Book of Leaves

Today I received an email interview (that I was expecting) from Aontacht, a Druid newsletter from the Druidic Dawn website. They've just undergone a change in editorial staff which means the interview was somewhat delayed and I'm left with just over a week to write up my answers. They want my contribution by the 18th so they can go to (virtual) press on the 21st.

A few of the questions do make me wonder about context but I can get clarification when I write back to them again tomorrow. In a couple of places they're asking about the "reconstructionist community"'s opinions and I suspect they're referring more specifically to the CR community, given the context of the publication itself. They're also asking about the "Celtic community" and I'm uncertain if they mean the Six Nations generally or just Celtic Paganism in particular.

This said, quite a few of the questions are pretty good ones that will require some thought and rather a bit of time to address. On the other hand, addressing these questions and doing this writing might knock something loose for the disability and world religions essay.

LJ just ate half of my reply. Erynn is not a happy puppy. She is, rather, a freezing cold puppy for it is 16f here at the moment. Inside the house, thankfully, is MUCH warmer but still a bit chilly. It's too late to toss a log in the fireplace at the moment, but tomorrow there will be a fire and there will be some happy Erynn as a result. For now, time for bed.

Less cold. More sleep.

I talked to Angela today after the spirituality group, extending our official invitation to her for Arlen's warrior return ritual. She was quite interested but somewhat hesitant at first, concerned that she wouldn't really have a place there, not being a part of our community. I talked with her for a few minutes and emphasized that there were several reasons behind the invitation.

First, I think it's important for someone in the VA system, and the chaplaincy in particular, to see how some communities handle the return of their people after they've come home. Most folks don't get much of a welcome, if they get anything at all. There's so much more that could be done if communities and the VA would advocate for and support return rituals in different communities.

Secondly, the warrior return ritual isn't just about one of our folks returning to our small spiritual community. It's about a return to civilian life. It's a return to a secular community as much as a return to a spiritual community. The people who are serving are, ideally speaking, serving and defending all of us, regardless of how I or others feel about the wars themselves. It's our responsibility to help people readjust, to help them think about purpose, about direction, and about meaning.

Third, this can give Arlen someone at the VA that he could talk to if he needed to; someone he's already met and might not feel so hesitant about contacting because she's been a part of something significant that was done for him by the community. So many vets are hesitant to deal with the VA. In many places the "care" is nearly nonexistent. It can be hard to know where to start and how to get into the system. Arranging an introduction can be useful in reducing hesitancy.

Having someone from the VA come in a spirit of participation and learning offers a way for our community to make itself heard, and for the VA to have an opening into new ways of dealing with veterans and their community issues. Returning home is hard. So many people never make it back, even if their bodies are home again. To be openly and obviously brought home and brought back into community with an experience that offers time for contemplation and ritual actions of purification and celebration of that return is vitally important.

It's not so much that we hope or expect the VA to introduce warrior return rituals of this sort, but the suggestion is there to be worked with and examined from the viewpoints of many spiritual traditions and communities. What we do isn't necessarily going to be duplicated, but it offers a model of approach that is different from what anyone else appears to be doing. I know that Native communities often honor their people who have gone to serve, but I never hear anything from cultures outside of theirs. The Christian experience doesn't have a way to frame this that I've ever seen.

American culture isolates veterans, who are expected to be able to just shrug things off and walk back into whatever life they left behind. This, however, obviously isn't working. The suicide rates for active duty and veterans is skyrocketing. Needs are ignored or dealt with in arbitrary and badly-handled ways. Even getting it together enough to apply for a disability rating if one is needed can be an enormous hurdle for a returning veteran. It's bad enough for people with physical injuries; for vets with PTSD, depression, and other psychological disabilities it's even worse. Military culture denies such things and labels those who talk about it complainers, slackers, problems. We're supposed to "man up" and ignore anything that might be wrong. And this is killing people.

I don't think it's too much to hope that, in some cases, ritualizing the return and reintegration can help some veterans. This is what we want to share. Perhaps it can ease things for some folks. Knowing that there is a caring community that can and will welcome someone home with more than just a little flag waving might save lives. Community doesn't end after the ritual is over.

When I talked to her about this context, she understood that we were asking her to come and be a part of this as a witness and as part of the greater community, and so she has agreed to join us on January 15, 2010, when we welcome Arlen home.

It's damn fucking cold. It's a whole 16f out there right now. I'm wrapped in several layers of layers at the moment, but my legs are cold because they're the least covered part of me. The heat in the house is at a reasonable level, but not too high so as not to run up the power bill too much.

Thankfully, it's dry weather, though this is a bit of a mixed blessing. It's so dry that my sinuses ache. I think I'd rather that than snow, though. I don't want a repeat of snowpocalypse this year! I know those of you who live in harsher climates laugh at we wimpy northwesterners but we're used to mild and damp and growing moss on our north sides. As I've said many times over the years, I love it here because you don't have to shovel rain.

I don't know if I mentioned it but I solved the Brigid's flame problem with an Indian oil lamp. It's a wonderfully clever contraption that holds enough oil to burn for probably three days, and the wick burns really well. Now and then it needs to be pulled up through the metal stem that supports it as the tip bit finally burns off, but the wicks last a very long time. It's not a cauldron, which I'd prefer for the symbolism, but it's a perfectly lovely bit of brass that fits in a smaller space and serves the need very admirably. It will burn any kind of vegetable oil (or ghee, which would be traditional there) and is a total snap to refill because the basin is wide enough to pour oil into without disturbing the wick at all.

This weekend is going to be really busy for me. Friday through Sunday mintofthewater and anthea7 will be moving from their respective apartments into a house together. I'm going to try to offer some assistance Friday and Sunday. alfrecht is moving most of his stuff to storage on Saturday. Sunday morning is the year's end ritual at the Shinto shrine where we turn in the amulets we've used this year. (They can be turned in anytime until mid-January when they're burned in a ritual bonfire.)

In the next couple of weeks some of the folks from the schmooze need to go over to talk to aion131 about the logistics for Arlen's return ritual and to block out where we're going to do things and how. That will probably be me, alfrecht and anthea7. And lakmiseiru wants to get together with alfrecht before he departs to points east. The rest of this month is going to be a scramble even without the looming writing deadline -- for which I still have to get moving.

I'm fairly content except for the frigid weather and the writer's block. Other things are going pretty well.

I have awesome friends.

Although joyful_storm was unable to be with us this evening, we held our scheduled discussion of personal practice and needs in the group. She asked if we could record each person's session -- given the number of people and the two-hour timeslot at Edge, we allowed ten minutes for each of us. A few of us didn't go to ten minutes, several people did. We all, I think, had more to say but we knew we needed to allow time for each of us to simply speak and be heard. We did end up recording everyone's talks and, during the course of them, I noted that a lot of common threads were coming up.

All in all, I'm pretty pleased with how things went. There were no interruptions by anyone; we were all listening respectfully to each member as they spoke about what they do, what they need, and where they're coming from as a part of this small local community.

Several things were reiterated a number of times. We all want to figure out what our collective cosmology is. We're all very concerned with dealing with landspirits here, where we live, as a large part of our practice. General consensus is that four high days and the two solstices are important to most of us, with individual dates scattered throughout the year that we can work with. Calendar-date is expressed as being less important than seasonal change, to reflect the land where we live. We all seem to want a stable structure for our seasonal rituals, though not necessarily scripts for all parts of them. There's an interest in ritualizing some of our monthly meeting time to match more with our sense of the sacred. And we want to learn things with and from each other.

These are all positive goals. We had a fair amount of agreement on things like the three realms being important, the symbolism of wells, fire, and trees, and a need to work toward what works for us now rather than attempting to push ourselves back into the iron age. The concept of shrines is more relevant to the majority than the concept of altars. Several of us are working with the same land spirits; Tahoma as our great mountain is a powerful presence for us. Salmon and corvids and other local animals are a spiritual presence in our lives that we feel a connection to and a need to honor.

Our concerns are more about what we need to do for ourselves as a small community, and enhancing that community in various ways, than worrying about what the larger CR community is doing or whether we agree with or conflict with other groups or factions within it. We are not, after all, interested in building a regional, national, or international organization. We're interested in doing what works here, for us, and how we express those needs in relationship with the various Celtic deities we each honor.

People asked for guidance on learning new things, on sources to read and ways to apply this learning. Some people are already doing what other folks want to learn, and it will be good to hook them up with each other outside of group time to work on individual necessary skills and interests. We need to learn to hear the heart of what's being said, rather than running with words that we all use but don't all understand in the same way. This goes back to things like shrines as more expressive of our needs and concerns than altars, or figuring out what we mean by "meditation".

I was heartened by the points of connection we have woven together, even though we all know it's not perfect, or not always serving everyone's needs as yet. I will admit to having been concerned that after all this time we might not be on the same page; we seem closer than I anticipated. We have yet to hear from joyful_storm, but we'll have time for that soon.

Another thing that was brought up at tonight's meeting was the possibility of inviting one of the VA chaplains to Arlen's warrior's return ritual. Everyone in the group seems open to this and Arlen sounded like he thought it was a good idea. The warrior rituals are something I've been talking about to both my shrink and the Tibetan Buddhist chaplain who coordinates the Tuesday spirituality groups. I don't know if VA regs will allow her to do this, but the invitation can now be formally offered. She was quite impressed by the ritual scripts, but to see it in action and to participate in the ritual is very different than just reading about it. If she's able to come and participate, I think it could have a profound impact on some of the discussion around the topic at the Seattle VA's chaplaincy department. From there, it could make its way to other VA systems adjusted to fit the needs of other veterans in other spiritual communities.

The idea is quite an exciting one. We created these rituals to serve specific needs within our own community, but so many people are in need of this kind of work. To demonstrate that some communities are working toward this kind of integration is really profound. Even if our group never did anything again after Arlen's return ritual, I think we would have done something important for members of our community and for Pagan veterans generally. The need for the rituals was unexpected but the results are deep and far-reaching. I would never have predicted this as one of our contributions to the CR movement, but I think it's a good one.

Here, at the two-year mark for our group, we're reevaluating and working toward getting what each of us needs, both as individuals and as a group. I'd like to think that this signals a new commitment to working with what we have and to our ability to change according to our needs. All of us together need to take up the responsibility for sharing our skills and knowledge with others, and for asking others to help us with what we want and need. We're definitely going to miss alfrecht while he's gone but I think that this will allow others in the group to find their own authority and pursue their own interests as seekers and researchers and teachers.

This is not the end of the discussion by any means. It is a beginning. I think it's a good one.

It was cold today, though I wasn't out in it much. Right now it's down to 24f but there's no snow and only a tiny touch of frost. I think all the moisture came out of the air yesterday or something. It's clear out tonight and sunset over the lake was quite lovely.

lupabitch came by after her photoshoot to have dinner with me and alfrecht, arriving about 6-ish. We had some portobello mushroom ravioli and I made a simple cream sauce with a touch of rosemary and some pine nuts to go on top of it. We talked about writing and I showed her the book on Ronald Hutton's work that I reviewed recently. She agreed with alfrecht that I was being kind. Poor gal was boggle-eyed as she read over the opening essay.

After that bit of breathtaking strange, we talked about the projects she's got going and all the writing we have to do between the three of us. She's trying to cut back due to grad school, which is only natural and reasonable, but she's still got one or two more in the hopper before she's at the end of her list of commitments for the moment. alfrecht has seven or eight things (right now; if you ask tomorrow he may have added something already), and I have about the same number, though I haven't actually been able to write a word outside of brief emails and entries here. I'm finding that very frustrating, really.

Anyway, she left about 7, wanting to get home to Portland at a reasonable hour. By then most of the traffic through Seattle would have calmed down, so I'm guessing she had a pretty smooth trip.

Tomorrow is the monthly CR schmooze. It's the last one that alfrecht will be attending until he gets back from Michigan, whenever that might be. There's no predicting where he will go from there, or if he'll be moving to a different job right after that. At any rate, at some point later this month I think we should have a going away party for him to send him off properly.

I had a really good time at the ball tonight. Saw a ton of my friends there and heard some good (and not so great) music in different styles. The guys from B.F. Fuller's tea were there serving and said that the Melange mix they made for Steamcon was so popular, and they liked it themselves so much, that they're putting it on as a permanent item. They've renamed it and offer it as either an herbal tisane or with black tea added. The tisane is called Winter Sun and the tea-added version is Winter Sunnier. By all means, if you liked it at Steamcon, pick some up from their website!

Tonight they were serving several things and I could really only drink one of them. There was an eggnog (out because of eggs) and a spiced cider (out because of apple problems), but their Kava Koko was a really nice mix of kavakava and cacao nibs, They did it as a sort of latte with soymilk and added some chocolate sauce for a very yummy and relaxing hot drink.

Toybox Trio was a fun performance. They're an odd little trio that plays toy piano, tuba, and concertina. For a couple of pieces a typewriter was used as percussion. It was really quite delightful in that offbeat way that so many things in my life seem to be. I quite enjoyed them. Their performances were upstairs at MOHAI in the tea parlor.

The other music in the tea parlor tonight was a guy named Jay Easton. He may have been dressed for steampunk, but his music was pretty much experimental ambient/electronica with horns. I didn't care too much for it, I'm sorry to say.

Cherie Priest read from her steampunk novel Boneshaker. It sounded rather interesting, but I'm not sure if I'd buy it, largely because I'm not reading that much fiction these days. The novel is set in an alternate steampunk Seattle, so it might be fun to pick up for that, but I'll have to think about it first. She seems pretty nice.

I heard one or two bits from Bakelite 78 that were pretty good. They were on the main stage. I've heard a couple of their songs before through sepiachord's compilations. Their style varies from song to song, which can be a definite plus.

We also headed for the back alley stage, where we took in a couple of burlesque performances and a steampunk belly dance duo. This was fun, and the belly dancers were a real hit with the crowd.

We missed the Scarlet Room performance, though alfrecht says he heard folks talking about it and that it was apparently a really good set for them. I'm sorry I missed them -- I had been wandering around the museum taking in the exhibits. They're in the midst of an exhibit on the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exhibition from 1909 so there was a ton of stuff about that along with the standing exhibits on Seattle's history. I think my favorite section, though, was the room highlighting the Northwest's Arts and Crafts/Mission movement. There were some really lovely works on display, from ceramics to stained glass, metalwork to book arts, paintings, furniture, and information on bungalow architecture. Very nice display all around.

Another of the fun highlights of the evening was the fantastic electrical mayhem hosted by Doctor Dietrich, with aetheric radio-telephony devices, argon-filled lightning bottles, hair-raising electrical experiments and spinning sparky things. He collected quite a crowd with his glass tubes and globes, sparking wheels, and huge sound-collecting horns.

All in all, it was $30 well-spent for an evening of art, music, and entertainment. I hope they'll do it again next year!

Tonight is the Steampunk Exhibition Ball over at MOHAI in Seattle. I'll be kilting up for the event. Apparently there's a Huskies game this afternoon so traffic is going to be hideous, but doors open at 8pm, I believe, so there's some chance that it will have calmed a bit by the time we're in the vicinity.

I didn't find out until today that tedgill is performing with Gamelan Pacifica tonight over at Cornish. He offered comp tickets but I'd been planning for the ball tonight since I heard about it at SteamCon earlier this fall and purchased my tickets last month.

I do want to go to the Medieval Women's Choir's holiday concert on December 12th. This year it will be Spanish themed. They're always an incredible performance. This one will (again) be at St. James up on Capitol Hill. The acoustics there are wonderful. Tickets are $25, "seniors and students pay as able" -- so if you're a student, this is a good opportunity to see the concert for less than the usual full price at the door. They're also selling their second cd, Laude Novella on their website now and will no doubt have them at the concert. This will be well worth getting.

Also in my musical life, I ran across a rec for Sunday Driver last night in one of the Steampunk communities. They're an Indian-influenced band from England, with some great sounds. You can download a couple of free tunes from them on their website to try them out. I was impressed and got their current cd, In the City of Dreadful Night, from iTunes. I think that'll be our soundtrack to Seattle tonight. Their Gayatri Mantra is an excellent take on this classic Sanskrit chant. Give them a listen!

It looks like yiaya will be over shortly to make golabkes. I just hauled myself over to the store and back to get ground chicken for the recipe. She's also bringing along an Australian shiraz - yum! We'll cook and alfrecht will hide until the onions are all chopped up and cooked sufficiently so they don't bother him anymore. Then there will be Brisco County Jr. Rice is already in process for the evening.

Food, wine, and a cheesy Bruce Campbell series. I ask you, can there be a better evening at home with friends?

Snagged from wisewomanjudith by The Decembrists. It's about 20 minutes long and there is some animation included after the credits.

Obviously it's really compressed, but it's quite interesting!

Garuda got taken down to the mechanic today to get the brakes tightened and belts replaced. He's no longer squealing like a panicked pig, thank the Gods. I still have hoses to replace and the 90,000 mile maintenance to do, but one or the other will get done in January when I have some money again. This month's spare room is pretty much shot.

Tomorrow, depending on tiredness levels, yiaya might come over to make another batch of golabkes. She called while I was waiting for my car, wanting to go for a walk around the lake, but the appointment took a bit longer than they estimated and I didn't get home until it was starting to get toward dusk. Walking in the dark when it's nearly freezing isn't always my cuppa, and I was feeling pretty tired anyway by the time I got home.

Looks like we'll be doing dinner with lupabitch on Sunday evening after her photoshoot. I'm not sure yet what we'll be doing, but it will be delightful to see her again.

I always have problems this time of year; the early darkness means everything feels so much later than usual. Even though I'm often up to ludicrous hours and am pretty much insomnia's bitch, I do get draggy in the early evening when it's so dark out. I may actually head for bed early tonight (aka by ten-ish) if I still feel this way in an hour or two. Perhaps it'll help some of that insomnia crap I'm dealing with lately. This week it hasn't been unusual for me to be heading for bed around 6:30am. This really should stop so that I can do things when there's at least a little light out.

Today I was working on refinancing the condo for a lower interest rate and so that I can take advantage of the VA's program to offer rolled in financing for energy improvements in the property. I've been wanting to replace the water heater for ages as it's old and the ones in the complex are on their last legs. Several have failed in the last year or so, so it's about time to get a new one. I want to get a tankless water heater and the VA refinance should make this possible without breaking what little remains of my credit. Then I can also get the energy tax credit for it. I just need to start calling around and getting some estimates for the heater, installation, and hauling the old one away. That'll be one major life-improvement/home-improvement project taken care of.

This afternoon I popped over to agatheringgrove to meet mistress_gaelan, as she'd offered me a free book that she was getting rid of. It was one I'd been wanting for a while and had been on my wishlist. Why say no? We talked for a little while as we had some tea, then she needed to write some letters and I needed to head back to the house.

alfrecht got back from Seattle a little after I got home from GG. He's finally finished indexing and editing his dissertation and tomorrow he sends off the manuscript to the publisher! This is really huge, so congrats alfrecht! I knew you'd get it done!

His dad's birthday was today and he asked if I could haul him out to Coupeville over on Whidbey Island so he could check in and bring him a birthday present. We took the ferry over and back. On the ride back, we were the first ones onto a very sparsely loaded boat, so we got to sit center front in the car for the ride, watching the lights of Mukilteo approaching. I really do love the ferries.

Tomorrow afternoon, Garuda's brakes get tightened. Bills are paid. All is right with my world. Except for that insomnia thing that has me up and posting at 4am, of course.

Today started with a trip down to Seattle for my VA spirituality group. We had a really good discussion and I had a pretty good time with it. alfrecht came along because we were meeting up with wire_mother afterwards, and he got some writing done while I was in the group.

We met wire_mother at Travelers, where I picked up a couple of things I needed and then sat down for a really long talk about the schmooze, structure, ritual, and reinventing wheels. One thing we spent a lot of time on was getting past some semantic barriers to get to what it was he actually wanted to discuss; some of the things he'd talked about in an email to me were kind of kneejerk words for me, so we had to talk around it until we realized that what he'd been saying and what I'd been hearing were two different things. Once that barrier was down, I think we got a lot worked out. I'm hoping that Monday's schmooze will be even a fraction as fruitful.

We went for some pho after that and talked a bit more, then hung out at Edge until I had to go down to Seatac and pick up yiaya at the airport, coming home from Sacramento. I-5 south was a parking lot, so I ended up making an end run down 90 to 405 to the airport instead of taking 5. Her plane got in about 20 minutes early so she had to wait a bit outside baggage claim, but we picked her up and zipped her back to Lynnwood fairly fast.

While I was at Edge, I picked up a book on ritual (Sacred Fire, Holy Well) by Ian Corrigan from ADF's press. A lot of it is, naturally, ADF-specific, but it does seem like it would have some useful models for things we can do with the schmooze group rather than flailing around like we often tend to. I'm not sure what will work, but I do know we have to find or cobble together something. I've got a lot of thinking to do.

The Breznyscope for today:


When Carolee Schneeman was a kid, her extravagant adoration of nature earned her the nickname "mad pantheist." Later, during her career as a visual artist, she described her relationship with the world this way: "I assume the senses crave sources of maximum information, that the eye benefits by exercise, stretch, and expansion towards materials of complexity and substance." I hope that you're attracted to that perspective right now, Aries. To be in most productive alignment with the cosmic rhythms, you should be in a state of nearly ecstatic openness, hungry to be stretched -- like a mad pantheist.

That's clearly what I need to get writing on the geilt article.

For those weirdos on my flist who are students of Old Irish, there's a great little book containing verb paradigms titled Old Irish Verbs and Vocabulary available from Cascadilla Press for a whole whopping $15 plus postage. It's a steal!

I'm going to get one soon.

This from lupabitch:

I've noticed a few contributors posting that The Women's Voices in Magic anthology is available. Just as a note, Tay and I handle all the US orders from the Immanion Press website. We will NOT have the books in hand until sometime next month; we're still waiting for some of the contributors to get their information to us so we can send them their copies, and additionally it takes two weeks after an order is placed for the books to be printed and shipped to us. So if you're advertising that the anthology is available, please let people know about the delay. We will keep track of pending orders and have the books mailed out as soon as they arrive. Thanks!

So yeah, it's out but not quite yet shipping.

The new Megalithica anthology Women's Voices in Magic edited by brandywilliams is available! I have an essay in it, and I know quite a few of the other women who have written essays for it. I can't wait to get my contributor's copy in the mail!

Go find one today!

*kermitflail*

I got handed a copy of Ten Years of Triumph of the Moon today by alfrecht, who received his contributor's copies in the mail Saturday. Though I took a number of breaks, I read it all tonight.

Some of the essays are good ones, with interesting and useful things to say. A few of them aren't that good at all, unfortunately including those of one of the editors, who doesn't seem to recognize the difference between a period and an ellipsis.

One consistent problem in this volume is the extremely poor copy-editing. In places this book looks like the editing was done with a hatchet. Despite the fact that some of the (lack of cohesive) editing makes some of the sentences in several papers almost unintelligible, there's some good stuff to be had.

Sabina Maglicco's article "Aradia in Sardinia: The Archaeology of a Folk Character" offers some evidence for the origins of Leland's Aradia, a seminal figure in the late-19th and early-20th century roots of modern Wicca.

Amy Hale's "White Men Can't Dance: Evaluating Race, Class and Rationality in Ethnographies of the Esoteric" addresses important ongoing concerns and prejudices within academia regarding the study of Paganism and esotericism in general in modern Western societies. She points out the racism and hypocrisy inherent in an academic establishment that relegates ritual and magic to supposedly irrational indigenous societies, assuming that "white" people of European extraction are above such things. Her discussion highlights the prejudices that scholars of magic and Paganism face in academia when trying to study Pagan and occult subcultures in modern Western society.

"The Occult Underground: Strategies of Power and Antinomianism" by Henrik Bogdan examines projections of demonism and Satanic evil onto various occult and Left Hand Path groups and individuals. He discusses Crowley and the Dragon Rouge order in the context of secularized and individualist modern society.

And, of course, there's alfrecht's excellent article, "Pagan Celtic Studies (Or, Throwing the Druidic Baby Out from the Still-Drinkable Sacred Spring Water...?!). This is the only article in the anthology that in any way directly addresses and challenges some of Hutton's assertions, which I think has been long-overdue.

While Hutton's work does have value in the community, he tends to be very dismissive of anything that can't be proved with a written cite. One of the caveats that I've had over the years about Hutton's Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles is that it has to be read in company with something like Ralph Merrifield's The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic to counter all his assertions that nothing at all has survived or had any continuity from the Pagan past into the present.

There are a number of other articles in the book, some of which are passable, but unfortunately one of the editors had the least readable and least useful article in the whole compilation. It's unfortunate he didn't himself have an editor to look over his own work.

I think that if you're a Hutton fan, you'll find a lot to like in this book, as well as a few things that might challenge your opinions. If you're not specifically a Hutton fan but are interested in the state of scholarship regarding Paganism and the occult today, this will also be quite worth reading. Just be prepared for a lot of bad editing.

Three and a half dancing druids out of five.

I finished up reading Working Emptiness: Toward a Third Reading of Emptiness in Buddhism and Postmodern Thought by Newman Robert Glass, Scholars Press, Atlanta 1995. alfrecht loaned it to me a few months ago when we were talking about nondualism, Marguerite Porete, and Zen. As so often happens, reading about Buddhist stuff gives me insights into all kinds of things, including CR practice, the Pagan community, and approaches to defining my own philosophies in regard to my personal CR practice and its interfaces with the larger movement.

Today's gem was this:

As noted in Chapter One, working with Chan/Zen texts is an activity that oscillates between "objectivity" and "imagination." Acceptable readings of a text might be seen to exist on a continuum within these two limits: in the narrowest (and perhaps most "objective") sense, a reading is acceptable only if it can be consistently supported through direct reference to the text; in the broadest (and most "imaginative") sense, a reading is acceptable, and can be very creative, as long as it does not in any way contradict the text. Within these limits all readings must meet certain standards of consistency, comprehensiveness, and explanatory power. (p. 83)

I see this as an expression of the tensions of the CR community. Some insist that we can't do anything that doesn't have a textual, archaeological, or folkloric precedent. Some insist that as long as the historical texts, archaeology, and folklore are not contradicted, innovation and creativity is necessary. I think that both of these points have their uses and that it is possible to walk a middle road that works within the knowable historical tradition and that looks to the future, growing from the seed of what has gone before. The key is that best practices in all camps "must meet certain standards of consistency, comprehensiveness, and explanatory power."

Without these things, we either have fragmented shards of historical practice, or a completely modern invented practice that bears no resemblance to any historical roots. Given that the majority of us are not living in the Gaeltacht or in areas with substantial speakers of Brythonic languages, we are, by our nature, "exiles" from that culture. At best, we can learn languages, understand histories, and create ourselves and our practices anew for the places in which we live. We must, perforce, pick and choose what we can and what we will renew, and what we will leave as history: slavery, human sacrifice, limiting gender roles, racism, sexism, isolationism; these are historical issues with which we must struggle and that we must transcend in order for CR to move forward as a viable spiritual tradition in this century and beyond.

There are many middle ways.

Today the mail brought my copy of The Salmon in the Spring by Jason Kirkey. The volume is really lovely; very nicely done. He signed it for me and I was thanked rather lavishly in the acknowledgements section at the end. That's always such a good feeling, knowing I've been able to help somebody out with something like this. Go and get one! You know you want to.

I got an envelope from mom today as well, containing photos of her grandparents, Fred Crocker and Jennie Marion Crocker, my Canadian great grandparents. Fred was from Newfoundland. I don't think anyone is quite sure where Jennie was from. They met in Cambridge, MA, where Fred's sister and Jennie were going to nursing school. Both of them were born in the 1880s and died in the 1950s, before I was born. These are prints of old photos that used to belong to my gramma Swehla; sepia-toned and battered from the years. I don't know when these photos were taken, though both of them were quite old in the photos.

Also today was Natalis Antinoi, so we set up an altar and laid out a Middle Eastern feast with falafel and hummus and baba ganouj and Greek yogurt. It was tasty!

It got quite cold tonight. The computer says 38F, but there was frost on the car when we went out to drive to the grocery store. I'm going to have to get myself a scraper, I'm sure.

Today we went up to alfrecht's mom's place and had dinner with her, her husband, and three of alfrecht's sibs. Traffic was, as one might expect, pretty hideous heading north. We came home fairly early (8ish) in hopes of avoiding drunks in the later evening. Traffic was slow heading home south, but not as bad as it had been heading north earlier.

Turkey was had, as was the obligatory pumpkin pie. I'm still feeling pretty tired and may end up going to bed soon. Called my mom while I was up in Anacortes and talked to her for a while. She'd been over to Uncle Eddie's for dinner. She says he's been doing pretty well with turkeys the last few years and she likes not having to cook. Nothing lately from my brother at all, but this isn't surprising.

We may or may not be going down to Travelers tomorrow, depending on if sebastian_lvx will be meeting us for Natalis Antinoi. I'm rather in favor of not driving tomorrow unless I must -- Black Friday is not a good day to go anywhere. But if we can see him, it will be worth the trip down.

It looks like December 12th is when most of alfrecht's stuff will be packed out of the Sekrit Lab and the house and off to a storage unit. There will be room in the garage again. He'll be leaving himself about January 2nd, I think, and taking the train out to Ann Arbor.

Tomorrow is my flamekeeping shift, on top of the Antinoan holy day. If we do head down to Seattle I'll have to light up the altar before we go.

And now, tired Erynn is tired and is going to curl up and read for a while.

Tonight we watched a film called The Color of Pomegranates, in Armenian Sayat Nova by Sergei Paradjanov. It was very strange and surrealistic, not intended so much as a narrative as a series of impressionistic images and quotes from the works of the 18th century Armenian poet, Harutyun Sayatyan, whose life it depicts.

Nothing in this film is particularly linear. There are strange juxtapositions of images, repetitions of motion and line, disjointed musical themes and a cacophony of colors. The whole effect is much more one of tableu vivant than film. There's very little dialogue, but I'm quite certain the film would have made a great deal of sense to an Armenian audience, who would be very familiar with the poet's life. It's made me somewhat curious about the poet it portrayed. The film itself was banned in the Soviet Union for "nationalistic themes" and the director spent nearly five years in a Soviet prison on several different manufactured charges some years thereafter, though the film won a series of awards outside the USSR. He was apparently bisexual, which was illegal in the Soviet Union, and this was the reason for his first imprisonment in 1948.

On the disc as well were an interview with the director and a short film called Hakob Hovnatanian consisting largely of images of art pieces by the Armenian artist of that name. The interview made a number of things more clear, contextualizing the director's work in opposition to Soviet mainstream filmmaking.

If you like your movies linear, this isn't one you want to watch. If you're up for some really fascinating images and tableaux showcasing Armenian costuming and fragments of Armenian Christian and village rituals, you might find it worth watching. Unless you're way better versed in Armenian history and literature than I am (that is to say, if you have any at all), you probably won't understand a whole lot of it except in feel and through symbolism.

Group today was fun and interesting, though I didn't have much to contribute on the topic. It was more a thinky thing for me than a participatory one. It happens sometimes.

At Travelers I met with meri_sefket and her husband. We had chai and talked and I took them over to Edge of the Circle for a browse round. We discussed all kinds of things and got onto the topic of cheezy movies so I invited them up for dinner, Taiwanese oolong, and The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. They were here until almost 11pm and have to head down to Portland tomorrow.

I had a really great time and am glad they mentioned they would be in Seattle. Hey guys -- I'm really looking forward to seeing you at PCon next February! Travel safe and have a great holiday.

It's half past one in the morning at the moment. I didn't get back into the CSANA yearbook yet, indulging in some dinner instead. I'm feeling stymied but hoping that I'll be able to break out of it a bit in the next few days. Sometimes it doesn't seem to matter how much I sit and stare at the keyboard; nothing quite happens. As I noted in my earlier entry, I find this frustrating, but it's part of the process for me. I can't necessarily just sit down, open up the file, and start cranking things out. Sometimes it works but other times the brain just seizes up.

Tomorrow is the spirituality group at the VA at 3pm. After that I'll be meeting meri_sefket and her husband at Travelers for some chai while they're in town. alfrecht may or may not be along with me, depending on how far he gets with his indexing before then, and whether or not he's awake when I head out of here at 2. He's getting a lot closer to finished, though, and is hoping to be done and have it printed for the publisher by Friday.

Last night I sat down and answered some of the questions sent to the Puget Sound CR list that we're going to be discussing at our December meeting. There hasn't been any response on the list as yet, but folks are busy and the holidays are impending. We'll work our way through stuff and figure out what we need and what we want. These processes are always like making sausage -- really messy to watch.

At the moment, what I need is some juice.

That part of the research is done, thankfully. There were a number of things there that will be helpful in further work, not just for the current project. It was, I thought, an excellent overview and analysis of the scholarship surrounding Buile Suibhne and other "mad" geilt figures in myth and literature.

Right now I'm taking a break from reading a couple of articles in one of the CSANA yearbooks that alfrecht loaned me; one article is on Lí Ban and the other is on Suibhne, both of which have bearing on what I'm working on right now.

I'm at the stage where I feel like the reading and research can never actually end. It always feels awkward. I never feel like I know enough to start writing -- remember, it took me 18 years to write the ogam book, after all.

Just got email from Jason Kirkey saying that my copy of his book on Celtic myth and ecopsychology, The Salmon in the Spring, is in the mail. I should be getting it by the end of the week, per his estimate. Can't wait to see the final version.

Last night's dream featured me moving back to Greenfield, MA because it would be cheaper than Seattle. Except it wasn't the Greenfield that actually exists.

I'd rather have all my toenails pulled out than move back there. At least the pain would be over eventually.

Things like this remind me ever so strongly of how much I love the Seattle area and Puget Sound. I love my friends, the land, the water. I love the places I can go and the things I can do. I love the camping and the hiking. I love the rainforest and the mountains. I don't love the rain and the overcast months, but I do love the green it makes. I love the festivals and the art and the books and the restaurants and the music and the access to technology.

There is not one single thing I miss about New England that can't be remedied by somebody coming out here to visit me. Momentary fits of nostalgia aside, I would never go back. I couldn't stand to live there. I'm so glad I left and so happy that I ended up here.

We got over to joyful_storm's place about 2:30 or so. There were a lot more people there than I'd quite expected -- perhaps a dozen. It was great to see so many people coming through to help out with painting. The house is a pretty nice one, though a lot of work remains to be done before they can move in. We saw most of the folks from the CR schmooze there. I painted trim on the fireplace & mantel, one of the windows in the library, and the floor trim along one side of the laundry and crafts room.

By that time my back was pretty messed up, as were my knees, so I popped some Tylenol and we begged off for the rest of the work. We put in about 3 hours or so. I'd intended to be there for four, but by then we were waiting for paint to dry so second coats could be put on things. Because the house is in a semi-deconstructed stage, there was no place to sit and rest, so we got changed into paint-free clothing and headed out to Greenwood for a bit until it was time for dinner.

There was bookshop browsing, then tea at the Wayward, where I kicked alfrecht's arse at checkers. It had been so long since I'd played that I had to look up the rules again in order to figure out what moves were legal. *yeesh*

We headed out to Kasbah and got there about half an hour early for dinner, but sat at the table watching the dancer as we waited. Craigula got there about 20 minutes after we did. yiaya had some traffic trouble on her way but finally arrived. She and I both had the T'faya tagine, a lamb dish that's a little sweet and quite savory. We're thinking about doing Moroccan sometime soon after she gets back from her California turkey day trip. She's heading out Tuesday and will be back the Tuesday after that -- I'll be picking her up at the airport.

Dinner was excellent, particularly given the company. It's always good to have time to talk to Craig. Usually I see him really briefly at Edge when we're hanging out for a few or are on our way elsewhere. It was good to catch up with him and hear about how he'd been doing since his art show at Gargoyles earlier this fall.

I'd been hoping to do some reading tonight but I'm really and truly fried so I'll be heading for bed here shortly. Tomorrow will be finishing up reading the dissertation and then, possibly, getting back into writing the geilt article. alfrecht informed me that the article for the queer magic anthology will be due end of January, so that's another deadline I need to be concerned with at the moment. That one won't have to be so long, though.

And here, below the cut, is a speech given this week by my friend Jan Buterman for Trans Day of Remembrance. ( Given in Edmonton, Alberta. )

I'm about 109 pages into the dissertation and finding it very useful so far. I'm quite pleased that I was able to have a copy. This is going to be an important thing for the geilt article and for the book, I think.

Tomorrow is painting. We'll probably be over at joyful_storm's place by about 2pm. I'm figuring about 4 hours will be the limit of my ability to paint usefully, but we'll bring stuff to help out with and leave it for others to use after we're gone if it's needed.

Moroccan dinner tomorrow, yay!

Bedtime now. Yes.

I got out to the Walgreens today for ink and walked over to Freddie's after that for paper so I could print out the 200+ page Suibhne dissertation. Looks like it will be excellent! I'm very excited to finally have got that project done. Right now, though, I'm having dinner. Can't read, type, and eat all at the same time. I need more hands. Or maybe tentacles.

Called and talked to mom today to catch up with her and the family. She's talked to quite a few of the relatives recently. For the most part things are going well, though both one of the Griswold cousins and his wife have developed various cancers and this is a cause for some concern. I'm keeping them in my thoughts.

Tomorrow is painting day over at joyful_storm's place, then a birthday dinner for yiaya at Kasbah. Oh, I do so adore Moroccan! There will only be four of us this year, but it should be a lovely party regardless. I'm thinking one of their delicious lamb tagines and a Moroccan red wine -- they have some very good ones there. I took mom to this place a couple of years ago when she came to visit and she really enjoyed it.

And now it is time to stop procrastinating and go read the dissertation.

The Sean-nós Festival Northwest is having its 3rd annual Sean-nós festival in Olympia on January 15th & 16th. There will be workshops on singing and Irish language. This is taking place at Evergreen State College. Looks like it would be a lot of fun!

Today's golabkes were significantly better, I think, than the last batch we did. I enjoyed them greatly and we split the booty so that yiaya took some home and I kept some for me and alfrecht. The wasabi guacamole was a little less successful because of a misreading of the recipe, but it wasn't bad.

Some episodes of Brisco County Jr were watched. This was fun and in googling the actor who played Lord Bowler later this evening, I was saddened to discover that he'd died of cancer last year.

I've been feeling rather under the weather and migrainey all day. My head is still painful, but it's manageable at least. It can be really hard to focus when I feel like there's a spike in my head over my left eye, but such is life in my body. There's really not much to be done about it that hasn't already been done.

I've been pondering the state of the library after alfrecht heads out for Michigan in January. It will obviously require some work to get things back in order. I'm debating putting the desk back there, given the light from the southern exposure window, but the window there is smaller than the open sliding door wall in the living room, so I'm uncertain what would provide the best light. Having the desk in there, though, would mean access to my reference books would be more consistent. Right now I have them in three different locations -- front room, hallway, and library. Consolidating them would be nice, I think. Then I could move the sciences, politics, and fiction out into the front room with the poetry and writing stuff. Anyway, this will require getting in there with a tape measure once the room is open again.

Unfortunately, with my head in this shape, most of my thinking gets really fuzzy. I'm hoping that once the headache resolves I might be able to wrap my brain around writing again. My next deadline is moving inexorably closer and I'm feeling quite behind where I wanted to be at this point. I still need to get a printer cartridge and a new ream of paper. Maybe tomorrow.