Thursday, March 31, 2005
Winds of Change
Yesterday was a day of tornado warnings, high winds, a late rain that softened everything, and cranes screaming high over a steel-gray lake.
Today, a pair of robbins on the hill behind the house draw my eyes to the first greens of spring.
Last year, these signs of renewal were spotted by a mature woman full of innocence despite her years and life-and-death experiences. This year, the woman sees them and knows they mark the last days of the first year of her precious boy-child's death.
Spring is come with its promises and its heartache.
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Monday, March 28, 2005
Muse
Thalia Took has a sweet deal with the Muse. Her image of
Hel shows her scholarship; her
Hera shows her understanding of power, aging, and the body; her
Coyolxauhqui showcases what is evident in the ensemble — the versatility and maturity of her craft; her
Nekhbet has me enthralled, and reminds me of a project I need to get back to.
I don't resonate with some of her interpretations (these cards are part of a
Goddess Oracle Deck); her modernizations shed new light on iconic images (you must see her
Sheila-na-Gig); some of
her captions reveal her wicked sense of humor and her ability to thread meaning from distant times and cultures to the present; her
God cards express her understanding of balance and her sense of humor and inclusiveness when it comes to gender and the divine.
Her terms of use are generous, and she offers a variety of ways to purchase her art through her online shop,
The Cat & Cauldron.
A must-stop destination on the cyberhighway.
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Friday, March 25, 2005
Soil Geology and Cosmology
A reader passed this article along because she thought I'd find it interesting ... and she was right.
The article (
God and the Good Earth, Guardian Unlimited, George Monbiot, Tuesday March 22, 2005) is based on the findings of a soil geologist:
Professor Greg Retallack has spent much of the past few years taking soil samples from the sites of the temples of ancient Greece. He has stumbled on a remarkable phenomenon. There is a strong link, challenged by only a few exceptions, between the identity of the god worshipped at a particular temple and the temple's location. Where Artemis or Apollo were celebrated, the soil was of a kind called a lithic xerept, where montane scrub suitable only for nomadic herders grows. Nomads living on soils called xeralfs, by contrast, worshipped Hera and Hermes. Subsistence farmers cultivating soils called rendolls built temples to Demeter and Dionysus, while fluvent soils capable of supporting large farms lie beneath shrines to Hestia, Hephaestus and Ares. The gods of ancient Greece, Professor Retallack suggests, "came not from an imaginary poetic city on Mt Olympus, but personify ancient local lifestyles". The ancients were worshipping their own means of subsistence.
Now that's the bit I found most fascinating, though the article is mainly about another fascinating topic, how the idea of "progress" developed among the Abrahamic peoples after they transitioned from nomads to settled people.
The philosopher John Gray has pointed out that, while pagans typically see history as a cyclical process, Judaism, Christianity and Islam all claim to be working towards a denouement: "salvation is the culmination of history".
And what does this have to do with soil and soil geology?
If you are constantly subject to the whims of the environment, as hunters and gatherers, nomads and primitive farmers are, an awareness of the cyclical nature of history is forced upon you. Your fortunes change with the seasons, the patterns of rainfall, the happenstances of ecology. Glut is followed by famine, followed by glut, followed by famine. Nomas, the Greek word from which nomad comes, means "the search for pasture". The name recognises the fragility of the people's existence.
A belief in progress, by contrast, is surely possible only after you have developed secure means of storing crops for long periods, and a diversified - and therefore more robust - economy. It is possible, in other words, only if you live on rendoll or fluvent soils, and build cities there.
I haven't scooped the whole thing. There's Easter, ecology, the Fall from Eden, Cain and Able, and more therein. Food for thought. Happy crunching!
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Monday, March 21, 2005
Crochet Pic -- Tarot Bag
Heather at
Sleeveless in Southern Utah said she'd like to see some of my crochet, so here's a first look (click on it for a larger view). Now remember, I'm a crochet beginner....
I made this bag for
Sarah Bebhinn as a thank-you gift for organizing the fabulous dance party that followed the
concert our choir gave for Women's History Month.
My beloved had made her a scarf of the same yarn a few months ago, so it seemed the thing to do. And these colors (autumn golds, blues and purples -- they don't show up well here) are so Sarah.
It's an acrylic yarn, not a good one for a learner, but hey! I have a sense of adventure. The clasp is a beautiful piece of natural coral, and I embellished the ends of the yarn with two antique African Christmas beads (bright, colorful glass trade beads; originally made in southern Spain and Venice especially for the African trade; now being accumulated in Nigeria and Ghana for export).
My blogging goal for 2005: get a digital camera! This scan is pretty good for what it is, but I want to photoblog the flowers as they bloom this year....
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Friday, March 18, 2005
Flux of Seasons
I woke this morning with the sights and sounds of spring in my mind: the robins and red-winged blackbirds I've seen recently, the sandhill cranes flying over, the pair of swans returned to the
Yahara, the sound of geese honking overhead, the lake cleared of the ice-fishing huts.
I woke this morning, looked out the window, and saw a fresh, thick blanket of snow, everywhere, and a sky that looks to be full of much, more more.
And this is how it's been the last couple of weeks. Warm days with snow melt, then frigid days with clear skies, then cold overcast days, then fresh snow, then warmer days again.
Crossing the threshold. We've survived the
Ides of March and
Saint Patrick's Day and the
Equinox is upon us. And Mother Nature challenges us. Is it spring? Is it winter? When the geese honk and the sandhills fly, She calls us to look forward. When she sends another snow, She pulls us back in time.
A month ago, I was ready for the end of snow. I'd had enough of brown, black and white. Let spring come with her sounds! her dance of life! her greens and blues, her yellows and pinks, her oranges, lavenders, purples and reds!
This morning, though, with white blanketing earth and branch, and spring birds darting from tree to tree, I'm thrilled by this beauty, by the way snow makes everything quiet.
Winter. Spring. Two distinct words, two different energetics, yet nothing is black and white about seasonal change. It's not one day that and one day this, coats and mittens yesterday, short sleeves today. No. It's too dynamic, too rich, too mysterious for either/or.
Spring would be the beginning, if there were beginnings.
In truth, the world's seasons spiral out from one another. There can be fall in summer, winter in autumn; sudden snow can freeze the summer crop, a warm wind melt the icy river. We complain and call the weather unseasonable, but we are not surprised. We are delighted when summer floods into fall, when a fall-crisp day appears like a miracle in midwinter. But we are not surprised. We know that, in the flux of seasons, we see each one more than once. ("Spring" [excerpt], Patricia Monaghan, Seasons of the Witch)
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Crane Cam Update
My crane-dreaming friend sends this missive from
Nebraska, where she's spending her annual working volunteer vacation at
Rowe Sanctuary:
There are a large numbr of birds here already due to the unseasonably warm weather this winter. The
Kids and Cranes on the Rowe web site is for big kids too and has great footage as well as changing each week.
Questions about cranes? Or about Rowe Sanctuary? Or about volunteering there? Or about cranes and cones of power? The
cranegirl2@yahoo.com says she's more than happy to answer your questions.
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Friday, March 11, 2005
Crane Cam
I don't know about where you live, but around here it's a season of many flavors. High 60s last Sunday; very cold early this week; 10 hours of snow yesterday — a muted gray/blue/white day; today — a bright sun burning off a thin veil of overcast.
My most significant moment of "spring really is coming" reality came on Tueday night when I walked across the lawn of the Beth Israel Temple on my way to choir practice. The bare ground, absent of snow, was squishy. Usually it's still hard as rock this time of year. Squish! Squish! Spring is come, spring is come.
The cranes have no confusion about seasonal change and take their cues from much more subtle elements. A crane-crazed friend of mine recently passed along the following:
Briefly every Spring about 500-600,000 lesser Sandhill cranes take a break on about 50 miles of the Platte River in Nebraska (USA) between Kearney and Grand Island to fatten up before heading to northern breeding grounds (from Minnesota to Siberia). This is unique experience that happens no where else in the world.
The migration will be view able on the web again this year from a live feed cam (with night vision) in the river from now until around mid-April. To view the crane cam online (sponsored by National Geographic and others) go to
www.rowesanctuary.org, click on crane cam, lower left corner. Or if that won't work try
this link. Viewing times are listed.
Since the cranes roost overnight in the river, every night they are in a different location. I would suggest checking the site multiple times if you don't get good viewing the first time.
Crane movement happens just before sunrise and just after sunset. Happy viewing!
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Wednesday, March 09, 2005
Offerings
Radical Druid responded to my post about
Pagan Proverbs a few weeks ago, and he's had me thinking since then about constructionist, reconstructionist, and deconstructionist Paganism. I've got some questions for him, some time, following from the questions I've been asking myself about how to best describe my own practices and cosmology.
For the purposes of today's post, I claim both reconstructionism (panPagan reconstructionism) and constructionism.
I've been thinking about Offerings lately (or maybe for a long time). This thinking came into focus two weeks ago when the third of the (
lost)
Boys of
Summer finally got a job.
Unlike Cobi and
Is.., who are no longer with us on the earth plane,
E.. is still among us. He's a beautiful young man, physically and otherwise. He's got a rather severe case of ADD, but he's getting it under control. At the worst possible time (not quite out of high school, not quite ready to be thinking about his next step [job? college? trade school?],
E.. did something stupid, thanks to a former friend's bad influence, being under the influence, having too much time on his hands and not enough money, being ADD, being young and stupid: he and his (former) friend broke into a private school, stole a small amount of cash, and had fun wrecking a science laboratory. He got stuck with the harshest part of the rap: 2 felony counts (they wrecked more than $10K worth of science lab). He served 6 months in jail; completed his HSED and a rehab program there. He's now living with a 27 year sentence; 5 years' probation; a $13K fine (his friend had a private attorney; he got off much lighter, though he's now in prison for another crime and
E.. has cleaned his life up). Once he's completed his probation, and paid off his fine, he can petition the courts to reduce his felonies to misdemeanors.
Believe me, all the aunties have been helping
E.. with his job search — we've prayed for and with him (in my case, we've called on the Great Goddess in thanks each time he's had a hint of a possibility of a job —
Thank you Mother for paying attention to E.., for noticing how hard he's working to get a job, to stay clean and sober, to get on with his life); we've networked for him, driven him to out-of-the-way places to put in applications, hired him to do odd (and not-so-odd) jobs.
Maybe you don't know, but over 60% of employers do not hire ex-cons. Makes it a little hard to get on with your life and stay out of crime, doesn't it? Apparently
low unemployment rates are changing the odds a bit, but I can tell you that
E.. filled out 20 job applications a week for nearly nine months before someone finally gave him a chance.
So, back to Offerings. When I got the word that the Universe had finally come through for
E.., I decided to make an Offering. But what Offering, and how?
I thought about some practices of current and past pagan cultures:
1. Offerings of
stone beads wrapped in grass and buried in special places or thrown into the oceans or caves, to keep natural cycles going, by The Kogi (Tayrona).
2.
Clothing offerings to Artemis Brauronia, for childbirth, and
body-part votives to Sequana, for healing.
3.
Food, coins and clooties offered to Brigid.
4.
Drink offerings to the Queen of Heaven.
5.
Pots of honey, spices, jugs of oil, wool, cheese, barley, and wine, placed in Kernoi,
grain, figurines, animal models, double axes, weapons, and pottery, placed in caves, on mountain peaks, in small domestic shrines, and in special sections of palaces — offerings made by the Keftiu (Minoans).
6.
Bread, beer and wine, beef and fowl, cloth, incense, pomegranates, grapes, flowers, and stalks of papyrus, placed on stone offering tables, to provide for the needs of the dead by the ancient Egyptians.
7.
Balls of copal offered to Aztec deities in the crater of The Nevado de Toluca, a dormant volcano higher than any mountain in the American Rockies, Mexico's fourth-highest peak.
Many kinds of offerings for many reasons. Libations. Cakes and ale. Some offerings are burned, some are used to support the temple, some dropped in sacred springs, some given to the poor after ritual.
But what is an Offering, really? My favorite definition: "Offering: Gifts offered to show respect." (from the
Glossary of the web site of His Holiness the Dalai Lama)
And why would a constructionist Pagan make an Offering? And how? Delicious questions. I suppose the simple answers are
to mark events as important,
to express thankfulness,
to admit wrongdoing and repair the Hole in the Universe that results from it (from the philosophy of Rahel, the Two-Egg twin, in
The God of Small Things),
to give back to that which gives us life,
to encourage abundance, flow.
Or maybe the best answer is the child's answer:
because. Because I want to. Because I'm moved to. Because it feels right.
So as an Offering of thanks for
E..'s job, candles have burned, incense has sweetened the air, sacred oils have simmered in the Blue Elephant cauldron, and a job has been done for someone, free-of-charge, because what comes around, goes around.
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Saturday, March 05, 2005
Is America Going Broke?
Protection Magick
ChildOfTheEther has a worthy article at WitchVox titled
A Shocking Lack of Protection. While I don't agree with some of the concepts (like evil and the equation of darkness with evil), I do agree with his basic idea, that beginning practitioners should be learning and using protection magick, and that teachers and authors should be teaching it in their Witchcraft 101 equivalent.
I speak from experience. I wasn't taught protection magic, and in my early days I read something in Starhawk's
Spiral Dance that made me think it was unnecessary. (My mistake -- I made a leap from "we don't believe in evil and don't cast circles to keep it out, but to contain the energy" [my paraphrase], to something like "I don't have to worry about protection magic, that's just some silly ceremonial magic nonsense." You know, I may not have needed protection from evil or malicious spirits, but I surely did need protection. Something I learned much later at my cost.
So, go read. You'll find more than theory, which is a good thing.
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Friday, March 04, 2005
Bad News for Vegetarians?
Human carnivores and omnivores under attack from righteous vegetarians sometimes shoot back at them something like "You're killing innocent plants, intelligent beings, to feed yourself when you eat broccoli and carrots and peas. Hypocrite. Plants have rights, too. Quit giving death to plants!"
It's never made a dent in rad-vegetarian consciousness, as far as I'm aware. But that might have to change. Consider this:
Hardly articulate, the tiny strangleweed, a pale parasitic plant, can sense the presence of friends, foes, and food, and make adroit decisions on how to approach them.
Mustard weed, a common plant with a six-week life cycle, can't find its way in the world if its root-tip statolith - a starchy "brain" that communicates with the rest of the plant - is cut off.
The ground-hugging mayapple plans its growth two years into the future, based on computations of weather patterns. And many who visit the redwoods of the Northwest come away awed by the trees' survival for millenniums - a journey that, for some trees, precedes the Parthenon.
As trowel-wielding scientists dig up a trove of new findings, even those skeptical of the evolving paradigm of "plant intelligence" acknowledge that, down to the simplest magnolia or fern, flora have the smarts of the forest. Some scientists say they carefully consider their environment, speculate on the future, conquer territory and enemies, and are often capable of forethought - revelations that could affect everyone from gardeners to philosophers.
(New Research Opens a Window on the Minds of Plants) have it right. Goddess is the Mind in Nature.
The Kogi eat fruits and vegetables and animals and fish. They understand that "Mother Nature" has given them the gift of life, a gift that includes the consumption of itself -- of plants, animals, and resources. How do they live so well with this paradoxical situation? They partake of life's gifts with reverence, which includes a consciousness about not abusing them. They understand species interdependency. Their culture "ties them to the environment and provides the wisdom necessary to appreciate the value of this interdependence." They live by "the code of the mother ... they observe the diverse natural changes of the universe, either the cycles of the animal or vegetable universe or the stellar cycles." They sing, tell stories, dance, make decisions by divination. They live in "right relationship" with the environment, understanding that their job is to take care of nature, to be safekeepers of the wisdom of the Mother.
This omnivore doesn't think it's about whether you eat flora or fauna, but about your relationship to the flora and fauna you eat. Life feeds on life, no matter how you peel the parsnip.
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Mslexia
A link for my beloved and all women who write:
MslexiaMslexia tells you all you need to know about exploring your creativity and getting into print.
No other magazine provides Mslexia's unique mix of debate and analysis, advice and inspiration; news, reviews, interviews; competitions, events, courses, grants. All served up with a challenging selection of new poetry and prose.
Mslexia is read by top authors and absolute beginners. A quarterly masterclass in the business and psychology of writing, it's the essential magazine for women who write.
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Thursday, March 03, 2005
The Blog Pond
1. Some of the great pagan bloggers have a new venture,
Vox Box: Voices of Paganism.
Vox Box is a collection of interviews featuring bloggers, and exploring assorted social, historical and cultural topics which hold special interest for them. The aim of Vox Box is to inform, not to endorse, dispute, or persuade.
It's an interesting read and I look forward to more of it. I particularly liked Shylah's and Jason's responses to the question --
Are there basic tenets which all Pagans espouse? -- which both seemed so inclusive as to include me in them:
Shylah: Most of the Pagans I know honor the earth and recognize/celebrate the Lunar cycles. Other than that, we're all pretty different.
Jason: Modern Paganism is different from other religions in that we aren't one religion but an umbrella for several different faiths that hold some commonalities. The most common features among modern Paganism is a belief that the earth is sacred in some manner, and most of us acknowledge the divine as both feminine and masculine (this ranges from strict polytheists who see the divine manifest as several unique beings to "facets of the gem" types who see the divine as whole with "masks" that we perceive it with). Most of us also believe in some form of magic/k or directed prayer, this ranges from shamanistic practices to "high" magickal rites and rituals.
2. My blog was recently included in
About.com's Pagan Blogs list. Cool beans, as my friend Pat would say.
3. I'm beta testing a new site,
Matrifocus Dot Net, a deep dream that has been rising up slowly for some long time and is finally sprouting. Spring is come, spring is come....
4. Finally! An in-the-flesh friend is blogging. Sarah Bebhinn's new blog,
Banba, is just about ready to move out of beta mode and leap into the blog pond. (I hope she doesn't mind my giving you a sneak peek). She says in her first post:
I feel as if I’m standing at the edge of a wild, thorny, overgrown wood. I’ve made it through, not unscathed, and I am looking beyond. Before me stretches an endless field of rich virgin soil craving my searching fingers, stones yearning to be turned, birds and beasts eager to share their stories. I take a deep breath and take the first fool’s step…
I can't wait!
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