Happy Dimming!

Posted on 2024-08-01 by Mark Green

It’s time again for the beginning of August Sabbath: the midpoint between Midsummer and Harvest.

It’s always been a challenge for me to name this holiday. I tried things like “Summer’s End”–but it’s often the hottest time of the year where I live. Summer’s Waning, perhaps? But again, it doesn’t feel like that…yet.

Still, the wheel of the year has definitely turned: the days are shorter, the quality of the light a bit paler, the sky a deeper, harder blue. As the first harvests come in and we begin to realize the fruits of the year’s labors, we are definitely headed into the dark and cold, however preliminary these steps may seem to be.

A member of the Atheopaganism Facebook group suggested calling this holiday “Dimming” a few years ago, and I really like that because it’s true everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere (and can easily be swapped for “Brightening” in the South). So that’s what I have settled on.

I celebrate Dimming with both traditional folkways, such as associating the holiday with the early harvest of grain and enjoying bread and beer and ripened berries, as well as with meanings I have chosen myself. To me, Dimming is the time when I celebrate the middle aged people in my community, and the accumulated “harvest” of all human experience: art, culture, science, engineering. My Paganism isn’t just about the old stuff of pre-modernity, but about all of the Cosmos and human experience: what we have learned and what we have made.

So think about it: what is the early harvest you’re enjoying? Not just from this year, but from all the accumulated years of evolution and learning that support where you are today. Got electricity, and running water? Books, safe shelter, sophisticated technology? Celebrate that harvest at this holiday, feeling the gratitude that those of us so privileged should never lose sight of.

I wish you joy and contentment in celebration of your harvest, and enjoyment of this waning summer.

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Listen to My Interview on “Embrace the Void” podcast!

Posted on 2024-07-19 by Mark Green

Host Aaron Rabinowitz had me on to discuss the new book, and we had a deep conversation about Atheopaganism and non-supernatural Pagan practice. Great, probing questions! Have a listen.

https://www.voidpod.com/podcasts/2024/7/15/round-we-dance-with-mark-green

Posted in Nature and Science, Practice, Atheopagan, Ritual, Atheology | Leave a comment

Discovering Atheopaganism

Posted on 2024-07-09 by Mark Green

I never knew there was anyone who felt as I did, who believed as I did. I really feel that I have found my people–that I have come home.

Atheopagan community member

It has been hugely beneficial for me to discover the Atheopagan community. I’ve always struggled to name my spiritual path. I love the nature reverence of modern Paganism but couldn’t subscribe to belief in supernatural entities or magical forces. Atheopaganism gives rational thinkers ways to celebrate our exquisitely beautiful planet and to live ethically.

Atheopagan community member

People don’t generally “convert” to Paganism. They find it, and find it fits. Which makes sense, because Pagans don’t proselytize. We don’t think everyone has to have the same path we have chosen. We’re not trying to take over the world; just to celebrate being a part of it.

That said, what we have to offer is pretty attractive. Better, kinder values. Joy in pleasure, instead of shame about “sin”. A life of adventure and growth. Inclusion of difference.

And what Atheopaganism has to offer is particularly attractive for many of us who have a scientific, reasoning, skeptical bent. Because it doesn’t ask us to believe anything without credible evidence to support it.

As I have sometimes said, it is the spirituality of the verifiably real.

To us, this magnificent Earth, this unfathomably vast Cosmos in all its manifold beauty is enough to inspire the awe and wonder and love that is the religious experience. To give our lives meaning and purpose and vivid color.

All that, without a scrap, a wisp of the supernatural.

Because we don’t need it.

Even if the supernatural exists, we simply wouldn’t need it to be happy, fulfilled, and moved by the experience of living.

This, material world is enough… no, is more than enough for us.

So we’ll be over here, celebrating and ritualizing and paying attention and growing and enjoying the hell out of being alive. If that sounds interesting, well…who knows?

You might find yourself coming home.

Posted in Atheopagan, Nature and Science, Pagan | 4 Comments

Feeling the Heat

Posted on 2024-07-02 by Mark Green

It’s 104 degrees F. (40 C.) outside my house right now. It’ll go higher tomorrow; a gigantic heat dome has formed over the American West and temperatures are spiking to insane levels. With this year already poised to break last year’s all-time heat record worldwide, climate change is here, bringing fire, destruction and death.

Meanwhile, in human affairs, this week the right-wing plants “Justices” of the US Supreme Court declared the President largely above the law, creating an imperial Presidency that is dangerous not only to its citizens, but to the world. They also radically curtailed the power of our federal government to enforce environmental regulations.

Elsewhere, the racist right is preparing to take over France.

Make no mistake: the right is the enemy of humanity. And the heat is on.

These are times when it might be easy to just give up. Stop following the news, try to stop caring about the future. And if you have to do some amount of that to take care of yourself, well, I think you should.

Me?

I’m angry.

These fascist nitwits have stolen my country from me and they threaten the single most Sacred thing to me, which is the fabric of life on Earth. Your future, and mine, and all the human futures to come. All the creatures going extinct. All the beauty, the wonder, the marvels of this place for which they have such dismissive contempt.

There is no bottom for these people. There is no act or statement too outrageously awful for them.

Well, I dissent.

And even if I’m eventually on my way to some kind of reeducation camp, I won’t go quietly.

I’m not giving up. I’m doubling down.

Donald Trump needs to not be elected. And I’m going to do whatever I can, little as it may be, to see to it that the drooling, selfish mob of casual bigots and meanspirited self-styled Christians who support him are disappointed in November.

It’s easy to get angry when it’s boiling hot. And it’s going to be a long, hot summer.

Posted in Politics, Personal Reflection | Leave a comment

The Living is Easy

Posted on 2024-06-16 by Mark Green

It’s summer, with Midsummer just a few days away. Long days full of Sun, sometimes hot but where I am, often buffered by the cooling ocean air to create perfect days with warm evenings.

I just moved inside from sitting naked on my patio, which is a seasonal pleasure. I also cut back the wisteria covering our back fence, which occasionally threatens to tear our house apart with its clinging, constricting vines, and watered all the plants in pots and half-barrels that make the place a lush oasis.

Being-Outside-Naked Season is something I look forward to every year. I love the Sun and air on my skin, and the feeling of freedom and comfort. Just sitting outside and writing or watching the breeze move the giant oak behind our back fence brings me a sense of calm and contentment.

Every year, I contend with the challenge of how to celebrate the Midsummer Sabbath. Unlike most of the holidays I celebrate around the wheel of the year, this one seems much more naturally inclined towards a social gathering with food and drink and games and socializing than a formal ritual.

That said, I am doing a few rituals this year–all on the 22nd, unfortunately, which means a bunch of driving and scrambling to accommodate my dance card: we’ll do an online ritual at the weekly Atheopagan Saturday Zoom Mixer, and then our Northern California Atheopagan Affinity Group, the Live Oak Circle, will convene a public Midsummer gathering in a park in Berkeley that afternoon.

From there I drive 60 miles back up to Sonoma County, drop in on the local UU Pagan group’s Midsummer gathering, and then put on more professional clothes and go to the annual fundraiser for the local environmental organization I founded back in the 90s.

So…it’s going to be quite a day!

Meanwhile, today is a day of true relaxation. A morning sojourn on the patio, a bit of patio gardening, and a chance to write a post. I’ll see friends later.

And then back to work tomorrow, my first full week in the permanent Executive Director job (I got it, yay!) and, as it happens, my one-year work anniversary on Thursday.

Posted in Holidays | Tagged | Leave a comment

A Straight, Cis Dude’s Reflection on Pride

Posted on 2024-06-02 by Mark Green

They make it all about sex.

The sneerers and spitters, the blithe dismissers, the judging castigators who allege that being queer is just about who you rub your body parts against. Who you create orgasms with.

The hatred is bound up with the sex. They simply hate and fear sex. The power of it, the vulnerability of it, the lack of control. And as they conflate queerness with sex, they hate, and fear queerness.

Once upon a time, I dated a stripper. She was brilliant, graduate of a prestigious Eastern university, after which she had ridden a bicycle to California. She was an activist, a thinker. And a stripper, very sexy. She was utterly amazing and I’m sorry we have lost touch.

I have loved ones who have had sex for money. Who have posed for pictures. Or done sex video.

In essence, they have done as they chose, given their lives at the moment. What seemed like the best thing given the options.

Like we all do.

My friends were not coerced, thankfully. They made free choices. I in no way claim here that some people are not coerced, are not trafficked. That happens, and it is appallingly wrong.

But to lump victims of coercion in with people who make a free choice about what to do with their bodies is also wrong. It is the Christian Overculture’s sex-phobia, weaponized.

I am so angry at how our society views and treats sex workers.

People exposing their bodies to danger, people generously offering themselves for services that others desperately hope for. Not just for orgasms (although those are a perfectly good reason): for comfort, for companionship, for solace, to stave off the terrible loneliness that so many suffer.

Like the sheroe of my nation right now, Stormy Daniels. Stripper, porn star, comedian, writer, director, mother, and brass-balled hero. I could not be prouder and more admiring of this now-historical figure. Stormy is as worthy of honor and respect as any public figure, and much more so than many.

All of this is to say: the smearing of people because of the sex is absurd, lazy, and so, so cruel.

Queer sex is great. Queer sex is fine. There’s nothing wrong with queer sex, however strange it might seem to me or anyone else, so long as it is consenting.

But the LOVE. Oh, the love.

How can I say what people have tried to say for centuries?

Surely the most glorious and beautiful of love connections are those which come despite all the obstacles, despite and notwithstanding the hell of other people?

Queer love is so, so beautiful because it persists. Because it INsists. Because love will be love, however cruel and mean and misunderstanding the world may be.

I’m a straight cis guy. I’m not narrow; I’ve experimented enough to know that that’s what I am.

I can’t speak to the queer experience at all.

But what I can do is say this: the desire isn’t dirty. The love is beautiful.

The love you feel, the desire you feel is beautiful and I completely adore you for feeling it.

Happy Pride, my dear, beloved friends.

Posted in Opinion, Sexuality, Uncategorized | 2 Comments