Blog o’ Gnosis

I have heard from several friends in other states and countries since the tiger mauling at the San Francisco Zoo happened last December, killing one young man and injuring two others. Aside from inquiring whether the victims were anyone I knew, there was a decided strain of “what the hell is wrong with you people?” in my friends’ voices.

Another year of losses, of big questions that elbow their way into the room and refuse to leave. A young man who grew up down the street and went to school with my kids was stabbed to death at a party this weekend. Two young men charged with his murder had a brother killed in Iraq at the beginning of the war.

What happens to kids? What makes one succumb while another one thrives? I don’t understand it, and all my pat answers, fears and suspicions merely mask the fact that I simply don’t know. I can’t keep my kids safe now that they’re grown, and the more beautifully they blossom the more I am aware of how fragile our hold is on this life we cherish.

I’ve always liked the phrase “Winter break” even though I long ago realized that it is simply a kindly old euphemism for “not really a break at all, plus it’s cold outside.” Winter break always includes some great time with my kids and family, my daughter’s birthday, Solstice, Christmas, delicious food, and maybe a day or two of rest if I’m clever about it. But it also means squeezing in as much work time as possible around the edges of all those holy days and holidays.

This year I have a very big task on the work table, one that looks daunting from the outside but will no doubt become manageable once I dive in. I’ll be getting ready to teach my first class as a faculty member at Cherry Hill Seminary.

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.

This Samhain season has had more than its share of sturm und drang, and I attribute much of it to the general sense of fatigue shared by almost everyone I meet. We are tired of war, tired of hearing of young people killed or injured in these endless struggles. We are sick and weary from corruption, pollution, environmental disaster.

We are working too hard, paying too much, bearing up as best we can under difficult times. With a stalled economy and soaring fuel prices, there are very few people who are not feeling in some way stretched to the limit. We are managing, but winter is coming and who knows what that will bring?

Just a quick post today for all of you thinking Pagans, mystical scientists, and citizens who fear the inroads fundamentalism has made into our schools, city halls, and the White House. I was deeply heartened a few months ago when I stumbled onto videos from the 2006 Beyond Belief Conference, where astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson had his way with intelligent design theory.

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.

This is certainly not the answer to all our many, and mounting, problems as a nation. But as the daily news cycle goes, it was a great moment. I know this picture is a little creepy, but At last, he’s leaving!images in the mirror are farther away than they appear, and the news that Karl Rove is at last leaving the White House is on the whole cause to rejoice.

If only I had all day to sit here and write about how my life has been influenced by just a handful of trips to Esalen. If only the stories were as interesting to everyone else as they are to me. Ah well, with great restraint I will spare you and focus here on the [...]

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 [...]