worth every mosquito bite

If you've been reading along for even the past six months or so--and certainly if you've been reading for longer--then you will already know that one of my favourite places on earth is my grandparents' cottage. It was a shack. It was a small, dirty, mouse-ridden shack with no running water, no toilet, no shower, built at least in the 1930s when a family lived there--with no heat, no insulation, no paved roads. I can't imagine it. There's nothing to do at the cottage except stick your feet in the creek and watch pinecones go over the falls. I loved it. To this day I can recall how it felt to put my hands or feet on the sandy, dry soil, all covered with pine needles and cones, and watch the ants scuttling over me. How the rocks nearest the shore were slimy and the water was always cold and you couldn't go out very far because the current was strong--it's a big creek--and you didn't want to get swept over the falls yourself.

Huh. I can't even begin to say anything about it without running off at the mouth. I'll start again:

If you've been reading along for even the past six months or so, you will already know that one of my favourite places on earth is my grandparents' cottage. Even if I haven't been there in almost twenty years.

So I was presented with something of a dilemma when Greg invited me to go up to his parents' cottage for the August long weekend to meet his parents and sister. Of course, phrasing it as a "dilemma" makes it seem as if there was ever any doubt of what I would do: the cottage is just down the street from my grandparents's. The cottage won. Any potential awkwardness would just have to be suffered through for the opportunity to see forests and trees and bugs and maybe even a few critters. (You might have noticed that I really like forests and trees and, yes, bugs and critters.)

Although as it turns out, there was no awkwardness. It was a lovely weekend all around. We played Settlers of Catan and Greg's superhero role-playing game (though I was more of an observer there, I did get to be the giant monster lobster, and I think I managed to clack and scuttle with the best of them) and brainstormed clues for a scavenger hunt and ate, and that, plus tromping around in the bush getting eaten alive by mosquitoes, pretty well sums up the weekend. The forest just behind the cottage is wet enough (either this year in particular or just in general) to support a wide variety of funky mushrooms and I dragged Greg through all of it getting shots of yellow translucent mushrooms like jellyfish and white mushrooms with red caps like elf homes in cartoons and irridescent mushrooms like the insides of seashells, and the local garter snake came out to say hello and asked me to take its picture too. I won't post them all today at least in part because I couldn't possibly, they wouldn't fit, but I'm sure you'll see them all eventually.

The cottage is on a fair-sized lake with a number of small-to-middling islands scattered through it (note: this describes much of Ontario thirty minutes north of Toronto and up), one of which is named the Peanut for its dimunitive size. Greg and I took the paddle boat out there and tromped around (as much as you can tromp over an island smaller than my living room) and I took photos of all the itty-bitty blueberry plants and trees that had somehow managed to grow on an island that is entirely an outcropping of clear and rose quartz (though it looks like granite, having been covered by fungi and mosses and lichens).

That's one of the things I love about the region: the bedrock is so close to the surface everywhere that it juts out, the bones of the earth right there to be touched, and still life thrives all over it. Everywhere you look is a green tangle of leaves; the tree seeds find cracks in the rock and somehow there's enough there to grow on. Life is tough.

Posted by Andrea at 8:44 AM | Comments (4)

Earth and Water

"I alluded a while ago to a recent trance (you read a witch's blog, you take the flaky with the profound, my friends) where, instead of finding the forest I usually do, healthy and green and crawling with life, I found a charred and blasted clearcut, the landscape so dry that even the riverbed was cracked and fissured. For the non-witches in the audience, aka most of you, water is the element of emotions. And it was as if a fire had raged through and evaporated even every drop of groundwater. It was frightening; considering what I thought was going on, it was also extreme. When I found a river I followed it to a waterfall with a cave behind it; the cave was like a geode, inside all amethyst crystals so sharp they cut my feet to ribbons. (I have not figured out why my feet were bare.) There was a scrying pool in the middle, and I smoothed out a patch of stone beside it using a file and a hasp. As I did, the rocks bled. The rocks bled, and soon my hands and feet were slick with it."

I wrote that in Slippery, the first post presaging the eventual divorce, back in December of 2006. Since that time it's been non-stop Epiphany Central around here, leaving me with any number of subjects I could write about for Julie's hump-day hmm today, most of which are subject to the gag order. Instead, I thought I would finish the story.

That was the trance that gave me the Monster; the Monster that, once looked at, ended the marriage; but it didn't bring the water back. For that I had to follow the river back to its source.

Would you believe me if I said I've never once used any illegal substances, and didn't even have a glass of beer or wine until after I'd turned 20? It's true. I have not so much as smoked a single cigarette. Anyway.

When I'd followed that river--the one that's in my head--back to its source, I'd found that it had been blocked up with boulders, and only the merest trickle of water was getting through. On top of the dam was a house, a house I'd recognized as my own; and even the house itself was full of rocks. This needs to come down, I thought, but had no idea how to do this or even where to begin. How do you dismantle a house and a dam? Kick it hard? Blow on it? Wish it away? Trances aren't strictly rational but they follow internal logic, in the way dreams do; you have to follow the rules to make things happen.

Digression:

This is a digression I've made so many times on wiccan posts I could probably type out the whole thing while singing the soundtrack to Moulin Rouge and scanning news headlines. Here I go again:

Wicca uses the traditional four elements, not in a scientific sense, but symbolically. The four elements are air, earth, water and fire. (Sometimes a fith, spirit, is added in the centre.) Air is to the east, earth to the north, water to the west, and fire to the south; unless you live in an environment where this makes absolutely no sense, i.e. Australia or the east coast, in which case you are free and even encouraged to rearrange them into something more locally appropriate. Air represents analysis, thought and communication; fire represents energy and passion; earth (typically represented by stone) is strength, and water is emotion. In dream symbolism (which trances borrow a lot from, since it's basically the same thing) houses are souls.

So, essentially, feeling had been completely dammed up by strength, and I'd built myself on top of this mess.

(Well done, Andrea!)

Sad Part:

My first memory is of my father throwing me on to a sofa. I can't remember why, so I tell myself it was probably supposed to be a game. The first thing I remember I am in the air. It was an old, worn-out sofabed, the cushions gone to mites and air long ago, and I landed on the metal spine in the back. It hurt; I can't remember how old I was, but I was small enough to be thrown, so I must have been fairly young. In any case, I hit it, it hurt, and I cried.

"It was only a sofa, Andrea," said my father. "It didn't hurt." And when I couldn't stop crying he sent me to my room.

I mention this because this became the pattern on which later emotional (un)expressions were built: everything was a sofa, and nothing hurt. Anything that was supposed to hurt, which in a normal family would hurt, was dammed up by another boulder. The boulders could be any one of a number of things: "Other people have real problems," "It could be worse," "It's all my fault anyway," "It doesn't matter," and so on. Until the river ran dry and the forest burned down.

Fast forward to last summer. Frances is with her father for the weekend; it's a beautiful late-summer day, and I am exploring my new neighbourhood by bike. I find the path by the East Don, and for the first time stop by "my" boulders, sit down, and watch. I trail a hand in the water, examine the shallows for fish. Iridescent-green and velvet-black dragonflies are dancing in the air by the water's edge, and the sky is that electric grey of early twilight. All the knots in my shoulders and neck unknot.

The water churns over the stones, thrown up into a white froth, backing up on itself, tumbling down a shallow cascade, and the music of it fills my head. It's not a natural environment, whatever it looks like: the boulders were placed here to channel the water and keep it from eroding the banks. I think: they don't have to be oppositional. Stones and earth don't have to keep water still and hidden, and look what they can make together. How much energy there is here. I remember the waterfall beside my grandparents' cottage, how it drowned out the trucks driving by on the highway, how we'd sit in pools within it formed by boulders and let the water pummel our shoulders. I think: water is more beautiful when it's moving over stones.

I don't need to get rid of the boulders; I just need to move them.

A shot of the rapids from "my" boulders on the Don.

Posted by Andrea at 1:49 PM | Comments (3)

Seven Lean Cows

Last night I had a dream that both of the toilets in my apartment were overflowing. The plunger was not helping. Soon there was shit* all over the floor. Where is all this shit coming from? I asked myself. How am I supposed to deal with all this shit? The shit just won't stop coming. I had no idea there was this much shit down there.

Sometimes my subconscious is about as subtle as a pole-axe to the brain. YOU'RE DEALING WITH A LOT OF SHIT RIGHT NOW. STANDARD MEASURES WON'T WORK. I wish I'd been able to stay with it long enough to see how dream-me managed to get all that shit back into the sewers where it belongs.

But this is unusual. Typically my dreams are about as cryptic as a politician on trial. "I'm glad you asked me about my alibi on the night of May 17, 2007; I'd love to answer that, but first let me digress by telling you this anecdote about a young girl I once knew who was fleeing uphill through the woods in a rickety car packed full of dozens of family members and their ancient suitcases, so that laps and shoulders and trunks were all full, while behind them pursued nameless and mysterious bad people in slick blad porsches. Once that's done, how about we talk about this other time where there were two moons in the sky, see, and one was red and one was blue, and they were on a collision course, and when they hit--poof!--one of them turned into a tennis ball and plummeted into the hands of a little boy sitting in a stone stadium that just mysteriously appeared in the midst of the Grand Canyon. Does that help you at all? No? I'm afraid I can't be any more clear. Let me speak to my lawyer."

Though now that I think about it, that first dream makes more sense than I gave it credit for, considering that at the time I was desperately trying to make a rickety marriage work as the vehicle for running away from a whole lot of personal problems. Go figure.

In The Twelve Wild Swans, Starhawk & Valentine write:

"Of course, it would be impossible to make lunches, drop off the kids, run to the grocery store, get to work, pick up the dry cleaning, make dinner, and catch a video if all these glories and monsters were swimming about in our heads all day long. The internal economy of our souls includes healthy boundaries that (usually) prevent our childhood conflict with our kindergarten teacher from causing us to snarl at the very nice lady who looks like her at the grocery checkout counter. Maintaining and policing these boundaries is an effort that ties up some of the energy of our spirits.

"And from time to time we may experience border wars, in which urgent and nonnegotiable information from our own depths comes spilling over, disrupting our ordinary lives. If I can no longer stand living with my partner of twenty years, if I aboslutely must quite a high-paying job or die of stress, my internal economy may be thrown off. If an endless round of consumerism is leaving my life meaningless, and I must find a purpose for my life or jump off the bridge, Younger Self may create a crisis.

"Younger Self may begin sending guerilla bands and spies over my boundaries in the form of disturbing dreams, accidents, reveries that keep recurring. I may find myself constantly humming a pop song about leaving my lover or learning how to fly. I may experience some disorientation, moodiness, inability to sleep, while my soul energy is bound up with the ever more difficult task of preventing entry of the unbearable insight.

"People often call these breakdowns, but they are equally breakthroughs."

I tagged that passage in the book as I was reading it in the latter part of 2006 and early 2007, and grappling with the Monster that eventually broke my marriage apart. Prevent entry of the unbearable insight indeed. But eventually the border fell; borders have been falling ever since.

Sometimes a dream is just a dream, a random firing of neurons that makes a good anecdote but means nothing. Sometimes the meaning of it is clear the minute you wake, like a hallway full of sewage. Sometimes a dream is an SOS whose meaning can take months or years to come clear.

If only there was a door to welcome the Younger Self through, some way to communicate directly between her pictures and symbols and my letters and words.

~~~~~

*expletive-heavy post. Sorry.

Posted by Andrea at 8:35 AM | Comments (2)

God, maybe

I didn't get down to the Don this weekend, in part because the weather was awful, and in part because I was very much otherwise occupied. It's too bad, because I'm pretty sure the trout lilies are out right now, and they never last long. Next weekend. Assuming it's not raining again.

Last weekend, though, before the gods remembered that this is supposed to be The Year the Weather Sucked, and it was accordingly sunshiney and beautiful and I rode my bike down for a quick stop by the river, I sat on the boulders--the water level seemed down, I couldn't get quite as close as I usually do. It looks so natural, it looks real, but if you know anything about the history of the river at all you know that its current naturalized state is completely constructed. The boulders I sit on at the river's edge are gabions, placed there to protect against erosion as part of a restoration project to return the river to something like its natural state. It's current health is a conscious plan; first it was broken, seemingly beyond repair, the water too polluted for living things and its banks too channelized and manipulated to provide habitat for anything. But they didn't just let the river go to make it beautiful again; people intervened. It was fixed.

What it is isn't anything like what it would have been if it had always been left alone, most likely; but its post-broken state is still pretty impressive. It looks authentic. I wonder if the river has a memory that carries scars?

In any case, I sat on the boulders, the ones that are quickly becoming "my boulders" and watched the water play with the rocks, and turned myself into a tree. Roots all the way down to the earth's core, branches and leaves all the way up to the sun--it's a witch thing--and then the moment where it clicks, in the way I imagine a more standard meditation clicks for other people, and where I used to end I didn't end anymore (in the lingo of the meditation experts, the boundaries of the ego dissolved). Instead, there were the trees across the river, the water swarming the stones, the trilliums pushing themselves up into the scattered sun. There was everything; and you'd think, having done this since I was seventeen, that it might become normal; instead it is a surprise every time. "I'm a part of everything," I said, the walkway far enough behind me that I felt safe in being largely unobserved.

So of course, I'm putting it on the internet.

I couldn't tell you what I think god is, except that I think there is something I call god. I can tell you it doesn't have anything in common with the christian god I was brought up with, not anymore, except for smidgens of passages in the old or new testament; "I AM," for instance. I can tell you it's not really anything like the wiccan god/dess as typically described either; no two faces, no million names. That's too anthropomorphic. Surely if there is one god and if there is any conscious life elsewhere in the universe, it would be unimaginable hubris to give god two human eyes, two human hands, a human mind, two human sexes, human familial relationships, human language. All of that could only be true in the sense of metaphor. On some other planet where maybe they have three sexes, or none, who would god be?

But I think when those walls come down, whatever god is can be touched. Not talked to, not reasoned with, bargained with, pleaded with, not understood, grasped or seen. Just touched. And--this is the part that makes me wiccan--part of what I'm touching is in me, and the trees across the river, the knuckles of the trilliums pushing through the dirt, the water and the stones; and in the keyboard, the seventeen photographs of Frances tacked up to the cabinet, the yellow chipped tea mug given to me ages ago by someone who doesn't like me anymore. All of it, everything. For a moment, it's not an intellectual abstraction, it's a seen thing, in the same way my own two hands in front of me are seen things.

A few minutes later I got up to go home. While I'd been sitting there, a middle-aged couple had come to sit down on the bench near "my" boulders. As I walked to my bike they gave me these very odd, strained, genuine smiles. I smiled back.

It was only the next day that I thought they might have heard me.

I wonder sometimes what it's like for people to walk through the park seeing only the river.

Posted by Andrea at 11:15 AM | Comments (2)

I can't even do this right

Julie's suggested topic for this week was The Rules--what are they, do you follow them, do you break them?

It would be oh-so-tempting to claim an exalted, superior, rule-flouter status for myself. Rules! I have no patience for them. Pah.

It is more accurate to state that I never follow the rules because I rarely have any idea what they are. If I did, I might still break them; on the other hand, I might not. I'll spare you the painstaking effort I've been taking lately to inform myself of what some of the rules are and why--but go read Emmie's post about how parenting instincts will fail you if your childhood was not ideal. It will give you some idea of what I'm doing, although not in the realm of parenting. Some of us just don't have a clue what the rules are and if we want to know, we actually have to go and find out. From a book.

Anyway.

On the other other hand, if rules don't make sense, I certainly won't follow them.

I've been throwing a post in my head about wicca around--it's been a while since I've done one of those, and lately I've been thinking about it a lot. What I started with was the idea that I took the newest, most flexible religious path available today and essentially twisted it about for my own purposes. There is one immanent god goes the dogma, with two faces--one masculine, one feminine. And a million names. That's where the pantheons come in.

Enh, I reply. I'm not so sure about that. I think it's more complicated.

Because even when I'm practicing a religion that essentially positions itself as at-odds-with-Western-culture, and even when I am intimately familiar with the doctrine and the rules from a decade or more of reading, and even when there are only two rules and they are both simple enough to be put into a fortune cookie, I still have to do my own thing.

The odd thing is that I still consider myself a witch.

(By the way, I suspect from my complete lack of comment spam overnight that the comments form is broken. Sorry about that. I'll fix it as soon as I can.

Edited to add: Never mind. The spam is back (plus a comment from Madeleine, who is not spam). The form must have fixed itself.)

Posted by Andrea at 10:00 AM | Comments (5)

The Wicked Vow

(The Monday Mission will have to make an appearance on Tuesday this week; I have an idea but it's not fleshed out enough to share yet, even in the guise of a writing exercise. In the meantime, enjoy this pointless meandering.)

People ask me sometimes why the hell I ever bothered to marry my first husband since, in retrospect, it is pretty clear I ought not to have even dated him. An excellent question, to which I can only reply that I have the very bad habit of doing exactly what I say I am going to do, even when it becomes clear that it would be disastrous to do so. I said I would marry him, and then I did, even though I knew by then it was a really stupid thing to do.

I am so old-fashioned in this regard (and take a good look at this sentence, Dear Readers, because that's not an adjective you're likely to see me apply to myself again) that I view the words "I promise" as nearly inherently dishonest, or at least indicative of weak character. If you mean what you say, then you don't need to tag some sentences with "I promise," which would seem to indicate that sentences not so tagged you are then free to violate at a later date. If I say I'm going to do something, I'll do it; you won't get any greater commitment from me even if I am standing on top of a stack of bibles, qurans and books of shadows.

There are times when this trait is useful; for instance, I used it just about this time last year when I left Erik by telling friends that I was going to leave him. Having made this commitment to some friends, I was not then free to just forget the whole idea when the time came and I knew it would be painful and hideous. And New Year's Resolutions tend to stick with me, especially when I post them here, because I said I would do them, and dammit, I will.

Then there are the times when I make bad promises, and end up carrying on through on them because, well ... because.

"Rose followed the Old Woman's advice, and when she arrived at the seaside, she found a little hut with twelve narrow beds inside. Sure that she was soon to be reunited with her brothers, Rose waited by the hut. The sun began to set, and in its last rosy light, twelve great swans swooped out of the sky. As their feet touched the earth, the sun set, and before Rose's astonished eyes the swans turned into handsome young men. 'I am your sister!' cried Rose.

"Her brothers stared at her, horrifed. 'What have we done!' they cried. 'We have vowed to kill the first young girl we meet, because our misfortune came to us through a girl!' Rose shrank back from them, but in this moment the Old Woman appeared again. She faced the frightened, angry brothers: 'Break that wicked vow, which you never should have made. Can't you see? This is your own dear sister. Only through her can you be restored.' And she disappeared as quickly as she had come."

That's a section from a fairytale about a queen with twelve sons who makes a wicked vow of her own: I would sacrifice all of my sons to have one daughter. (Let's leave out how tremendously unlikely such a promise is in any patriarchal feudal society.) When her daughter is born, all of her sons turn into swans and fly away. They turn back into men only at night. The daughter Rose, when she is older, learns of what happened and resolves to rescue them. It's used as the metaphor tying together one of my favourite wicca books, The Twelve Wild Swans; and it seems this is something I need to learn over and over again. There is no honour in keeping a wicked vow.

It's identifying the wicked vows that's tricky.

Wicked vows can be anything from trivial ("I'll go on vacation when I lose twenty pounds") to the self-destructive ("I'll become a lawyer even though I hate it because my sister is a waitress and it broke my father's heart") to the truly wicked ("I will never let you see your son again"). Any promise made to self or other that should never have been made, and which you or I keep anyway, out of a misguided sense of integrity.

Some I eventually figured out:

I'll let myself write when I've earned it by doing everything else I'm supposed to do first--professional career and marriage and house and family--even though that leaves no time for it.

I never was the child they wanted, so instead I'll be the adult daughter they wanted, in a nuclear family with a big suburban house, even though I hate the suburbs, and hate driving, and hate having a big house to take care of, and even though the marriage is making me miserable.

I will do everything I can to save the world before I allow myself a moment's frivolous fun.

Others I'm still struggling with, unsure whether they are truly wrong or merely inconvenient.

I will never ask for more than I have, because I already have more than I deserve?

I'm stronger than you, so I will let you break my heart and I will never break yours?

How can I ever be sure?

Have you ever made a wicked vow? I will never make anyone angry or I will never make my mother cry or I will never tell them what you did to me? Others? Did you keep them, or break them?

Posted by Andrea at 11:47 AM | Comments (7)

The Talk (which didn't go the way I thought it would)

Wednesday was a self-declared snow day. I took one look at our slushy, snow-laden, uncleared sidewalks and declared them impassable by stroller, and we stayed home. I got a fair bit of work done for someone who was being bounced on by a small child demanding repeats of hide-and-seek and Candyland, and she went only marginally stir-crazy.

While we were playing Candyland, it came out that someone at school told her Wiccans are bad guys. I can't get out who, but in the end I suppose it doesn't really matter. "I'm Wiccan," I said. "Am I a bad guy?"

"No," she said. "Are Wiccans good guys?"

"Some of them. Some of them are good, some of them are bad. Just like everyone else."

And we sat down and I gave a little speech about how wiccans and witches are the same thing, and it's not like the books or television, and if she ever has any questions about wiccans or witches or if she hears anything about them she should come and ask me. "Do you have any questions?" Her eyes were very large and blue.

She nodded, looking solemn. She pulled down the neckline of her shirt, stared at her chest and said, "Where are my breasts?"

OK. What the hell. "You'll have breasts when you're a teenager. But that's a few years away still."

"Are you a teenager?" She climbed into my lap.

"No, I'm a grown-up lady."

"Oh."

"What are you going to do when you're grown up?"

"I'm going to teach you stuff." She squirmed herself into the four inches of empty couch between me and the armrest.

I shifted over to give her more space, and put an arm around her shoulders. "Oh? That's nice. Thanks."

"Yeah. Because you don't know anything yet."

Truer words may never have been spoken.

Posted by Andrea at 7:57 AM | Comments (7)

Scooby Doo and the Witch's Ghost

One could write an entire post or even an entire series of posts on everything that is wrong with Scooby Doo. Talking dog. Marijuana references. Preponderance of white characters and boys. Daphne's Damsel in Distress Syndrome, especially in the originals. Formulaic plots. Crappy writing. Pick any one of the above, and presto: blog fodder!

But Frances loves Scooby Doo. He's a big friendly talking dog, what's not to love? She loves the mysteries which are never too scary and always come out not scary at all in the end. She laughs at all the stupid jokes and the marijuana references go right over her head. So we read Scooby Doo books, and I keep the groaning and kvetching to myself until I have a sympathetic adult audience.

But not for this one, which came as part of a Scooby Doo hardcover storybook collection.

Ben saw Velma staring at the picture. 'Sarah was a Wiccan,' Ben explained, 'a kind of medicine woman, like a doctor.'

'I've read about them,' Velma said. 'Wiccans don't use ordinary medicine. They understand the forces of nature--herbs and plants--and use them for healing.'

Did you know I don't use ordinary medicine? That's right. My insulin is special.

Look, I'm already struggling with how to deal with this. It's not like I'm telling Frances I'm a buddhist or an atheist or a yogic flyer. There's a lot of baggage with the word "witch," and she's already bringing plenty of it home from school and daycare. "Witches can't pee," she tells me; or "witches don't have round heads." And if you think these statements are limited to Hallowe'en, you're mistaken. I don't need one of her favourite entertainment franchises further muddying the waters with stories about "good wiccans" who use herbs to heal people and "bad witches" who die and turn into ghosts and terrify villages.

Ben grabbed it. He grinned, but it was an evil grin that darkened his face. 'This isn't a journal,' he growled in a low, threatening voice. 'It's a spellbook. Sarah was a witch!'

I read that book to her the first time with a sinking feeling, stumbling through the words with my sweet girl snuggled on my lap gobbling it all up.

Isn't that bad enough already? Do you think it can get worse? Let's read the Amazon reviews:

"The book contains "real" ghosts and witchcraft. Several nasty-looking girls who practice Wicca are portrayed as good and cool. I don't want my four-year-old to think Wicca is just a cool and different, but acceptable, lifestyle."

Heaven forbid. How dare a children's entertainment franchise preach tolerance to youngsters! Don't they know that for hatred and fear to be properly inculcated you need to get them young and never let them forget that different is awful and evil and terrible and will eat you while you're sleeping?

"Second, the book is a PR effort for wicca, the religion of witchcraft. Even positive reviews conceed [sic] this point, and the debate has been on whether or not it is OK to preach the benefits of witchcraft to young children. Make up you own mind, but the consistent, overt and in-your-face praise of witchcraft as a path of life (even being encouraged by Scooby's gang) is incredibly inappropriate."

Horribly inappropriate. How dare we! In-your-face praise of a religion as a path of life is only appropriate when you're in a traditional, organized, monotheistic religion. Otherwise it's straight-up corruption of youth.

But the book of course is not PR because it doesn't even get it right. Not even the smallest, simplest detail of either wicca or witchcraft is properly explained. It would be like a children's book talking about how christians are good people who worship god and cause water to turn into non-alcoholic wine on a regular basis by praying over it, but protestants are evil holy-ghost worshiping people who will come after you when they're dead to poke you with a pitchfork.

Shaggy grabbed the witch's spellbook and threw it to Velma. She flipped through the pages, searching for a spell to imprison Sarah.

'Here!' she said to Thorn. 'You're a Wiccan. Read it!'

The witch was getting closer! Quickly Thorn read, 'Ancient evil get thee hence...'

Suddenly the book jumped out of Thorn's hand, glowing and crackling with energy.

Do you think, if I could do that kind of thing, that I wouldn't have done so a long, long time ago? I mean, by now, wouldn't I be a millionaire with a private island, and also a harem?

Normally I have a sense of humour about this stuff. I don't get bent out of shape over the witch costumes and decorations that abound on Hallowe'en. People use witch as a polite alternative slur for bitch, and I laugh. Organizations get all up in arms because Harry Potter is corrupting an entire generation by proselytizing for wicca, and I shake my head. But this. As a foundation for building a positive and meaningful dialogue about my spiritual beliefs and practices with my daughter, this leaves much to be desired.

You can imagine I was already cross, then, when I came across Stephanie Conover's story.

""Our board of directors has eliminated her as a judge as tarot card reading and reiki are the occult and is not acceptable by God, Jews, Muslims or Christians. Tarot card reading is witchcraft and is used by witches, spiritists and mediums to consult the dark world."

The letter went on to quote a couple of passages from the Bible, including one from the book of Leviticus that warns, "Do not turn to mediums or seek out spirits for you will be defiled by them."

"We hope that Stephanie Conover will turn from these belief systems and will repent from her practice of them," the letter reads."

Repent. Defiled!

I hope you all know you're defiling yourselves just by reading my blog.

""Some would call me a witch, yes. But we don't believe in the devil. There's no devil in Wicca. We believe whatever you send out, good or bad, comes back to you three times. Ninety per cent of those who practise witchcraft or Wicca do it for the betterment of themselves or others. It's a religion and we're trying to get it recognized by higher-ups in government."

Conover said she also promotes diversity and multiculturalism as her mother is black and her father is white. Murray insisted Conover is "trying to stir up trouble" by raising the issue in the press. "She's obviously a very vindictive person," she said.

A very vindictive person!

I give up on humans. I think I'll go have a nap.

Posted by Andrea at 6:45 AM | Comments (10)

Monday Mission: No Ideas but in Things

(Today's mission is to write a 500-word postcard story without dialogue or any description of characters' interior states. Every idea needs to be placed in an object or an action.)

She fastened her skirt behind her hips, tucked in her high-necked green sweater, pulled up her tights and squirmed her feet into her black boots. Reflexively, before leaving for her new job, she fastened her silver pentacle around her neck, then did up her winter coat and grabbed her purse and ran for the bus.

The bus was late and full and she found a spot by the rear door to stand, holding the railing, staring out the window. Outside grey empty trees and dingy grey snowbanks creeped by, but her eyes focused elsewhere. Maybe on the dim grey sky behind the grey buildings. Not, certainly, on the eyes of the woman sitting in the seat by the window, pointedly staring at her.

She got off, raced to her desk, checked the clock. Ten minutes early. She poured a cup of tea and let it steep at her desk while she checked emails before the morning’s meetings. The next one in the Yonge Room—where would that be? Third floor? No, fifth. This hallway? No, that. There it was. Five minutes late. She found an empty seat and pulled out her notebook and pen and took notes, referring frequently to the binder left behind by the last person in her job. She took frequent small sips of her tea and made careful notes in a neat hand. Blue ball-point pen, nothing fancy, just a Bic. When the break came she grabbed a mini muffin and sat back in her seat, re-reading her notes and the binder, annotating the margin; eventually she put the pen down and leaned back, breaking small pieces of muffin off and putting them in her mouth, wiping her fingertips on the napkin between bites. The room was corporate beige and corporate grey and corporate red, the carpeting laid in inoffensive tiles, whiteboards and corkboards hanging in place of art in any other room.

Groups of attendees stood around the room in clumps of two or three or four, talking and laughing, but sometimes, too, staring at her. Or not precisely at her. At her neck. She flushed, and traced the silver chain with her index finger, held the pentacle in her palm. As the meeting reconvened she kept it there, thumb and forefinger worrying the line of the star, still taking notes with her right hand, still flushed, looking only at her page or at the speaker. By the time the lunch break came around, she had carefully tucked the pentacle inside her green shirt, chain and all.

~~~~~

422 words. Not bad.

In this morning's Toronto Star there is a story about Stephanie Conover, invited to participate in judging a beauty pageant, then de-invited when the organizers found out she practiced Tarot and Reiki. Just in case any of you were under the impression that we had freedom of religion in this country.

More on this tomorrow (or Wednesday, depending on how busy I am). Today it might make my head explode.

Posted by Andrea at 10:01 AM | Comments (5)

Structure(d)

One of my favourite things about the alchemy of writing is how forcing something into a rigid shape makes it more itself, not less. The container allows the energy of the work to build; the stronger the shape, the stronger the energy. There is little in life more passionate than a sonnet, though the words it contains are nearly empty of emotion. Don't believe me? Consider:

My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.

(Yes, I memorize poetry. Norman Doidge in The Brain that Changes Itself argues that memorizing poetry makes your brain stronger and improves IQ, which was a nice validation of a trait I previously considered to be something of an embarassing tic.)

Back to the poem:

The only word in that stanza which refers to an emotion is "love." The rest of it is an extended medical metaphor. As free verse, it would never work:

"I love you so much I feel like I'm sick, and I don't want to get well."

Doesn't have quite the same punch, does it?

The apparent formlessness of free verse is something of a trick, an illusion; the truth is that a really good free verse poem is highly structured, but the structure is unique to that poem, the poem dictates the structure that most suits it. Still, the best free verse rarely whips itself up to the frenzy of a really good sonnet. The form of a sonnet is a cast-iron pot that you can stick on the hottest fire, and keep the water boiling for hours. Most free verse is a plastic bag. Try boiling water in that.

(Note: I'm not arguing that all poetry should be this passionate, or that free verse is bad because it's not; only that the rigidity reinforces the passion, rather than killing it.)

This applies to blogging, too, I've noticed. My most successful posts (from the point of view of the quality of the writing) are very structured. The structures appear to be my own--or at least I'm not aware of anyone else blogging with them. (Bracketing experiences with quotes is one; I try to use one to set off the other, whether through reinforcement or contrast. It's fun, and it works. Many of the ones I get the most recognition for follow this structure. I'm experimenting with others but most of them are not as set yet.) This in fact is one of the main values of blogging for me right now; it's a chance to experiment and practice with different sorts of structures. What happens if I include five short scenes with consecutive quotes from a piece of popular fiction between them? What happens if I start at the beginning, go all the way to the end, and then back to the beginning again? It doesn't matter if I fall flat on my face here; if the pot isn't strong enough to contain the water and take the heat, it doesn't matter.

The same is true in fiction. Really good fiction is highly structured. There is the set-up, rising tension, climax, denouement; and the climax usually takes place about 90% of the way through the book. (Try it with your favourite novel.) There is a certain balance of scenes (where things happen) to exposition (where things are described), a balance between dialogue and action, inclusion of all five senses, a main character who wants something they can't have, and a sense of inevitability. If the author's idea can't be contained within that structure, regardless of the work's other merits, it will fall flat. It will be uninteresting. Authors who have flouted those rules (James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, etc.) have been successful to the extent that they were able to replace elements of the traditional structure with a new structure. It may seem that they are free-forming their open and directionless emotions in a vast and undifferentiated soup all over the page. This is why they are geniuses: the works are highly, tightly structured. They are cast-iron pots. They only look like wickerware. (Making a cast-iron pot look like wickerware is much tougher than just using the cast-iron pot.)

That it is the structure that builds the emotion--the level of caring for the characters and their plight, the tension in seeing how it all turns out--and not the words themselves is evident in fiction's most basic rule: Show, Don't Tell. Don't tell us "he was mad." Tell us what his anger looked like, how it felt, whether he snapped or snarled or whined or slammed the door or only thought about it. Emotion without a container, in writing, is just water dripping all over the stove. Turn the heat up as high as you like. It won't boil.

And now, in the middle of drafting a novel, in the free-forming stage of flooding the page with soup, I'm beginning to grasp what the structure could be, or should be. It's going to take a lot of work to shove it into that shape when I'm done, but the book will be better for it. (Not necessarily publishable. Let's not go crazy.)

###

(Yesterday evening I got home from work and made Frances her dinner while she watched Dora Saves the Mermaids, again. She ate while I heated my soup, cut the bread and cheese for topping, and while it was under the broiler I moved the books from the couch to the bookcase and cleared a spot for drinks on the coffee table, cleared the papers off the kitchen table, returned Frances's toys to their appropriate containers. In between all this I checked emails and replied. The soup was done just before seven, and I ate it while Frances talked to her father on the phone.

Then it was Frances's bedtime. Upstairs we went; she took off her clothes while I packed her suitcase for the weekend, then we got on her pyjamas and brushed her teeth. Booktime. Tucked her into bed, and time for a Princess Frances story. Time for a kiss and a hug, then I changed into my workout clothes and went downstairs.

A brief respite for reading Julian the Magician, Gwendolyn MacEwen's first novel (I already know I love her poetry). Time for a workout. Oddly, it's energizing: my brain feels cleared and I know I will not be able to sleep for two hours yet at least.

Time for dishes, to scrub the kitchen counter. My weekend is fully bracketed already: guests tonight, writing workshop Saturday, Santa Claus Parade on Sunday. Somewhere in there, laundry, groceries, cooking, cleaning, exercising must be done. So this can't be let go.

Another few minutes to relax, then it's time to write. I'll get a thousand words done at least before turning in. By then I will be drained, boiled dry. Before bed, a few minutes to light a candle; I'm working on Water. But I can't stay up too late: Frances will wake at 6:30 whether I am ready or not, and there's work to go to, income to be earned.)

###

Characters are making friends and falling in love where I hadn't expected them to; it's braiding a few subplots together into a thicker, stronger material, itself suitable for braiding into the main plot. Other characters are falling apart to their own internal stresses, the structure of their lives insufficient to the tasks at hand. Meanwhile I am beginning to see how this scene can click in to that one, that dialogue can knit with that description, to make something seemingly seamless from the outside. Or that's the hope.

It still seems magical, though; or is it just me? That the very artificiality, the forcedness, the seeming falseness, makes the story more itself, allows it to build and become stronger. Invention permits truth. It makes no sense; but there it is. Focing something amorphous into a cast-iron pot makes it stronger, deeper, more authentic. It is magic--real magic, not TV magic--the spell or the ritual creates a container for the energy to build within, so that when it is directed at a task, it is equal to it.

Meanwhile, I know I said I would be writing here less while working on the novel. Strangely, the more I write my story at night, the more I can think of things to say here, during the day. Who'd have guessed?

Posted by Andrea at 12:36 PM | Comments (4)

Samhain and the Shadow

Samhain caught me by surprise this year.

Last Samhain was the Monster. Last Samhain, I saw that no matter what I thought or wanted, my marriage was over, and it was time to admit it and go. It took me six months to work through this and act on it (which puts the separation eerily close to Ostara). But even though Ostara and Beltane normally put me back in the overworld, outside my head where I then act on things that are important to me, the entire year has felt so self-focused, so drawn around restructuring my life and reassembling all the pieces, that I felt as if I'd never left the underworld at all. Never left my head. As if my normal pattern--six months up, six months down; six months out, six months in--had been shattered by life circumstances.

And then on Samhain I saw that it hadn't. Last Samhain I saw the Monster; between Imbolc and Ostara I admitted it, and acted on it, and we separated. The next six months were focused on the outside after all: protecting and helping Frances, dealing with the separation, and lawyers, and property, finding neighbourhoods and apartments, selling the house, moving, settling in. Then Samhain came, and with it the pull back inside. I don't know what the Shadow has to show me this year. But I can hazard a guess.

The hard thing about wicca is that there are no soft, comforting lies. You are confronted by yourself as you really are, over and over.

Six months up, six months down. Six months out, six months in.

Down I go.

Posted by Andrea at 9:24 AM | Comments (3)

It's Samhain, kid

It's Hallowe'en, the one day of the year when the world at large remembers that witches actually exist. The other 364 days we are a charming plot device on improbable television shows, where we use our apparently limitless magical powers to dye our hair and snag boys. Which seems like a waste. But on Hallowe'en, the mainstream media remembers that there is a religion called wicca, also witchcraft, and say! Did you know that they don't even have green skin or anything?

Sadly, this has not filtered down to the preschool set, which is where Frances has been spending her time, playing with hallowe'en stickers, some of which bear a startling resemblance to a woman in a pointy hat riding a broomstick. Can't think what that might be. Frances knows, though:

"It's a witch."

Good call. And what does Frances have to say about witches?

"Witches don't have round heads."

Why don't witches have round heads?

"Because they're not persons!"

Andrea: Yes they are.

Frances: No, they're not.

Andrea: Yes, they are. Witches are persons.

Frances: No, they're not.

Andrea: No, really. Witches are persons.

Frances: (laughing uproariously) No, they're not!

Huh. I foresee some work to be done. (This is my magical powers of precognition talking.) I wasn't sure before about when exactly to have the "Listen, kid: your mom's a witch; and today might be hallowe'en for you but it's samhain for her" speech, but I think the time has come.

Posted by Andrea at 7:25 AM | Comments (5)

Prophecies and Foreshadowing

It's a wiccan tradition to use Samhain (hallowe'en) as an opportunity to look to the future--it is, after all, the wiccan new year. But the looking-forward comes with a distinctly witchy twist: there's no goal-setting (I make my resolutions in January just like everybody else), but fortune-telling. October is a veritable orgy of tarot-reading around these parts. And in my usual way of mitigating the flakiness by subjecting it to the scientific method, all of the spreads get written down so I can squint at them years after the fact to see if they came out or not.

Normally, they do. I have no solid explanation for this; my hypothesis is that using cards is simply a different way of thinking, a more visual way, so it accesses intuition and basically shows you things that you already knew, but didn't know that you knew, or didn't want to admit.

Initially I was going to share a general "what's likely to happen in the next year" spread, but it turned out to be unbloggable. I know that's a tease, so I'll share a little without the photo:

Self: victory after a struggle, but it's not all done yet, there's one more push coming. A new path will need to carved out. A great deal of restlessness and continual change.
Environment: Divorce. Unbloggable unbloggable unbloggable. More unbloggable. Even more unbloggable. You'll have to take my word for it, though; it's pretty well bang on.
Hopes & fears: Imagination and creativity, new beginnings, career progress, new friends, plans, and routines.

...and pretty well everything after that is unbloggable too. Tarot aficionados with enough curiosity to kill a cat can email me and I'll send it to you privately.

After this, I thought perhaps I would ask a nice, safe question (what's likely for writing in the next year?) and share that instead. There are still unbloggable bits, but on the whole it's much more satisfactory, and you can read it above.

So there you are, Julie: my goal, where I want to go, as always, is towards writing. But will I?

According to several assorted pieces of colourful cardstock, the answer is a qualified yes.

A more detailed description of that qualified yes follows:

The current situation is one of conflict and tension resulting in an inability to make a commitment or decision regarding writing currently, not helped by the covering card, as the tarot aficionados in the audience can make a stab at for themselves. The near future will see either a modest increase in material circumstances (I am getting a raise in a few weeks) or slight movement towards a long-held goal (that's promising) or both. The current block has been partially contributed to by unbloggables, and also the financial negotiations associated with divorce. I am leaving behind a stagnant relationship and a set of limiting beliefs, but the transformation has not been pretty. Coming up is either a powerful woman who is inclined to help me (introduce yourself please!) or an emphasis on creativity and intuition. Personally, I'm pulling for the former, but I suppose the latter would work too.

I'm on the threshold of a journey, ready to take a gamble and try something new; what's on my side is that the current sadness and loss of faith is temporary and will soon shift to renewal and positive changes, so long as I reassess the situation. The ultimate outcome is a period of withdrawal and rest to recover from a recent stressful phase, resulting in a change of direction. I'm going to say that this means I will write next year.

In case any non-tarot aficionados in the audience are curious: the "slots" (what is recent past, recent future, applies to self vs. environment, and so on) are determined by where the card sits. I don't get to decide which card applies to which situation and so interpret it to suit.

Posted by Andrea at 6:16 AM | Comments (5)

Secrets and Lies

When my five-year-old cousin died, her parents--my aunt and uncle--went to their pastor for counselling. This wise and compassionate man turned to the crumbling humans before him and said, "You must have sinned terribly, or why would God have punished you like this?"

That, Dear Readers, is why I cannot stand The Secret.

Contrary to Byrne's claims, The Secret is not some hidden, arcane knowledge that is suddenly being revealed to the public for the first time. It's old hat. It's that evil pastor sitting on his saintly chair and accusing my aunt and uncle (two kinder people never lived) that their child's life was ended by a compassionate God because of something they did or didn't do or thought or didn't think. It's the woman who told me that if I'd managed to convince myself that I needed my "miracle drug" (insulin) to stay alive, then it was my own fault, but she wasn't about to judge me for it. It's arrogant, indulged, privileged people who sit on top of a mountain of labour performed by the less fortunate for their entire lives, and then congratulate themselves for their "hard work" and "positive attitude," while criticizing the people who keep them in their fortunate position for the perceived failures that keep them from enjoying the same successes.

All of this is annoying enough; but what really pisses me off about The Secret is this: it's magic. It's the same magic that neopagans and wiccans practice all the time--only hamstrung, shallow, and without kindness, ethics or compassion.

Hamstrung

At the risk of saying this one too many times, thus fatally boring all of you and causing your untimely deaths--words are powerful because they not only reflect reality, but manipulate our perceptions of it, thus altering the course of our lives. Magic largely involves getting around, under and over words by using images, scents, sounds, and so on.

There are two ways this can work, and I'll say up front that I personally don't care which is correct. As far as I'm concerned, it's like electricity: as long as the light turns on when I flip the switch, the precise mechanics and engineering don't interest me. The two ways that magic can work are: changing yourself (goal setting, positive attitudes, self-improvement), and changing your environment ("energy").

That The Secret, if it works at all, will do so primarily through goal-setting and attitude adjustment seems self-evident. What will every weight loss guru on planet earth tell you to do before you begin a new diet or exercise program? Write down your goals, of course, and post them somewhere you will see them often. Pull out photos of yourself at the weight you want to be and stick them on the fridge. Tempt yourself with treats you can get when you rack up a month's worth of workouts. I know I'm poking a giant pin in a thousand balloons, but isn't that The Secret? And how does it work? By keeping your goal before your eyes so you are not tempted off the path--it works by altering you and your behaviour. It hasn't got a damned thing to do with sending energy out into the universe so the universe can send it back.

But if it's energy you're interested in, try this:

Stand still, somewhere quiet and where you're not worried about looking like a doofus. Imagine there are roots growing out of the bottom of your feet; they're growing fast, twining deep around boulders, through groundwater and solid rock, deeper and deeper, until they twist around earth's magma core; and now, through your shoulders and the top of your head grow branches, higher and steeper, into twig and leaf, right up through the stratosphere, with the sun beating hot on the leaves. Imagine the energy of the magma travelling up through your roots, through your body, through the branches to the leaves; and then raining back down again into the earth, back to the magma core, and over and over again.

Once you've managed this, and you feel like a human lightning bolt--now picture what it is you want.

Shallow

The Secret ignores action. Any witch worth listening to will tell you that magic by itself gets you nothing. All the positive energy in the world won't bring you your heart's desire if you're not also doing the work necessary to bring it to pass: you won't find your dream home if you refuse to look for it; you won't land your dream job if you never hand in your resume. Filling your head with pretty pictures and forcing yourself to walk around believing that you already live in them would, I presume, make one feel much better about the things one doesn't have, as a starving person might feel better about their empty stomach if they went around visualizing ice cream and forcing themself to believe that they would eat it for supper. But it is not going to fall from the sky.

The Secret also works only, so far as I can tell, with positive mental imagery. Which is all well and good, so far as it goes; but pictures don't make the world any more than words do, and where's the rest of it? We have five senses, not two.

Kindness, Ethics, Compassion

Other bloggers have already noted the cruelty implicit in The Secret itself; notably how one is advised to turn away from obese persons lest one "catch it" like a mental flu. Note the many useful and productive endeavours to which this could be applied: Why, if I never want to be part of a famine, I'd better turn off CNN the moment they start showing pictures of starving orphans in Ethiopia! And I don't want AIDS, I know, so no more sad news from South Africa for me. If those people in Darfur are being slaughtered they must have brought it on themselves by thinking negatively; so why should I bother to intervene or act on their behalf? If no one looks I suppose no one can help and then they'll all die--but that's a small price to pay for my own protection, isn't it? A world of The Secret would be a world of social injustice and sanctioned yet invisible bigotry the likes of which we've never known.

But let's pretend that most of the world has enough common sense to dismiss at least this appalling aspect of The Secret, and it will only be applied as positive mental imagery. What then? Is it ethical and compassionate?

No.

Sending energy out into the universe is only a harmless hobby so long as it doesn't work. If it does work, or if you believe that it works, you are required to exercise the same ethical consideration with "positive energy" as you are with any other action you might undertake to achieve a goal. You cannot use it to impose on or dominate another person. You cannot use it to achieve a goal which is itself wrong.

One would not, for instance, countenance a person kidnapping and holding hostage another person they want to be involved with romantically. It obliterates their free will, which they have a right to exercise, as do you. If you believe that love spells don't work, then go ahead, cast away; what harm can it do? Ah, but if you believe that they do work, then casting a love spell is no different than kidnapping.

Similarly, if you believe that putting positive mental imagery in support of your wants out into the universe will make the universe send back to you what you want, then you need to be sure that no one's free will is being obliterated by your actions. You cannot dominate or impose on them. Every witch I know won't even cast a healing spell without the consent of the sick person involved. That is the first ethical consideration.

One also would not advocate a person pursuing a lifestyle or dream which is innately harmful to other persons or the environment. Well, ok, our entire culture advocates this precisely; but I'll assume that the majority of my Dear Readers agree. We would not advocate for a person to use even the most ethical methods possible for achieving unethical ends--a job overseeing prison torture, for instance; or spending fifty million dollars to build oneself an island in the Pacific on which one will construct one's own mansion. One might follow the hiring process to the letter, and fulfill all of the necessary permits for island construction, but that doesn't make it right.

Similarly with magic, if what you are asking for yourself entails a loss for someone else (no matter how far away) or someones else or somethings else (an ecosystem, an economy), then it order to be ethical the gain it brings you and others must at least outweigh the harm you cause. Again, if it doesn't work, who cares? Buzz like a vibrator and send as much positive energy out into the universe as you can stand. But if it works then you are required to take responsibility not only for the positive energy and desires you send out but also for the negative consequences that they entail.

This is why, as much as I joke about magic never getting me a mansion and a harem, I'd never even ask for them. It would be wrong. It would, if it worked, dominate the free will of other persons and entail a whole lot of negative consequences that I'm not prepared to accept responsibility for. At least 99% of the ritual work I do is on and about me, for precisely this reason.

Of course, it wouldn't work; and it wouldn't work because magic is not a catalogue through which one can order whatever one wishes and have it show up on time and without surprises. I can sit here and imagine myself a new pancreas until the end of time; I can cast spells and do rituals and trance myself a hundred times an hour. I'm stuck with the broken one I have. Magic would probably be effective in helping me to manage it better, in encouraging me to test more often and eat healthier foods; it also might nudge the world a bit closer to a cure, maybe, if I'm lucky. But the actual physical pancreas in my actual physical abdomen is not going to repair itself tomorrow.

If you buy the energy explanation, think about it: there are six billion other human beings on planet earth sending their own energy out into the universe. You could be sending out positive energy around the clock but if it's counterbalanced by the contradictory desires of the other six billion people sharing this world with you, it's not going to get you anything.

Now imagine the universe itself, all of those planets and galaxies and whatever or whoever else is out there. And you, little speck that you are, here and now, with your own paltry store of energy. If you manage even a tiny little nudge, that's phenomenal.

Posted by Andrea at 11:28 AM | Comments (17)

The words get in the way

I love words. I spend hours each day voluntarily mucking around with them, shifting them, inverting them, and putting them in disguise. The right words (whether my own or others) give me a physical thrill, and I can read a beautiful sentence dozens of times and not tire of it. I learned to read when I was three; I do not remember a time when I did not know what letters and words meant and did.

But I know that words are slippery, manipulative little devils as adept at changing reality as they are at passively reflecting or revealing it.

How good are you at drawing likenesses?

No, really. When you sit down to sketch a face, does it look like a real face, or a representation of a face?

The most likely explanation for this that I've read (and 'fess up, most of you (with the exception of two or three readers who can draw) can't draw a lifelike face anymore than I can) is that the words get in the way. We look at the face; we think, 'let's see, the eye goes here'; and then, instead of drawing the eye the way it actually looks, we draw "AN EYE," the simulacrum of an eye. The label EYE prevented us from seeing the eye that was there, and instead, we drew the eye we imagined.

~~~Andrea Promotes Herself to Neurobiology Professor~~~

Different parts of our brains are responsible for processing different kinds of sensory information. You knew this already, yes? There is a part of the brain that processes visual information, another part that processes auditory information, another part that processes tactile information, and so on. The part of the brain that processes language is Broca's area.

As befitting such a complex job--you need to know what words mean, what they look like, how to put them together, what words sound like, how they attach into sentences and paragraphs, and so on--it is in the frontal lobe. Yes, that's right--the part of your brain you are probably familiar with as the root of "frontal lobotamy," because in that procedure, it was the frontal lobe that was damaged. On purpose. To attain mental health. (Doctors.)

The evolution of the brain went something like this: the hindbrain, responsible for basic motor functions like regulating heartrate and breathing (way at the back of your head), came around the time we were all reptiles. When mammals appeared, so did something called the paleomammalian brain (which regulates social, emotional and sexual behaviours), just in front of the hindbrain. Later, primates added the cerebrum, where information processing takes place. Our own ancestors modified the cerebrum with a highly convoluted neocortex and, finally, the frontal lobe, which is what allows us to imagine the future, appreciate our mortality, control our impulses, solve problems, become socialized, and speak.

The new structures did not replace the old structures, but were simply added on top--like getting a set of speakers for your stereo system, or adding a video card to your PC. We still cart around those old reptilian brains in our skulls. And the old mammalian brains. We couldn't live without them. We still need to breathe, balance, feel things, and negotiate complex social relationships. In fact, the love a mother feels for her child is located in the reptilian hindbrain--right along with control of breathing and pulse, and nowhere near complex abstract thought. (This explains a few things.)

(A few more links on brain evolution, if you're interested:

http://www.primatesociety.com/Into/survival/timeline/textEvol.html

http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/d/d_05/d_05_cr/d_05_cr_her/d_05_cr_her.html)

~~~Andrea Takes Off Her Neurobiologist Hat, Whereupon it is Immediately Squashed and Incinerated by Real, Actual, Employed Neurobiologists~~~

Yes. Well.

Anyway, the point is this: the part of our brains involved in processing and producing language is very, very small, and it is, evolutionarily speaking, new. Yet we walk around all day and night experiencing ourselves as a constant internal monologue: "I'm cold. I'm freezing. I'd better get a sweater. Ah, that's better. What a nice sunset. I want a snack. I'd like chocolate but I should probably eat some produce, and those peppers are going bad. Still hungry. I'll get a cup of tea. That'll distract me. Wow, what a gorgeous sunset. I love this song." The actual experiences are almost immediately bypassed in favour of the words used to describe them. But, just as the words used to label body parts interfere with our ability to draw them, the words used to label our experiences can interfere not only with the way we remember an experience, but with the experience itself.

Buddhists call turning off the internal monologue "achieving mindfulness" or "being present."

Wiccans call it "getting to Younger Self."

~~~Andrea Puts On a Pointy Black Hat~~~

Rather than dividing consciousness into an Id, Ego and Superego (a la Freud), or Conscious and Subconscious/Unconscious, wicca as I am familiar with it divides the mind into a Talking Self, Younger Self and Deeper Self.

Talking Self: The monkey brain, right up front, that never shuts up. The part that takes every object and every experience and turns it into words so fast you don't even realize it's happening. The brain that is so busy analyzing it never sees.

Younger Self: The mammalian and reptilian brains, deep in the back, that think and experience in emotion, colour, sound. The parts of your brain that are incapable of analysis and so must, necessarily, deal in primary, unmediated experience.

Deeper Self: Jung's collective unconscious, essentially: the group mind. The interesting thing about wicca is that this is included in the self. As in deep ecology, the boundaries of the self are not thought to be at the edge of the skin or some arbitrary distance beyond it defined as "personal space," but to also include those things that one has a connection to, whether a family, a home, a nation, a community, a religion, a place, and so on. Which defies the standard definition of "self-interest," and on purpose, too.

A lot of magic is simply a collection of tricks to get the Talking Self to shut the fuck up for five minutes in a row.

This is harder for some of us than others. You know, those of us who are excessively wordy. Not that I know anyone like that or (ahem) am like that myself.

I say that wiccan spells are analogous to prayer, and that's true, with one all-important exception. Prayers are words. Spells aren't. In spells, words are chosen carefully and used sparingly, with full consciousness of the warping effect they can have. A spell or ritual is essentially a carefully constructed experience which depends on colour, sound, scent, image, and so on, to communicate its intent. You're bringing the rest of your brain in on the action because, while the different brains definitely communicate, their experiences are different and they don't necessarily agree with each other. Your hindbrain knows things and feels things that your frontal lobe simply can't; and once the frontal lobe has had its way with your hindbrain's primary experiences, they often can't be recognized.

Trances and divination are the same. One finds a way, by any means necessary, to get around, over, under, through Talking Self to Younger Self.

The world looks like a very different place when I'm not seeing it through a haze of words.

The whole sensation of experience is different when Broca's Area has been unseated, if only temporarily. I have, once or twice, used the opportunity of a long meeting in which I had nothing to contribute or a presentation to enter a mini trance, and then had a question directed at me--and the difficulty of understanding, first of all, that the sounds had meanings, and I was expected to do something with them; and then determining what those meanings were, and what meanings I should be directing back, and how; and the sensation of those words coming from a long way away, as if I were unconnected to them, and the sounds coming out of my mouth were unconnected to me, was odd, though not unpleasant. (Fortunately, the answers seemed to work; no one has yet given me a "what the fuck are you on" look.) Even the feeling of speaking is different, as if one's mouth and tongue and throat are thick. Speaking is effort.

~~~Andrea Takes off the Pointy Black Hat (which, fortunately, remains in one piece)~~~

The strange thing is that when Broca's Area grabs the reins again, the horses are easier to manage. One might assume that once you've gotten around, behind, under the words that their inadequacy might be too glaring, their ability to manipulate memory and consciousness too galling. Instead, their other attributes--their sounds, their rhythms--become easier to apprehend. The right word isn't the one that glitters on the surface of the neocortex like a diamond, which Broca's area can easily interpret and respond to. The right word is the one that uses every ounce of heft, every glottal stop and slice, to drive a spike into the hindbrain. Or, as le Guin wrote, once your mind enters into the true rhythm of a story, it's impossible to choose the wrong word; one rides the wave of the mind.

Of course, the horses want to go somewhere different than you do. But once you know this, once words are no longer seen as passive sounds but as active constructs that chip and chisel at the edges of our experience and memories and meanings to force them into boxes, it is easier to, at the very least, choose the most appropriate box. And keep a sense of the edges of the object which do not precisely fit inside it.

When Frances was a few months old, and before this blog went public, I wrote a post called "ten things I never want to forget." One of the ten was "My hand once covered her torso."

My hand once covered her torso. My hands, like my feet, are on the small side; and once, a flat closed hand placed on her back would cover her from neck to legs.

I remember that. I remember thinking it, sitting in the glider in the dark, her sleeping head nestled on my shoulder. I remember the fine, wispy dark blond hair clinging to her sweaty scalp. I remember the cannonball butt of cloth diapers on small babies. I remember her legs curling, just under my breasts; I remember carrying her around the house, her head in my elbow and her feet in my hand. And I remember those tiny feet, that each of them could be encompassed by one closed hand.

But her hands--how did they feel, clasped around my finger? How big were they? What was the precise roundness of her cheeks? I remember later on, thinking that they were like baseballs, but not then. How did her cry sound? How did her back feel, when I lay my hand on it and noted its size? How smooth was her skin? Later on I described it as velour, but then? She was always slim; did her shoulderblades poke my fingers? When I rubbed my fingers against her tiny ribs, how small were they? The hollow between her ribs and her hips--was it as soft as it is now? So many edges that didn't fit in the box; what I have captured by that one phrase feels complete, but it's not. It's not even a snapshot.

Worse--what of that memory is real, and what is invented? I remember pressing my hand to her back and marvelling at its small size; I remember the angle of my hand, the angle of her head, her back rising and falling with her breath as she slept. But did that really happen? Or do the words I put to that experience encourage me to fill in the blank spaces with imagined details I could never actually recall?

Words feel complete, but only because we erase what isn't captured by them. We structure our lives and store them in memory as words. They are efficient; they collapse a lot of meaning and experience within a small space that can be stored in a handful of neurons. But their very efficiency is their cost. In the end, all we have are the words. Between the microscopic flecks of almost-matter that words are, are the yawning chasms of empty space--what words miss. What's lost. What they twist and misrepresent.

But knowing this, I can choose which words to remember; and choosing which words to remember means choosing which memories to keep, and which to let go. If I remember those evanescent moments of joy from Frances's infancy, like sudden shafts of light in a dark room, it is because I chose the words to fit to them. I chose the moments to remember, and I chose how I wanted to remember them. By selecting the words, I selected and then rebuilt the moment, altering a documentary photograph into a flattering sketch.

Posted by Andrea at 6:45 AM | Comments (13)

Blog Witch

"Magic is the art of changing consciousness at will." Dion Fortune

In wicca, everywhere is sacred space. There are no churches, no temples, no special groves; everywhere is the centre of an infinite circle, including where you are right now: a cabin in a northern boreal forest, the computer lab at a university on the east coast, a scorching afternoon in a southern garden with the laptop on a chaise lounge, watching a fine drizzle on the Pacific coast through your living room window. The unergonomic chair giving you carpal tunnel or the worn-out mattress you're sprawled on, with a spring poking you in the rib. Everywhere is the centre.

In a panentheistic religion (where god/dess is believed to be in the world) this is inevitable. Deity--the gods--aren't entities living in some special place that is above and beyond the earth who can only be contacted in particular earthly spots. They are the earth. The keyboard I am typing this on, the sun's glare on the windshield during my morning drive in to work, the trickles of melting snow on the road, the bits of pine tree littering the backyard, the monitor you are reading these words on, right now, are all god/dess. Yes, wiccans generally spend a part of their rituals calling the goddess from the moon, and the god from the sun; but these are metaphors. It would be more correct to state that the purpose of these portions of the rituals are meant to remind us of something that is always true: s/he is here, always, in the half-cold tea sitting in the mug beside the mousepad, in the voice of a friend on the telephone, in your fingers, your eyes. As you sit, this very moment, reading this, goddess is running through your veins.

A lot of people wrap themselves in knots trying to prove or disprove that magic "works." But whether or not it "works" depends on what it is you are asking it to do; if you asked me whether a pair of scissors "work," I'd say "yes" if you want to cut open a bag of potato chips and "no" if you need to scrub the bathroom sink. Does it work? Do you mean, can I turn you into a frog? No. If it worked that way, I'd have a mansion on a ten-acre lot, and a harem. I have none of those things so, clearly, that's not what it's good for.

Magic is the art of changing consciousness at will. All effective writing, for instance, is magic.

This goes beyond opinion pieces, where the goal is to change someone's mind. Mind-changing is important and valuable; but changing consciousness is something other, and it works on both the writer and the reader.

John Gardner called fiction "a vivid and continuous dream"; it is, but creating that vivid and continuous dream is magic. To arrange words on a page or a screen in such a way that their combined rhythm, sibilance, pattern and repetition, imagery, symbols, metaphors, allusions, influences, situations, scenes, tension, takes the reader out of their uncomfortable chair and puts them in a cafe in Paris or a battleground on Middle Earth or a rolling deck on a Viking ship at sea, to make them more aware of the imaginary events you have put together than they are of the ache in their right shoulder and their scratchy socks, is to alter their state of consciousness at will. It's magic. And if, once the incantation ends, the reader is transformed in some small way, then the magic was very strong.

But it isn't just the readers who are affected--especially here, on the blogosphere.

One of the rites of passage, for a wiccan, is to choose a name. The right name, like the right word, is powerful; it doesn't just reflect reality, but shapes it. We become what we name ourselves. When I first chose Athena Dreaming, it didn't quite fit; but now it does, like an old glove, and far better than my given one. I didn't just choose a name for myself; I chose my self.

Choosing a name pales in comparison to what we do every day on personal blogs.

Last year I struggled with the sense that blog-Andrea was fast becoming someone different than life-Andrea. By choosing what to include, what to leave out, and the words to frame what's here, it is inevitable that the version of me who emerges here differs from the version of me who brushes her teeth in the morning after eating an english muffin with peanut butter. Blog-Andrea talks a lot more, for one thing; she uses more ten-dollar words, she is more open, she is braver and stronger, better organized, and she doesn't lounge around on the couch on Saturday mornings in her pyjamas until noon. The more people who read the blog, the more of a difference I noticed, because the me who was created in the mind of each reader was added together in some kind of weird synergistic calculus, from which the me I really am was then subtracted. If you think back to the paragraph on fiction, imagine how different the Viking ship in your head was from the Viking ship in my head, and the Viking ship in the heads of the few hundred other people who will read this post. The specific creak of the wood, snap of the sails, the position of your feet on the boards, the presence of other people, the size of the ship, all of these details that I did not include will have been filled in by your imagination. And so it is when I talk about me--the colour of my hair, the clothes I am wearing, my tone of voice, the presence or absence of dirty dishes in the kitchen sink or a ring around the bathtub, will all have been filled in by your imagination; even if I am excruciatingly honest in every detail that I relate, there is so much that I do not and cannot relate that blog-Andrea and life-Andrea helplessly differentiate. This is then amplified and reflected back when readers take what I give them and fill in the blanks (which is exactly what you're supposed to do--still, it's a strange feeling). Sometimes when someone posts a particularly supportive comment, I feel like shouting, "My socks don't match! I never make the bed!"

But here is the cautionary tale: they then approach each other again. Not because blog-Andrea becomes more like life-Andrea, but because life-Andrea becomes more like blog-Andrea. Every day I write myself into being, here; and it changes me. Every day I use words to reflect my own experience; but they shape that experience, too. They alter my consciousness. They alter me.

So to anyone coming along behind me on the blogging path, who is slowly beginning to feel the audience and the construction diverging from her sense of herself, who is wondering to what extent the blog-self reflects or diverges from the life-self, who is seeing the amplification of difference from the audience, I would say, step carefully. Choose wisely. Be as honest as you can, spill your guts, open a vein and bleed all over the monitor; but when you lie, and you will have to even if only in ommission, lie carefully. Be sure the persona projected on your blog is a self you don't mind becoming. Because you will.

Blogs are magic.

We make the blogs, and then the blogs make us.

Make your blog-self a you worth being.

~~~~~

Dear Readers, I'm feeling a little spent. There wasn't much sleep last night (and is the 'last night' as I write this the same 'last night' when you read it?). I feel the last of my energy dribbling out through my feet; my blood is only blood, after all, and the imagined four readers at the four corners of the continent have vanished back into the ether. I'd like to thank them, though, for involuntarily participating in my conceit. And now it's lunch time. I don't know about you, but I'm starving.

The circle is open, but never broken. So must it be.

Posted by Andrea at 7:18 AM | Comments (14)

Want/on

wan·ton [won-tn]
–adjective 1. done, shown, used, etc., maliciously or unjustifiably: a wanton attack; wanton cruelty.

Want is a complicated thing. We live lives saturated with want; yet concurrently, are told that having it would be bad for us. Does it lead to lives inevitably filled with frustration? Is unsatisfied want the definition of the modern condition? Is that what we are today--bundles of tormented nerve endings?

Or am I projecting all over this? Is the message of renunciation yet another feature of the fundamentalist hangover I've been carting around for fifteen years? Suffering is noble--asceticism is the path to enlightenment and virtue. A strong person is someone who can do without. Right? A strong person is the one who leaves the last cookie on the plate, the lilac shirt in the store, the dreams boxed up in the closet with the Christmas decorations.

I thought I'd dealt with this at seventeen, when I was dragged kicking and screaming from Christianity and still, perversely, for two years, convinced that my immortal soul was damned by it. I'd been taught growing up that witches were evil satan-worshipping handmaidens to the apocalypse, paving the way for the antichrist (sure to show up any day), who revelled in blood-soaked rituals at midnight. I still, at my conversion, believed it (how I managed to convert under the circumstances is a long story for another day, and one I've covered before).

And if you're going to hell anyway, why not deserve it?

2. deliberate and without motive or provocation; uncalled-for; headstrong; willful: Why jeopardize your career in such a wanton way?

Why not break into houses with troublemaking boys on a cold night, to carry away a trinket or two and have a snack? Why not climb into stolen vehicles and go for a ride? Why not make out with someone else's boyfriend? Why not say yes to the cute stranger at the club where I'd snuck in underage? Should I have been worried about jail? About pregnancy? About disease? I was going to hell.

These are not the two years I'm proudest of, and they seemed poised to continue indefinitely, had I not been introduced in a university class to the wiccan Rede: Do what you want, but harm none.

Harm none.

Up until that moment, I would have perceived the bare concept of wiccan ethics as a tragic farce, a helplessly self-deluding oxymoron. Wiccan ethics! Might as well talk about the ethics of stomping on puppy heads. But somehow it struck at the right moment from the right angle to chip out a tiny crack in the fundamentalist armour: I knew who I was, I knew what I was, but until then I was not capable of believing that it might not be a bad thing.

3. without regard for what is right, just, humane, etc.; careless; reckless: a wanton attacker of religious convictions.

Harm none.

I latched on to those words and never let go.

It took a long time before I even considered the words before the comma: "Do what you want."

What I wanted? Wanted? Certainly what I wanted--the very idea of wanting itself--was bad?

Isn't that why I was in environmental studies in the first place? Because unrestrained wanting and possessing were destroying the planet and making a mockery of human rights anywhere in the world where the population wasn't primarily white?

Wicca is a religion without texts, which is not to say that it is without books. There are books aplenty; but they are in the spirit of gentle encouragements or helpful suggestions, not pronouncements or commands. Very few writings on wicca have attained the status of text--that is, a piece of writing you can't wriggle away from and still claim to be practicing wicca. Once I'd wrapped my mind around the idea that maybe witches weren't all fang-toothed goat-fuckers, so perhaps I ought to read something about wicca written by an actual witch, and tracked down some books, I found there were only three: the Rede, the Threefold Law (essentially, karma with a kick), and the Charge of the Goddess.

I'll be the first to admit that all three were written in the mid-twentieth century by people who were probably stoned at the time, but regardless of their origins, they are texts. And the Charge made me squirm like a worm on a hook. Seriously, they had to be kidding?

"Sing, feast, dance, make music and love, all in My Presence, for Mine is the ecstasy of the spirit and Mine also is joy on earth..."

Which seemed to land me square back at reconciling "wiccan" and "ethics." I could, just barely, conceive of a morality in which revelry and extra-marital sex weren't wrong, but as religious obligation? And holy hell, you couldn't even just lie back and think of England. You had to enjoy it.

What had I gotten myself into?

4. sexually lawless or unrestrained; loose; lascivious; lewd: wanton behavior.

What did I do?

I ignored it. I hung my practice almost entirely on "harm none" and forgot, or tried to forget, about "wanting." I channeled wicca down the well-worn path of Christian asceticism and attempted to calculate each action in terms of its potential harm. The harm of the loss of pleasure did not factor into it, although the harm to third-world slave labour and the food web of the Pacific Salmon did (and still does, and should). It doesn't fit that well. If one focuses on the Rede, it almost works; but the Charge is too insistent in its hedonism:

"Let My worship be in the heart that rejoices, for all acts of love and pleasure are My rituals."

The Rede is much more slippery than it appears, even when one does focus only on avoiding harm (and I think the distinction between harm and hurt is critical--one can be harmed without being hurt, and hurt without being harmed). The complete avoidance of harm is in practice so impossible for any decision larger than "Shall I drink my tea now, or thirty minutes from now?" that one is left weighing the harm of this vs. the harm of that, the harm to me vs. the harm to him or to her, the harm in the near-term vs. the harm in the long-term. No wonder people like commandments; they are easier, much easier, compared to calculating complex equations based on imperfect knowledge all day every day.

But none of this excuses me for eliminating pleasure from the equation.

5. extravagantly or excessively luxurious, as a person, manner of living, or style.

My brain runs smoothly through the rut of renunciation largely from training: I was taught that our purpose here was to suffer nobly and die, hopefully in order to avoid suffering horribly for eternity. But it's slowly clicking over to the other track--very slowly, almost painfully, in bits and bursts of startled revelations.

Surely clean air and water are more important to our happiness than ten purses apiece and matching footwear? Surely a world without war is more likely to bring joy than is the personal transportation we all rely on, and the daily endless violations of human rights in other countries required to sustain it? Surely the point of all this environmentalism and human rights business is not simply because it's the right thing? Isn't it because they will increase human pleasure and happiness that they are the right things? Is that renunciation, or is it simply a recognition that the material items we have been taught are supposed to be pleasurable, in fact are not, and that they bring more harm than joy?

But, goddamn, it's hard to break a lifetime's habit of putting pleasure and the self last and act as if joy matters. On a large scale, I have no trouble intellectualizing all of these different thought processes and supporting the pursuit of joy for the Masses, unwashed and otherwise. But for me? OK, hang on: I have a nice house, I live comfortably, I have political rights, I'm not owned by anyone...so I shouldn't want anything. I run in mental circles, knowing that I don't want what I have but feeling that I should and trying to talk myself into it, until I get dizzy and fall over.

6. luxuriant, as vegetation.
7. Archaic. a. sportive or frolicsome, as children or young animals.

It's taken a long time--maybe too long--to realize that just because ninety-nine per cent of human beings alive today want what I have, doesn't mean I have to want it too. It doesn't make me wrong for not wanting it. That, perhaps, what's wrong is trying to force myself to want what I've been told I should want. To allow myself only small breaks from convention, small deviations from the mold.

b. having free play: wanton breezes; a wanton brook.

Have you ever felt as if you carried around inside you, cushioned deeply, a fragile singularity? As if somewhere below your heart there beat a different pulse, a slower one; and if you let it, if you stepped back and closed your eyes, it might become a universe? As if sometimes it were beating on the inside of your skin like a drum, so that you felt it might crack and split? And then who would you be?

The Charge ends: "I have been with you from the beginning, and I am That which is attained at the end of desire."

At the end of desire. What exists at the end of desire? If I followed desire down the rabbit-hole, would I find Wonderland? Or the destruction and despair we're warned of? Would it make me a monster? Or would I find, at the end of that thrumming string, the goddess waiting for me?

Posted by Andrea at 6:46 AM | Comments (12)

Look at me! I'm evil!

Or at least, a mom in Gwinnett County thinks so:

"Laura Mallory, a mother of four, told a hearing officer for the Gwinnett County Board of Education on Tuesday that the popular fiction series [Harry Potter] is an 'evil' attempt to indoctrinate children in the Wicca religion."

Mothers, grab your children and run for the hills! My secret is out. If I ever get a chance to corner your innocent offspring, I will brandish my secret copies of Harry Potter and brainwash them with talk of "environmentalism" and "sex equality" and "paying attention to the rhythms of nature." Then, when they're least expecting it, blammo! Satan will pop out from behind the curtain and their souls will be ours.

Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha!

That's when my skin will turn green, my nose will lengthen and sprout a couple of warts, I'll whip out my trusty black cape, and when all hope seems lost, an enterprising girl from Kansas will kill me with a bucket of water.

Oh, wait ... wrong book.

Posted by Andrea at 12:46 PM | Comments (20)

Down I Go

Wiccan mythology is based on a cycle called the wheel of the year. It was first written by the british, then re-written by californians, so over time I've adapted it to something a little more appropriate to southern Ontario. The link is actually pretty thorough for a brief summation, so give it a read if you're curious; my additions to it are below:

1. Imbolc, according to those crazy brits and californians, is supposed to be the first spring celebration. HA! I say, and again, HA! February 2 is never warm here, so in my calendar, Eostre (or Ostara; spring equinox) is the first spring celebration.

2. Lammas, on August 1/2, is supposed to be the first harvest festival. HA! again. Not here, it's not. August is the muggiest, steamiest, summeriest month of the year. Samhain (Hallowe'en; pronounced Sow-En) is meant to be another one. HA! By the end of October, no one's farming anymore. I restrict my harvest celebrations to the fall equinox (Mabon, or Harvest Home--along with a plurality of belief, we have a plurality of festival names).

The rest of it is pretty well the same.

And strangely--or maybe not--after twelve years of following the wheel on purpose, I find I'm entrained to it: by spring, I'm tired of myself. I want to get outside (of the house and of my own head). I turn my focus outwards, collect hobbies and causes like baseball cards, read about all kinds of important things like environmentalism and racism and feminism and politics and whatnot. I fill my head with new facts and new perspectives, never knowing what will stick or where it will go. Wicca is in the background--Beltane, Litha and Lammas are sadly neglected in my home. I can't be bothered, really.

The light starts falling. The air gets a bit nippy. A part of my mind (I don't know what to call it) wakes up, stretches, opens its eyes and--hello? What's this? Where did all this information come from? What is that perspective doing over there? What on earth did I think I was doing when I picked that hobby up? Like a cat, it stalks the altered inner landscape, sniffing everything, butting into it from as many directions as possible, leaping on top, and in general expressing disapproval until everything is made my own. Helplessly, my focus turns inward. Is there a world out there? I can't be bothered, really.

I am thinking about Samhain and Yule, already. Planning what cards to make, what foods to prepare for the Mabon meal, if I'd like to have a Samhain or Yule party, wondering where I left the pentacle. I pull out the tarot cards, blow the dust off the wicca books and creak them open again.

I will assume this is not typical. I would find it jarring, I think, not to have the outter world reflect these inner shifts to some degree. If the flowers were still blooming on Yule while my brain was preoccupied with change and rebirth and the possibility of redemption, it would be profoundly unnerving. But then, we've already decided that I'm hopelessly entwined with my current living-place.

We've had the fireplace on a few times, when it was just a bit chill but not cold enough to turn on the furnace (which had better work this winter). I'm filling up the vase on the mantle with pinecones from the backyard. I've ordered a large quantity of flour, for all the baking. It's time to get some pumpkins for the front walk. It's time to make soup for the freezer. I can't help it.

In Babylonian and Sumerian mythology, winter and summer were described as the descent of Ishtar into the underworld, the territory of her sister, Ereshkigal. (I prefer this one to Demeter and Persephone; the female characters are more active and powerful.) In some versions, she descends to save her consort (Tammuz) from death; but in the versions I prefer, she's just power-hungry and wants the underworld for herself.

There are seven gates between the surface world and Ereshkigal, and at each one, Ishtar must remove a piece of clothing, until she is standing in front of her sister, naked. She tries to take the throne; Ereshkigal defeats her and has her imprisoned/tortured/turned into a piece of rotting meat (depending on the version). On the surface world, the loss of Ishtar (the goddess of earth, the life force, and the chief diety in the pantheon) is felt:

"The bull springs not upon the cow, the ass impregnates not the jenny,
In the street the man impregnates not the maiden.
The man lies in his own chamber, the maiden lies on her side."

The method of her release depends on the version, but it often depends on a trick of Ea, another god; when Ishtar returns to the surface world, spring comes, and life returns.

I feel like Ishtar.

Not in the ruler-of-all, goddess-of-the-life-force sense, though that would be pretty cool, but in that I seem to make this annual journey. Down into the underworld for six months of introspection and quiet and inaction. Up into the real world for six months of activity and learning and noise. Pull inward, push outward, pull inward, push outward, and all the while I feel like things are starting to come together, making sense, like it all fits.

~~~~~

What does this mean for you?

Not much, except that I expect the contents of the blog will be changing. Less about the outside world, more about the inside world. Whether this is a good or a bad thing will depend on your preference. In either case, it doesn't much matter, because I couldn't change it if I tried.

Posted by Andrea at 8:24 AM | Comments (12)

Awesome.

TheStar.com - Court rules lesbians can be co-mothers

The Ontario Court has ruled that the government has 12 months to change laws that prevent lesbian couples from putting both mothers on the birth record. What fabulously amazing news. Yay Ontario!

Posted by Andrea at 7:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

So. How was your Easter?

One of the stranger things for me about Wicca in Canada is that Easter feels more like Ostara than Ostara does. March 21 is the vernal equinox (depending on the year) but it never feels like Spring until mid-April or later, when it is finally consistently above freezing and a few brave shrubs and trees start to bud out. I've thought of adapting the given holidays and dates (mostly developed in other, more temperate climates) for Canada by observing them when it seems most sensible to do so.

The unfortunate thing about spring in this part of Canada is that it's so damned short.

Winter lasts until mid-April; summer technically begins June 21 but it generally feels like summer by late May, hot and muggy and smoggy. So we have one blessed, glorious month of temperatures warm enough to be outside without a jacket, but not so warm that you feel like scurrying for air-conditioning. I try to take advantage, because once the smog hits my outdoor time will be severely curtailed.

Yesterday it was bright, cloudless, windless and 18 Celsius (fahrenheit translation up to you, Dear Readers). We went to the Zoo in the morning, and while F.E. napped I sat outside, listened to The Diamond Age on my iPod, and took some pictures of the shrubs in our backyard getting ready to leaf, the little buds swollen and just beginning to split. I finally can think about Wicca again.

Strange, isn't it? A faith that depends on nice weather to contemplate. But it's true, for me at least. Starhawk would be ashamed, but she lives in California and at a latitude where it seldom snows; I wonder how truly she can understand a Canadian's innate sense that Winter is the Enemy, and you court it at your peril. It is dark; sun sets by 4:00 or 4:30 in January. It is blisteringly cold, even packed to the gills in down and thermal fleece. And it lasts forever, November to April, even in a comparatively warm latitude such as mine. Winter is a time, for a wiccan like me, to sit safely behind the double-paned glass and admire the snow from a distance. No matter what my intentions, I cannot make myself go out into it. Maybe (probably?) it is a sign of a lack of commitment.

Regardless, it's warm again and I will soon be back out in the walking trails and local patches of wilderness, learning the local ecology, following the life cycles of the wildflowers and anything else I can observe, aided by my trusty camera, sketchbook and journal.

It's about time.

Posted by Andrea at 10:03 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Happy Ostara

Today, there will be exactly as much daylight as darkness.

Which means that tomorrow, there will be more daylight than darkness.

And before we know it, we Torontonians will be loving those glorious summer days that last until 9:30 at night, complaining about smog and saying "It's not the heat, it's the humidity."

It's hard to remember when we're still chomping at the bit with temperatures just above freezing and too many layers to put on to go get the mail.

But soon, soon.

Posted by Andrea at 10:54 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Happy Imbolc

The days are getting noticeably longer around here, and February is typically warmer than January. Spring is still a ways off, but we've crossed the hump. Thank the gods.

Imbolc isn't a holiday I usually celebrate with any fanfare. In this part of Canada, Imbolc is just a tease--no matter what the Groundhog says, winter ain't going nowhere for at least another six weeks. Winter loses its hold here grudgingly, incrementally; the air can start to smell like spring in February, but the last trees will bud and leaf in June. Between now and mid-April we will likely have several mini-thaws followed by snowstorms--spring followed by winter followed by spring followed by winter in quick succession until we've all given up hope of ever leaving the house without our winter coats on.

The moment I realize spring has arrived is the same every year: When the trees are blushing. That faint, light green of no-leaf-yet, but soon.

It sure as hell won't be today. But I'll drive home wearing my sunglasses instead of using the headlights and content myself that it's just around the corner.

Posted by Andrea at 10:41 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

RIP Rose

In one of the wicca books I'm working through (glacially), The Twelve Wild Swans, the authors recommend keeping fresh roses around to remind you visually of your intentions.

"How wasteful!" I thought. "And expensive. I should just get a potted rose plant and do that instead."

In my university days, I had a green thumb for houseplants. Somewhere along the way, it turned black and fell off.

I think I have some homework to do before I bring another rose bush home, only to have it petrify before my very eyes. In my defence, it took six or seven months to get to this point. Actually, that doesn't sound much better, does it?

Poor Rose. I'm so sorry.

Posted by Andrea at 9:37 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

The Solstice

I've written a lot already on how the winter solstice is the beginning of a season of death. It seems as if life heard me, and has decided to provide case studies.

CS#1: My SIL's father died suddenly about ten days ago.
CS#2: My husband's boss's sister died.
CS#3: A friend's grandmother died.
CS#4: A good friend of mine has lost her job--and her family depends on this income.

Not that I needed the reminders. Three of my grandparents died on or around Christmas.

The Winter Solstice--it's depressing.

Thank the gods for the lights and decorations and manic music and special food and gifts, because otherwise, it could be unbearable.

Posted by Andrea at 8:20 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack