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.

The Earth Tide Flows

At Samhain, the Earth Tide flows. This is a time of certainties. The Witch in this tide is seer and not sorcerer.

It is not always a certainty of stillness. It may be a certainty of change. But the tide will move by its own power. There is little to do now but see, and ride.

It's a Will, Not a Want

We will enforce fairness and decency in the places of power.

We will deny to the wealthy few the privilege of lives outside the law.

We will free ourselves of the burdens of wars we cannot afford, and of parasites who take with both hands and give nothing.

We will remove our energies from the causes of death and greed, and give our energies to the causes of life and hope.

We will do this in many ways; some will march, some will occupy, some will teach, some will heal; some will simply do what they have always done, fairly and decently, but also speak truth to power.

We will do these things as a creative and joyful community. There will be no need for violence.

After we are done, there will be time and place for all the various things we might want.

Now, at the eve of the astrological cross-quarter, is the time of a Witch's greatest power.

The water tide is at its farthest ebb. Things that normally are hidden are revealed.

It is a time to wander the mudflats, take hold of what you find and make of it what you will.

I guess it’s not too surprising that the first Occupy actions to make the authorities really nervous have been in cities with mild climates and therefore large homeless populations.

Perhaps we need to think through what kind of protest action works best in different kinds of communities. Camping out to draw attention to the issue of unemployment may not be the most effective action in cities where thousands of unemployable people have been camping out for years.

One of the issues we have to confront as a society, of course, is the blurring of those categories. Thirty years ago, one assumed that anybody living on the streets was probably on booze or drugs, or had some other kind of problem negotiating reality. Now all kinds of people are homeless, and many of us who are employed and look relatively comfortable are really only a few paychecks away from it.

Another obvious long-standing issue is why thousands of people who belong in hospitals or rehab or halfway houses are sleeping on the streets, getting sicker and wierder and angrier all the time.

But in a place like Oakland, an Occupy encampment rapidly gets occupied by the endemic homeless population, creating an excuse for the cops to move in and deal with it, in a hyped-up version of the way they have always dealt with an ongoing "nuisance."

Time to get creative about some other effective actions. I’m for boycotting banks, for instance. Just use credit unions, and explore other alternative systems like the old-fashioned and now disappearing British building societies.

It also could be entertaining to identify the homes or neighborhoods of some of the more egregious 1%, and go hang around in some irritating but legal manner. I am not sure specifically what I mean, but if I keep thinking about it the ethos of my gentle Quaker upbringing might suggest something.

The Water Tide Ebbs

After the Fall Equinox, the Water Tide ebbs.

The Tides of the year influence the kind of magic that will be most effective in addressing a given issue, and the magical purposes for which work is most effective.

Generally speaking, events in the flowing Tides are less responsive to active, instrumental spells than events in the ebb Tides. When a Tide flows it is a force of nature that carries the time along with it, and when this happens the Witch's best policy is divination to determine how things are moving and how best to move with them.

On the ebb tide things become more fluid and uncertain, and the Witch's power to mold them increases. Sorcery has its greatest effect at a full ebb Tide, just before a new Tide flows (the days leading up to each of the Cross-Quarter Days--Samhain, Candlemas, Beltane and Lammas).

The elemental influence of a Tide suggests the most auspicious magical aims and methods for the time. The ebbing Water tide is the best time of the year for works of healing. This influence grows from Mabon to Samhain; but when the Earth Tide flows at Samhain, it is overwhelmed by the certainties of nature and mortality.

The God at Mabon

Now the fires are burning low, and the light I have is dying.

There is more power in the bread than there is in me.

When you have eaten of it, I will be gone.

Things Fall Apart

The community college district, of course, has a hiring freeze on. Nobody who retires, gets fired, goes off the deep end or is run over by a truck can be replaced. It makes for interesting times, in the ancient Chinese sense.
The competent over-achiever who used to do all the room scheduling has retired, so now there can be no more room scheduling. Your class is probably in the same place it was last year. It works out all right for the most part, since there are no longer any new teachers or new courses. But no changes of venue are possible.
My phone doesn't work. The line has been dead since school started. I printed out and completed a work order, after a bit of hassle finding someone whose computer had access to both the Internet and a printer. Then I took it over to the mail room to place in the box for the "switchboard office," as directed at the top of the form. The mail room guy, one of the key people in the institution who still works there, said that there wasn't any box for the switchboard office because it was only one person, and now she has retired. I wondered where to put the form, and he suggested a few possibilities, none of which seemed like a sure thing to him, or sounded quite right to me. So I choose one at random, and shoved it in.

Fortunately, in the 21st century, phones are no longer essential. My students and immediate colleagues know they get better results from me on email anyway. Since somehow this dead phone line still pretends to take messages, I do worry a bit that somebody higher up, high enough to have a phone that works, will be upset if I don't return a call. Only a bit worried, though--such are the luxuries of tenure.

In the ESL department, we tell each other how fortunate it is that most of us were in the Peace Corps at one time or another. It was good training for what's going on now. Just find a good shade tree, prop up a blackboard, and start teaching something.
Over Irish coffee at the hofbrau tonight with my full moon cronies, we exchanged workday war stories. One friend said that all those alumni fundraisers who are always harassing us for more money than we've got to spare should adopt the methodology of those helpful organizations who market modest, useful gifts for people in third world countries--you can buy ducklings for somebody in Bolivia, or a goat for Nepal. Why not solicit affordable amounts to fund specific things that schools need? She'd be happy, my friend said, to donate what it costs to put in a phone line. People could fund this and that, there would be commemorative plaques on the photocopiers, maybe items funded by little trust funds in honor of departed relatives. Then I could have a cheery, operational phone message ... "Hello, you have reached Sybil Drinkwalter on the McIntyre Memorial Phone Line ..."

Signs of the Times

I've been going to the Touchless Car Wash in downtown Berkeley for years now. For $20 they take the car through the wash for you (I have a tendency to claustrophobia and really hate doing that) and then four or five people in red Touchless T-Shirts descend on the car to vacuum out the inside and wipe down all the surfaces (I have arthritis and just plain don't do that). While they are busy, you go inside and amuse yourself shopping for junk food and a whimsical selection of greeting cards and gift items.

Today, taking my grimy car in for some attention after leaving it parked out front of my house for much of the summer, I was struck by a shift in the ethnic composition in the staff. For as long as I can remember, the cashier has been a young man from somewhere in the Middle East (not always the same young man from the Middle East) and the grunt workers in the red T-shirts have all been from somewhere south of the border or beyond, and I suppose I always assumed, not thinking about it any more than middle-class white people in California have to think about it, that most of them were probably undocumented. Now, the crew is getting to reflect the ethnic composition of northern California--black, white and Asian as well as Latino.

And then there are the changes on Lincoln Avenue, the street where I grew up back in Amherst, Massachusetts. Lincoln Avenue is about a mile long, and connects the Amherst College and University of Massachusetts campuses. The housing runs a social gamut; four or five huge, gracious mansions in the first block at the Amherst college end, and increasingly modest middle-class homes as you move toward UMass, with a block of apartments bordering the campus at the end.

The top block has not changed one iota in appearance for the past fifty years. From there on down, there are creeping signs of shabbiness and disrepair, first in some of the houses, then in all of them. The apartments down at the end, which used to be tidy and utilitarian, have deteriorated into a little slum.

It's kind of a parable for the times.

This Is Your Old Age on Drugs

My mom, now 91, has one of those foot-square plastic trays with pills sorted out in lidded compartments by day and time, 28 for a week. (I have a smaller one, still just one little lidded box per day. And the system works better for me because most of the time I can still remember what day it is).

In the case of my mom, whose physical health is remarkably good, most of the drugs are psychoactive. I have not followed what they all are, or which discouraging aspect of her emotions and behavior they are meant to treat, since we have two nurses and a doctor in the family who are much better qualified for this responsibility than I. Just now, my sister was on the phone with the psychiatrist, having a very complicated conversation about dosages and trying more of this and less of that.

The result of all this medication is that my mom is not crazy, exactly, but still quite depressed. And more confused than she should be, given the appearance of a recent brain scan. (She doesn't have Alzheimer's--you could have fooled me.)

Coming from the 1960's by way of California, I of course see the obvious option of trying some really good drugs, if she is going to be on drugs. Primo bud her food, might be a good place to start.

Apparently my teenage nephew recently made a similar suggestion at the dinner table but was quickly stifled (his father the doctor is, like most doctors, quite conservative).

For myself, if I make it past 90, I definitely intend to do it stoned.

Wort Moon

The full moon that falls in Leo is sometimes called the Wort Moon because its waxing is the auspicious time to gather certain worts, or herbs useful for the leafy part that grows above the ground. (Dried herbs of this type are medicinally and magically effective for only about a year after they are picked, a fact that is ignored by most businesses that market them.) Two herbs traditionally associated with this time were mugwort and vervain.

Mugwort is plentiful in California, and known since Native American times for its power to induce dreams. Drink it as a tea, and fall asleep intending to dream what you need to know. Some herbals give warnings about its possible toxicity, but you would probably have to drink gallons of the stuff to do any harm, and there's no reason why anyone would do that. You'd be up all night peeing, and never get any dreams at all.

Vervain is traditionally used for kidney stones and bladder problems, also to drive away vampires. The Iroquois used it to drive away anybody they didn't want to deal with, but this strategy doesn't seem to have stood the test of time. It apparently works better on vampires than on white people. Vervain has general protective qualities, though, and is also used in divination; you can see the future by gazing into a fire through vervain. Or add some to your mugwort tea for prophetic dreams.

Work in the Time of Harvest

(The flowing Water Tide, from Lammas to Mabon)

This, like the planting time from Eostara to Beltane, is a period of intense hard work. It is a time when work comes to fruition, and the rewards of past work can be reaped. There will, however, be a lot to do to accomplish this, and it may feel as though the time is too short. It is a time of intense activity, both work and play.

The Mother at this time is at the height of Her power, her breasts flowing with milk at the very sound of a child’s cry. Honor Her with works of healing and compassion, with a portion of each thing you earn or reap.

The Mother of All Living tells us that she demands no sacrifice because she needs make no such demand; a portion of every labor and every love returns to Her by the law of Nature. When that return is brought to her consciously and with gratitude, she rewards Her children by opening to them the storehouse of Her wisdom; the truth that lies there is our own, which she has saved for us from our gifts of past seasons. Thus at this season we eat new fruit and old meat, new achievements and old wisdom.

Love and labor are one in the Mother at this season. Seek to perform all your work with love, and work to sustain your love for others.

Like the Planting Time, this is a season which, in the old days, required the give-and-take of community effort, as large work teams harvested one farm after another. Look carefully and the patterns of reciprocity in your relationships, ask yourself whether they are balanced and fair, and what you can do to improve their equilibrium.

Try to “float to the surface” of the Tide, to take along and broad view of things, so as to maintain your perspective. Take time from your full and busy days to study and contemplate the huge expanses of space and time—the physical universe, karma, your past lives. This is the most productive Tide for trance divination, for traveling in trance and dream the roads that lead to the future and the past.

Wells Fargo

Wells Fargo has sort of been on my s**t list for a long time, ever since as a new and unwary credit customer, I realized that my debt to them was creeping up because the minimum payment was set at less than the amount required to prevent that from happening.

It's not much surprise now to learn that they also illegally pushed borrowers into subprime mortgages and falsified loan documents.

The penalty for these procedures, which surely must involve multiple felonies, is to pay a fine that amounts to a tiny fraction of the bank's recent yearly profits.

In a free market, business ethics are fostered because a reputation for integrity is good for business, and being caught ripping off your customers is very bad for business. Government bail-outs have removed that natural and internal control mechanism, and token penalties for blatantly criminal behavior now reinforce the message to financial institutions that they are so important that they are allowed to do whatever they like (kind of like the later and most decadent Roman emperors).

Mrs. D. now belongs to a credit union, and no longer deals with banks at all if she can help it.

Pagan Preacher: The Time of Ripening

(from Dyffd ap Tower)

Here we are in the middle of the year, between the Planting and the Harvest, between the conception and the realization. Here are in the midst of Life. Let us take one day to celebrate and then get back to work.

These are the golden days. Golden because of the presence of the Sun and golden because we have a goal to work toward. This is the best of times.

Now one might ask, What’s so good about it? Here are right in the middle of things, there’s lots to do and so far there has been no payoff.

The “payoff” is not just in the rewards that come with accomplishment, it is also in the experience and the effort.

In our conversation is more worthwhile to talk about what we are doing or what we have been doing rather than what we have. How we got something sounds so much better than what we have got.

The truly creative person loses all interest in what has been done and turns their mind to what is being done or will be done.

The value comes from seeing what needs to be done and liking what we do to reach that goal. If you see a need to drain the swamp, it is worthwhile to not only get in with the alligators, but to like it as well.

So here we are in the middle of Life, and all the things to do that we must to maintain Life and we must appreciate the need to do them.

As mundane as some of these things are, they are important and they are what makes the quality of our lives. Let us enjoy the experience.

IT DOESN’T GET ANY BETTER THAN THIS!

Turkey a la King

Bobby, here. We got a lot of turkey a la king for the full moon the other night. Mrs. D. writes up all this moon stuff it's some big deal, but what they really do when it's full is go to this kind of Irish hofbrau place down by the railroad station and have a drink, and then have another drink, and then get a lot of food, and I'm in storage in her bag under the table and don't get any. Then they pack up the leftover food and drive down to the marina and look at the moon. I still don't get anything to eat, but she lets me out of the bag so I can pee on a few trees.

They look at the moon, and they sing the same old song about it, and blather on the way they do. Then we all get in the car and go home.

I finally got leftover turkey a la king for dinner yesterday. This morning, I had to make a bit of a scene, but scored some more for breakfast. Tonight she mixed the last of it up with the dumb old kibble, so I had to pick through to get the good stuff, and leave the slimy bits of kibble in a heap on the floor beside my dish.

I realize that you can more or less survive on that kibble if you have to, but it's pretty weird how she thinks I can't tell the difference.

Full Moon

Worship and celebration

Dancing and music

Lovemaking

Conception and birth are both likely and auspicious.

MEDITATION:

If possible, sit where you can see the moon. Otherwise, visualize the full moon hanging in the sky. Close your eyes and see the moon grow smaller and smaller, until it is just an intense point of light in the sky.

Then it will begin to grow larger again. As it begins to grow larger, you may say that it has taken a new form---the figure of a Deity, or an animal, or some other image; or it may be just the moon itself.

The image will grow larger and larger, will surpass the normal size of the moon, and will fill the night sky.

Then it will continue to grow larger, encompassing the earth, and surrounding you and filling you with its gravity and light.

Feel yourself in the moon and part of the moon, as it permeates your body.

Then the image will begin to grow smaller and recede, leaving some of its power behind, in your bones and blood.

The image will recede back to the small point of light in the sky. Then the point will begin to grow again, until you can open your eyes and see the full moon again as everyone sees it, hanging round in the sky.

Acceleration

I've spent the last three days at a conference on "acceleration," our new community college buzz-word. There is some research indicating that under-prepared community college students can do as well or better with less remediation rather than more. There is a push to apply this principle to ESL, my field, which I find counter-intuitive.

Achieving academic proficiency in a second language is not really remediation, for one thing. Thinking of it as such might even be regarded as a subtle form of imperialism, since it is most often required of people from less powerful countries or communities who must establish squatters' rights in a dominant culture in order to improve their prospects. Certainly I couldn't do college-level work in any language but English, and neither could most other Americans. And plenty of long-established research suggests that it takes a number of years to get there.

My French, for instance, is probably more or less equivalent to my intermediate students' English. Suppose that I were a bit younger, found myself in a French-speaking country and wanted to get a university education there. I would have at least a few years of hard work to get ready for that, and would not be in any way served by an attempt to "accelerate" the process from a few years to one.

Anyway, after three days of sometimes inspirational and sometimes annoying pep talks, my conclusion is that, probably unbeknownst to the people actually running this conference, "acceleration" is a characteristically Californian spin on all the devastating budget cuts.

You see, it's actually good for the students to spend less time in school and reach their goals faster, and we can make this happen for them by working really, really hard and teaching really, really well, and oh, yes, spending less of the taxpayers' money, so it's a win-win all around.

People there were boasting about how teaching is their whole life, they need no other.

I tried this "teaching is my life" thing for a few years in the early '80's, during which time I drank a lot (something that was also in evidence after-hours at this conference). Then, throwing up on the compost heap in the back yard one night, I was blessed with a moment of realization that I stood poised in a window of opportunity between heavy drinking and truly addicted alcoholism, a good time to quit.

Without that hazy cloud of alcohol at the end of the day, "teaching is my life" no longer seemed quite so fulfilling, and I was forced to diversify my portfolio.

Waxing Moon

Magical work for fertility, prosperity, growth and plenty:

Harvest crops and herbs that grow above the ground.