Blog o’ Gnosis

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.

When I was growing up, on Easter morning we’d come out to the dining room to find lovely big baskets full of malted milk ball eggs, chocolate bunnies and marshmallow chicks waiting for us. Later, my mom would hide jelly beans in the green shag rug of the living room and we’d go searching for them, a little less enthusiastically. Can there be anything less exciting, really, than finding a crushed lemon jellybean full of rug hairs and dirt? Fortunately there was chocolate to eat, so none of us had to dwell on the unfortunate jellybean portion of our second favorite Christian holiday. (I dimly recall earlier Easter egg hunts out in the grass, but I think in later years she got too tired to do that and downscaled the whole outdoor component. WWJD?)

Due to a plumbing emergency this week, I found myself out in my front yard two mornings in a row. My neighbor Joe was doing the fixing part under the house, and I was there helping by periodically handing him a tool or a rag when he yelled for one. The rest of the time, [...]

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 [...]

Next weekend I will be headed, along with a thousand or two other Pagans, to PantheaCon. I have been there every single year it’s been held - with my booth in the marketplace, my kids, notes for workshops and rituals I’m doing, and every scrap of shiny, colorful clothing I own.

Among the many things I am doing this week to prepare for PantheaCon is ironing those scraps of clothing, some of them still wrinkled in the closet from last year’s post-con washing. A clothes horse I am not, but after my first foray to witchcamp in 1994 where I realized that the only colorful thing I’d packed was a red sweatshirt, I took the challenge to upgrade my wardrobe. Since then I have slowly gathered a respectable amount of ritual clothing, most of which meets my prime criterion for dressy clothes: they must feel as close to wearing pajamas as possible. Comfort trumps fashion to me, which admittedly sets me at odds with most of my Pagan brethren here in the Bay Area.

I absolutely love the Winter holidays. I’ll take all of ‘em, I’m not picky. The tree, the lights, the darkness, the candles, the food, the staying up late and drinking too much, the days in between one bash and another where I get to just sit around and reflect. My dreams at the end of [...]

I was just in Chicago for the weekend, and had the chance to catch up with some Reclaiming friends while I was there. Getting out of town is I think critical for most bouts of soul-searching, including organizational soul-searching. It gives you a whole new perspective on what really is out of whack. Is it [...]

I continue to mull over my long involvement with Reclaiming, listening to what other people consider the babies in the bathwater, sitting with reactions and reflections in order to think of something useful to say about it all. One image that pops to mind is an incredible moment that occurred less than a year ago, and maybe that’s as good a place as any to begin.

This is a very old quote, maybe it was Plato, maybe Aquinas, maybe, more recently, Heschel. But I just found out today it was also a favorite quote of Rabbi Michael Robinson, who passed away early Thursday morning and whose funeral I attended today.

This is the worst week of the year: the week when every radio announcer and third-rate journalist announces the arrival next week of “the first day of summer.” June 21 is the Summer Solstice, also known as Midsummer. As in mid-summer, or the mid-point of summer. In other words, the middle of summer. Not the first day, the middle day. How difficult is this?