The story behind the way of things runs in a circle, and can be entered at any moment of the year.

This is the time of the God's transformation from child to man. He beholds the Lady, now a mature maiden, and is overwhelmed with love. She is ready for union, but knows that he is not yet ready for her.

Some say that there must be a swift, secret mating at this time, because it is nine months from now that the new God will be born. But there is really no need for the Gods to conform to the biological time frame of humankind, or any other species.

Be that as it may, the Lady sends him away, into the Greenwood. She gives him work to do, to prove his manhood; mysterious tasks, secret gifts--it is whispered between them, what is to do be done.

She sends him away, to live wild in the Greenwood until time and work are accomplished. She promises that if he does all that she requires, she will meet him on May Eve in the Greenwood, and become his wife.

Equinox

At the Spring Equinox, I was told by by first teacher of the Craft, the Fire tide reaches its height and begins to ebb. It marks the coming-of-age of the young God, who was born at Yule and will be crowned at Midsummer. With the ebbing of the fire tide comes the season for sowing; seed is sown for new life, new workings and new endeavors. Fire has the power to destroy and create anew, and now, in the ebb-tide, I have found that a Witch's power grows--the tides flow at the Great Sabbats, ushering in times ruled by the powers of Nature; the ebb-tides are more susceptible to the influence of human magic.

This, and the time of Harvest between Lammas and the Fall Equinox, are the two most demanding times of the year.

There may be hard work on many levels--professional, emotional, and magical. Projects to start, new developments in your relationships with others. Magical work that you undertake at this time may have far-reaching implications. All this work will use to the utmost the resources you have been mustering during the past few seasons.

You may well have feelings of pressure and urgency about all that needs to be done during this season, and you may find that you have little or no leisure time for a while. Be sure that you get enough food, sleep, and rest to sustain your health. Pay conscious attention to time
management, and do not get swept away by the feeling that you are too busy to be organized.

Seek out companions in your work whose company gives you pleasure and who share your values and goals. Such friends will make the work more enjoyable, and mutual-assistance arrangements can help get jobs done.

This is a time for sharing resources and tools, as in the old days a team of oxen and a plow could be shared around several farms until all the fields were sown.

The Bottom Five Percent

It’s good to hear that the Obama administration has taken notice of the failures of No Child Left Behind—beginning with the cruel irony of its name, because it has been leaving so very many children behind. (The ones I know best are the teenaged immigrants of Oakland who were abandoned in a weird triage program that funnels a strapped urban school system’s limited resources into the intensive coaching of the kids haven’t passed the test yet, but might. Fifteen-year-olds who turn up not speaking English aren’t going to pass the test any time before the age of 18, so just provide some kind of nominally supervised space for them to hang out in for a year until they can drop out. Then, if they or their families still have any aspirations for them, they will turn up in a community college where we do, in fact, have classes and teachers for them.)

But to return to Obama’s proposed renovations. Now, I wanted Obama with all my heart, but when it comes to education, which is what I do, I’m starting to feel like what Tom Lehrer described, in another context long ago, as a Christian Scientist with appendicitis. First we heard about competitive grants and a “race for the top.” A race is by definition something that most people lose. It is not a good paradigm for public education. To get a competitive grant, you need a good grant writer. Good grant writers cost money. I’ve worked in inner city schools where nobody had the time or energy to fill out the forms for the most obvious non-competitive funds, let along any hard-to-get grants.

Here in California we lost this race, being too broke or too disorganized or too union-ridden or something. (California schools have a very high proportion of English language learners, and we who teach them have an unreasonable tendency to resent evaluations made of them, and us, based on tests administered only in a language they don't yet know very well.) But I think in fact that failling to qualify for this new game plan may be a blessing in disguise. Now the idea is to target the lowest five percent of the low-performing schools, and be very, very tough with them. Fire teachers and principals, who are obviously the culprits who are responsible. Give their jobs to creative and enthusiastic people who are waiting in the wings, just dying to take over. You snooze, you lose.

For several years, I worked as the coordinator of a family literacy program, funded by a competitive grant won by Catholic Charities, which can pay grant writers, which operated out of the lowest-performing elementary school in California. For a year or two it was second to the bottom, edged up by another one down in the LA area. But then we slipped down to the place of honor once again. It is probably a lot like the lowest-performing elementary school in most other states.

There is a lot about this kind of school that Obama does not seem to know. For one thing, before you go firing the staff, many of whom who are either recent college graduates rapidly recovering from their idealism or genuine saints hanging in there from dogged dedication, be very sure that you really have figured out who else wants to work there. It's not like casting a Broadway show, or anything like that. The jobs were very hard to fill, as I recollect. Perhaps in the present job market people are more available, but they won’t be any more creative or enthusiastic.

And please, before you blame the school for those low test scores, have a look at the community it's sitting in. The school where I worked serves two communities, living side by side in more or less equal numbers, with no love lost between them. It is an inner-city African-American neighborhood devastated by the drug epidemic. Kids damaged by drugs before they were born, kids surfing sofas, kids raised by impoverished and exhausted elderly relatives who do their best while the parents are off somewhere burning up the welfare checks in their crack pipes. The neighborhood also serves as a landing pad for recently arrived immigrants, mostly undocumented Mexicans, a more hopeful community, partly because their involvement in the drug scene is more peripatetic and more profitable, and partly because they tend to go find somewhere cleaner and safer to live around the same time that they start learning English, so that if the kids do eventually pass the Star test, it will be somewhere else.

Don’t blame the principal and the teachers in this place for the low test scores. Pin medals on them for their efforts to head off violence, scrounge up food and clothes for everybody, and remain calm at the sound of nearby gunfire.


In unrelated news, it's St. Patrick's Day.

"St. Patrick drove the serpents out, and brought the churches in,
'Twas a bloody poor bargain, I would say, be Pagan once again!"

(Lyrics by Isaac Bonewitz, to be sung to the tune of "A Nation Once Again.")

Evangelism

It’s a curious trait some people have, this compulsion to evangelize. They want to sell you their religion, or their diet. I have a couple of ecologically-minded friends who are always urging others to accept cast-off items for which they can imagine possible uses. More than one woman has tried to talk me into being a lesbian. Then as you get older, people try to get you to have the same ailments they do.

Not long ago, my sister’s friend Marge tried very hard to sell me on sleep apnea. She was sure I must have it.

“Why?” I asked

“Do you wake up during the night?”

“Yes, but that’s because I have to pee, or the dog is barking at the raccoons in the garbage barrels. Then I go back to sleep.”

“You don’t wake up because you need to pee. You wake up from the apnea, and then you feel like you need to pee.”

I think I wake up because I need to pee. I have dreams that ingeniously incorporate needing to pee and not being able to; say, I’m in the stall in a public restroom trying to pee, but there’s a bossy-looking woman standing in the open door, watching me, so I can’t. Then I wake up and go pee. I worry that one of these nights that woman is going to shut the door and go away, and then I will pee in the bed.

“Do you snore?”

“Who’s to know?” I said. Except the dog, of course. I burned out on men some years ago, even before I became uninteresting to them, and the aforementioned lesbian evangelists have not brought me around.

“Virtually anyone who is overweight will have sleep apnea,” said Marge, firmly. “And if you get treatment, you will be so much less depressed.”

“Do I seem that depressed?” I asked, beginning to doubt myself. But as it turned out, Marge was using “you” in the sense of “one,” that is to say “I,” and the depression in question was her own. She discussed it at great length, the various medications she had taken over the years, and I gradually gathered the impression that she was still battling depression and that having sleep apnea had perhaps not cheered her up so very much after all.

Evangelism seems to be based on an assumption that people are more alike than they really are, or perhaps a desire for company in your (one’s) own joys and misfortunes, or perhaps a bit of both.

I remember a conversation I once had with a Christian evangelist, back in the days when I used to have conversations with such people. (I’ve since learned that, like jerks hassling women in public places, they take any sign of notice as a sign of encouragement.)

This woman asked me whether I believed in reincarnation, and I said yes. Seeming to pounce on an opening here, she hastened to explain that Christ offers the promise of eternal life; if you are saved, you will spend eternity in heaven, and you won’t have to keep coming back.

Well, there you have it. She doesn’t want to come back. For her, this life is something to be saved from (I’d always sort of wondered what it was they were being saved from.) I want to come back again and again, to do the things I haven’t done, to repair mistakes, to try things differently the next time. I certainly don’t want an eternity of anything, no matter how pleasant it might be for the first ten thousand years or so. I have never heard any description of heaven that didn’t sound as if it would eventually get on my nerves.

She is happy with the prospect of not coming back, of spending eternity somewhere else. But all my hopes are of this world, and I am happy with the prospect of returning forever.

Paying to Learn

A traditional Craft information list I'm on again has started up the old thread about charging for training and initiation. We don't do this, and I shot back the reasons why--the Gods choose their own and you must keep their way clear, charging for a service rendered sets up a very different relationship than coven members have with each other, and anyway, what sense does it make to charge for what was freely given to us? Teachers do charge for other kinds of intiation in other places. Different situations, different relationships, different cultural baggage, all beside the point.

Someone contributed a cute story about a high priestess (not a traditional Wiccan one) who charges $180 for her training class, which is refunded if the student is eventually initiated, so that people "won't waste her time."

Aside from the little problem of people going through with an intiation just to get their money back, there is the larger matter of what it is a teacher does. I've been teaching much of my adult life, my day job and my night job. It inevitably involves a great deal of what appears to be wasted time. You are a resource, you set up learning opportunities, and have no way of predicting what, if any, use people will make of them. That's the way of it. This is the basic problem with the idea of merit pay for teachers. As a teacher, you have influence, not control, over what or how much people learn, just as a doctor has influence but ultimately no control over a patient's health--for all the same reasons. But this is another topic, for another post.

But to take a cue from this high priestess who doesn't want her time wasted; how if we were to have all our community college students who say they want to transfer to four-year schools pay triple their current tuition, and then get it back if they succeed? My guess is we could raise the transfer rate a bit and increase the community college budget at the same time.

However, the problem is the same as for the Craft; among the many other things that you cannot predict, you have no way of knowing that the student who is unable or unwilling to pay is not the very one you are looking for.

Marching forth, sort of

Today at the college we all walked out at 11 to protest budget cuts to education. I took the class out the the quad and told them not to leave the rally until the normal time for class to end, sat on a bench where I could hear but not see, and ate my lunch. Then the events moved to city hall and I met my afternoon class, who had been given the choice of going downtown and writing about it, coming to class and writing their representatives, or just coming to class and doing their homework. Or making up missing work, which some always need to do.

I did demonstrations a lot when I was young. Now I don't go places where I have to stand too long and there's no bathroom. And the truth is that my heart isn't 100% in this one.

Not that I support the disintegration of public education in the state of California.

It's not so awful to have to bring your own chalk and work around the fact that some of the students can't afford the textbook, which I had to do back in the Peace Corps when I was first learning to teach. The strategy and intrigue required to get stuff (like class time in a computer lab for instance), is also familiar from those days, although the specific goals are different now, and back then you could figure out who to bribe and how much--a carton of Marlboroughs from the Navy base commissary often went a long way. Here, in my own culture, I grope to figure this out. Nor do I really mind having to explain to recent high school graduates the difference between the Roman Empire and the British Empire (the history of western civilization does not seem to be prominently featured on the STAR tests). The differences are kind of interesting, quite apart from the time line on the board, and I'm always encouraged when they don't know a thing like this and somebody in the room has the curiosity and gumption to ask.

But public education developed because the founders of our democracy realized that it wouldn't work if too many people were ignorant and illiterate. I am haunted by the idea that public education and functioning democracy may go down together.

At the same time, clamoring for more money to buy chalk and books and all the rest of it isn't going to have any more effect than it would have thirty-five years ago in that dusty little market town on the edge of Sahara. Now, as then, there isn't any money. The question to address here, and now, is why there isn't any money; how the richest country in the world has managed to squander its fortune and now must settle for a third-world education system.

Bobby's First Post

This is an indifferent picture of me, Bobby. I don't photograph well, being black and all. You can see that I am quite a large and intimidating dog. I started out fairly small, but grew up to be nearly six pounds, more than that if I weigh in wet or just after dinner. You don't need to be scared, though--I don't bite, at least not what you would really call bite. A couple of times I have nipped at dim-witted human puppies who kept chasing me after I'd clearly told them to back off. A great fuss was made over this, but if you ask me I did them a big favor if the experience prevents them from trying the same thing on some pit bull with a short fuse.

I live with Mrs. D., and you can bet she would be D. for Dead by now, if it weren't for me. I keep us safe from passing dogs outside, and the raccoons and other urban wildlife that raid the garbage cans under the bedroom window at three in the morning. I chase away the vacuum cleaners and skateboards. I even keep a sharp eye on boys who look like the type to ride skateboards, even if they aren't doing it at the moment. All this keeps me busy a lot of the time, and when I get a break I like to play fetch or tug, or hide things and pretend I can't find them so Mrs. D. has to come get them for me.

People sometimes ask her if I am her familiar, which apparently means am I somehow involved with what she does in the back room sometimes, or what they get up to when people come over and they start moving furniture around and putting different stuff on the coffee table. I give no attention to any of this, however. It simply diverts her attention from its right and proper object, me. They like to stick me away in the crate or the bedroom for these events, but I've figured out that if I lie low and hide while things are getting started, they are likely to forget about me and leave me alone. I generally do come out when they start on the food, but they don't seem to have anything very tasty on these occasions. If she wants me for a familiar, she should lay in some chicken or something.

Mrs. D. is not the smartest chipmunk in the tree. She can't hear well, for one thing, and she can hardly smell a thing. She also has a lot of very dumb ideas about leashes, and that crate, and little outings to vet. But she's the one who dishes out the food around here, as well as most of the other comforts and diversions, so as a general rule I just go with her program. She does most of the talking, but I may be checking in now and then if I think any of her remarks require back story or clarification.

I see that it was still February when I said it was the Full Moon in March. But there is a three-day orb for the full moon, according popular Pagan custom, so it should not matter much which day I noticed it. Although the old man who first taught me the Craft did not believe this. "Either the moon is full or it isn't," he said.

There technically is only a precise and fleeting moment when it's truly full, not nearly enough time for all the things Witches do about it. I suppose he meant either it looks really full or it doesn't, but that is a subjective and variable perception, like the quickening of a child.

I found Yeats' "A Full Moon in March," though not my paper about it. Here is the end, which I remember having to deliver in a monotonous atonal chant. The director wanted to do it the way Yeats intended it. Yeats was not much of a playwright, and even less of a director. And even for poetry, he did considerably better on many occasions:

Why must those holy, haughty feet descend
From emblematic niches, and what hand
Ran that delicate raddle through their white?
My heart is broken, yet must understand
What do they seek for? Why must they descend?

For descecration, and the lover's night.

I cannot face that emblem of the moon
Nor eyelids that the unmixed heavens dart,
Nor stand upon my feet, so great a fright
Descends upon my savage, sunlit heart.
What can she lack, whose emblem is the moon?

But desecration and the lover's night.

Delight my heart with sound; speak yet again.
But look and look with understanding eyes
Upon the pitchers that they carry; tight
Therein all time's completed treasure is:
What do they lack? O, cry it out again

But desecration and the lover's night.

So it's about descration, not purification. Or maybe that's just one of the things that Witches turn inside out, along with darkness and light, God and Devil, and with black cats and toads and spiders all being good luck. And thirteen a fortunate number, a full coven. Which Jesus of Nazareth had, actually. It only came to be thought unlucky because there was one who betrayed him, which is not our problem. Purification and desecration could be the same thing, depending on who you ask, and when.