Personal Reflection
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What We Turn Back into the Soil
It’s Hallows season–Samhain, Halloween, what have you–and my mind turns to mortality, decomposition, recomposition and the great wide Circle of Life. I’ve written a bit about death. Here, about the fact of mortality. Here, about how we can prepare for our deaths in a manner that is kind to our survivors (downloadable workbook included!) And here, finally, as I have grappled with the dark marvel, the creative force that death actually is. Today, I have just returned from a weekend of camping with members of the Northern California Atheopagan Affinity Group, which calls itself the Live Oak Circle. We had a lovely time. One of the things we like to…
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Feeling the Heat
It’s 104 degrees F. (40 C.) outside my house right now. It’ll go higher tomorrow; a gigantic heat dome has formed over the American West and temperatures are spiking to insane levels. With this year already poised to break last year’s all-time heat record worldwide, climate change is here, bringing fire, destruction and death. Meanwhile, in human affairs, this week the right-wing plants “Justices” of the US Supreme Court declared the President largely above the law, creating an imperial Presidency that is dangerous not only to its citizens, but to the world. They also radically curtailed the power of our federal government to enforce environmental regulations. Elsewhere, the racist right…
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A Straight, Cis Dude’s Reflection on Pride
They make it all about sex. The sneerers and spitters, the blithe dismissers, the judging castigators who allege that being queer is just about who you rub your body parts against. Who you create orgasms with. The hatred is bound up with the sex. They simply hate and fear sex. The power of it, the vulnerability of it, the lack of control. And as they conflate queerness with sex, they hate, and fear queerness. Once upon a time, I dated a stripper. She was brilliant, graduate of a prestigious Eastern university, after which she had ridden a bicycle to California. She was an activist, a thinker. And a stripper, very…
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May Eve, the Darkness Before the Splendor
So it’s Walpurgisnacht, the night before May Day. Traditionally, a sort of transposed Hallows, with ghosts and spirits loose in the world before the brilliant dawn of the May. I sometimes think of May Day as the dawning of the World. There is something so grand and magnificent about dawn at this time of year, with the bird chorus and dew-spangled grasses, the cool-but-not-cold that will fade to kissed-skin temperate breezes. It’s luscious, and filled with wonderful memories for me. This year, May morning will fall squarely in the midst of the work week and there is exciting stuff happening at work that I must attend to, so I won’t…
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Against the Golden Age
So, we were talking about “origin myths” in one of the Atheopagan community Zoom mixers the other day. And Mícheál, who is a member of the Atheopagan Society Council, suggested–somewhat facetiously–something like this for much of mainstream Paganism: Long ago, people lived in peaceful, egalitarian matriarchal/matrifocal societies that revered the Earth Goddess in many forms*. Since then, patriarchy has poisoned the relationship between humans and the Earth, subjugated women and created war. We must get back to that prior way of being. Now, this is grossly oversimplified, of course. But it is, at root, the story that many Pagans have told themselves, and often still do. Some still extend the…
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April 8, a Red-Letter Day!
Monday, April 8 will be a day that a lot of people will remember as the Solar Eclipse of 2024. With the path of totality passing over a region housing more than 31 million, it will be a shared experience that many will hold for the rest of their lives. I with I could be one of them. We’ll have a partial eclipse here in California, but the path of totality is far away and I can spare neither the time nor money to get there right now. Too bad, because the next North American total solar eclipse won’t be until the 2040s. I’m likely not to be around by…
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Now Comes the Tainted Holiday
It’s American Thanksgiving again. Time for turkey, stuffing, cranberries and cognitive dissonance. Like so much of the history of the United States of America, Thanksgiving is a happy smiley story layered over appalling crimes against humanity. Ask the Wampanoag what they feel about the meal they shared with white colonizers 400 years ago. It is not a happy, smiley story. They are not grateful for encountering those people, or for that day. And yet, part of me is so pulled to the concept of a holiday for gratitude. Which is, after all, one of the Atheopagan Principles. Shouldn’t we have one of those? Yes, I think we should. The Harvest…
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Keeping Cool Stuff in Ornate Containers
Maybe this is where it all started. I remember, when I was very young, perhaps seven or eight, I read one of those stories about an Olde Curiosity Shoppe that appears, sells something Unusual to the protagonist, and then was gone when he went back to find it again. The shoppe was full of stuff. Cool stuff, in strange dusty bottles and jars and boxes (some of which had eerie sounds coming from within). I loved the sound of that place. I wanted to go to there and root through all the weird, magical things. It started with a brass oil lamp, like an Alladin-style lamp I bought in Spain.…
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New Title, Better Boundaries
If you’re familiar with this site, you may have noticed that the title has changed. Now, it is “Mark Green’s Atheopaganism Blog”. That’s to make it clear that the thoughts, opinions, ideas, and resources presented here are mine. Not necessarily those of the nonprofit Atheopagan Society, which is administered by a Council on which I have one of thirteen seats. We are evolving and growing as a community, and it is deeply important to me that Atheopaganism not be “mine”. So this is a step to ensure that the community and its collective activities are directed by itself, not by me, and that includes speech. Nothing will change here, content-wise.…
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A Paradoxical Trip
So, I’m flying today, to help the environment. Seriously. I’m on a work trip to lobby in Washington, D.C., meeting with Congressional and Senatorial offices to promote wilderness protections and promote the designation of three new National Monuments. If ever there were a net-benefit reason to put that carbon in the atmosphere, this would be it. Wild lands are essential for biodiversity, and sequester tremendous volumes of atmospheric carbon when they are managed for thriving ecosystems. My organization, CalWild, is the preeminent voice for protection of wild areas on public lands in the state of California–an internationally-recognized biological diversity hot spot. California also plays an outsized role in climate policy…
