Posts Tagged nonfiction

I work part-time for the Minnesota Legislature, which limits my political activism opportunities. “Active and Impartial”, a new post about these opposing pulls on my loyalties, over at paganSquare. But what I can tell you, and do tell you, without reservation, is: vote. No matter what candidates and ballot positions you favor, even if they’re anathema to mine, get yourselves to the polls on November 8. Representative democracy is only representative and democratic when all the people make their voices heard.

I would write a longer post about my new post at paganSquare, but I’m sitting in my parents’ dining room, working on a computer that MAKES NO SENSE TO ME. Anyway, if you’ve followed anything about the recent changes in the Reclaiming Tradition’s Principles of Unity and its subsequent frouferaw (possibly not causal), you already know the background. If you don’t, well…here’s a good place to start.

Hoeing Rows and Bigger Pies

A couple months ago, Anne Newkirk Niven, the unstoppable force behind Witches&Pagans, Sage Woman, and Crone magazines, asked me if I wanted to do some blogging at paganSquare, the amazing and rapidly growing community of Pagan bloggers she’s assembling at the W&P website. I said, “Sure; what kind of things are you looking for?” Anne sent me a list, and my brain exploded a little, because she has so many amazing ideas she wants covered, and I wanted to tackle them all.

After I calmed down and realized I can’t write all blogs for all people, I noticed that paganSquare has a path-specific blogs section, and that Anne was looking for a Reclaiming writer. I am a Reclaiming Pagan. Ah-hah! thought I. This will be my sneaky way to talk about every topic dear to my heart (and Anne’s): because once I’m talking about Reclaiming, I’m really talking about everything.

If that makes as little sense as I suspect it does, please check out the first post of the new blog, “Reclaiming by Doing” (cleverly, this is the title of both the blog and the blog post). If you’ve ever wondered what it is a Reclaiming witch does, exactly, if you’re the kind of Pagan who finds spiritual fulfillment in the acts of daily life as much as the formal ritual, or if you just can’t get enough of my writing, this is the place for you.

We’ve been struggling with health problems at my house. One thing that’s struck me as we’ve dealt with the pain and the doctors visits and everything else that goes with the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to is how much harder it is to b gentle with ourselves than with others, human or non. We’ve been cranky and impatient, wishing our bodies would hurry up and get over it already.

We would be so much kinder and more patient if the pain were in someone else’s body—a friend, perhaps, or a beloved animal companion. Or if it were the body of Earth Itself. Isn’t that what environmental activism is, at heart: our deep love of the planet collides with ecological catastrophe, spurring us to action. We would never tell another to hurry up and heal themselves. Why is having compassion for our own bodies so much harder?

I don’t have answers. But I do have stories. “Loving the Broken” at No Unsacred Place is the latest.

Horror is an unkind genre to copy editors. We’re so busy keeping our eyes on spelling, grammar, punctuation, and other fiddly details that we miss the slow establishment of foreboding that is the genre’s forte. When I first read “Trespassers”, the climax seemed to come from left field. On a second pass-through, I noted subtle use of words like “snaking”, “furtively”, and “feral”, quietly building a foundation of pervasive dread.

Michael muses on “Trespassers” at his livejournal.

Sky-Tinted Waters is available via Sam’s Dot Publishing.

My mother is a restless woman. When I was a kid, we rarely vacationed in the same place more than once. When I was in college, she made a sort of game out of staying in a different hotel every time they came to visit.

Dad and I are more fixed. We want to put down roots and really get to know a place. There was one vacation we took every year, the same week each year, to Bellaire, Michigan. That was the trip I loved, the one I looked forward to every year. I couldn’t wait to visit familiar places, to see what had changed and what had stayed the same. I relished the rhythm, the routine, the relationship to this place.

But what was the relationship I had to this place, after all? In places with high tourism volumes, especially during the warm months, “summer people” is often a perjorative the residents use to describe the hordes who descend and then depart each year. The scorn, I suspect, is not for the visitors in and of themselves but for the sense of entitlement they often carry with them. The feeling that, because they spend a few weeks or even a few months here every summer, that this is “their” place, that they have the same rights and relationship in regards to it as do those who make it their year-round home and know it in all its seasons and moods.

I think the truth is, as usual, somewhere in between. We should acknowledge that even people who only perch in a place for a few days, but who do so over and over, have some sort of relationship with that place, but we should be honest that it isn’t the same relationship as that of those who roost in that place permanently. Can we, perhaps, learn to harness what is best in both of those kinds of attachments for the good of the place that, after all, we all love?

A few things to perhaps ponder as you read my latest post at No Unsacred Place, On the Function of Time on the Magic of Place.

One of the best parts of having pets is the way they draw my attention to things I might otherwise miss. Many of us humans spend a lot of our time blundering through the world unaware of the nonhuman life that surrounds us. But our animal companions are usually much more keenly attuned to that life and can, if we pay attention to them, draw our awareness to it.

One morning a couple weeks ago, I opened the curtains and noted, in a not-really-conscious way, an unusually large number of crows in the back yard. But I didn’t truly notice them until our cat Mister Brown jumped onto the coffee table under the window and started making desperate “lemme at ‘em” noises. Only then did I think to wonder why we had so many crows in our yard. The answer, and the musings that followed, can now be found in the post “The Squirrel and the Story”, over at No Unsacred Place.

One year ago, a thoroughly delightful fellow named B.T. Newberg started the Humanistic Paganism website. Originally envisioned as a place for Newberg to share his own thoughts and feelings on the marriage of a humanistic worldview with a neo-Pagan practice, HP has blossomed into an amazing community of non-deistic Pagans of all stripes to share ideas and stories about how we perceive and act in the world. The conversations are sometimes contentious and challenge our growing edges, but they are always enlightening in one way or another, and I am honored to have been a contributor to the site on two occasions.

To celebrate the site’s first year, Newberg has collected the year’s postings–essays, interviews, polls, and community fora–into an ebook entitled Year One: A Year of Humanistic Paganism. I am proud to have my two essays included in this work. It is a lovely and thought-provoking work, essential for anyone interested in what Newberg calls “the marriage of science and myth”, spiritual seekers, or anyone looking for a new set of lenses for viewing the world.

Happy reading!

I really enjoy when writers open a story by throwing me into the middle of characters’ lives or the events of the plot and leave me to puzzle things out as I go, revealing bits and pieces of the back story as we progress. This feels, to me, more like real life; after all, I’ve been alive for 33 1/2 years, and only my parents have been around for all of them. If you were to meet me tomorrow, we’d be plunged into the middle of each other’s lives and would learn about each other as we go. I wouldn’t introduce myself by saying, “Hi, my name is Eli, and I was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the eldest child of…” Any writer who opens a story in that fashion would have to work very hard to keep my attention for more than a few paragraphs.

And yet, I realize that that is exactly what I’d planned to do with “Restorying the Sacred”! “Bee and Orchid” was a guest post, and I’d intended my first “official” post as a staff writer to be a step-by-step explanation of what I planned to do with this new column. An infodump! My first time out!

Only then Tom Keith died, and I rediscovered the article about the Outcast Star, and a lot of other things seemed a lot more interesting to write about, right off the bat. The explanatory post kept getting pushed out–and that’s to the good (though of course I’d choose to have Tom Keith still be alive over a well-placed exposition in a heartbeat). Because I think, in the intervening weeks, that people got curious, got more involved in the story that’s been unfolding, wanted to know more. Wanted to know, if Tom Waits will forgive me, what I’m building in this small corner of the internet.

And now, all is revealed–complete with silly oaths (don’t worry; no falling on your sword required).

What’s She Building in There? at No Unsacred Place.

On a naturalistic Paganism list I belong to, the conversation turned to aspecting, a fairly common practice in the Reclaiming tradition (of which I am a practitioner), among others. Aspecting is a way of allowing a deity, spirit, or other entity or even a characteristic, such as Love or Joy, to speak through a person, and it can be a very powerful magical and ritual tool.

The question arose of how those of us of a naturalistic mindset, who do not necessarily believe in the external existence of deities, handle an experience like that. I dashed off a response detailing my own history with aspecting and why it still works for me, even though I don’t believe in gods and goddesses as literal beings out there somewhere. A few weeks later, B. T. Newberg, blogmaster of the remarkable Humanist Paganism blog, asked if I would let him publish it as a guest post. I consented with great joy, and the post appears today.

Deities as Role Models at Humanistic Paganism.