Blog o’ Gnosis

Anyone involved in the creative arts, or with an active spiritual practice, probably has some strong positive associations with the symbol of fire. It is passion, inspiration, faith, hope, transformation, courage, resurrection, rebirth, purification, healing, creativity, the heart’s desire, the soul’s purpose. Being “on fire” is the highest compliment: we are tapped into the life force, joining our personal creativity to a greater force and doing some of our best work.

Finding one’s fire is an epic journey, and central to the human condition. From Prometheus to Maui, the creation stories which feature heroes, gods, and animals assisting humans in their quest for fire are legion. In mystery traditions, these tales are often read as initiatory journeys, and the mastery of various skill levels is spoken of as the ability to carry fire, or walk through the fire.

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 weekend I went to a lovely Lammas dinner at my friend Victoria’s house, a feast fit for the Gods and a few dozen people as well. I love a good harvest meal, and any menu that starts with home-baked bread, whole poached salmon and fresh tomato slices is just bound to be good. The company was splendid, the fog came in like a blanket without too much wind, and I got back to find I had blessedly missed much of my daughter’s late summer Buffy-fest, wherein she watches an entire season of episodes in a shockingly short amount of time. Ah, to be young and bored again!

Harvest is a rewarding and also a nerve-wracking time. To reap the benefits of long months of work is good news, but it is not always easy and rarely goes completely according to plan. You never know what will wash ashore from the deep as you go about the business of finishing off projects and tidying up loose ends.

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 [...]

Last weekend I went to the conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams held at Sonoma State. I could only attend for one day, but fortunately it was the same day that Fariba Bogzaran presented a panel on “The Phenomenology of Light in Dreams.”

In her presentation she talked about different ways she has experienced light in dreams. She is a gifted lucid dreamer and artist, so she spoke of her attempts to translate her lucid experiences, which were filled with different qualities of light, into the medium of paint. It was a fascinating presentation, followed by three other speakers who each had something unique and personal to say about how they experienced light in dreams.

The past few days I have been searching through old journals and notebooks looking for notes on an event I went to years ago. I haven’t found the prize yet, but in the process of not finding what I was looking for I did find some other interesting stuff.

Back in 1990 I was taking a poetry class in the evenings, and I worked on those assignments in the same notebook that I used for recording meeting minutes, jotting down ideas for articles, and writing songs. Somewhere in the middle of all that I found the following, dated July 12, 1990. I have no recollection of writing it, but I think I was in the middle of writing a song that wasn’t cooperating, so this came out instead.

The Pile o’ Books challenge was fun. Today a few folks on a Pagan bloggers list were tossing around ideas for new and exciting challenges, and I came up with the idea of photographing something at our homes that is an altar but doesn’t look like an altar.

So what do you call it when you grew up in a tradition, learned a lot from it, owe a lot to it, but have moved away from it in significant ways?
Reclaiming is like a quick-rising bread. If you want to experience the potential of energy and magic, it’s all there at your fingertips without [...]

All kids needs rite of passage ceremonies when they come of age. We planned an elaborate one for my nephew Alex, a small intimate one for my niece Rose (both of whom lived with us during their teenage years—long story), another complicated one for Bowen and a big community celebration for Lyra. The most important [...]

Several years ago I caught a segment of some TV documentary about Central American shamans. I only remember one scene, but it made a big impression on me. It was in the hut of a curandera who was doing a distance healing on someone. She went to her altar, chanted something, spoke some words, and lit a candle for the person. Then she left.

That was it. There was no checking back after five minutes to see how the candle was burning, no worrying whether she’d contacted the right spirits, no concern that maybe the ritual wasn’t going to work. She just went about the rest of her day seemingly unconcerned about both the process and the outcome. The level of trust she had was amazing to me. Oh, and incidentally, the healing worked.