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Sitting vigil

May23

I’m honoured to be able to attend the rebirthing of our Hieromum as she leaves this plane of existence with some of my TOILA sisters. She got to come home to hospice last night there was joy and the knowledge we have to let her go.

There have been many tears and much laughter and love this afternoon and evening.

When we sang the knot for her, her breathing calmed and she relaxed.

We continue tonight on this journey with her down the celestial Nile.

Sitting vigil

May23

I’m honoured to be able to attend the rebirthing of our Hieromum as she leaves this plane of existence with some of my TOILA sisters. She got to come home to hospice last night there was joy and the knowledge we have to let her go.

There have been many tears and muxh laughter and love this afternoon and evening.

When we sang the knot for her, her breathing calmed and she relaxed.

We continue tonight on this journey with her down the celestial Nile.

Poetry month – On my honor

Apr13

Because of where I spent my day having a wonderful time

ON MY HONOR

On my honor I will try,
There’s a duty to be done and I say “aye”,
There’s a reason here for the reason up above,
My honor is to try and my duty is to love

1) People don’t need to know my name
If I do them any harm then I’m to blame.
If I help a Friend then I’ve helped me
To open up my eyes that I might see.

2) I’ve tucked away a song or two,
If you’re feeling low there’s one for you
If you need a friend, then I will come
And there’s plenty more where I come from.

3) Come with me where the fire burns bright,
You can see even better by firelight,
You can learn even more by the campfire’s glow,
Than you can ever learn in a year or so.

4) We’ve made a promise we’ll always keep,
We’ll pray “softly falls” before we sleep,
We’ll be Girl Scouts together, and when we’re gone,
We’ll still be trying and singing this song.

By Cindy Dasch

G is for Gaming, the Goddess and Feminism – A pagan blog post

Apr7

G is for Gaming, the Goddess and Feminism.

 

 

I should start by saying I’m a 2nd wave feminist. I had a charter subscription to MS magazine when it debuted in 1972. It was the 2nd magazine I ever subscribed to. The first was National Wildlife. My grandmother was a 1st wave feminist. And after some of the things said this week to me I’m inclined to think no progress has been made at all.

 

One of the ways a lot of my friends came to the Goddess was gaming. A group of us from Girl Scout camp used to play D&D every Friday night at the Last Grenadier in Pasadena and when the game was over we spent the rest of the evening at the pinball arcade a few doors down.

 

When we were first playing D&D it readily became apparent that the shop keeper who was also the main Dungeon Master (DM) was going to have to start a separate game for women and those who at least were open to playing with us. When we played with the boys they spent most of the game trying to kill us and not play the game because girls can’t game. We were older than most of them and I have to say a lot smarter and usually made a lot of progress in the game because the boys were more interested in trying to get us out of the game. It didn’t help that we were all lesbians and dressing like them. Not only were we girls but we weren’t pretty available girls. And when we were even paying attention to them could slice and dice them with a few words. Something we had to do regularly aided and abetted by the DM who loved having people who thought of unusual ways out of problems beside beating something to death.

 

We finally gave it up as a bad deal and let Kathy be our DM because we got tired of the constant of trying not to be stabbed by a party member just for being female. But there was a lot more to it. We got tired of trying to find female figures to paint and play that didn’t look like one of those boys wet dreams. Most of the lead figures at the time were something out of Hildebrand and none of could imagine going into battle in a brass bikini. I think one of the reasons a lot of us played elves were the figures were fairly androgynous and could be painted to look more like us. Good luck finding a human that wasn’t naked. I once played a female dwarf that was so totally ugly that I had to name her Butt Ugly. She looked like a feminized fireplug. The male dwarf figures didn’t look like that. And by the way, one night she saved our part of the party because when one of the boys cast a sleep spell so he could kill us in our sleep she was impervious to the spell because she was a dwarf as he found out to his detriment, aided and abetted by a pissed off DM.

 

From the article I just posted digital gaming hasn’t changed much since we were physically playing in the late 70′s and early 80′s. This was the group that lead to me discovering Z Budapest, thanks again to Kathy and the things she brought home from working at Page One women’s bookstore. So gaming led me to the Goddess along with Marion Zimmer Bradley and the Darkover novels that we were also reading at the time. We wanted nothing more than to live in Thendara House and be Renunciates. We were lesbian Girl Scouts and feminists and doing our best to grow young strong women to follow us.

 

But after this week and some of the comments I got I have to wonder if what we did made any difference all. Several comments said that veiling wasn’t anti-feminist but I still think it is. The societies that promote head covering are all with no exception patriarchal societies where women are stringently controlled. One women told be she did it to shield herself psychically from other’s energy. Well then she needs to learn better shielding techniques because that is what the problem is. We all have to learn to shield so we aren’t broadcasting ourselves and to protect and a piece of cloth isn’t doing that.

 

To be a witch practicing any kind of magic is to learn how to build wall and to build shields and to know how to take them down when in circle or at need. If you can’t do that you’ve had a piss poor teacher and need more practice. If you are doing it to hide yourself you need to do some meditation on why you are hiding. When you hide you are stealing from the community. We need everyone and withdrawing is selfish and rather narcissistic. What are you trying to hide that is good the rest of us aren’t allowed to see it?

 

I’m not attacking anyone for doing it although I’m sure a lot of people will think I am but I do want you to list 10 reasons to do it and not just, “my Goddess told me too”, because my answer to that is the same one your mother  would have given you about jumping off the building. Do mothers still ask that?

 

If the 10 reasons are logical to you then it doesn’t matter what any old fart like me says. It only matters that you have clear reasons for yours and not someone else’s reasons.

 

 

So yes, I’m an old fart 2nd wave feminist who participated in Marches although the last one I did was in the March for Women’s Lives in 1986 in the pouring rain. http://www.feminist.org/research/chronicles/fc1986.html  Which was a companion to the DC march and 30,000 women came out in the thunderstorm to get soaked to the skin. It was the largest march in LA since the one in 1968. We marched wearing white and I still remember being with friends and strangers and singing as we marched. Passing a group of all male protesters to us waving bloody baby dolls and yelling with their toxic faces that we were going to hell, and we just laughed at how impotent they were in the face of some many like minded women and men.

 

And it comes back to 2013 and women are still in the midst of the rape culture and women are still living in fear and not taking up the space that the Goddess gave them to inhabit and sometimes I wonder why we bothered to march for ERA and for Roe v Wade if women haven’t seized their own space in the world and still seek to hide themselves away. Are we empowering women to be all that the Goddess meant them to be?

 

If you are going to go off half cocked and leave me moe nastiness which reflects on you more than me, read this: http://elfkat.wordpress.com/2013/04/09/a-followup-on-g-is-for-gaming-the-goddess-and-feminism/

Godspousery and mediumship

Apr2

One of my concerns about godspousery has to do with mediumship. Being a medium is a talent you are born with, it isn’t something you can just decide to be. It can be a gift and it can be a curse. I ought to know I’ve been one all my life. I don’t talk about it much because other people don’t understand and people who know things they shouldn’t know scare the crap out of people.

What does this have to do with godspousery? I would think if you were going to pursue a relationship with a deity you would want to have some communication with them and if you have the gift (?) of mediumship you are asking to put yourself in proximity to a rubber room. Being a medium is hard enough without that added component.

As I said I have been a medium all my life. It ranges from knowing things with no source you can cite to full on having someone move in your head and either push you out or move and talk to you at the same time and let me tell you, that can hurt…a lot!

From the time I was little I’ve had what I think of as drive by dumps of information that I spontaneously KNEW and then had to tell. If your mother is not especially fond of her mother’s gifts having her daughter tell her things she should not know will either anger her or freak her out. You learn to shut up about what you know very, very quickly because sharing things from people who are dead and you couldn’t know because you are 5 can get an explosive reaction and they accuse you of eavesdropping or lying neither of which are true.

When I was nine a trigger appeared, 3 times in one day and I ended up losing one of my best friends over it. The first was as I got to school that morning my friend, Diana came running up and said “Guess what?” I immediately without thinking said, “Your dog had puppies.” And Diana freaked out because their momma dog had killed every single puppy she had ever given birth to and so they had stopped telling people that the dog was pregnant. For some reason this time she didn’t and she ended up being a good mom but how did I know that? I don’t know. All I know is it came out my mouth and never hit my brain first.

A while later my best friend said the same thing and I told her that her dog had died, also something that I had no way of knowing before it came out of my mouth. Her basset hound had tried to jump the fence that morning and hung himself on his leash. That scared K so bad I saw her literally retreat from me and she was never as close again. I remember seeing some kind of tie break at the time.

I’ve been racking my brain trying to remember the third thing but at the moment I can’t all I know is that it was a repeat of the first two, someone saying, “Guess what?” and me popping out with something I had no way of knowing before hand and it coming out of my mouth and never have it go through my mind first. Scared the living crap out of me and I shut down for a long time after that except for dead people like my grandmother visiting me the same night she died.

Periodically this would happen but never 3 in one day until the mid 80’s and all of a sudden I couldn’t shut anything out from anybody. I could hear what people were thinking. I could tell everything people were feeling whether they were near me or not. And to make matters worse a good friend died and visited me and I was stupid enough to tell my mom that Jim was dead and I’d seen him and spoke to him. Mom immediately called everyone she knew that was close to Jim in the choir who told her he was not dead and of course, condemned me for saying it and his best friend who was also in choir was just livid that I would even say that. But it turned out there had been a delay in notification and he had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance and had died. In fact he was one of the first deaths in what would come to be known later as AIDS. They said at the time it was his liver but I’ve seen too many die since then not to know what he died of. Anyway J to this day has never forgiven me for Jim visiting me and not her when he died. She still wasn’t speaking to me at my mom’s funeral a few years ago.

I was out of control and going out of my mind when Kathy made me go to her HP and my first ritual so I could maybe get some training to at least make it my choice and thank heavens, she was right. I learned to make shields of my choice and how to raise and lower them and that I didn’t have to emulate a radio picking up all frequencies and broadcasting them back out because I was broadcasting to anyone who could hear. Not good!

The only other time I have been overwhelmed since was a Hallows celebration where we drank mugwort tea to be open to whomever wanted to communicate. The veil was thin and I caught a really big fish, as in pissed off demigod/hero in the Scottish/Irish tradition. I have never felt such mental pain. My head literally felt like it was too small to hold her and she was pissed. From what I eventually put together after I recovered and what I said at the time, no one had talked to her in a very long time and she had things to say and I was the first Gaelic speaking/understanding being to be open enough for her to get a hold of in centuries and by goddess she was going to take it. She spoke very archaic Gaelic and I never did sort all of it out. And everyone else there could see what kind of trouble I was having and couldn’t do anything to help. (Yeah, everyone wants an audience for that, not!)

And now we are getting to my point. If I had that much trouble and pain from a demigod how much more would a full deity that wants to communicate do? There is no way communicating with a deity in that fashion would not cause pain especially if the god in question is someone like Loki or Ares/Mars. It’s one thing to have a UPG it’s a whole other thing to have something move into your head. Human beings are frail and breakable and all I can see is there might be a case of someone (a god) not knowing their own strength. If you are untrained in the concept of protecting your mind or shielding or even knowing how to shove someone back out of your head the whole thing seems to me to be a very bad idea. You’d have a migraine at the very least. And I had a whopper and couldn’t drive home afterwards and ended up crashing on the floor and I was wiped for days afterward and I’ve had training and practice.

Most of the people who say they are practicing this are very young women and there is no way they have had enough training to take that kind of communication on and why would you do it if you can’t have that kind of communication. Also some of the descriptions scream Vegas wedding as I’ve known you a small amount of time, let’s get married. I thoroughly believe in living with someone before you marry them and living with them a good long time, none of which seems to be happening.