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 [...]
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.
Website maintenance is a near-continuous process, something they don’t tell you in those seminars about how easy it is to put up a website. When I first realized that having a website meant I had to figure out how to fix it when it was broken, I was filled with dread. Over the years, though, the process has gotten easier to manage. I chalk it up to my Philosophy of Dreadful Jobs: when faced with any daunting task, if you actually start it at some point, then continue until it eventually is completed, it becomes less daunting. Who knew?
Okay, I’m sorry, this is it. For those of you who weren’t watching, and even for those who were, we have just witnessed the countdown clock begin to tick. That sound you hear is the imminent end of American Idol’s fifteen minutes of fame.
I finally got around to watching Jesus Camp last night, and while I was horrified at how these kids were being brainwashed I also recognized some disturbing similarities between different brands of “spiritual” childraising. Watching Pastor Becky Fischer in action, I couldn’t decide whether she ought to go to prison or a mental health facility for how she bullied those kids into crying and being ashamed for their “sins,” then turned around and filled them full of crap about being the “chosen generation” to lead Christians through the “end times.” It’s a bi-polar emotional feast, and it left me wondering just what skeletons in her closet have caused her to be such a militant.
(With apologies to Roger Miller.) I have been enjoying myself out on the road this week. There’s been no boxcars or broom pushing involved, but thanks to the largesse of old friends and the interest in dreams and other workshops I give, I’ve been able to partake of early Spring in the Northwest, a rarefied [...]
Okay, time to fess up. We’ve all heard the word bandied about. We’ve all applied it to someone we think is one, or have argued heatedly against applying it to someone else. We think we know what it means, but aren’t sure that anyone else would agree with us. It’s tremendously important, but also a [...]
I have recovered. Three days of laying low, staying warm, and sleeping a lot helped me cross over back into Life Outside the Pagan Hotel. I can tell that I’ve fully recovered, because just now I was remembering some really great things that happened last weekend that are worth mentioning.
Several people came up to me [...]
Today as I was walking along the beach, I tossed around in my head the word “witch,” also the word “Witch.” These words have been familiar companions since I began thinking of myself as maybe possibly sometimes a witch, well over twenty years ago. Since then it has been at various times an albatross, an inspiration, a dare, a tired relic, an embarrassment, a shocker, a battle cry, a statement of fact, and a clever diversion.
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