This is going to get long: I warn you now.
A couple of years ago, I began baking bread. I do it for ritual, I do it to eat at home. I bring it to potlucks (as I mentioned, it’s a money-cheap way to bring something people will love for potluck).
Here’s how I do it, with some links to some other options. Note that these are optimised for my particular preferences and needs (and I talk about what those are, as we go along). Adjust as makes sense to you.
Things that affect my baking:
- I am short: I hate kneading on the counter because it’s totally the wrong height. I knead in a mixing bowl, sitting on the floor so I can put my upper body into it. This is admittedly weird. Knead on the counter/table if you prefer.
- I live in a little tiny house. It has a little tiny oven (just big enough for a standard baking sheet, one rack, etc.) I am not fancy about my baking.
- I have very little storage space: I do not own a baking stone, fascinating other baking tools, or a mixer: I just don’t have space for them. This is the fairly minimalist version.
- I am aiming for ‘good bread’, usually, not the ‘ultimate best bread ever’. Those usually take more time than I realistically have.
- My preference for bread is a lighter (less chewy) crust, and reasonably dense. Your preferences may vary - the resources section has some other places to go learn more about variations.
Read the rest of this entry »
This post goes with my previous post on financial costs of group work, as I think that being aware of the time we spend on something is also an important conversation to have.
Getting there:
Obviously, besides gas to get there, it’s going to take you time to get to where you’re meeting. My current driving time is 0 (for things I host) to about 30 minutes each way (heavy traffic, right after work) at my covenmate’s. More normally, it’s about 15-20 minutes. At 2-3 trips a month, that’s 40-90 minutes of driving time. Pretty reasonable.
In my former group, the drive was a bit longer - more like 35-40 minutes, and sometimes worse. When I was doing 8-10 trips out there a month, I was spending at least 4-6 hours in the car. This was slightly less fun, especially with later evening events and getting up early for work.
Preparation:
If I’m hosting, I need to spend about 2 hours preparing in advance. I live in a little tiny house (more on which in a future entry, because I want to talk about how I’m thinking about what a covenstead is), but 2 hours is plenty of time for me to do a thorough cleaning, sweep, do all my dishes, move the furniture that needs to be moved in advance of ritual, move the computer, and so on.
The good news is that much of this is work I should be doing anyway (general housekeeping) and I can keep on top of it fairly easily, or split it up over 3-4 days. The ‘day of ritual’ preparation (stuff that must be done that day) takes about 20-30 minutes, mostly moving furniture and computer and sweeping afterwards.
Ritual bread baking (for use in ritual) also takes time: the basic recipe I use means I need to be home for about 3 hours. However, most of that time is rising time: I can be doing things on the computer, cleaning, petting the cat, or working on a hobby for all but about 20 minutes.
Ritual:
Ritual takes as long as it takes, but generally, we plan on 2-3 hours (including setup and food after) for a moon, and generally longer (4 hours, sometimes more) for a Sabbat, because what we’re doing in ritual is often designed to take longer.
Discussion:
We schedule our discussion nights for a worknight, and I get up early (I start work at 7:30, so get up around 5:30.) So far, we’ve been finding that a 6-9 or 9:30 discussion works really well for us, and we’re trying to do 2 a month. 7 hours, give or take.
Classes:
In my former group, classes were twice a month, once for around 3 hours, and once for 4-6 hours. In the new group, I want to leave it somewhat more open ended, with the idea that student and teacher should be seeing each other twice a month (because this helps build connection, and keeps things on track) but that times can be variable.
Class preparation time, now, that’s a tricky one. With an existing curriculum, like the one my former group had (where teachers for a specific class had notes to work with), preparation is mostly reviewing the material, and teaching - pretty quick for most of us. For the new group, I’m redesigning from the ground up, so of course, it’s taking hours and hours and hours for each class, plus a bunch of time for the overall structure.
(This is what happens when I work in an excellent high school for years: there are all these educational theories I’ve seen in practice that I want to make some use of.)
Personal work:
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I believe that the foundation of good group work is personal work. Yes, this is hard. No, I don’t always manage to do it.
My personal goal, these days, is 5-10 minutes of moving meditation work in the morning, 5 minutes or so of devotional work as I begin my day, and ideally 10-15 minutes worth of meditative or astral work in the evening. I’m trying very hard to add 10-15 minutes of musical work each day, too.
It’s a goal - I usually manage two of the three on a good day.
I also spend a fair bit of time (probably an hour a day) reading material that directly impacts my religious life - online Pagan discussions, books, magazines, and so on. I also spend time on a regular basis writing material - posts in those discussion, entries on this blog, posts on LiveJournal, and so on. (This probably comes out to half an hour a day, but there are days I’m writing for 4 hours, and days I do none.)
One of the things that I’ve been thinking about are the actual costs of group work - in terms of both time and financial cost. I’m not talking about paying for training, mind you - just about the other things that go into it. With rising gas prices and other costs, I’ve seen more discussion of this in people looking for groups, but there are very few specifics out there.
Now, obviously, I have one set of experiences: the numbers below are not going to reflect everyone’s experience. But I do want to put some concrete numbers out there (along with where they come from) so that other people can get a general idea of some patterns.
(This gets very long, so you click on to read the details)
One of the good things about working for a school is the vacations.
(There are also downsides: my breaks are unpaid time, and I don’t get any say in when I get them - it makes it very hard to do things requiring time off during the school year.)
Last summer, I started a habit of doing a short retreat each quarter.
- Last July’s was focused on things I needed to finish before getting my 3rd degree. As part of it, I did a day of no words - didn’t talk (even to the cat), didn’t read, didn’t write. I did survive it, but it was an interesting experience.
- November’s was focused on preparing for my 3rd degree ritual (I did the retreat work over the Tuesday evening-Sunday of Thanksgiving, with the ritual itself on the Saturday)
- I took some brief time in February to decompress and relax.
- I managed to not do one in 2nd quarter, because I just couldn’t get time clear in the schedule in ways I could do something meaningful with.
And this week, I’m doing another one. I have a lot on the agenda, but in a different way:
- Revamping my daily schedule to make sure that time for things I really care about (making music, playing the harp, dancing, doing devotional and meditation work) happens every day. Less of the random webbrowsing.
- Reorganising my lovely tiny little house now that I’ve lived here and know I’m staying put for the forseeable future. I did a quick overhaul cleaning yesterday, and am spending each day this week doing major reorganisation in each room. (This is much easier when the whole house is 400 square feet, and you only have 6 theoretical different spaces - bedroom alcove, front room, kitchen, pantry, bathroom, and basement. I am not worrying about the basement this week, but everything else *should* be achievable with nothing much else on my calendar.)
- Eating lots of good for me food - one of the things on my agenda for a while has been eating more yogurt, and this is a good week to make sure I get in the habit. I also still have excellent goodness from last week’s CSA box in the fridge that needs eating.
- Making some more art. And music. And writing. And all sorts of other goodness.
- Some ongoing meditation and ritual work.
At the end of it, I expect to not only be refreshed and well-rested (one of my rules this week is no alarm clocks. If I am tired and want to read and nap, reading and napping is totally fine. There will be time for the other stuff later.) But I also expect to be far better organised, so that keeping up with things in future is *far* far easier. There is nothing bad about this.
I am keeping a running list of things I want to do - many of which are very short and easy to do, like “Water herbs” and some of which are longer (resorting the boxes under the bed, or the extensive pile of *stuff* next to the closet). The latter I do while watching a movie.
I’ve started with a long bath, complete with face mask and other good bath things. And in a bit, I’m off to attack the boxes under the bed, do some more reading, and then some music.
Cat Chapin-Bishop, guest blogging at the Wild Hunt, made a fantastic post about ‘why don’t we write more about what we experience’, and less about the mechanics of how we do things.
She’s right. It’s something I struggle with, too, because I describe the essential tension in my religious life as an Air-Water problem: I am inclined to be intellectual, to be hands-off and analytical, to look at information and knowledge, and books, and words, but sometimes have problems diving in and experiencing and flowing and feeling. (I come from British parents who rarely expressed emotion: I learned a lot of it very deliberately as a college student and adult.)
It’s no surprise that my strongest primary deity affinity is to water deities (and a specific one in particular, but in general? I’m fond of them.) It’s taken me several years to get a grip on this, but it’s been good for me, every step of the way.
In honor of Cat’s post, a few memories and experiences of my own. A couple I want to come back to in later posts, but a glimpse now will give some idea.
My first Pagan ritual, ever was MIT’s Samhain ritual in 1997. I was still Catholic at the time, and it was a particularly bad year for remembering my father (who died Nov. 3rd, 1990). A friend invited me to join her at MIT’s ritual. I went from playing piano for the Catholic mass that evening to getting on a bus to meet her.
I don’t truly remember the ritual. The memories are lost in the twist of the spiral dance, the endless harmonies of a hundred singing voices, in the careful step in the dim light down into their basement chapel, thick with incense smoke. Part of my brain, even then, was comparing it to what I’d read about, and to the rituals I knew - but part of it was far, far away, dancing, and singing, and tasting the sweet tang of the pomegranate.
My experience now tells me it was a beautifully done large public ritual. But the important part is that it worked. It helped, it eased, it did things deep inside me that I didn’t know needed doing.
Some years later, in the summer of 2001, I went to my first Sabbat with the group I initiated with and trained with, and have only recently left.
We were outside, in a valley in one of the local city parks, away from the crowds, at the height of midsummer. I remember a little about the ritual (and I took notes on it at the time). But what I remember, what sticks with me, years later, is the rainstorm. One minute it was clear, then cloudy, then there were drops of rain.
And then, this being Minnesota, there was a downpour, three minutes of hail, and then everything cleared up and blew away. The ground was damp, but barely muddy, but the shimmer and the shine on the grass was breathtaking. It felt fresh and clean and gorgeous, and like anything in the world was possible.
After ritual, I remember sitting on the ground, and talking to people in the group about anything and nothing in particular, of sharing food and laughter, and knowing that - whatever else happened - some of these people were going to be very important to me.
There have, in fact, been many more rituals, with many more stories. I’ll leave most of those for another time.
Two dear friends, one of them my HP, and the other a widely-respected teacher with a rather different approach to some of what we do - got married. It was the best wedding I’ve ever been to. (Granted, I haven’t been to a wide range, but this - it’s hard to top.) Amazing people, and incredible amounts of love, and fantastic food, and people honestly and truly joyful to be there.
It also made a decision much easier for me.
I remember sitting at the table over potluck afterwards, talking to people I knew (because I did not - and I regret this - have energy to go be social with all the fabulous people I did not know). My husband and I had been seeing if our relationship was fixable, and in the midst of all that joy, and all that love, and all that community, I looked around, and knew my marriage was over. That while it had some good in it, it lacked that essential spark and joy.
What amazes me is that it didn’t hurt. I didn’t even feel like I should have done more, or that there was anything I needed to do. It was just done. I was just done. It was time for it to be done.
Moments in the kitchen: Many of my fondest memories of the last two years are of a particular kitchen table. For over a year, I’d meet L (who was first a dedicant the same year I was, and who is now my co-conspirator in the shiny new coven) at her house, to pick her up before an evening meeting with the group. In her kitchen - which glows with light and looks out on her garden - we’ve drunk cups of tea, snacked, and talked about everything, nothing, and the whole scope of the world in between.
I come away from every one of those conversations refreshed, renewed, delighted with some new insight or idea or concept or way of looking at the world, because although we have very similar training, and while we have a very similar take on the power of discussion and conversation, we actually have some fairly different views of how the universe works. Doesn’t matter: we can still work in ritual very well together.
My Craft life has brought me a number of relationships and people I treasure and love - but this one is particularly near and dear my heart, because there’s nothing else quite like it.
Around a month ago, I started noticing increased eyestrain headaches, and got my act together to go and get my eyes examined.
Now, I’ve had glasses in the past - both times briefly, as my eyes got better, and there were some practical issues (computer-only glasses are a really poor choice for a librarian: I’m often up and down talking to people, looking at a shelf, getting a laptop for checkout, and all the other parts of it.) The end result? I have a mild astigmatism in both eyes, enough that everything’s readable, but not crisp. Hence, eyestrain.
The nice optometrist I talked to about this agreed that for library work, computer-only glasses would not work very well (they’d be constantly on and off, with all the wear and tear that brings), and so wrote my prescription for all the time wear. This is fine by me: as I pointed out, it was the only appearance thing I was missing on the librarian stereotype list (I have long hair, often in a bun, and I generally wear skirts and sensible shoes…) And I hang out in geeky-type crowds, anyway, so there are more people around with glasses than not, most of the time.
I picked up the glasses on Sunday. Being me, I also started thinking about the ritual and magical implications. And, since I’m finding less out there about how other people handle this than I thought I might, I figure a post about it is a possibly useful thing.
I do have some options, since I do not actually need them to read and can function just fine with them off (except for the eyestrain aspect if they’re off too much). In fact, I’ve been taking them off when I go to bed, even though I generally read for at least 15-30 minutes before sleep, because I both read and fall asleep on my side.
Ritual
There are, I am told, some groups out there that heavily limit items like glasses in ritual. (I’ve seen different arguments for this, some of which I’ll address below.) We are not one of those groups: my covenmate wears hers pretty much all the time.
Our ritual work (as you might have guessed from my general description of approach) is something we take seriously, but it is not necessarily very formal. Our current ritual clothing is generally ‘whatever suits the ritual’. But since before I can remember, I’ve also been a big believer in the interaction of ritual and theatre, and very aware of how people pick up mode, mood, and focus cues from choices in dress, word choice, body language, and so on. (This makes even more sense when you know my father was a specialist in ancient Greek theatre, and a theatre historian in general.)
Taken this way, glasses are interesting for two reasons. First, they are a physical, obvious difference: they’re on my face, after all. But second, I’ve already noticed some changes in body language (not just from the lack of tension in my jaw and neck, but also in how I hold my head, move, adjust them, etc.)
Does it matter if they’re on my face? Good question.
For most rituals I’m likely to be taking part in, I don’t think it matters: they aren’t going to affect my ability to priestess or otherwise lead or participate in ritual.
There are times, though, when I think taking them off may be a good idea.
1) One obvious time is if we’re doing something either messy or potentially messy. For example, we’ve talked about a ritual using either body paint or henna: I’d rather take the glasses off rather than risk splatters (and also because it gives more choices for face art.)
2) When they’d be distracting to me. I haven’t yet figured out what I want to do about meditation work, for example. I normally work with my eyes closed, and either sitting up or lying down on my back. I don’t know if I’ll find the weight of the glasses (or something like them shifting slightly) distracting.
3) When they break mood. For example, I’m likely to remove them for ritual theatre, or for Drawing Down, because in both cases, they may be one more thing for people to edit in their heads about presentation. As in good theatre, paying attention to the little details often helps. (Also, from a purely personal point of view, taking them off may be a good indicator to my brain that stuff outside my norm is happening.)
I don’t know which of these will end up happening, but they’re the things I can see as potential options right now.
Daily Wear
But aside from ritual, there’s another aspect that intrigues me.
See, I name stuff. Especially stuff that’s core to my daily function. I have named my computer, my harp, my car. My iPod. My cell phone (ok, so that one I don’t actually use very often.) This is not actually all that weird: many people name their cars, technology, or major musical instruments (or have some sort of consistent pet name.)
I often have small personal ritual moments - I’m not talking big weird things, but I do talk to my car (and my computer, and my harp, and…) and I have *far* fewer technical glitches than you’d think the law of averages would suggest. Treating the glasses in the same sort of ritual sense I treat those things is probably not a bad move. (And even if it’s weird, at least it’s an internally consistent weird.)
I’m not sure yet how I want to handle this with my glasses. Some obvious possibilities include having a specific place they’re kept at home, cleaning them as part of my morning devotional work (in part because there’s such a clear link to some of my primary vocational stuff), or naming them. I’ve been thinking about this since I got them, but I’m still trying to decide which things are meaningful and useful to me, and which things aren’t.
I live alone. I’m often free on Fridays with nothing scheduled (in the past, it’s been because various covenmates have their date nights on Friday, and also because of other aspects of my schedule.)
I decided when I moved to try Fridays as a personal ritual. Come home, tidy up a little bit, and make a nice meal with a few extra special touches. Maybe a glass of wine, or something that takes a little longer to cook. I’d fallen out of the habit for several months, but tonight seemed like a good day to try again.
I didn’t have much cleaning to do (I spent last weekend and the early part of this week doing a serious spring cleaning of everything that wasn’t tucked under the bed or kitchen table - that’s this week’s project) so I came home, put the library books out of the way, petted the cat, and did some basic cooking.
Nothing fancy today - mashed potatoes with the remains of the gorgonzola crumbles, a mixture of frozen peas and carrots, and some stuffed grape leaves (bought while I was at the co-op for something else today). I’m about to stick baked mushrooms in the oven for a late-night snack. A little Perrier (from a gift bottle from a friend) to drink, as I’m out of still-good wine.
I actually ate at the kitchen table, rather than the computer, too. (When it is just you, and you are busy, eating at the computer becomes somewhat more reasonable than otherwise.)
I then brought every non-specifically-dedicated candle in the house (ok, that’s six of them: I don’t have a lot of storage for them) into the bathroom, lit them, stuck nice music on iTunes, and had a lovely long candlelit bath. I have baths anyway [1], but taking a long time and luxuriating with a gift of LUSH bath stuff (Bathos, a longtime favorite, this time) in the candlelight was glorious.
I then spent the evening doing some writing (a post on my reading blog about A Companion to Wolves, which I’d been trying to get written for about two weeks) and catching up on other things. In a bit, I’ll go curl up in bed with a book or two (a new-to-me mystery series that looks promising.) And a cat.
I’ll have to do this next week. (The 22nd, I will be out at a Wailin’ Jennys concert with two good friends, so I will have to find another night. And the 29th, I will be in ritual, so ditto. I’m excited about their concert: their “One Voice” - how I discovered them - encompasses a lot of my worldview in some ways, and I like a lot of their other songs, too.)
[1] My tiny little house doesn’t actually have a shower, just a claw-foot bathtub. This suits me just fine, as I prefer baths by preference. There’s a longer story behind this, but it’s been an evening decompression ritual for decades now. (Also, as I point out, you can’t read most books in the shower for very long.)
This coming Friday, I’m celebrating Yule with friends (they throw a big party.) I’m hoping to make it up for dawn on the Saturday, before finishing my holiday shopping. On the 23rd, I’m on a plane to visit family.
My mother lives in the Boston area (my father died when I was in high school). From there, we’re going down to New Haven, to spend Christmas with my brother, sister in law, and my nieces who are 3.5 and 5.5 (and adorably cute.) I’m looking forward to it, but there are also parts of it that I’m a little nervous about.
See, this is the first time I’ll have been out there for Christmas. Last year, my mother and I were together on Christmas, but we were travelling (a river boat group on the Danube, visiting Vienna, Bratislava, and Budapest: Mom was born in Vienna, and a number of our ancestors were Hungarian before that.) Mom went off to Midnight Mass with other people from the boat, I went to sleep.
In years I’ve been out to Boston, I’ve flown on Christmas Day, which has had the advantage of being relatively cheap, and of avoiding trying to do religious coordination. This year, the scheduling made that complicated if I wanted to see my brother and his family, so I’m flying earlier. My family know I’m a witch, and that I am no longer Christian, and that Wiccan is a good first-approximation term for me. They’ve been far better about it, all in all, than I’d ever anticipated: we have sensible, thoughtful conversations in which they listen and ask questions they’ve clearly been thinking about.
Some of this is just about travel. I do a morning daily devotional that doesn’t require much stuff - but that I know will be slightly complicated sleeping in the loft space at my brother’s. That’s relatively simple: they’re deliberately designed to not require a lot of ’stuff’. I pack a small travel altar (mostly jewelry pieces that do double duty if I need to put on my priestess hat, as it were.) and I’m usually fine.
But there’s also always the question of navigating church services, and of moving from the family traditions of my childhood to those of my brother’s family. This year has been full of transitional and liminal times for me: one more is certainly manageable. It’s just also a little unsettling, in the way that most often leads to growth for me.
I will not only manage but have a fantastic time, I’m sure. It’s just a question of what’s going to happen and how.