believing is seeing

"We say, "Seeing is believing," but actually... we are all much better at believing than seeing. In fact, we are seeing what we believe nearly all the time and only occasionally seeing what we can't believe." Robert Anton Wilson
















It’s the anniversary of my father’s suicide. A year or so after, a friend was looking at our family photograph album and was aghast at this photograph. She kept repeating “oh my god, why is this in here! Oh, my god!” I couldn’t figure out why, until she pointed out the noose around my dad’s neck.

I’d never seen it before, although I knew the photograph well. It had been taken in old Tucson and the baby my father was holding was me. I had always liked the way his lower hand was snugly holding me, and the way I seemed to be looking into his heart. It startled and appalled me that I had grown up loving that picture and had never seen the noose. I showed it to my sisters and was even more shocked to find they too couldn’t see the noose until it was pointed out to them. Such is the power of denial. Such is the power of family systems. Such is the power of belief.

This week I haven’t been able to stop thinking of this photograph. How often do we not see what is right in front of us? How often do we delete from our sight what is obvious to others? A client said to me today about a situation she’d been in for years; “I drank the kool-aid. But, I’ve been realizing that the only way to stay there was to drink it.” It wasn’t an abusive situation that she was in, just one that now she was out of she found herself open to all sorts of other perceptions of the world. In order to function in the families, relationships, communities, and work situations that we find ourselves in, we have to drink a bit of kool-aid. We have to distort our wide-open perception and tune out things that we aren’t even aware we are tuning out. Or do we?

This is what I have been mulling over for the past week. Is it at all possible to truly see outside of our beliefs? And what do we give up when we choose seeing over believing?

My father’s suicide gave me my spirituality. It sent me to the coast of Oregon and it directed me to tune into the rhythm of moon and tides. I eventually came to San Francisco and found people I began to call family. We formed covens together, did political actions and risked arrest and even bought land in the country together. I spent seventeen years with my blood family and had my father in my life for twenty two years. I stayed in my chosen family for almost a decade more than that.

Besides the actual people, I attached and committed myself to the traditions that we were building and clung to the beliefs we held true. Reclaiming and Feri – both ecstatic traditions of magic – have been just as formative to my being as my original family. And so too, my coven sisters, in both shadow and light. As a child of a suicidal parent, I found comfort and joy in wedding myself to the life force and committing myself to serve it. I know that I’m a better human and a better therapist for it. I'm better for what I have believed in.

And. There’s a noose in the picture that the last few months have opened my eyes to. Like my blood family, I’ve known that there were things amiss well before I could see the noose. And like my family, I’d already separated myself quite a bit. But something changes upon seeing things outside of beliefs.

The photograph of my father holding me is well worth a thousand words. I am forever grateful for the ways in which my father held me and the ways in which my chosen family held me. Both, also, have broken my heart. Hearts can mend, and mine seems remarkably resilient, but there were many things I couldn’t see until I got some separation, until I was willing and able to let go of beliefs I had formerly cherished. Isn’t this true for just about everything and everybody?

This solstice, may the light return and be gentle with us. Sometimes it’s painful to see things clearly. Liberation is, in fact, difficult to adjust to. It means seeing, rather than believing. And who, really, can do that?

such a winter's day

all the leaves are brown
and the sky is grey
I've been for a walk
on a winter's day

stopped into a church
I passed along the way
well, I dropped down on my knees
and I pretend to pray

California Dreamin'
on such a winter's day                                        
  

-the mamas and the papas

Like my friend Macha, it’s been quite awhile since I’ve blogged. This time between Thanksgiving and solstice has been a time of inner work and laying low. It’s always a dicey time for me and quite possibly always will be. Having a parent who commits suicide right before solstice gives the season that extra special something.

Most years I find comfort in the overt honoring the dark and trusting that light will return that celebrating solstice provides. And some years the cheery Christmas songs and pressure to find or make gifts that will please makes me want to jump off the bridge. There’s a big golden one quite nearby. The beauty of it never fails to take my breath away in the best kind of way, but every time I cross it I wonder if this will be the time I catch a glance of someone leaping. Beauty and despair so many times are c lose companions.

The flu laid me out for almost two weeks, letting up just enough over the weekend before last to allow me to travel to Esalen to participate in and priestess Jeremy’s memorial service. On the drive down it became clear that I was not going to escape the truism that one loss brings back all other losses.

As we got closer to Big Sur, grief closed in on me. To me, Big Sur is the dividing line between northern and southern California, and it is a gate to something that goes beyond words. Maybe it’s that place where beauty and despair dance cheek to cheek. It’s a place that my father loved, and was also favored by that famous depressive I loved so much in my youth, Richard Brautigan. As you get closer to Big Sur, you can feel the power and potency of the elemental forces. There is a natural hot spring at Esalen, bringing together the best of water and fire. Air and earth loom large here as well, with the mighty Pacific crashing against the huge ancient rocks, and looking out, you can’t help but marvel at the way the sky meets the sea.

There’s magic in how places like this reverberate with the potency of loneliness, grief and depression while also providing a balm for the same. I found myself crying for not only the loss of Jeremy, but for all the losses of friends, family, and even the loss of the pride I use to feel being part of the spiritual tradition I took part in crafting. But as Bruce Springsteen sings; “Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact. But maybe everything that dies someday comes back”. I’m thinking that just may be true, but feeling sad that there’s those I won’t set my eyes on again in this lifetime and feeling the tenderness that a heart can feel when it lets go of old illusions.

So, I’m going thru the motions, pretending to pray until something shifts, and that old fierce optimism returns. The solstice altar is under construction, and the crèche for the baby sun is up on the mantel place. This weekend I plan to make presents for my loved ones, and I just began playing the musical solstice compilations that my friend Steward sends me every year. Light will return, baby, that’s a fact. But then, everything that returns someday goes back. Such is this dance of light and dark, and beauty and despair. Are there really any other dance steps?

jeremy crosses over

Last night, just after sunset, as the newly full moon began to glow, my friend Jeremy Paster crossed over. Crows surrounded the house a half hour or so before, cawing and calling out. I have no doubt they assisted in his spirit finding wings to leave.

Jeremy had been battling cancer for the last year and a half with all the loving energy any person could summon. I continue to have trouble with the whole "warrior" term, feeling uncomfortable with the war part that it invokes and I find myself struggling to find the right term to describe my friend. Jeremy was fiercely gentle, sturdily peaceful, and stalwart in summoning compassion in the hardest of circumstances. I met Jeremy in the course of organizing for the action in Seattle around the WTO. In the maelstorm that Seattle became, Jeremy was a touchstone of calmness.

Before being diagnosed with cancer, he had worked on many, many, many fronts imagining and taking action to create a world where love is the law. He ran medicine to the Karen people in Burma, worked to help the U'Wa in Ecuador fight big oil, and softened loggers anger as he strove to save ancient forests in Alaska, all the while weaving together a community of people who loved and admired him.

It's time to create a new word to describe those like Jeremy. "Loveior" or "Fierce Mystic"? I don't know, but I'm feeling strongly we need new language. "Warrior" and 'battling" and "fighting".....these aren't words that describe Jeremy and the energy he put to his actions. He didn't really work "against" anything, but had the ability to work in service of the life force in a way that stood out amongst our activist friends. He put his shoulder to the task of loving this earth with a verve that will rarely be matched. His dying had so much life force and love force in it that it is hard to believe he is really gone. Diagnosed with cancer, he created a foundation - Healing the Roots - which will aid and assist other activists who fall ill or are injured.

A month ago, I sat crying as I watched Jeremy walk to the podium at the Rainforest Action Award Dinner to receive a lifetime achievement award. Receiving the award in person was a testament not only to Jeremy's achievements, but to our community's skill at doing direct action mixed with magic. Jeremy had been "broken out" of the hospital. It was a 45 minute tight caper to get out and back without being missed. Surgery on his spine had happened on Tuesday, and he received the award Thursday night. All of the audience knew we were witnessing a miracle.

Two weeks ago, we gathered around him for what he termed a "living wake". He wanted to hear what we had to say about him while he was alive and he wanted to assure us all that we'd still be connected, that his spirit had no intention of dying. He summoned the strength to be there and to give us comfort even as we were grieving. We called in the names of those we loved on the other side and asked them to prepare to greet Jeremy when he crossed over. The air thickened, and I trust that Jeremy is now being feted by all those who came close two weeks ago. Jeremy said he would communicate to us in dreamtime, and that already is proving to be true.

Today I spent the afternoon at a houseboat in Sausalito with Jeremy's wife, mother, and other assorted family and friends. More than one recounted a powerful dream involving Jeremy that had come to them this week. The messages were all similar. He is alright with dying and wants us to know that. He will be helping us from the other side. The stories flowed today, and they will keep flowing. There was laughter, and of course there were tears. Above all else, there was gratitude.

Some are calling him a mighty warrior. All of us who knew him understand that he was a mighty agent of change. Someday the right word might emerge, one that describes the energetic akido master that he was and still continues to be. Maybe he'll even whisper it to one of us in our dreams.

What is remembered lives.

Long live Jeremy Paster.

The Best Policy

At Samhain in 1999, I was part of thowing a magical benefit to send a group of Reclaiming witches to join in on disrupting the WTO in Seattle. The benefit we called “The Dinner With the Dead” and it was essentially a potluck held at the Martin de Porres soup kitchen. We created sacred space, shared food, and as we ate, toasted our dead and asked for their guidance and help.

Help us they did. We raised a bundle of money, and we were part of shutting down the WTO. With a few friends, I repeated this magic for three more years, raising money for various magical actions.

The last few years none of us had the heart or fire to put the dinner on, being disaffected and disillusioned by our local Reclaiming community. It was at one of the last dinners that on cleaning up I found out that the undercurrent of weirdness I was feeling was because the small circle of folks who put out the Reclaiming Quarterly had just decided that week to give me the axe as a regular columnist.

I knew this was coming, as the fights for freedom of speech as per my writing were getting fiercer.and more surreal. In one of the last arguments over censorship of my column I was told that my challenging “leadership” was divisive to the community. Re-reading my rather tame column on the move from the age of Pisces to the age of Aquarius - from the age of the individual being the hero to the community being the hero - this criticism remains more than ridiculous when applied to a supposedly anarchist community. But, that’s Reclaiming.

So, the dinner I’d worked so hard to put on for the “community” was filled with whispers and silence as I approached small groups of people talking. The group had agreed to not talk to me about their decision until one of them officially told me a week or so later. But, of course, people being people, it was being talked about. I was supposed to be being “protected” by the silence, but as most of us know, invoking a group to keep things quiet, usually does just the opposite.

Especially when what is being asked to be kept silent is fraught with controversy. One person had just left the group over it, and was especially upset about the mendacity of covering the decision of canning me by creating a new policy of no regular columnists. There were only two columnists, myself and Starhawk. Every issue from then on Starhawk’s articles would be featured, but no longer calling her a columnist allowed them to get rid of me without being honest. Creating a new policy to cover up dealing honestly with individuals is something I’ve seen done over and over again in Reclaiming. Who does it really protect?

So, after 3 years not doing the dinner, along with the ICT guild, I decided to do it again. The folks who are wedded to these old dynamics I no longer engage with, and also, I knew they’d stay away. The dinner was a resounding success. The entire room was filled with people toasting the dead, the novenas and sugar skulls added beauty, and the amount of food exceeded expectation. We raised a lot of money from donations for Cora Anderson, and the energy was in direct opposition to what had transpired at that previous dinner. I and others have been successful in disconnecting from the old energy body and creating something different. It felt great!

But, all around the edges of the dinner, before and after, that same energy swirled back into my consciousness, in a way it has not in many years. One of my guild sisters found out right before the dinner that she’d been lied to by the Spiral Dance Cell. Anne Hill’s accounting of what happened is written with breathtaking precision.

Two days after the dinner, out of seemingly nowhere, Starhawk called and asked me for mediation. We met and were successful in talking thru an old issue that has festered for years. It’s been great to clear it out, and we talked at length about our pretty polarized positions on what she sees as confidentiality versus what I see as transparent process. I can’t say anything was really solved or we swayed each other to the other’s position, but it was a respectful and thoughtful conversation. We even talked about collaborating in the future in envisioning what could make for healthier community. A complete turn around from the energy between us for the last several years.

I’m choosing to believe at this moment that the dead we feasted with at the dinner are actively involved in trying to help us. And my goodness, the world and Reclaiming sure need help.

Next week I go to a spokes council meeting for the witchcamps in New Hampshire. I’m hoping the dead are as of service there as they’ve been here for the past week or so. My vow is for honesty. As it turns out, it really is the best policy.

the work of samhain

Today is Samhain, or Halloween, as it’s called by everyone else but us witches. The veil is thin, and it is time to deal with the dead. That means honoring them, working on healing any old relational wounds we still have with them, and asking them for help. As my beloved said to me this week, “Being a witch is a lot of work”. I’m particularly feeling that today. For the past few weeks I’ve been creating sugar skulls and for the past few days I’ve been creating tall votive candles with pictures of ancestors of spirit on them, all those who are our/my allies on the other side.

There are a lot of them, and the binder keeps expanding in which I keep copies of all the photos and pictures I have collected. Google images is an incredible resource! As I’ve made both skulls and candles, I’ve felt the spirits come closer, and not an hour goes by when a new name or face doesn’t emerge from the memory bank. We witches say, “What is remembered lives”, and this week, I am remembering back into life a whole passel of dead.

As I’ve been writing this, there have been two big disruptions. I had to solidify the date we plan a living wake for my friend Jeremy, and I had to pack up the sugar skull for my housemate to take to our mutual friend in the hospital who had a mastectomy today. I sent over a skull covered with pink ribbons to symbolize those on the other side who have died of breast cancer. I feel them working to keep Marika on this side of the veil.

Tonight I will dance in the Headlands, the hills looking down at the bay from the other side of the Golden Gate. I will dance with a small group of witches, holding jack-o-lanterns, in a ritual that my friend Macha has been part of creating for many many years. Names of the dead will be sung, and the beauty of this living earth will be felt.

Saturday night I will be part of putting on what we call “Dinner With the Dead”. The sugar skulls and candles will grace the tables, and people will bring food to share, food that either their dead and/or ancestors loved. We will toast to the memory of our dead, and feel them amongst us, whispering advice and encouraging us to toast the memory of this one and that one.

The following weekend I will be part of creating a living wake, celebrating the life of Jeremy, letting him know before he crosses over, what he has meant to his community. We also will introduce him to our dead on the other side, bringing pictures and asking for their help in welcoming him when he crosses over.

It’s Samhain, a time most of us Witches work hard. The alliance between the dead and the living is important. Remembering our dead helps keep the life force strong. Each year, as the Craft as grown, I’ve felt the spiritual part of this holiday gain strength in the overculture. More and more people who don’t call themselves witches are building altars and tuning into the power of remembering. It’s a lot of work, this being a witch. But what better work to be doing?

the veil gets thinner

As a child and teenager, death was part of a collective dream. It wasn’t up close and personal, but played on the screen of the black and white television and came in over the radio. I remember my second grade teacher tearfully telling us the president was dead and then watching Oswald being shot live/dead on the screen in my family’s living room. Many more of these kinds of deaths would follow, and nightly the news brought us images of the carnage of a distant war. Church bombings, casualties of war and assassinations of heroes were the backdrop of a childhood devoid of family funerals. Up until my twenties, I don’t think there was one funeral I attended.

My twenties seemed consumed by them. In my twenties, death came like an icepick. It hit hard and fast and it hurt. Bad. When I went off to college one of my new friends was raped and murdered. Before I was twenty three I would lose my father, my cousin who was also my best friend, and my grandmother. Death came quick by suicide, car crash, and stroke. These deaths came all within the span of three months, leaving me raw and reeling. I found solace in living on the coast of Oregon, and learned to know the rhythms of moon and tide. It was death that started my life as a witch.

In my thirties, death came slowly and insidiously. At thirty, I was finishing up graduate school in San Francisco and the mysterious illness that was killing gay men and I.V. drug users had finally gotten a name. Aids. Moving thru the city, it was impossible not to note an increasing number of bone thin men with lesions. Death began on the edges of my social circles, winding itself closer until I finally found myself as one of those surrounding a death bed of someone I loved. It was a time that people in their thirties watched many others of the same age go. Many of us of that age learned how to do the slow loving work of midwiving death, at the same time as learning to be with those who were giving birth. As it turns out, it truly is the same gate that we come in and go out of. By the time I turned forty, I had experienced the luminescence in the room that occurs when a baby is born and when a loved one dies.

Death pulled back in my forties. There were major life transitions and there were losses, but not from death.

The leaves are swirling in that particular way they do as Samhain approaches and the dead flow into the city. I’ve been preparing my molds for the sugar skulls, and I have all the makings for the frosting which will decorate them. I am fifty-two and I’m realizing that death will be a major player in this decade. Marla, Jan, and my aunt and uncle have all passed on since turning fifty. My mother and two other friends have cancer. More will probably have it by the end of this decade, and I’m pretty damn sure somebody I love will die from it. Besides the personal losses, it’s been since turning fifty that it feels like death is gathering up steam in the collective dream. The planes crashing into the towers and into the pentagon, the ever increasing deaths due to war, the earthquakes, tsunamis, Katrina, and the monks being killed in Burma, the deaths just keep mounting up.

I haven’t blogged in quite awhile. Some of it has been due to processing that I may soon lose someone I love, and some of it has been because of preparing to do Open Studios. In truth, it is because of both. I had a beloved Mexican papercut of a skeleton surrounded by animals that I wanted to give more life and that I wanted to make part of the show. I painted a juicy scene of a rainforest on which I was going to lay the papercut. After spending days painting, I went to take the papercut out and found it was glued to the paper behind it. No matter what I did, the life affirming scene would not and could not show thru. Several hours later, I found myself in my deck garden with two friends, hearing bad news about our mutual friend with cancer.

So, that’s how it’s going to be. I don’t think the piece will be in the show. It will however, be on my wall, reminding me that behind every death and every loss, there is a fragrant and wild jungle of possibility. Even if you can’t see it, it will be there. And in the making of this piece, the skeleton did change, and there is color and vibrancy where there was not before.

Let’s hope that’s true for how I feel when turning sixty.

This is going to be one heck of a Samhain.

a surprising balance

During my high school and college years, I never once attended a football game. Or any other kind of ball game. So, it's weird and kind of unsettling to be now going weekly to watch my son play for his Catholic high school. This equinox weekend will find me in the stands, rooting for his team and mulling the irony of balance in the universe.


As it turns out, he's as much a raging individual as I am, and just as rebellious a teenager. What better way to rebel when you have a anarchist, queer mother who also happens to be a witch than to go to Catholic school and play football? I thought it might be a phase, but now that he's a starting quarter back, I'm realizing that there's a level of devotion to this that I probably won't see wane for quite awhile. I'm realizing too that my rebellion stuck. The values and interests that my parents found so confounding turned out to suit me, and they have shaped who I have become. Maybe, just maybe, this love of sports will continue to suit my son and his life too is being shaped by what his mother finds so challenging. His long time dream of being a professional ball player still shimmers, but now he's added that he wants to go to a university with a program on sports management. This equinox I'm working with acceptance and trying to smile about it.

He and his best friend since preschool are on the same team together. They are the "Fighting Irish". How bizarre is that? Funny how I'd be more comfortable if he was covered with woad
with his hair spiked with lime. Or would I? I continue to puzzle over the way they are devoted to "toughening up", and how transformed they are in their pads and helmets. I faced it when he was about three that my young feminist beliefs that the difference between the sexes were a result of socialization were dead wrong. Boys actually for the most part are different from girls. And boy, did I get a boy.

It's downright disturbing watching my son and his friend get tackled, and I find myself unsettled by the roars of delight from the crowd when one of them trounces or runs over someone else. The San Francisco Chronicle just ran a story about the concerns of parents over the possibility of their kids getting hurt playing football. No shit. It worries me.

My son says he knows the risks, but playing is important to him. I've seen him become more confident and his ease on the field is noticeable, even to me, who doesn't understand much of anything that is going on out there. I've brought him up to trust his intuition, and to follow it. I had no idea it would take him to Catholic school, but damn, it actually appears to be the right place for him. And the football field does too. Grudgingly, I am learning to respect his choices.

I'm trying to embrace the experience of the sitting in the bleachers in the autumn air amidst other parents and a multitude of teenagers, many wearing the school colors. The girls paint the numbers of boys they like on their face. My son and his best friend seem to be well represented. I'm considering buying a windbreaker myself with the words - "The Fighting Irish" scrolled across the back.

This weekend there will be an equinox ritual in Golden Gate Park. I will be in the stands at the rival school, Saint Ignatius, cheering my son on. There is balance to everything, and many times that balance can come as a complete surprise. I'm choosing this equinox to embrace the mystery of this.

a moral compass

I wrote this awhile back for the British Reclaiming Newsletter. Seems a good time to put it up and out in cyberspace..

Spiritual Authority, Ethics, and Community - A Reclaiming Feri Perspective

To be a Witch, and especially a Reclaiming Feri Witch, is to ultimately create and live by your own moral compass. Reclaiming and Feri both encourage us to be our own spiritual authority, which means picking and choosing the tenets by which we live our own life and deciphering and abiding by our own moral code. This is challenging enough, but even more challenging is creating community with people who are also in this process. Spiritual authority, like any other authority, is not gained overnight, but is something that is attained with time, study, practice, and mistakes made and learned from. Spiritual authority does not come easy, neither does consciously creating our own sturdy moral compass that we can turn to, rely on, and that guides us towards behavior and actions which have integrity.

Creating an effective moral compass means learning from others who've created ones that work effectively, that move thru the world with an integrity we admire. It means examining the foundation of spiritual systems we are drawn to, and making them our own. It also means looking at what tenets from our own upbringing we want to hold on to, what beliefs we were raised with that have guided us on a path that we feel is right for us. Many of us were raised with religious and moral systems that didn't completely work for us; that stated sexuality outside of procreation was shameful, or that God would punish us for eating bacon and shellfish. However, most religions do have kernels of wisdom worth keeping. Loving your neighbor, doing unto others as you would have them do unto you; this is stuff worth holding onto. Becoming our own spiritual authority means combing thru our old belief systems, keeping what fits and leaving the rest.

To create magical community, it helps to have some agreement on what we can expect from each other ethically, and to have a common understanding of what principles we will hold each other to. Reclaiming is a tradition that puts a big emphasis on creating community. This is problematic if everyone's moral compass is pointing in a different direction. To this end, right before the original Bay Area Reclaiming Collective dissolved, we created the Principles of Unity. One of the core principles is that everyone is their own spiritual authority, yet we also laid out explicit spiritual principles we expect those who practice within our tradition to agree with, and better yet live by. To practice within a community of witches means embracing this paradox. We all are our own spiritual authority, but it's nice to know what guidelines we agree to live by.

Anderson Feri Tradition, which is one of the strong roots of Reclaiming Tradition, claims itself to be amoral, and practitioners are not required to adhere to either the Rede, (which is one of Reclaiming's principles of unity), or to abide by the Threefold Law. The Rede commands us to "harm none", which means the magic we do must be done in the spirit of healing and never to hurt or hex. To live by the Rule of Three means to accept that everything we do comes back to us by the power of three. To me, this is also a law of nature. For every action, there will be reaction. What we do effects us mind, body, and soul, as well as affecting our Triple Soul. Some Feri practitioners scoff at the Rede and the Threefold Law, and others, like myself, are guided by them.

Anderson Feri Tradition is fierce in its belief that we are our own spiritual authority, and there is a wide spectrum of ethical beliefs and practice in the tradition, noticeably around hexing. The only thing all Feri practitioners need adhere to is our oath to not reveal certain materials to non-initiates. Anderson Feri Tradition claims to be amoral, but this does not mean all of its individual practitioners are. As Bob Dylan says; "To live outside the law, you must be honest". I'd expand on this to say that to live a true spiritual life outside of any preordained religious law demands honesty, strong ethics, and constant grounding in love and compassion. Those just interested in power end up corrupted.

Reclaiming Feri, which is an integration of the two traditions, has the fierceness of Feri's demand that its practitioners be their own spiritual authority while also demanding that Reclaiming's Principles of Unity not only be agreed on, but truly taken apart, line by line, and made our own. What does it mean personally to commit to a feminist radical analysis of power and to have a questioning attitude? How does this play out in community? Are we truly committed to sharing power or are we focused on self-promotion and threatened by open leadership roles? How do we balance our individual autonomy with social responsibility? Are the principles of unity mirrored in how we operate as community?

Reclaiming's Principles of Unity, as they include the Rede, ask us to forgo ever using magic to cause harm. If you ascribe to the Threefold Rule, cursing or hexing is self destructive magic , as everything we send out will come back. Working with the Threefold Rule we learn to ground all our work in love, even when we are protecting ourselves from attacks, psychic and otherwise.

In Reclaiming, there is a lot of talk about "coming into our power". Those who come into power and don't balance this with compassion and a commitment to honesty and accountability become bullies. This is problem not only in Reclaiming and in Feri, but in the pagan community at large. Witches are drawn to power, and too many of us become accomplished at throwing it around as opposed to learning to ground it in service to the common good.

Reclaiming, with its emphasis on public witchcamps, has engendered an insidious narcissism in its glamorization of the position of teacher. Extroverts and those who are drawn to power over spiritual depth find Reclaiming a great network for finding a audience to admire them. Casting a glamour, having a rudimentary understanding of magic, and charming one or two key people can get you a position as witchcamp teacher, without any real soul development and any compass except self interest.

To walk a spiritual path in our lifetime is to invoke a challenging journey. To be our own spiritual authority is to take on rigorous responsibility. To do this in the context of building and sustaining community requires conscious and consistent review of what makes up our moral compass. As both individuals and as a community it is important to regularly review what values are guiding us and what core principles our actions spring from. Reclaiming is lax in training individuals to do this, and Feri tradition is so ruggedly individualistic that it has no community standards.

Both Reclaiming and Feri are ecstatic traditions. Spiritual journeys within ecstatic traditions such as Reclaiming and Feri call for a strong ethical compass, otherwise they can quickly veer towards spiritual narcissism, where we are guided only by pleasure and self-involvement, becoming addicted to the drug of being in the center of a cone of power rather than the rigor of being a decent human being.

The integration of the two traditions, Reclaiming Feri, brings with it the best of the two traditions, challenging us to thoroughly examine and keep examining what spiritual and ethical principles are guiding us on our spiritual journey, both as individuals and as a community, helping us to come into a seasoned spiritual authority. Having strong principles serve as a compass, and without a strong compass, we can easily loose our way on this most challenging of journeys, the journey of spirit

Follow the Money

A week ago I stood before this accounting of what it takes to put on the witchcamp I was teaching at and found myself uncontrollably crying. The financial report had been casually taped up on the side of the dining hall by an organizer. There had been no fanfare, no ritual around it, and no hubbub (other than my crying). There were some questions and comments by those who looked at it, but all in all it was a very low key event. Some revolutions barely get noticed by the time they fully happen.

It's a revolution that has been fermenting for years. I've played a primary part in it and because of the part I've played, I've also paid. Dearly. If anyone eventually does write a history of Reclaiming, odds are this revolution will not be recorded, or if the shift in witchcamp culture and structure does get noted, credit will probably go to those who fought it the most. Such is the nature of history.

Credit, as it turns out, is not the most important thing, at least to me. What is important is that things are shifting radically, that we are finally in the greater part of Reclaiming putting our money where our mouth and magic is. To do magic that invokes creating a culture of beauty, balance and delight calls for us to be accountable and transparent financially, and to create structures that mirror the world we want to call into being.

BC witchcamp is the longest running Reclaiming witchcamp. This year was it's twentieth anniversary. It began as a part of the production business of one woman, Pat Hogan, who graciously turned if over when the community was ready for it to be put on collectively. It was also the first camp to publicly announce that it was doing away with the old pay scale and paying teachers equally.

I was sent this photo of the financial report yesterday. Once again, looking at it, I cried. The change has happened. For the past five years I've taught at camps where there is an understanding that the way we are structured affects the magic we make. Avalon(spring), Spiralheart, and BCWC are all committed to accountability and to working in accordance to the Principles of Unity. They are all non-profit ventures and all pay teachers equally. At BC witchcamp, looking at this financial report, I fully took in how widespread the change has been, how different witchcamps have become from ten years back. I choose to believe it makes the magic we do all the more potent, as the structure of most camps support and mirror the kind of world we are invoking.

The only hold-out, as far as I know, sadly continues to be my "home" camp, California.

Someday, and may it be soon, a financial report might be accessible to the community there as well. Someday, and may it be soon, there might be revolving leadership in organizing the camp, and the one paid producer will turn it over to the community.

Maybe it will never happen, but I bet it will. Seeing that financial report makes me believe that just about anything is possible. And that makes me cry.

A Time Was Had

I’m back from a week between the worlds. I’m back from B.C. Witchcamp.

When the teaching team gathered in Seattle, I invoked a piece of magic which worked on us all week. I've invoked the same thing before, with great results. This time an entirely different thing occurred, but that’s the nature of magic. How the elements respond to our requests and interact with us shifts and changes. It can’t be scientifically quantified or counted on. Magic is mysterious. We know that by working magic, something will happen, but we never can really know what that something is. Working magic is engaging in a relationship. Being just one piece of it, you can’t really know how the interaction will turn out.

While we were planning the night rituals, something that can take hours and hours to happen, and all of the “free” time at camp, I invoked that for every 3 minutes of clock time, we would have 9 minutes of experiential time. In that planning day we did a lot, planning all of the rituals but the last one. However, the magic kept working, and instead of one week at camp, I ended up being there for three weeks.

We still used a heck of a lot of clock time honing and crafting the night time rituals while we were there, but three weeks of experience occurred in one week of clock time, AND the clock in the room truly did move only about three minutes for every nine, getting slower and slower as camp went on. By the time we left, it was barely moving.

I’m stepping out of this, and time is getting right sized. Three minutes are becoming three minutes. In the next week or so, I hope to write about some of the experiences I had at camp, on the other magic that was worked. Nothing that we planned turned out like we thought. If I had to put all that happened into a sentence it would be: Mistakes Were Made and It Was Good.

I love the people I worked with and met, and it feels like I have known them all forever, or for at least three weeks. Paul and I proved to be seasoned priestesses of Elvis, and the Elvisyinian Mysteries were shared in a way that was potent but didn’t infringe on the whole camp. The planets and stars danced in step with our magic, and we danced in step with them. New dances and ways to raise energy were created. There was a lunar eclipse which was sung to. The community as a whole stepped into the ruby slippers, and the age of Pisces seemed to slip mightily into the age of Aquarius by week’s end.

It’s time to stop writing and step out into Seattle for my last day of sightseeing with my girlfriend before returning home. Last time I was here was for the WTO and I spent the gist of the time in jail. Both visits contain magic, but this time the magic is in the relaxing pace and the luxury of a good hotel.

I love being a witch.

they pull me back in

"Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in", says Michael Corleone in Godfather III. It's damn hard to leave a family, especially a Mafioso family, and Michael never succeeds. This is his story. And in some ways, it's my story too. His family was involved in organized crime. Mine disorganized religion.

I can't seem to leave Reclaiming. Here I am in Seattle, in a big house with a gaggle of witches. We aren't a coven, but after this week we will have formed a magical bond, hopefully deep. We spent yesterday planning the night rituals for witchcamp. As I sit here, I can hear laughter and the soft chatter of people enjoying each other. It's going well. So far working together is easy and there is a good creative flow. Soon we will be packing up to drive up above Vancouver. Witchcamp begins tomorrow.

Most likely I will be off line until after labor day. I'm thinking about why I continue to be pulled back in, and why too I sometimes want to get out. Reclaiming and Remaining seem to be my story. This week, I plan to embrace it.

it's over

Everything comes to an end. Everything. I know everything comes to an end, yet, it seems impossible to accept when something I am attached to does disappear into the ether. There's been other endings this summer, but this one I didn't see coming at all. I thought it would outlast me, that it would remain a staple of my life. It's something that has never failed me. But then, it has billed itself as "the world's only reliable newspaper". And rely on it, I have. I love the Weekly World News. I will miss it beyond reason.

I'm not sure when I started reading it, but it was over a decade or so ago. I'd pick it up in the supermarket line and find myself laughing and end up buying it. Unlike the Onion, which is outright satire, The Weekly World News lies somewhere between, invoking a kind of magical realism that plays to me as more realistic than many major newspapers. I've longed for a Shamanic Times, a newspaper that reports on the happenings that really seem to matter, like when the bald eagle at the National Zoo got mysteriously eviscerated on July 4th. Or when the guy playing Jesus for Mel Gibson's movie got hit by lightening, proving that the sky god was not pleased at all by this particular telling of the tale of his son. Mel Gibson blamed it on Satan. Satan would have gotten Jesus drunk and sleeping with someone inappropriate. Lightening bolts, that's God's weapon.

These are the kind of important stories that the Weekly World News has covered; the horsemen of the apocalypse getting lost, Rumsfeld having a heart three sizes too small, and of course, all the places Elvis has been sighted and what he's up to. The Weekly World News is the closest thing to a Shamanic Times we have had. When they started to cover Bat Boy's assistance in looking for Osama Bin Laden in the caves of Afghanistan, I became a subscriber. These years of the Bush regime I've needed a newspaper that gave it to me straight, and more importantly, that made me laugh.

But, it's over. The last issue came yesterday in my mailbox. I actually cried, much to the utter disgust of my teenage son. Soon, he too will feel the loss. The newest issue always goes straight into it's special place in the bathroom. At least once a week somebody brings up an article they've enjoyed. My son has liked the coverage of the world's fattest cat and the gay time traveler, Miss Adventure.

Everything comes to an end. Soon, the subject of the latest great article in the Weekly World News will be a thing of the past. I'll have to decide whether to keep the stack I have left or to put them in the recycling. I guess like all things that still have a material body, but no real life left in them, they will be "collector's items".

I am so sad.

every living vessel is sacred

Every
Living
Vessel
Is
Sacred.

Today is the anniversary of Elvis leaving the building. And yet, he remains, and is indeed, everywhere. On my trip to New Orleans in June, I found the words Every Living Vessel Is Sacred scrawled on this chalkboard outside a tavern in the French Quarter. It gave me quite a start, as this phrase I thought was part of the Elvisynian mysteries. This is a saying that came to another Priestess of Elvis and was passed on to me by Paul Eaves, my brother in worship at the Temple of Elvis. Had one of them been passing through New Orleans? Had this bit of wisdom come through another of the King's priestesses? It is a mystery.

Thank you, Elvis, thank you very much. You opened the sex chakra of white america, and changed life as we know it.

Read my article on Elvis and join in embracing him as true Pagan God.

He is.

follow, follow, follow, follow.....

I'm feeling a tad wrung out, for the last two weeks have been quite a soul washing. I've walked the beaches of my youth, crying as the sun set over the waves, wishing a dear friend a good journey to the other side of the veil. I've flown across the continent to priestess a handfasting in the rolling hills of West Virginia, stepping into the last night of the week's worth of magic and mayhem which is Spiralheart Witchcamp. I'm home now and in the midst of a week of seeing clients, many who have experienced the wheel being in spin too. Funny how that works when you are a therapist!

Breathing and listening, this is what I am trying to do, encouraging my clients to try as well. And I am trusting my intuition, that gut/heart feeling you get that flies across all reason or logic. I trusted this last year, and trusting this allowed me to be both at Spiralheart this last weekend, and in Cannon Beach the weekend before. I followed my intuition, and it lead me where I needed to go.

The Spiralheart community wanted the same team back this year that taught last year, and I was part of that team. We'd done a great job, especially in modeling working as a team and priestessing in alignment with the Reclaiming Principles of Unity.

When witchcamps first began, Reclaiming teaching "teams" played like Martha and the Vandells and Bruce Springsteen and the E-street Band rather than ensemble groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. The music/magic of all is exhilarating, the players all top notch, but there is a world of difference in the experience of playing in the band if the band has the moniker of Paul McCartney and the Beats or Mick Jagger and the Stones rather than the inclusive Beatles or Rolling Stones. For many years witchcamps and Reclaiming events were publicized as "Starhawk and Reclaiming" for the pragmatic reason that Starhawk’s name was more recognizable than Reclaiming’s. It brought more people in, but there was a price. It created a strong template of the big priestess and the less important backup, a template that still structures reality in much of Reclaiming.

I've been a major force trying to shift this paradigm, opening my big mouth time and time again, and more importantly, modeling that ensemble teaching still allows every player to shine. Last year’s team at Spiralheart shone to such a degree that divisions between teacher and student teachers melted away. We were a circle of witches and priestesses, all with our own skill sets, all important and vital to the magic.

I loved the team last year, I loved the community, and I loved the land, the spirits that dwell there, and the top notch gourmet meals. A few weeks after I happily agreed to come back with the team, I got the strongest feeling that it wasn't right, a feeling I couldn't shake. It made no sense, but using my divinatory tools; tarot, trance, and just plain deep listening, the information all pointed to one word; home. I needed to focus on home. My standing up for a paradigm shift has lead me to be unwelcomed at my home camp, the one that holds on tightest to the old paradigm. I translated the word home to mean I needed to once again focus on trying to participate at California camp, struggling to have it come into some kind of alignment with the principles of unity. This was reinforced by the news (which turned out to be incorrect) that the structure was changing at this camp. Teaching at home became my focus. What can I say? Mistakes were made. Again.

I reluctantly bowed out of teaching at Spiralheart, pulled by the feeling I could not shake, the word home. I put energy once again into healing the riff between the group of us blacklisted from California camp and those who have supported the old structure. It quickly and painfully became clear that the structure was not actually changing, and that even those who don't particularly like the structure, were still wedded to staying in it. I learned a valuable lesson; if both parties don't want, or can't envision resolution, resolution is not possible.

Meanwhile, a friend had to bow out of teaching at B.C. camp, and asked me to take her place. I said no, but when one of the organizers called me weeks later, I found myself agreeing. Why? Home. The theme is the Wizard of Oz. I agreed to teach at B.C., believing that my strong intuition to focus on home as opposed to going to Spiralheart must mean that I really needed to do the story where the refrain is “there is no place like home”, that this is where my priestessing was needed. And, maybe the magic at B.C. might be needed to lead me eventually back home, back to being able to feel comfortable in the local Reclaiming community.

On Thursday night, as the plane took me towards the handfasting I’d agree to do at Beltane, back to Spiralheart, I found myself laughing to myself. My intuition was right. In the service of home, I needed to forgo teaching at Spiralheart this year. If I had been teaching there, I would have faced a horrible decision; to fulfill my commitment to teach, or break it at the last minute to go to what I once called home – Cannon Beach. My intuition steered me right. That weekend needed to be left clear to honor Jan, to be amongst those I consider family. This past year has seen me grappling to make sense of my intuition, and in doing so, I’ve followed trails that led nowhere. With time, it all became clear. Thank goddess I trusted it. Next time, maybe I won’t try so hard for it to make sense, next time, maybe just having it will be enough.

Next week I go to B.C. My intuition is my yellow brick road. Following it, that is the trick.

time travel

There is such a thing as time travel. It doesn't involve fancy machines, casting circles or calling allies and spirits from other dimensions. Time travel is part of the human experience. Heck, for all I know animals and plants do it too. As a therapist, I kind of specialize in it. I invite people to journey back to an earlier chapter of their lives, encouraging them to tweak and twiddle with perceptions of events, thereby changing the present and the future.

But you don't need to be in therapy to time travel. Just attend a high school reunion or call a friend you haven't talked to in years. This past weekend I was trundled back in time to the era I lived in Cannon Beach. In many ways, I'm still there. Jan dying will probably mean that I spend a lot of the upcoming months back in time. Every few hours a new memory pulls me back. Rooms open up that I haven't been in for decades. Moonlight on sand and smoke in bars are ventured back to.

I am time traveling, there is no doubt about that. How this will change my future, I'm not sure. But it will. That is the power of time travel, the gift and the curse. Traveling back in time, we change the present and the future. I'm grieving Jan, but in deep gratitude for the journey her death is taking me on. Snapshots and postcards will be forthcoming.

how we shine!

It is Lammas, the cross-quarter point between solstice and equinox. The reign of the Sun King is on the wane. The clients I see at 7pm I now need to turn on the lights for and I’m no longer waking early with the sun. This week, for the first time, I can sense the dark waiting just off stage.

Here, right before summer begins its descent into autumn, I am grieving. In every life, there are key people who, like points of stars making up the zodiac, help create the story of our lives. I’ve had many of these, and I am blessed with a complicated and sparkling tale of a life. One of these stars died in the past week, but just like real stars, her light will still shine long past her death.

I graduated high school early, desperately wanting to escape the confines of my family and Morgan Hill, just south of San Jose, California. Immediately I set out with my friend Diane in her VW van to discover America. I didn’t get very far, just up to the top of the Oregon Coast. In that short trip that took a long time, I discovered one of the people that has shaped my life and one of the places on the planet that helped forge me.

Diane had a phone number and address of one of her mother’s old friends that we planned to look up as we drove up the coast. Diane couldn't remember her, but we had hopes of a free meal and maybe a place to shower. We did eat, we did shower, and we stayed. Diane stayed for over a week and traveled on, I stayed for months. I left to start college in the fall, and I came back during school breaks and in the summer. I was home.

My wonder at meeting Jan was akin to how Harold felt when he met Maude. She was older than my mother, with four children and a Russian husband who’d been Igor in his homeland, but was Harry to all of us. They’d been beatniks in San Francisco, the real thing, and had fled when Ronald Reagan became governor of California. They settled in Cannon Beach, a small sleepy haven made up of people who’d been raised there and the assorted artists, writers, and other riff-raff that come to small beachside towns escaping something. Meeting her, I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. Alive.

Jan taught me how to cook a big meal in the midst of chaos, the magic of fresh and local produce, the value of a raging and laughing debate over dinner, and how to always cook more than you need in case a hungry artist suddenly stops by. She taught me the value of having a home where friends feel welcomed and where the art of the spontaneous party is constantly being improved upon.

Living with Jan I learned the movement of the tides ,when to go out digging for clams and where to find the hand-blown glass floats the Japanese current brings in. Over the sink there was always some cuttings taking root, and nature never stopped at her doorway. Her house was full of art, books, garage sale treasures, rocks, feathers, shells, and other assorted found objects. At any point in time at least one room was torn apart in some kind of long-term remodeling project, and evenings were just as likely to end up with a living room of people dancing wildly to a record of African or Cuban drumming as end up with a dinner party taking crowbars to the tiles in the bathroom.

Jan died of congestive heart failure a few days ago. I am flying to Portland on Friday and driving out to Cannon Beach for the weekend. I left a message for her daughter Teter this morning saying that I would help with the memorial if she wanted me to. She called an hour or so later saying she had just listened to the message after deciding with her brothers that they needed help coming up with a ceremony. She laughed, saying how wonderful it was to hear my message and know we are all on the same page.

We are. Jan is gone, but her star shines brightly. Dying at Lammas seems right and fitting for this force of nature I was blessed to know. There are so many incredible friends and family members that have been part of the constellation of my life, that shine on and through me. Some, like Jan, are dead. Some I have lost contact with, or moved out of my life for a myriad of reasons. But still, how they shine! We are made up of our relationships to other beings - out of the same carbon as stars. Soon I will be in Cannon Beach, saying good-bye to Jan, and toasting to her memory with people I haven't seen in decades. You bet I will be looking to the night sky while I am there. We shine, especially in the darkest of times. Oh, how we shine!

Portal into Gratitude: For Me, It's Gnome and Strawberries

I've been spending a lot of time on my rooftop garden. For me, it's the best place to get quiet and to listen. And to pray. For many years, as a witch, I felt funny using the "P" word. But praying is something I've always done. Doesn't everybody who has any sort of a relationship to the Divine pray? How could you not? Annie Lamott says there are essentially two kind of prayers; "Help me, Help me" and "Thank you, Thank you". I think there is actually a third, which is the blend of the two. This is the kind of praying I've been doing recently.

Gnome Chomsky has been a great addition to the garden and has become the Protector and Guardian of Strawberries. I think it has something to do with his red hat.

Thank you, Mary Oliver, for this beautiful poem.

Praying - by Mary Oliver

It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.