Posts Tagged prose

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.

I love music. Have done most of my life. Although I never had aspirations to be a musician of any sort, some of my earliest childhood memories involve singing while I played. As I grew up, music continued to play an import role in my life, be it in my high school band, the choirs I (briefly) joined in college, or any number of concerts and operas I’ve attended in adulthood.

Of late, I’m turning a bit toward writing songs–Pagan devotional songs for use in ritual and personal practice. They’re simple tunes with simple lyrics, easy to remember, to teach to others, and to carry on while doing other work. But I’m quite pleased with them, and eager to teach them to some of my fellow witches in hope that others will enjoy them enough to incorporate into their practice.

I’m sure you can imagine how awestruck I was when I learned that our planet sings. How unbelievably phenomenal is that? The whole planet–heck, every planet–humming a great, ancient song. We can’t hear it, but it’s happening at every moment, and has been from the beginning.

No wonder we love music so much.

I am so fortunate to now have a forum where I can write about such amazing things. And so, as is my wont, I did! Check out “The First Song” at No Unsacred Place, and keep an ear out for that deep, round, Earthsong. It’s in us somewhere.

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!

When I was in school, the English language seemed so easy. Girls were shes and boys were hes and that was all we needed to know.

Then I grew up and went out into the world and met people who consider themselves both she and he, neither she nor he, something else altogether, or out of/beyond a gender spectrum altogether. The simplicity of the language started to feel like a severe limitation. A host of alternative pronouns assailed me: ze and zir, fe and fem–none gaining universal traction, few even known outside the small community of genderqueer folks and their allies. A former teacher of mine said, “I’d prefer to call everyone ‘it’, but people can be so touchy.”

So you can, perhaps, imagine my frustration when trying to write a story whose protagonist isn’t human–or any sort of being we generally think of as having gender. I’ve actually wrestled with this in all of my “Restorying the Sacred” posts. For “Bee and Orchid”, I felt okay using “she” because that is how bee societies work: any bee out gathering “messages” from Orchid would be female. In “S and R Dance On”, you may have noted that I cleverly skirted the issue by avoiding pronouns entirely for S and R.

But now we come to “A Song for Dark”. And I found I simply couldn’t keep saying “Dark” over and over without feeling like I was stuck in a poorly-written soap opera. I was going to have to make a Decision.

“She” or “he” never crossed my mind. I tried “ze”, but that was quite distracting and threw me out of the story–even while I was writing it, which boded ill for people reading it. Plus, to speak of darkness having gender seemed to me to force a complex complex into a fairly limiting framework. So I took a page from my teacher’s book and said “it”, though I worried that that would take away the sense of Dark as a living entity. But, looking at the finished product, I think “it” works. It feels right. This story feels right. The English language lives to fight another day.

“A Song for Dark”, a heartwarming holiday tale about light pollution, at No Unsacred Place.

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.

A tragic love story about binary stars? It must be “Restorying the Sacred” time at No Unsacred Place.

The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics press release regarding the star called SDSS J090745.0+24507 and its ill-fated companion was issued in 2005, but I don’t think I found out about it until later, maybe sometime in 2007. Ever since, I’ve wanted to “do” something with the story, but nothing’s ever been quite right. Finally I realized that that’s because I’ve been trying to write about the item, when what I really wanted to do was rewrite it as a narrative, offering it to the world in a way that lets everyone know why it affected me so deeply. I’m honored to at last have had a chance to do so.

My first “official” post at No Unsacred Place is up. It honors the recent passing of Minnesota Public Radio’s Tom Keith and his role in creating my personal story of Minnesota.

I realize that the broad readership of NUP might not be familiar with Mr. Keith, so here’s a bit of MPR’s coverage at the time of his death:

*A Montage of Tom Keith’s work
*Tom Keith, a showman but not a showoff, a commentary by Keith’s long-time Morning Show co-host Dale Connelly.

With delight and humbled awe, I come to tell you that I have been chosen as a staff writer for No Unsacred Place, the science and nature blog of the Pagan Newswire Collective!

I will be embarking on an adventure called “Restorying the Sacred”, in which I will explore myth-making and storytelling and how the creation of new sacred stories can help modern Pagans connect to their now and here.

Neoshamanic practitioner and writer Lupa will also be joining NUP, taking over the “Earthly Rites” column.

I am more thrilled than I can say and hope you’ll join me on this new adventure!

A guest post o’mine, “Bee and Orchid”, with accompanying photography by the brilliant and talented Leora Effinger-Weintraub, makes its debut at No Unsacred Place, the amazing Pagan living blog of the Pagan Newswire Collective. Bless the bees!