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...