Smithsonian Article

The Air Tide Flows

This season, between Beltane and Midsummer, is called the Time of Change--possibly because Beltane is one of the two hinges of the year that herald dramatic changes in energy and conditions.

The crops are sown, and now the fragile seedlings must take root and grow. The fields must be weeded and watered, relatively light work if diligently done. But now, the outcome of the past season's sowing depends on the vagaries of chance; the weather, the whims of marauding birds, forest creatures, otherworld spirits.

The veils between the worlds that opened at Beltane still remain thin. Connections are loose. All things are possible. The Lady and Lord, wholly absorbed with each other, leave their children to shift for themselves.

The time is more auspicious for divining than for sorcery. The lot-casting methods--the runes, Tarot, geomancy, the I Ching--will be the most effective ones.

On the Waning Moon

End projects and relationships
Sell property
Clean house
Sort and throw things away
Prune, weed and cut back
Harvest root crops
Trip hair or nails to make them grow more slowly

Auspicious for:
Vacations and retreats
Evaluations and examinations
Magical workings for cleansing, banishing, warding, protection and exorcism
Surgery (wounds will bleed less)

GRADUATION EDIQUETTE

1. NO CELL PHONE USE DURING THE GRADUATION

a) No Calls Please!

b) No Texting Please!

c) TURN THE CELL PHONE OFF. THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

d) No Talking to Your Neighbor Once You Are Seated On Stage!

2. NO SLEEPING DURING THE PROGRAM

a) Pease Be Alert and Pay Attention Through-Out the Entirety of the Program - Speeches and Presentations.

b) We want our Graduates to Feel Special, and the Audience to SEE That You Believe Them To Be Special, and the Graduation Ceremony as well.

3. REMINDER! IF YOUR NAME DOES NOT APPEAR ON THE GRADUATION PROGRAM, DO NOT APPROACH THE PODIUM/MICORPHONE - AT ANY TIME!!!

THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!!!

This was on the faculty seats on the stage along with our commencement programs, for us to peruse for our edification after we processed in.

We are not in the Ivy League, here. The sound system didn't work, and the keynote speaker was pretty tiresome, a fledgling local politician who was not only boring, which is par for the course, but embarrassingly off-topic. She grabbed us as captive audience for her campaign speech, only acknowledging our new AA graduates for a moment at the end, to encourage them to be inspired by her example. At least so I gathered, through the deficiencies of the sound system.

But the musical numbers were great, in spite of the sound system. We don't worry much about test scores around here, but we have got rhythm.

And our valedictorian was splendid, as is often the case. This year, a middle-aged Filipina with an articulate and radical economic agenda to save public education, which had a mostly black and brown crowd of 1500 standing and cheering. Somebody out there ought to be listening.

Merry May!

A Tree Song

Rudyard Kipling

Of all the trees that grow so fair,

Old England to adorn,

Greater are none beneath the Sun,

Than Oak, and Ash, and Thorn.

Sing Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, good sirs,

(All of a Midsummer morn!)

Surely we sing no little thing,

In Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

Oak of the Clay lived many a day,

Or ever AEneas began.

Ash of the Loam was a lady at home,

When Brut was an outlaw man.

Thorn of the Down saw New Troy Town

(From which was London born);

Witness hereby the ancientry

Of Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

Yew that is old in churchyard-mould,

He breedeth a mighty bow.

Alder for shoes do wise men choose,

And beech for cups also.

But when ye have killed, and your bowl is spilled,

And your shoes are clean outworn,

Back ye must speed for all that ye need,

To Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

Ellum she hateth mankind, and waiteth

Till every gust be laid,

To drop a limb on the head of him

That anyway trusts her shade:

But whether a lad be sober or sad,

Or mellow with ale from the horn,

He will take no wrong when he lieth along

'Neath Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

Oh, do not tell the Priest our plight,

Or he would call it a sin;

But - we have been out in the woods all night,

A-conjuring Summer in!

And we bring you news by word of mouth-

Good news for cattle and corn-

Now is the Sun come up from the South,

With Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

Sing Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, good sirs

(All of a Midsummer morn):

England shall bide till Judgment Tide,

By Oak and Ash and Thorn!

Facebook Fishbowl

I'm taking courses in how to teach online. This is part of my retirement plan, such as it is. (Teachers don't all get big fat pensions, by the way. Republicans lie a lot. But that's the topic for another post.)

Part of the current course has us exploring Facebook as a teaching tool. Apparently this is a great ploy for motivating middle school kids who are more easily seduced into education if it seems like something else. For my community college students, and myself, I worry about conducting class in public to such a degree. You can hide the posts from random googlers, I realize, but not the names of your "friends." Maintaining privacy on Facebook can be done, sort of, with the use of an alias that they don't want you to use and have software to spot. (Sybil Drinkwalter got past their radar, but Grammar as a first name did not.)

But you have to be savvy to stay in control of your privacy on Facebook, more savvy than most of my students, among them people being stalked by vengeful exes, young people with double identities (gay with conservative immigrant parents is one example of the complex scenarios that develop. Or a woman from a strictly traditional Muslim immigrant family whose friends and activities have become a bit more Americanized than others in her family realize). There are people with political and legal histories that provide any number of reasons for preferring privacy. And not one of them will want a prospective employer who googles them five years from now to see what their English is like now.

And I get nervous, too, viewing the spread of photographs on my new Facebook page in my legal name ... "people you might know" ... you betcha. There they all are, lined up in random order, Witches, occultists, community college students, community college administrators, my sister in Tacoma, my born again cousins in Texas, people from my high school class whom I haven't been in touch with for nearly half a century, and if it's been that long there obviously have been reasons why not. Of course, I don't have to friend them all, but if they want to friend me, it seems rude to ignore them. And it's disconcerting to know that there is software out there that can so instantly determine that I "might" know them all.

Why Easter Is So Late

"Easter falls on the first Sunday following the first ecclesiastical full moon that occurs on or after the day of the vernal equinox."

And what is an ecclesiastical full moon, I hear you ask?

The web page I got this definition from, (http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/easter.php), does not explain except to say that an ecclesiastical full moon is not quite the same thing as an astronomical full moon, but that they are pretty close. I am sufficiently annoyed by the presumption of Christian ecclesiastics in setting up their own full moon, different from everybody else's, that I have not pursued the matter further.

Anyway, this year the moon was full only a few days before the Equinox, and will not be full again until the wee hours of the morning tomorrow, which is a Monday, putting off Easter until April 24th.


Easter is actually a perfectly good word for either holiday--ask your Christian ecclesiastics where the word comes from. Don't ask our fuzzier-brained Pagans, actually, many of whom are pretty sure it has to do with Ishtar. That similarity in sound is apparently pure accident, English and ancient Semitic languages not being very closely related. "Easter" does derive from a Germanic Goddess of the dawn.

The Christian scheduling strategy was to give their God the last word in the days when people were still talking to more than one. However, I think it was a miscalculation on their part to allow for quite so much lag time. This way the Pagans get the last word with May Eve, one of our real blockbusters, less than a week after.
And it is an inconvenience for us when the Spring Equinox and Easter are so widely separated in time, because Safeway doesn't have Easter candy for Pagan children.

My schoolteacher problem is that the spring break is always the week before Easter, even though probably no more than ten percent of my students celebrate it (most of them being Buddhists and Muslims). I am accustomed to a spring semester rhythm in which we do midterm exams just before spring break, take a week off to reflect on the implications, then come back and really get down to business. This year it looks as though we will be getting down to business far too late.

Kathy Mar has a wonderful song called "Everybody's Moon." For just $.99, download and listen to the whole thing.