Dancing Down the Moon

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.

Ritual Tools, part 1

I don’t imagine that the idea of a long-winded essay about ritual tools is terribly interesting to seasoned veterans of the Wiccan path. It’s gotten to the point where, if you’ve read one 101 book, you’ve pretty much read them all, and they all have at least one chapter devoted to the increasingly dull task of describing traditional ritual tools and their various associations and purposes. Really, how much is there to say about a wand?

Plenty, if you’re me, and you don’t use one. There are in fact a number of small but significant differences between my altar and those of many of other Wiccans.

First, however, a bit of background:

I am lucky enough to live alone and have neither inquisitive dogs nor small children, so I have altars all over the house. My main working altar is in my bedroom, where I can see it every morning when I wake up. I have used everything from the top of a foot locker to a board on a stack of books as my altar, and during my first few years on the path I stuck to the layouts and tools that books told me to. I thought, “Hey, I don’t use half of this crap, but someday I might, and besides, it looks so cool.”

Yeah, I thought that. Don’t forget I became Wiccan at age sixteen.

Concepts of Deity, part 2

Any creative act is born of the union of masculine energy and feminine; whether that energy is expressed by a man or a woman makes no difference to me. Relating "masculine" just to having a penis is limiting the Divine to human flesh, and as a panentheist I know there is far more to Deity than anthropomorphized images. I also know that becoming pregnant and bearing human children is hardly the only form of creativity. 

In yet more pseudoscientific terms, the Goddess is matter, and the God is energy. You can’t really separate the two, because without either, the universe simply would not exist. 

From these Two, humans create Multitudes. Different cultures and people need different faces of Deity to relate to; you could hardly expect a tropical people, for example, to connect to a desert god. So thousands of gods have sprung up throughout history, each reflecting the creativity and needs of the people who envisioned them.

Concepts of Deity, part 1

This will be the first in a series discussing aspects of my personal tradition; my goal here is mostly to share how I do things, but also to help me organize things in my head so that I can decide which ideas and practices become part of my teaching tradition, EarthDance, and which remain personal.

I had every intention of starting this series with a post about tools and altars, but it occurred to me that there was one subject that absolutely had to come first: Deity.

Warning: I’ve divided this into two posts, but it’s still hellishly long. If you plan to be a regular reader you’ll need to get used to that. Hope you’re in a comfy chair.

Spiritual Priorities

In my last post I mentioned that if you were to ask ten average Wiccans (assuming you could figure out what an average Wiccan is), “What aspects of your spiritual practice are the most important to you?” you would get ten different answers.

What do I mean by “aspects?” Well, for starters, I would hope that most Wiccans would place some variation of “devotion to Deity” at the top of the list. If you were to ask, say, the HPS of a coven, she might add “creating transformative group ritual” and “counseling/teaching” to her list. A solitary Wiccan who practices yoga and participates in activism to save the oceans might add those things as important parts of her spirituality. We all have different priorities as evolving practitioners and children of our gods.