First Of The Month Bazooms Blogging

A v. kind monk just reminded me that it's the first of the month and I'd forgotten to do Bazooms blogging.

Ladies! It's the first of the month! An excellent time to do a breast self-examination (BSE)! It's easy to do a BSE; here's how. BSEs, by detecting breast cancer when it's in the early stages, can help to save lives. Set aside some time tonight to do a BSE. If you prefer to do a BSE at a particular time in your cycle, now's a good time to calendar it.

And, the year's almost up. Got $$$$$$ in your cafeteria plan? Had a mammogram this year?????? Schedule one and then schedule lunch with a friend, a manicure, a massage, a trip to a museum. You deserve it.

WTF??????????????=

Under siege in April 2006, when a series of retired generals denounced him and called for his resignation in newspaper op-ed pieces, Rumsfeld produced a memo after a conference call with military analysts. "Talk about Somalia, the Philippines, etc. Make the American people realize they are surrounded in the world by violent extremists," he wrote.

Am I the only person in America with any outrage left? I'm amazed that revelations from today's WaPoarticle, based on documents that WaPo FOIAed out of Rumsfeld, have slipped into our collective pond, producing nary a ripple. Even if these revelations did have to compete with, ZOMG, Hillary's scary vagina and some tennis star taking drugs. Retired generals, who almost NEVER criticize a sitting admin., demand Rummy's resignation and his reaction is to insist that his aids go out and try to scare the shit out of Americans so that they'll stop daring to criticize him. Dood. Halloween was last night. WTF? Anyone want to comment on this? Pelosi? Clinton? The NYT? Harry Reid? Hello? Is this thing (America) on??? Can I get a tar and feathers mob?

In one of his longer ruminations, in May 2004, Rumsfeld considered whether to redefine the terrorism fight as a "worldwide insurgency." The goal of the enemy, he wrote, is to "end the state system, using terrorism, to drive the non-radicals from the world." He then advised aides "to test what the results could be" if the war on terrorism were renamed.

Again, am I the only one who thinks this is just amazing, shocking, absurd? Our nation is founded upon the notion that [w]hen, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them all that is necessary is that a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. And this criminal is suggesting that America wage a "war on insurgency"???? Dood! We were insurgents to the British! Fuck the motherfucking "state system." WTF is wrong with your soul?

And, of course, it wouldn't be complete without the racism and the ruling class' complaint that the "others," here, Muslims, just won't work hard enough: He also lamented that oil wealth has at times detached Muslims "from the reality of the work, effort and investment that leads to wealth for the rest of the world. Too often Muslims are against physical labor, so they bring in Koreans and Pakistanis while their young people remain unemployed," he wrote. " For more on this important topic, you really need to read Barbara Ehrenrich's Dancing in the Streets. Is his argument even logical? (Don't answer that.) They're "against physical labor" -- obviously the only kind of work for which "they're" fit -- so "they" bring in immigrants to do the hard work that their young people would, apparently, otherwise love to do (so I guess that they're not aginst physical labor). Remind you of anyplace coughAmericacoughfarmworkerscough?????

I really hope that bad things happen to this person. He's done so much evil and he's such an idiot and he's really a phenomenol ass.

Paxcast

NTodd talk, you listen.

Duh!

Professor Glick also concedes that much of this data — like his 2000 study showing that women were penalized more than men when not perceived as being nice or having social skills — gives women absolutely no way to “fight back.” “Most of what we learn shows that the problem is with the perception, not with the woman,” he said, “and that it is not the problem of an individual, it’s a problem of a corporation.”

I actually think this "concession," reported in today's NYT, is important. For too long, women have been told that it's our fault. Somehow, each individual woman out there struggling on the job is led to believe that if she could just precisely calibrate the exact proportions of being smart -- but not too smart, aggressive -- but not overbearing, demanding -- but not castrating, ambitious -- but not grabby, etc., etc., etc. that she could run the obstacle course that it is to be a woman in the work-a-day world and still succeed. That's not true. The fault, dear sisters, to mangle Cassius, is not ourselves, that we are underlings, but in our culture. It's true, an individual woman up against an impossibly toxic mix of Catch 22 expectations, has no way to "fight back." It's not the woman who needs to change. I am just saying.

Winter

Well, then, there it was. The wheel of the year did what it always does -- it turned. The veil, although it is still thinner than it is in, say, Midsummer, is already beginning to thicken a bit. The dream images that I received this morning from the ancestors won't be coming so clearly,nor so forcefully, until the wheel winds all the way round again. From here on, it's darkness and cold and turning inward. It's introspection and waking up to the cold kitchen floor when it's still dark outside and worrying about slipping on the ice. It's the discipline part of achievement, where you just make yourself do what you've promised to do, even when it's too early to see results, when you really don't want to do what you promised, when your very own Shadow that you very carefully constructed all by yourself lunges up and suggests, in its iron voice, that you go back to sleep. Now. Just this once. Now. It will be like this through Yule, and on into Imbolc (my least favorite time of year), and it won't start to change for the better until Ostara, at the earliest. Every year, I want to love the winter, but every year I wind up longing for sun, for the Caymans, for fruit, for light, for fresh greens, for bare feet.

I've written down my goals for this new year, journaled about what I want to accomplish. I've remembered the honored dead, and recited my matrilineal line (child of a dysfunctional family, mine is simpler than my sisters': "I am Hecate, daughter of the Great Mother Goddess"), and released some things and people that I needed to release. And now it's time for me to hunker down inside my cozy cottage, cat on my lap and cup of tea in my hand, and think, reflect, plan, do magic. I'm looking at my calendar and longing for a few days in a row for an in-home retreat, time to rake leaves, think, walk, sit at my altar, listen to my own thoughts. Maybe in a few weeks, maybe when I crank this pleading out.

Winter is the time to plan a new garden, a new project, a new article, a new brief, a new way of living in the world. Will we or nill we, here we go.

Our Honored Dead

The wheel's gone round another time, and some wonderful people set sail for the Western Isles.

Lloyd Alexander, author of children's books that sustained me.

Ingmar Bergman. Director of one of my all-time favorite movies, the Seventh Seal. Jag var Doden.

Father Drinan. A v. smart guy who enjoyed living in several worlds.

Molly Ivins. What can anyone say? Lady, you are missed. A wonderful writer from Texas who tried to warn the world about Shrub. I fucking hate fucking breast cancer.

Lady Bird Johnson. What lovely grace. Thank you for the wildflowers.

Madeline L'Engle. For me, this was the greatest loss of this turning of the wheel. L'Engle's fiction saved my life when I was a young child. When I was a young woman, she taught me how to write, how to take writing seriously, how to be a woman leading a spiritual life, how to integrate family and writing. Over and over throughout my life, I've come back to her work to ground myself, to remind myself of what's possible, to relive the person (Meg/Madeline/Mrs. Murray) that I wanted to be. I'll be placing her book on my circle's Samhein altar, toasting her as the mother of my writing self at our dumb supper, sending my energy to help her to find her way to the Summerlands where, I've no doubt, she'll hear them playing the Tallis Canon. Lady, thank you. I will remember you. The witches say, as I imagine you knew, that what is remembered does not die. I will remember you.

Remembering The Salem Dead

At Samhein, we remember our dead. The population of Salem, Massachusetts, location of many of America's witch trials, swells during Samhein. Which is odd, because the people tried and, generally, executed at Salem almost certainly were not witches. And, yet, I find it somehow appropriate, as a witch, to recall their names at this time of year. According to the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project, the following people were executed as witches.

Bridget Bishop
Rev. George Burroughs
Martha Carrier
Giles Cory
Martha Cory
Mary Easty
Sarah Good
Elizabeth How
George Jacobs Sr.
Susannah Martin
Rebecca Nurse
Alice Parker
Mary Parker
John Proctor, Sr.
Ann Pudeator
Wilmot Redd
Margaret Scott
Samuel Wardwell
Sarah Wilds
John Willard

Additionally, these people died in jail:

Lydia Dastin
Ann Foster
Infant Girl (daughter of Sarah Good)
Sarah Osborne
Roger Toothaker.

Now, when the veil is thin and all times are one time, is a good time to to say: May the Goddess guard them. May they find their ways to the Summerland. May their friends and families know peace. It's also a good time to say: Never again, the witch trials.

Never Blog About What You Ate For Lunch

In one of those, "this is what I love about my life" moments, I had lunch today with my wonderful, wise friend B. at Kaz Sushi Bistro. She was coming from getting her nails done. I was coming from (and going back to, sadly enough) trying to turn co-counsel's unmitigated mess into an actual legal pleading. We talked about mothers-in-law and grandchildren and grammar -- and planned the Dark Moon ritual for next month. B. had a plum wine sakitini; I, virtuously, abstained (I probably should have had a drink; it would have made the afternoon's chore less painful).

I just want to say: the Plum-Wine-Infused Foie Gras w/Plum Wine Jelly was one of the most amazing things that I've had in my mouth in some time. If you can possiby get to Kaz, order about half a dozen of these. (B. and I contented ourselves w/ two apiece, but I wanted several more all afternoon long.) I love my life.

********************
Twisty, come to DC and order some of these. You'll never brag about Austin ever again!

Robin Givhan Is A Complete Idiot And A Talentless Hack

Lilith on a lamb chop! Why does anyone let Robin Givhan, aka the world's worst writer and stupidest person, anywhere near a keyboard? What a load of rehashed, trite crap. If there's a point to this article, it's buried so deeply as to be completely impossible to locate. Old feminists = bad/Hillary Clinton=fake, is I guess, her message, not that you can really tell.

They Will Help Us Get Peace

There's a really interesting article in today's NYT Magazine concerning the crack-up of the xian right. It may be overly optimistic; reports of Mark Twain's death and all that. I'll have more to say as the election heats up about a group of supposed "values voters" who, as the article notes, will vote overwhelmingly for thrice-married, estranged from his children, mobbed-up, abortion-favoring, gay-loving Rudy Guiliani over Hillary Clinton, who honored the part of her marriage vows that say "for better or for worse," whose Methodist religion actually has influenced her entire life, who raised a lovely daughter, and whose elderly mother lives with the Clintons. What I'll have to say will be mostly: See? I told you that it was always about patriarchy and never did have anything to do with "values" or "family" or the "culture of life."

But what really struck me was this quote from former president Jimmy Carter -- who, lest we forget, has always been an evangelical xian. Carter said: “I think that a superpower ought to be the exemplification of a commitment to peace,” Carter told Hybels, who nodded along. “I would like for anyone in the world that’s threatened with conflict to say to themselves immediately: ‘Why don’t we go to Washington? They believe in peace and they will help us get peace.’ ” Jimmy, I'd like that very same thing and I'd like it very, very much.

A Veil So Thin, It's Like Cobwebs And Moonlight And Frost

Advice for Lou Dobbs

It's Weird When They Openly Admit That All They Really Want Is To Foster Needless Discrimination

Keith Olberman has a point. Bill O'Reilley, who runs around pretending to be horrified over a nonexistant "campaign" to "indoctrinate" children so that they'll won't hate gay people and treat them like shit (no, really!), begs women to engage in threesomes with him. And his idiot listeners are fine with that.

Saturday Goddess Blogging

Calaveras

Every year, I promise myself that NEXT year, I'll get my act together in, oh, late August, and make sugar skulls for Samhein. I didn't manage it this year, but for next year, I'm determined!!

It looks pretty easy, and maybe G/Son will be old enough to have fun "helping" me. I think they'd make an amazing Samhein altar, and, as Kathy Cano-Murillo from The Arizona Republic notes, a Día de los Muertos altar without sugar skulls is like a Charms Blow Pop without the bubble gum inside. Inkubus adds that: Sugar Skulls (Calaveras) are a traditional folk art from Southern Mexico used to celebrate El Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). This is a happy occasion in Mexico. The spirits of the dead are welcomed back . . . home with these beautifully decorated skulls as well as with altars, flowers candles, incense[,] and special foods. Families take the flowers and sugar skulls to the cemetery to decorate the tombs. Sugar skulls are colorfully decorated with icing, pieces of bright foil, [and] colored sugars[,] and usually bear the name of the deceased loved one being honored. If kept dry, the skulls can last a year .

Sure, Samhein is, for me, a holiday of Celtic origin, and Día de los Muertos originates, according to Wiki with the indigenous peoples [of Mexico and surrounding areas] such as the Olmec, Zapotec, Mixtec, Mexica, Maya, P'urhépecha, and Totonac. Rituals celebrating the deaths of ancestors have been observed by these civilizations perhaps for as long as 2500–3000 years. In the post-Hispanic era, it was common to keep skulls as trophies and display them during the rituals to symbolize death and rebirth. The festival that became the modern Day of the Dead fell in the ninth month of the Aztec calendar, about the beginning of August, and was celebrated for an entire month. The festivities were dedicated to the goddess Mictecacihuatl known as the "Lady of the Dead", corresponding to the modern Catrina. But that's what I love about modern Paganism: the chance to create a completely syncretistic religion (yeah, I know that, for some, that's a term of derision) that blends together amazing elements from all over the world. And I've always found the beliefs surrounding the Day of the Dead to be, well, pretty Pagan.

Wiki explains that: Some Mexicans feel that death is a special occasion, but with elements of celebration, because the soul is passing into another life. Plans for the festival are made throughout the year, including gathering the goods to be offered to the dead. During the period of November 1 and November 2, families usually clean and decorate the graves. Most visit the cemeteries where their loved ones are buried and decorate their graves with ofrendas, or offerings, which often include orange marigold called "cempasuchil", originally named cempaxochitl, Nahuatl for "twenty flowers", in modern Mexico this name is often replaced with the term "Flor de Muerto", Spanish for "Flower of the Dead". These flowers are thought to attract souls of the dead to the offerings.

Toys are brought for dead children (los angelitos, or little angels), and bottles of tequila, mezcal, pulque or atole for adults. Families will also offer trinkets or the deceased's favorite candies on the grave. Ofrendas are also put in homes, usually with foods such as candied pumpkin, pan de muerto ("bread of the dead") or sugar skulls and beverages such as atole. The ofrendas are left out in the homes as a welcoming gesture for the deceased. Some people believe the spirits of the dead eat the "spiritual essence" of the ofrenda food, so even though the celebrators eat the food after the festivity, they believe it lacks nutritional value. The pillows and blankets are left out so that the deceased can rest after their long journey. In some parts of Mexico, such as the towns of Mixquic, Pátzcuaro and Janitzio, people spend all night beside the graves of their relatives.

Some families build altars or small shrines in their homes.

How could I not love a holiday that has people building altars in their homes, leaving offerings of alcohol for their beloved dead, and growing marigolds all summer long in order to be able to celebrate the passage from life to death, the turning, to use a Wiccan term, of the Wheel? I've always loved the scene in the movie Frida where Diego Rivera comes, after a long and difficult absence, to see Frida in the cemetery on the Día de los Muertos and asks her to house Leon Trotsky who had fled from the Soviet Union to Mexico. It's night. It's a cemetery. It's completely festive. She grants him his wish (and then fucks Trotsky).

So, that's it. Next year, I AM going to make sugar skulls, and decorate them, and make an altar. Hail Mictecacihuatl! Hail Catrina!

**********

Oddly, I find that more and more of my high holy days require the acquisition of plastic molds. My circle celebrates the rising of the Yule sun by banging on pots and pans and blowing whistles and beating drums (gotta wake up that sleepy sun!) and drinking strong drink in glasses made of ice that we then break upon the frozen ground (see, above, re: waking up the sun).

Friday Cat And Decoration Blogging

Friday Decoration Blogging

May It Be So For You

In a life of unearned joys, being able to live in a circle of amazing women is one of my greatest joys.

I've slept, in Stevie Nick's words, with poets, legends, priests of nothing.

I've been mother to a kind, good, sly-humored young man who has turned out to be, all unmentored, the most amazing father, a great writer, a v. good cook, a wonderful person, and a better son that I ever deserved. I've been lucky beyond luck to have a good and brilliant and kind daughter-in-law with whom I love to spend time. I have a G/Son whose picture I show to my dentist and to strangers on the train and who I knew immediately that I would love beyond imagining. I've lived past breast cancer to hear him say "Nonna," and if that's all that chemo bought for me, well, then, it was cheap at the price.

I've spent a lifetime reading poetry and seeing art and attending the ballet and walking in the gardens and the parks of some of the most amazing cities in North America.

I got to study law and to work for one of DC's best law firms and to handle fascinating, precedent-setting cases in great courts for a fantastic client.

And, yet, I count myself in nothing else so fortunate, in the words of the The Bard, than as a witch, in a circle of women. Tonight, a full moon under a rainy sky, was a confirmation of that for me. Wonderful, unearned things have been happening all my life, but having a circle of women sitting in my living room, eating dinner, drinking wine, relaxing from magic, sharing lives -- that's a gift from the Goddess that I never really expected to receive. Women applying for new jobs, sharing information about obtaining security clearances, renovating homes, going through pregnancy, watching their family members die, dealing with middle school girls who get called "easy," and coping with law firms where the chairman tells sexist jokes -- I count myself so lucky to be inside this swirl of energy.

May it be so for you.

Take Those Nooses Down

Code Pink Completely Rocks

What watertiger said. More here. Code Pink rocks.

And Then, It Rained

It's been such a long dry summer. I've watered, and watered, and watered my garden and my trees, getting a water bill that's double last year's. But that's only been to do triage, to try to keep alive my oak trees that were here when the American Revolution happened, to keep the expensive new toad lillies and the ancient rhododendron alive, to keep the moonflowers that Ruth sent to me, and the roses that I bought, and the gardenias that scented this entire Spring, alive.

But this morning, at about five o'clock, I woke up to the sound of rain on the roof. What an amazingly lovely sound. It's been so absent, lately. And, wonder of wonders, this evening, it was still raining. On Wednesday evenings, I get together with some amazing witches and we do ecstatic dance and eat a healthy potluck meal to which we each contribute. Tonight, after dancing and catching up with each other, we had collards and mustard greens, Susan Weed's cancer prevention cabbage and sea weed, garden squash and kashi, and cheese. We ate out on my screen porch and I kept interrupting the conversation to say, "Wow. I love the sound of the rain." My sisters indulged me. The rain is as if the Goddess just kept saying over and over and over again, "I love you. I love you. I love you."

Tomorrow, I'll gather with the women in my circle to do magic for two of us who need magic. Next week, I'll dance on Tuesday, instead of Wednesday, because Wednesday is the high holy day for my circle: Samhein. On Wednesday, we'll eat a dumb supper to honor the ancestors and do divination for the coming year. Magic matters, in my life, and my life is full of magic.

I wish that you could hear this rain, hear the thirsty earth drinking it in, hear the oaks and the datura and the thyme and the sage and the basil and the bee balm and the budelia drinking their fill for the first time in months. I wish that you could smell it through my open windows, dance in it with me under the full October moon, as we move from Libra to Scorpio, I wish that you could see, moment to moment, what it's doing for the thirsty plants.

What If They Invaded America?

My New Name For A Blog

What Diane Said.

Pretty Much

My New Name For A Blog

What Sir Oolius Said. What Natasha Said. What the NY Times Said:

Scientists have warned of impending disaster.

And life, for the most part, has gone on just as before.

The response to the worst drought on record in the Southeast has unfolded in ultra-slow motion. All summer, more than a year after the drought began, fountains sprayed and football fields were watered, prisoners got two showers a day and Coca-Cola’s bottling plants chugged along at full strength. On an 81-degree day this month, an outdoor theme park began to manufacture what was intended to be a 1.2-million-gallon mountain of snow.

By September, with the lake forecast to dip into the dregs of its storage capacity in less than four months, the state imposed a ban on outdoor water use.



To which, I'll only add: Too. Many. People.

How Your Cat Wakes You Up

This, right up until the baseball bat, is EXACTLY how Miss Thing wakes me up every morning, including the nails in the archival fabric of the bedspread. And, although Son says that I'm mistaken, this is EXACTLY how G/Son says "meow," which is his word for cat. I'm not sure, however, that the artist accurately rendered the "dance of the kitty paws upon the full bladder" which Miss Thing has completely perfected.

/Hat Tip to plum p in coments at Eschaton

Oh! Shiny Things!

Like Lunea Weatherstone, I'm a huge fan of Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab. The amazing thing is that their scents do smell exactly as described. And I can read the descriptions all night long. Here are some lovely new ones:

THE GHASTLY GARDEN
Overgrown oleander, marshy water hemlock, the sugared nectar of carnivorous blooms, putrefying wet greenery, oozing sap, crushed rosary peas, withered climbing roses, and nightshade berries.

THE TWISTED OAK TREE
Blackened, rotted oak wood blanketed in moss and choked by a cloak of grasping ivy.

ARCHANGEL WINTER
Crystalline, glassy ice whipped by a snowstorm. Piercing ozone, winter darkness. (I really want this one!)

JÓLASVEINAR 2007
The Jólasveinar are the seventy-some offspring of Grýla and Leppalúði, an ogre couple with a taste for chomping naughty children. This impish brood delights in causing discomfort, sowing confusion, and all-out raising hell during the Yule season. Their names are indicative of their malicious intentions -- Strap Loosener, Door Slammer, Window Peeper, Sausage Snatcher, Doorway Sniffer, Icebreaker -- and their creepy natures -- Lamp Shadow, Smoke Gulper, Crevice Imp. The devillish Jólasveinar finally cease their mischief and head for home at Þrettándinn.

Their scent is a mishmash of snow, dirt, Icelandic moss, marsh felwort, and the smushed petals of buttercups and moorland spotted orchids, with the barest hint of the scent of pilfered Christmas pastries.

THE SHIVERING BOY
Cold, cold forever more. A winter storm roaring through empty stone halls, bearing echoes of despair, desolation, and death on its winds. The scent of frozen, dormant vineyards, bitter sleet, and piercing ozone, hurled through labdanum, benzoin, and olibanum.

I'm also a big fan of Elsa Peretti and am lately longing for her heavily-promoted round pendant. Something about her shapes is so modern and so organic at the same time.

And, this Spring, I want to plant about 25 of these bat plants in the woodland garden. Surely next year we'll get enough rain, right? I will, of course, always long for far more books that I have time to read.

In just a few weeks, I'll run to Whole Foods to buy this year's Beaujolais nouveau, which I'll drink all the way up to Yule. Speaking of Whole Foods, they've gotten me hooked on Brown Paper Chocolates. I especially like the dark chocolate, zapped by ancho chiles, almonds and aged tequila and the white chocolate fragrant with Lavender, Pimm's® No.1 and Chervil with a cracked pepper and lavender fleur de sel afterthought. A tiny shaving of one of these is all you need, much better than the cheap stuff.

What are you longing for?

Twisted Fate

It has a certain symmetry to it, and while I have always liked the word rather more than the definition, I may be coming to appreciate the concept.
I'm about to buy a house in the one place I never wanted to live. And I somehow couldn't be happier after being handed life's lemons.
In the scheme of things, it is not that long past that I left the district, the capitol, the beltway boys behind. I spurned the traffic and the emotional gridlock and the fraternity of men who run think they run this country. I intended never to return.
For work and for marriage, I broke the promise. I broke down crying. I broke with personal traditional and I begged my husband in the middle of the night to pledge I wouldn't have to die in this place, where everything seems corrupt, where everyone becomes pasty and gray-eyed with work. I broke.
And in the candlelight, I sat and I faced the shadow in the inhumanity of the tower of white-walled, beige-carpeted luxury apartments. The months lengthened and when my spirit bent and bowed, it was not the goddess that saved me.
I did it. Day by day I learned to live in the body I am in, to inhabit my own self truly at last. I learned to find the women who would stand with me in the face of that fraternity, women who would not settle, who would not give, who would not only hope but act and laugh as they did.
And when my husband asked me what I thought my heart would long to hear, `Do you want to go?' I was almost disappointed. Why should I be chased away by men with a penchant for hostility and their fingers on the button? How could I leave now, when I have so much work to do? Plus, I'll take it as a sign that our realtor runs a Chinese medicine business on the side.
We stayed. We sang. We thanked the wolf and the spider and the symmetry.
The lemonade tastes good here.

Saturday Goddess Blogging

The Banshee

As we came down the old boreen,
Rose and I – Rose and I,
At vesper time on Sunday e’en,
We heard a banshee cry!
Beyond the churchyard dim and dark,
‘Neath whispering elms, and yew-trees stark,
Where our star shone-a corpse-like spark-
Against the wintry sky.

We heard and shuddered sick with dread,
Rose and I- Rose and I,
As the shrill keening rang o’erhead
Where cloud-wrack floated high.
Our two young hearts long, sorely tried,
By poverty and love denied
Still waiting for some favouring tide,
And now! Death come so nigh.

‘Which of us two is called away
You or I-You or I?”
I heard my patient poor love say,
With bitter plaintive sigh.
‘Neither, dear girl,” I bravely said,
‘To Mary Mother bow your head,
And cry for help to Her instead,
Nor heed the Banshee’s cry’.

We raised our hearts in fervent prayer,
Rose and I-Rose and I,
Nor knew our troubles ended there,
Our happiness came nigh.
For ‘twas the grim old farmer, he-
My only kin, rich, miserly,
Who, dying left his wealth to me-
For whom the banshee cried.

by Alice Guerin Christ

St. Gertrude

If fate had taken a very few different turns, its v. likely that I'd have ended up in a convent, and I'll admit that, to this day, virulent anti-Catholic that I am, I still sometimes long for the structured life of prayer and community that only Catholic convents appear to provide. Katherine Kunz doesn't help with her current photo essay concerning the Monastery of St. Gertrude. Here's the kind of thing that always pulls me in:

Stability with the Land

Sr. Teresa reflects that, “stability in community is also stability in the whole ecosystem of a place,…of which we are a very small part.” Stability cultivates a sense of groundedness. Almost everyone I talked with expressed the importance of the forest and walks on the land to their spiritual life. Sr. Placida spent an entire year living in a rustic cabin in the forest behind the monastery. Living one quarter mile from the monastery, Sr. Placida would join the community on Sundays for Mass. This time of solitude was extremely important and served to deepen her “inner life.” Many of the sisters come from farming families surrounding the monastery, and the bodies of sisters who have died are laid to rest in the monastery’s cemetery. The sisters have recently started to construct their own wooden caskets to be more connected with the land and to decrease the ecological impact of burial practices.


Kunz quotes the brilliant Joan Chittister, a Benedictine sister and author, [who] urges sisters to live their Monastic Profession through its three dimensions of stability, obedience, and conversatio morum in their present day commitments. “Do what these values demand, in this culture, on this planet, at this time, in this civilization, in the here and now.”

I imagine that's what Wiccans are supposed to be figuring out how to do, as well: Do what our values demand, in this culture, on this planet, at this time, in this civilization, in the here and now. Sweet Kali on a kettle drum, it's easier to say than it is to do. What does that mean to you, to do what the values of Wicca demand, in this culture, on this planet, at this time, in this civilization, in the here and now?

Hint: it has nothing to do with buying a cool athame. And just because you cast a circle, doesn't necessarily make it magic.

Great News!

Mary Oliver begins blogging.

A Woman In The White House

I think that Eugene Robinson makes some good points in today's WaPo article. I've been pretty upfront that one of the reasons that I support Hillary Clinton is that she's a woman. She's not nearly as liberal as I am, but then, I've never voted for anyone as liberal as I am. For my entire adult life, I've voted for white men who had a shot at winning but who were not nearly as liberal as I am. Given that, I think that there's inherent value in having a woman in the White House, at least once every 231 years or so.

And I don't intend to feel "bad" about calculating based, in part, on sex. Goddess knows, there's a boatload of white men who won't be voting for either Hillary or Obama based upon her sex and his skin color. We should stop taking sex into account? You first, Bubbas, you first.

Friday Cat Blogging

Sex By Moonlight

From NYT:

[A]t night, just after the full moon, under warm tropic breezes, the corals dissolve in an orgy of reproduction, sowing waters with trillions of eggs and sperm that swirl and dance and merge to form new life. The frenzy can leave pink flotsam. . . . When I talk about thousands of reefs in the Caribbean releasing their spawn within minutes of each other during a specific phase of the moon, people marvel and ask, ‘How do they do it?’” said Alina M. Szmant, a coral expert at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. “My answer is always, ‘It’s a mystery.’”

My New Name For A Blog

What John Michael Greer Said.

Now Why Didn't I Think Of That?

My Heroine.

Some Sanity In A World Of "Abstinence Education"

Good. Let's hope that other schools will follow. What's the point to denying children the medical care that they need? Who thinks that it's a better option to let middle school kids conceive babies? As for the "parents' rights," parents can exercise their rights by staying involved with their kids' lives and supervising their kids. But they don't have a "right" to foist unwanted babies and sexual diseases onto their kids or the rest of us.

When The Rough God Goes Riding

My New Name For A Blog

As always, my new name for a blog is What Athenae Said

Your Wild Self

This is too much fun.

/Hat tip to Shaw Kenawe.

They Don't Even Try To Be Logically Consistent

It's old news by now that the Republicans and their orc pit of bloggers have taken to attacking the families of kids who benefitted from SCHIP, the children's health insurance program that Congress wants to expand and that Bush has vetoed.

What's interesting about the latest attack is that it's directed against a family that lacked insurance but chose to have a child, anyway. The child had a serious heart condition that required expensive health care. (The mother had insurance years ago at a prior job, but quit when that job became "unmanageable" and has worked for years as a waitress at a restaurant that doesn't provide insurance.) The right wing slime machine is in high dudgeon over the notion that this family shouldn't have had kids if they didn't want to work at jobs that provide insurance.

Of course, the right wing also doesn't believe in family planning or birth control. What was this married couple supposed to do -- abstain from sex forever? What if they'd saved enough to pay for a normal hospital birth for a healthy child, but discovered, while the mother was still pregnant, that the child, when born, would have an expensive heart condition? An abortion at that point would be affordable, out of their savings, but they couldn't afford the health care. In the wingnut world, what should they have done? Remember, wingnuts hate abortion worst of all.

And, of course, there's no end to the "objections" the wingnuts can come up with when they presume to decide how other people should live their lives. What about people who have jobs that provide insurance, have a child, lose that job to "oursourcing" (it happens in George Bush's America) and then their child develops an expensive medical condition? Sure, we could go back and criticize some "choice" they made -- there was that year that they took the family to Disney Land instead of foreseeing that their child would develop cancer and need to be hospitalized for a month. If they'd invested that money in the stock market -- oh, wait.

In the end, it's all just nuts. We're the richest country on Earth. We can afford trillions of dollars for an war of aggression against a country that didn't attack us. Our wealthiest citizens pay ridiculously little in taxes. If we have money for that, we have money to provide health care for working families, people like waitresses and cabinetmakers. The notion that people should have to "choose" between working at the vanishingly few jobs that provide real health insurance and having a child or between owning a home and having a child or between being self-employed or having a child is just goofy. Well, no, it's more than just goofy. It's evil and pernicious and disgusting. I'm looking at you, Republican Party.

It Costs Money Not To Address Climate Change

From today's EEI newsletter:

University of Maryland Study Assesses Economic Effect of Climate Change

The University of Maryland's Center for Integrative Environmental Research has released a study showing the economic impacts of climate change, the Washington Post reported. Wrote the newspaper: "Global warming will strain public budgets and raise the costs of cooling American homes, the authors write, and it will provide only temporary benefits to the mid-Atlantic's agricultural sector. For example, a predicted rise in sea level would require Hawaii to spend nearly $2 billion on upgrading its drinking water and wastewater facilities over the next 20 years."
Washington Post , Oct. 17.

The costs of doing nothing, the costs of business as usual, are staggering.

No. U Can Not Haz Made Bed. Why U Ask? U R Stoopid? Go To Work. Bring Home Fancee Feast

Courreges

Water, Earth, Air

That Soft Landing

My New Name For A Blog

What Freeway Blogger Said.

Black Oaks By Mary Oliver

Blog Action Day

Okay, not one can write a symphony, or a dictionary,

or even a letter to an old friend, full of remembrance
and comfort.

Not one can manage a single sound though the blue jays
carp and whistle all day in the branches, without
the push of the wind.

But to tell the truth after a while I'm pale with longing
for their thick bodies ruckled with lichen

and you can't keep me from the woods, from the tonnage

of their shoulders, and their shining green hair.

Today is a day like any other: twenty-four hours, a
little sunshine, a little rain.

Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from
one boot to another -- why don't you get going?

For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees.

And to tell the truth I don't want to let go of the wrists
of idleness, I don't want to sell my life for money,

I don't even want to come in out of the rain.

May It Be So For You

There's a moment when the Canon and Gigue in D Major by Musica Antigua Koln is on the stereo, Les Heretiques is breathing in the decanter, the Halloween decorations are up, the oak leaves have been raked into the street for the county to turn into mulch, the boeuf bourguignon is on the stove, the cat is asleep on the hearth, the laundry is done, and my altar becons.

That's the moment when I'm happy, content, alive.

May it be so for you.

Just Go Watch

I totally stole this from Feministing, and it has had me in tears for about twenty minutes.

Relevant Poetry Blogging

"Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York,
And all the clouds that loured upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths,
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments,
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smoothed his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamped, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them,--
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun." -
-- William Shakespeare

All That Is Necessary For Evil To Succeed . . . .

Normally, I'd just provide a link, but I think that what Frank Rich says today is too important. We have got -- all of us -- to stop being "good Germans."

The ‘Good Germans’ Among Us
By FRANK RICH
Published: October 14, 2007

“BUSH lies” doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s time to confront the darker reality that we are lying to ourselves.
Ten days ago The Times unearthed yet another round of secret Department of Justice memos countenancing torture. President Bush gave his standard response: “This government does not torture people.” Of course, it all depends on what the meaning of “torture” is. The whole point of these memos is to repeatedly recalibrate the definition so Mr. Bush can keep pleading innocent.

By any legal standards except those rubber-stamped by Alberto Gonzales, we are practicing torture, and we have known we are doing so ever since photographic proof emerged from Abu Ghraib more than three years ago. As Andrew Sullivan, once a Bush cheerleader, observed last weekend in The Sunday Times of London, America’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques have a grotesque provenance: “Verschärfte Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the ‘third degree.’ It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation.”

Still, the drill remains the same. The administration gives its alibi (Abu Ghraib was just a few bad apples). A few members of Congress squawk. The debate is labeled “politics.” We turn the page.

There has been scarcely more response to the similarly recurrent story of apparent war crimes committed by our contractors in Iraq. Call me cynical, but when Laura Bush spoke up last week about the human rights atrocities in Burma, it seemed less an act of selfless humanitarianism than another administration maneuver to change the subject from its own abuses.

As Mrs. Bush spoke, two women, both Armenian Christians, were gunned down in Baghdad by contractors underwritten by American taxpayers. On this matter, the White House has been silent. That incident followed the Sept. 16 massacre in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, where 17 Iraqis were killed by security forces from Blackwater USA, which had already been implicated in nearly 200 other shooting incidents since 2005. There has been no accountability. The State Department, Blackwater’s sugar daddy for most of its billion dollars in contracts, won’t even share its investigative findings with the United States military and the Iraqi government, both of which have deemed the killings criminal.

The gunmen who mowed down the two Christian women worked for a Dubai-based company managed by Australians, registered in Singapore and enlisted as a subcontractor by an American contractor headquartered in North Carolina. This is a plot out of “Syriana” by way of “Chinatown.” There will be no trial. We will never find out what happened. A new bill passed by the House to regulate contractor behavior will have little effect, even if it becomes law in its current form.

We can continue to blame the Bush administration for the horrors of Iraq — and should. Paul Bremer, our post-invasion viceroy and the recipient of a Presidential Medal of Freedom for his efforts, issued the order that allows contractors to elude Iraqi law, a folly second only to his disbanding of the Iraqi Army. But we must also examine our own responsibility for the hideous acts committed in our name in a war where we have now fought longer than we did in the one that put Verschärfte Vernehmung on the map.

I have always maintained that the American public was the least culpable of the players during the run-up to Iraq. The war was sold by a brilliant and fear-fueled White House propaganda campaign designed to stampede a nation still shellshocked by 9/11. Both Congress and the press — the powerful institutions that should have provided the checks, balances and due diligence of the administration’s case — failed to do their job. Had they done so, more Americans might have raised more objections. This perfect storm of democratic failure began at the top.

As the war has dragged on, it is hard to give Americans en masse a pass. We are too slow to notice, let alone protest, the calamities that have followed the original sin.

In April 2004, Stars and Stripes first reported that our troops were using makeshift vehicle armor fashioned out of sandbags, yet when a soldier complained to Donald Rumsfeld at a town meeting in Kuwait eight months later, he was successfully pilloried by the right. Proper armor procurement lagged for months more to come. Not until early this year, four years after the war’s first casualties, did a Washington Post investigation finally focus the country’s attention on the shoddy treatment of veterans, many of them victims of inadequate armor, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and other military hospitals.

We first learned of the use of contractors as mercenaries when four Blackwater employees were strung up in Falluja in March 2004, just weeks before the first torture photos emerged from Abu Ghraib. We asked few questions. When reports surfaced early this summer that our contractors in Iraq (180,000, of whom some 48,000 are believed to be security personnel) now outnumber our postsurge troop strength, we yawned. Contractor casualties and contractor-inflicted casualties are kept off the books.

It was always the White House’s plan to coax us into a blissful ignorance about the war. Part of this was achieved with the usual Bush-Cheney secretiveness, from the torture memos to the prohibition of photos of military coffins. But the administration also invited our passive complicity by requiring no shared sacrifice. A country that knows there’s no such thing as a free lunch was all too easily persuaded there could be a free war.

Instead of taxing us for Iraq, the White House bought us off with tax cuts. Instead of mobilizing the needed troops, it kept a draft off the table by quietly purchasing its auxiliary army of contractors to finesse the overstretched military’s holes. With the war’s entire weight falling on a small voluntary force, amounting to less than 1 percent of the population, the rest of us were free to look the other way at whatever went down in Iraq.

We ignored the contractor scandal to our own peril. Ever since Falluja this auxiliary army has been a leading indicator of every element of the war’s failure: not only our inadequate troop strength but also our alienation of Iraqi hearts and minds and our rampant outsourcing to contractors rife with Bush-Cheney cronies and campaign contributors. Contractors remain a bellwether of the war’s progress today. When Blackwater was briefly suspended after the Nisour Square catastrophe, American diplomats were flatly forbidden from leaving the fortified Green Zone. So much for the surge’s great “success” in bringing security to Baghdad.

Last week Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq war combat veteran who directs Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, sketched for me the apocalypse to come. Should Baghdad implode, our contractors, not having to answer to the military chain of command, can simply “drop their guns and go home.” Vulnerable American troops could be deserted by those “who deliver their bullets and beans.”

This potential scenario is just one example of why it’s in our national self-interest to attend to Iraq policy the White House counts on us to ignore. Our national character is on the line too. The extralegal contractors are both a slap at the sovereignty of the self-governing Iraq we supposedly support and an insult to those in uniform receiving as little as one-sixth the pay. Yet it took mass death in Nisour Square to fix even our fleeting attention on this long-metastasizing cancer in our battle plan.

Similarly, it took until December 2005, two and a half years after “Mission Accomplished,” for Mr. Bush to feel sufficient public pressure to acknowledge the large number of Iraqi casualties in the war. Even now, despite his repeated declaration that “America will not abandon the Iraqi people,” he has yet to address or intervene decisively in the tragedy of four million-plus Iraqi refugees, a disproportionate number of them children. He feels no pressure from the American public to do so, but hey, he pays lip service to Darfur.

Our moral trajectory over the Bush years could not be better dramatized than it was by a reunion of an elite group of two dozen World War II veterans in Washington this month. They were participants in a top-secret operation to interrogate some 4,000 Nazi prisoners of war. Until now, they have kept silent, but America’s recent record prompted them to talk to The Washington Post.

“We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture,” said Henry Kolm, 90, an M.I.T. physicist whose interrogation of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, took place over a chessboard. George Frenkel, 87, recalled that he “never laid hands on anyone” in his many interrogations, adding, “I’m proud to say I never compromised my humanity.”

Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those “good Germans” who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo. It’s up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge administration policy every day. Let the war’s last supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of our country’s good name.

Saturday Goddess Blogging

Confusing 1950s Culture With Scripture

Prior Aelred directed my attention to this post from The Carpetbagger Report, which makes, I think, some v. good points.

The Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, for example, is offering courses on homemaking — in which women are taught that “men make decisions; women make dinner.”More moderate Southern Baptists disagree, and counter with their own biblical references. When Jesus dined at the home of two sisters, he praised Mary, who spent the evening studying his teachings, above Martha, who did chores. Elsewhere in the New Testament, the Apostle Paul writes that “there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ.”

“We’re confusing 1950s culture with the teaching of Scripture,” said Wade Burleson, a Southern Baptist pastor in Oklahoma. “I nowhere see where the Lord Jesus places limitations on the role of women in our culture.”

That said, I think the Baptists have a right to do this, with their own (not tax) dollars. Just as I think that Moslem women have a right to wear a head scarf, even though I don't agree with the notions upon which that practice is based.

I sure hope the young woman discussed in the article, who is sewing a pink-and-brown polka-dot dress for herself and who says, “It really doesn’t matter what I think. It matters what the Bible says,” never finds herself widowed or divorced with a passel of kids to feed. In those situations, it's useful to know how to do something beyond sewing polka-dot dresses and it starts to matter a whole lot whether you can think.

Congratlations To The Man America Elected President In 2000

Early this morning, Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize.

He certainly deserves it, as every environmental disaster prevented likely prevents another war, another group of refugees, another tragedy for countless species.

And I'm getting a lot of pleasure out of how pissed off that stinking non-entity in the WH is this morning. Hide, Barney! Hide!

No one would have blamed Al Gore if, after having the election stolen from him by SCOTUS, he'd gone off to his farm to drink himself into an angry oblivion. He didn't do that. As a grandmother, I'm v. grateful for what he's done with the last 7 years.