[So, one of my goals this year is to update this blog weekly on average. I did not quite expect to start with this topic, though.]
I’ve just seen a number of news stories come across my professional blog RSS feed about the case of a resident of Salem, Missouri (Anaka Hunter) who (supported by the ACLU) has sued both the library and various other named parties (including the library director) for blocking reasonable access to material – namely information about Wicca and Native American religious practices, among other topics.
Ars Technica has an excellent overview, and links to the PDF of the complaint.
Reading the stories I’ve seen so far, I have both a few questions – and the thought that a lot of people don’t know how libraries are supposed to handle this sort of thing, or what the common considerations around filtering/etc. are in public libraries and schools.
This weekend – the US Thanksgiving holiday weekend, whatever days it actually falls on – always reminds me of how cycles begin to stack, once you’ve gone through enough of them.
Thanksgiving has never been a big family holiday. First, my parents were English and raised in the UK, respectively (Christmas was always the . . . → Read More: Cycle on cycle
About half an hour ago, I finished the major work I wanted to do for this year’s Samhain.
It reminded me of one of the powers of tradition. In my tradition, the Samhain ritual has been one we’ve done in much the same way for my time in the tradition (ten years and a bit). Of course, it’s been adapted – for number of people present, for number of people to take roles, for overall energy.
This year, I’m 1500 miles away from others in the tradition. (And in fact, I’ve been in Maine for 13 weeks.) And I’m working by myself, so many of the pieces of my tradition’s practice are simply not going to happen.
And yet, there are ways in which I stepped into ritual tonight, and all the chords of all those rituals were right there with me.
I hear certain music, in the dark, in the midst of ritual, and there is no space but the space of the circle, no time but those shared moments of dark and remembered grief, and yet hope for the coming year, mingled and echoing across the years.
Bites of food in ritual remind me of how amazing ritual foods taste – there is nothing in the world like the first bite of pomegranate on Samhain night, or even of the meat pie that’s been my contribution to ancestor feasts for those ten years. [1]
So, a few days ago, I talked about the actual preparation work. And then I went and did it.
Note to self: please remember that you still need to rest a lot between housecleaning bits. Schedule accordingly. Note to everyone else: this meant I cleaned yesterday, and am doing the ritual stuff in a . . . → Read More: Untangling old patterns: the untangling
Some time ago, a friend online asked me to expand more on how I go about untangling unwanted energy and patterns that I’m now done with. I begin with some preparation, namely getting down to basics and figuring out what’d be actually most helpful, along with some general good habits (which I’ll cover in this post) before going on to some more specific work designed to figure out the untangling and then untangle it better. (Which’ll be next post, because this one is approaching 2200 words.) . . . → Read More: Untangling old patterns + energy – prep
