Blog o’ Gnosis

I live in one of the few places in Sonoma County where there is a shred of freshness in the air today. The wind is blowing fierce, the sky is like a milky soup with streaks of rust from all the fires burning, but at least here the smoke mingles with a layer of fog sitting just off the coast, and it is possible to see small patches of almost-blue in the sky, to the west. They are faint as phantoms, and if you focus hard they disappear, but even the hint of a clear sky helps restore sanity.

A few days ago I joined a California disasters email group, where it is possible to get hourly updates on all fires and other critical conditions in the state as they unfold. The traffic is so heavy on the list that I opted for the digest version; even then I have been getting two or three email digests per day. I scanned the messages once but couldn’t bring myself to read them. I was safe; the fires were striking other places; that was all I really needed to know right then.

I spoke with a good friend in Willits today, who said that the air was so thick with smoke it was impossible to even take a walk without feeling sick. He was in Santa Cruz over the weekend, and standing on a bluff looking south toward Big Sur he could see the enormous black thunderheads come in off the ocean, striking dry lightning across the landscape. And from every lightning strike there soon rose a column of smoke. Literally hundreds of fires were set this way over the weekend, some of which are being left to burn as firefighters concentrate on the most threatening ones first.

I went to Oakland this Saturday, the morning that my father collapsed at the pool and died. As I sat with my sister and my mother, who was still in shock, I noticed the air getting hazier outside. I had to do something, in between calling people, reminding ourselves of other people to call, waiting for the coroner’s report, and answering calls from those who had heard the news.

So I checked my email on his computer, the new one I helped him buy and that he never fully mastered. He was frustrated by the tremor in his hands; no matter how I adjusted the keyboard sensitivity he always ended up pressing the wrong keys and his letters to friends ended up looking like a scrabble game.

I had been planning to spend time with him this coming weekend, maybe all of Monday morning, helping with his latest email woes and teaching him again how to use his scanner. Instead I cleaned up his desktop, deleted all his junk email, and started sending notices to his friends and colleagues. I re-set the keyboard to how I like it, and then, unable to begin writing his obituary, I started reading about all the fires.

My mom and I went outside for a while, I forget why, and the air had gotten palpably thicker. I was on the verge of pointing it out to her, but then thought the better of it. There are some moments of personal crisis which are made transcendent by knowledge of simultaneous collective “disturbances in the Force.” This would not be one of them. For her, at 74 losing her mate of almost 50 years, a reminder that the hills were a blazing inferno would be in no way comforting.

So I kept the news to myself as I read the laundry lists of fires, each identified by acronym, with details of how many acres were affected, what percentage was contained, and which neighborhoods were being evacuated. I wrapped myself in quilts of town names, roads closed, and evacuation centers opened. I tried reading other things, but somehow the short, declarative statements of the fire reports were all I could absorb.

For years I tried to get my father to write about his life, but he always resisted. Maybe I was really talking to myself all those years, because now when I try to remember the stories he told me, I find that I can only think of the ones I wrote down. I wrote about one memorable lunch here, and our most recent lunch here. It turns out that was the last time I ever saw him alive. We spoke on the phone twice after that, but were due for another visit which now will never happen—at least, not on this side of the veil.

There are tragedies, and then there are tragedies. My father died on the Summer Solstice. He was 81 years old, had led a full life, and left swiftly while surrounded by friends, doing what he loved. If there must be a sacrifice at the sun’s zenith, let it be this. I will miss him terribly—I do already—but I can’t begrudge him a quick death before his growing infirmities rob him of joy.

The sky now at sunset is tinged red all around. There is no escape from the smoke, and the black thunderclouds are riding across the Valley, slowly advancing on the tinder-dry Sierras. We are being hit hard this fire season, even those of us not in the path of the flames. Tomorrow I will view my father’s body. Monday I will speak at his memorial. In between, there are countless tasks and trials. The wind outside is cold and damp, acrid, and stings the eyes. It also carries the faint whisper of freedom.

A couple years ago, I wrote about how singing and especially songwriting was one of my personal indicator species—those activities which, by their presence in my daily routine, mean that I am functioning at my fullest. By their absence, I can measure the level of stress that I am under. When they return, it is like I have just noticed that the sun is out and am able to take a full, deep breath.

Now that I have my own place, it is dawning on me that perhaps there are other soul-health indicators that I have been unaware of all this time. I have never had a garden of my own, to design and plant and care for just the way I want. For the past couple years there has been too much going on to do more than punt in the garden here: plant a few things, see if the deer eat them, water them when I remember, and hope they survive.

I made a few good choices: an apple and fig tree which thrive in the coastal climate, a bay tree (laurel nobilis) which gently demarcates the front yard from the side yard and gives me pungent leaves for cooking. Somehow those got watered enough, and with deer netting around them they are growing well into their second year.

Other choices weren’t so wise, and I won’t bother to list them. But this year I was determined to get started on the project I have always wanted to create: an herb garden. Specifically, I wanted to grow the herbs that I use in my work with dreams: mugwort, valerian, skullcap, lavender, hops, verbena, angelica, rose, sage, rosemary, and a few others. I figured if I started small, with one or two plants of each, chances were that I could keep up with maintenance and harvesting, and eventually make dream pillows with homegrown herbs.

It turns out that even starting small is a lot of work! Finding good medicinal herb plants is not easy, for one thing. Then planting them in neglected beds meant that I had to attend to the woody stragglers planted in years previous that were barely hanging on. I kept at it, weeding and sheet mulching and hooking everything up to a drip. In some cases, that meant ripping out and re-creating an entire bed taken over by spearmint, or doing a morning’s excavation of the old drip system, parts of which were blocked and parts which were leaking like a sieve.

By early this month I had everything in the ground and hooked up to the drip. There are still a few mysteries, like what is eating my marigolds (deer and insect resistant!) to the ground, and what that strange color on one of the roses is. But there have also been wonderful finds, like a pitcher sage that survived three years with no care whatsoever, and two types of honeysuckle that hid from the deer and are bouncing right back to grow over a trellis.

In one bed there was a French lavender that I feared the worst for, but pruned back and watered anyway. I checked on it two weeks ago, and it was full and bushy and loaded with stalks of unripened flowers. So over the full moon this week I have been doing my first Summer Solstice harvest of lavender, as well as rosemary. My dining room table is piled high with fragrant herbs soon to be hung upside-down in bunches in my shed, along with a tray of Spanish moss harvested from a cypress tree near the beach.

Being an herbalist has been a lifelong dream of mine, and I had thought it was brought on by all the young adult fiction I read as a girl, where there was a wise old woman living in a cottage somewhere who had healing plants growing all around her. It turns out that it has been part of my nighttime dreaming too, for just as long. Digging in the ground these past few weeks I started remembering many dreams I have had through the years of finding the woman with the herb garden and listening to her stories.

In a sense, this whole full moon has been a waking dream for me, where I rise in the morning and step outside into a long-forgotten dream that is now being tended, and watered, and bearing its first harvest. I pick my herbs and carry them inside, notice what plants are growing well and which need more care, and give them all a drink before the heat of the day.

When I go back inside to sit at my desk, the garden outside keeps growing. I feel buoyed by the life in the ground, the fragrant herbs scenting my fingers and clothes, the color reflected back to me through my windows. It is a good feeling—a great feeling—new, yet vaguely familiar.

I find myself sifting through other people’s dreams now, searching for the dried-up survivors of ancient dreams which keep appearing and refuse to die, calling out for water, waiting to bloom again. The tenacity of the soul, and the speed with which it can recover from years of neglect: these are the gifts of my first dream harvest.

It is amazing, the human capacity to make do and get by, when really we would prefer an entirely different set of circumstances. Perhaps this adaptive trait is what has made us such a successful species—but I didn’t start this post to talk about evolutionary biology. Heavens no!

No, I am excited to spread the word about a major new development in the increasingly adrift world of media outlets. Newspapers across the nation are tanking, newsrooms at every major network are having their budgets slashed, and even the internet has not been able to pick up the slack in terms of investigative journalism—with notable exceptions, of course.

Yesterday, however, I found out via Jeff Jarvis that a new, independent, investigative journalism enterprise has started up, ProPublica. From their “Who We Are” blurb:

ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that will produce investigative journalism in the public interest. Our work will focus exclusively on truly important stories, stories with “moral force.” We will do this by producing journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them…

We have created an independent newsroom, located in Manhattan and led by some of the nation’s most distinguished editors, and staffed at levels unprecedented for a non-profit organization. Indeed, we believe, this is the largest, best-led and best-funded investigative journalism operation in the United States.

Yay! This just makes me incredibly happy. They have created six categories for the stories they produce: Business & Money; Justice & Law; Energy & Environment; Government & Politics; Media & Technology; and National Security. You can subscribe to RSS feeds for any or all of these categories, or just browse their main page to see the stories posted since they started, in late April.

I could go on about how blog-based software (which is what they’re using) is revolutionizing both collaborative publishing and website development in general, but that would bore even me. And I will leave it to others to say hopeful things about how this will hasten the return of the democratic process to our suffering nation. Instead, I’m going to head over there right now and start reading.

Yesterday afternoon I was preparing for my first class on Children in Contemporary Paganism, to be held online that evening through Cherry Hill Seminary, by reading some of the articles assigned to my students. The first piece was a lovely essay by my old friend Mary Klein, and as I read it I remembered the time I met her (now teenage) son Robbie. Mary and Dave had come to one of our first May Day parties, and Robbie had all the enthusiasm of an almost-toddler eager to walk, but not yet able to walk alone. I have never seen a child take so many trips across a lawn and back, gripping tightly to the fingers of one or the other of his hunched-over parents. Mary and Dave were patient and good-humored, in spite of having aching backs by the end of the afternoon.

I read four articles in all, written by friends of mine and published in the Reclaiming Quarterly over the past decade. They reminded me of earlier articles that I had published about Pagan parenting, back when the Quarterly was the humble Reclaiming Newsletter. And because my mind loves nothing better than a juicy tangent, I decided I must then and there dig up my old back-issues and see if I could find those articles.

Hours later, the class was about to begin, I had a desk full of stapled copies of some old pieces, and my scanner was busy making a final PDF of a long-forgotten poem I’d written about my daughter’s birth. I was not as prepared for the class as I had hoped to be, but taking the winding trip through my closets to unearth the box and sift through old newsletters had done me a world of good.

When I first got involved with Reclaiming, in the mid-80s, I read every newsletter I could get my hands on. I craved the backstory on all these people I had just met, and wanted to understand both the personal and the political dimensions behind every topic.

In the pages of the newsletter there were arguments about how much to charge for classes (Cerridwen Fallingstar against just about everyone else, as I recall), humor pieces from the fictional housecleaner Hannah Clancy, rants from Rose Dance and Moher Downing, poetry by Francesca Dubie (before she became DeGrandis), and hilarious send-ups of favorite liturgy, like the one at right. I inhaled it all. These were my people, my new tribe, and I loved hearing about their conflicts just as much as their inspirations. It made them all the more human to me, and therefore more authentic, which allowed me to both trust them and not put them (or the tradition) on a pedestal.

As the Newsletter morphed into the Quarterly, I gradually lost interest in its content. It became more of a platform for a particular subset of our thoughts and ideals, and seemed to lose its earlier focus of intense, engaged discussion. This is not in any way a criticism of the dedicated people who kept the quarterly in print throughout that time. Having worked on the newsletter for many years myself, I know how much hard work is involved, and how difficult it is to keep up that kind of commitment over the long term.

The change was due to a number of factors, not the least of which was the decentralization of Reclaiming and its growth both nationally and internationally. With the rising popularity of blogging over the last five years or so, many of us loosely (or not so loosely) connected to Reclaiming have developed our own forums for thinking about, and talking about, the topics of the day. It has been thrilling to re-connect with old friends like Robin Weaver, Kevin Roddy, Pandora, and Sharon Jackson through the blogosphere, even as I become acquainted with many newer people through their own blogs.

Now, it appears that the Reclaiming website will be supporting this constellation of conversations, by listing prominently all the blogs hosted by Reclaiming-affiliated folks. I look forward to this major change, and not because I think it will drive more traffic to my blog. If anything, the Reclaiming site will see increased traffic from all our blogs being linked to it.

As an old-timer, and somewhat tangential to the extended Reclaiming community, I will love having easier access to what people are saying in other regions. But as a newcomer to the clan, I would love it even more. The backstory! The drama! The differences! Ultimately, our blogs are testimony to how people can disagree and yet maintain common connections. I would be the last person to characterize Reclaiming as a utopian social experiment that succeeded, but it has somehow supported a culture of inquisitiveness and a great many people who are skilled at expressing themselves verbally and in writing. That is something any tradition should be proud of, and enthusiastically share with the world.

One of my early memories is of being six years old, getting ready to go to school early one morning. My mother had turned on our small black and white TV, and on it I saw a long, solemn procession moving slowly down a street, with many people bearing a raised casket in the middle of the crowd (or was it a long hearse?). The sight filled me with an intense grief that I didn’t understand, and I had to start wailing and running around the house. My mother was startled and tried to shush me, and my father herded me out the door to school with my sister, without another word about it.

Years later I was able to piece back together the scene, and realized that it was Robert F. Kennedy’s funeral ceremony I had seen on television that morning. My parents, never big Kennedy fans, had not been paying attention to the broadcast at all, but it affected me deeply. The scene came up again in a major recurring dream I had when I was nine, and to some extent has remained with me throughout my life.

I believe what I was feeling was collective grief, the sense shared by so many that a great hope had been lost. It is impossible to view our current election season—or any presidential race, for that matter—without hearing that cultural overtone ring loudly again when things heat up. As they are doing now, with or without help from the upcoming anniversary of RFK’s assassination on June 5, 1968????????.

My first civic post was in second grade, when I was elected secretary of our class council. I thought secretary was a modest position to start with, but my true ambition was to be President of the United States. Not the first woman president, just president. By fifth grade I had rethought that career plan, and decided it would be nice to be on the Newbery Award Committee instead, as I would get to read all the best children’s fiction each year.

In ninth grade, my last year of junior high, I ran for president of the student body. Twice. To this day, I do not know what possessed me to run again the second semester after having been defeated the first. All I can come up with is that I genuinely thought I would do a great job, and felt that I was a better candidate than the others. I don’t remember any adult trying to dissuade me from running, but I remember all too well the hurt that came from defeat. My sole consolation was that, according to the vice principal, I had picked up 200 more votes the second time around.

The first time I ran, my chief opponent was my friend and classmate Jacques Hébert. Everyone loved Jacques. He came from a well-respected African American family, he was tall, good-looking, athletic, smart, and kind. Of course Jacques won, and I didn’t really begrudge him the loss. The second time around I lost to another of the most popular boys in school, but he didn’t have nearly the character or intelligence of Jacques. That one hurt.

All this came back to me this morning, as I puzzled over the dream I had just before waking. In the dream, I see Barack Obama drinking coffee in a café. I greet him, he is an old friend on the lecture/writing/traveling circuit, like several people I know. He looks absolutely exhausted, so I invite him over to my house for dinner and a rest before moving on to his next gig. He accepts gladly.

We drive over in my car, and when he comes into the kitchen I introduce him to my two daughters who are seated at the counter. I tell them, “Say hello to Barack Obama,” and then it occurs to me that this will be a huge deal for them, because they might be meeting the next president of the United States. But to me there is no glamour, he’s just an old friend.

This dream was surprising to me, mostly because I have not been a big Obama supporter. I never trusted his rhetoric about a “new type of politics.” It has always seemed to me that anyone with the ambition to be President must have an astute grasp of politics in general, and “new” or “old” is just a marketing term. His health care proposal, compared to that of Edwards and Clinton, was disappointing, and combined with his inexperience and conciliatory stance toward the right wing of Congress, I feared that the net effect of an Obama presidency would be a profound disillusionment among his ardent followers.

That to me has been the most worrisome aspect of his candidacy: the inevitable popping of the hope bubble, and the damage it will do to the young people who are now engaged in our political system because of his campaign of hope and change. I fundamentally do not want to see another generation become as apathetic and cynical about the process of democracy as my generation has been. And too, I don’t think I can bear to go through more years of political disappointment myself, either.

Yet my dream felt like an admission that he would in fact be the Democratic nominee, something that until today I had not really come to terms with. Obama’s anointing by the Kennedy clan is just another unsettling tone added to the cacaphony of hopes, dreams, fears, and projections already swirling around the country. That cultural harmonic of hope betrayed is ringing loud and clear, and I dread the coming months.

I am not one of those Clinton supporters who would vote for McCain—Gods forbid he ever enters the White House again except by invitation to tea. At least if I do vote for Obama, as seems inevitable at the moment, my dream reminds me that it will be a strategic choice, not a romantic one.

And the fact that Obama looks a lot like my old friend Jacques—I will just try to put that out of my mind. Of course the qualified woman loses to the cute guy in the class. I was really hoping that dynamic would change before my daughters were of voting age, but it looks like we will have to wait another several years before a woman has a chance to just be elected president.

In between writing a major post for someone else’s blog and jump-starting a new website of my own, I have had precious little time for posting dream tidbits on this blog. Well, all that is going to change, starting right now.

The folks at the Lucidity Institute are running an experiment to test Tibetan Dream Yoga principles, and they are looking for participants, especially left-handed ones. From their website:

For over 1,000 years, the Tibetan Buddhists have been practicing lucid dreaming as a means of approaching enlightenment. In this pursuit, they have developed elaborate techniques for inducing lucidity. Some of these are esoteric beyond the capacity of the uninitiated Western mind to conceive, let alone practice. However, others bear a striking resemblance to the techniques now employed by Western oneironauts, for example, frequent reflection throughout the day on the dreamlike nature of reality.

The premise they are testing right now is whether sleep posture and “nasal laterality” (differences in air flow through the nostrils) affect lucidity and dream recall. They are going to correlate the results with right- and left-handedness, and also with gender difference.

If you are interested in collecting data from at least 16 cycles of dreaming and waking, you can download their handy pdf form here. They are hoping to gather all the dream reports by June 30th, so get cracking! Also, their website has lots of information on dream recall, lucid dreaming, and reports from previous studies.

I have never felt the need to encourage or induce lucid dreams since my regular dreams give me enough information to process already, but I’ve had their form printed out on my desk for a couple weeks now, so maybe I’ll give it a try, too. (Plus, I’m left handed! They need my data!)

Longtime readers of this blog will know that I periodically lust over things, especially techno-gadgets. I have been pretty good lately in making do with the gadgets I already have: I’ve never owned an iPod, use a bare-bones cell phone, and keep typing away on my old PowerBook, even though the warranty has run out and it is slowly falling apart.

My sole technology purchase last year was a new car stereo for my 1992 Honda. The new one plays CDs, a quantum leap from the broken cassette player in the old one. That upgrade alone has made my driving hours much more enjoyable and productive.

But that’s not to say that I haven’t been following closely the evolution of the gadget I most want to own: the iPhone. Or, as some have snarkily called it, the God Phone. When it came out last year, I sat on my hands and reminded myself that 1) I didn’t absolutely need it; 2) I couldn’t afford it; and 3) it would be cheaper if I waited a few months before buying it. That is the logic of an eventual customer, however, not a die-hard skeptic.

Since the iPhone’s release I have been staying the course, noting in my travels any occasion where an iPhone might have come in handy. Like the time when I drove to a meeting but couldn’t absolutely remember the way there. If I’d had an iPhone I could have had a map in hand within minutes. Or the time when I was waiting for an important email but had no computer access. Or when my plans suddenly changed and I had time to catch a movie before my next appointment, if I only knew what was playing and where. (And that’s not to mention the many handy uses I could make of an iPod.)

None of these were case-closed reasons to take the plunge, however. They didn’t warrant an extra $20 on my monthly cell phone bill, for one thing. Besides, for me the iPhone was still hampered by one major deficit: the inability to create new documents. I am forever getting writing ideas while away from my desk, and therefore any mobile gadget had to have the basic ability to open a new text file and start typing.

Now there are well-founded rumors and speculation that an even better second-generation iPhone may be announced in June. Not only that, but my dream of an iPhone that is also a decent hand-held computer also seems to be within range. (Gamers are also getting excited.)

Simply put, my resolve is slipping. I can feel the Lure of the Gadget slowly reeling me in, like some giant consumerist tractor-beam against which my paltry logic is no defense. I would probably be standing in line with the rest of the geeks and hold-outs when the announcement comes next month, except for one last shred of reasoning: the Fall discount.

Early adopters of the iPhone were irate last Fall when Apple announced a $200 price cut just in time for holiday buying. No matter how amazing the 2nd generation iPhone is, odds are excellent that it too will be discounted after the summer rush tapers off. So, that is the extent of my remaining resistance. I will be assimilated, but with any luck it will not be until October, at which point I can find some comfort in the fact that I waited as long as is humanly possible before succumbing. Meanwhile, I foresee lots of deep breathing and hand-sitting in my near future.

Post-WWDC update:

As predicted, the new iPhone is super-cool. However, I will not be getting one, even when they get cheaper before the holidays. The reason? AT&T has exceeded my price-point for the monthly data plans connected to this phone: $30/month for unlimited whatever on their new 3G network, as opposed to $20 for the current iPhone.

I pay Comcast a ridiculous amount per month for basic cable and internet service. I pay almost that much each month to my local ISP for email, domain hosting, and a number of other web-based business needs. But at least these two companies have very good customer service.

There really are not enough disdainful words in the dictionary to describe what I think about AT&T, their abyssmal customer service, and the outrageous amounts they charge for just about everything. Still, I have a business phone and fax, a home phone, and cell phone service for my daughter and myself, all through AT&T.

Maybe this is a stupid place to draw a line in the sand, but literally when I heard that the were increasing the data plan charge for the new iPhone I lost all interest. They just pissed me off for the last time. Without some industry-wide regulation and consumer-oriented reform of pricing practices, I simply won’t indulge in a new iPhone. I wonder how many more people feel the same way.

As a dreamworker, I estimate that roughly 75% of my clients have their questions answered satisfactorily using the tools of dream interpretation. Another 25% have concerns that are not completely resolved by looking at the content of their dreams. These folks are usually coping with some kind of sleep disturbance, and need to know how to get a good night’s sleep so that they can remember more of their dreams.

The field of sleep medicine is growing as more people experience insomnia, chronic nightmares, sleep apnea, and other issues that interfere with their dreaming and overall functioning. With these folks in mind, I have been reading up on ways to cultivate restorative sleep. Among the many websites I have traversed, the National Sleep Foundation has lots of informative articles and links to sleep centers across the country.

There are also some interesting books on the subject that have come out recently. Among them is one which on the surface seems completely unrelated, even frivolous, yet contains some valuable information on the ins and outs of getting good quality sleep.

I am still working on being able to say (or write) the title of this book without wincing, but here goes: Sleep Away the Pounds: Optimize Your Sleep and Reset Your Metabolism for Maximum Weight Loss. There, I almost did it. Maybe it will be easier next time…then again, maybe not.

Unfortunate title aside, the book’s main point is that one of the main side effects of not getting good sleep is that your metabolism gets out of whack and you end up at greater risk for a host of health problems, including obesity. Addressing sleep disturbances is a key but often overlooked process for losing weight or maintaining your current weight.

The most valuable contribution of this book is that it presents a well-rounded picture of how to achieve a restful night’s sleep, covering nutrition, allergy control, nighttime routines, relaxation and meditation, supplements, exercise, and more. Their section with practical tips for getting good sleep goes on for fourteen solid pages. (p. 29-43) The sleep information is followed by a thorough section on reducing stress in general, then moves on to treating insomnia and other sleep problems, before talking about diet plans. But if you’re not interested in dieting and just need information to help you sleep, there is still plenty you can get out of this book.

The authors, Cherie and John Calbom, suggest a reasonable method for determining how much sleep you actually need. They give a detailed description of the hormones that are most affected by sleep deprivation, and describe the physiology of sleep in a clear, comprehensible way. In fact, all of the information in the book is presented in a very readable manner.

I admit that I only skimmed the “21-Day Sleep Away the Pounds Menu Plan” chapter, but it looks like it’s got some practical, common-sense advice as well. I was pleasantly surprised by this book, despite some overwrought marketing copy in the first couple chapters, and would definitely recommend it to people who want a general introduction to getting better sleep. The authors have done a service for dreamworkers and sleep professionals in general by highlighting the importance of restorative sleep for our overall health and functioning, both at night and during the day.

There are other places much more suited to outdoor celebrations of May Day than the Northern California coast. Our weather is dicey at best in the spring, often accompanied by cold winds that whip in from the ocean. It would make much more sense to celebrate Beltane here in September or October, when the wind is at its lowest and the days are clear and jewel-like.

But this is where we live, so for the last three years my daughter Jojo and I have taken our chances and hosted May Day here anyway. Actually I should say both my daughters, as Lyra takes time out of her intense college schedule to hand-design a flyer for the party every year. She was with us the first year, and with luck she’ll be here again.

I posted last year about how Beltane starts at Spring Equinox. This year the preparations began soon after themebeli new year. The huge construction project of last summer and fall had destroyed garden beds, made a hash of my already sparse lawn, and created piles of rubbish that I slowly had hauled away between winter storms. I found someone to build a garden gate to protect my front yard from the deer, which ate most of the herbs I’d planted last year. As soon as that was done, I could restore the beautiful passion flower vine which over the winter the deer had torn down from the fence and ripped to shreds.

The ivy, morning glory, and Himalayan blackberry had encroached from all directions and had to be yanked out. I didn’t get it all, but I knocked it back enough for this year. Finally, I had a huge pile of mulch hauled in and set about restoring the beds that had been trampled, caring for the plants that had survived, and creating new beds where I want to expand the garden this year. All this activity took me well into the week before Beltane. But that was just the outdoor preparations.

One of the things I have learned is that rituals can be pared way down and still be very powerful, so long as the preliminaries have been done properly beforehand. In the case of Beltane, the ritual essentials are an invocation, good music, nice ribbons, the dance, and delicious food afterwards. It is not all that complicated, but like flicking a glass to hear the tone it makes when it rings, the more prepared your space is the sweeter sound the ritual will create. I wash all the windows and mirrors, clean the bathrooms, dust, vacuum, sweep, refresh my altars, and set things right in my office—one of the places I most want to benefit from the energy of the maypole dance.

The day before, I do a cleansing of the ritual site including the pole, leave offerings where we will sink it into the ground, clean off the old ribbons, and leave it to sit overnight under the stars. Then the day of our party I can focus on setting up the food and drink and answering the phone. This year Jojo helped out a lot, and I think she actually enjoyed getting swept up in the preparations. She made four batches of brownies and cleaned her bedroom and bathroom—dare I say it—happily.

As Oak wrote, there were a passel of teenagers over this year who were pleasant, amusing, and such fun to watch. They’re still in the stage where they run in packs instead of pairing up, which I will appreciate as long as it lasts. Several girls stayed the night after the party. Here are some of them, with Jojo on the bottom left.

The whole day was incredibly sweet for me. It was a wonderful group of people, probably the most beautiful weave I’ve ever seen on our maypole, and the weather was glorious: clear and warm, with a moderate wind. Because I’d started so early with the preparations I wasn’t stressed by getting ready at the last minute, so not only did I enjoy myself at my own party, but the clean-up afterward seemed like a piece of cake.

The best thing about hosting this ritual at my house is that for weeks afterward I get to gaze out my windows and see the colorful ribbons of May Day shining in the sun. So I will end this post with the view that greeted me the next morning, returning home after walking my dog Vince. It doesn’t get much sweeter than that.

Later that morning I drove off to the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, and bought a few important herbs to plant in the new beds. Then I made delicious chicken enchiladas with some of the leftover chicken, and Jojo and I settled in for an afternoon of lazing around, enjoying ourselves. Life is good. May yours be good as well.

Every so often I read a description of a mundane event which suddenly transports the observer into a mythic moment. Having just received a particularly moving account from a friend, I’ve decided to highlight these “waking dreams” in a semi-regular series of posts. I doubt I will be posting one of these each week, but “dream of the week” has a certain ring to it.

Feel free to email me waking dreams you think might be deserving of the prize—the prize being, of course, getting mentioned here. Ah, the pretensions of bloggers! My sole criteria: great moment + well-written. Is that so much to ask?

The following is from my friend Paul, who recently discovered he has cancer. This moment came during his pre-radiation scan last week.

The PET scan was in a trailer with a technician and two assistants. The technician brought a metal cylinder out of a lead lined box and opened it behind a shield of leaded glass. The assistants very gingerly moved out of the room while this was happening. The technican, a man who was obviously from India, took a smaller cylinder of it. Inside of this smaller cylinder was the dye. This he carefully put in another cylinder with a syringe fitting inside this. With this extended beyond his body, he walked towards me with the needle sticking out and injected me with the radioactive material.

I felt somewhat better when, during this process, he told me his name was Krishna and that he had done his morning worship. For a moment I slipped out of time and wondered if we were repeating the great battle scene in the “Bhagavad Gita” where Arjuna asked the Lord Krishna the great questions, “Why is this happening? Who am I here in this moment? Why do I have to do this thing?” The assistant came in and brought me back from the battlefield—she instructed me that I could have no stimulation while waiting for the dye to work, about 30 minutes. So I couldn’t listen to my iPod. Damn! The results were as they (and I) I hoped: the cancer was limited to the tumor and two lymph nodes and had not spread.