I have been having a wonderful holiday, with my daughters around me and the house full of colored lights. Last weekend we gathered with so many friends in San Francisco and celebrated the Solstice in style. Two days later Jojo turned 16, the next night my family came up for a lovely Christmas Eve dinner, [...]
I have never actually seen a ghost—at least, not the kind that leaves you shaking in your shoes, white as a sheet, with eyes as big as saucers in a face that looks permanently stricken. But yesterday I spent about 45 minutes watching someone who obviously had.
I thought I would try to learn something about [...]
When I was in grade school we learned all the old patriotic songs. The Star Spangled Banner of course (which came in handy during the 1970s Oakland A’s winning streak). But we also learned America the Beautiful, the Irving Berlin tune God Bless America, Woody Guthrie’s great This Land Is Your Land, and a whole raft of other stuff.
It’s one of those weird things, [...]
Last week I took down my Day of the Dead altar. All the novena candles went into in a box, one with my father’s picture on it face to face with the likes of George Carlin, Abbie Hoffman and Isaac Hayes. I still challenge the old guy, even in death. The mini-altar of my old [...]
Friday I went to the opening night of my daughter’s high school play. They were performing The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s brilliant play about the witchcraft hysteria of 1692 in Massachusetts colony. There she was in the opening prologue, dancing and singing with friends in the woods like any good Pagan child. There she was a [...]
I had the pleasure of spending an hour in the studio with my good friend Thorn Coyle a few weeks ago. Thorn has been doing a great new series of podcasts, called Elemental Castings, where she talks to different people about how their magical and creative practice links in with a particular element. In my case, [...]
In this case, a very cute Welsh/American youngster, aka my niece Elena the Pundit.
Weighing in from her elite media lair in Cardiff, Elena has this to say about the election:
In the darkness before sunrise I got up, put the kettle on for tea, and went to the computer for a first pass at headlines and email. It was a bit early for poetry, but my eyes were caught by a snatch of it, in all places on the New York Times op-ed page. My [...]
Yesterday in a Sebastopol parking lot I ran into an old acquaintance who, like me, drives an aging car. I joked with him about the fact that we were still keeping our jalopies going, when he came over to me with a conspiratorial smile.
“I don’t know what you believe, but there’s this website…” Oh no, [...]
Like so many others, I have been glued to the screen over the past few weeks. Debates, opinions, news of the economic collapse, cowpies from the election trail—it is all so important, and so crazy, that I consider it a survival skill to understand what is going on as best I can.
Along with this, coming [...]
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