Personal Reflection
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Towards Reindigenization
I don’t have a job. Instead, I have a joy. Working covers my expenses, but most importantly it serves what I most love. Every day, through the meetings and the challenges and the problem solving, I am privileged to pour out my love into the world. I have no significant material assets. I am anything but “wealthy”. But I have tremendous wealth: beloved communities, loved ones, and a life of adventure and service and authenticity. Native people speak, Starhawk speaks of the reindigenization of the mind. And I think these things are related. I know there is a way of seeing the relationships: how things talk with one another. How…
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Nature and Nurture, and Now
I am the first to cop to it: I am a rather disputatious person. I was a debater in high school and college. Fanatical about it, actually: the theory, the logic (and fallacies), the strategy and tactics, endless hours researching evidence and writing briefs in the days long before the Internet. I am generally pretty skeptical. Many of the ways I have come to understand who I am–as an atheist, as a Pagan, as a nontheist Pagan, as an activist for political change–arise from deep contention with how the world has been arranged by the history of humanity leading up to my life, by how so much of it now…
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Sifting for Indigeneity
You know that feeling when your heart soars at a sunset or a moonrise, or a mountain panorama or the ocean? That I-am-so-blessed/so-grateful/so-privileged-to-be living-this-life feeling, where for one brilliant moment it all makes sense and there is a logic and a system to the world and though we are small we are magical and we belong to everything? That feeling? That’s a fragment of your inheritance. I should be clear: I’m writing now for descendants of settlers like me. If you’re indigenous, you don’t need this post because it doesn’t refer to you unless you have been deeply alienated from your native culture. This piece is about sifting for the…
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I Know.
I know you’re struggling. I know that even if your basic needs are met, the state of the world is crying inside you. And if they’re not, I know you’re afraid and exhausted, numbed, perhaps unable even to contemplate the future because the now is taking up every last bit of energy and attention you can muster. I know you’re tired, and there is so far to go before it seems there can be hope for improvement. If you’re in the US, or paying attention to it, or to world affairs generally, I know the impacts of that man’s irrationality and arrogance and incompetence to all that is Sacred and…
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Mendicant Traditions and the Accumulation of Wealth
A mendicant is a beggar: a poor person who importunes others for money or other material support. In Pagandom, we remember many holiday traditions rooted in mendicant practices. This post is about the special wonders of traditions involving house-to-house beggary, and the deeper meanings associated with many of them. I’m thinking about these traditions, and what they mean. What their function is. But to start with, let’s look at them! First and most famously, there is Wassailing in England: the homes and the orchards. As well as… Thomasing in England: The former custom of going from house to house on St Thomas’s day (December 21) to beg for small gifts…
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Sacred Turbulence
I have a predilection for watching trees sway in wind. Understanding that under the hypnotic dance, swaying resiliently against the buffets of air, there is extraordinary chaos mathematics: that the raised arms of the trees as if to pray to the Sun–for, after all, isn’t that what they are doing?– are both enduring and celebrating. Knowing that this chaos is everywhere in our world, and yet these creatures, like all of us, are built for surviving and know how to bend rather than break. I can watch for a long time. Poetry of the world in long upraised fingers, in light and shadow, dancing. It’s good for me. Helps, in…
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It’s Even More Important Now
It’s a natural impulse: what, right now, is the damned point?* What’s the point of spirituality, of religion? What’s the point of personal rituals and seasonal celebrations, of rites of passage? With things as they are, why bother with things like mythopoetic expression? And I am here to tell you that at such times, it’s more important than ever to conduct our rites and to build community around our shared values. Here’s why. First of all, it is the #1 assignment for those of us who embrace values like the Atheopagan Principles that we persist. Even the most evil regimes have not lasted forever. We have to carry the torch…
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Keeping the Flame Alive
The cruelty will be the point. The incompetence, we get for free. Today is the last day of the Joe Biden Presidency in the US. By all factual accounts, Biden has done a sterling job: orchestrating a “soft landing” for the US economy after the plunge of the pandemic, shrinking unemployment and promoting unions, providing unprecedented leadership on climate change and conservation, reestablishing credibility with allies, and pushing through the largest investment in clean energy and US infrastructure since the creation of the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s. But right-wing media and propaganda are an increasing presence in our lives, and first Biden, and then Vice President Harris were…
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The Resistance Becomes Serious Now
The return of Donald Trump and his appalling gang of fascistic cronies to power will have worldwide impacts. There no other way to put this: those of us with decent, kind and life-affirming values are decidedly out of power in the United States as of January 20, 2025, and the likely environmental, human and economic harm that will result both domestically and internationally cannot be understated. Atheopaganism has always been transgressive. Our relationship with the Overculture has always been one of pushing back on core values like the idea of the “inherent sinfulness” of humanity, our exploitative relationship with our fellow creatures and the fabric of life on Earth, and…
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Anxiety Eve
It’s the night before the most important US Presidential election of my lifetime. The entire world has a stake in the outcome: a decent and adequate leader with sound values and qualifications versus a mad, incoherent, hateful man obsessed with prosecuting his grievances and who has surrounded himself with truly terrifying, fascist ideologues. Tomorrow, we vote, the polls close and then we count. To me, this is still Hallows season. We’re watching a creepy movie to escape. And we’ve already filled out our ballots to drop off tomorrow (California is all vote-by-mail). So now, we wait. Gotta work through tomorrow, thinking about people voting, wondering about the outcomes. I’m hosting…
