Blog o' Gnosis

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?

As it happens, this trifecta of disrespect is not all that difficult to accomplish. This is after all the feast of Samhain, when opportunities to ritualize bad manners abound. At Samhain the veil of etiquette is thin, as we all know, and the living and the dead co-mingle like ants around a sugar skull.

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.

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.

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.

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 [...]

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.