In a moment of sad synchronicity, only a few hours after I posted this I found out that Mary Oliver is seriously ill. Writers and poets are sharing their stories about how her work has influenced them, and sending their blessings and prayers. I know many Druids and Pagans are also familiar with her work and have been touched by her vision and love of nature. Please take a few moments today to express your love and gratitude for an amazing woman, and consider sharing your story with her by sending her an open letter.

In honor of our first Valentine’s Day as husband and wife, I wanted to share the poem that Jeff and I had read at our wedding.

Photography by Matt Lusk

The Ponds

Every year
the lilies
are so perfect
I can hardly believe

their lapped light crowding
the black,
mid-summer ponds.
Nobody could count all of them—

the muskrats swimming
among the pads and the grasses
can reach out
their muscular arms and touch

only so many, they are that
rife and wild.
But what in this world
is perfect?

I bend closer and see
how this one is clearly lopsided—
and that one wears an orange blight—
and this one is a glossy cheek

half nibbled away—
and that one is a slumped purse
full of its own
unstoppable decay.

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled—
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing—
that the light is everything—that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and falling. And I do.

Mary Oliver

Happy Valentine’s Day! May you and your loved ones overlook the crass consumerism and Prisoner’s Dilemma romance of the day to celebrate the joy, gratitude and love in your lives.

Photography by Matt Lusk

I’ll be offline completely for the next several days as we move into our new place and set up utilities. In the meantime, interwebz, play nice!

Interwebz Update 2.10.2012

Our new landlady is letting us borrow internet until ours kicks in next week, but the connection is still pretty tenuous.

Lunar Union

I expect an eclipse of moon
to be a kind of dilation,
corona blaze of blue iris
flaring out from the pupil-
depths of midnight sky
cast, in its center, suddenly
to shadow by coy sunlight.
I expect a god, his gaze
past the austerity of bare trees,
sharp eyelashes against the pale
cheek of hill, and the thrill
of being strewn across
the slender landscape by his
casual devastation. I expect
dizziness. I expect winter
to collapse into blossoms
of infinity, of warm rain.
Instead, I lose circulation
in my limbs, waiting still
for the dull red skin of eclipse
to creep across the moonlight,
the inside of an eyelid.
We blink away stars, myself
and the moon, a slow reunion
of celestials, once familiar.
We expand. I expect it to
take forever, and it does.

This post is part of the 7th Annual Brigid Poetry Festival.

Muse Abused: Ars Poetica

She sleeps with fists
clenched and wakes with bruises
in her palms.
She is reversible.
She folds colored paper along creases
that could break
open the skyline,
then quietly she unfolds it again.
The moon rises.
She knows the empty
roads, long and wet with rain, punctuated
by streetlamps,
are what whisper
along the necks of sleeping girls, absence
of unwoken hours.
She pretends subtlety.
Shadows cling to the hem of her
dress, ends of her
hair, broken strands
of moonlight that ripple down her back.
She moves first
with her silver eyes;
her body follows like fog slowly melting.
She does not breathe.
The stream breathes
of her. She cradles thick riverbanks
like an instrument,
touches three strings.
One chord moves the air, three drops
of rain entering
the same pond.
She traces circles back to their beginnings.
She is afraid of
losing the source
of things. She understands dissipation.
She bathes her old
soul in oil pastels
and touches three strings with charcoal
fingertips. The stars
circle their beginnings.
She sleeps with fists clenched and wakes
with inky palms.

This post is part of the 7th Annual Brigid Poetry Festival.

I’ve lived so long among ghosts,
the puffed up shells,
watery husks
shimmering transparent skins
that shiver in the wind.
Like so much sea foam,
they shrink away
from the outstretched hand,
fall back into their emptiness.
They were only ever noise
and tension, then,
stealing form
from chaos.
I see faces in the foam
like the pantomimes
played out among the clouds
— then they are gone,
only ever projections
of a lonely eye.

So much better
the quiet suck of mud
after a long rain,
the tough old stems,
the sting of the stubborn nettle,
all about the earth
that lingers,
that leaves a mark.

This post is part of the 7th Annual Brigid Poetry Festival.

When I was a Catholic, the question of belief didn’t trouble me all that much. Not because I had been told what to think and believe unquestioningly, but because I had two thousand years of theologians, mystics, philosophers and saints who’d explored these questions before me and come up with myriad ways of answering them, more than imaginable. Choosing what to believe was like a hunt for buried treasure among a rich tradition nourished and nurtured by elders and wise men for generations. And it was a hunt I was encouraged to go on, an invitation to adventure and not a threat of “getting it right” or facing some awful punishment (at least this was true in the liberal, intellectually curious Catholicism that I was raised in, a kind of Catholicism that seems to be rapidly disappearing these days). After a long hunt, I discovered that the treasure I’d uncovered — that “pearl of great price” — did not belong exclusively to Christianity, and in fact had a great deal more in common with the ancient, pagan traditions that knelt close to the earth, sinking loving fingers into the soil and dancing down the rain. It was a treasure born of the natural world, the poetry of my Celtic ancestors, the music of the World Song singing in the roots of the trees and the stones of the burial mounds and the caressing waves of the ocean lapping against the shore.

So I left Catholicism behind and began wandering in the wilderness. Druidry was the path I took, one that resonated with me deeply for many reasons. But as with most young traditions, I quickly discovered that modern Druidry, and much of modern Paganism in general, had only shallow roots that ran up far too quickly against the bedrock of lost heritage, oppression, disruption, colonialism and the uncertainty of intervening millennia. What were the traditions of the ancients that I hoped to rediscover, and even if I did manage to find them or piece them together from the few clues left, how could I be sure that they would be relevant and meaningful to me as a woman in the (post-)postmodern world?

The search for answers to my theological questions took on a new anxiety. Where once I could sift through the opinions of philosophers and mystics for the truths that resonated with me on a personal level, now I found myself striving to become an Expert In All Things Pagan, trying to build a whole new tradition for myself on the uncertain foundation of the ashes and dust and old bones of the beloved dead and the competing interests and egos of contemporary Pagan leaders, some of whom were (let’s be honest) not always very kind to newbies and neophytes (or even people they’d only just met who, for lack of a reputation, they merely assumed were newbies). As the Joni Mitchell song goes, “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone…”

Without a larger, well-established religious community to offer support and acceptance, without the tether of discernment and long-cultivated wisdom that allowed me to safely wander far into the depths of the unknown along my own spiritual path — I found myself incredibly anxious about straying too far from the herd. I tried for years to be a “good polytheist” with an anxiety and uneasy eagerness to prove myself that I’d never felt as a monotheist. Suddenly, it wasn’t enough to profess a belief in my gods; I also had to prove that my knowledge of them was founded in solid, up-to-date research by only the best scholars. I had to pronounce names in unfamiliar languages with perfect accuracy during rituals, I had to demonstrate my knowledge of exactly how the Irish Manannan mac Lir differed from the Welsh Manawydan fab Llyr, I had to strive to believe in a “hard” polytheism that took for granted deity identity much less fluid than even the identities of my fellow human beings, I had to guard against eclecticism and syncretism as naughty words, or even the whiff of these that might waft off of sources and authors who weren’t considered approved reading. Personal experiences that fell beyond the carefully constructed box of modern polytheistic practice was tactfully labeled “UPG” and left to shiver out in the cold of solitary practice where it was easy to wonder if maybe I was just crazy after all.

Much of this was my own personality. I’ve always wanted to do well at whatever work I take on, in love with the challenge that learning, exploration and skillful mastery can provide. I hate doing things half-assed, and as a Gemini, you might say that I have two whole asses to worry about putting on the line. I fling myself into all kinds of work with a passion, and that includes spiritual work, the Great Work. But sometimes, in my enthusiasm, I don’t spend enough time paying attention to whose standards I’m striving to measure myself against. I do value scholarship and academic rigor, and I appreciate nuance and intellectual subtlety as much as poetry, art and damn good ritual — and so it took me a long time to realize that the anxiety I was feeling about my spiritual life as a Pagan was not the healthy passion to explore, but the sinking feeling of dread at being laughed off as crazy, wrong or — gods forbid — just perpetually silly and “noob”-ish.

I’m beginning to think that this is a pretty common experience for Pagans. Some of my favorite fellow Pagans have a deep ambivalence about the community and the label itself, sometimes feeling boxed in or trapped by it, unable to relate to others who use that term or the communities they represent. I have been lucky in finding some strong, supportive Druid communities who help to keep me firmly tether to a process of discernment and honest exploration — but among the greater Pagan community, the anxiety persists. In recent months, I’ve realized that the anxiety has grown so great that there are times when I’m not even sure what it is that I do believe anymore, so long have I been paying more attention to the delicate dance of group opinions than to my own personal convictions.

So what exactly do I believe? To answer that question, I have to go back to basics. And in going back to basics, I have to face my fear of being forever shrugged off as a newbie fluff bunny who can’t be taken seriously. It’s easy to say, “So what? What do you care if people take you seriously?” But as a member of a scattered, small community, a minority religion in a predominantly Christian culture, it can feel pretty devastating to be shrugged off or shuffled aside even by those you thought would welcome you with open arms. But that’s the risk you have to face if you want to cultivate an open and free relationship with spirit and the sacred world. The world is far stranger and wilder than the books and experts would have you believe.

So what, at the most basic and deepest level, do I believe?

• I believe in the Song of the World, a harmony of interweaving melodies woven from the chorus of atoms and earthquakes, of wind and fire, of sun and starlight, of misty woods at dusk, of the butterfly’s dance and the call of the heron, of rainstorms and rivers, of ocean tides and cresting floods, of blood and gore spilled red upon the white purity of snow and the black of the raven’s wing, of rosebuds and the smell of summer grass, of the gods in their myriad forms, of the beloved dead, of the spirits of the land. I believe this World Song is what the Taoists call “The Way of Things” — both the deep, resonating essential nature of all that is, and the guide of natural harmony that shapes the world and the land around us and within us.
• I believe in fire and water, the sacred duality that dances at the creative heart of existence, born of that numinous unity which moves through the melody of the Song of the World. Fire and water move. They are the complimentary opposites that give rise each to the other, fire licking upwards, water trickling down, one bright and one dark, one hot and one cool, one active and one receptive, yet both liminal still, embodied best in movement not in form, consuming and all-permeating, the first spinning of unity into expression but still not yet manifest. I find that my guides to understanding this sacred duality are my primary gods: Brighid, goddess of fire, sun and stars; and Manannan, god of mist, storm and sea.
• I believe in the Three Realms of land, sea and sky, and the three Druidic elements of nwyfre, gwyar and calas (wind, water, stone; breath, blood, bone; force, flow and form). These triplicities are the dynamic manifestations of the marriage of fire and water, day and night, above and below, and all such sacred dualities. But they are not static, nor forced into a stable, permanent form — they move and turn, each arising from the others. Above, below and center. Transcendent, immanent and manifest. The in-breath, the exhalation, and the moment of stillness between. Like a three-legged stool, the stablest of all, these triplicities embody a dynamic, ever-changing stability of the natural world. And as three points define a plane, the Three Realms define the sacred space in which we live and move and have our being, while the three Druidic elements describe the processes of that life, that movement, that being-becoming dance of existence.
• I believe that the gods (however we conceive of them), the ancestors (however we remember them) and the spirits of the land (however we experience them) all play active, meaningful roles in shaping our lives and our selves. I believe that we in turn can cultivate meaningful, mutual relationships of love and respect with them through ritual, prayer, meditation and contemplative attention, and that these relationships offer us connection and opportunities to seek to live in harmony with the World Song through intention and free will even in the face of forces that are so much bigger than we can even imagine.
• I believe that all things are manifestations of Spirit, the Song of the World, and that all things also have spirit, unique selves which embody the myriad ways in which the world experiences and is conscious of itself. Rocks and whirlwinds possess a consciousness just as humans and house cats do, not to mention oak trees and gods and computer circuitry. This belief is generally called animism, or sometimes pantheism (though usually pantheism is a kind of non-theism that does not include a belief in individual deities). Either way, it celebrates the raven-ness of ravens and the mollusk-ness of mollusks, the utter tree-ness of a tree and the stone-ness of a stone as sacred expressions of the numinous, each with its own gift of awareness and experience to give back to the World Song.
• I believe that living rightly and mindfully in the world requires us to cultivate an integrity of balance and harmony with all these other beings that share the world with us, and that this naturally leads us to desire lives of sustainability and ecological awareness, as well as a reverence for nature. This reverence for nature is not only a love of the wildness and wilderness of landscapes and sacred places untamed and untrammeled by the controlling machinations of humans, but also a sacred acceptance and gratitude for the essential nature of reality itself, the Way of Things, the Song of the World. This reverence for nature leads us to see that nature is, indeed, everywhere, and cannot be otherwise but everywhere, for it is the essential, inalienable quality of the world itself. And realizing this, we no longer seek to exert control over nature, but to understand it and live according to nature in all its manifestations, including our own deepest, truest natures as human animals, members of this planet Earth.
• I believe that ritual, like poetry and art, can open us to more authentic relationship with the nature of things, the Song of the World, and all of the beings who share the world with us by engaging us in the sacred play of creativity, imagination and creation. Through ritual, we experience space and time in new ways, and discover the diversity of experience embodied in the myriad beings of the world. Through ritual, prayer, worshipful devotion and meditation, we cultivate our ability to attend to new perspectives and to connect to the beauty inherent in all things, including the beauty and meaning within ourselves.

I believe in a great many more things, but these beliefs are at the very foundation of my Druidic practice and my spiritual life.

This post is part of the Pagan Blog Project 2012.
Why not join in?

Last night was our last night with my husband’s kids for we don’t know how long. We all went out to eat at T.G.I. Friday’s and ate spinach dip and ice cream sundaes until we were stuffed to bursting. We laughed a lot, and we all mostly tried not to think about the uncertainty of the times ahead.

My husband has been in negotiations with his ex-wife informally since October, and formally (read: with lawyers) for two months trying to work out a child custody arrangement that will let him see the kids after we’ve moved. We originally hoped for a three-month period of time with them during the summers, but after their mother objected that this would interfere with their homeschooling schedule, we compromised with a proposal to have them two months during the summer, and one week each in March, October and in December over the winter solstice. It’s still not very much time, and it’s going to be really expensive for us to have to pay to fly four kids back and forth across the country several times a year instead of us just making one trip out and back… but it’s worth it to see the kids.

Now, after four weeks of missed deadlines and inexplicable delays, we finally received a counter-proposal from my husband’s ex. We’re… flabbergasted. She wants to drastically reduce his time with them to only a few weeks a year while also stipulating that if the schedule changes at the last minute, he forfeits his time with them completely (something that’s a big concern for us, since his ex has on numerous occasions changed her plans at the last minute or scheduled the kids to spend time with grandparents on days when they were supposed to be with us — if she did this under the new proposal, she could deliberately sabotage the only time we have with the kids). We received this counterproposal the day before the movers come and we leave for Seattle, despite a long legal process during which we requested her feedback for weeks and received nothing but silence in return.

We’re out of time. We’re almost out of money and we’re worried about being able to afford the legal fees to fight this, especially long-distance. And we’re getting pretty low on energy and hope, too, after months of attempts at compromise and civil discussion that have met with obstacle after obstacle, months of having to tell the kids, “We don’t know when we’ll see you again, but we promise that this isn’t goodbye for good” — not even sure that we’ll be able to keep that promise.

So we’d like to ask you for your support and your prayers. We would like to reach out to our religious community for emotional and spiritual support during this really hard time — to help us, and the kids, to get through this together more or less intact and still joyful and optimistic about what the future will bring. We have a lot of worries right now. We’re worried about our time, money and energy running short in the face of a stay-at-home mom who has her husband’s much larger salary as well as my husband’s child support payments at her disposal. We’re also worried about the prejudicial nature of their mother including the fact that we’re Pagan in the child custody agreement as a reason why we shouldn’t be allowed to see them during Christmas. We’re worried that once we’re out of town, our chances of winning a child custody battle will be greatly reduced, even though the new job that’s requiring us to move has brought my husband not only great career opportunities but a lot of personal fulfillment and happiness during only the short period of time he’s worked in his new position — a job that his ex demanded that he quit so that he could stay in town.

We’re Pagans. We’re proud of that fact, and proud that we belong to a community that believes intentions matter and magic is real and can make a difference in the world. We’re saying prayers and burning candles with reverence and hope, but we’d also appreciate any blessings or positive energy you can send our way. Thank you for being such a wonderful community for us, for all that you’ve given us over the years and all that you’ve allowed us to give back through our writing and blogging. Our hearts are filled with gratitude.

If you’d like to help us out with our legal fees, please consider donating below. Even a small amount will help:

What is She? Who is She? Celestial, ephemeral, pristine and pure, delicate, new, grace itself, fresh and bright. Earthy, dark and grounded, sweat and dirt and hot breath, the hard flex and tension of muscle, the rough power of fire and stone, the burning fluidity of molten ore. Primal, deep and ageless, utter stillness and distance, utter light in the darkness, spun out, flung out, fragmented, holographic, the whispering wholeness buried within each disparate glint of limit and form.

And the hammer, the anvil, the spark — the sweat and hot breath of the universe, the work and labor of the cosmos brought to bear on itself, the earthy Ground of Being lifted, deepened, expanded to fill a sky overwhelmed with the clamor of stars, each forged, each made new, pristine, a shining fragment of light. And the stars, the infinite suns, perfect spheres in a great dance of beauty, humming with song, swung in great arcs as though in one another’s arms, spinning into newly created moments, new beginnings, like a child spinning around her center in a fresh spring meadow, arms flung out, effortless in grace and welcome.

And the hiss of the steam, the pulsing of groundwater, the twining thrust of energy rising in the mound, a serpent of stars in the dark earth. The tongue of flame licking dark and bright above the wellspring, the purity and intensity of all-consuming heat, soften, tempered by the fresh, cold waters.

She is too much. I cannot hold onto Her, I cannot see Her — I can only follow the winding, spiraling connections, dynamic and always changing, fluid, fleet. Sometimes She is overwhelming, even austere, so hot and great that Her fire burns cold. Sometimes She is all innocence and promise, coaxing and gentle and warm, caressing and playful. Sometimes She is so intimate I cannot tell Her from my own passion, the drive that spurs me, the energy that courses through my blood and lashes out in righteous anger or sharp, clever words like a long blade. Sometimes, She is absence, void, the emptiness of death or grief, the keening of wind whistling through the hollow, the barely glimpsed sliver of light reflecting off the rainfall in the dusk, wane, distant, not enough.

Who is She? I don’t know. I cannot describe Her outside of poetry, and poetry cannot do Her justice. She is creativity at the heart of existence, tempered and expressed in culture and art, the resistance and pressure of material forms that force us into relationship and engagement, and the release from those heavy forms afforded by inspiration and the spark of light and insight that lifts us up beyond ourselves, seems to defy even gravity itself. She is my Goddess, my Sun, my Center, my Light, my Starscape, my Tongue, my Fire, my Draught, my Forge…

This post is part of the Pagan Blog Project 2012.
Why not join in?

I’ve joined sites all over the world wide web — from Reddit, BoingBoing and Wikipedia to WordPress, Google, even the Pagan Newswire Collective — in a blackout protest against the proposed SOPA (Stop Online Piracy ACT) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) bills that would drastically change the way the internet works and undermine innovation, communication and even basic safety by putting in place the infrastructure necessary for large-scale censorship.

My stepdaughter recently treated her father and I to this gem of wisdom when we were talking about her uncle’s job in the marketing industry:

“But if you create positions of power based on the idea that a good person will use that power wisely, you don’t have any way of preventing a person who isn’t good from abusing that power later on.”

She was raised on Lord of the Rings. Can you tell?

That’s what this protest is really about. As a writer and creative type who thrives in the online world, issues of copyright protection and piracy can be very real problems for me. Of course I want legal protections for my work. As an avid reader and web-surfer who loves lolcats and Dinosaur Comics as much as the next person, I want the artists, writers and creative types out there who produce content for my favorite sites to have those same protections — even, no, especially if those creative types are just some college students messing around on YouTube and not Hollywood stars making millions off the latest blockbuster.

But that’s not what SOPA/PIPA is really about. The SOPA and PIPA bills are like the ring of power forged in the fires of Mount Doom: one law to rule them all, one law to find them, one law to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. Sponsored by a bloated entertainment industry that overcharges for pretty much everything, these bills would put in place the kind of invasive oversight infrastructure that would not only allow large corporations to sue technology start-ups and independent artists out of existence based on little to no evidence of piracy or copyright infringement, but would require on-going surveillance of user-produced content that makes Facebook’s privacy problems look like child’s play. Any website perceived as a potential threat to the Powers That Be would be vulnerable to lawsuits, while individuals would be subject to censorship and data-mining as a matter of course, creating a hostile and uncertain online environment in which conformity becomes the order of the day.

Ungood. Doubleplusungood.

Now, here’s the thing. Over on Google+ today I saw that Diana Rajchel is participating in the blackout, but also writing a piece on why the SOPA/PIPA issue is receiving more attention and immediate action than the NDAA/indefinite detention amendment that would make it possible for the government to indefinitely detain anyone suspected of terrorist ties, including U.S. citizens. (People always say that last part as though it’s especially bad, though personally I’m horrified at the idea that we think it’s okay to detain anyone, citizen or not, indefinitely without trial or access to legal aid.) Lots of people have been making noise about this amendment online and protesting its implications, but that didn’t stop Obama recently from going ahead and signing it (although he noted his reservations and promised that his administration would never detain U.S. citizens in that way — he should have a talk with my stepdaughter).

At the time of this writing, I haven’t read Diana’s post so I don’t know what she’s going to say. But her G+ update got me thinking about the challenge of balancing our political activism, choosing carefully how we address the myriad injustices that we face as a society. There are a lot of them. Sometimes the deep, systemic problems get overlooked in the swell of support for more sensationalist issues. Someone a little further down in my G+ stream complained that the only reason #Occupy caught on was because poverty had finally begun to effect middle-class white people who’d thought they were immune. That may well be true, and it’s painful and frustrating for people and communities who have been struggling with poverty and marginalization for decades, centuries, even millennia. For the most part, people are pretty small-minded and self-centered, and it can be difficult to mobilize a society around issues that only affect small, disenfranchised groups who lack the visibility or clout of the mainstream. Diana brings up just another example of this. The indefinite detention of terror suspects is a far greater injustice than whether or not some new social network start-up gets a fair shot at providing us with amusing pictures of cats. Right?

On the other hand, I wouldn’t have even known about the NDAA amendment, or Diana’s plan to write about it, without those very social networking sites. Young Egyptian protesters wouldn’t have been able to organize an uprising without Twitter and Facebook. #Occupy wouldn’t be changing the conversation about capitalism and corporate personhood without the internet — hell, the very movement is branded with the epitome of a social media symbol, the hashtag. None of these political movements have been perfect, and all of them have taken for granted certain assumptions of the very political and social structures they’re trying to change. That’s why political activism is an on-going commitment to the process of creating and carving out space for social justice, not a once-and-done fix-all. As Pratchett’s anti-hero Samuel Vimes said, “Revolutions always come around again. That’s why they’re called revolutions.”

So how do we choose when and how to act? How do we choose where to put our focus? Each person has to answer that question on their own, but I’ll let you know a bit about how I decide:

As a Pagan, I honor the cycles of the natural world. Life and death, mutation and evolution, adaptation and survival. As human animals, we have this thing called “culture.” Other animals have it, too — there’s evidence that apes can learn and pass down social behaviors from generation to generation, for instance — but I think it’s safe to say that human beings have pushed culture kicking and screaming into the foreground as our primary form of adaptation and evolution. For most animal and plant species, evolution comes gradually as unhelpful biological traits and instinctive behaviors are slowly weeded out of the gene pool as individuals with those traits don’t survive long enough to reproduce.

But when a species or a community develops culture, they now have another way of passing on helpful behaviors and traits to the next generation: education. Cultural adaptation gives a community an alternative to the slow process of genetic trial and error. An ape that can learn from an older member of her social group how to use a twig to dig for ants doesn’t need to be genetically related to her teacher in order to benefit from the lesson. And that same ape doesn’t need to have offspring of her own in order to pass on these learned behaviors for the benefit of others. Species that have the capacity to learn and to teach can circumvent death as their primary way to correct for inappropriate or poorly-suited patterns of behavior. New behaviors can be learned as environments change and communities grow, and those behaviors can be spread more quickly through cultural education than through generations of genetically-predisposed offspring.

In other words, when it comes to evolution our choice is quite literally: education, or death.

That’s how fundamental education and the free expression and exchange of information is to the survival of a species like us humans. Education or death.

The history of the human species has shown us over and over that communities kept in ignorance and isolation are the very same communities that tend towards militarism and violence. The cycle of ignorant xenophobia and social aggression feeds on itself like a snake eating its own tail — without access to education and free communication, death becomes once again the only way we can learn the lessons of adaptation and cooperative, mutual survival. Yes, it is absolutely necessary to fight the injustices of war, violence and oppression, to confront them head on and stare them down with an unwavering commitment. But the foundation of that struggle is our ability to communicate and learn from each other, to listen with receptivity and appreciation to those who seem different or strange to us. Scaling back the war machine is only a temporary measure at best without substantive, fundamental cultural change — and that change can only come about through education, communication, creativity and innovation.

So I’m participating in the SOPA/PIPA blackout protest because I want, with all my heart, for folks like Diana to keep on writing about the NDAA amendment and all the other crazy, fucked up injustices in the world.

Sure, lots of people are probably mobilized around the SOPA/PIPA issue because it could jeopardize their ability to make lots of money off of user-generated content and sponsored ads online, or because it might interfere with their addiction to dubbed-over nature documentaries about honey badgers and auto-tuned Charlie Sheen interviews. Are those really shitty reasons to care about the problem of internet censorship? You bet. Is the SOPA/PIPA blackout protest gaining momentum because it affects ordinary, mainstream, middle-class white people, and not just those “bad people” potential-terrorists? Yep. So it goes.

Because that’s what a free society looks like. If you want a society where people are free to care about and mobilize around the deeply, vitally important issues of social justice and peacemaking, you have to work for a society where they are also free to care about silly, trivial nonsense if they want.

Does it bug the hell out of me? Fuck yes. It seems grossly unfair that religious, ethnic, racial and gender minorities have been struggling forever against systemic prejudices, that the impoverished, disenfranchised and most vulnerable in our society are the easiest scapegoats to blame and punish when something goes wrong, and the easiest to ignore when everything seems fine. A lot of the time, I feel like Ani DiFranco when she sings:

You want to track each trickle back to its source
and then scream up the faucet until your face is hoarse,
because you’re surrounded by a world’s worth of things you just can’t excuse.
You’ve got the hard cough of a chain smoker,
and you’re at the arctic circle playing strip poker,
and it’s getting colder and colder every time you lose.
So go ahead…. make your next bold move.

There is so much injustice in the world. Sometimes the cause of peace seems to be up against impossible odds. But then I also like to remember the story about Mother Teresa in the streets of Calcutta, tending to a group of starving and injured children, when a reporter approached her and asked, “What about the children over there? Why do you help these children instead of those children, when those others need help, too?” And Mother Teresa looked at the reporter and said, “You’re right, they do need help. Why don’t you put down that microphone and go help them?”

When we show up to each other, when we reach out and communicate — that’s when we can coordinate our efforts. We don’t each need to be strong enough or powerful enough to save the world all by ourselves. All we need is to be willing to work together to do our part.

That’s why I’m protesting SOPA/PIPA today. Because I want to be able to keep writing blog posts like this. I want to keep being able to tell stories about why I love this world so much, and why I long for peace with every fiber of my being. And yeah, sometimes I want to watch silly videos on YouTube and laugh and find joy in those things, too. The world needs joy and silliness just as much as it needs anger and protest. I don’t want a revolution if there isn’t going to be some dancing.

Strict pantheism is, I think, a difficult outlook to maintain. You find only a few people — even among Pagans — who are truly and purely pantheistic. Polytheism has its multiple gods, goddesses, elementals and other spirits, inhabiting a sacred natural world but also maintaining distinct personalities within it. For polytheists, a local river god, no matter how closely identified with the river, is not just the river, but conceived as “something more,” as possessing some quality of character or personality, some human-like attributes with which we, as human beings, can communicate and interact. Certain monotheistic religions go to the other extreme, conceiving of deity in purely transcendent terms, inherently separate from the “created” world. Usually modern critiques of each of these belief systems focus on the extent to which they deny or imbue sacredness in the natural world. Examples from past cultures show us that polytheism can degenerate into petty bickering among fallible and narrowly anthropomorphized deities, whose capriciousness no longer points to the mysteries of a shifting natural environment but has become entirely self-referential and melodramatic. Likewise, religions based on transcendent conceptions of deity come to rely heavily on abstract revelation (often supposedly only available to religious or political leaders) rather than personal experience of a sacred world, and even the extreme view that nature is inherently “evil” or degraded and must be rejected and escaped.

So how does pantheism cope with the “hour of adversity” and the inescapable reality of physical death? What can the bardic tradition of satire in Celtic mythology and folklore tell us about how we can confront a loss of faith in our spiritual lives as well as in our political leadership?

You can read the full article here.