branches up, roots down

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...