I was just in Chicago for the weekend, and had the chance to catch up with some Reclaiming friends while I was there. Getting out of town is I think critical for most bouts of soul-searching, including organizational soul-searching. It gives you a whole new perspective on what really is out of whack. Is it [...]
I continue to mull over my long involvement with Reclaiming, listening to what other people consider the babies in the bathwater, sitting with reactions and reflections in order to think of something useful to say about it all. One image that pops to mind is an incredible moment that occurred less than a year ago, and maybe that’s as good a place as any to begin.
I was talking to a good friend last month who lives out of state, and of course our conversation wound around to our love/hate relationship with Reclaiming. We both came up through the ranks of Reclaiming as teachers and priestesses, and we both benefitted greatly from the skills in collaborative ritual, facilitation, group journeying, and [...]
I’m blogging today from WordCamp, a free one-day conference in San Francisco for WordPress bloggers and developers. It takes a powerful force to pry me away from the coast these days. I am in hyper-hermit mode, plus who would ever want to leave a beautiful house on the California coast if they don’t have to? [...]
This is a very old quote, maybe it was Plato, maybe Aquinas, maybe, more recently, Heschel. But I just found out today it was also a favorite quote of Rabbi Michael Robinson, who passed away early Thursday morning and whose funeral I attended today.
The air feels like liquid here, in blue skies or cloud. Sure, there’s a high moisture content because of the coast, but there’s more to it than that. The air is vast, like an ocean itself. Land and sea are all on a flat plane with not much visibility downward, but the air alone is three dimensional. We can see up through it but never to the end of it.
This is the worst week of the year: the week when every radio announcer and third-rate journalist announces the arrival next week of “the first day of summer.” June 21 is the Summer Solstice, also known as Midsummer. As in mid-summer, or the mid-point of summer. In other words, the middle of summer. Not the first day, the middle day. How difficult is this?
I love watching birds, and I want to know more about them. What I want to avoid is having to learn about them, specifically studying birds from books. I tried that last Fall, when I bought about the smallest birding primer you’ve ever seen, about 3″ x 3″ square, called Birdwatching For Dummies. It’s got a large font size, generous line spacing, and only 120 pages. I am still only halfway through it, and I can accurately report that I haven’t retained any information from my read of the first half. This is probably some sort of undiagnosed handicap of mine, but fortunately I have developed a couple workarounds.
Some years ago, my wise friend Cybele gave me a sacred challenge: to meditate on the Wild and the Domestic, and write a poem about each. Cybele has a well-deserved reputation for going right to the soul’s questions, and offering challenges which bring that material to light. Her challenge to me was no exception.
Saturday I was in Berkeley attending the Pagan Alliance Festival, where I was an honored guest. I’d been nominated as grand marshal for the year, a position they call “Keeper of the Light.” It was completely unexpected and I was deeply honored to be recognized by so many in the extended Pagan community of the [...]
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