Blog o’ Gnosis

I went to WordCamp in SF last Saturday, to hang out for a day with the bloggers and developers who, like me, use the charmingly sophisticated open source WordPress blogging software. WordPress used to be just free software that you downloaded and configured onto your website to create a blog. Now it is actually a whole enterprise where you can host your blog on their servers for free, becoming part of the “community” while not having to install upgrades or worry about .htaccess files. Ah, progress! (And it’s easy to import from Blogger, TypePad, LiveJournal and all those other places. I’m just saying.)

Last month as I was reading Chas Clifton’s book Her Hidden Children, I came across the curious phrase “California Cosmology.” Chas uses the term in his discussion of West Coast feminist Witchcraft’s influence on Paganism as a whole and cites Ronald Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon as the source of the phrase, so when [...]

Last weekend I went to the conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams held at Sonoma State. I could only attend for one day, but fortunately it was the same day that Fariba Bogzaran presented a panel on “The Phenomenology of Light in Dreams.”

In her presentation she talked about different ways she has experienced light in dreams. She is a gifted lucid dreamer and artist, so she spoke of her attempts to translate her lucid experiences, which were filled with different qualities of light, into the medium of paint. It was a fascinating presentation, followed by three other speakers who each had something unique and personal to say about how they experienced light in dreams.

This year was my first 4th of July in the Mission District of San Francisco, and even though I’d heard reports I was unprepared for the amazing exhibition of loud, bright, flaming things flying through the air. Chrissy Field and the Embarcadero were lit up with big traditional fireworks displays. But so was the Castro, Twin Peaks, Bernal Hill, Potrero Hill, and every intersection between those points. Big ones, pretty ones, mean and noisy ones, sparkling, whistling, screaming, and ear-popping ones—you name it, it was going off that night. At 2-second intervals. In short, the City looked and sounded like a guerrilla war going on in a carnival tent.

There I was, minding my own business on a beautiful Sunday morning, sitting around reading internet news and opinion. I heard a helicopter overhead, which is a fairly unremarkable event here on the coast. Summer weather combined with weekend visitors means lots of work for those who pluck people off cliffs, save drowning swimmers, and rescue anyone left as an offering on rocky outcroppings.

Anyway, the noise kept getting louder so I glanced out the window and saw said helicopter landing a few hundred feet away from my house. Instantly, I intuited that it was time to take Vince for a walk. Acting on a hunch, I also brought my camera.