Seeking

One staple of books on modern pagan practice is the guided journey – the book offers a script for the reader to use to go on an otherworldly trip to obtain some piece of wisdom. I usually like these little journeys and have often found them useful for getting whatever point the author was trying to make. I like doing them because I wind up somewhere I wouldn’t have gotten on my own. A while back, I did one of these that was intended to find an ancestral guide. I found her – a helpful if somewhat severe older woman with a long white braid. We had a good chat. It went something like this:

“You’re nervous,” she asked. “Why are you nervous?”
I replied, “Because I’m concerned that you’re not real. I want you to be real.”
“What else would I be?” she asked.
“Imaginary,” I said. “An aspect of myself, a bit of my psychology, not a real, independent, ancestral being who will guide me”
“So,” she said, “what is it you want from me?”
I said, “I want a guide and a teacher. Someone who will help me [and here I rattled off a long list of all the stuff I wanted to learn and be and do].”
She snorted. “Oh, right, you want me to help develop all these little bits and pieces of yourself. All these different interests and talents you have, you want someone who can address all of those at once? and hold your hand through them in just the right way?”
“Well, um, yeah,” I said.
“What makes you think I can do all that?”
“Um, I read in a book to come here and ask you.” [Here I am beginning to get the problem with my approach]
“So you’re looking for someone who is exactly like you… only better?”
“I wasn’t thinking of it that way, but now that you mention it…”

“And you’re afraid that I’m just yourself talking to yourself? Gods, girl, with all that in mind, what the hell else could I be?”

—-

I have worked with the same being since then, but I’ve learned how to approach her with a whole lot more respect and have learned quite a bit from her. I still don’t know if I’m just talking to myself, but it seems to work.

I like working in a group. I like my druid grove. We get together eight times a year to do ritual, and it’s always good and I always enjoy seeing everyone, but we don’t do anything in between times. Part of the problem is that we’re geographically scattered – it would be a major inconvenience to get together any more often. Another part of the problem is that we’re all on our own individual paths. There is no “Order of Darach Dubh” – no unifying set of principles or practice beyond the desire to get together eight times a year to do druidy seasonal ritual together. I think it would be a smashing failure to try to impose anything like that upon us, and I accept that our little grove is what it is and can’t be prodded into being something else.

I like the idea of being part of an order with a heirarchy. There’s a set of unifying priniciples to start out with that guides the discourse and focuses activity. I’m currently a member of two such orders which are quite different in scope and aim but which are both rewarding to me in their own ways. The problem with both of them is that neither of them are local and there are no members of either group local to me (or, if there are, they’ve chosen not to make themselves known, which amounts to the same thing.) I feel, as I have always felt, the desire to be part of an in-person, committed, involved, local polytheistic spiritual group with members at a variety of different places along the path and with varied but compatible interests.

Here are my practical requirements for a teacher/group/temple/grove/coven/church:

1. At least some participants must know more than I do about what I want to learn and be willing to engage in teaching activities, formally or informally. I’m willing to begin at the beginning to learn the specific practices of a particular tradition, but only with a greater goal in mind. I have no interest in “101” classes if the only point of the class is to learn for personal development. If it’s to learn a particular technique to work well within the parameters of a tradition, I’ll be delighted. If it’s to lay the groundwork for more intense practices later on, I’m even happier. I don’t need a “101” if there is no “601” down the road. I’m also not looking for a group that just meets eight times a year and only does seasonal ritual together. I’ve already got that and am content with it, as far as that goes. I’m looking for something with a more mystical bent. I really want to study with RJ Stewart, for example, but can’t just fly off to locations where he teaches. Which brings me to the next requirement:
2. You must meet within reasonable traveling distance and near enough to public transportation that I can get there. For anything that meets once a month or more, it would need to be in Philadelphia or the immediate vicinity. For anything that meets a few times a year or less, I’d be willing to go as far norths as NYC, as far south as DC, east to the Atlantic Ocean, and west as far as Harrisburg. Has to be near the train or bus line, though. I don’t drive, and that’s not going to change while I live in the city.
3. I will gladly pay any reasonable class fee, but I’m far from wealthy and can’t afford a whole lot. I will not pay for ritual participation beyond sharing expenses for venue, supplies, etc. I don’t mind paying for professional services such as teaching but I don’t want to take part in ritual if anyone there is doing it for a paycheck.
4. Respect me. I can’t stand being related to as a “type” and I don’t deal well with condescension. Know that (a) I don’t have much money and (b) I am married and not all that exciting to look at – I don’t have much of anything to exploit, so if money or sex are a big part of your motivation, let’s just not bother. You won’t get what you want and I will make fun of you in public. Easier just to skip it.
5. Respect others. Maybe people in some other tradition were mean to you, maybe you think everyone is wrong but you. It’s okay – you’re entitled to your opinions. However, I don’t want to hear about it in either class or ritual context. I’m not there to hear about why Christianity is oh-so-wrong, or to pick apart the dominant culture, or to shake my tiny fist at centuries of persecution. If putting down other religions or groups is part of your teachings or practices, I’m not going to stick around. It’s boring.
6. I have a low BS tolerance, I love to do research, and I will not just nod and smile if you tell me something I know to be untrue. I will be glad to discuss it and I’m willing to accept the difference between mythology and historiography, but don’t present me with something that is blatantly ahistorical. For example: “Modern witchcraft is a direct descendent of pre-Christian European religious practices.” I’m perfectly willing to hear about the spiritual and mystical applications of this myth, but if you try to make it into a historical account, I’ll start to fidget. If you insist it’s true in the historical sense, I’ll ask politely for references.

1-3 are simply practical requirements that must be met for it to be possible and worthwhile for me. 4-6 all have their origins in others with whom I’ve tried and failed to work – I have no interest in repeating those experiences. My requirements are a whole lot simpler than what I initially asked for from my ancestral guide, but I still fear that it’s too much.

I’m mostly writing this as a sort of magical act to focus on what I really want to find, but if anyone knows someone that fits the bill for me, please let me know, because that works, too.

 

The end of the world news

You know things are bad when the investment advice from the Wall Street Journal is “stock up on food.” Costco is rationing rice, wheat and cooking oil. Oil is on its way to $120/barrel and gas is headed towards $4/gallon and shows no sign of going down. The Federal Reserve is propping up our banking system using drastic measures. The dollar is crashing .  I am not an economist and don’t completely understand the implications of everything that is going on, and if anyone with a firmer grasp on these concepts wants to tell me why it’s not as bad as it looks, please do. I would love to hear it.

I don’t like talking this way or admitting this pessimism. I want to qualify it somehow, to say that it’s all going to be OK. To celebrate human ingenuity and adaptability, to look to the bright days ahead that will come once we figure our way out of this mess. To ask someone to tell me that it’s not as bad as it looks. I am resisting the urge to find a way to say, yes, things look bad, but here’s what we can do! Because I don’t really know what we can do.

I want to think that people will be outraged that 100 million more people are without food than there were six months ago or that children in Haiti are eating mud pies to stave off hunger pangs. (the linked article also mentions that the price of mud has now risen in Haiti as a result.) Then I remember being a poor child that was often hungry, occasionally to the point of malnutrition, and I remember that I noticed perfectly well that nobody cared. I know that I feel outraged in that impotent way I do and I suppose most of my readers do when we see TV pictures of suffering people. But I also know that I live in the city, and almost daily someone approaches me to tell me how their children are hungry and can I just spare a quarter, please? and I usually walk by, just like everyone else. It’s a systemic problem, right? It’s not my fault, I didn’t do it, I’m too powerless to do anything about it and anyway, it’s all I can do to keep my own family fed. Just like everyone else.

I’ve spent most of my adult life with a vague sense of living in a civilization in decline. My earliest memory of political awareness is of hearing the general outrage among my parents’ social circle over the way Reagan demolished both the advances in conservation and alternative energy made in the ’70s and the political will among the American people to do anything about the issue.  We could do better, I heard, but we chose not to.  Environmental degradation marches along, species are wiped out every day, more trees are cut down and there is less and less wild space. Ice is melting. Things in general are sliding downhill.

My response so far has been to plant more of my own food. I buy all I can locally. I don’t drive – I get in a car maybe once every six weeks. I recycle. I compost. I make my home as energy-efficient as possible. I buy almost everything used. I’ve been doing all of this for years, partly out of a sense of social responsibility, partly out of thrift, and partly out of simple habit. I make medicine out of plants I grow myself or that grow wild. I water my garden with cached rainwater. try to make a change every month to make my existence a little lighter on the earth (for this month, I’m changing my wine-buying habits – I like Southern Hemisphere wines from Australia and Chile and such, they are cheap and tasty, but they have to come so far – so from now on, it’s Pennsylvania or New York wines.)

I’m not particularly smug about any of this. I feel like it’s not enough, it’s petty stuff in the face of overwhelming problems in the world. I do it because, really, what else am I going to do? I wouldn’t be happy living any other way. I just wish more people would connect the dots between an hour long commute and little kids eating mud in Haiti. I know, I already know  – you have to drive that far because how else are you going to make money to feed your own family? It’s not your fault that our society is set up this way. You didn’t do it.

But maybe, if you really thought about it and understand the harm it has already caused, maybe you would find a way to do it differently.

 

Lloyd Alexander

Here, Neil Gaiman writes about the kind of process I’ve tried to describe, the way stories become part of our psyches and change the way we see the world. He talks about watching Dr. Who as a kid, and becoming “infected” with the notion that there are other worlds, just a step away, just out of reach, all around us. He picked up this infection and passed it on, to me among millions of others, as I’ve already described here. Of course, this virus is not original to Dr. Who – the notion of an Otherworld is, I believe, as old as humanity, and perhaps older.

I just started rereading Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles. They were some of the books that I read obsessively as a kid, checking them out of the library over and over again. Since I’ve recently gotten interested in Welsh mythology, I thought it might be time to revisit them. I remembered that Alexander used names and ideas from Welsh mythology, but his stories and characters were his own. I reread “The Book of Three” last week, and realized why it is that Gwydion from the Mabinogion always, in my head, has wolf-grey hair and green eyes flecked with gold. Alexander also wrote the Westmark books, which I have always thought of as the sort of Platonic ideal of adventure stories.

I was back at the library today to return the book and get “The Black Cauldron,” the second book in the series, only to find that it had been checked out. I was a little disappointed, but I was happy imagining that it had been checked out by a ten-year-old girl who was hungry for other worlds, and that the virus was being passed on as it should. I found a Clive Barker book that I hadn’t read yet instead, and came home to the news that Lloyd Alexander died the other day.

I’m sorry I never got to thank him. He didn’t live very far from me, and I always sort of hoped I would run into him someday and thank him for showing me Prydain. I suppose he heard that sort of thing all the time – I hope he did – but I’m still sorry I didn’t get to do it myself.

 

Blog business, Awen, and an eclipse

I was posting over on Blogger and mirroring to this site, in order to check out WordPress and see which I liked better. WordPress wins, so now I’m going to just be posting here.

One thing I like about WordPress is that it shows me lots of information about traffic. As I write this, this site has gotten 51 hits. I have no idea who you people are, since I haven’t given this address out to any of my friends yet. Welcome, whoever you are. Hi. I just assumed, over on the Blogger page, that it was only read by people who actually know me and hardly at all by anyone else. I can see that this is not actually the case, and I like that. I keep an online journal in order to share my experiences – there’s another journal, much more extensive than this one, that is kept in a book, written by hand on paper (a process that feels oddly uncomfortable and archaic) that nobody sees. If I didn’t want all this to be read it would be in that book. So, again, Hi! Good to see you here. I did some minor editing and took out a few posts that seemed uninteresting or out of place. Enjoy.

I spent this weekend Out of the City. I have some friends who have a beautiful, snug little farmhouse out in Hickland. I have a friend who is an accountant, and she and her husband and her son – who collectively are three of my favorite people in the world – came out to my friend’s place in Hickland for a tax-a-thon. She did taxes for seven different people in one day, which is a feat of superhuman strength that should be celebrated in the history books. So we were there for the tax-a-thon, but also to be with people that we love.

There was an eclipse Saturday night. We were all eager to see it, but were thwarted by clouds – only the barest smudge was visible through the cloud cover.  When it became apparent that totality was past and we missed it, everyone went back inside. I went off into the woods, down a path to a little clearing where my friends have a fire circle. It’s not far from the house but out of sight, and totally out of sight of neighbors or road. I looked up to where the moon-smudge was and started chanting “Awen.” Before I had even finished the first Awen, the clouds parted and the moon, still half-eclipsed, came into view. It was perfectly silent, and there were enough patches of snow on the ground to reflect the moonlight back up to me. The clouds were high and blowing fast, and I stayed there, chanting Awen, until the moon was fully back in view.

I don’t get to be outside alone at night very often. Around here, any place that is dark and isolated is not a place to go alone, because  when you get there you probably won’t actually be alone and the company is not good. It doesn’t actually get dark or quiet anywhere around here. I miss the quiet dark.

 

Odd Fellows

The tall square building is the old Bartlett Odd Fellow’s Hall. Whoever has it now put a coat of paint on it. When I lived there, it all looked like that top dormer, and the letters “IOOF” could just be made out above the second story windows.

Following is a post that I made on the AODA_Public board, but I also want to put it here because it’s kind of important to me, and it gives a brief review of a book I just read that is relevant to the topic of this blog:

“I just got this book [Inside a Magical Lodge, by John Michael Greer] based on the posts here, and I have to add to the chorus of praise – I love this book! As a founder and leader of a small magical/religious pagan group, I’ve found that there aren’t many helpful books on the subject – the only other really valuable one I’ve found was Judy Harrow’s “Wicca Covens,” which has more of a psychotherapy-influenced group-process approach. Everything else I’ve found on the subject seems to be aimed at teenage girls.
“Inside a Magical Lodge” comes from a different perspective and has gotten me really interested in the old fraternal orders. It’s also very practical and useful.

When I was about 11, my mom bought a big, falling-down old building that had the letters “IOOF” in faded paint across the top of the third floor. This place was totally unsuited for being a home, but it was lots of square footage for cheap. I now realize that my bedroom throughout my early teenage years was most likely the antechamber to the main lodge hall. There was a peephole in the door into the big
main room whose purpose I now understand. I knew what “IOOF” stood for, but I never gave it that much thought – though I spent many hours in that room as a kid reading books by Crowley and Regardie and others, wishing that there was something like the Golden Dawn for bright twelve-year-olds. Kind of gives me another perspective on the
whole thing.

. . . [edited out irrelevant bit about OES floor cloth, and bit about PA Grand Lodge. Leaving in the link for those who might be interested]

Here in Philadelphia we have an enormous and spectacular Masonic temple. ”

I had forgotten about much of this. I mean, I remember that we lived in an Odd Fellow’s Hall, but I never thought of it as anything all that interesting. Mostly I resented the place. It was drafty and cold and sort of embarrassing. I wanted a real house. As an adult, people hear that I lived in a tipi and an Odd Fellow’s Hall and we had sled dogs and stuff, it sounds interesting and exotic. At the time, I felt poor and wierd. I’m grateful now for much of it, because it made me into the person I am, and I like me. I’m not “normal” and I would have felt even worse trying to pretend that I was. I don’t think I realized that as a kid, so it didn’t help back then.

I’m now overwhelmed with curiousity about the history of fraternal orders in New Hampshire. I’ve tried to find information about the chapter that would have used our house as their lodge, but to no avail. The NH historical society seems to have the information on the IOOF in New Hampshire, but I’d have to go use their library to find out more. I may still do that, but not for at least a few months yet. I also found that there was a Knights of Pythias lodge in town, as well. I’m trying to find where that would have been – I have a suspicion but I don’t know. It’s not like it’s a huge town.

That’s another thing – such a small town, with two fraternal orders? Every man in town must have belonged to at least one. The Hall is a huge building, as you can see, and if the K. of P. lodge was the place I think it might have been, it was almost as big. I don’t know of any Odd Fellows or Knights in town anymore. There is a Masonic lodge in N. Conway, and the Grange is active all over, but those two seem to have melted away.

I looked into the IOOF, to see if I wanted to join. There doesn’t seem to be a Philadelphia chapter, but even if there was, monotheism is one of the requirements for admission. I don’t qualify. The OES sounds interesting, and there is a lodge, here, and I was tempted in spite of the “Supreme Being” thing when I found this from the Chick people. If they think it’s a source of evil, then there has to be something good going on. They want you to be related to a Mason, though, and I’m not.

When I finally get back to something like rural life, I’ll look into joining something – it seems really important, in spite of the Christian thing. Actually, I should say because of the Christian thing – it’s not like I’ll be joining a church, so this is a way of getting to know the neighbors. As long as they don’t burn me at the stake, we should be fine.

*Apologies to whoever I swiped the above picture from – I did a web search to find a picture, and I think that came from someone’s Flickr vacation pictures (seems to have been taken from the train). I right-clicked, saved, and moved on without recording where I found it, and now I can’t find it again. I wanted to find some old photos of Bartlett, but couldn’t. Got homesick looking for them, though.