Nightmares

Children dream of monsters in the dark.

Normal, the experts say.

The self fears its new and undiscovered growth,

And so screams out.

In middle years, the anxious dreams of threatened self-importance;

Naked in the street, speechless before a theater,

Assigned to teach a class where you are ignorant,

And the students have no patience.

But in old age, I find, the nightmares are of loss and confusion:

A wrong turn somewhere, a missed connection,

A mistaken off-ramp, and no return on the other side.

You seek the way home, but there is no way.

There are people, but they do not help;

They are mute, or indifferent, or in the worst dreams

Mad with some irrelevant obsession.

When you finally understand that here you must remain

You wake to your accustomed bed,

Relieved and hoping

That you have not foreseen the realm of death.

Christian Morality

I have a very hard time grasping this. Many right-wing Christians, with their "family values," apparently don't care if somebody like Gingrich has a sleazy past. Now, if such a thing as a Pagan candidate were possible, one with Newt's past adventures would, I'd hazard a guess, be too sleazy even for most Witches and Pagans. Cheating on wife #1 with wife #2 while wife #1 was in the hospital dying of cancer. Cheating on wife #2 with wife #3 while pretending moral outrage with Clinton, whose only transgressions were a) accepting a blow job from someone who enthusiastically threw herself an his feet and b) agonizing too much when he had to explain it later. (He could have just said, "She threw herself at me, I didn't handle as well as I should have. Next question?" Or being a Christian, he too could have said "I sinned and Jesus forgives me.")

Because, as it seems, if you are a Christian Jesus forgives you, then everything is OK and you can still be president.

If you are a Pagan, the best you can do is be sorry, hope to do better in your next incarnation, and probably forget about running for president in this one in the unlikely event that it was ever an option to begin with.

At the Dark of the Moon

Introspection, trance work, self-evalution

Dream work

Fast or eat sparingly

Don't overwork

Wrap yourself in a covering or veil of some kind, arranged so you can breathe properly (oxygen deprivation is not an essential part of the experience.)

I especially like some slow and evocative sound for this--Tibetan temple bells, for example.

Close your eyes and go into a cave. As you go deeper in, the light becomes fainter and fainter, and you have to feel your way with your feet and hands.

The passageway becomes narrower, and more difficult to negotiate. You go deeper and deeper into the earth.

Then after a time you will suddenly lose your footing and go floating in free fall, around and around, down the passageway, until you land in a cavern deep inside the earth.

There you may find something, or you may meet someone.

You may be told something you need to know, or you may be given something to take back with you.

Perhaps you will find or be given something that must remain in the cavern, but which you can return to again.

When you are ready to leave the cavern, you will find that you can float up and out the passageway, by the same way you came.

Then you will find your footing, and make you way along the passage, feeling with your feet and hands, until you return to the mouth of the cave.

Wolf Moon

This is the moon that falls in Capricorn. On the Wolf Moon, work for protection and preservation.

Wolves share many attributes with humans, and so provide us with certain lessons about this.

http://www.wisdomofwolves.com/

Winter Solstice

from the Pagan poet Gwion:

We are only concerned with light.
We have given up on warmth,
Have abandoned discernment
Of color and brightness and shape.
We are only concerned with light,
Because the sky, wide vessel
And disperser of radiance, is dark.

We tend our sparkles of fire
In the calendar's frosted eclipse.
We have come to the Season of Man.
This single night
The only light is our own
For all the lands and seas and skies.

The log must blaze!
And every quick branch bear candles,
Not to suffuse us with a cheery glow,
But to ensure that no gust of winter
Will snuff it out.

We are only concerned with company.
We have frozen standing quarrels,
Have abandoned distinctions
Of preference and propriety.
We are only concerned with company,
Because the sky, Great Hall
Of perpetual companions, is empty.

We gather our kind
From withered prairies and crusted shores,
We have come to the Season of Man.
This single night
Ours is the only company
For all lands and seas and skies.

We must be merry!
We must raise a common voice in any song.
We must pledge ourselves without reserve,
For no other rampart stands against extinction
But our bonds.

This single night, this Season of Man,
We are the only gods; the universe is ours.
Behold our magnificence!
If we are diligent
And sacrifice all lesser concerns,
We may keep the light from dying
And our hearts from growing still
Until dawn,
When the gods return
To take the year from our narrow shoulders
And hurl it toward a season bright and fertile.

Oak Moon

The Oak Moon falls in Sagittarius, usually as the Earth Tide rises and the dark and cold increase. It is a known as a time for fellowship, for renewing the bonds of friendship and kin. By now we know who they are, the dear ones who will get us through the night. It is a time touch them, and to understand them.

Reality Check

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/11/two-shootings-occupy-oakland-camps

Around here, we inhabit a different reality than the news stories describe.

One of our local certainties is violence, unfortunately. Oakland had its 101st homicide of the year last night, typical of the ones that take place every three days on the average, with many familiar elements to the typically garbled story. Young guys, drugs, an altercation, a gun.

There is a Catholic church I drive by on my way to work where they put up white wooden crosses each year for every Oakland homicide. The churchyard is empty of them each New Year's morning, and then they begin to accumulate. I suppose they are stored in some closet back in the parish house, along with holiday decorations, perhaps, to be used year after year. Now, in November, there is a small forest of them out front, joined by another one this morning.

Last night's shooting happened to occur nearby the Occupy Oakland encampment. The news people make significance of this, rather like amateur seers with a personal agenda reading their own story into the tea leaves.

Closing down the Occupy encampments will not make troubled young people stop shooting each other over drugs. Nor, for that matter, will it stop severely depressed veterans from committing suicide--another event that the constructors of reality on the evening news have somehow worked into their narrative.

The only thing that might prevent those things from happening, or perhaps make them happen less, would be what the protesters are calling for-- forcing the fabulously rich to give their fair share for things like education, job training, job development, and health services.

And the main reason why these protests are now happening is that a whole generation of young people are finding themselves corralled into a dead end like that ones where inner-city youth and damaged war veterans have been hanging out for a long time.