story change

I love the Oscars. I’ve watched them as far back as I can remember, my parents letting me stay up late – a tradition I carried on when I had my own child. If magic is defined as “changing consciousness at will”, then movies are magic. Throughout time, stories have held power. Movies are the stories and myths of popular culture, binding us together and creating frames of reference. On Oscar night we gather around the flicker of the television screen to celebrate the stories and honor and award those who’ve written, directed, produced, edited, and acted out the stories. Awards are given too to those who created sets, dressed the actors, and made the music that fueled the story. People gather around the screen, debating who they think deserves the award, placing bets, arguing over the significance of the stories. And, of course, dish the fashion. I wouldn’t miss this for the world.

Last year there was a plethora of movies with gay characters, signaling that the closet door of consciousness is wide open and won’t be closing. This year, the Oscars showed we are opening up to stories from other lands, other cultures, signaling that the United States just may be beginning a shift away from considering ourselves front and center. More movies were nominated that were made outside of Hollywood, with at least one, Babel, centering on a more international understanding. People of color were in the past an aberration as Oscar nominees and winners, so much so that there has been a secret tradition of a “Black Oscars” where black actors get together the night before the Oscars to recognize each other’s achievements, knowing they will be invisible the following night. This gathering was cancelled this year, due to visibility.

I miss the spontaneity of Oscars of my youth, when you could count on Vanessa Redgrave or Marlon Brando to say or do something out of the box. But that was a different time. As I watched the Oscars this year, I thought about how it is not only an award ceremony for the movies, those pictures which do tell a thousand tales, but is in itself a story and reflection of our time.

What struck me this year is how the story of climate change is finally center stage, thank the Goddess and Al Gore. It has affected the Oscars quite literally. The Oscars have gone green. When Leo announced this, I got the kundalini spark up the spine. The story is changing. The story makers are literally paying attention to the environment. As Melissa Etheridge was singing “An Inconvenient Truth”, there was a stark print in back of her on a screen with facts on climate change. As she came to the end of her song, one sentence held on the screen for just a little bit longer than the others. That sentence was “Pray that people will find the strength to change”.

I’m praying. And on the full moon of March 2^nd beginning at 7:30 pm Eastern Time I will be working with Hecate and her circle in invoking a recipient for the $25 million prize for the scientist who invents/discovers a way to remove carbon from the atmosphere which has been offered by Sir Richard Branson. Join us. I know the story can’t be as simple as one scientist figuring out how to stop climate change. We all have to change. That’s the change in climate that NEEDS to occur. I saw the climate change at the Oscars this year. Nobody carried a sign; there were no cry of outrage. But if the Oscars have gone green, maybe we all can. That's what I will be thinking about on this full moon. I love the Oscars. I love stories of all kinds. The story is changing. Let’s pray in the way we witches do that we all find the strength to change and we change the story. And let's look fabulous while we do it. I love the Oscars.

moving into pisces

Maybe it was Pantheacon, or maybe it was the moving into Pisces, but my nights have been filled with a multitude of vivid dreams. Among other things, I’ve been busy attending in my dreams all the workshops I missed at P-Con. I don’t regret for a second staying home to honor and bask in the perfection of Friday night and Saturday day, but it just so happened that this meant I missed two of the talks that I wanted to attend. One was the talk by Margot Adler, who just may have the best overview today of the history and diversity of this new “old religion”. She’s done me the courtesy of making several appearances in my dreams, imparting all sorts of wisdom that of course I can’t exactly recall. I’m thinking Margot is actually pretty wise, as from what I heard she said we’ve got to stop trotting out our “lineages” and we need to take better care of ourselves physically. Yes, and more yes. It is time to be adults, realize we can’t party without consequences forever and time to stand on our own accord, not being defined by our parents…or those who initiated us into the Craft.

I’ve been a witch for just over thirty years now, with the Craft/Neopaganism being not much older than that. In talking to my friend Reya, she pointed out that this means the Craft is now passing its first Saturn cycle, that it indeed is becoming an adult. In astrology, the “Saturn Return” is the time between the ages of 28 and 30 when the planet Saturn completes it’s cycle and returns back to the spot it occupied when we were born. Here’s how Wikipedia describes it;

"Saturn is symbolically/astrologically associated with time, challenge, fear, doubt, confusion, difficulty, seriousness, heaviness, and hard lessons, among other more positive things such as structure, significance, accomplishment, reflection, power, prestige, maturity, and order – this is why astrologers believe that the thirtieth birthday is such a major rite of passage and is considered by many astrologers to mark the "true beginning" of adulthood, self-evaluation, independence, responsibility, ambition, and full maturation.”

Personally, the last few years have certainly felt like a spiritual Saturn return. I’ve questioned what I have previously taken for granted and reviewed and reflected on all my thealogical constructs. Attending Pantheacon, I know now I have not been alone in this. One of the real signs of our coming into adulthood is finally acknowledging that for many years we really were kids. There’s not so much carrying on about being “the old religion”, but much more acknowledgment that we are a fledgling yet rapidly growing religion, one whose strength lies in its wacky diversity.

The dreams keep coming, and the rains are back. This morning I walked out the front door to the dreamscape of a street and sidewalk covered in pink petals. Last weekend was an Aquarian feast, segueing into this Piscean diving deep and dreaming. One of the big news stories of the week was of an army chaplain relieved of duty in Iraq because of becoming Wiccan. Becoming more mature, becoming an adult doesn’t mean things won’t be strange and dreamlike. They are, oh, yes, they are!

weighty objects

I did indeed go to Pantheacon, and am still ruminating on the experience, which was overwhelmingly positive. Witches and pagans are indeed moving on from the state of reaction and reclaiming and as a whole I felt the maturing of the Craft. Hopefully, in the coming days, I will write more, but at the moment I am exhausted and will soon go to bed.

I drove from Pantheacon down to Morgan Hill to help my cousin sort and box up the contents of my aunt’s home. I came back yesterday with a carload of stuff, that now needs to find a place in my home. Almost all the items are fraught with memories, and lots of them include my grandmother and great grandmother. My aunt was the holder of history among her siblings, the one who researched the family tree, who kept old photos, and who considered anything an heirloom that involved those who came before her. I’ve unpacked the boxes, so now there are piles of dishes and glassware on my dining and kitchen tables, waiting to find their place amongst my things. It’s pretty emotional, this mixing it up of china! I now am one of the holders of the past, guardians of the ancestor’s stuff. I’ll probably have most of it until I die, and then someone else will be sorting and packing up these things again.

Last night my dreams were vivid, and my guess is tonight’s will be as well. I’m going to fill one of the blue depression ware glasses of my grandmother’s with water and head for bed. The bizarreness of Pantheacon somehow is the perfect ballast to this weighty taking on of so many objects with history. My grandmother’s blue glass at the moment seems as out of place and context on my nightstand as a thousand and some witches filling up a corporate hotel. No wonder I’m exhausted!

Experiential Witchcraft

My plans were to be at Pantheacon, but I am home. Here I am, blogging on my rooftop deck with the early spring bursting all around me. Yesterday and today are the kind of sublime days that demand to be admired. It’s balmy out, and the plum trees in the front and back of my house are in peak bloom. The air is perfumed with the subtle scent of the blossoms, and it truly is the most glorious of days.

I’ve been preparing for Pantheacon for days now, and thinking a lot about Hecate’s response to Thorn’s and my musing on a lack of depth in Craft writings. Her point is that the Craft has up to now been an experiential thealogy, not primarily passed on thru the written word. This is certainly true, as when I began practicing there was a dearth of written material on feminist spirituality and neopaganism. We were too busy reclaiming and creating it. That time has now passed, and what with the internet and so many more books being written, we really are in a different stage. Unfortunately, the majority of books are still recipe books filled with words for spells and focusing on a general “how to” of being a witch as opposed to moving and inspirational books springing from our thealogy that are on par with what Buddhist’s have been writing.

I’ve been feeling called to attend Pantheacon partly to see how this change is expressing itself, and what it feels like. Yet, here I am on my deck, having just brought up the lilacs that need to be planted. It’s the right place to be. Witchcraft, like any spirituality, is meant to be practiced. Not just written about and talked about. Years ago, to my chagrin, I realized that at our public ritual to celebrate the solstice we had huddled together tightly in the cold of a San Francisco summer listening to a priestess laud the beauty of the sun while meanwhile the sun himself had been slipping into the sea, with not one of us witnessing and actually experiencing his descent.

Yesterday and today are days that need to be witnessed, demand to be experienced. In a few days time these blossoms will not be so potent with fragrance, and fog or rain may remind us that winter has not completely withdrawn. But today, oh today! I celebrate and soak up the beauty of rebirth, the emergence of spring in this gorgeous city by the sea.

In a few hours I will make my way down to Pantheacon, to the Doubletree Hotel that invokes not a whit of treeness or love of the green world. It will be filled with witches, some which are dear and beloved friends, all committed to the worship of this green spinning globe, this beautiful world. I’m so glad I’ve been in it all morning. It truly is sacred. And smells good, too.

Happy Valentine's Day!!!

I saw too many couples in conflict today. Next year, I'm going to refuse to see couples on Valentine's Day, suggesting instead they invest what they spend on therapy on a nice dinner out or perhaps filling their home with flowers. Sometimes therapy is not the right therapeutic endeavor. Seeing couples today just felt wrong.

I love weddings, as they are one of the few rituals left in the overculture that celebrate love and connection. Heck, they are the only ritual that does this, except Valentine's Day. So, of course, I love Valentine's Day as well. What can be wrong with a holiday that centers on hearts and cards expressing love? Believing in the power of ritual and symbol, I believe in the magic of Valentine's Day.

I wore red today, including a fabulous pair of socks dancing with a print of scarlet flames. And also a big silver heart on a chain. I made every couple at some point in their session stop and remember what they love about each other, and breathe into it.

Love IS dangerous. It can lead to couples therapy. But I'm still for it.

one weekend to the next

I had an almost perfect birthday weekend. My girlfriend took me to a beautiful hotel situated smack dab between Chinatown and North Beach. All weekend, when taxi drivers and the like asked us “where are you from?” we would laughingly answer “The Mission”. It’s great to be a tourist in your own hometown, seeing it with new eyes and fresh vision. Saturday afternoon we met up with some of my dear friends at Nordstrom’s on Saturday for a lesbian lingerie fashion show, and then it was off to a ritzy spa on Nob Hill. Do other cities have department stores that host lingerie shows for lesbians, complete with champagne and chocolate dipped strawberries? The flower festival in Chinatown, along with each meal being better than the last, made the weekend more than delectable.

It was a feast of a weekend, and now I find myself preparing for what comes next. This upcoming weekend, for some inexplicable reason, I will be going to Pantheacon, the big pagan conference disconcertingly held at a sterile corporate hotel in San Jose. Why am I going? I’m just not sure, but something is drawing me there. The last few years I’ve pulled back from participating much in public pagan events, instead taking time to review and reflect on my relationship to the two “traditions” I’ve been initiated into. I’m no longer in reaction to my disappointment in both, and am finding myself hesitantly comfortable being “Post Reclaiming Feri”, being a witch in my own right, not defined or confined by whom I’m associated with.

Anne Hill recently questioned on her blog whether “witch” is a name that she wants to be held to. I can’t imagine letting go of it, but am also feeling the yank of its limitations. The same “in your face” energy the word invokes that I loved as a young person I now find annoying. Spirituality is about connection, and it rankles that the word that describes my spiritual path I more often than not find disconnects me from others. My connection to the elements, my experience of the sacred as immanent, my non-monotheistic world view, and my deep understanding that we can change consciousness at will – all of this comes from my being a witch. It’s been a great boon to my work as a psychotherapist, which makes it all the more disconcerting that it’s so acceptable and even popular right now to practice psychotherapy from a Buddhist perspective, but not from a Wiccan one. Hopefully in the coming years this will shift, and the spiritually transformative aspects of living as a witch will become recognizable.

Like Thorn, who recently had some great entries on this subject on her blog, I find myself frustrated with the emphasis on “raw power” in the Craft as opposed to in-depth discussions on how our spiritual practice informs and shapes our lives and gives it meaning. As a psychotherapist, it’s sad to me that when recommending books to clients who are in pain and seeking spiritual comfort, I find myself recommending books by Pema Chodron , the Buddhist writer, as opposed to anything written by a pagan. Where is her pagan equivalent or something pagan akin to Scott Peck’s (a Christian) The Road Less Traveled?

I went to my first pagan “conference” well over twenty years ago, and what I most vividly remember is the goat with a deformed horn that was being passed off as a unicorn. To be a witch is to be a part of Freak Nation, a citizenship that sometimes is confining, confounding, if not downright embarrassing.

Perhaps this coming weekend will not be in such a different vein as this past one. Perhaps I’m drawn to Pantheacon because it’s time I viewed it too with new eyes and vision, attempting to be a tourist in my own theological home town. I’m hoping that our theology and the way it is practiced have begun to show signs culturally of depth, that we are crossing the border beyond Freak Nation to something more universal. Sam Webster is doing a workshop on something that looks promising, called “The End of the Occult…Should We Be Using the O word?” I think there just might be plenty of us who are in a period of reviewing and reflecting, and who are ready to make a contribution outside the borders of our little nation. So, I'm off soon for another full weekend. If only I loved San Jose like I do San Francisco.

I am the wealthy one

The rain fell softly on and off all day. Tomorrow is my birthday, always a time of reckoning in some way or another. I’m tender from my visit with my mother and maybe from other things as well. If reading poetry is like a massage to the soul, then I’ve been getting spa soul treatment since Brigid. My love affair is turning into a comfortable relationship, something which is making me rather uncomfortable. Isn’t it dangerous to be so happy?

And then there are my friends. Yesterday and today there was a variety of calls and e-mails from and to my friends. Some were checking up on me, some I was checking up with. Nothing really out of the ordinary, but in my tender state, with my pores wide open from the soul spa treatment, I realized how rich I am, how wealthy in friends. Even writing this, I’m tearing up. I love my friends and I know they love me.

Tonight, my son is up in our attic, with a group of his friends. I can hear their laughter as I write this, and the house is swollen with adolescent energies. He is rich too, being blessed with a best friend since the age of three. They have no school tomorrow, so his best friend will spend the night and I know they will go over every detail of the get together this evening, there are girls here, after all, and tomorrow they may or may not get up in time to fix me a birthday breakfast.

I am rich in friends, and I love them and they love me. It may be dangerous to love, but right now, thinking of these friendships, I think perhaps it’s even more dangerous not to love, not to embrace happiness. I am rich, and thank goddess, I know it.

In Good Company

I’m back in San Francisco, my beloved city. The trees are beginning to bud. The plum tree out my back window has begun to bloom, and tonight I’m loving the beginning of what hopefully will be several days of soft rain. The poetry has not stopped. Every day I follow a link to a new one. The web was aptly named, and what makes this spinning out of poetry so perfect is that so many actual knitters and actual spinners are part of it.

I came back to a city abuzz with the news of our mayor having an affair with the wife of one of his friends. Both my housemate and ex-husband know the friend. It is a small town. Now Gavin is saying that alcohol is a problem and there’s a cry for him to resign. Gosh. I’m having a kind of strange reaction, not unlike how I felt during the whole Clinton blow-by-blow blow job hoo haaa.

I’m missing my childhood. I’m missing a time when the president was having martinis (and popping pain pills) and fucking everything that moves, and it was not any of our damn business, really. I remember clearly Marilyn purring “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” in that dress that screamed “sex”, and the half smile on my father’s face and my mother rolling her eyes, and I remember it feeling all rather good, kind of like a delicious secret.

The Poetry

For three days now I've been traversing the web, going from one blog to another, reading poetry and "meeting" the most amazing folks thru their blogs. I wouldn't miss this experience for the world. However, making my way back to the limerick about knitting or the poem about kissing cannot be done quickly or easily. Yvonne, who submitted a great original poem, has begun the endeavor of collecting the poetry in one place, making it possible to view in one swoop the diversity of the poems. We can even all help in adding on to it!

The site itself is amazing - the pagan theologies wiki. I know I'll be contributing to this beyond the poetry. It also means that from now on, each year we can put a poem on our blog, and then record it also on the wiki, for a record of what was "read" at Brigid's poetry slam.

Thank you, Yvonne!

Surprise, Arizona

Today my mother’s hair started falling out for the first time. It really does fall out in handfuls! Big hunks come out with one swipe of a brush. Tonight she is close to bald. We are in new territory in more ways than one. This is the first time I’ve visited her here and I’m feeling a bit like someone in movie about time travel. I’m in Surprise, Arizona, and it’s not anything like San Francisco, California.

In San Francisco, I can feel Brigid in the buds emerging on the trees, the green that is beginning to insist. Here, I can’t quite acclimate myself. It is a land of malls, chain stores and suburbs built on desert. Going out to get groceries and some fresh nightgowns, I felt myself a stranger in a strange land. Sad, but true, that I feel more at home in France, Wales, Italy, or Central America than I do in the majority of the United States. It’s helping to know that so many people from all over the states are posting poetry.

The memory of this trip will forever have poetry engrained into it. The original poetry has amazed me, as well as the diverse selection of favorites. The rich river of poets is bringing their healing green to this arid place; Cummings, Rilke, Plath, Hughes, Ferlinghetti, Gluck, Parker, Tennyson, Oliver, Brautigan, Broumas and more. The poetry really does seem infinite, and so does the beauty of each blog and the individuals out there writing. This is healing. It really is.

Thank you.....what a poetry reading!!!!

I’m in Phoenix, visiting my mother who had chemotherapy yesterday. I flew here last night, and thankfully, there’s wireless service here. Spotty, but working enough for me to occasionally immerse myself in the poetry flowing thru the blogosphere. Last night I read until sleep overtook me. Today, every hour or so I read another two to three poems, marveling at the new sites I’m finding in the process. The poetry is a balm to the ache of this visit. I am so thankful for it. This poetry reading is potent. This poetry reading is healing. Thank you, my fellow bloggers!!!!

a poem for Brigid

Fifteen years ago, I gave birth to my son on January 30^th. This week, as I reflected on which poem I would dedicate to Brigid, I kept coming back to the poem he wrote for me two years ago. My son was conceived on Beltane and was born a few days before Brigid. From the beginning I have felt my son was a gift from the Goddess. Being a teenager, his task now is to rebel. He’s doing a good job of it. He was the quarterback on his football team at the Catholic High School he fought to go to. He is more straight arrow than this queer witch can fathom. Being fifteen, he’s embarrassed by just about everything I do and say. Two years ago he wrote this for me, and in the last few months I've returned to it again and again. I am so thankful for him. And for poetry, life, and love. It has all come back. And just keeps coming.

The One

The water for the seed

The one who grows

The young. The teacher.

You are the oak for

The acorn. The one

Who stands tall like

A tree in a blizzard.

You are the one.

The one who put

The pieces to the

Puzzle for your

Beloved. The energy

For the light. You

Are the base of love.

You are the one. The

One who is the silk for

The cozy sheets. You

Are the roots of life.

You give out love and now

Love is coming back. Love

Is coming back to the one.

The one who is the saver.

You are the one. The one

Who makes the hot chai

In the morning. The one who

Yells at me to wake up, to

Stop playing the early morning

Rap. The one who goes out of her

Way to give me love, but this

Time, all that love is right

Back to you.

Casey Cooper Quirke 2/9/05