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It Starts with Just One Thing
It’s a gunmetal grey day, portending welcome rain. The last of the autumn foliage is still evident, this being Northern California, and somehow it is calm and silent in our neighborhood despite the proximity to shopping districts. Today is the day I declare it: the season of Yule has begun. Usually, Thanksgiving is the transition: that’s the day I pull the Hallows decor from my Focus and replace it with holly and evergreen and sun symbols. But I’m a little late with the spirit of the thing this year; I wrote about that before. A part of the challenge is that we’re in a new place and still settling in.…
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A Winter Spell
O cold, inexorable darkness Draw back now beyond these circling walls. Should fear, and want, and danger walk It shall not be, it is not here. Let this place of warming light Bulwark against freezing night: a promise Holding through the day that we, come nightfall May sleep safely, cozy, soundly in the soft Down drift of love and food and enough. Pass on, cold night. Howl your rages, Pelt your icy javelins. Blot the stars and Dance the barren trees in anger. But come not here. Pour upon the freezing ground Your brutal rain, but step Not one foot within this woolen nest. Have your time, o winter dark. But…
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The Dusty Altar
Since I was a small child, I have suffered bouts of depression. Most of the time I muddle through but a few times it has been crippling: the kind where you spend months in bed, looking down at yourself and thinking, “JUST GET UP. JUST DO IT.” But you don’t. Because you can’t. I’ve been in remission for a couple of years since my last big black hole, and I have a new medication combo that is working very well. I’m working, I’m up and about. By and large, I’m good, even though this past year has thrown more garbage my way than I care to discuss. Recently, though, I can feel…
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What Will Be the Paganism of the Future?
Many religions contain a rosy story about the past, and look forward to a “foretold” future. Certainly the Abrahamic monotheisms do that; and many Pagan paths are highly focused on learning about and replicating traditions from long ago. Even many atheists who pursue spiritual paths these days feel that there must be a story about the future to which they can subscribe: the idea of humans as the vehicle for Life to spread to other words (SolSeed), and even transhumanism, wherein we can use technology so that our consciousnesses are preserved indefinitely, transcending death. To which I say: enh. I’m more focused on the relationship between humans and the biosphere. In healing that rift.…
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Vigil
Vigil Winter stands in the corner of my garden, Rounds her shoulders, tucks her chin, draws tight her cloak of stars and ice, Razor moon and rain. Spare and erect, gaunt in the darkness, Bark-peeling with moss predation, slick and black she nods, She waits, she leans, The sky shows her jewelry, vents its wet moods. Death litters The paths with bones and brown rags. Secret life skulks then like a thief: She finds mushrooms between her toes, grows green and furry slippers. Long, long. Until one day the clearwashed air grows sweet and yellow With acacia, and her memory stirs with the taste Of a near-forgotten lover’s scent, feels…
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They’re Not My Elders
Recently, there has been much sturm und drang in the Pagan blogosphere over the clearly-just-not-getting-it comments about trans women by recognizable Names in the community who have been involved at a high-profile level since the 1970s or even earlier. I feel a need to say something about this. First–as seems unfortunately necessary in a situation like this–I will declare my allegiances: I am for the inclusion and acceptance of trans people. I think theirs is about as hard a road to walk as can possibly be imagined, and I support easing it at every possible turn. AND I understand that as a man I don’t have any idea about women’s spaces, AND…
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No, the Blood of the Ancients Does Not Run Through Our Veins
There is something pleasantly romantic about nostalgia. Particularly nostalgia for what has never been experienced: imagined times, long ago. I’m certainly prone to it. I love costuming and living history and reenactments and really good, period-accurate films and television series. Nemea and I enjoy throwing themed costume parties, and I go overboard in my efforts to make them like time travel, like going Somewhere or Somewhen Else for awhile. I think there is also something characteristically American about this propensity. The entirety of the American conservative movement, in fact, is built around a rosy imagined 1950s when things were “normal”—meaning, of course, they were good for middle class straight white men,…
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The Powers of an Atheopagan
They aren’t gods. They aren’t self-aware, and thus have no agency. They don’t communicate. They simply are. Irrefutably. And they are not “worshiped”. They have no egos with which to soak up adulation. They are here. They are real. They are honored, revered, contemplated with humility and wonder. They are the Powers of this world. Earth. Sky. Sun. Moon. River. Ocean. Mountain. Desert. Forest. Yes, we Atheopagans can speak to these. We can tip our heads forward to rest upon the cool rock, or plunge shrieking into the cold water or climb to the airy summit, knowing we are small and temporary and they are…well, also temporary, but large, and well out…
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We Die.
We’re going to die. All of us. Grappling with this fact may be the single most powerful factor in what it means to be human. It is so profound and unarguable a fact that every religion has to confront it in one way or another, and Atheopaganism must, as well. And while most religions—including most flavors of Paganism—promise that death is only temporary; that some future in an afterlife will be provided to the Faithful, I’m sorry, folks, but I’m not going to do that. We die. We really die. We simply have no credible evidence to the contrary. But is that, frightening as it may be, really all that terrible? I was…
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Harvest of Ashes: A Shadow Sabbath
It’s supposed to be a time of bounty: the gardens overflowing, the grapes coming in to be crushed, the hard blue sky of autumn whispering, “hurry, time’s a-wasting.” A time for feasting with friends and reveling in sunsets; a time for sporadic hints of the wild weather to come. But what are we to make of Harvest—of the autumnal equinox—when the crops have failed or burned? How do we celebrate plenty when we are bereft? How, in short, do we observe the Wheel of the Year when life isn’t cooperative with its narratives? When tragedy comes at High Spring, or birth at Hallows, or joblessness at Yule, how do we continue…
