branches up, roots down

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.