Author Archives: Hecate

Welcome, Returning Light


And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs -
Because Sophia over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

~with apologies to Gerard Manley Hopkins

And, so, although I have lived here, on this bit of Earth, lived here Summer drought and Winter blizzard, lived here ordinary day and ecstatic night, lived here in sickness and in health, lived here, slept here, planted here, eaten here, done magic here -- solitary and with Sisters -- for nigh on a decade, and, so, and, yet, on the Winter Solstice the lovely land that owns me had a lot to show me.

The thing about mystical experiences is that -- although "I only am escaped to tell thee," -- mystical experiences cannot be told. This is why the Charge of the Goddess says: "And you who seek to know Me, know that the seeking and yearning will avail you not, unless you know the Mystery: for if that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without. For behold, I have been with you from the beginning, and I am That which is attained at the end of desire."

And, yet, knowing, as I start, that, at the finish, this thing cannot be told, I will try to tell it.

Every tiny plot of Earth is crammed -- crammed, I tell you, crammed -- crammed and jammed and overfilled and flowing over with Goddesses and Gods and Genius Locii and Fae and Spirits and Beings and Living Rocks and the Bright! Alive! RNA and DNA and Mitochondria of the Worms and Chipmunks who grace this place and every tiny plot of Earth is full to the brim of Consciousness in every form of incarnation and those things that de Chardin hardly dared intimate and, oh, poetry. And there is mystery and easy ecstasy in the skies and the turning of planets makes music in the spheres and as above so below and, well. And, the entire Earth is crammed with divine poetry and music and what I imagine mathematics must be for those, like G/Son, who think in such terms and, well, also, "Everything," our speaker is reduced to noting, "is Alive -- EVERYTHING." . . . .

I was right. You can not tell it.

But you can know it. And my wish for you on this day when the Light begins to return is for you to know it deep inside your cells. And to live in the truth of that knowing.

What would change immediately for you?

Io! Evoe!

Picture found here

Solstice Celebrations


Here's a nice story about the Stonehenge Solstice celebration. Kudos to the author for understanding how to capitalize.

And, here's another nice one about Icelandic Asatru and other Pagans celebrating the returning sun. Kudos again for correct capitalization.

Sadly, not everyone seems to have gotten the message:
In their quest to bring the Christian religion to the pagan people of Western Europe, the Church cleverly incorporated existing festivals and rituals into the Christian calendar. One of the many correlations between ancient winter festivals and Christianity revolves around the older Celtic name for the festival of Alban Artuan – or the “Light of Winter”. When deciding where to put the Christian celebration of Jesus’s birth, it is little wonder that they chose this festival to herald the arrival of the “Light of the World” – a human beacon of hope and light into a time of darkness.
It is thought that pagans may have been the original “tree trimmers” as they brought greenery into the house as a symbol of life through the long dark nights. The evergreen was brought in and adorned with decorations to symbolise the various stellar objects that were important to them; the sun, the moon, the stars. These also served as gifts to the pagan gods.

Dear Caledonian Mercury, If you capitalize "Christian," then you should capitalize "Pagan." If you capitalize "Christians," you should capitalize "Druids." It's not complicated.

Picture found here.

Now That’s Not Something You See Every Day


Once every several hundred years, we have a full Moon lunar eclipse on the Winter Solstice. And that's approximately how often I will ever agree with anything that Ross Douthat has to say. So it's especially amazing that both events would occur within the same 24-hour period.

But I agree 100% with Douthat that:
Thanks in part to [a] bunker mentality, American Christianity has become . . . a “weak culture” — one that mobilizes but doesn’t convert, alienates rather than seduces, and looks backward toward a lost past instead of forward to a vibrant future. In spite of their numerical strength and reserves of social capital, . . . the Christian churches are mainly influential only in the “peripheral areas” of our common life. In the commanding heights of culture, Christianity punches way below its weight. [Cute phrase, huh?]

[T]his month’s ubiquitous carols and crèches notwithstanding, believing Christians are no longer what they once were — an overwhelming majority in a self-consciously Christian nation. The question is whether they can become a creative and attractive minority in a different sort of culture, where they’re competing not only with rival faiths but with a host of pseudo-Christian spiritualities, and where the idea of a single religious truth seems increasingly passé.

Or to put it another way, Christians need to find a way to thrive in a society that looks less and less like any sort of Christendom — and more and more like the diverse and complicated Roman Empire where their religion had its beginning, 2,000 years ago this week.


Exactly. I agree completely. Perhaps you guys would like to get started on that, well, now. Now would be good.

(Douthat says, as per usual, a lot of whiny, silly stuff with which not even an easily-confused four-year old would agree. For example, he snivels that Christmas is the season "when American Christians can feel most embattled. Their piety is overshadowed by materialist ticky-tack. Their great feast is compromised by Christmukkwanzaa multiculturalism." Really? Your piety can't stand up to sales of stuff? The same sales of stuff that, if they aren't accompanied by the sales clerk wishing you a "Merry Christmas" send you into a temper tantrum? So stop watching tv and stay out of the malls; go to church instead. Stay home and pray the rosary. And your "great feast" (by which I imagine you mean Christmas Mass) is "compromised" because other people are celebrating other holidays at approximately the same time? Really? If so, your "great feast" must celebrate a rather anemic god. Maybe you shouldn't have gone around appropriating other people's holidays if you've got such delicate feefees. Then you could have had one all your own. But, hey, as noted, it's not every century that I find something Douthat says not only correct, but quotable, so let's not quibble.)

Hat tip to Chas Clifton for the info on the lunar eclipse.

Picture found here.

Have a Fantastic Solstice. No, Really.


From Strategic Sorcery:
Now you may not know this about me, but I am the mythic Yuleclipse Fairy. I need you to know a few things.

Tuesday is a lunar eclipse. It will be visible from most of North America

Tuesday is also the Winter Solstice - the longest night.

Tuesday is the first night that a lunar eclipse has occured on a Winter Solstice in 456 years.

Tuesday is the day that you will be outside doing magic.

If you don't do something I will know and I will be displeased. You don't want to piss me off. Just get your lazy ass out there and meditate, cast a spell, dance a jig, do something!

You should read the whole thing.

Picture found here.

This


If something is really, honestly indefensible, it can be defeated. The people perpetrating that indefensible thing will want you to think that what they are doing is inevitable. They will want you to think that it cannot possibly be changed or fixed. That it is the way it has to be, that that is the way it's gonna be, they will want you to think those things. And it's not true. An indefensible practice or policy is, in America, vulnerable."

- Rachel Maddow

hat tip: Comments at Eschaton

Picture found here.

Saturday Poetry Blogging


THE VASTEST THINGS ARE THOSE WE MAY NOT LEARN

The vastest things are those we may not learn.
We are not taught to die, nor to be born,
Nor how to burn
With love.
How pitiful is our enforced return
To those small things we are the masters of.


~Mervyn Peake

*********************

Which, of course, reminds me of this:

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history or
music, that we should begin
with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying
the hard ones, practicing till strength
and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence, take the chance
of breaking down the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
And in fact we can’t live like that: we take on
everything at once before we’ve even begun
to read or mark time, we’re forced to begin
in the midst of the hard movement,
the one already sounding as we are born.

At most we’re allowed a few months
of simply listening to the simple
line of a woman’s voice singing a child
against her heart. Everything else is too soon,
too sudden, the wrenching-apart, that woman’s heartbeat
heard ever after from a distance
the loss of that ground-note echoing
whenever we are happy, or in despair.

Everything else seems beyond us,
we aren’t ready for it, nothing that was said
is true for us, caught naked in the argument,
the counterpoint, trying to sightread
what our fingers can’t keep up with, learn by heart
what we can’t even read. And yet
it is this we were born to. We aren’t virtuosi
or child prdigies, there are no prodigies
in this realm, only a half-blind, stubborn
cleaving to the timbre, the tones of what we are,
even when all the texts describe it differently.

And we’re not performers, like Liszt, competing
against the world for speed and brilliance
(the 79-year-old pianist said, when I asked her
What makes a virtuoso?—Competitiveness.)
The longer I live the more I mistrust
theatricality, the false glamour cast
by performance, the more I know its poverty beside
the truths we are salvaging from
the splitting-open of our lives
The woman who sits watching, listening,
eyes moving in the darkness
is reheasing in her body, hearing-out in her blood
a score touched off in her perhaps
by some words, a few chords, from the stage,
a tale only she can tell.

But there come times—perhaps this is one of them
when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die . . . .


~Adrienne Rich



Picture found here.

People Keep Doing It; I’m Going to Keep Complaining About It


Here's an article about a Winter Solstice celebration that manages to trip both of my switches. First of all, there's no reason why "Pagan" shouldn't be capitalized throughout this article. If the author were writing about a Catholic celebration of Christmas, for example, "Catholic" would be capitalized. Or, if the article were about various Christian Winter celebrations, "Christian" would be capitalized. So should the article capitalize "Pagan."

And, then, of course, there's the by-now-almost-de-riguer-shooting-of-ourselves-in-the-foot by the Pagans involved:
Although there are many “preconceived notions” about paganism, Cannon-Nixon and Gillingham said most of them aren’t true.
“We don’t believe in the devil,” Cannon-Nixon said.

There is absolutely NO reason for Pagans to keep doing this. Just as when Dick Nixon infamously went on national television and announced to Americans that, "Your President is not a crook," thereby convincing any remaining doubters that he was, in fact, the world's biggest crook, all that it does when Pagans run around announcing that "We don't believe in the devil," is to convince any doubters that Pagans, must, in fact, kiss the devil's ass at every full Moon.

I'm going to keep saying this until people stop doing it.

Picture found here.

And I’ll Choose the Wood(s)


Brother and Sister
by Terri Windling


do you remember, brother
those days in the wood
when you ran with the deer
falling bloody on my doorstep at dusk
stepping from the skin
grateful to be a man?

and do you know, brother
just how I longed
to wrap myself in the golden hide
smelling of musk
blackberries and rain?

tell me that tale
give me that choice
and I'll choose speed and horn and hoof
give me that choice
all you cruel, clever fairies
and I'll choose the wood(s)
not the prince.

*******************

Picture found here.

Ground as Hard as Iron



It's not, as we all know, really, at least astrologically, Mid-Winter. In fact, it's still, for a few more days, technically Autumn. Real Mid-Winter is late February when it (normally, and, oh, Goddess, please again this year!) begins to warm up along the Potomac and the crocus start promising to bloom.

But here in the magical Mid-Atlantic, we have ice (and flocks of Canada Geese) on the Potomac, an inch of snow in my garden, and it's so cold in the mornings that my knitting-sore fingers twinge and ache even inside leather gloves. The Earth in my garden is, indeed, hard as iron and the water in the small spring just up the street has frozen, hard as stone. Just this week, Landscape Guy and I got the plants cut back to the ground and a layer of mulch on the cottage gardens.

I'm working at home today: taking conference calls while I chop vegetables for pistou, reviewing applications for solar power while the dishwasher runs, furiously knitting cowls and hats for Yule. And, every so often, I stop and wrap my shawl around my shoulders and go out on the porch to watch the snow, throw some more peanuts to the squirrels, and toss carrot peelings to the rather aged rabbit who seems to be adopting me. (I told her, I did. I said, "Babe, there's a fox who lives up that hill and she'll be around here any minute. Fair warning and, if I were you, I'd go beg scraps from someone else. There's a nice lady up the street with no trees in her yard who'll feed you." The rabbit told me that foxes are her version of an ice floe, she knows where the fox is, and she'd still appreciate some carrots. So, who am I to argue; I peel another carrot for the soup and bring the scraps outside for my leggy new friend. Madame Fox, I hope you appreciate what I'm doing, in the end, pour toi.)

This wonderful song, with lyrics by the poet Christina Rossetti is one of a number of Christian songs that are so lovely that I just get past their Jesus gloss. And since, as we Pagans like to remind the Christians this time of year, they appropriated quite a bit of what they've got from us, it's not all that difficult. Heaven can't contain your god and he infills the material world? Welcome to my religion.

And, you've got to like a song that celebrates the fact that "a breastful of milk," is enough for a baby (isn't it great how that works out? ;) Because a breastful of milk is what most mothers have! ) divine and/or human. My favorite lines, though, are these:
But only His mother
In her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the Beloved
With a kiss.

We Pagans know a lot about worshipping with a kiss and, well, maiden mothers? We invented those.

And, as for:
Angels and archangels
May have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim
Thronged the air,

well, shoot, that's how I experience Air every minute of every day.

Stay warm. Feed the animals.

Magic


About two decades ago, I was doing something v difficult and, one evening when things seemed most difficult, I got a blast of energy from my future that sustained me and got me through the rough time. It taught me more than I can say about sending magic backwards and forwards in time, something that I've been doing ever since.

And, last night, I lived the night that generated that blast of energy and knew that I was sending it to my not-yet-40-year-old-self on that long night in the past. Turns out that, when it came time to send that energy back, it was the easiest thing in the world to do. It's all good.

Picture found here.

Damn; It’s Cold Out There



I put out birdseed and peanuts this icy morning and the squirrels, birds, chipmunks, and a big brown rabbit showed up. I looked at that leggy old rabbit and wondered, "What are you here for?" She looked back at me with the largest brown eyes. I went back inside to the veggie drawer and got the slightly wilted carrots I'd been saving for soup. Yep. That's what she was here for. Goddess forfend that I ever send anyone away from my door hungry or thirsty. Time are tough all over. And, yet, those Solstice bells . . . .

Mistress Mary, Quite Contrary, How Does Your Garden Grow?


Gardeners love to talk about the bones of their garden, especially at this time of year. By "bones", they mean the naked trees, stark walkways, walls, mulched spots, and other permanent features, which somehow seem to stand out very clearly once all the flowers and leaves go away (and a dusting of snow, such as the one we had this morning, can make the bones even more visible). It's a perfect time to be out (albeit, bundled up) in the garden, spending time with it, learning from it, sitting in silence with it, and figuring out why some things work and some other things maybe don't. If it's not slippery outside, I'm bundled up and outside in my garden every dawn and every evening this time of year. It's absolutely the best thing I've ever found to do before I begin the process in January of perusing the garden porn (seed catalogues) and figuring out what I "need" for next Spring.

And I think the same is true of this time of year vis-a-vis our lives. Although December is often a time of too much rushing around, getting ready for holiday parties, baking, buying gifts, running ourselves ragged, trying hard to ignore the dark, sometimes even in December the weather intervenes and keeps us at home, inside, with our own thoughts and our own lives for company. And January and February, even more so. I have a hunch that, as global climate change brings us more intense Winters and as tax cuts for billionaires make it more and more difficult for towns and counties to clear streets, we may find ourselves spending more days snowed in than has been our previous wont.

Sure, you can spend your snow days in front of the tv or buying more stuff online.

Or, you can stop. Bundle up by grounding. Cast a circle. Sit with the bones of your own life and figure out why that wall makes perfect sense but that walkway needs straightening. Listen to your life and figure out which shrubs need to get rooted out and where you need to plant a new vine.

Spread a teaparty on the table and invite your Shadows in for a one-hour tea. Set some ground rules, esp. about leaving when asked, and then ask them what they need you to know.

Pull out all of your old journals and catch up with yourself. Can you see some overarching themes, just as a gardener might realize that her garden really is about simplicity and that's why those fussy roses have never quite worked?

What indoor activity puts you into a meditative state of mind? The treadmill? Folding laundry? Kneading bread or chopping vegetables for soup? Painting, throwing pots, dancing? For me, it's knitting, I can sit and knit and find myself deep in worthwhile insights.

Do a tarot reading and then take a nap, announcing your intention to dream the reading into your life. Cast the runes, stare into the fireplace flames, scry in the bowl of melted snow.

The plants in our gardens give themselves this time to pull back and go within so that they can survive the Winter weather and come back stronger in the Spring. Between now and Ostara, it's a gift that we can give ourselves, as well.

What bones do you see in the garden of your life?

Picture found here.

Bring Me a Rose in the Wintertime, When It’s Hard to Find


Landscape Guy and I got together last week to exchange holiday gifts. He's quite a good giver of gifts; this year, he gave me Wicked Plants by Amy Stewart, which I've been longing to read.

It's odd, isn't it, how some people just do manage to give really meaningful gifts? I suppose that, if I had to pick the best gift that I've ever gotten, it would be a wicker picnic basket that an old love once gave to me. It had these amazing leather straps and pockets inside that held things like wine glasses, and cheese knives, and red gingham napkins. I still have it, and I treasure every picnic to which I've ever taken it. One year, for my birthday, he redecorated my bedroom while I was at work and I'll never forget walking, unaware, into that room and experiencing this huge blast of color. Last holiday season, that lover's lover sent me 100 snowdrop bulbs; that was a pretty good gift and I'm eager to see them bloom in a few weeks. My wonderful DiL once gave me a great book on herb gardens and a gift certificate to Burpees: a perfect gift. One Mother's Day, after we'd had a big argument, Son gave me a beautiful cut-glass keepsake box that still sits on my dresser, and one year when I was so sick from chemo that I wanted to die, he took me to see Showboat at the Kennedy Center and to lunch at what is now Willow. Later, when it looked as if the cancer might have spread to my liver, Son called me every single day to say that he loved me; I still have the voice mails that he left. Those were amazing gifts. But the gift that I remember the most from Son is a big bouquet of flowers that he brought to me from his job just after he graduated from high school and started working. I can still see him, in my mind's eye, through the kitchen window, walking home in his one good suit, carrying that bouquet, bought w/ his first paycheck. T & E once brought me some rose petals from roses stuck on the WH fence during a Mother's Day protest; I used those in a v powerful ritual. I have a decorated pencil from a goody bag that G/Son got at a birthday party to which I took him. In the car, going through the bag, he came to the pencil and said, "Here, Nonna. You can have this pencil." It sits on my desk, in my pencil jar, and I smile every time that I look at it. I have socks and silky scarves given to me by Circle Sisters and I feel warm, and loved, and blessed, and supported every time that I wear them.

Wicked Plants has an interesting chapter, "Dreadful Bouquet", about a gift of flowers:
On July 2, 1881, Charles Julius Guiteau shot President James Garfield. His aim was not quite good enough to kill the president; Garfield lived for eleven weeks as doctors probed his internal organs with unsterilized instruments, searching for the bullet that was actually lodged near his spine. . . . On the morning of his execution [Guiteau's] sister brought him a bouquet of flowers. Prison officials intercepted the bouquet and later discovered that there was enough arsenic tucked between the petals to kill several men. Although his sister denied having poisoned her brother's bouquet, it was well known that Guiteau feared the hangman's noose and would have preferred to die some other way.

Wicked Plants goes on to suggest an arsenic-free bouquet composed of flowers that "would do quite a bit of damage all by themselves": larkspur and delphinium, lily-of-the-valley, bleeding heart, sweet pea, tulips, hyacinth, Peruvian lily, chrysanthemum, and monkshood. They're not all in season at the same time, but if death at my own hand were what I wanted, I'd treasure a gift of that bouquet.

What's the best gift that you ever got or gave?

Update: What Witch wouldn't want THIS????????

Picture found here.

Synchronicity, You’re Soaking In It



I love the artist's discussion of how her childhood spent in Nature influences her art.

*****************************************

[H]ealing the broken bond between our young and nature—is in our self-interest, not only because aesthetics or justice demands it, but also because our mental, physical, and spiritual health depends upon it. The health of the [E]arth is at stake as well. How the young respond to nature, and how they raise their own children, will shape the configurations and conditions of our cities, homes—our daily lives.

~Richard Louv
More here.

Hat tip to Margaret Roach, in A Way to Garden.

For My Friend, The Singer


Nursing You by Erica Jong

On the first night
of the full moon,
the primeval sack of ocean
broke,
& I gave birth to you
little woman,
little carrot top,
little turned-up nose,
pushing you out of myself
as my mother
pushed
me out of herself,
as her mother did,
& her mother's mother before her,
all of us born
of woman.

I am the second daughter
of a second daughter
of a second daughter,
but you shall be the first.
You shall see the phrase
"second sex"
only in puzzlement,
wondering how anyone,
except a madman,
could call you "second"
when you are so splendidly
first,
conferring even on your mother
firstness, vastness, fullness
as the moon at its fullest
lights up the sky.

Now the moon is full again
& you are four weeks old.
Little lion, lioness,
yowling for my breasts,
rowling at the moon,
how I love your lustiness,
your red face demanding,
your hungry mouth howling,
your screams, your cries
which all spell life
in large letters
the color of blood.

You are born a woman
for the sheer glory of it,
little redhead, beautiful screamer.
You are no second sex,
but the first of the first;
& when the moon's phases
fill out the cycle
of your life,
you will crow
for the joy
of being a woman,
telling the pallid moon
to go drown herself
in the blue ocean,
& glorying, glorying, glorying
in the rosy wonder
of your sunshining wondrous
self.



Picture found here.

Hmmmm


Is it just me, or are the Fae, in fact, out in greater force than normal this cold December? Has the Wild Hunt, in fact, been out riding more frequently and with more force than is usual?

Driving home along Spout Run (admittedly, one of the most Fae-inhabited spots in DC) late Tuesday night, I had to roll up my car windows (which I usually keep down even in the coldest temps) and call loudly to Bride the Bright and Vesta the Virtuous in order to make it home to my own snug cottage. And, somehow, a part of me is, even still, wandering those chilly banks, trailing my cape and soaking my boots in those icy waters, finding myself irrevocably lost, twigs in my hair and dirt under my nails, as I look for the entrance to the hill from whence those dancing tunes still beckon. It's a killing cold, and, yet, and yet . . . .

And, tonight, standing for a moment in the bones of my winter garden, talking with the lovely crescent Moon, something suddenly chilled my blood. "My" fox walked out into the middle of the yard, stared at me and said, "Go. Inside. Now."

And so, I did.

Picture found here.

Apologies to Tolstoy


The amazing Theodora Goss writes that:
With apologies to Tolstoy, all A papers are A papers in their own way. They don’t just lack mistakes. They have something extraordinary about them, a level of engagement with the texts, a felicitous style. They grab and keep your attention, and it’s interesting to think about what does that. Usually, I think, it’s the student’s voice. The student already has an individual voice. The student is already thinking, and writing, in his or her own way. There’s an enormous pleasure in seeing something like that.

Shorter Ms. Goss: When it's done well, we cannot know the dancer from the dance.

I find that the same thing is true of a compelling legal brief; I spend almost as much time reading and editing briefs as I imagine Ms. Goss spends on student papers. And there's little that sends a thrill down my spine quicker than a well-written brief -- although it's painful if it's a brief directed against my position. Good legal writing is something that people like to pretend is an oxymoron. But good legal writing is, IMHO, some of the best writing that there is. It informs, persuades, and carries the reader along in an elegant and almost seamless manner from the initial question to what appears, by the end, to be the only possible conclusion.

How do you know good writing when you see it?

Picture found here.