Personal Reflection
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It Is Long Past Time for Women, God Damn It.
I voted for Elizabeth Warren for US President. She was clearly the smartest, most prepared, most compassionate and sincere and—yes, I’ll say it—most progressive candidate in the race. She really gets poverty. She gets bigotry. She gets intersectionality. She gets it. She wasn’t perfect, and she’s made mistakes. Who hasn’t? But Elizabeth Ann Warren is an educated, passionate, articulate, knowledgeable woman. And that, America simply could not forgive. I am sickened. I work in the nonprofit sector, and I have worked under a number of women. And I would characterize most of them as exceptional leaders with competency, empathy, compassion, and focus, who nonetheless had to be twice as good…
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Mostly Russian River
What I am made of lifted as fog from redwood trees to drip across bay leaves down to Lake Sonoma. It seeped through oaks’ roots and fossil limestone and chanterelle mycelia and vernal wetlands to creeks where egrets and ospreys hunt, where steelhead and coho salmon struggle their way to spawn, and bears yet roam. What I am made of slid down the brilliant bark of peeling madrone. What I am made of knows the scent of the great Pacific, carried up the mighty River by those anadromous fish, and river otters, and tides. It sheets across the sheer compaction of redwood duff on the forest floor, soaking up the…
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The Long Game
It’s not looking so great for the future of the world right now, is it? The machinations of Vladimir Putin to stir up nativist and racist sentiments in the UK and US have led to disastrous results: the Trump election and Brexit. Both are systematically destroying the liberal democratic traditions of these countries and threatening spillover into other places like the Middle East. Meanwhile, China is playing go, calmly and methodically placing its stones throughout Africa, Asia and South America to claim resources and subvert democracies in those places…all the while committing its own domestic genocidal campaigns against Muslims, Tibetans and Uighurs. And, of course, there is climate change. These…
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I’m Gonna Go There: A Rant.
Paganism is a very broad category. It includes a tremendous range of traditions, practices and paths. Which is as should be: people are diverse. They should do what gives them joy and meaning. So it can be about many things. It can be about rituals and “magic”. It can be about the Earth. It can be about gods. It can be about principles for living. It can be about activism. But you know, one thing we can say with confidence is that at its heart, Paganism is not about owning witchy clothes, or fancy tools, or other trappings. It’s not about Harry Potter or goth aesthetics or LOTR or Renaissance…
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The Secrets, Pt. II: Ritual and Observance
I’ve been thinking more about the idea behind this post. Had a good comment exchange with Yvonne Aburrow about the concept of a day when we can share our deepest and most shameful secrets. She agrees that it could be really beneficial for many; an opportunity for the kind of “absolution” that Catholics, for example, seem to get out of confession. Now, I think of guilt as the most useless of emotions except possibly envy. It doesn’t make us better people; it just gnaws at us long after we have learned the lesson of whatever we did to disappoint ourselves. It doesn’t necessarily have to be that way, but we…
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The Secrets
What if we could speak the unspeakable, shameful secrets, just for one day? What if we could say, I have come to hate my child, or I make my money illegally, or I like rough sex, or I am impotent or I am using heroin or I am a compulsive shoplifter or once, I hit my partner? What would it be like if we could bare ourselves to one another, just for that one day? If that One Thing that inspires a cascade of shame could be spoken to another, without being judged? If we, as a society, had a culture of radical honesty on one particular day? I have…
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More on Community Transition
Recently, I wrote an optimistic piece about the evolution of the Pagan movement. Some insightful commenters were not so sanguine as I, and I’d like to address their contentions here. Their arguments fell into several general buckets: The Internet is not a substitute for in-person contact and relationships. Rigid ideologies and fundamentalism are tearing us apart, and newcomers seeing this will be alienated and flee. We cannot have kinship and a culture—and, therefore, a cultural impact—unless this divisiveness ends. Paganism has reached the end of a 40-year cycle common to spiritual movements and, having not gained much social traction, will now fade. People are leaving Paganism and “occult” practice, even…
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The Point of Friction
Once upon a time in the mid-80s, few of the Pagans I knew ever even talked about what they believed. We just did rituals together and enjoyed one another’s company. Sure, there were shout-outs to various gods and goddesses in most of the rituals, but those were easily understood as metaphorical (as I did). When the subject of beliefs did come up, they were all over the map: there were those who believed in everything, from gods and magic and fairies to alien abductions and Atlantis…and then there were those like me who saw our rituals as meaningful but ultimately symbolic and metaphorical practices. And no one cared. We were…
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At the Mercy of the Elements
So here it is again: evacuation in the face of wind-driven wildfires. Second time in two years. Climate change is real, y’all. More severe winds, higher temperatures leading to lower humidity: boom. Fire. It disturbs me how little the subject comes up as the whole community freaks out over the fires. This is not a random event. Once? Maybe. It happened in 1964, and again in 2017. But two years later. Again? After continuously record-breaking temperatures, month after month, year after year, this is not a random event. It’s an inevitable event. I’m sitting at friends’ house, glad to have a place to retreat to. We even still have power,…
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Things End
I’m in an odd space right now. On the one hand, excitement about The Book and the newness of all the Author Stuff like promoting it, doing interviews, etc. is really thrilling. But on the other, beloved things are coming to an end, and I’m sad about that. Pantheacon, which has been the largest gathering of Pagans in North America, has announced that 2020 will be its last year. The owner of the event is retiring and no one else has been willing to take it over. Now, I’m skeptical that this will come to pass. There is enough of a population of people who love the event—and enough money…
