Blog o’ Gnosis

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 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 [...]

I was recently tagged for another blogging meme by Chas Clifton. This one I like, however. It has produced a lovely post by AD, another by Cat Chapin-Bishop, and undoubtedly more that I have yet to spot. And in spite of my crusty exterior and propensity of late to blog about cars, it has captured my imagination so here I go. The rules of the meme are thus:

…the point of memes like this, but I am nothing if not a joiner. (Joke. That was a joke.) So here is my response to Chas’s challenge. The rules for this book meme:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

I did promise to blog again after being “well and fully rested” from the ordeal of PantheaCon. Well readers, I must submit to you today that perhaps such promises are not the wisest notion. For I was no sooner back from Pcon than I was laid flat by the flu, or the bronchitis, or whatever it is that renders people completely helpless, fevering and delirious for days on end.

Okay, well two days on end. On the third day I had to haul myself out of bed for my radio show and a couple other things. By today I’m feeling quite a bit better, though I still haven’t done all my post-Pcon bookkeeping. Yet progress is progress. And considering that this week I have had more rest than activity (besides, do we ever fully recover from ordeals?), I must admit that it is time to blog about the Con.

Well, all our vigiling worked! The sun is now rising earlier and setting later, with no end in sight until next Summer Solstice. My only regret about life continuing for another year is having to live through the insanity of a national election, not to mention the insanity of more 2012 predictions. Haven’t we had enough of the End of the World by now? I’ve still got pinto beans stockpiled from Y2K! In 2008 I think we should declare a moratorium on all wacky doomsday/super-evolution scenarios, especially those fueled by anything Daniel Pinchbeck says.

Anyway, that is not at all what I wanted to write about tonight. Instead, I would like to highlight a great new blog post by my friend Gus DiZerega. Bravely attending public Solstice rituals so you don’t have to, Gus managed to turn what could have been an occasion for heavy drinking into a really thoughtful essay on Pagan ritual and theology.

When I was in college back in Santa Cruz in the 1980s, there was a women’s poetry collective known as Moonjuice that held poetry readings and self-published their own poetry anthologies. That is how I became acquainted with the wonderful Maude Meehan, whose book of poems Chipping Bone I loved. When I was looking for Ellen Bass’s poem Then Call It Swimming to post here last year, I found it in one of the Moonjuice anthologies still on my shelves.

A couple years later, the Kensington Ladies’ Erotica Society came out with their first book of erotic short stories. Around that same time, the Women’s Songbook Project in Berkeley published the anthology Out Loud: A Collection of New Songs By Women. If I tried to recall all the grassroots women’s publishing projects I have come across from that era to this, I could go on for pages. In fact, just a couple weeks ago a friend sent me an announcement for a new anthology of women writers she’d been published in.

Do you remember Ronald Reagan’s first Secretary of the Interior, James Watt? The guy was a real piece of work, a fundamentalist Christian (oh, how we have become inured to religious extremists in public office since then!) who shocked the nation by his crass attitude toward the environment, and also to other people.

My favorite quote by him (and he is eminently quotable) comes from a source I can’t remember, but it was an interview somewhere, I believe after he left office. Someone asked him what his biggest fear was about environmentalists, and he said he feared that all of them were secretly Pagan.

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.)

What? A challenge from another blogger to take a photo of all the books I’m in the middle of reading? That sounds like a lot more fun than all the other things I planned to do this morning. And it comes after a recent purge, where I put back on the shelves all those books (and there were several) that I was in the middle of reading but hadn’t touched in over six months. That’s the rule: I can’t really claim to be reading something if in fact I never actively read it.