loveandpower

[More from my ongoing project]

People write to me periodically about the problems in their communities with people wanting initiation into this or that, and there not being enough initiates to go around. I wrote a whole article for Thorn Magazine (no relation!) on this subject regarding the opening of the Mystery in all of its variety and glory. You might want to support his fine publication and order a copy. But that is not the topic of today’s musing which is:

There are many reasons to want an initiation. What I’m thinking of today is one facet that crops up over and over again: a wish for external validation. I’ll take myself as a case in point. Periodically, I get an itch to go to graduate school. I had been preparing for this right before my first book was published and my life turned on its head. Needless to say, I dropped the project because it seemed life was taking a slightly different course. However, there is still something in me that loves to study, loves the intellectual sparring with others, and wants more training. There is also a part of me that wants external validation in some letters tacked onto the end of my name. When I look at the amount of time and effort and money it requires, however, usually I find other places to channel my energy. The external validation is just not strong enough to fuel my desire.

External validation never satisfies for long. In the book “Art and Fear” the authors talk about an artist who’s driving goal is a one-person show at a prestigious gallery. He works toward this day, year after year. Finally, the show opens to great acclaim. Success! You know the punchline to this story, right? He never really paints again. His painter’s soul had turned into a soul that wanted outside recognition and proof of his worth. The soul that loved painting itself gave up somewhere along the way, subsumed to this other goal.

Why do we apply ourselves if not for the love of the work? Even those who have a clear outside goal going in must want to fully engage for the love of engaging, otherwise we end up over and over with half finished projects or haphazard practice and return to something easier. We have to have desire to engage will to it’s fullest for the long haul. What interests us about our workouts? What interests us about our study? What interests us about our partners? What interests us about painting, music, dance, gardening, or physics? What interests us about magic, about meditation, about plumbing the depths of our souls and seeking out our heart’s desires?

Without that abiding desire, bringing us back to the search again and again - re-engaging our lives - a degree means little and an initiation is just a blip of an event. There is no outside confirmation that is lasting. The only thing that lasts is what is accrued on the inside. Success is granted within.

The end of 2009 was strange with my stomach flu and working. I had no desire for any kind of retrospective and then wrote two on LJ. Then I was fortunate to have three days off in a row, which I expect won't happen again until Thailand, and I actually had the free time to do some projects I'd been putting off.

I have a box. It used to be more like three boxes, filled with stuff I've been dragging around since childhood. A lot of correspondence, old cards, letters, mix tape playlists. Then there were several old papers from college and high school, and fifty copies of the same five stories with notes written from my peers and teachers. One part of me, I'm just going to admit, has held on to this stuff in case I ever get famous and die and have biographers hoping for some kind of paper trail to pore over and debate for years.

Since I've been moving a lot, and have moved a lot in my life, there's become this periodic built in nostalgia/cleansing process. I'll pull out the boxes from where they've sat for months, open them up, wonder why the hell I have all this crap, and then sort through them. Purging some stuff, holding on to a lot, having some sort of profound re-vision of my past. In this last move I've consolidated the boxes down to one, and decided to finally put all those lose photographs into the half-empty photo albums, and make a scrapbook with the old correspondence.

This I did on Sunday and Monday. Turned out much quicker and easier than I'd expected, since I used the scrapbook more as a folding filing system instead of cutting and pasting stuff together. I organized the letters and such by theme, such as: Childhood through Middle School, Internet Friends, High School, College, Family Members, etc.

There is so much stuff I didn't even know I had. I had two pictures of a young girl I didn't recognize. I had no idea where they came from. Then I found a letter written from an old Internet Friend from the Prodigy days, saying that she'd sent me those pictures of her as a child for no particular reason. The letter had an oddly desperate quality. Her parents had cut her off entirely from the Internet (which was easier to do in those days when most people needed a Prodigy or AOL account and it wasn't mandatory to have an Internet presence).

In one part she told me to "write her back this time, okay?" Implying, I guess, that I had gotten letters from her and never written back, which is probably true. Within five years, I think, of writing that letter, she died. I have these pictures of a person I never met and will never meet. I feel like I should send these to her parents, to somebody, but I don't know how I'd find them.

Then there's this swelling of love I feel in looking through letter after letter from my parents and sister, and all these people I've known, and realizing there has been this enormous flood of love holding me up all these years and I can't say whether I've given back half as much as I've gotten. I didn't even read the huge packet of letters we got at our senior retreat. In part because last time I did I thought half of them seemed really fake now, whereas at 18 I was just floored that these people even knew who I was.

Poll #1507611 Coffee (and silverware)
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 47

Do you prepare your coffee in a way that requires you to stir it once it's in the cup?

If so, do you leave the stirring utensil in the cup after stirring?

Speaking of stirring, under what circumstances is it acceptable to take out a clean utensil and then put it with other clean utensils (in a drawer or dish drainer) with only a rinse (no soap)?

And that is all that we know about Louise. The story is that she came to Natchez sometime in the 19th century to marry a man who jilted her, and she ended up becoming a working girl at one of the brothels or saloons at Natchez-Under-The-Hill. She contracted yellow fever (or in some versions, tuberculosis) and allegedly died in the arms of a clergyman who was tending to the sick. The clergyman never knew her last name, but out of compassion, did not want her in a pauper's grave. So, the story tells us, he paid to have her buried properly.

Hm. But...unidentified yellow fever victims were buried as quickly as possible. From the descriptions of the yellow fever epidemic, many were buried in unidentified or even mass graves. And, granted, there were clergymen who did choose to work with the sick. But putting up a gravestone cost money back then. And there were plenty of working girls who died and were buried without an expensive headstone, or any headstone at all. No, there's more to this story than what we know. But this is all we know.

(picture by JS - more later)

EVER since childhood, I have been honing my skills for living the life of a Radical Feminist Pirate and cultivating the Courage to Sin. The word "sin" is derived from the Indo-European root "es-," meaning "to be." When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a woman trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, "to be" in the fullest sense is "to sin." - Mary Daly from "Sin Big," The New Yorker, February 26, 1996


Without the poles of black and white, the middle pillar does not form. Mary Daly lived as one radical, elemental, essentialist pillar, opposing an opposite radical essentialist pole. In her lifetime, and partially because of her work, that pole of opposition changed. She never really did.

When I heard this morning that Mary Daly died yesterday, at the age of 81, I pulled my 1973 copy of "Beyond God the Father" off the shelf. I must have bought it used in the early 80s when I was angry, disaffected, and very, very, young. I was a newly minted Witch, a feminist, and upset with the status quo. I recall that even during that time in my life, her opus Gyn/Ecology was too angry even for me. Years later, however, her Wickedary of the English Language charmed.

Mary's thinking was thorough, deep, shocking, and very, very problematic. She was notorious for good reason. An essentialist, she had no use for men, overall - though as a scholar would sometimes quote them in her works - and considered transsexuals to be products of Frankenstein. She did not take into account criticisms of women of color. Unwavering in her quest to overthrow patriarchy, she held her radical feminist pole until the end. Even though I disagree strongly with her, I am grateful for her years of thinking.

There are and will be those who think I have gone overboard. Let them rest assured that this assessment is correct, probably beyond their wildest imagination, and that I will continue to do so. - Mary Daly, from Outercourse

Imagine 1950s America. Imagine wanting more than anything to study philosophy and theology. Imagine being told you could not because of your gender (or any other "other-ing" that may arise). Imagine wanting it so much, you found a way regardless. Mary did. She went to Europe to study, living on not much, dedicated to the mind. Imagine exiting school at the beginning of a new social movement in which white women were throwing off the shackles of the delimited social system. Imagine having studied some of the very systems that gave rise to this. Imagine having the power to write, to think, to make change.

Mary did. The Goddess Movement would not be the same without her. Contemporary Paganism would not be the same without the Goddess Movement. The radical essentialism of thinkers like Daly was a challenge to the pole that said "only men can communicate with the divine". That pillar that she went up against? Mostly it has changed, leaving behind laughable relics, some of whom unfortunately still hold a measure of power. Yes, inequality still exists and yes, I am still a feminist, but things have gotten better. Much, much better. I don't know if Mary Daly was able to see the battles she actually won.

Holding the identity of "the oppressed" keeps one oppressed or in reaction forever. In coming into autonomy, we throw off that identity and forge a vision of one who has a right to be, as one is. We have done that as women, as queer people, and as Pagans. In speaking to the legacy she bequeathed to Paganism (or paganisms), this is part of it: we have learned in a few short decades to move from clinging to a mythology of brutal oppression and into a taking of our place as a viable spiritual path that need not exist in reaction and that need not take on the role of victim. We are becoming our own people.

I am grateful for this growth, and grateful for the radical - nay, Piratical - thrust that made this foray toward adulthood possible. Thanks for sinning, Mary. We look at sinning differently now because of it.

I will close with a benediction written by Mary Daly herself, which is a piece of the(a)logy that sings, and a glimpse of the middle pillar that, despite her stalwart holding of one pole, still shone within her, somewhere:

There have been and will be conflicts, but the Final Cause causes not by conflict but by attraction. Not by the attraction of the Magnet that is All There, but by the creative drawing power of the Good Who is self-communicating Be-ing, who is the Verb from whom, in whom, and with whom all true movements move. - Mary Daly from Beyond God the Father

Blessed be.

Last night did feature a "little person" wearing no pants screaming "House of the Rising Sun." It reminded me of the 90s when I used to go see Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper, one of those completely nuts kind of things. I wasn't drunk, I don't think I'll ever get drunk again. Oh my (insert deity of preference here), never more, ever. Anyway, if I had been drunk for that I think it would have harmed my mind somehow.

We did make it to the Natchez City Cemetery today. Natchez is a place that exists in a permanent dream of the past, not quite awake to now, and that is never more clear than at the cemetery. The cemetery reinforces that hallucinatory sense of blurring between the present and the past.. Going through the graveyard and reading those old tombstones, if you look at them carefully, tells a very human story. I should say, stories. The inscriptions on the stones and the stories behind those stones are arresting.

In going through the cemetery, some things become strikingly clear. In the 18th and 19th century, there were quite a number of people who did not live to be 50. There are a good many people buried at the Natchez City Cemetery who didn't make it to age 40. Part of this is because of the history of Natchez, of course; several epidemics of yellow fever, brought by ships from South America and spread by mosquito, ripped through the town over the years, killing literally thousands of people. Yet the port was important enough to where people would not abandon it. Many of the people who died in their 20s and 30s were killed by yellow fever. More than once you can find an entire family wiped out. On one tombstone a 27-year-old woman is consigned to God along with her five children, the birth dates of which show that she was married and having children by age 16. All of them died in a yellow fever epidemic, the youngest first and then inevitably the rest. 

Those who did not die from the fever could meet their end in a number of ways. Natchez-Under-The-Hill was, for many, many years, a hard, rough part of town where the steamboats and the flatboats unloaded their goods to be transported along the Natchez Trace. Robbery and murder were part and parcel of the history of the town, especially considering that before the Louisiana Purchase, anyone could simply cross the river from Natchez and essentially be in Spain or France. Natchez-Under-The-Hill was different from Natchez-On-The-Bluff. The city on the Bluff was where the profits went and were spent, but Under-The-Hill (which is right on the Mississippi River) was where the profits were made, and those profits were none too clean - slave trading, gambling, prostitution, piracy, gun-running, you name it. Getting killed happened.

Of course the lack of any sort of antibiotics meant that even a minor wound could finish you off in a matter of days, not to mention the kind of wounds you could sustain in the Civil War. So, quite a few people never made it past their 20s. Or even their teens. The number of graves of children 5 years old, or less, is considerable. You can tell most of them by the sleeping lamb carved on their tombstone, either in bas-relief or as a sculpture on top of the stone.

hi all--

the dustbunnies are looking for enthusiastic singers (and musicians) for the revival, which will be happening again (in two ballrooms, so we can fit twice as many people as last year). anyone interested should contact the choirmaster, ron miller: rmil0987 at gmail dot com. anyone interested in speaking parts, ushering, or other help, please contact jenya: jentb at hotmail dot com. minimal experience required, just the ability to make a joyful noise.

thanks, and see you there!!
v

Yes, I want all of you to have a good 2010! Thank you for reading and thinking and living along with me on this planet, in this place, at this moment.

Right now I am in Natchez, MS, typing away on my little Acer Netbook, which I got for Hogswatch. Natchez is where our friend Ju lives, and we are staying in a rental room above a bar next door to the apartment where Ju lives. It's a very old and wacky house. Natchez is a place that is old and slightly deranged, a bit like New Orleans, but where New Orleans is continually vibrant due to the people zooming in and out, Natchez is grey and a bit wrinkled and old due to neglect. Gently decaying into time. Like the decade.

Time to go out for a while! More ruminations later.  

Beneath New Year's Resolutions is always the beating of either want, need, or desire. But sometimes these "I wants" are really a variation on "I should". Those sorts of resolutions are usually not kept. A resolution where we have examined the underpinnings, and decided this is an actual want that we are willing to engage will around for our own betterment and further strength or joy, often get kept. A resolution built on true desire - where want and need have joined with our life force and activated our intention - can blossom.

What keeps us from desire? What plunges us into self-loathing or the punishing nature of "I should"?

"I should" is not good enough for the heart and soul. If that is all our resolution is about, perhaps we can set it down for now, allowing space, time and energy for a deeper want to arise.

This coming Gregorian year, what do we actually desire? Are we willing to do some cleansing work, put intention into action, and move our life's energy toward that desire?

When we can say truly, "I want", we can then resolve to say "I will".

We can say "I do" to desire.


As usual, I leave you with one of the most successful spells I have yet written, that stemmed from a great desire I had around five years ago. It is still working marvelously. I would be pleased if you would pass it on as a toast tonight. Repeat after me:

"Love. Health. Prosperity. Knowledge. and Great Sex!"