A Pict Song - My Pipple!

Rome never looks where she treads.
Always her heavy hooves fall
On our stomachs, our hearts or our heads;
And Rome never heeds when we bawl.
Her sentries pass by and that's all,
And we gather behind them in hordes,
And plot to reconquer the Wall,
With only our tongues for our swords.

Chorus:
We are the Little Folk--we!
Too little to love or to hate.
But leave us alone and you'll see
How we can drag down the State!
We are the worm in the wood!
We are the rot at the root!
We are the taint in the blood!
We are the thorn in the foot!

Mistletoe killing an oak--
Rats gnawing cables in two--
Moths eating holes in a cloak--
How they must love what they do!
Yes--and we Little Folk too,
We are busy as they--
Working our works out of view--
Watch, and you'll see it some day!

Chorus
Although maybe we are not strong,
But we know Peoples that are.
Yes, and we'll guide them along
To smash and destroy you in War!
We shall be slaves just the same?
Yes, we have always been slaves,
But you--you will die of the shame,
And then we willl dance on your graves!

Chorus

~Original poem by Rudyard Kiplling

Sexiest Line I've Heard In A Long Time

"My love rode by with sun-stained feet"

~from the song, The World's Wedding, sung by Emerald Rose

Bad Idea

The Queen Of All Argyle

Lines On The Land

We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening –
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encrouching horizon,

Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye
Of a tarn. Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun.

They’ve taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up
An astounding crate full of air.

~Seamus Heaney

Save Tara!

Beltane 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 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.

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. (Mattsmom, email me! I owe you a reading!)

Merci!

And,



here's a video demonstration of a BSE.

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

Cora Anderson, elder of the Feri Tradition of witchcraft passed over to the Summerlands early this Beltane morning. What a perfect time to slip between the whisper-thin veils. More here.

Blessed Beltane

That's What I'm Taking About

In addition to Beltane, or, actually, because of it, but that's a long bit of history for another day, May 1st is also known as a day for the world's workers to protest working conditions. You could spare a moment of Beltane magic tomorrow in support of America's longshoremen.

An arbitrator has ordered the union that represents dockworkers at West Coast ports to tell members they must report to work on Thursday and not take the day off to protest U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A wide enough walkout could cause a slowdown at the West Coast ports — the nation's major gateway for cargo from the Far East.

. . .

Despite that decision, word continued to spread on the Internet of a May 1 walkout by longshore workers and details of protests, including a march in San Francisco. Thursday is May Day, when workers traditionally celebrate the labor movement.

Thank the Goddess someone is willing to protest these illegal, immoral wars.

/hat tip to ErinPDX at Atrios

Blessed Beltane

Remember to wash your face in the dew tomorrow morning. It's an old Beltane charm for staying beautiful.

Sick, Disgusting, Old, Unfit For Office

Just Stop It!

OK, I will say this in little words and short sentences. The Democrats need to quit pandering to the religious right -- which will (are you listening?) NEVER VOTE FOR A DEMOCRAT EVEN IF THAT MISGUIDED RABBI, JEBUZ OF NAZARETH, GETS DOWN OFF OF HIS CROSS AND HOLDS UP A SIGN SAYING "VOTE DEMOCRATIC IN THIS ELECTION IF YOU LOVE ME I DIED ON THE CROSS FOR YOUR SINS YOU WILL BE WASHED IN THE BLOOD OF THE LAMB BLESS MY SOUL IN THE BOSOM OF ABRAHAM!"

I understand. Many of you, are, in fact, devout xians. You see nutjobs like Tom DeLay and Larry Craig and David Vitter and, the xian god forgive us, George W. Bush, getting elected because they appeal to xian whackjob fundies and you say to yourselves, "Self," you say, "why don't I get some of that action?"

The next time that you say that to yourself, go smack yourself in the face with a wet washcloth and get the fuck over it. Stop picking Harry Reid for Senate majority leader because you think that because he's against abortion (and, it turns out, ever doing anything even mildly effectual), he'll appeal to "value voters." He won't. Stop running devout catholics like John Kerry because you think that will inoculate the party against attacks from the little-boy-molesters in the catholic church. It won't; Razi will arrange for Bush to visit Rome and give the sitting pope a medal while releasing rumors that Kerry should be denied communion. Stop running bullshit ads, like Obama's been doing, about how you're a committed xian and are "called to serve." Just stop it.

We're seeing this week how much good it's done Obama (and, yeah, they're all guilty of it, but he's gone way out of his way to assert that he should get elected because he's such a devoted xian and he's getting pounded the hardest for it this week, so I am using him as an example) to play the xian card. He's getting hammered over the head with his xianity and this is WEEKS and WEEKS after he, supposedly, put this entire issue to bed with his "masterful" speech on race in America, which we were all told was such brilliant political ju jitsu. Not.

Religion will NEVER be anything except a hammer to use against Democrats. Democrats need to accept that fact. I am more religious, I am willing to wager, than 95% of Americans. My religion would only be a detriment to me if I decided to run for office. The best thing for Democrats to do -- and, wow, here's a benni, it's also the right thing to do -- is to insist that religion has no role to play in American politics. Refuse to answer questions about your religion because, in America, we have a separation of religion and the State. Change the topic. Assert the principle. Quote John Adams. Move on.

Look, my number one issue is the environment. I'm NEVER going to vote for a Republican, even if s/he talks about "Blue Skies" and "stewardship" and "Clean Forests," etc., etc., etc. First, I don't believe her/him, and, second, even if I did believe her/him, I don't think that she's/he's AS COMMITTED to those notions as is the Democrat. I'm not really any smarter than someone who's number one issue is the rather obscene notion that "America is a xian nation." They don't care how much a Democrat talks about "Called to Serve," etc., etc., etc. First, they don't believe the Democrat and, second, even if they do believe the Democrat, they don't think that the Democrat is AS COMMITTED to those notions as is the Republican.

So Democrats have two choices. They can concede that being a good xian is important in politics, in which case, they can keep losing. Or, they can challenge the basic premise and begin to move the debate off of their opponents' favored ground. It's unclear to me why this is such a difficult choice for them.

Imagine

What If?

Query

In her newsletter, Janet Kane notes that, "Simone Weil wrote, 'The beauty of the world is the mouth of the labyrinth.'" I wonder what Weil meant.

Listen

Poetry For Beltane

As I've said before, I think this is a perfect Beltane poem:

The Swan


Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air -
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music - like the rain pelting the trees - like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds -
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?



- Mary Oliver

Please?

Angela Eloise! Everytime that I try to comment at your blog, I get a message saying that I've tried to post too many posts in too short a time. Can you fix this?

Beltane

My brilliant friend E reminded me this week of something I wrote a while back about Beltane:

My idea of the perfect ritual involves women showing up to a calm, clean, well-ordered space, where wine is poured, tensions are dropped, flowers release their scent into the ritual air, muscles relax, women remember who they are and from whence they came. I want intent clearly specified, ritual supplies laid out, incense alight, and grounding done right.

Like Anne, I prepare like hell for the strike, and then I let that sword just fall as it will. My Younger Self responds better that way.

But, that's not THE only way to do ritual. I've been reading Barbara Ehrenreich's Dancing In The Streets every day at lunch, four or five pages a day. She talks about how women left their spinning to run into the streets to follow Dionyisis, how ecstacy can overtake even the most repressed, at times. Beltane is all about living in the moment, all about feeling, after a long winter of parsing out the left-over seeds and saving enough back for planting, that it's ok to let go, ok to burn fires on the high hills, ok to have sex in the fields, ok to act without thinking it all through. About finding what Anne calls the "middle ground between worrying and controlling something on the one hand, and ignoring it on the other."

Blessed Beltane.

As you prepare this week for Beltane, for the fire festival on the high hills, for our religion's most important celebration of acts of love and pleasure, I hope that you feel free to let go. Goddess knows, I mean to.

Blessed, blessed Beltane.


Art found here.