"They honor the moon, not us"

The Solstice morning on which Walhydra published the previous post, she walking into her witchy sun porch to do tai chi and meditation and glanced at the art and poem for the 7th Lunation on her Lunar Calendar.

The Lunar Calendar: dedicated to the Goddess in Her many guises is an excellent Pagan resource which Walhydra has been using faithfully since she first discovered it in the early 1990s.

Each year's calendar shows the 13 lunation cycles, intermeshed with the Celtic Ogham tree alphabet from Beth/Birch through Ruis/Elder, and noting lunar rising, setting, void of course and sign transit times.

But, best of all, each lunar month has a poem and a piece of artwork.

When Walhydra looked at this lunar cycle's poem, she stopped still. Once again, synchronicity [see note]—since she doesn't believe in coincidence—had spoken directly to the moment.

Having just written and posted her piece, "Walhydra's Sadness," she read the following poem by Marge Piercy:

They honor the moon, not us
For Max (1995-2001)

A shriek in the night wakens me.
Then silence. Then the gloating
cries of a family of coyotes
over their kill. Rabbit,

fox, someone's beloved cat.
They took the Chief's dog
In front of him while he
called for his gun.

When they first began appearing
twenty years ago, they vanished
like smoke when you saw them.
Now they stand their ground.

They grin. Sometimes they advance.
They insist they, not we,
are the top of the food chain.
They view us as supermarkets.

They humble us, who squat
so heavily on the earth, despoiling
and restructuring. In our tidy
suburbs as well as piney woods

the close summer night is torn
by their howls of triumph
or worship of the bone white
moon who is their mistress.

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

Note: The term "synchronicity" is a Jungian coinage. There is reasonable skepticism about the supposed phenomenon. Robert Todd Carroll writes in his The Skeptic's Dictionary that "What it explains is more simply and elegantly explained by the ability of the human mind to find meaning and significance where there is none (apophenia)."

Walhydra would not argue with this alternative explanation at all.

The human mind is divine.

Walhydra's sadness

Back in Walhydra's teen years, when she was still a closeted sissy-boy but didn't know it yet, she latched onto this verse from the Book of Job (5:7)—though it's probably actually a line she got from Linus Van Pelt of Peanuts:

Man is born to suffering as the sparks fly upward.

Even though Walhydra's suffering had been, till then, mostly of the generic teen sort—or, more accurately, the generic teen-closeted-sissy-boy-but-doesn't-know-it-yet sort—she thought that just knowing that verse made her feel somehow more mature.

A few teen years later, Walhydra stumbled onto poet Archibald MacLeish's modern version of Job, J.B. Fascinated by a performance of the play, she devoured the script and memorized a key verse which just leapt out at her.

The line is spoken early in the play by Nickles (“Old Nick” aka Satan) to Mr. Zuss (God):

I heard upon his dry dung heap
That man cry out who cannot sleep:
"If God is God He is not good,
If God is good He is not God;
Take the even with the odd,
I would not sleep here if I could,
Except for the little green leaves in the wood
And the wind on the water."

Granted, this verse is the beginning of Nickles’ cynical challenge to Zuss to let him torment J.B. And, granted, Walhydra didn't actually believe its despairing message.

Nonetheless, she recited the line to herself throughout her college years, as if it posed a challenge to her that her own adolescent faux-cynicism wasn’t yet up to understanding.

Looking back on this verse decades later, Walhydra now recognizes that the problem it speaks to has, in fact, driven her spiritual puzzlement for much of her life.

"It just doesn't work for me to believe that God (or Goddess, or Whatever…) causes suffering. Or even that He/She allows it.

"I know that doesn’t make any sense," she equivocates. "But the only evil I see done is done by human beings."

"So why doesn't God stop evil?" she imagines the gentle reader asking. "Why does God let anyone hurt or kill innocent people?"

Walhydra pauses. "Why does God let a hawk kill an innocent mouse or a tsunami kill thousands of innocent human beings?"

"That's not the same."

"It's not?" says Walhydra, amused to find herself playing the Socratic role which Goddess usually plays opposite her.

Although she can't pretend to be wise or enlightened—well, actually, she pretends both all the time—Walhydra has somehow come to understand that human beings are mortal, just like other animals.

And that suffering just happens. Not as punishment. Not as fate. Just as part of the mechanics of being mortal.

"I don't mean that we shouldn't care about suffering. That we shouldn't avoid or try to prevent suffering for ourselves and others."

She glances about warily, feeling somewhat awkward about channeling Goddess.

"I just mean that it happens anyway."

Or, as a Zen precept she often quotes says:

Renunciation
is not about giving up
the things of the world,
but accepting
that they go away.

So...somewhere between the theist Jew's sparks flying upward and the nontheist Buddhist's things going away, last week on the New Moon, Walhydra called her mother, Senior Witch, early in the morning.

The faithful reader will remember that Senior Witch had relocated to the home of Walhydra's sister in Pensacola, Florida, back on St. Padric's Day. Alzheimer's was making it unsafe for her to continue her independent, self-sufficient life in her home of forty-some years.

"I'm okay, but I'm feeling homesick," Senior Witch says, reciting the line with which she now begins every phone call.

Walhydra is feeling more than usually connected this morning, so she says without even pausing, "Yes, Mom. I think homesickness is just going to be a part of your life from now on."

There's a momentary silence.

"There's no way to feel good about losing your friends and church and neighbors back in South Carolina," Walhydra continues boldly. "I wonder who your new neighbors are?"

This gets a bit of exploratory conversation going.

The problem is that Senior Witch has declining hours of lucidity, declining hours when she can retain the mental focus and energy of an adult. That means even the best ideas—even the ones she embraces with enthusiasm when Walhydra shares them—fade into wishful thinking or forgetfulness before she can act.

What's left, Walhydra recognizes sadly, is to give her mother moments of affirmation or hope. Moments which Senior Witch will relish—and then forget.

"Mom?" Walhydra continues. "You remember that my brother drove down from Massachusetts to meet me in Columbia last week?"

"Uh-huh?"

"Well, he got there a day before me to clean your whole house from top to bottom, to get it ready to sell."

"Uh-huh?"

"And—" A lump starts in Walhydra's throat. "And he told me that it didn't feel at all like an empty house. It still felt like a warm, lived in home. Your home."

"Oh."

Walhydra is well into Quaker vocal ministry by now, saying things she hasn't even thought of.

"So...you have the sadness of having left your home behind. But you have left behind a home, not just an empty house, for the next family to move into."

"Oh. Oh. I'm so glad you told me that!"

"I thought it was important for you to know."

"Yes."

Recalling that exchange tonight, near midnight on Summer Solstice a week later, Walhydra suspects that Senior Witch may not even remember it. She knows that she will repeat her brother's message whenever she can work it into conversation.

And the line about homesickness.

And the line about new neighbors.

Like any adult, trying through repetition to reassure a child that the world is safe—even glorious, even wondrous!—to live in, with little green leaves in the wood and wind on the water.

Even though the sparks fly upward and we can't avoid having things go away and we all die.

This doesn't feel very good to Walhydra right now.

But it's not God's fault.

It just is.

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

The birds and the bees

Walhydra is terrified.

She's been scared about the disappearance of the honeybees, ever since she first learned about it and other mass die-offs from Sara at Pagan Godspell.

And now, from today's New York Times:

Millions of Missing Birds, Vanishing in Plain Sight
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: June 19, 2007

Last week, the Audubon Society released a new report describing the sharp and startling population decline of some of the most familiar and common birds in America: several kinds of sparrows, the Northern bobwhite, the Eastern meadowlark, the common grackle and the common tern. The average decline of the 20 species in the Audubon Society’s report is 68 percent.

Oh, my Goddess!

What are we to do?

I Trust Snape

On a recent slow hour at the reference desk, Walhydra was doing what all good librarians do to improve their professional skills: playing with Google.

Being for this incarnation a gay male, she has discovered a new fascination with the newly adult version of Daniel Radcliffe—especially the full Monty version displayed in the promotion for his stint as Alan Strang in the London production of Peter Shaffer's Equus.

As one of Walhydra's gay friends remarked, upon seeing the fully *ahem* uncut version of Daniel's famous pose in front of the white horse, "Ah, now I see where all his baby fat went."

*ahem, ahem*

Since she'd gotten tired of looking for new pict...uh...reviews of this performance, Walhydra decided she would look for something about the real hero of the Harry Potter opus. Severus Snape.

To her delight, Walhydra has discovered I Trust Snape, an online "community for those Harry Potter fans who still believe in Severus Snape, for whatever reason, and for whatever theory."

Walhydra read the first Harry Potter book back in 1999, in library school, when she decided to see what all the fuss was about.

She's never been particularly patient with censors, especially faux-religious ones of any stripe. If she squints, she can find some sorrow for these folks, whose suppressed fear of the world is clearly so great that they believe they have to stomp out anything they don't understand.

But, to quote Andrei Codrescu of The Exquisite Corpse, she sometimes wishes "the Rapture would happen and take them all, so the rest of us could get on with our lives."

Anyway....

"Hey," Walhydra noted, as she read.

"This is just like dozens of juvenile fantasy books I read as a child back in the 1950s, before anyone thought about the 'Religious' being 'Right'!

"I don't think those books did any damage to me."

[Some might beg to differ.]

She harrumphed. Twice.

"And besides, it's getting boys to read. Grade school boys. Reading a big, hardcovered book that doesn't have colored pictures and talk balloons. How DARE they censor this?!!!"

Back to the future...uh...present....

Walhydra has always recognized Snape as a kindred spirit.

Granted, he wasn't exactly a teacher's pet, in the normal sense of the phrase.

Yet clearly (or, rather, very mirkily), J.K. Rowling has buried beneath the obnoxious, ambivalent surface of this character real depths of complexity and potential for heroism.

Depths which include a fierce, immovable sort of ethical stance which no one except Dumbledore seems to recognize.

So...Walhydra is holding her breath (well, not really) until the seventh and final book arrives at her doorstep in July.

She hopes Ms. Rowling hasn't totally flimflammed her.

She wonders whether, if it turns out that Rowling has made Snape into a traitor to Dumbledore, she will burn the books out of her own sense of betrayal.

In the meantime, she has added this icon to her sidebar, so that others might explore the marvelously silly website she has stumbled onto.



Play with it.

Faux News

As an addendum to the previous post:

Juan Cole at Informed Comment notes this story by Dan Marsh of The Daily Shiftings Herald. Cole writes:

Fox Cable News spent more time than other cable news networks covering Anna Nicole Smith, and spent much less time covering Iraq than the other networks. Gee, back in 2003 they seemed to have a lot about Iraq....

At last, an explanation for the 33% who think Bush is doing a good job in Iraq! They are not getting any news about what is going on there from Republican Party t.v.!

Walhydra's reply: " 'Nuff said."

Who gives a *bleep* about Paris Hilton?

Walhydra realizes that, by publishing this post, she is committing the very culture crime she is getting ready to rant against, but...oh, well....

The faithful reader will have noticed several previous occasions when Walhydra has flown off the handle about being famous, exploiting someone's so-called fame to sell headlines, or being gullible about that fame.

She figured she'd said enough, already!

And then, today at lunch, she noticed peripherally that Fox "News" was broadcasting live coverage—for over half an hour—of Paris Hilton's mansion. That is, the mansion and the crowd of newscasters waiting in front of it for the sheriff to arrive and ferry her back to court.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!!

It wasn't even as interesting—not that she was watching, you understand—as that boring "chase" of the white Bronco years ago.

Walhydra has mentally ill street people customers at the library who are way more interesting.

But she thinks she's beginning get a better sense of what this is all about.

Maybe.

People have probably always had a perverse fascination with those who appear to be more powerful, more important, more attractive, more rich, more more than they are.

People envy these folks. We want to be like them. We want what we think they have, and we want other people to admire and envy us as we do these folks.

And we want to see them FALL!

That's it. We want our resentment of their privilege to be rewarded by the disclosure—live on Fox "News" and on every tabloid cover at the grocery checkout—that they are utter failures as human beings. That they screw up, over and over and over, even more than we do.

Walhydra feels both better and worse, having realized this.

Better, because she thinks she can be the eensiest bit forgiving toward others who actually pay attention to Paris Hilton, et al.

Worse, because she just paid attention—again.

Oh, well....

Rooting for our enemies

Walhydra had an interesting surprise this morning from one of her old buddies on the Crone Thread listserv.

A dear cyberfriend named Igraine has been reading Rob Brezsny's book
Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.

Brezsny is Wahydra's favorite astrologer, because he insists upon finding good readings for every occasion. Someone has called him the Master of Rowdy Bliss, and Walhydra totally agrees.

Rather than waste her own words giving an inadequate third-hand description, she's going to give you Igraine's words:

I can't even begin to describe this book. Oddly, or maybe not, it was the only one in the store when I was there, and it was kind of "stuck in" a place where I think someone had just put it down. It really called out to me.

Suffice to say that I am thoroughly re-examining my attitudes and outlooks on a lot of things. Particularly in the political arena. I am coming to realize that our politicians and our "enemies," i.e., terrorists, etc., are probably our greatest benefactors and teachers right now because they are working SO HARD to show us how not to be.

So, I bless them. I thank them. Dare I say, I ENCOURAGE them? Do your worst. Show us how bad-awful we can be so we'll be sick of it and want to be better. I realize they are the perfect teachers, here at the perfect time.

The "critical mass" is growing. Those people all over the world who want "things" to be better, to figure out new ways of relating with each other, our next door neighbors on the street, and our geographic neighbors in the world. It will happen, it IS happening. Thank the teachers, and then move on.

What you resist, persists, so quit resisting it, and go out and create the world you want to be in. Sometimes, things DO go away if you ignore them.

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

Whadaya mean, "cranky"?

The faithful reader may remember that Walhydra doesn't like to admit how much she secretly craves acclamation.

It takes great agility and acting skill to exercise the art of teacher's-petitude while at the same time feigning a humble, even self-deprecating, normalcy to peers—so as not to get ostracized or beat up on the playground.

This being the case, Walhydra acknowledges a sort of delighted shock that Sara Sutterfield Winn over on Pagan Godspell has tagged Walhydra's Porch as one of her five choices for the Thinking Blogger Award.

This makes Walhydra particularly proud—with a sort of warmed cockles of the heart feeling, whatever that means—because it was Sara's blog which breathed new life into Walhydra's faltering sense that incarnation is a blessing rather than a curse.

Thank you, Sara.

Most of the Thinking Blogger tagging Walhydra has seen has been passing among her Quaker and Pagan and Quaker-Pagan and Pagan-Quaker cyber-acquaintances. She's been amused to notice their typically Quakerish effort not to just tag each other back in a mutual admiration go-around.

Walhydra will honor this ethic, but she wants to affirm four blogs she would have tagged, had they not already been named:

Sara, of course, for Pagan Godspell
Cat Chapin-Bishop and Peter Bishop, for Quaker Pagan Reflections
Liz Opp, for The Good Raised Up, and
Robin M, for What Canst Thou Say?

It was these folks who first drew Walhydra into the "Convergent Friends" conversation, as well as the overlapping conversation among Pagan, Christocentric, Jewish and Nontheist folk. Such blessings!

Here are the five blogs Walhydra wants to add to the meme-ification process:

Simon St. Laurent, on Light and Silence, whose deep, rich research into the history and thought of early Quakers caught Walhydra's attention last winter, when Simon was writing about Quakers and Montanists and Fox on the Trinity, Spirit.

Richard M, on A Place to Stand, especially in his recent opening up of important cross-boundary concerns with his Behind the Hedge post.

Marshall Massey, on The Quaker Magpie Journal. Actually, most of what Walhydra has read of Marshall's is in his lucid, thought-provoking comments appended to discussions on many other blogs. The two which have helped her most recently in clarifying her own understanding are this one on Jesus and the "new face" of God and this one on the "lamp of YHWH."

In a totally different realm of the blogosphere, Steven C. Clemons, on The Washington Note. Several times a day, Clemons shines a sharp, progressive Washington insider's spotlight into the fog of Foggy Bottom.

Finally, Walhydra's librarian colleague, known to the blogosphere as Alonzo Moseley (FBI), on Acrentropy. Walhydra has no TV, misses most of the movies she wanted to see, and hasn't a clue why the fate of the world depends upon what happens in Lost. She delights in learning about all of this—plus chicken caesar salad—from Alonzo.

Congratulations to these folks.

Should you choose to participate, please make sure you pass this list of rules to the blogs you are tagging.

The participation rules are simple:

If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
Optional: Proudly display the 'Thinking Blogger Award' with a link to the post that you wrote.

And....
Blessèd Be.