Goddessing: A Goddess / Pagan Blog

Permalink posted by Sage -- 11:05 PM.

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Can you see Ellen DeGeneres as God/dess? Well, Hollywood's gonna help you do just that. I liked Oh, God! with cigar-smoking George Burns. I'm bound to like the remake with my favorite talk-show host playing God as a Woman!

And on a completely different note, from a completely different part of the planet, there's this inspiring story of devotionalism, spiritual journey and a message from a devotee of one of the oldest Pagan religions:


READ THE WEB ARTICLE

Permalink posted by Sage -- 12:22 PM.

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Early morning phone chat with my sister: she wants me to go online for her -- she needs to order flute pedagogy materials for beginning students. Her computer died last spring and she seems determined to not replace it. I keep trying to talk her out of this stance and into doing a team blog with me, or a blog of her own (or both!), but so far my powers of persuasion are dim.

We are both former band nerds, at least that's what we called ourselves back in Paris, Texas, where we grew up. Public school band students (and eventually all-state band members): she played clarinet, I played flute. She went on to major in clarinet performance and a few years ago went back to school for her teaching certificate. In her twenties, before motherhood, she played jazz (all the saxophones, flute, clarinet, and the occasional backup vocals) and, through a combination of obstinacy, passion, and talent, broke through the conventional barriers and opened the way for women instrumentalists to join the jazz scene in Houston, Texas (yes, she was the first).

These days, she's a beginning band teacher, working with fifth- and sixth-graders in a public school in Houston, Texas. She's one of the lucky ones, in the professional sense: she's doing her right work.

Her first day of classes this year was Thursday, August 12. She called me early on Saturday morning, the 14th (notice a pattern?), emotionally wrung out. She said that when she was crossing the band room on Friday she had an epiphany and a shift in her grieving over Cobi's death: in an instant she knew she would forever more look at, and treat, each of her students as if s/he were what s/he is: totally precious, totally beautiful, totally deserving of her full attention. Part of this, she said, was a consciousness of her own son's difficulties adjusting to a new school when he was in fifth grade. Part of it, I think, is an act of atonement for the times when she wasn't able to give that total attention and lovingness to him.

Today is four months since Cobi was buried. When my sister told of her transformation experience, she said she knew it would be coming because of her readings of after-suicide literature. But it's too soon, she said. I didn't think it would happen so soon. It's only been four months.

Four months.

The grief is still acute, not perhaps at the surface, but very close. When her school year started I had moments of tears stinging my eyes and a storm in my chest: how could a school year begin without Cobi in it?

A few days ago, deep in papers to be sorted and filed and followed-up on, I came across some Cobi things. Two pages of math problems he did while visiting me the summer after his sixth grade (we did math every day for six weeks). Some papers his mom brought when she visited in June. Photos.

It's time to do something with those things.

I'd say our high school band-nerd days didn't prepare us for the kind of grief we've experienced in the past four months, but that would dishonor how important our band and music experiences were in shaping our lives.

While we were talking this morning, my sister told me of how hard she works to help kids realize their interest in participating in her band program. Many of her students can't afford instruments. Some can't even afford mouth pieces or reeds. She spends a lot of time and heart strategizing about how to get these things for her students. Many of them live in single-parent families, and she knows too well those economics. Many live in two-parent and even multi-generational families whose members work hard, at minimum wages, to keep up with the basics -- there's little extra for things like musical instruments. The State of Texas has a long-time commitment to music in its public schools, and each program has some loaner instruments, but there are never enough for schools where a large percentage of the population lives in poverty.

Does your school have a website? I asked. I thought maybe they'd have a PayPal donate button or something, and surfed over to the Wilson Intermediate site. No PayPal donate button.

Oh, I bet that picture of me looks terrible, she said. Picture? I looked. The faculty link led me to a 404 page.

There should be something there about my program, she said. More searching. Finally, under "Organizations," I find the Band Page, and the photo of my sister and her students. And when I read the caption, I howled.


Flutes? I think not. When I described the picture and read the caption to her, we both laughed like, well, band nerds. Long, deep-bellied, out-of-control, teenager-mortifying laughter. Sisterly laughter. Band-nerd laughter. Medical laughter: deep relief for deep grief.

Band nerds, indeed. Long may we wave.

Permalink posted by Sage -- 10:56 AM.

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The season is changing! An easy sign: new birds out the window, new songs great and small. The loud, insistent, rising buhreep, buhreep. The aria, so long and sweet and varied I couldn't possibly characterize it here. The little-voiced chee-lit-lit-lit, chee-lit-lit.

Notes noted.

And partner-of-mine, dear faithful reader (yes, you!) -- Please Note: National Geographic Guide to Bird Songs (see over there, on the right, under the My Wish List heading?). Birthday, Solstice, Just Because! That's what I want (oh yes, and chocolate).

Permalink posted by Sage -- 7:29 PM.

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A trio of Blue Herons and a pair of Gold Finches (wild canaries!) at the lakeshore this morning. Purple coneflowers, golden rudbekia, lavendar blooms drooping from tall spikes above lime green clusters of hosta leaves.

A shoreline volunteer: a Broadleaf Arrowhead, its deeply-notched forest green leaves backlit from the light of the pale yellow sun rising over the blue-gray waters of the lake.

And the earth, the brown-black earth.

And the sky, the pale blue sky.

Permalink posted by Sage -- 10:25 AM.

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Permalink posted by Sage -- 1:24 PM.

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The BBC is doing a weekly radio series on Goddesses in Today's World.

"She's the Mother of Everybody."

Updated on Wednesdays, this week's program is an interesting 13 minutes of goddess lore, interviews from London to Kathmandu to Manchester, temple chanting, and current issues. It includes a brief interview of P. Monaghan on Kali.

Permalink posted by Sage -- 3:02 PM.

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Permalink posted by Sage -- 11:09 AM.

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I read at the Wildhunt Weblog that Joseph "Bearwalker" Wilson, a father of the American Pagan movement, passed recently. I've been following some of the links to acquaint myself with Wilson and his work, including this page of links to the Toteg Tribe Philosophy.

The mother of the Women's Mysteries movement in the US, Z Budapest, has been in her country of origin (Hungary) for almost a year now, having hip replacement surgeries. She's having trouble with one of the post-op hips and they're talking about having to go in and do it again, and she says she's sick of it and wants to come home. She asks for the following thought/prayer/affirmation from those who support her:


Today I'm remembering Z's response to the general interest in the search for Extraterrestrial life and the space movement -- a concern that these might distance us from valuing Earth and from interest and activity in preserving our planet's health. I remember her asking the question (something like this): "What if Earth really is the only planet that supports life?"

She may have been onto something. See CNN's Space & Science article, Solar System May Be One of a Kind.

And while I'm on CNN and Science News, here's an interesting one about Ireland as the Lost Island of Atlantis!

Permalink posted by Sage -- 11:15 AM.

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I need it.

A rather deep depression had just started lifting, and really bad news from this past weekend (another death of a young one; just too terrible to talk about) threatens a recapitulation.

I apologize for the juxtaposition and blame it on a fibro- or depression-enduced bout of sleep deprivation. Humor:

Permalink posted by Sage -- 1:02 PM.

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My priestessing friend PC says our job is to "cover the ground we walk on." That's a great (and manageable) way to think about our environmental responsibilities. I decided to do this "following the money" exercise as a way to vote with my dollars, to find out who and what are profiting from my purchases. Voting is important; activism is important; environmentalism is important; magic is important. So is matching the power of my dollars with the power of my values, and that takes education, just like all the others do.

It's interesting to learn, as I did yesterday, that this use of time and focus and blog space may be, in some small way, contributing to something other than my own consciousness and spending behavior.

When looking at my sitemeter yesterday (installed as part of my blogiversary celebration), I saw that someone had found their way to my blog via a Google search on the terms altria blog.

Altria is the Philip Morris company, which I referred to in one of my earlier Following the Money posts. I looked at some of the other sites on the altria blog search results page, and read in Liam Donnell's bayer's sneaky blog-reader post:


Chandrasutra writes about Why bloggers scare the %#!* out of the PR world and opines that bloggers are threatening a (mis)perception that PR and advertising professionals control their companies' images and control how the public perceives them. An interesting read.

All this sent me on a little sleuthing and I found, in a different part of my site meter, that I had had a visit from someone at the altria.com domain. Hmmm. If I don't post again in 24 hours....

Permalink posted by Sage -- 3:37 AM.

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My partner brought home Godiva Chocolate the other night (she's strong on the sweet department and not too hip to fair trade chocolate). I followed that money to Campbell Soup and Campbell Soup CEO Douglas R Conant.

To Conant's credit, I found out that

• he and his wife are patrons of the New Jersey Theatre Alliance
  


• he's an Associate Chair of The 2004 Catalyst Awards Dinner; the Catalyst Award "honors innovative approaches with proven results taken by companies to address the recruitment, development, and advancement of all managerial women, including women of color."
  


• he's a Board Trustee of The Seeing Eye, "an organization which concentrates on its mission to enhance the independence, dignity, and self-confidence of blind people through the use of Seeing Eye dogs."
  

And as for Campbell Soup:

• the company is a long-time supporter of the National Association of Letter Carriers campaign to Stamp Out Hunger
  


• according to Campbell Soup spokesman John Faulkner, "many of his company’s products contain infinitesimal amounts of genetically engineered corn or soybeans. Typically, those ingredients are used as bindings in soups and sauces. The corn in Campbell’s soups is not genetically engineered."
  


• there was a time, though, when Campbell Soups was the "first target of a coalition composed of Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Center for Food Safety and four other groups" in a campaign to force the company to "stop using gene-spliced ingredients in its soups, breads, juices and other products"
  


• it scores well on Transnationale.org's soup-brand shopping guide
  


• it's one of 200 major transnational food corporations investing in nanotech (atomically modified) research (foods are modified, but not by transferring genes between unrelated organisms, as in GMOs)
  


• it recently entered the organic foods world with its organic tomato juice
  


• it is a corporate agribusiness....
  


• it is working to reduce pesticide applications
  


• its Sacramento, CA, facility ranks highly clean (relative to all U.S. facilities) on 7 of the 8 Scorecard air pollution categories
  


• that 1 of 8 that receives a bad ranking must be really bad because Campbell's Sacramento facility shows up in the no. 11 spot of the Sacramento News & Review's Dirty Dozen List "for racking up air-pollution violations and venting respiratory and cardiovascular toxins into our air."
  


• it is on the Stop Corporate Welfare Coalition's list of twelve corporate welfare programs to be targeted for elimination
  

I'm going to have to put together a list of fair trade chocolates for my partner, because chocolate has become an important food group for me lately.

Permalink posted by Sage -- 1:04 AM.

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Rereading one of my own web pages, I came across the following and it snagged the temple-preoccupied region of my consciousness:


A both/and model for my temple/sanctuary polarizing brain.

Permalink posted by Sage -- 1:10 PM.

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Permalink posted by Sage -- 1:29 AM.

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