branches up, roots down

"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 th...

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...

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 me...

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 kn...

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 bac...

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 b...

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 w...

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 ha...

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 ...

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 ri...

"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...

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 ...

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.

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...

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, ...

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...

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 do...