May Madrigals

As often happens with blogs, IRL has kept me busy this month. My life has changed, the repercussions yet to be determined.  I think it's all for the best.  It is hard for me to be both in action and reflective enough to support spending much time writing. Not that reflection hasn't been happening, reflection and processing have absolutely been happening, just that the written recording of those processes have not been happening.  The thought of how much writing that would have been is rather overwhelming!

In the meantime, the aspirants have had their ethics and warding/safety classes.  They went well. Nice group of folks.  I like the discussions.

We're almost at the mid-point of the year.  I've been joking with my boss that it's nearly the end of 2015 since the beginning of the year because time passes so quickly, and yet, here we are and the first half flew by, as it does.  Yeah, yeah -- barely a month until summer solstice, but that's a matter of days in quick succession.  The wheel turns faster and faster.

It's a thing, this wheel of time.  And sometimes all the things it contains are too big to find words for.  Silence does not indicate a lack of activity, but rather the opposite.

Words Mean Something

Chronology, the time which changes things, makes them grow older, wears them out, and manages to dispose of them, chronologically, forever. 

Thank God there is kairos too: again the Greeks were wiser than we are. They had two words for time: chronos and kairos. 

Kairos is not measurable. Kairos is ontological. In kairos we are, we are fully in isness, not negatively, as Sartre saw the isness of the oak tree, but fully, wholly, positively. Kairos can sometimes enter, penetrate, break through chronos: the child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionata are in kairos. The saint in prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby are in kairos. The bush, the burning bush, is in kairos, not any burning bush, but the particular burning bush before which Moses removed his shoes; the bush I pass by on my way to the brook. In kairos that part of us which is not consumed in the burning is wholly awake.

--Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet 

Words mean something. They do, they surely do.

 I talked a little about the Be, Do, Have framework in my reflections from my first Leadership workshop last month.

As Yeshe Rabbit & I were talking through the Distance Aspirant Ethics plan for this weekend, thinking about one of the exercises triggered something in my head that I thought I would try and see what happens.

Part of what I've included in my daily practice is requesting assistance for some very specific qualities that I need to embody.  "Please help me..."  "Please grant me..."  Looking for these things as if they would come to me from outside me.  As I was thinking about the framework of this exercise we'd set up, I thought about the "is-ness" of it (am-ness?) and it occurred to me that I should see how that changes the feel of my daily practice, especially since the exercise we're proposing for them will also become part of my daily practice.

It sounds mundane, but the difference between 'Please help me find the keys...' and 'I am the key...' or 'please grant me wisdom, strategy, and strength' and 'I am wise, strategic, and strong' is tremendous.  I look forward to seeing how this tiny-not-tiny change in language ripples out into the world.

It's little things, the difference between intellectual and experiential knowing in the practical application of known things.  The difference between changing happenings from chronological to ontological time.

Writings from Writing From The Spirit Retreat

Stone meditation:

• The big soft-edged grey stone that called to me from the edge of the curb near the canal. It is a little bigger than my hand and so solid & grounding. Scraped from where the different tires had pushed it along the road & curb-sides.
• It called out to me, the perfect rock, perfect in its imperfections, holding it’s essence though under what seemed like less than optimal circumstances. It called out to me to take it home.
• It’s heaviness is grounding. So solid, brigs me back in the flurry of uncertainty -- that airy, drifting disconnect.
• It tells me secrets of the alchemists — it is not what goes into the crucible, that is the essence of the being. All the magic that happens in the crucible is possible because of the boundaries of the crucible. The boundaries keep the elements of magic within appropriate proximity to act and react and merge and separate. The crucible retains the boundaries and allows magic to happen within but it remains consistent at the end, whatever else has been going on.

It’s an alchemically philosophical rock!? Then again, it was the one that called to me to bring it home...

• The crucible is the vessel that carries, can be rinsed clean, and is what always remains.
• Through transformation, we can add things to our crucible, to our stone soup pot, to our vessels ourselves, but the transformations that stand up to time are the transformations that rinse us clean, back to our essential natures. “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” (St. Exupery).
• Transformation through the elimination and removal of our limiting beliefs. The false stories we tell ourselves about who we are, that sometimes we don’t even know are false. When we become wrapped up with having and doing rather than authentic being.
• The final message of the rock:
  Shed your limiting beliefs and transform by going back to that which is essential to your being.

Thank you, rock, for grounding me today and last fall. Thank you for reminding me that the essence of being is that which is immutable and that which remains when all else is washed away.

———

Writing for me is a practice of processing. Human beings are ‘sense makers’ (or at least some of us lean that way). We want to know why things happen. What just happened. What’s going to happen. Does it make sense? All of the religions in the world, all of the divination systems in the world, all of the beliefs in the world (limiting and freeing) are stories we tell ourselves to try to help us make sense of the world.

Sometimes the world is non-sensical. Things don’t always happen “for a reason” or the things that happen are incomprehensible. Sometimes we try to apply a framework to those stories that don’t fit, trying to make sense of them according to something that has helped us make sense before but is not appropriate now, and may not have been appropriate then. Sometimes that leads to more nonsense or guilt or harmful/not right action. Sometimes our frameworks require review and adaptation and correction.

I write to make sense. To take the strands and ends, the odds & sods that appear in my brain, and lay them out in front of me. To take the jumbled pieces and see what patterns appear in front of me. Sometimes my stories are correct and true, and sometimes they are colored by my perceptions and application of frameworks and my limited perspective. Sometimes I need to process as best I can to keep trying to move forward.

———

Alas, I missed the next writing exercise — life is what happens while you’re making other plans.

———

Yeshe Tsogyal writing meditation:

• Perfect memory — that memory that surfaces what needs to be surfaced, correctly in the correct moment.
• Bees bringing wisdom to and from the flowers.
• Watching the incense rise and curl in a sun beam, being and knowing in the moment.
• I’m sort of mesmerized and distracted by the curls of incense. The shades of blues and greys, twisting in the rays of the sun.

…

• She says,
  Being and knowing in the moment. It’s ok sometimes to just be. And know. Let it be.

I Commit

From Yeshe Rabbit: Ritual for Women's History Month (March)

http://yesherabbit.squarespace.com/way-of-the-rabbit-contemplation/2015/3/2/womens-history-month-ritual-can-you-commit-to-women

In addition to and in alignment with the ritual that Yeshe Rabbit has come up with, I have a couple of investments and commitments that I am making as well. I am towards the outer edges of introverted. In business astrology Meyers Briggs, I come up consistently IN, the last two letters are variations on TJ (most often) and FP (less often). In DiSC, I come up outer edge central C. None of these tend to be the majority in leadership positions, and yet here I am in my day to day. 

Big investment/commitment #1 (only in the sense that I'm talking about this first) is that I have signed up for a Mastering Leadership program to help me work through all the stuff that goes along with being a strong and intentional leader as well as give my career a kick it needs. I am also paying out of pocket for it which is sort of an oof and definitely a glad I have an annual bonus to pull that from!

Big commitment #2, I have long sort of suspected that I'm on that border where introversion meets social anxiety but also sort of worried that there are so many people with "real" issues that mine weren't really that bad... One of my coping habits is compulsive (obsessive?) info gathering and organization -- conveniently useful in my chosen field! A couple of long time friends are in clinical year/prep for final boards to become counselors, so I swallowed a lot of 'oh god, so awkward!' and talked to them as part of that info gathering coping. That in and of itself was a huge first step. I don't want to be defined by something like this. I've spent a big part of my life swallowing my fear and anxiety, trying to push myself to just do things anyway. It has often paid off well enough that I find it worth it to continue to challenge myself in this way -- see also: my first commitment above. Their unanimous advice after asking a bunch of questions was GO SEE YOUR PRIMARY CARE PROVIDER YESTERDAY. So that was an interesting response, I thought. I thought I "just" needed some tools to process through and modify thinking and behavioral patterns (and I don't think anyone would disagree), but apparently there can be a physiological component too. So, after sitting with things procrastinating like a mofo (avoidance being one of my less productive coping responses) for a couple weeks, today I made an appointment with my doctor, right after getting off the phone from doing the screening call for the leadership program.

I'm committing to take care of me. I've given so many women at work the advice that they *must* get the oxygen mask on for themselves prior to trying to get it on other people while at the same time finding myself masking (successfully and NOT) gasping for air as I try to navigate complicated and ambiguous passages with no air.  I committed about six months ago to stop bullying myself for not living up to my own impossibly high standards. I say weird things. I can't word or brain sometimes, to the point that one of the managers that reports to me and I have running jokes about it (he's got some similar but different stuff going on). Me and my monkey brain are still working on this, identifying triggers, and trying to be kind to myself when I recognize that something has set me off. Trying to remember that the stuff that I say that is so totally something only I would say is part of what I bring to the world in being a uniquely contributing human being.

I don't share this information about myself lightly. I don't want to be social anxiety girl. I don't want to build a community around me that gives me a pass because I'm terrified. I don't want to be terrified. I'm not a survivor because I'm not a victim. I am working towards an improved, more intentional me. I just have some shit to take care of and I have some human elements that I will always have and will always need to consider mitigation strategies for. I'm ok being an introvert, I need to transcend the anxiety stuff though.

This is big magic, complex alchemy. It is staring my shadow in the face, meeting it eye to eye and getting to know it so well that I can move from responding via reflex to making considered choices. This is the path to enlightenment. And every day, my commitment to myself is that I will chop the wood, carry the waters of self care. I will get my oxygen mask on first as best I can manage and then move on to tending to others. I will show myself compassion when the right words are hard to connect outside my brain moving a million miles a minute with my mouth that is too often struck dumb as if it isn't connected. And because I Will, I will. In Love: for myself, my community of women, for the world.
http://youtu.be/Lm38Ojh61lY

February's Silent Moon

Seems like forever.  Doesn't it always?

Random thoughts:

• We have moved from being Aspirants to Dedicants.  We'll meet later this month to talk about the upcoming year.  It was pretty well perfect with the usual attendant "whoops, we're online" glitches, taken in stride, as you do.  Hail to the Elements.
• Nike has been sweet to my girls.  Thank you Nike!
• The moon was so bright last night I wondered if I was going to be able to get to sleep.  I did, eventually.  But it was a beautiful night for Mother of the New Time and various other things that happened along those lines.
• From Yeshe Rabbit & CAYA:  We recognize February as the Silent Moon. How can we find silent time to restore and regenerate our enthusiasm for our lives/work/relationships? 
• So needed.  With crazy busy (and awesome) kids, this becomes ever more complicated until my little fledglings fly (which seems way closer than it should be for the oldest, and yet... here we are... two and a half years from it!).  I've been taking the time at night after everyone is in bed. After getting everyone to bed.  It makes for late nights, short nights, and hard mornings.  Mornings are hard enough, but... I need time.  Unwinding, just being, reading, letting things process on the back burner...  I'm a night owl by nature, so it's the easiest time for me.  But it's easy to drift in the evenings and not restore/regenerate.
  
  For now it will have to be grabbing bits and pieces as I come to them.  Weaving is nice, the rhythmic thunk as the heddles shift.  It goes so quickly with fabric scraps.  I may have enough of the little girl tights to do another floor mat.  The hardest part is setting up the loom, the warping of the thread, then dressing the loom with the warp, threading the heddles then slaying the reed.  Oof.  But then it's back to the thunk, shuttle, thunk, shuttle.  For the upcoming regional swim meet, I will probably start a new knitting project to take with me.  I have So Much Yarn in my freezer.  I used to try to make something as I spun fiber up, but I enjoy spinning most of all, and somehow got away from that idea.  And the possibilities with a loom are broader in terms of using old clothes to make new mat sorts of things.  But since I enjoy spinning, I need to use that up too.  ALL THE PROJECTS!  These things are restorative and regenerative for me.
  
  Also restorative/regenerative is journaling.  Sometimes.  Just getting it out.  I journal like I blog though -- sort of intermittently.  Cuing of things (like this) helps somewhat though. 
• Last night on our way home from dropping M2's friend off from their choir rehearsal, as we drove past the park on the hill, a fat happy bunny scooted across the road in front of us, causing the entire car of us to break out in coos of "aww, bunneh!  Go bunneh, go go go!  Look at the fuzzy little bunneh butt!  And the fuzzy little bunneh ears!  Bunnehhhhhhhh!"  Bunneh.  

And now to carry on.  I think that's the majority of the battle in finding the silent recovery/restorative/regenerative/rejuvinative spaces -- there's always something I *should* be doing... taking that language and recognizing it's often *could* be doing, and prioritizing the important silences and spaces in is critical for survival.

Considerations

I can't believe the calendar year is almost over.  It was approximately this time last year when J pinged me and said, 'hey, CAYA is doing an online thing, and based on some of our recent discussions, you might enjoy that.'  2013 Fall/early Winter was dreadful and I desperately needed something positive so on that like mayo on a polyester suit.  It has been such an incredible blessing all year long.  I have enjoyed it tremendously.

Yeshe Rabbit has asked us to consider some things, it may be early yet, but I wanted to start putting some thought into the questions she's asked back in October:

• Dedication ceremony (how might we do this thing together, online, probably late Jan/early Feb, which makes sense),
• What dedication means to us, what do we do now, where do we want to see this go
• Would we consider joining in facilitating next year's aspirants as well.

The easy one is the last one, I'd be happy to join in facilitating next year's aspirants.

The second bullet is obviously actually two things to consider.

• What does dedication mean to me?
  Dedication means not only that I've passed the first round of understanding how this group operates but that I agree to continue to abide by this approach.  It further means, I hope, that further and deeper exploration of approach opens as a possibility.  So many things with so much potential to explore [with room here to expand further on the concept of what it means to be dedicated into this tradition].  Which leads to...
• What do we do from here/where do we want to see this go?
  This is sort of tricky -- I guess something I'd like to know is, what happens next for the corporeally gathering dedicants after dedication?  What framework/s do/could next year look like?  I will need to consider & ponder & ask some questions.  I know I want to do more Explore All The Things!  MOAR PLZ, KTHANKS, but I'm not sure I have clarity beyond that...

Which leaves the actual dedication ceremony, the first is last, oroborous eating its tail... We may be starting this discussion, having taken the second part of the second question to the google hangout group...  Will continue later...

------------

Witching Hour of the Graveyard Moon

And now it's The Witching Hour, my pretties!

Dammit, why is there no cackling Witch riding off into the night on a broom! Or at least a hair pin emoticon like the hilarious Witch Hazel on Bugs Bunny! I love Witch Hazel...

 

A key, it's a gift to us all from Hekate! May it unlock the secrets we need to hear tonight, and may she light our way through the darkness we encounter in the world with her torch! May she and her blessed dead and our blessed dead and her big black dog guard us and protect us. 

Burn, baby, burn, disco inferno! 🔥

Moon in my backyard!

All The Incense!

Happy Full Moon, my witchy friends!

More Thoughts on Priest/ess & Witch

OH!  These things so much!

priest/ess 5: priest/ess at large by Yeshe Rabbit
Premonitions of Melissa on the Wild Hunt by Alley Valkyrie

To be honest, I would have put those things in category witch, for myself, but if others perceive these things as priest/ess 'at large' or other priest/ess work, I can certainly roll with that.

Perhaps it is that 'witch' is what I practice, priest/ess is in the how I express that practice.  It's definitely an 'at large' situation, and most people don't recognize it as it's happening.  When The Rainbow Lady was still alive, she approached my husband, me, and a very young M1 in the co-op my husband would soon run and told us we had a very special child and asked to bless her right there in the store.  Of course she could!  The Rainbow Lady, after all!  I suppose that's her acting as priest/ess for us.  Many people talk to me about the things they can't tell their families -- the grocery store cashier who tells me about the dolphin tattoo she wants because of the deep spiritual resonance she feels with them, but her family is super evangelical Christian and she could never do it and she doesn't know why she just shared that with me.  The people who sense the librarian, 'ready reference' source of knowledge who ask me where things are, how to get places, etc.  Librarians joke that it's a librarian thing, but we're all sort of priest/esses of access to knowledge -- people know we either know the answer or can find the answer, and as a service role, that we are near compelled to provide assistance by our nature.

The birds either tell me things, or bring me the intuition I need to interpret things, often via crow, raven, robin, or hummingbird.  The plentiful finches & jays, sparrows & swallows tend not to for whatever reason.  The last thing the crows brought me was impending news that N would not survive.  One flew up close and landed on a nearby perch while I was out in the hammock, looked at me, croaked, nodded, and I knew.  Sometimes the bees share as well, but mostly they bring me calm.

I suppose I should tell P at some point that his bff's father (and P's cousin) stopped by a day or two after he crossed over, in the middle of the night, to see where P ended up living.  I was putting the old lady cat food away, stepped into the dark kitchen and could see him out in the street, smoking a cigarette.  The silhouette was unmistakable, the logger boots, & everything.  Just standing, smoking, looking at the house, I could sense the wry, quiet grin he had when he was content that things were right.  I suppose it could have been someone else, but...  I suppose I haven't told this story because I don't really do 'ghosts', but in the moment, it was so clear.

I have helped a lot of kids learn to respect nettles (and thistles too, but this is the nettle story) -- "THEY HURT ME!" (thwacking away at the nettles with a stick). "You must be gentle with nettles, they are asking you to respect them, they are very good for you! -- look, I can pet them and they don't hurt me!"  "How!?"  "Gently, across the leaf with your finger tips, like you're petting a cat ever so softly!  Try it!"  "Noooo!  O-okay... oh!"  "They'll still demand your respect, but if you recognize them and treat them with respect, you'll get stung much less!"  I'm rarely stung by nettles now, even when I accidentally brush against them.

Many other examples, but these sorts of things are part and parcel of the way I explore and experience existence.  How I interact within the world.  So many things to revisit, restore, reclaim, remember.

Intention v. Motivation

Have been thinking a lot about the two lately, as gyro teacher updates on Orcas draws near, and as yet another year has passed and I have done no classes since last year, and not gone to Florida to get my certification taken care of.

As I was on my way to class yesterday -- to take, not teach, obviously -- it dawned on me that often I have plenty of motivation to do things, but I don't always have a clear intention that guides that motivation.  I know my motivation behind doing the teacher training:  I like learning, and  I like moving at a deep level, and I like sharing learning, and hearing what other folks who are learning and moving deep are learning/experiencing.  I have great motivation!  Curiosity!  But what I am doing, what I want to do, what I am going to do with all that once the motivation has carried me for a while, what my intention is in getting teacher training is... not clear.  I don't have the kind of space I would need in my head to take on teaching classes, much less realistically in my schedule.  So... curiosity is driving, and I guess my intention is simply the exploration and sharing of that curiosity.

I have been thinking of doing a 40 day yoga practice (might go longer, might not), and I've been procrastinating starting it.  Too tired or too many potential interruptions or am/can I mix in gyro & PT (yes, of course I can!) or lazy don't wannas or can't find something I want to do/or plan out a little ahead... Silliness.  But there it is.  In this case, I have intention, but not motivation.  Well, I even have motivation, it's just not yet sufficiently compelling, apparently.

Things will eventually sort themselves out. Or not.

Various Thoughts on Homework Questions

1.) Coven size -- benefits of a large coven is that the likelihood that you'll have enough people to make for a nice sized gathering for any particular even is better.  Also, folks can break into smaller 'affinity' groups for the smaller group experience (men/women, folks interested in specific areas, etc).  In my experience, a certain number of people are required to get and maintain a certain level of community momentum as well.  Drawbacks can be that it's more difficult to get to know everyone (sometimes even find conflicts with some).  With really huge groups, there is the possibility of getting lost in the crowd as well.

2.)  Jaina Bee and I have been friends since we were 16 and I'd been following along with her process here and elsewhere.  For a long time, this aspect of my life had slipped under.  We moved into new space and it's... there's a lot going on here, and I started feeling like it was time to dig out.  I was sort of mucking through a reintroduction, having lots of thoughts and questions, and when Jaina said, "hey, we're going to give distance aspirant a try", it seemed like the perfect thing to give the digging out a sense of focus and process.  Honestly, the distance  piece was a big piece of the draw for me.  Between kids and work, I haven't got a lot of social energy or going out and doing things space, but I'm a night owl and tend to find that when I have space for thinking and through stuff is after most reasonable people are asleep.  Also, initial forays into not nearly as well established attempts similarly made me think perhaps I would like to keep the 'safety net' of interaction online, at least initially.  Now I sort of wish y'all lived a lot nearer, but I like feeling connected to people all over the place too, so it's all good.  :)

3.)  I schedule my time commitments as soon as have confirmation, and often significantly ahead of that if I think something might be coming up.  Two kids with school events and swim team makes this imperative.  I am pretty rigid about keeping scheduled events -- I flex my weekly gyrokinesis class  once or more a month in part because I have teacher training and can (and should more regularly) do it on my own, and in order to fit CAYA in, that's the only way it was going to happen.  In the absence of pretty compelling reason, I will be where I say I'm going to be, if it makes it on to my calendar though.

4.)  Ritual -- Chrystal mentioned as part of ritual a potlatch that we both experienced at different times.  Potlatch in the big house was SUCH a formative experience for me. And listening to Bill and Carla and Karen's stories around the campfire, and the big canoes. I miss them all so much. Jaina and I bonded at sixteen on the Indian canoe trip, the canoe that was taken out by the ancient madrona branch a few years ago. I still sing a mangled version of either a canoeing song or it might be a lullaby that Karen taught us. Such a tremendous honor that Bill was given these dances to share with us all. Such an amazing experience.   I watched on the sidelines from 10-16, then participated in a couple when I was older.  Cedar burning still triggers really strong, good memories for me.  Deep soul food.  And the art of the coastal tribes too.  But ritual.  That was a huge summer ritual, between the dances, the canoes, the salmon baked traditionally staked up around pits of cedar bark.  There was the Sunday ritual of going to church (Lutheran) with my parents where I learned some sense of structured religious ritual, both in complex ritual, as well as how simple and stripped down the ritual could be and still be fairly profoundly meaningful.  Now I have my daily practice, parts done in the morning as soon as I'm coherent enough to remember where I am in the recitation and parts done in the evening as part of my getting ready for bed, cleaning off the day, sending love, best wishes and gratitude out, and checking in/grounding.  I do the Mothers of the New Time at full moon.  I clean and sweep with intent at new, and burn down the remains of candles that are too far gone for their candle holders in a big ceramic plant dish.  Sometimes I plan rituals, sometimes they happen spontaneously.  Sometimes daily acts (cooking, cleaning, etc) are ritual acts, and sometimes they're just getting stuff done...  Ritual is such a state of mind thing -- it sometimes seems anything in the right mind set can be ritual.

On Priest/ess & Witch

There have been various discussions that have crossed my radar lately on what  it means to be Priest/ess.  I am engaging with a coven as an aspirant, for the first time in a 25-ish year solitary practice and... thinking...  I identify as 'witch'.  It's sort of but not quite really the same.  As others have pointed out, priest/ess is a bit of all sorts of things, from ritualist, to counselor, to spiritual mentor, to minister, etc.

I figure part of engaging as part of a group is that I revisit reading All The Things from many perspectives, find what is resonating with me, what isn't, and while I've been doing that all along, the context of 'aspirant', traveling a specific (even if still significantly self-defined) path, changes things for me somewhat.  Being part of something bigger means I am part of a shared trajectory.

What I am leading to, and puzzling over right now is this -- in so far as witch and priest/ess have significant parallels, and in so far as I identify as witch, but not particularly priest/ess (or even necessarily called to identify that way) -- is it just a semantic difference in pursuing the shared deeper knowledge that I seek, without necessarily taking on the particular word of priest/ess?

John Beckett notes that for the role of clergy there are "three main things priests do: serve the Gods, act as mediators for the Gods, and serve their communities." I have a personal practice. I've sort of joked that I've taken Lutheranism to its extreme in one sense in that I don't require a mediator for my experience of the divine, though as I grow older, the idea of having others who can sometimes drive so I can simply participate as part of the chorus, or not have to have dual consciousness about what I am doing now, what comes next seems like a lovely thing, but that is more of a field trip coordinator than a mediation of the experience? Is that too granular of a distinction to be relevant for most (something I am often guilty of)? I am on the fence about defining what I do as "service" for a "God/dess" -- "belief" and "God/dess" is terribly complicated, and I have practices, but it seems a stretch to call that "service" especially given "belief".

This is getting into that lost territory, so dialing it back in again... both of these are granular and semantic in a way, and so grey and fuzzy in terms of definition for me. The third, to serve the community, seems most concrete to me -- this resonates, this I can do, one way or another or many ways. This is not grey and fuzzy for me, it just requires consensus between me and my community that the service I can/want to provide aligns with what is needed.

In a lot of ways my puzzle about disparity between witch and priest/ess is in parallel with my disparity of feeling about teacher training for gyrokinesis (all but certified) and yoga (eventually I may pursue, but...) -- I want the knowledge, I want the practice, I even want to be able to share my knowledge and sometimes my practice, but... I don't identify as "teacher". I don't want to teach classes... but I want to be deeply immersed and talk and practice with people who are extremely deeply immersed in theory and practice -- often that means my cohort is, for yoga and gyrokinesis, those who teach. And for spirituality, it seems often those people are priest/esses.

Which brings me to another puzzle of the moment -- how far can I follow my trajectory as witch practitioner, wanting to explore and know and experience all the way up to, and possibly well into the territory often marked as priest/ess territory while not taking on clergy, lay or otherwise, aspects.
I may be over thinking this, and I so often find in discussing this with others that my perspective is broadened by exposure to the creativity and both complexity and simplicity of others interpretations that I have so many other options that are open to me.
 
Yeshe Rabbit elucidates further on the roles of priest/ess as she identifies them according to her practice. Many, but not all resonate with my own practices (naturally, as she identifies as priest/ess and I do not and even in the eventuality that perhaps I do, my expression may/will likely find varying outlets because we are different people with different experiences).

Perhaps another question I have coming out of this is concurrently to discussing what clergy and priest/ess are, what are we defining against this as what non-clergy/priest/ess are? Part of defining what one is is also defining what one is not. In terms of functions of roles within an organization, even loosely defined, there is a relational aspect between roles. For paid clergy, money clarifies things somewhat for me, in that clergy is supported by the community for the spiritual services provided, whether directly (paid for services or readings, etc) or indirectly (tithing and the like where the individual services are not charged for but covered by dues, of sorts). Money, for better or worse, sort of formalizes the roles and expectations of the exchange happening.

In contrast, my analog (and maybe a more appropriate parallel) for priest/ess in my life is my professional role as a senior manager. I've managed teams as small as two, and up to four teams at a time, with 20 people reporting directly to me. I'm responsible for projects, production work, team and individual development, mentoring, coordinating in support of my organizations defined and supporting goals and objectives. I have lateral peers that I also collaborate with. I have industry groups that I participate in beyond my own organization. I know what kind of work it takes and the obligation to the various parties involved which leads me to being wary of extending additional sense of obligation as a leader within community/ies... and yet still, the draw to the deeply immersive experience lands me... somewhere, I'm not entirely sure where yet.

Dunno. It's all a long way of saying I see a parallel here with my yoga/gyrokinesis practice where I want to be so deeply immersed that my peer group is called something that I don't entirely identify with but to be not as deeply immersed is counter to my desire for such deep immersion.  But perhaps I see a parallel with my professional role, except with that money clarifies my role and expectation for responsible of that specific community and I don't have that clarity within spiritual practice?  So complicate!

I am deeply respectful of those who pursue the path that identifies as clergy and priest/ess, grateful for their shared knowledge and mentorship, sorting out my own trajectory within relationality of community is different from solitary practice.  As Alice discovered in Through The Looking Glass, and as I have come to understand as a manager, communicating and aligning language is an important piece of community defining.

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master -- that's all.'   

This is largely me just trying to navigate language (and the various granularities that appear as I think through implications), community, and how/where I might fit.  As an aspirant, it may be way too early for me to consider my future with any specific group, but I also know that there are some areas where I will continue to pursue learning until logical conclusion (lol -- learning is forever! There is no end!).

In the end, I suspect I will find a way that both the semantics and actions align for my practice.  I just don't know quite what that means yet.

Apologies to all the other authors and their articles that informed my questions that I don't reference directly here. I don't want to backtrack all through my feeds to find all the articles.

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Upon going back and reading the (new to me) comments from Sunsmith and Molly on Yeshe Rabbit's post, I am given additional thought about how broadly and simply (and complexly) we can define language, semantics, and practice.  This is one of the things I love about having a community I am nominally a part of.  It is the collaborative sharing of experience that allows one to break out of the unnecessary boxes one's mind and re/create, re/craft, re/vise the world into a better place.

On Silence

http://theheadlesshashasheen.tumblr.com/post/90883336652/what-do-you-feel-about-the-four-tools-of-a-magician-to

This was really helpful as a point of understanding for me.  It makes ever so much more sense than endless references solely to the burning times, but also for those of us who have a tendency to want to try to process using language, as I do here, and given lost and maybe not lost posts, often fail at.

In particular:

Quite simply, talking about shit ruins the magic. The numinous doesn’t survive contact with language very well. Oftimes trying to articulate events occurring in a magical space, or any experience of Gnosis, or numinous experience into conventional language just renders away so much of the power of the experience. (zerosociety)

and:

Some experiences cannot be pinned down verbally; they must be dealt with internally, muddled over, considered, in the beauty of silence. (theheadlesshashasheen)

There are things that are experiential in nature that cannot be communicated or processed in any other way, which is why doing and experiencing is a critical component of so many things, learning included.  Is the synthesis of knowledge, and all of the senses that creates understanding.

Trying to find the balance between those things that can be articulated as part of processing and synthesizing and those that can't is a challenge.  And while I've let this aspect of my world lie fallow for many years, I feel I have a lot of catch up to do, and yet so much is familiar.  Integrating and deepening understanding and experience, practice, practice, and practice.

Have had some thoughts about systems theory as a direction I need to do some exploration around, as well as other things.  All The Things!  But marathon, not sprint. And as I'm drifting how, time to drift along...

Edited to add, and of course theheadlesshashasheen has additional elucidating insights...

Maybe Not Lost

But definitely wandering.  And there's something to be said for wandering.

Listening to the rain. I love the rain on the roof. I love being able to hear it in the leaves of the trees.  Eventually, if the first rain chain works, I should be able to hear the rivulets in the rain chains too.

So soothing, makes me sleepy.

Lost

Not really, but it's easy for me to get sidetracked away from the 'Saganist' side of my sense of awe of The Universe to the use of mythology to explore and better understand human experience.

I just came across this quote:

“The brain is a sparkling field of rhythmic flashing points with trains of traveling sparks hurrying hither and thither. It is as if the Milky Way is engaging in a cosmic dance. The cortex is an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never a lasting one; with a shifting harmony of entrancing subpatterns.” --Charles Sherrington

For the last month? Two months?  I've been wandering around the internet late at night looking for, and even sometimes finding, information that resonates with me on Hekate.  More recently that has shifted to Athena as I have come to find that I, for the time being, have come to a sense of comfort with Hekate, and am finding that the qualities presented by Athena are areas in my life where I have need to focus some attention (strategy? civility? patterned technology? independent woman functioning in a strongly masculine sphere of influence?  Oh. Hell. Yes).

I don't actually "believe in" embodied gods/goddesses, but I find their attributes and affinities (codified social "energy"?) useful in identifying situational frameworks that enable (or are disabling and require modification, in some cases) functional behavior patterns.  Sometimes that starts slipping away from me, towards how to placate or ensure favor from something and that is simply not the relationship that I find fruitful or "awesome", in the awe-inspired sense, of my relationship to The Universe.

I am an animist, of a sort, in that every single thing that exists, exists as a unique expression of The Universe expressing itself through creativity and as such is imbued with a transitory, shifting life cycle state of being. Things are expressions of their Platonic ideal. Through this creative expression, spaces can have a genius loci, less in the literal sense of the word, but in that sense of character of a space.

Where am I going here.  I guess I'm just finding a pausing point to catch my breath, find my compass, reground to what I find literally awesome about The Universe, and what I find "merely" helpful in identifying and understanding situational anthropomorphic relationships and frameworks for best practices attributes and jumpstarting creative troubleshooting by accessing pattern libraries.  And to pause and be amazed at the complexity and the beauty in the natural world where I can crudely approximate the beauty and creativity of The Universe by weaving a recycled clothing rug for the bottom of my stairs or a silk and wool table runner, while my cortex contemplating all this has "millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern...; with a shifting harmony of entrancing subpatterns.”

So many threads to follow here and yet, a different weaving/work project calls.

Compass

When I took down the altar I'd had, pretty much in the same state since college in preparation for putting the house on the market, the only thing I kept out was my compass. I think I kept out my pocket sundial as well, but that would be a different story…

So my compass. I always had it on my altar to align it to the directions, elements being associated with directions, yada, etc. Some sort of stone, etc in the North, my tiny (now broken) glass wand in the East, my double edge blade (scissors for various reasons, perhaps to be another story, not sure yet), and a cup to the West, sometimes with water, sometimes not. Candle in the middle, various other bits and pieces of accumulated symbols as well. Pretty solid representation of an altar.

When it all came down, I left the compass and sundial out as a non-obtrusive reminder of the directions and all the associated elements. A representing shadow altar of sorts.

My old altar was a grounding point for me for many years. I felt very ungrounded without it for a while, typically it was only dismantled for moves. As the time wore on and the old house didn't sell (3.25 years, ugh!), I refound my ground, and realized that I had been retaining the trappings of an ideal that didn't reflect my current practices (which were by that point virtually nil) much at all any more.

In part, I am coming back home and revisiting, re-grounding. But regardless, the compass has always been out, even when the sundial finally got packed away. North is alway to the north, more or less, magnetically speaking, the rest follows from there, with all the associated implications, physics or associative. Like Jack Sparrow, my compass lets me know which direction is north so that I can gain-regain my bearings.

Yes, I've been out wandering and sort of lost, and maybe now I'm starting to find my new-old skin again. My old-new skin?  Various things have been building up, not even so much around the edges, but spilling forth, riotously spring time.  I'm missing my silver candle holder, the broken wand, the tiny cast iron cauldron... I don't know that I want to set that all up again, but I want the pieces to configure on an as needed, just in time basis.  Though perhaps in the end, one cannot get as far with tools that got one here, and now I need different tools.  Missing my silver candle holder and tiny cauldron tonight, while appreciating the minimalism and depth of meaning that the compass and sundial came to represent.

~~~
Thank you, Universe and Multiverse, for helping me find the rest of my original altar tonight!  I have missed these things so very very very much! Thank you, thank you, thank you!
~~~

On Daily Practice

 I seem to have ended up with both a morning and evening practice, both include the daily practice.  The evening one when I’m coherent and can feel something other than grar morning ughhhhhhh, includes the daily practice and a request for compassion (for all) and expression of gratitude. The thing with daily practice is that it takes time to build up a ‘charge’ of sorts, some time to settle in and start gaining the sense of benefit.  Sort of like it takes a while of dragging your feet on the carpet before you start shooting off sparks because of the retained static electricity that’s built up over time.