By now the gentle reader knows what an unrepentant grouch Walhydra wants everyone to think she is...but there's an odd little Celtic cross-quarter sabbat which always manages to get her feeling like, well, maybe all is not lost.
It's called, variously, Imbolc, the Feast Day of Brigit (with various spellings), Candlemas, Groundhog Day, etc., etc., etc.
Rather than filter the information through her own murky lenses, though, she has decided to point her friends directly to some of her favorite online sources.
The one from which she stole...uh, borrowed...the accompanying image is celtictale.com.
Another source she likes—since she's always liked Mike Nichols' writing—is Candlemas: The Light Returns.
Then there's this one: The Celtic Year: Imbolc.
But today, the piece which moves her the most comes from Sara Sutterfield Winn's blog, Pagan Godspell.
Here's the passage which got Walhydra excited:
Imbolc is a time of quickening—the flexing and stretching of the sleepy Land as it stirs slowly awake, letting out a cold breath or two, murmuring and sighing—a seed of light in the dark. The Festival of Lights—a branch decorated with lit candles. After the explosive gorgeous moment with the sun cracks over the horizon on the Solstice, everything seems to fall into a lazy, somnolent torpor during January—exhausted from the frenzy of Misrule, of feasting and partying and dancing and giving gifts. But the Land stirs nonetheless, and as February approaches I am ready to embrace Newness and the fresh promise of spring, even if it seems remarkable distant as we sit beneath layer after layer of cold snow.
This gives Walhydra shivers—in the nicest sort of way.
[Note from Walhydra's amanuensis: Here's a story written in 2003 for the Crone Thread listserv, about three years after Walhydra and hubby Jim moved to Florida. Although Walhydra complained at the time, the gentle reader may recognize some parallels with her confession in Walhydra's Convincement.]
Walhydra is having an identity crisis.
The fifty-something, queer, would-be writer she rides around in has discovered a new mindfulness practice which is "changing his life."
For decades he's known that he is a grouchy, critical, angry old soul. Yet, since childhood, he has been a master of the art of being polite and generous and affirming to people while cursing them behind their backs.
He can be "endlessly tolerant" of the demanding, obnoxious things people do in his presence. Behind the wheel, though, every too-fast driver on his bumper, every too-slow driver in front of him, every driver who creeps through the yellow to leave him on red, gets shot at with streaks of blue death. Likewise every object which obeys gravity at inopportune moments, every website which loads too slowly, every pen which runs out of ink before the end of....
"So what's wrong with that?" Walhydra inquires coyly. "A well-adjusted curmudgeon. A man after my own gallbladder."
Of course, Walhydra has been known to spend entire incarnations terrorizing the neighbors and reporting little dogs to animal control.
So what is she to do, she wonders, now that he has finally noticed?
It began a decade or so back, when he started to feel guilty that he didn't practice what he was preaching. Naturally, he always forgave himself. God is a forgiving Goddess, you know. But it rankled.
Then there was that dangerous reading he did in the late 80s. That guy James Breech in The Silence of Jesus, stripping away all the doctrinal add-ons in the Gospels and finding just sayings and stories about people who resent the choices other people make.
"Oops," said Walhydra, sensing danger. "Too close to the bone there!"
She managed to distract him for another decade. During which he spent eight hours a day helping homeless, mentally ill and drug-addicted men in prison—and then resenting being hit up by street people while drinking his cappuccino al fresco after work. It was a hard battle, but she managed.
Until the move.
"Oh, that move!" Walhydra grows livid when she remembers. "Everything, everything got bent out of the frame when he and his honey moved!"
Both would-be writer and honey hated their new jobs. They loathed Jacksonville. Would-be spent the first year and a half diligently avoiding being there. Refused even to learn the names of streets or which ones were one-way in which direction.
But love will out, damn it!
Sometime during his third year, driving home from a movie across one of Jacksonville's seven high bridges, he realized that he now knew the back route from anywhere to anywhere else in town.
"Oh, no!" he thought. "I've finally become a Jacksonvillain!"
As he turned to explain this to his honey, Honey said, "I just had the same thought!"
"Curses!" muttered Walhydra.
It got worse.
Toward the end of that third year, he and hubby were on the out and out over a much-in-need-of-a-retread marriage. And he was praying and sitting zazen overtime to find the discipline and emotional self-reliance to stay reasonably sane.
And then one morning....
"No," said Walhydra.
He realized....
"Eek."
That he was angry because of resentment.
He was resentful because things didn't go his way.
And then....
"Don't go there!"
It occurred to him....
"Nooooo...!"
That there was no reason why things should go his way.
"Oh...."
He was just one person....
"I'm melting. I'm melting...."
In an ageless, cyclical cosmos of being and nothingness....
"What a world! What a world...!"
And that: "It isn't about me."
"Oh.... Look what you've done to my wonderful wickedness...!"
Now, whenever he even notices annoyance, he says quickly, "It isn't about me."
"Ooooooh...!"
And, because there's nothing to resent, his anger melts away....
"Ooooo...."
And he just enjoys the scenery.
"...!"
Walhydra can barely contain her rage and despair that the present Administration intends to send even more Americans to die in a country where we are responsible for tens of thousands of death and the suffering of millions, but...
In an effort to keep her head above the water in the "Big Muddy"—in which we are once again no longer just "knee deep"—she offers, courtesy of Tom Toles, the ultimate commentary on our dangerously adolescent President:
Walhydra has come to the conclusion that there is another “oldest profession” besides the one most folks speak of.
The profession usually meant by that term has to do with gratifying the desires of the body, preferably in an entertaining way. Unless its workers are exploited in an unequal power relationship by their employers or clients, or its customers are betraying fidelity to commitments made to others, it is generally an honorable profession. That is: it doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is.
The other oldest profession has to do with gratifying the unexamined beliefs of the mind, again preferably in an entertaining way. This profession, however, depends for its very success upon exploiting unequal power relationships and betraying fidelity to all sorts of spiritual and social commitments. And there is nothing honorable about it.
“The problem,” says Walhydra, “is that this other oldest profession is way more successful, more powerful, and more destructive than the first one ever thought about being.”
What in the world, the gentle reader asks, is Walhydra ranting about this time?!
Well, last week the news media and the blogosphere were full of the most recent example: Pat Robertson’s latest dire predictions on The 700 Club. Almost as regular—and, regrettably, as well-publicized—as the Oscars, Pat was once again gleefully awarding biblical doom to millions of innocents for something someone else supposedly did.
"What gets me," Walhydra complains, "is it doesn't even matter whether any of his predictions come true. The people who turn to him want to believe. And it's not as simple as wanting to believe what he says. It's way more subtle."
Those in the other oldest profession are in the business of gratifying people's desire to believe that what they believe—in all its unreflective, uncritical, resentful or envious or self-justifying unfoundedness—is not only correct but admirable.
One of the pros of the previous generation, Oral Roberts, was particularly good at providing this service. The Son-of-Roberts, Pat, is definitely no slouch himself—even if his predictions seem more wacky to outsiders (i.e., non-customers) as the years go on.
Part of the knack comes from knowing what P.T. Barnum recognized: “No humbug is great without truth at bottom” (quoted by Stephen Jay Gould in Bully for Brontosaurus, p.45). The masters of the other oldest profession always mix a leaven of seemingly relevant factoids in with their customers’ flour of discontent.
But they never worry about getting caught out—because their customers don’t want to get caught out either. As Stephen Colbert said of Bill O’Reilly in a recent Rolling Stone interview:
You know, actually, I have a genuine admiration for O’Reilly’s ability to do his show. I’d love to be able to put a chain of words together the way he does [snaps his fingers] without much thought as to what it might mean, compared to what you said about the same subject the night before.
The other part of the knack—and this is really the essential talent for any pro—is being unfailingly entertaining for the customers who want to pay for the show.
Walhydra has a perverse admiration for Rush Limbaugh in this regard. He’s the only one she knows of who has flat out admitted, “I’m not a journalist, I’m an entertainer,” knowing that he risks nothing by doing so. Other bloggers have noticed this about him as well.
But here's where the whole business gets particularly stinky for Walhydra.
"The journalist/entertainers on the 'other side' do the same thing!" she yells. "They cater to all those folks who love to be scandalized by the pronouncements of Oral and Pat and Bill and Rush. Every time that Virginia Beach idiot opens his mouth, the media give him global coverage, and so-called 'liberal' bloggers and late night hosts milk it for days!!"
It drives Walhydra mad with anger and despair that the hucksters on the religious and political Right have vast and deadly power to sway public opinion and national policy precisely because the hucksters on the Left give them headlines.
"Would anybody know that one majorly sick, enmeshed, emotionally abusive, homophobic Topeka family named Phelps was even still around—let alone let them have any influence—if the media, and even Congress, didn't keep calling our attention to them?!!"
Walhydra shakes her head and stalks away from the microphone in angry tears.
It's called, variously, Imbolc, the Feast Day of Brigit (with various spellings), Candlemas, Groundhog Day, etc., etc., etc.
