Curtain Call

December 10, 2007 at 4:59 am (Good News Communique, Meta-blogging)

It’s Good News
when you reject
Things as They Are.
When you lay down the World As it Is,
and you take on the responsibility of shaping your Own Way:
That’s Good News.

Everybody talk about spirituals and they say:
“Oh Lord, Black folks singin’ ’bout going to Heaven”:
No, this lesson is for you tonight: November the 8th, 1980 in All Souls Church:

Lay Down the World
and pick up
My Cross.

And they don’t say it’s Good Times,
they say Good News.

It’s hard times when you decide to make your own way.
You’re gonna catch Hell
if you don’t do it the way they say Do It.

But when you lay down the world and shoulder up your cross, that’s what?

Good News.

-Sweet Honey in the Rock

—————–

Greetings, best beloveds, from the snowy, blustery white fields of the not-so-wild midwest. Come to think of it, this may be the wildest season we have here among the thickets and slopes of the upper midregions of the country. The wind rips through the eaves. Things get dark and strange – the electricity flickers, the animals become wilier, the folks burrow into the backs of their homes and fust and burn like small fires and create miracles wrapped in half-light.

As for me, I’ve been doing an amount of fusting and burning myself.

As I have stated previously, I began this blog as an experiment in balance, in order to feed a hungry part of myself and articulate some thoughts that had been floating around my head for any number of years in the process. And do a little verbal shimmying to boot – shaking a Pagani holy roller tailfeather, relishing the Good News. Towards all those ends, I have considered Pagan Godspell a right success, and I have been the recipient of a number of grand unexpected gifts as well – I’ve gotten to exchange ideas and thoughts with a host of wonderful Pagani, I’ve received words of encouragement and strength that I cherish, and I’ve gotten to feel as though I was part of a thriving online community of bloggers who care about the Mama, delight in the Beauty that Runs like a Holy River through All Things, and love their Gods with all their Hearts’ blood.

But, as so many fleeting gifts from the Mama that hold their beauty in the clutch of their mortality, I have come to the conclusion that the time has come (the Walrus said) to hang it up at Pagan Godspell. My posts have been few and far between of late – I am excited about some new writing ideas and other projects for the future. The winter tugs at the hem of my skirt. The new sun waits behind the hill, and I am putting some things to bed and waking up others.  Some of the material on this blog has been and will be transferred to my web site, most significantly my three lists of recommended books which together make up the Good News Bookshoppe. Come on by if’n yer of a notion.

It was the quote at the beginning of this post, delivered during Sweet Honey in the Rock’s 1980 performance of the African-American spiritual Good News, that inspired much of my thinking when I started Pagan Godspell and it still sends shivers down my spine whenever I hear it. The theology may present itself in words and images I may not necessarily use, but the sentiment grabs a-hold of me anyway. It’s hard times to make your own way – you’re gonna to catch Hell – if you don’t do it the way they say do it. But when you lay down the sewage fed to us by this pervasive worldview of greed and shoulder up the burden of the Holy Hysterical, the Ecovangelical, the Sacred Shout and the Miracle of the Mama, that’s Good News. It’s been a privilege to ferment and bubble along in my little corner of cyberspace for a precious time. I look forward to the sun over the hill. I say thank you.

Grok Earth. Pray without ceasing, friends Pagani.

15 Comments

The Lonely Heath

December 2, 2007 at 4:34 pm (Pagany Musings, Theology)

AS o’er the gloomy heath the Pilgrim strays,
When night’s dark shadows thicken all around,
While nought he hears, save the low moaning sound
Of sweeping winds–at length, far distant rays

Sonnet, “As o’er the gloomy heath the Pilgrim strays” – Susan Evance, 1808

Greetings, Pagani, from pools of light spilled in icy darkness that coats the indigo pockets of the not-so-wild Midwest. The Mama has delivered unto us a visitation of freezing rain that pierced the day and splashed sheets of ice on every blade of grass and naked twig. The crabapple tree with the delicate spring blooms and the hardy fruit in summer has lost every leaf and turns in the moonlight like a piece of precious glass. In the spirit, we are wrapped in blankets and do the majority of our evening work by candlelight and oil lamp, pondering lost arts. Witchcraft and candlelight are married to a dream and the sensuality of real magic – there are no shadows like those made by fire, and there is no craft without shadow. A mystery of fire and ice in the first days of December.

I am thinking of solitude. Not hard, in the thick of a winter storm, to cast one’s thoughts out on the lonely stretches and invite the delicious saturation of emptiness into meditation. The path of the Pagani is one of dancing and hands and delicious conspiracy, conflict and transforming madness and laughing wrapped in the velvety, sandpapery art of community…certainly, we humans with our hot blood and our easily frost-bitten skin are communal creatures, touching and whispering and bickering and loving. But the path of mystic and occult wanderer necessitates Something Else in addition to our mingling breath and our throngs and assemblies. A witch may raise sand with her sisters and brothers in a copse of trees under a blood moon and with them throw her arms out in a shot of blistering, splitting joy on Sabbat Eve… but likewise, she knows that there is a lonely call, a Hand that plucks her thread from the ribbon of her bonds and sets her to wandering on hills and in dry riverbeds, picking stones from the dust and measuring loneliness into a coat of moss.

Of course, one could argue about what it means to be alone. It’s a silly civilized assumption that solitude is predicated solely upon the absence of human life. When I wander in the sweet lost hours over and through the prairie grass, I am never alone. I am watched by a million eyes and my scent is tasted by a thousand tongues. There are languages being spoken all around me, though I’m ignorant of their nuances, and I find that fact lamentable. But this isn’t really what I’m talking about. Just as there is silence and Silence, so there is solitude and Solitude. Alone with the spirits. Alone with the self. Alone with the Stars. Alone with the Gods. Alone with Silence. And the Soul. And the Cobalt Heart of the World.

Ultimately, there is a lot of Work to be done alone. Indeed, it might could be argued that the first duty of a mystic is the marriage to Solitude – to be entered and emptied simultaneously. Whether the Desert or the Sea, there is an Expanse Within, and we are standing in the middle of it. To walk in physical solitude is an exercise of itself – to walk while the core of your heartsblood is infused with the essential liqueur of Holy Solitude is deeper still. All those invisibility spells that get splashed around are hinting at the deeper secret. To melt into the Presence by virtue of solitude is to become the beam of sunlight in the corner of the bookstore where the dusty old tomes on philosophy and theology are kept – that beam of light with the dust motes in it, rapturously spiraling out of the ink between yellow pages and into some other story altogether. There are people on the other side of the bookcase, caught in a bubble of words and breathing the same air, and you are illuminating their book and their hands, and you are Alone in All the World.

Now me, of course, I go back and forth (as I’ve stated numerous times – no miraculously preserved corpse that smells like violets and juniper smoke for me). Solitude can be wholly and unequivocally, knee-jellying and stomach-thunking scary. Vast and bare. The Desert. The Sea. They can cut your heart open and pin it back exposed to all those eyes and tongues faster than you can spit. Naked naked naked. The Silence can undo you as neatly as it stitches you back together. It’s fucking hard for my civ-self to get down with the Big Shocking Lonely. Oh but that Hand still plucks at the hem of my skirt, on nights filled with the splinters of stars and the trees like lacy death. Those delicious kindled moments, I burn with the call to slip through the cracks of the golden hour as it slips into the first blue notes of evening, haunting the tall grass and becoming intimate with the heavy blanket of the wee hours of the morning, when so many other creatures of solitude make their way in the world. And then my heart aches after light and voices…and then the lonely night, and then the busy day…waxing and waning with the rhythm of a walker and a nomad, learning the lesson of balance with each turn of my head and each flicker of my eyelashes.

On this evening of all hard angles and sharpsy freezing bits that will rip you open before they melt, I wish for all People Who Dream an evening of shadow and ice – the Silence and the Solitude. Those brilliant, terrifying companions that wait in the middle of the Presence and dance until you are too enchanted to do anything but Come Home. In the fire of the blessing Desert. In the salt of the blessing Sea.

Grok Earth. Pray without ceasing.

5 Comments

Spiced Apples and Lemon Perfume

November 28, 2007 at 8:57 pm (Pagany Musings)

Greetings, best beloveds, from the fog-enshrouded fields of the not-so-wild midwest!

Snow gathers in the thick of low-hanging clouds that smell like the North and have a Woman cackling in them. Mother Holle gathers her bedclothes and makes ready to shake down over the corn stubble, making modest the naked Land. The first snows of late fall. Signaling fine, they come, they come. Dusting the branches of skeletal trees.

Oh, and here I am. Full and brimming and struggling to find words. Dissolving in the delicious golden light of a dimly lit room, sipping cinnamon & turmeric tea touched with the miracle of honey, thinking of vanilla brandy. Wondering what a perfume called “Winter Light” might smell like, dreaming with my eyes open, steeping homemade cranberry midwinter liqueur and reading about coffee filled with cardamom.

The achingly cold nights that have led me so far into my bones now tease me out into my tongue and hands. The fastest way to bring me back to myself is with a spicy cup of tea. My body was made to touch and taste, to smell and hear and see. I can’t help but roll through the gorgeousness of the world on the best instruments the Mama has given – a sensualist’s manifesto.

I have had a full to bursting couple of weeks – brought out of my bonewalk into an explosion of color and light, into laughing and city wildernesses, into labyrinthine bookstores and storytelling concerts. The season of richness and smallest lights in the darkness is cusping. My mystic’s hat seems permanently affixed to my head lately – it’s good to be brought up to the breathing world by pink cheeks and dancing. The path of my beloved Pagani is a sensualist path, and I am reminded of its joys and its loveliness, plucked even in the teeth of the grotesque, here in the gloaming, when just this evening the sky caught on holy fire and no one was left unmoved. What were these bodies made for but to celebrate and mourn and eat and sweat and pray?

Over here, the smell of cloves. Over here, a ragdoll made of thrownaway pieces of gingham and velvet. Over here, a stretch of fiddle music or a crusty bass line, impossible to resist.

5 Comments

No Work and Pie Day….Still Denial

November 22, 2007 at 9:53 pm (Culture War, Politics)

Thanksgiving.  No Work and Pie Day. Every year I struggle with what to say about it, to my friends, on this blog, in my heart…because most of the time there are those that say it so much better than I do.

This year is no different.

Robert Jensen explores the continued frustration in acknowledging that Thanksgiving is a federally and culturally sanctioned denial of genocide and not necessarily knowing what to do about it.

The general answer to that question is simple, though often difficult to put into practice: We must keep speaking honestly, as often as possible, in as many venues as possible. We must resist the conventional wisdom. We must reject the cultural amnesia. We must refuse to be polite when politeness means capitulation to lies.

I have not always been strong enough to meet even these basic moral obligations. Most of us in positions of unearned privilege and power would be wise to avoid pontificating about our moral superiority and political courage, given our routine failures. Can any of us not point to moments when we went along to get along? Have any of us done enough to bring our lives in line with the values we claim to hold?

Still, we need to help each other tell the truth, even when the truth is not welcome.

Amen.

Gratitude is something I like to try to engage in the entire year ’round.  If I need a special day to be thankful, I choose any one of the Harvest festivals of my religious faith, who have at their heart the celebration of life and the overwhelming gratitude I feel for the blessings of living on the Mama.

This day, I struggle.   With owning the truths behind the country I live in, behind my own privilege and my own complicity, with telling the truth to myself, and seeking a way to hold my hands out around a table, seeking community and thankfulness and joy, still holding that truth, and making a promise in my heart every year to continue to struggle.

9 Comments

Hunting

November 13, 2007 at 4:32 am (Pagany Musings, Theology)

& at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason – Coleridge, for instace, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

-John Keats in a letter to his brothers Tom and George, December, 1817

The year grows dark, best beloveds. The moon greets me thin and clever in the early night and the Gingko trees have chosen to drop their golden leaves all in a single freezing blue day. I have been lost in a funny blissful nonbeing…passing demons and ghosts with no notice. Ruminating on the long dark, absorbing the lessons of Samhain, which are taking longer this year to soak into the organ of my skin and the meat of my heart. I have become a ravished lover of gravity. I am a mendicant in a world of bones and old leaves.

The fields that were flush with rustling at midsummer are flat and cut, stripped and swollen with dust. Exhausted, the soil gasps in huge breaths, weary from bearing the burden of greed and desperation. I am swaddled in guilt – feeling the season’s spirit blooming and germinating around me like a delicious moss and cradled in the rapture of chill while at the same time caught in the devastating point of loss and confusion – joy and beauty and despair. The Mama breaks me down and builds me back up every season, each time with a piece missing and a new piece added. An extra heart, a missing tongue.

I’ve wandered off into the imaginal barzakh of the Mama’s exquisite squeeze – the season of Beauty and Death. Beauty and candlelyte and darkness. Beauty and poetry. Beauty and the shattering of everything, everything made out of glass. I’m waiting for the darkness to break, and some kind of presence to come back to me. And in the moment, my beloved Keats sidles up to me on the devil’s side (Is there a poet on the angel side? Who on earth would that be? Has there ever been a poet unfamiliar with horns?) and whispers all this deep marvel into my ear, summoned from the crusty tectonics of his home.

This season strips me down and robs me of reason…an enormous season – the sky like a bowl of shining fruit, in which the mystic, the poet, the human, feels the stirrings of sugar in the inky pools of the soul, and the Mama shakes out winds and clouds pulsing with the Longing, the same Longing that kept Keats wrapt in the savage joy of a fast star, spending his 25 years shining like a million matches onto paper. Crying “IO!” on the hilltops, dancing in the Penetralium.

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know
-from Ode on a Grecian Urn

Traveling into the inner Deep in search of Beauty – hunting the soulskin down into the infinite point between the last second of the long night and the breaking of the solstice dawn. This is the season of the hunt for the Self, and the organic place where the Self and Beauty that underlies all things become impossible to separate. It’s a season that digs deep, and speaks in a multitude of poems and rhymes and singing. Every time I surmise that I am finished my meditations, it worries my skin some more with its sticky teeth.

That is, the Penetralium is neither anima personified as Sophia, nor a temple. “The Penetralium of Mystery” is organic: it is the body, not just of Sophia, but of Sophia and her lover. When mouths meet in a kiss, there is both entering and being entered. The Penetralium is the place of being joined. – Brian Charles Clark, Puck

Words are just fingers pointing at the moon. But in a poet’s hands, there have been moments when words become the moon, and the moon becomes a silver dish of words, if only for a nanosecond. Reaching the place of being joined. Reaching relationship. Uncovering the place where the fact of Beauty leaves the mind and floods instead in a wash of bare branches.

Oh, I am still empty of concrete thoughts. I am on the hunt. Tossing and turning in the night. The season of Negative Capability. Cheers to that delicious boy John and his poems – ancestor to every dreamy heart that sobs in reaching and hunting towards It Knows Not What. Towards the Beloved, and the Home, and the Presence.

Hey.  It’s a really really really fucking gorgeous everything, friends Pagani.

Slainte! Go forth and haunt the thickets and tidal pools. Dream of honeycomb communion and a thousand veils. Here’s a cup of spiced mead and a handful of hazelnuts. May your days be encrusted with mystery and your nights spent in the savage luxury of the hunt for the Mabon, the Penetralium, the infinite point and the Beauty that Moves Through All Things.  May you find the place where all your weeping becomes all your laughing.

There is a seed of darkness that burns in the light.

4 Comments

Initiation

November 7, 2007 at 4:00 am (Random Thoughts)

What is born this time of year.

The sky is freezing and bright – the stars are shattering. I am breathing in and shuddering at the sight of the manifestation of sleep and night and dark. The moon is high and silvery and shocking. Crisp. Like fresh cucumber slices. And ice.

The Time Before Death 

Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think…and think…while you are alive.
What you call “salvation” belongs to the time before death.

If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?

The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten -
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next life you will have the face of satisfied desire.

So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is, Believe in the Great Sound!

Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for, it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that does all the work.
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.

-Kabir 

————

Sometimes I think there is little else to say that poetry cannot say it.

And at the same time, I think that I dump a lot of pretty words out there with little substance attached to them and become afraid that all I’m chewing on is a little sack of bones.

It’s the bone season.  Rich and empty.  Full and slack.  I have nothing but a bunch of contradictions and poems.  And an urgency. I try to remember that it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that does all the work.

7 Comments

Wilderness and Yellow Windows

October 26, 2007 at 8:25 pm (Culture War, Pagany Musings, Theology)

The season is on us, beloveds. The sky is bright as a pearl during the day and dark as a cherry stone by night. The frost comes lightly in the mornings and my coat has come unbundled out of the closet in anticipation of each breathless day – the maple has begun to lay down her leaves, shocked with scarlet, and there is a stillness that sits on the branches and waits. There are pumpkins stacked by the roadways and in the markets, and acorn squash on the dinner table. Today the full Apple Harvest Moon glows big and sweet, though due to a late frost this past spring our apples are few and more precious than usual.

I am a jumble of thoughts and wanderings this time of year, and I have been struggling with how to pin some of these thoughts down for an obligatory post about Samhain, which is arguably one of the Holiest days of my religious calendar. It’s been hard this year, I admit. I am weary with the deluge of articles and ridiculousness, with the “ZOMG We Interviewed a Witch!” staple of American Journalism, with the ongoing arguments from all sides about the TRUTH about Samhain (its origins, whether its evil, etc etc ad nauseum), so much so that I can only barely muster any feeling other than a kind of tired irritability, much akin to how I feel after a few days of scratching at the same mosquito bite. Samhain is by far our most visible holiday as a people, and sometimes I feel washed out by those big spotlights pointed at us for an entire month – especially as during this time of year I feel more and more inclined to walk in the early darkness and hide in the hedge, storing up on silence.

So. Sew. Sew buttons. Somewhere around this week, I always seem to come back to it. I always have at least one day of feeling wholly sick of everything before I Remember… before I choose to embody joy in my dealings with the blustery wind and the red maple and the smell of squash baking. And then it comes.  I remember that when all is said and done and folks have worn themselves out from arguing the historical validity of the holiday and whether or not its evil or just fun or spiritually significant, there remains the moss-covered, secret shining truth (truth! yep, I said it) of Samhain in the core of my heart, and within that truth is the fact that this season has always held something precious, gorgeous and mysterious for me, since before I had a name for it. And I have always felt that the veneration of my ancestors is crucial to the practice of my spiritual being. And I am ever in awe of the power of Death. And I am ever grateful for the outstanding and overwhelming explosion of Life that comes through and between and in spite of and because of Death.

When I placed my young hand on that first book so many years ago that spoke so directly and piercingly to the very bedrock of my blood and bones and told me the name of my people and gave me a point of reference for the way that had been stirring in me for years, one of the first things I crowed with delight to discover there in my little room surrounded by the detritus of my 14 years on earth was the fact that my people had a theology, books of rituals/practices/meditations, beautiful stories, a veneration and a deep abiding love, all centered around this gorgeous, delicious time of year. Much of what I learned back then is historically inaccurate – of course I’ve made changes in my understanding of Samhain (and Paganism, of course) since then. But the fact remains – it is a part of what makes us human that we remember and celebrate our beloveds who have died. It is a part of what makes us human that we celebrate the turning of each season and the blessings of our lives. Samhain is a story. A good story. It is the story of those that lived before me and live in my elbows and my back. It is the story of the Mama as she lays down and sighs and sleeps. It is the story of the screaming chaos of winter and the harsh clicking of the Oldest Woman, Owl Woman, who sits in the blackest night and spins out the dealings of our smallness and our bright thread. It is the story of squash. And pumpkins and turnips. And the human gift of telling stories to dance with fear. To look at Death, between Her curtain and His veils, and speak to those we love.

Death is on my mind. The bluntness of it, the reluctant necessity, the beauty and the unfairness. I may light candles for that Dark Lady, Sly Angel, Skull-faced Santisima, but I no more like Death than any other hot and fleshly creature. Death is a wilderness we cannot navigate but only hold in our hearts like a terror – noticing as the leopard leaps how gorgeous it is before it cuts out our throat and eats. It is a really really scary love. I will never master it. I shouldn’t. I will never never tame it. I shouldn’t.

One of my favorite activities is to peer into empty buildings and lost corners after dark. The secret wilderness that pools there is testimony to the power of the wild resurrection of timeless Mystery. When we give up the day, the night refills our bodies with fresh cups of dreams. When we give up clock time, we are refreshed by the radical anarchy of natural time in ritual – that space within a sea of right now. If we can stop the endless grinding frenetic movement of our industrial hyperculture long enough – it wouldn’t be long before the moss and the little things that live in the silent spaces between the grass blades would be singing all their night songs in celebration of Everything We Don’t Know. How terrifying that must be to a civilization bent on order and knowing. In this spirit, this may be why, aside from the deep and vital blessing of holding a day out to give thanks to The Beloved Dead – Those That Come Before and Who Sleep In Our Marrow, I find Samhain to be a holy moment, and knew so before I had a name for it. Samhain is a great Empty even as it is full of voices – a howling stillpoint before anarchy, a salutation to night songs and feral non-time. Samhain is the first invitation to a season of testimony and wild resurrection. Of Mystery and Sleep. Of masks and gifts. Of offering after sacrifice. Of holding ourselves out in the cold night and laughing after we scream. Owl Woman at the back of the cold room rocking in her chair. Laughing her ass off. Scaring the shit out of every breathing thing.

The more I try to hold on to it, the more it slips away, wily and crafty season.

Not that I post enough nowadays so’s you’d notice, but I will be out of the internetoblogosphero for the week, hoping to return with fresh joy and a basket of yellow windows, making ready for snow and watching the geese fly. Many blessings to you, beloveds, as the year turns and the shadows reach out for your toes. Mother Holle is dancing just over the hill.

Grok Earth. Pray without ceasing.

5 Comments

Pause

October 19, 2007 at 2:14 am (Pagany Musings, Random Thoughts)

Greetings, Pagani, from the wet, emerald green and blustery spectacle of the not-so-wild Midwest. Our autumn has been late, and less colorful than in other years, but the promise of night is still extant – sidling up to the window and scratching at the door, whispering little songs in sibilant languages and speaking frankly about death. The weather is large, and dramatic – enormous clouds boulder and slash across the sky, which often has that gorgeous sheen that builds in the human eye just before weeping, that makes the blue look…saturated with a breathless joy. I stop often to take big gasping breaths of the Mama’s gifts. And sometimes my eyes water with the wind, or the wonder, and then I am the Mama, and my eyes are the sky, and she is me, but bigger then me, and then I grin a lot, and I have an apple.

Other than that, I’m at a loss these wet and grand weeks. Driving in the lightning gray steel evenings through the mind-erasing rain, I make a lot of wishes. It’s wish country here around this time of year. I light some candles on the altar of my ancestors and look into their eyes and dream. I grapple and wrestle. I pray. Sometimes I hear nothing. So I go on wishing.

Sometimes a blog post pops into the middle of the wishing and the praying. But not this week. This week, there is only the beds of weeds, all soaked, and a single dying wasp on the sidewalk. I with my shroud of crabapple leaves and shaking water off of the ragged bottom of my jeans, helping her into the dark between two blades of Oz-green grass and whispering to her a peaceful Return.

8 Comments

The War on Halloween

October 11, 2007 at 2:47 pm (Culture War, Extremely Silly, Random Thoughts)

AH! It’s that time of year again. The leaves are turning, the pumpkins are blushing orange, and the War on Samhain begins. Let’s begin this year’s festive 3 month long Season of Religious Bickering (running approx. October 1st through December 26th) with a letter.

Dear America,

As a fellow American dedicated to the worship of my beloved gods, I am personally outraged at the lack of respect given to Halloween, the most sacred day of my religious calendar. I am sickened by the continued commercialism assigned to this most holy of days, and I can only imagine that the spirits of my Beloved Ancestors feel the same. I am worried about the escalation of this War on Samhain, and I beg you to remember the Reason for the Season, which is the veneration of our Beloved Dead. It is a disgrace to our heritage and an insult to the multiple, splendid and eternal gods of this Land to ignore and/or cheapen this most noble of holidays with bland “Harvest” festivals (ironically possibly more Pagan than commercial Halloween…) or cheap candy. Every public space should feel free, if not obligated, to display an enormous carved turnip at every turn (boldly and proudly referred to as a Samhain Turnip), and altars to loved ones should festoon the halls of our governmental buildings.

Sincerely,
Gospel Pagan

*This is (mostly) satire. Satire loses something if one has to tell people that it’s satire…but I am not in the mood to delete 40 comments from outraged people who think I’m serious about the governmental buildings comment, etc. Comments from outraged people who recognize that it’s satire but hate satire are okay.

**Also – the word “festoon” is awesome.

8 Comments

Colonialism Sucks

October 8, 2007 at 7:51 pm (Culture War, Politics)

And so does Columbus Day.

As usual, I am grateful for the journalistic savvy of Jason Pitzl-Waters, who compiled this excellent post on the continued resistance of Indigenous Peoples to this egregious “celebration” of colonialism.

1 Comments

On Breathing Out My Darkness

October 8, 2007 at 3:14 am (EcoTalk, Pagany Musings, Theology)

It happened in the time of long nights and icy winds: one morning the jasmine flowered in my garden, and the cold air was impregnated with the fragrance, and on that day the plum tree also flowered and the turtles awoke.

It was a mistake and did not last. But thanks to that mistake, the jasmine, the plum tree, and the turtles could believe that some day the winter would end. Me too.

-Eduardo Galeano, Walking Words

It is unseasonably warm for October. I try to walk under the sun and in the heat with an eye towards winter and not think about how my heart constricts with a hollow, empty horror about the potential of Climate Change, but I am often defeated. Last year our winter lasted approximately a month and came dreadfully late. This year, I wonder if we will have winter at all. I saw a film once where it began to snow in the middle of July, and some ridiculous couple grinned and frolicked in the white wet, and I thought – why aren’t they terrified? And then, at the same time I thought – this is good too, to be able to love and laugh in the midst of the end of the world. To know that in the mistake, we can believe that some day the winter will end. So I live my life torn. On one hand, we aren’t near as frightened as we ought to be when it’s 90 degrees in October in the Midwest. And on the other hand, we must struggle to remain human through it, to kiss our loved ones and rock in the dark. Paradoxes and mysteries are the heart of what we are, I guess. There is a seed of light that burns in the darkness and a seed of darkness that burns in the light.

So I find myself thinking about Darkness here in the waning days and in the tumble of my hot nights.

Darkness is necessary. The Pagani go on about this point quite often. And yet, at a group ritual this year I was disturbed to hear the leaders beseech the participants to release their negativities by “breathing out their darkness.” Well, goodness. How civilized. How terrifying.

More and more I miss unknowing. I shield my eyes from the glare of our post-enlightenment obsessions. We pour buckets of light on the world – exposing, investigating, revealing. And we don’t realize that in doing so, we are losing. Horribly. Destroying pockets of mystery, pockets of sweet shade and shadow. Savagely burning the hiding places for things that keep us grounded and sane…

The Sea Serpent’s Daughter: A folktale from Brazil*

In the beginning of the world there was no such thing as Night. The face of the glorious disk of the sun was always full and bright on the land, never rising and never setting, hiding the stars and the moon and washing the world with light. It was in this dawn of the earth that the wise daughter of the Great Sea Serpent happened to fall in love with a man who lived on Land. In time they married, and the daughter went to live with her husband under the sun, as a mortal man could not join her beneath the silent sweetness of the wave.

Though she was happy to be with the one she loved, living under the burning eye of the diamond sun was extremely difficult for one used to the sea’s peace and hush. As the months passed she withered into herself, withdrawn and silent.

“There’s something in my father’s kingdom we call Night,” she told her worried husband. “It’s a soothing darkness, a fabric woven out of heavy shadows under which someone may rest their eyes, where they may sleep, and dream. If only I might have some of this, for I miss the Night and my dreams as I miss no other, and I am so very tired of the light.”

Because he was a good man, and in love, on hearing this the husband rose from his wife’s bedside, ran from their home, and summoned three monkeys, his most trusted attendants. “I have urgent business for you,” he told them. “You must travel to the kingdom of the Great Sea Serpent and tell him that his daughter is in dire need of darkness. Tell him she may die here if she cannot have some slice of night.” And off they ran to the sea.

On hearing this news, the Great Sea Serpent hurried off into the shadows to fill a bag with night, sealed it tight, and gave it to the monkeys. “Remember one thing,” he told them, “Whatever you do, do not open this bag until you reach my daughter.”

This should have been simple enough. But what unraveled the three monkeys were the strange sounds coming from the bag filled with night: the piercing cries of night birds and the drone of insects, a chorus of hoots, hisses and rustling unlike anything they’d ever heard. And finally, the last monkey of the three grew more curious than alarmed, and after much persuading, convinced his friends that they should open the bag to see what could possibly conjure such sounds. And so it was that they broke the Serpent’s seal. And in a moment, the carpet tumble of night rushed out of the bag, full of birds and beetles and bats, and flew gracefully up and away, over the jungle.

Back in the village, the Sea Serpent’s daughter sat under a palm tree, her eyes burning with the dreams she had not dreamed in months. And then, a noise over the trees made her raise her tired eyes to witness the blue cloak of night gathering on the horizon. With a delicious sigh and a sweet laugh, she lay down under the palm and fell into a blissful, perfect sleep.

She awoke in that perfect tender moment of time between darkness and dawn, healthy and filled with joy. As she walked, she spoke to those things that would become the powers of land and time between dusk and morning. She told the rooster it would be his job to keep watch and call out at the approach of day. She spoke to the morning star, giving it her blessing to rule the sky just before dawn. And she whispered to a hundred thousand birds, singing them all the songs to praise and greet the dawn in a hundred thousand tongues.

And she dreamed. And all the world dreamed.

————

I’m not one to be breathin’ out my darkness any more than I’ll be breathin’ out my light. I have read so many treatises by Pagans on the subject of embracing darkness that quite frankly I was more than a little startled to hear the old “darkness = badness” thing trotted out at a gathering of the Pagani. Balance, yes. The dance of balance always. But if anything, at this time in our spiritual history, it is the darkness that we ought to be cultivating in the gardens of our hours, making pockets of space and time in which the small things can creep back in, restore the old wells, rekindle wildernesses, spark the gift of storytelling, and make safe haven for secrets. If anything, we should be breathing darkness into our bodies and making places of rest in our bones.

I am exhausted with light. I may go months without the gift of the truly starry night sky due to the obscene amount of light we pour upwards into the inky vault. I am weary of the great gaping mouths of runaway enlightenment scientism declaring nothing precious, nothing sacred, nothing left alone. Our silly fears will kill us. Darkness can’t be tamed and so it must be erased. Light is order, growth and abundance. Light is savior. Order over chaos, good over evil, light over darkness. No unknowns, no uncertainties, nothing hidden or fearful waiting to leap out from behind the thorny bushes. No mysteries, no chaos.

Without a healthy fear, there is only unhealthy fear, that becomes so overwhelming that we are lost in it. So distorted, we barely recognize ourselves.

Yes, yes, light is important and good. Without it we would die, of course. Oh but darkness, we know, without it we aren’t whole, and we can’t rest. In the wilderness and in the darkness we are full and flesh and glorious. In Dionysus we are mad and full of joy. In darkness we find the wild places, that when tested, come rushing out of the bag like the birds and beasts of nightfall, that are a fundamental part of ourselves, that, though we have historically tried over and over to tame them, are crucial to our being.

It is true that I have a bias towards the night, whom I worship, and the madness of the Lord of Honey and Wine over that Lovely Gent Apollo with the Lyre and the Shining Face. I get that we need both, but I hunger after what we are losing – I am terrified as I watch civilization snuff out darkness wherever it finds it. Where is winter, I wonder as the days grow shorter but no colder. I shiver against the hard light of civilization and pour my love into unreadable corners and unparseable shadows. Holding onto the night. Holding my breath to keep the darkness deep within me, where it makes me whole, and delicious, and full.

*This version has been partially re-written by myself based on a version that I read elsewhere. I don’t recollect where I acquired the original version of this Brazilian folktale, so I can’t cite it. But if you’re looking for a version of the story in children’s book form, I did find The Sea Serpent’s Daughter by Margaret Lippert.

5 Comments

Isis! Isis! Ra Ra Ra!

October 3, 2007 at 6:37 pm (Culture War, Pagany Musings, Theology)

While I was strolling along down the sidewalk the other day, a young woman sitting on the curb said: “THIS lady looks like a Jesus-lover! Hey! Do you love Jesus?”

First off, I’m not entirely sure what it is about me that resembles a “Jesus lover” (or what that entails, really). Certainly she must have missed a few of my tattoos. At any rate, what I resent is being asked deep theological questions when I’m on the move.

DO I love Jesus? I don’t know. Which Jesus? The one who threw a righteous, radical “eff you capitalist bastards!” tantrum in the Temple? The one that liberal Christians like to depict as a hippie love-fest rebel of a guy? Weeeell….that Jesus is just all right with me I guess. Sure. Why not? How’s about that Jesus that other folks depict as a psychotic, obsessively mean person who takes immense pleasure in skipping my demon-worshipping head across a lake of fire? Not so much!

And what do you mean by love Jesus? Does it mean I worship him? Does it mean I worship him to the exclusion of others? Do I have to worship something because I love it? Is to love something automatically to give it praise and thanks -to worship (condition of being worthy, honor, renown)? What is the difference between love and worship? Those be some groovy-ass deep questions, man. I can’t sum them up in thirty seconds. I can’t sum them up in thirty lifetimes.

The thing about Jesus is that he’s more and less than what people seem to make of him. The thing about religion is that it’s kind of….complex.

So how am I supposed to answer that question when I’m half way down the street already?

I’m sure I’m being pissy, but aside from the irritating fact that we live in a culture that privileges one religion so much that people feel comfortable making offhand “rah-rah” statements about their religion on the street at passersby without worrying about any kind of backlash, I have to say that it made me pause for a moment to reflect on how the oft-repeated fact of our hyperdrive, soundbite culture has affected our religious interactions with each other. Passive entertainment and passive culture breeds passive religion? Maybe. Maybe.

Like life, beauty, community, and wholeness, religion is not a sound bite. Religion is not a pep squad cheer. Religion is deep, and complicated, and messy, and strange. There are no fast answers. You can’t sum it up in 30 seconds or less, which is why I’m always flustered when someone asks me “what Paganism is” and expects a commercial-length answer.

You wanna know if I love Jesus? Sit me down – I’ll talk to you for five hours. I’ve got time for that. You wanna yell at me from the curb as I try to go about my business? You’re not seeking dialogue – you’re soliciting a validation of religious privilege and a high-five. And I really don’t have time for that. Funny thing, time.

6 Comments

Paper and Clocks

September 28, 2007 at 3:16 am (Good News Communique, Meta-blogging, Random Thoughts)

This week, over the hills and beyond the black clouds that swelled and bled silver and wet over our fields and thickets, I watched the sun set in colors that I’m glad to say we still don’t have words for, with a rainbow to boot. That’s some sweet Mama goodness.

I am all a-quiver with the beginning of my favorite time of year. I anticipate the approach of the new year – the season of the Beloved Dead. Of heavier quilts, and pumpkins and candles. And it occurred to me as I pondered and dreamed…hey, I’ve blogged about this before…and well, I’ll be damned (maybe literally, but figuratively for the nonce)! It’s Pagan Godspell’s one year blogiversary, one day before Michaelmas. Holy guacamole! A whole year.

I’m not entirely sure how one celebrates that sort of thing. Glancing through the dubiously endless wealth of “information” on the internet, I see that traditionally one might give one’s blog the anniversary gift of paper products, but a more modern list instead recommends giving clocks of some sort, perhaps as some kind of backhanded hint to my blog regarding its egregious tardiness, or maybe instead as a kind of ironic gift symbolizing the fascist tyranny of linear time, I’m not sure which.

So here’s some other stuff instead:

1. In the bad news, corporations suck and have only the destruction of everything beautiful and good as their primary goal.

2. But take heart! There are radicals in our midst and they ain’t afraid to call it like it is!

3. AND, we have friends, who are on the side of the reindeer and know what the Poetry of the Mama’s HeartSoul looks like when they see it.

Yep. That pretty much sums it up for me. Happy Blogiversary, PG!

5 Comments

Harvest Home

September 24, 2007 at 3:19 am (Pagany Musings)

Many blessings to you, Beloveds, as this Harvest Home day folds back into the grass and gives up its apple-cheeked ghost.   It is the first day of fall.  The crickets don’t know that – they’re belting it out as though summer has no plans on ending any time soon.  But the maple has started to turn just a bit, and the beekeepers are up to their gloved elbows in the golden sisters’ autumn wealth, and I have begun to make designs on the kitchen in full and round thoughts of crusty breads and thick soups.   The summer was full to bursting and I am worn a little more each year, seeking silence in deeper ways all the time.  I am ready for the spectacular glamour of fall and the empty meditation of winter.

I have spent the balanced day half in tears and half in joy – fitting, maybe, but exhausting all the same.  Before I go to bed I will steal a little more time for prayer.  And I will give thanks for the equinox and its rare gifts:  Today, I ate two peaches.  I listened for silence and it came, but it was hard won.  I read this poem:

The Moths

There’s a kind of white moth, I don’t know
what kind, that glimmers
by mid-May
in the forest, just
as the pink moccasin flowers
are rising.

If you notice anything,
it leads you to notice
more
and more.

And anyway
I was so full of energy,
I was always running around, looking
at this and that.

If I stopped
the pain
was unbearable.

If I stopped and thought, maybe
the world
can’t be saved,
the pain
was unbearable.

Finally, I had noticed enough.
All around me in the forest
the white moths floated.

How long do they live, fluttering
in and out of the shadows?

You aren’t much, I said
one day to my reflection
in a green pond,
and grinned.

The wings of the moths catch the sunlight
and burn
so brightly.

At night, sometimes,
they slip between the pink lobes
of the moccasin flowers and lie there until dawn,
motionless
in those dark halls of honey.

-Mary Oliver 

Harvest Blessings.

3 Comments

How Can I Keep From Singing?

September 19, 2007 at 1:52 am (Meta-blogging, Pagany Musings, Theology)

Greetings, beloveds, from the astonishing grace of the not-so-wild midwest in the throes of the tender lip of autumn. It’s amazing how quickly the oppressive thoughts of late summer evaporate as the world opens and shines holy like a morning glory in mid-September. I am half rock n’ roll and half gregorian chant as I stare down the long, golden road of fall – noticing as I drive the long dusty farm roads to various appointments, how the corn turns a rusty shade of red and blushes new as a peach at sunset. How the rain comes cold and sweet like a lemon. How the creeks lap at the grass and wax blue as the best evening sky.

And here I sit in the breathless perfection of creeping spectacular death – the tending to the sleeping bed of the Mama before her long, ancient nap – and….well, it’s hard to stay irritated when the world is just so freakin’ gorgeous.

I’ve been thinking about a recent conversation I had with a friend regarding an interesting split between the person who writes these blog entries and the much angrier person that interacts with the world on a daily basis. I do wonder if it makes me a hypocrite – writing love letters to the world, to my communities, to the Mama – when so often the world, any given community, and even the Mama, well, pisses me right off. And yet – there is nothing inauthentic about either of these women, she who waxes lyrical about the exquisite perfection of living rich on a gorgeous planet, who loves the world, who revels in her crazyass Pagani peeps… and the other woman, who is furious with the stink of the shit human beings dump out on the planet, who is overwhelmingly aggravated by the myriad silliness that can be so readily perpetuated by the same Pagani she loves, and who, quite frankly, could live without the entire month of July and be perfectly happy weather-wise (blasphemous stuff from a Mama-worshippin’ lady such as myself). I am them both. I am them together. I may think I love one more than the other at times, but I don’t. Each is keeping me alive.

I have spent a lot of time with Angry Woman – feeding her and nourishing her, and giving her many outlets in which to express herself. They’re readily available after all – I mean she just has more opportunity. Civilization…how shall we say…blows. For many years, the part of me that trembled in a holy joy and fire at the opening of a September rose or the sight of a fox kit under a baby maple in the spring was more or less a secret. And then, in August a couple of years ago, my intrepid spouse and I took a rare, precious road trip to the Pacific Coast that broke the silence of the Woman that Sings and Celebrates.

We drove to Mendocino, California, the Misty Avalon of the West, shrouded in fog and set on cliffs, and we camped up that blissful, memory-less coast to Portland, Oregon. In Ukiah, CA, where I purchased a small felt witch-doll that peeks out from behind a jar full of odds and ends on my altar as I type this, I found a copy of Rob Brezsny’s Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia – and Holy Shit! The Woman that Sings and Celebrates spent a week giggling up the coast and barking at seals. Rob Breszny was just the right blend of authentic bedrock, righteous silliness, kickass philosophy and SARKesque* buoyancy that I needed in that moment to make me realize that there was a part of me that needed nourishment. That I would die if she didn’t begin to speak in some way or another. So I spent some time with that. And then I started a blog, to give the Woman that Sings and Celebrates an opportunity to make known all the things that she thinks are groovy and kickass while at the same time keeping a firm grasp on Angry Woman’s necessary radical pushing. It’s a bit of a balancing act…one that I fail at more than I succeed. Mostly it’s an experiment in finding out where my authenticity lies. Where the real Good News is.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in the haunted and empty Desert of my prayer country these few weeks, exhausted and sometimes sick, grumpy and irritated. The Mama knows that though I may call out in delight to my beloved Pagani, there are an equal number of times that my beloved Pagani make me want to stab myself in the eye with a fork. No matter how many times my heart feels like it will shatter from some daily miracle – the fat Monarch butterflies doing the merengue with the bumblebees in the Michaelmas daisies – there are the times when the compost just reeks and looks fucking gross. For all my love, there are the same amount of times that I feel like I want to throw the whole moldy burrito of the human world out with the garbage where it belongs.

But for the asters. Have you seen them? My gods – the asters.

And then the weather comes in all shot through with flamenco and cloves and oranges, and I lose the ability to speak for a while for want of describing it. And I read:

I read the end of Ephesians 5 as an example of what happens when you discover a metaphor so elusive you know it must be true. As you elaborate, and try to explain, you begin to stumble over words and their meanings. The literal takes hold, the unity and the beauty flee. Finally you have to say, I don’t know what it means; here it is.

-Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk

Oh yes. Oh my yes. And then I think, in the face of such astonishing mysteries and such gorgeous poetry, buried even under all that shit:

How can I keep from singing?

I don’t know. But here it is anyway.

————

P.S. So, and where’s that bit on the gods of the Pagani I’ve been trying to write for weeks now? Well….I’m thinkin’ it’s just not happening any time soon. Some of my thoughts on the matter can be found in this post…

*Oh, I’m not the biggest fan of SARK, you know…no matter how cheerful the Woman who Sings and Celebrates gets, SARK is always lightyears away in some kind of frenetic Rainbow Happy Zone I will never see (vestigial traces of my goth days I’m sure) – but I still gotta love a woman who talks about vibrators in that stars-n-flowers font of hers, and who wants people to kick some colorful, creative ass.

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