding, my heart was pounding, my monkey mind was chattering, my ego was demanding attention. And, then, it happened. The daily practice took over. I knew, even in that strange basement, how the Earth felt to my roots in January close to the Potomac, how the sky felt to my branches beneath the waning winter moon, where I was, what I was doing, who I am. Years of the Ha Prayer clicked into place. My daily prayer: "I am a manifestation of the Goddess. Mother, help me to grow into my better self," effectuated itself and I was "there," in sacred space, a daughter of the Moon, a priestess of the Great Mother Earth, ready to do the magic that I'd been called upon to do. I called East and West and Athenae and did what the Goddess needed done in that moment, in that place, for those women, in that perilous time. E called South and North and Lilith and did what the Goddess needed done in that moment, in that place, for those women, in that perilous time. And, it worked. The magic took over and the magic happened and the magic worked. Perfectly. In the "real" world, on a demonstrable level, observable.

I was also reminded of the joys of working in a circle. E and I have been doing magic together, come dark moon, come full moon, come cross quarter days, come solstice, come equinox, come what may, for several years now. It's a joy and a delight and a deep, coursing undercurrent to my daily practice to know that I work within a circle, that I can trust these few women with my secrets, my self, my fears, my magic, my power, my cares, my loves. To know that I can lean back upon that circle and draw from it and find myself placed geographically, between the worlds, within that magical working.

And, so, I am delighted to trip over the web and find women all over the world honoring Brighid the Bright, preparing for Imbolc, noting the changing seasons, turning the wheel of the year. A witch's job is to turn the wheel and round and round the wheel does turn. Feel free to note in comments any blogs honoring Brighid and I'll try to add them here in updates.

A blessed Imbolc to you and to your daily practice. It's all Goddess pouring Goddess into Goddess.

**************

Update: Donna Woodka has more on Brigit. And, there's gorgeous poetry at The Gods Are Bored.

Art found here.

(Almost) First Of The Month Bazooms Blogging

Ladies! Listen up! Catching 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 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.

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.

Merci!

And, here's a more graphic demonstration of a BSE:

Come On Spring!

Oh baby, oh baby, oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, baby, yes!

Code Pink Update

Liz was found not guilty and Desiree got a continuance until April! V. good news all around!

Thanks Code Pinkers for all that you do!

A woman takes responsibility for the time she takes up and the space she occupies.

State Package for Hillary Clinton by Maya Angelou

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may tread me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I'll rise.

This is not the first time you have seen Hillary Clinton seemingly at her wits' end, but she has always risen, always risen, don't forget she has always risen, much to the dismay of her adversaries and the delight of her friends.

Hillary Clinton will not give up on you and all she asks of you is that you do not give up on her.

There is a world of difference between being a woman and being an old female. If you're born a girl, grow up, and live long enough, you can become an old female. But to become a woman is a serious matter. A woman takes responsibility for the time she takes up and the space she occupies. Hillary Clinton is a woman. She has been there and done that and has still risen. She is in this race for the long haul. She intends to make a difference in our country. Hillary Clinton intends to help our country to be what it can become.

She declares she wants to see more smiles in the family, more courtesies between men and women, more honesty in the marketplace. She is the prayer of every woman and man who longs for fair play, healthy families, good schools, and a balanced economy.

She means to rise.

Don't give up on Hillary. In fact, if you help her to rise, you will rise with her and help her make this country the wonderful, wonderful place where every man and every woman can live freely without sanctimonious piety and without crippling fear.

Rise, Hillary.

Rise.

Who Was Really Disorderly?

May The Goddess Guard Her.

In the morning, Desiree from CodePink goes to court for "disorderly conduct" because she confronted Condi Rice with the fact that Rice is a war criminal. She punched through the bubble in which the members of this junta live and let Rice know that some Americans are against the illegal war and occupation of Iraq.

That's not a crime. That's patriotism in action. But Desiree could be sent to jail tomorrow for 130 days. Or, her judge could do the right thing.

If you do magic, please do magic. if you pray, please pray. If you can send good wishes, please send good wishes.

Warned

Space By The Fireside

It's dead serious, this time between Yule and Imbolc. It's the time of the year for forging ahead, for making real accomplishments.

I'm exercising like a mad woman and reorganizing files and writing articles and cleaning out the ritual room and taking charge of my health and doing v. serious things and moving money around and doing magic outside the Capitol and taking all of the cold-air steps that will seem too serious to approach in Spring. I'm standing in a garden stripped to its bones and conjuring its flesh as deeply as I know how to do.

And, yet, the v. best part of my life, the place where I am really living, the locus of my magic is the spot where G/Son teases me by pretending that he's going to eat the Soy Dough snakes we've made on his dining room table while Son and DiL do errands. We say, "Yucky!" and we say "Silly Nonna!" and we laugh until we get the hiccups. The place that matters most isn't where I do law or where I live in a circle or where I garden or where I foster revolution or where I dance. The place that matters most is the place where I change a diaper and discuss who has a penis and who has a vagina and read a story in the intense Western afternoon sunlight as a way of putting a tiny mancub down for his afternoon nap. Not a new skill. I put his father down for just such a nap, oh, thirty-three years or so ago. It feels so right and so good and it connects me so strongly to my ancestresses.

Here I am. I, too, am old. I, too, am looking back. I, too, remember what it's like. I, too, I too, I too, gentle the new generation into a nap, into a milk-drunk sleep, into a long rest in the strong sunshine. I lived long enough for this. I, too, I, too, have come to this place of the grandmothers. Move over, old ones. Make room for me. I've brought my knitting. I've brought my DNA. I've brought my progeny. Move over.