Dancing Down the Moon

By Knot of One...

My early training as a Wiccan was fairly typical once I got to college.  After two years of solitude, stuck in a small town before the Internet, I found a whole new world in Austin and soon started a series of classes with a group that sounded reputable and had an eclectic curriculum.  The main advantage of the group was that it was made up primarily of solitaries, and once initiated students could go off and do their own thing, join other groups, and so forth, or continue up the degree ladder.  I liked the structure-without-structure.  I stayed with them for several years but eventually personal differences with the leadership drove me out. 

At the time it was a negative experience, as an unfortunately large percentage of Pagan group experiences are, but I'm grateful to that organization for several reasons, most significantly that through them I met some of the most important people in my life.  It was worth all the drama just for S1ren, quite possibly the most amazing woman I know.  I also might never otherwise have met Amber, fellow writer, early teaching partner, and all around cool chica. 

I also came away with a much firmer idea of what I wanted to give my future students and what I believed Wicca really was.  My brand of spirituality was fundamentally different from what I had seen in class, and I was glad to have learned that it's all right to be a black sheep even among other black sheep. 

More of a red sheep, really.  Or possibly paisley.

As Within, So Without

From our earliest ancestors-of-faith driving fat clay goddesses into the mud to the multi-layered symbolism of an array of Gardnerian ritual tools to the haphazardly elegant collection of shells, stones, and flowers of our coven's Ostara, altar building is one of the simplest yet most profound statements a spiritual practitioner can make:  I am here.  This is my universe.  These things in this place at this time have meaning for me.

We express our religious creativity and our desires through our altars, and we use their shapes, textures, and layouts to affirm our priorities.  Setting up a permanent altar is a very serious announcement to the gods that you intend not only to honor your commitment to Them, but to the space itself, both internal and external.  When you build an altar in the physical world you also build one in your heart, making room for miracles, allowing for the possibility of a magical world.

What do you suppose it means, then, when you neglect such a holy creation?  I found myself asking that question as I sat in front of my altar, knees drawn up to my chin, pondering the film of dust that covered the objects I had, more than once, declared sacred to me.  What does that dust say about the state of your spirit, your commitment to the Divine, and to yourself? 

It says it's time to get your house in order.

Ashes to Midol

Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

~TS Eliot, "Ash Wednesday"

Ever since I was a child I've had a fascination with Lent.  I grew up Southern Baptist, but our small town had a large percentage of Catholics, and the comparatively strange rituals of Catholicism seemed magical even though Catholic Mass, I quickly discovered, was no more engaging to me than a typical Sunday sermon.  All that standing up and sitting down baffled me.  A pancake breakfast, in comparison, was a much more accessible ritual.

Mass did have two things over our services, though--ceremony, which my spirit craved even at a young age; and a noticeable lack, comparatively speaking, of brimstone and Bible-thumping, or as I like to call it thanks to a certain t-shirt I saw once, Hellfire and Dalmatians. (And He sayeth unto them, "Bad dogs!  Bad!")  Little did I know that our local priest was engaging in some, er, extracurricular activity in the rectory (though thankfully not with altar boys in this case).  The whole Pope thing made me uneasy, and the older I got the less attracted I was to Catholicism's dogma, though the idea of being a nun did, and still does, intrigue me.

Still, as a child I would frequently "give things up for Lent" (with about as much success as most kids, I imagine) and would stare, mesmerized, at the smudge of ash across a friend’s forehead on Ash Wednesday.  I was always too self-conscious to ask what it was supposed to mean, or why you had to give something up for Lent.  It seemed like a game more than anything else.  Local restaurants offered (and still do) special fish meals during Lent, and to me this seemed a particularly grueling sacrifice as I didn’t like eating fish.

What does this have to do with Wicca?  Not a blessed thing, although it does provide an interesting contrast in worldview.  Wiccans, after all, don't generally devote much energy to concepts like penitence and atonement.  Guilt isn't really our stock in trade, as we do not view the world as fallen or human beings as inherently sinful and in need of redemption; although I have observed that, thanks to the religious experiences of our youth, many of us still carry around a great deal of residual guilt that takes years to exorcise. 

I'd like to say that this has led me to an in-depth exploration of the concept of guilt and its place or lack thereof in Wicca, or at least a lengthy meandering about the difference between guilt, which cripples the soul's evolution; and regret, which can empower us to create change and heal wounds that we all inevitably cause during our EarthWalk (unless of course we cling to it and transform it into guilt)…but alas, on this lovely warm Ash Wednesday in the year of the Common Era 2007, I am beset by a much more immediate affliction than guilt:  cramps.

Therefore, I leave you with this astoundingly brief and fairly pointless post, and go on a holy quest for a bottle of ibuprofen and my thermonuclear heating pad.

(This post was sponsored by our good friends at Acme Parentheses, the world leader in punctuation for confusing asides.)

My Most Recent Idea (of Shadows)

Pagans are a creative bunch. Whether it's because artistic and creative thinkers tend to shy away from the mainstream and therefore tend to congregate in alternative religions, or because our up-close-and-personal relationship with Deity tends to inspire us so passionately we have to find some way of expressing our ecstasy, or both, or something else entirely, over the years I have seen some of the most fantastic art and craft from my people, ranging from Tarot to music to sculpture and all points West.

I’m something of an artist, and by that I mean I have artistic talent but not the drive to make use of it regularly. My creativity finds its outlet in the written word, plus occasional forays into colored pencil art, wee sculptures in polymer clay, and even a painting or two. (Painting is difficult for me, as I have essential tremors in both hands, so mostly I stick to pencil and clay.)

Even if you don’t think you have any talent, there are some forms of art that any enterprising Pagan can create. The most obvious, and perhaps most important, is of course the altar, where form and function unite, making a Michelangelo out of every Aradia WeaselFox. The second is that "ancient" form of magical recordkeeping, the Book of Shadows.

The minimum to-do list

This past week on The Happiness Project blog, Gretchen Rubin posted her daily “minimum to-do list.”

It’s her list of things that anyone can do every day, so that at the end of the day even if you accomplished nothing else, you’ll know you at least did something, such as:

Make the bed
Eat a fruit or vegetable
Go for a ten-minute walk
Put your keys away in the same place
Touch everyone in your house with affection

I think Gretchen is on to something here, especially if you are seeking at the New Year to integrate your spirituality more fully into your daily life.

Notice that the list is not made up of negatives (I didn’t eat a box of cookies; I didn’t call my boss a rat bastard, at least not to his face). It may seem insignificant, but I find it is far more rewarding to do something than not to do it, so when making affirmations or doing spellwork—or creating a minimum to-do list—I try to keep my language positive.

Try making a list like this for yourself. What are the little things you can do every day to enrich your life without disrupting it? As I’ve said before, if your spiritual practice distracts too much from your routine, you are more likely to give it up in frustration when you realize there simply isn’t time to work, eat, sleep, play with the dog, read, pee, and spend two hours in lotus position surrounding yourself with Divine light every single day.

I think my list would, at the moment, look like this:

Make the bed
Eat a piece of fruit (I already eat plenty of vegetables)
Say something nice about someone (without snark)
Write in my Gratitude Journal
Take my supplements
Put something away
Pause at my altar

Normally I try and have a longer meditation or devotional ritual of some sort at least four or five times a week, but I usually manage to at least stop, light my central candle (and incense if I am home long enough to let it burn), and offer up a brief prayer every day. If I can sit down, so much the better.

Another worthy everyday practice is to greet the first living thing you see upon leaving your house, whether that’s a person, bird, tree, or whatever. Say good morning, offer a blessing, or just nod and smile. It starts you off on the right foot with the rest of the world, and can help you look up from your navel and notice what’s going on in Nature as you’re charging ahead with your day.

Dendrites

This morning as I sat shivering, waiting for my car to warm up, I happened to glance up at my sunroof and notice that it was etched with tiny ice crystals. My eyes followed their delicate pattern for a moment, then refocused higher in the air on the live oak that stood watch over the parking lot.

There among the branches I realized that the same pattern played out in the tree: snowflakes of blue sky formed by the spaces between the leaves. If I looked at the tree through the ice on my roof, I could fit the ice shapes into the tree, as if one had been made by tracing the other.

I thought of the stone in my pocket, and there it was again: the same pattern in the inclusions of a Sweetwater Agate. The small smoky blue stone comes from Wyoming, where manganese oxide forms lacy snowflake-like dendrites inside the rock. Though Sweetwater Agate isn’t generally listed in crystal-healing type books, I’ve always found it to have such a soothing, gentle energy that I keep it in my pocket on stressful days, seeking it out with my hand for reassurance.

Ice, tree, stone; seeing the same phenomenon in all three struck me practically stupid with awe, my numb fingers and overly thin sweater no longer important in the face of Nature’s perfect wisdom. From the seeming disorder of disparate elements, a pattern emerges. From the chaos, stars are born.

I drove to work feeling ridiculously peaceful for a Monday morning, my mind full of the connections among simple things. I thought about how spirituality is in essence the art of connection: we seek out and nurture our link to the Divine, and through it, find our common ground with others, and with all that is.

It has always been my opinion that all paths have validity, but that the spiritual paths that truly foster growth are those that seek to bring us closer to others, not build walls of "us" and "them." The Divine is what permeates and forms the entirety of entirety. Seeking it, we seek union, not division. The closer we come to the sacred, the fewer walls we are able to build. Religions that encourage their practitioners to find and exploit—or persecute--that which is different are, I feel, missing the whole point.

We can and should celebrate what makes us unique as individuals, but it is our shared humanity, our shared pain, our shared capacity for compassion and love, that religion should bring us home to; for those qualities that connect us—delicate branches in ice and stone, not lines drawn with a sword in the sand--are the essence of God.

Don't Just Sit There Bitching...

"Don't do nothing because you can't do everything. Do something. Anything."

~Colleen Patrick-Goudreau

I don't intend this blog to be a platform for me to rant about veganism; it is, however, a place for me to write about my spirituality, and veganism is becoming a very important part of that spirituality, so from time to time ideas and recommendations along those lines will appear here.

I will not burden your eyes with endless diatribes about Why Pagans Should Be Vegetarians or anything like that, partly because I don't take well to being bitched at (and nothing will get people bitching like suggesting they change the way they eat), partly because I do that sort of thing over at my personal blog already, and partly because the self-righteous preaching of other vegans has already turned off enough people--including me. I no longer spend time on vegan forums or other communities due to the fact that a large percentage of vegans are, unfortunately, holier-than-thou assholes (and there's nothing assholes love more than an online forum).

Grace and Gratitude

Once again I must apologize for my absence of late.  I blame Mercury.  Hey, it's as good an excuse as any, right?

I am at present toying with a couple of new book ideas (or rather, old ideas that are resurfacing because obviously I don't have enough to do with my time), and the one that I think is most likely to see print first is a book on my approach to Wiccan values, the Graces.  I believe in a system of virtue-based ethics, and "Graces" is simply my name for those virtues I feel are most in keeping with Wicca as I practice it. 

Thoughts on the Ancestors

This time of year the Pagan internet is filled with thoughts, prayers, rituals, and altars to the Ancestors and Beloved Dead.

Once upon a time, I dutifully built my altars and made noises of honor as well; a few years ago, however, I just...stopped. I had finally reached the point in my practice where I was no longer willing to go along with things just because that's how they were done; I needed a reason to do what I was doing. So I finally sat down and really thought about the concept of Ancestors, Beloved Dead, and how it all fits into my life.

Ritual Tools, part 2

Then come the two oddball Elements, Darkness and Light. I was first inspired to include them when I started working with the Brian Froud Faery Oracle; in the accompanying book, five Faery Elements are described, those being the traditional four plus Moonlight. The idea struck me, and percolated in my mind for quite a while before I considered working with it in Circle.

Darkness and Light aren’t really Elements so much as they are energies, or aspects; each Element could be seen as having a Dark manifestation and a Light one, and each of my deities also have both. Everything in the universe is made up of the energies of the four primary Elements, but everything also contains within it a balance—or imbalance, in most cases—of Dark and Light. The two don’t really have a list of correspondences the way the other four do, and I don’t use their energy in magic the way I do the four Elements, but I felt that my Circles were missing something until I started working with the two.