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.