Personal Reflection
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The Elemental Enemy
My sacred places are burning. Sonoma County, heart of my heart, is on fire, and its magnificent wildlands, its rolling oak woodland hills and grasslands are steadily being destroyed. Annadel and Sugarloaf Ridge State Parks, where I have lost myself in a steady wash of serotonin joy at the sheer beauty, the wildness, the richness of creation, are aflame; Annadel is mostly gone now. It’s hard even to get my mind—much less my visceral understanding—around this fact. Things are moving quickly and every day of the past five has brought new alerts, new evacuation orders. The fire that dislodged me from my home stabbed deep into my home town of…
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Turns Out, I’ve Been Living in an Atheopagan Focus
A guest post by Kaigi-Ron. It was the knives that first pointed me to the truth. Seven of them stood at attention by my sink (fastened in magnetic rigor by the new strip I’d just installed), adjacent to the Hello Kitty curtains. And I was struck: OMG, I have a living Housewives Tarot card in my kitchen! What was weirdest, this didn’t seem random: I had recently been the victim of vicious (and untrue) gossip. Yet My Science Nerd Mind knew that there was no way this was “directed” at me by “somebody else”. I pulled the HWT deck from the shelf, found the Seven of Swords, and re-read the copy: GOSSIPS…
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Autumn
In the coastal Mediterranean climate where I live, September and October are times of hot days and clear, cold nights. The sun is no longer strong enough—nor are the days long enough—to drive the cycle that draws ocean air inland during the height of summer, blanketing us with cooling fog. It is a somewhat eerie time, typically windless, with wan sunlight and hard blue skies as leaves turn, children return to school and adults to work after the playful season of summer. The scent of fermenting grapes often fills the air as “The Crush” of the grape harvest proceeds and the vineyards turn autumn colors. Summer gardens crank out vegetables…
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Why Naturalism? Because This.
Yet another example of a Pagan in a leadership position using that position for sexual misconduct, citing woo-woo “spiritual” reasons involving disembodied entities and “magical bonds” as “explanations” for his abuse. How far would such hokum fly in a naturalistic Pagan community? Not. At all. Willingness to take someone’s word about supposed supernatural processes and invisible beings is a formula for being abused. Healthy skepticism would have tossed this creep out on his ear long ago, but the conventions of many Pagan communities which take at face value highly improbable assertions about the nature of reality create safe contexts within which abusers can operate. Say what you like about naturalistic…
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What If It Really Is the End of the World?
You know you’ve been thinking this. I have, too. These are times that make hopeful optimism a serious challenge. The effects of global warming and climate change are accelerating, and it is becoming less and less credible to believe that we are going to policy-and-technology our way out of them. Meanwhile, fascism and authoritarianism are on the rise even in the places that have historically been most resistant to them. Atheopaganism is, more than anything else, a religion of reality. We don’t tell ourselves reassuring stories about gods bailing us out of our problems or having a plan for us. We don’t pretend that we have magical powers which will enable…
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When the World Feels Icky
It’s particularly bad where I am right now. We are experiencing a heat wave that will drive temps up over 110° F today, and even higher tomorrow. In addition, smoke from the wildfires in the northern part of the state has been blown down here, casting a pall over everything and bringing a sharp, unpleasant taste to the air. The sunlight itself is a nauseous yellow, pounding down heat in a creepily still, hotbox environment of smoke. We even had a little earthquake yesterday morning. All in all, it feels like disaster is everywhere. Of course, that’s kind of how it’s been ever since November 8, 2016, when the worst…
