Blog o' Gnosis

It has been over two years since my first post about elders. And now, handily, Brendan Myers has posted a lovely article on the same topic over at the Wild Hunt blog. Not only that, but he’s also taken up the issue of what to do when you have no elders around to learn from. [...]

It has been a very lean summer. Everyone is cutting back, stores are closing, and I don’t know anyone who takes their job (if they still have one) for granted. Those of us who are self-employed continue to blog, network, write our books, and drum up gigs wherever we can. We are all caught up [...]

Newt Gingrich’s recent comments to a right-wing religious audience that “We are living in a period where we are surrounded by paganism” have been getting lots of coverage, and rightly so. What worries me more, however, are his comments immediately before and after the “paganism” line: that the ACLU is a “hateful, anti-religious system” aimed [...]

That’s “the virtuous life,” for those of you like me who are not proficient in Spanish. The subject has been on my mind lately as I finish reading Brendan Myers’s recent book The Other Side of Virtue. It has taken me a long time, partly because it is a new subject for me. Paganism as [...]

Talking with my good friend Dawn on the phone last week, I asked how everything was going. She hesitated, then said, “Well, it’s the new normal.” I understood exactly what she meant.
Everyone with a job was still employed. No one previously healthy had been diagnosed with anything. Our friends were carrying on, the children [...]

I’ve been home from PantheaCon since Monday evening, and I can still hear Thalassa’s voice over the vendor’s room microphone, cracking jokes and telling people to leave because the room is closing. Is this some weird sign of stress or lingering sleep deprivation? The answer is probably yes on both counts, considering that I only [...]

The unique blend of Eastern and Western mysticism, science, and parapsychology that characterizes California Cosmology makes so much intuitive sense to me that it is difficult to even describe why that is so. In my review of Jeffrey Kripal’s book on Esalen I gave it a pretty fair shot, so I won’t spend [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]