Into The Woods

It's that time of year, again. What we need to be doing, what our bodies and souls feel programed to do, is to go inward. Think about our lives. What changes do we need to make in order to be who we are meant to be? What are we doing that is working and we should emphasize? What no longer helps us to manifest "this god" in the world and can be let go?

Yet, all around us, there's a ramping up. Lights! Stuff on Sale! Holiday parties to plan! Stuff to buy (buy, buy, buy!). Thanksgiving is a mere way-station on the way to secular xmas, which must be merry (merry! merry! merry!). It's as if the culture deliberately sets out to discourage our need to go inward (not a lot of money to be made off of people walking in the woods and thinking).

The only answer for it is to: go inward. Go for the walk in the woods instead of the mall. Sit and stare at the fire instead of the television. Breathe. Sleep. Ignore the frentic hype. Plug in your earbuds and ignore the 700th version of "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" or the (especially odious) "December to Remember" commercials. Where will you go today for a walk in silence?

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

Le Beaujolias Nouveau Est (Almost) Arrive!

The third Thursday in November is only a few days away! Rumors are that this year's vintage is quite good.

Fun facts here.

If you're in D.C., you can find parties here. The Obamas love to go out in D.C., so one never knows.

Picture found here.

One More Time

Some things make me so angry that I become inarticulate. So:

What Amanda Said

and

What Ericka Said.


Since before the Civil War, the nice progressive men have been explaining to women why we had to wait for our rights. First it was to free the slaves. Then it was to win WWI. Then it was so we could get Civil Rights for African Americans. Then it was so we could end the war in Viet Nam. Now, it's so we can get a health care bill passed. It's odd how we can't multitask. But I'm old enough to detect a pattern here. And I don't fucking like it.

To Be A Witch

Most of us, most witches, don't, however much we might imagine that we long for it, live in a snug little cottage deep in the woods where we spend all day long doing witchy stuff and posing like the heroines in Waterhouse paintings. We live in apartments in big cities and we have jobs and families and bills and Blackberries and computers and a million distractions and a million demands on our time.

And it's easy, too easy, to come to a place where it almost seems "natural" to have "everyday life," and, then, on the 8 Sabbats and an occasional time or three when we decide to do some "real magic" to address a problem, to remember that we're witches. And, that's ok, if that's ok, you know what I mean?

But there's more to living the life of a witch than the occasional festival, spellcasting, purchase of another tarot deck (repeat after me: buying stuff is not a spiritual practice). And one of the simplest ways to deepen as a witch is to engage in a daily practice: Center. Ground. Breathe. Pull back into the center spot in your belly all of the millions of strands of yourself that you've spun out into the universe. Connect, or more accurately, remind yourself of the connection that you have to Earth, Sky, Fire, Water, Center. Remember that you are a spiritual being having a physical experience and that both of those aspects matter. Remind yourself that the way to respond to this work assignment, this demanding child, this reckless, inconsiderate driver, this insane politics of war, this demand on your time is as a witch. Check: Are you, as a manifestation of the Goddess, doing the work for which the Goddess manifested?

If you can stop and do that throughout your day, you're a witch whether or not you've studied a year-and-a-day with Lady MeadowStarFox, ever danced the Spiral Dance beneath a full Moon, ever grown a single herb or worn a pentacle or consumed Cakes and Ale.

Set the alarm on your iPhone. Program pop-up reminders on your laptop. Wear a bracelet or a ring and do your practice whenever you notice them.

Picture found here.

Sunday Poetry Blogging

Conceit

I heard a winter tree in song
Its leaves were birds, a hundred strong;
When all at once it ceased to sing,
For every leaf had taken wing.

-- Mervyn Peake


Picture found here.

That's Not Change We Can Believe In

and

We R In Ur Army, Prayin To Teh Urth

Oh noes!

As we see in flashbacks, Django's training program included the group recitation of a prayer to the earth, one of the pagan devotions that his favored parotege Cassady continues to practice. We're also shown that among the transformative therapies Django sampled during his spiritual metamorphosis was nude co-ed hot-tubbing, though the scene is a short and relatively restrained one.

~Whew! Thank the Goddess for relative restraint!

Where's the concern over animal sacrifice???

Why Poetry Matters

“Poetry is a life-cherishing force. And it requires a vision–a faith, to use an old-fashioned term. Yes, indeed. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes, indeed.”

-Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook


Quote found here.

Picture found here.

Look! A Missing White Woman!

A people with any self respect would take to the streets.

This is not change we can believe in. Just sayin'

Picture found here.

Herne

The Legend of Herne

There is an old tale goes that Herne the Hunter,
Sometime a keeper here in Windsor Forest,
Doth all the winter-time, at still midnight,
Walk round about an oak, with great ragg'd horns;
And there he blasts the tree, and takes the cattle,
And makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chain
In a most hideous and dreadful manner.
You have heard of such a spirit, and well you know
The superstitious idle-headed eld
Receiv'd, and did deliver to our age,
This tale of Herne the Hunter for a truth.
"The Merry Wives of Windsor"
Act 4 Scene 4
~Wm. Shakespeare


Picture found here.

Rain Into November, Dropped Softly Into The Grave

Finis Poloniae

BY GOTTFRIED BENN

Finis Poloniae—
a phrase/figure of speech,
that apart from its literal historical meaning
stands in for
the end of empires.

Charged atmosphere,
everything breathes damply,
epicene air—if it could think anything
it would think un-European things like monsoons
and yellow seas.

Greatness bears itself to death,
says its last words to itself,
a foreign-sounding swansong, generally misunderstood,
sometimes tolerated—

Finis Poloniae—
perhaps on a rainy day, bummer,
but in this instance a sound of happiness
followed by solo horn,
and then a hydrangea, most placid of flowers,
capable of standing out in the rain into November,
dropped softly into the grave.

Poem found here.

Picture found here.

Yes, Yes It Is

Go look at the picture at the end of Reya's post. Just go do it and then come back and tell me the world is not en-chanted. I dare you.

Just Like That

Lascaux

BY JOSEPH SPECE

Struck a pair of stones to start off. Left behind
ten men curled like scythes round the fire.
Left behind the bracing moon. Passed a pack
of ibex, passed the mammoth. Left the carious
canines before the rath, left the scapula—
freed space for petal dyes, for fixatives.
Passed (in a dream) Chauvet. Alsace. Lorraine.
Past the scree, past the wolf standing sentinel, her
mouth. Struck two stones to hearten the blaze,
sped up; pulled from the sack the manganese, the gilt
mixture of ochre and ore, the animal fat,
the deer bristle. The hare I speared fresh
for better reds. Mash of berries in a rolled frond.
Looked back—still breathing, still lone, set
bone to the bare wall: summoned up the aurochs
in a dervish turn, flank hot with lashes, all hot with dying and kneeling
down. Then nothing. Then the quiet
credit of our kind.

Picture found here.

Listen. Can you hear it? There's no mythology that I know of to support this, but, for me, the period between Samhein and Yule is the Time of the Wild Hunt. I have an odd, unearned sympathy for Herne and what he does on his hunt. And as the veils begin to solidify right back up, everywhere I look I see him, his horse that steams and snorts and hooves the Earth, his horn that sends chills, the kind of chills that I think Mary Oliver may have meant when she said: Let the unknowable touch the buckle of my spine,, his host that blasts the leaves and sends even the foxes and squirrels racing for covered places. Here he comes. Do you have a ready offering?

This Is Fun

There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Claire has never met the painter, Paddy Shaw. And he had no notion of her existence when he painted the picture.

"I'm genuinely puzzled. It's a very strange coincidence that somebody would paint a picture about Alice that looks exactly like me when he's never heard of me.

"I wasn't working on the book when he did the painting. The more I think about it, the more creeped out I get," she said.

"He painted a woman that looks exactly like me, even the way she wears her hair and the fact that she looks the same age as me, it's everything else about it," Claire said.

The portrait also shows Aethiops in the background. He is a mythical figure and supposedly the founder of Ethiopia.

Goddess knows what Ethiopia has to do with it.

Picture found here.

Divination

D.C. is full of little-known treasures, and the Freer Gallery of Art is one of them. Right now there's an exhibition that I am longing to go see:

October 24, 2009–January 24, 2010
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery
Whether by consulting the position of the planets, casting horoscopes, or interpreting dreams, the art of divination was widely practiced throughout the Islamic world. The most splendid tools ever devised to foretell the future were illustrated texts known as the Falnama (Book of omens). Notable for their monumental size, brilliantly painted compositions, and unusual subject matter, the manuscripts, created in Safavid Iran and Ottoman Turkey in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, are the center piece of Falnama: The Book of Omens. The first exhibition devoted to these extraordinary manuscripts, Falnama: The Book of Omens sheds new light on their artistic, cultural, and religious significance. The exhibition comprises more than sixty works of art from international public and private collections and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

I have to admit that I'd never even heard of this form of divination.

Where I Want To Be, She May Be

How Publishing Is Like A Saint's Work

Sunday Poetry Blogging

My Life Needs To Change

Damn. I wrote part of a pleading this weekend.

/hat tip to ina in comments at Eschaton.

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.

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.