Beloved, gaze in thine own heart
The holy tree is growing there;
From joy the holy branches start
And all the trembling flowers they bear.
The changing colours of its fruit
Have dowered the stars with merry light;
The surety of its hidden root
Has planted quiet in the night;
The shaking of its leafy head
Has given the waves their melody.
And made my lips and music wed,
Murmuring a wizard song for thee,
There the Loves a circle go,
The flaming circle of our days,
Gyring, spiring to and fro
In those great ignorant leafy ways;
Remembering all that shaken hair
And how the winged sandals dart
Thine eyes grow full of tender care;
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.
Gaze no more in the bitter glass
The demons, with their subtle guile,
Lift up before us when they pass,
Or only gaze a little while;
For there a fatal image grows
That the stormy night receives,
Roots half hidden under snows,
Broken boughs and blackened leaves.
For all things turn to barrenness
In the dim glass the demons hold,
The glass of outer weariness,
Made when God slept in times of old.
There, through the broken branches, go
The ravens of unresting thought;
Flying, crying, to and fro,
Cruel claw and hungry throat,
Or else they stand and sniff the wind,
And shake their ragged wings: alas!
Thy tender eyes grow all unkind:
Gaze no more in the bitter glass.
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,
The holy tree is growing there;
From joy the holy branches start,
And all the trembling branches bear.
Remembering all that shaken hair
And how the winged sandals dart,
Thine eyes grow full of tender care;
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Have a blessed Thanksgiving
I hope everyone has a safe and blessed Thanksgiving. Husband and I will be going to my mom's house a little bit later to visit and then we'll all drive out to his family's house for the meal.
I thank the Gods for food, family, friends, and fellowship. Hail, and blessings!
I thank the Gods for food, family, friends, and fellowship. Hail, and blessings!
Monday, November 21, 2011
The moment of the storm...
Got an email this morning from the lovely chap who asked me to do the Gaiman reading next week, and apparently it's not the I believe monologue, but that's okay. Here's the reading I am actually doing:
This was the moment of the storm.
The paradigms were shifting. He could feel it. The old world, a world of infinite vastness and illimitable resources and future, was being confronted by something else—a web of energy, of opinions, of gulfs. People believe, thought Shadow. It’s what people do. They believe. And then they will not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjurations. People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people believe: and it is that belief, that rock-solid belief, that makes things happen.
The mountaintop was an arena; he saw that immediately. And on each side of the arena he could see them arrayed.
They were too big. Everything was too big in that place.
There were old gods in that place: gods with skins the brown of old mushrooms, the pink of chicken flesh, the yellow of autumn leaves. Some were crazy and some were sane. Shadow recognized the old gods. He’d met them already, or he’d met others like them. There were ifrits and piskies, giants and dwarfs. He saw the woman he had met in the darkened bedroom in Rhode Island, saw the writhing green snake-coils of her hair.
He saw Mama-ji, from the carousel, and there was blood on her hands and a smile on her face. He knew them all.
He recognized the new ones, too.
There was somebody who had to be a railroad baron, in an antique suit, his watch chain stretched across his vest. He had the air of one who had seen better days. His forehead twitched. There were the great gray gods of the airplanes, heirs to all the dreams of heavier-than-air travel.
There were car gods there: a powerful, serious-faced contingent, with blood on their black gloves and on their chrome teeth: recipients of human sacrifice on a scale undreamed-of since the Aztecs. Even they looked uncomfortable. Worlds change.
Others had faces of smudged phosphors; they glowed gently, as if they existed in their own light.
Shadow felt sorry for them all
There was an arrogance to the new ones. Shadow could see that. But there was also a fear.
They were afraid that unless they kept pace with a changing world, unless they remade and redrew and rebuilt the world in their image, their time would already be over.
Each side faced the other with bravery. To each side, the opposition were the demons, the monsters, the damned.
Shadow could see an initial skirmish had taken place. There was already blood on the rocks.
They were readying themselves for the real battle; for the real war. It was now or never, he thought. If he did not move now, it would be too late.
In America everything goes on forever, said a voice in the back of his head. The 1950s lasted for a thousand years. You have all the time in the world.
Shadow walked in something that was half stroll, half controlled stumble, into the center of the arena.
He could feel eyes on him, eyes and things that were not eyes. He shivered.
The buffalo voice said, You are doing just fine.
Shadow thought, Damn right. I came back from the dead this morning. After that, everything else should be a piece of cake.
“You know,” said Shadow, to the air, in a conversational voice, “This is not a war. This was never intended to be a war. And if any of you think this is a war, you are deluding yourselves.” He heard grumbling noises from both sides. He had impressed nobody.
“We are fighting for our survival,” lowed a minotaur from one side of the arena.
“We are fighting for our existence,” shouted a mouth in a pillar of glittering smoke, from the other.
“This is a bad land for gods,” said Shadow. As an opening statement it wasn’t Friends, Romans, countrymen, but it would do. “You’ve probably all learned that, in your own way. The old gods are ignored. The new gods are as quickly taken up as they are abandoned, cast aside for the next big thing. Either you’ve been forgotten, or you’re scared you’re going to be rendered obsolete, or maybe you’re just getting tired of existing on the whim of people.”
The grumbles were fewer now. He had said something they agreed with.
(from the novel American Gods by Neil Gaiman)
This was the moment of the storm.
The paradigms were shifting. He could feel it. The old world, a world of infinite vastness and illimitable resources and future, was being confronted by something else—a web of energy, of opinions, of gulfs. People believe, thought Shadow. It’s what people do. They believe. And then they will not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjurations. People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people believe: and it is that belief, that rock-solid belief, that makes things happen.
The mountaintop was an arena; he saw that immediately. And on each side of the arena he could see them arrayed.
They were too big. Everything was too big in that place.
There were old gods in that place: gods with skins the brown of old mushrooms, the pink of chicken flesh, the yellow of autumn leaves. Some were crazy and some were sane. Shadow recognized the old gods. He’d met them already, or he’d met others like them. There were ifrits and piskies, giants and dwarfs. He saw the woman he had met in the darkened bedroom in Rhode Island, saw the writhing green snake-coils of her hair.
He saw Mama-ji, from the carousel, and there was blood on her hands and a smile on her face. He knew them all.
He recognized the new ones, too.
There was somebody who had to be a railroad baron, in an antique suit, his watch chain stretched across his vest. He had the air of one who had seen better days. His forehead twitched. There were the great gray gods of the airplanes, heirs to all the dreams of heavier-than-air travel.
There were car gods there: a powerful, serious-faced contingent, with blood on their black gloves and on their chrome teeth: recipients of human sacrifice on a scale undreamed-of since the Aztecs. Even they looked uncomfortable. Worlds change.
Others had faces of smudged phosphors; they glowed gently, as if they existed in their own light.
Shadow felt sorry for them all
There was an arrogance to the new ones. Shadow could see that. But there was also a fear.
They were afraid that unless they kept pace with a changing world, unless they remade and redrew and rebuilt the world in their image, their time would already be over.
Each side faced the other with bravery. To each side, the opposition were the demons, the monsters, the damned.
Shadow could see an initial skirmish had taken place. There was already blood on the rocks.
They were readying themselves for the real battle; for the real war. It was now or never, he thought. If he did not move now, it would be too late.
In America everything goes on forever, said a voice in the back of his head. The 1950s lasted for a thousand years. You have all the time in the world.
Shadow walked in something that was half stroll, half controlled stumble, into the center of the arena.
He could feel eyes on him, eyes and things that were not eyes. He shivered.
The buffalo voice said, You are doing just fine.
Shadow thought, Damn right. I came back from the dead this morning. After that, everything else should be a piece of cake.
“You know,” said Shadow, to the air, in a conversational voice, “This is not a war. This was never intended to be a war. And if any of you think this is a war, you are deluding yourselves.” He heard grumbling noises from both sides. He had impressed nobody.
“We are fighting for our survival,” lowed a minotaur from one side of the arena.
“We are fighting for our existence,” shouted a mouth in a pillar of glittering smoke, from the other.
“This is a bad land for gods,” said Shadow. As an opening statement it wasn’t Friends, Romans, countrymen, but it would do. “You’ve probably all learned that, in your own way. The old gods are ignored. The new gods are as quickly taken up as they are abandoned, cast aside for the next big thing. Either you’ve been forgotten, or you’re scared you’re going to be rendered obsolete, or maybe you’re just getting tired of existing on the whim of people.”
The grumbles were fewer now. He had said something they agreed with.
(from the novel American Gods by Neil Gaiman)
Sunday, November 20, 2011
I believe...
So this morning I was asked to do a reading at service next week from American Gods by Neil Gaiman, which is my absolute favorite book of all time. I am beyond thrilled. Excited doesn't even begin to cover it.
The reading is the "I believe" monologue. If you haven't read the book, I HIGHLY recommend doing so. Your library has it, half price books probably has it, I have two copies of it in hardback and one in paper (which I think the husband still has somewhere). Why two copies in hardback? Because this year they released a ten-year anniversary edition which has more stuff in it, and the minute I found out about it I pre-ordered it from Amazon.
Anyways, here's the monologue. (They actually have this on a tee shirt which you can buy through the website Neverwear. If anyone out there was having a hard time deciding what to get me for Yule...*HINT*)
I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen–I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones who look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline of good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of The Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal God who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal God who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies too. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
(American Gods by Neil Gaiman)
The reading is the "I believe" monologue. If you haven't read the book, I HIGHLY recommend doing so. Your library has it, half price books probably has it, I have two copies of it in hardback and one in paper (which I think the husband still has somewhere). Why two copies in hardback? Because this year they released a ten-year anniversary edition which has more stuff in it, and the minute I found out about it I pre-ordered it from Amazon.
Anyways, here's the monologue. (They actually have this on a tee shirt which you can buy through the website Neverwear. If anyone out there was having a hard time deciding what to get me for Yule...*HINT*)
I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen–I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones who look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline of good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of The Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal God who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal God who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies too. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
(American Gods by Neil Gaiman)
Thursday, November 17, 2011
For Thursday...
God of thunder, God of rain
Earth shaker who feels no pain
The powerhead of the universe
Now send your never ending curse
Earth shaker who feels no pain
The powerhead of the universe
Now send your never ending curse
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
The Yule Rune Project
So, a very dear friend of mine who is also pagan commented to me at a 4th of July picnic this year that he is very interested in learning the runes (he's more into celtic-stuffs, ogham, etc.) and asked for my advice about purchasing a good set. I commented to him that he could buy a commercial set (there's nothing wrong with that, I have a commercial set which I bought when I was like 15 and still use), but that if he would be willing to exercise patience and wanted to save some dollars that I would make him a set of runes for his Yule gift. He appeared very excited about this and agreed that he could wait.
Realizing the other day that it is now November (eep!), I remembered my promise and began contemplating my options for making him a set. After some thought, I decided on getting some wooden discs and burning the runes into them. Due to all the rain/damp weather we've had until very recently, I decided not to gather the wood myself and instead ordered some oak slices off of Etsy from (of all places) a button maker (I didn't want to those commercial, perfectly round craft circles you can get at Michael's, that didn't seem right at all). The set she sold me has exactly 24 pieces. Seems like they were made for this purpose. They should be on their way to me soon. Next, I have to acquire a wood burning tool, which I should be able to get at a craft store. Then I need to practice using the tool so I'm comfortable with it. I will post pictures as this project commences. I'm very excited. I love crafting, but with my life the way it is right now it is hard to find time.
My personal rune set is also burned, but they are made from deer antler instead of wood. I did not make them, but they were handmade by the lovely pagan folks over at Vermorlian (look them up if you're not familiar, they have fantastic goodies for sale).
Realizing the other day that it is now November (eep!), I remembered my promise and began contemplating my options for making him a set. After some thought, I decided on getting some wooden discs and burning the runes into them. Due to all the rain/damp weather we've had until very recently, I decided not to gather the wood myself and instead ordered some oak slices off of Etsy from (of all places) a button maker (I didn't want to those commercial, perfectly round craft circles you can get at Michael's, that didn't seem right at all). The set she sold me has exactly 24 pieces. Seems like they were made for this purpose. They should be on their way to me soon. Next, I have to acquire a wood burning tool, which I should be able to get at a craft store. Then I need to practice using the tool so I'm comfortable with it. I will post pictures as this project commences. I'm very excited. I love crafting, but with my life the way it is right now it is hard to find time.
My personal rune set is also burned, but they are made from deer antler instead of wood. I did not make them, but they were handmade by the lovely pagan folks over at Vermorlian (look them up if you're not familiar, they have fantastic goodies for sale).
Friday, November 4, 2011
I like this...
By Fire and by Water
Between the Earth and Sky
We stand like the Worldtree
Rooted deep, crowned high.
Between the Earth and Sky
We stand like the Worldtree
Rooted deep, crowned high.
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Odin, give me strength...
I could rant and rave about work, but I'm not going to. Trying to let it go and get through today, tomorrow, and Friday, so I can enjoy the weekend. Saturday morning I'm getting my hair cut, which is always a relaxing experience. Then we have a wedding to attend. Sunday's events are undetermined. I like this.
Speaking of the wedding we're attending, I promised the groom he could have one of the bottles of my one gallon sack mead batch, which was a tremendous hit @ the hootenanny. That leaves me one bottle, which I'll likely save for Yule. Which means I need to put another batch on to brew soon. Thoughts? Votes? Husband wants to make another cyser (that's mead made with apple cider, which was the first one we ever did--a fine choice). I am thinking I want to try my hand at a melomel again (that's a fruit mead). Maybe cranberry, since they are plentiful this time of year? Or orange spice? Or cranberry orange??? :D The sack mead has a distinct citrus flavor which everyone commented on. Likely from the yeast being activated in orange juice, which was then thrown in the must, and the citric acid. I love my mead recipe book.
Speaking of the wedding we're attending, I promised the groom he could have one of the bottles of my one gallon sack mead batch, which was a tremendous hit @ the hootenanny. That leaves me one bottle, which I'll likely save for Yule. Which means I need to put another batch on to brew soon. Thoughts? Votes? Husband wants to make another cyser (that's mead made with apple cider, which was the first one we ever did--a fine choice). I am thinking I want to try my hand at a melomel again (that's a fruit mead). Maybe cranberry, since they are plentiful this time of year? Or orange spice? Or cranberry orange??? :D The sack mead has a distinct citrus flavor which everyone commented on. Likely from the yeast being activated in orange juice, which was then thrown in the must, and the citric acid. I love my mead recipe book.
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