Beltane

Beltane is my favorite celebration of the year.

And for once, it's not about the food. Some of it is the activities - our maypole has, invariably, been accomplished in the dark, while drunk, and generally around a basketball pole. It's the final capstone of the evening though, so that makes sense.

Let me start at the beginning. A proper Beltane, for us, involves several friends, and the woods. This year, lacking a friend with the proper woods, we'll be camping. For several years, we attempted to attend the local Beltane festival, but as it waned in entertainment year after year, we finally gave up and just straight up have our own party.

First, we barbecue. It's a good impetus to bring the fire in right off the bat, and gives everyone a solid chance to start eating and talking. This is the warm-up of several hours.

When dusk is still a few hours away, the face painting begins. Everyone gets appropriately fierce faux-tribal markings of their choice, and we have accidentally roped in up to 15 non-pagans simply by having so much fun doing it. Beer, mead, and wine appears at this juncture, if it hasn't already.

Then, the Feats of Strength. We don't know how this started, but it's been an annual tradition for just about four years. The men-folk decide upon three or four events - push-ups, pull-ups, arm wrestling, real wrestling, whatever is appropriate to the attendees, and proceed to cavort for the women-folks amusement. The women-folk are the final judges and arbiters of all contests. Also, once, the administers of first aid to massive rug burns.

By the time the Feats have been accomplished, and the arguing is done, it's dusk and time for the bonfire. Fire goes up, people seat themselves, and more eating commences, along with story-telling. Story-telling ranges from mythologies and tales appropriate to the olden times to "You would not BELIEVE what did last weekend. It was a DISASTER..."

Eventually, this morphs into toasts, boasts, and oaths. Toasting seems to follow Newtonian law in that, the longer it goes on, the more force is required to stop it. It's a momentum thing.

At some point, as the fire burns down, we remember that we havn't done the Maypole yet. Attaching the prepared ribbons (or yarn, or scraps) to the basketball hoop is sometimes accomplished at this point, but if we were lucky, someone remembered to declare a Pole Shimmy as one of the Feats, and it's just waiting for us.

Then, everyone goes to bed. Or, 'bed', as the case may be.

I understand that some people get very irritated by the prevalence of sex in Beltane, but to me, trying to take it out is like trying to take Santa Claus out of Christmas. There are some hard-asses who succeed, in both cases, but it's kind of missing the larger point. Christmas is about giving and receiving (Christmas, Yule, Mid-Winter, every single mid-cold season holiday of greater Europe, as far as I can tell.) Beltane is about sex. It's about fertility, and kicking off the growing season, about creativity and sparks and energy. It's about fire.

As I said, it's my favorite. It's quintessentially about life, and passion, and growth. It is, for me, so unconnected to any Christian American holidays that it holds no other connotations. This is MY holiday, the one I get to tell other people, "Sorry, I'm busy. Maybe next time." The holiday that takes precedence over other obligations - instead of planning my holiday around and between.

And we're celebrating twice this year, which just makes it better. Life, Fire, and Goddess Bless the Winter's passing.

Blessed Be!

Pennanti

On Connecting to the Self

I should be writing a post-Ostara, pre-Beltane work-up post right now, but I'm not. Soon – Beltane is, hands-down, my favorite pagan holiday of the year. Some of that is it's the one I started celebrating first, and as such, as the most history with me now. Some of it is also that it's not connected, even tangentially, to any of the holidays I grew up with. There's no emotional baggage tied to it, and I can look forward to that every year.

Anyway. NOT the Beltane post. I mentioned, a few months ago, that I was going to try a kick-boxing/muay thai class and see how it went. I'm still going, and not only that, but I actually like it. Two times a week, mostly, though this week I made it three. It's strange, for me especially. I've never been overweight, at least, not by more than 10 or 20 pounds. This is because I realized early that I could counteract the effects of laziness by ramping up the laziness to the point of being too lazy to eat. Two meals in a day, or a snack in the morning and dinner at some point around 9 pm, has not been unusual in the past.

Throw in the sleep schedule (non-existant), and the fact that I've been running around in a state of mild-to-medium dehydration for the last ten years or so, and it would be fair to say that I'm good, even practiced, at ignoring what my body is telling me.

But with this new exercising thing, I can't do that anymore. I'm hungry all the time now, in a manner that I can't ignore. I'm more in touch with my body and energy than I think I have been since I was a kid.

That being said, my body is a noisy, complaining bitch. I don't know how people manage to take care of themselves properly and still get other shit done. Every time I turn around, I'm either hungry, or thirsty, or sleepy, or (and this is really new), I really want to go do something. I actually did squats in the bathroom at work last week, just to get my muscles to stop vaguely twitching. It felt a little like being some kind of addict (Like, really? You can't get through the workday sitting anymore? What's wrong with you? said the voice in my head). Also, because I'm drinking more, I have to pee, like, 5 times a day. It's bizarre.

I like yoga, and meditation, and all of those things, but they never put me in touch like this. Losing weight is nice, but the anxiety slowly resolving itself is even better. Score one for the psychic. When I went earlier this week, I had the sudden realization that I like being at the gym. It smells weird, and there's some kind of music I can't identify playing loudly (unless it's Rage Against The Machine. I can identify that through sheer dislike.), but in the corner my coach and one of the amateur fighters were beating the shit out of each other (laughing, both of them), and it felt good to sit down and get ready.

Why is it that the media interpretation of the monk is all about a guy who can ignore the physical – walk through fire, sit through snow, work without food or sleep – but everything that reaches us from the East is about slowing down and paying attention to exactly that? The dichotomy bothers me. I don't know anything about Eastern philosophy, because everything I've heard combines to not interest me. It's not my path (except the yoga. My family path is bad joints, so I'll deviate enough to hopefully avoid them for a few extra decades.)

Meanwhile, as I'm interrupting all my normal patterns – eating better, sleeping more, drinking more fluids – I can see a new pattern interruption coming down the highway. Squirt is visiting from FL in mid-May. You know how family patterns develop, and stagnate, as you grow up together. She's the aggressive, athletic one. I'm the tolerant, techno one. Always been that way. Neither of us are good at adjusting to change, at least for internal family behaviors. We're gonna fight.

At least I get to have Beltane first!

Blessed Be,
Pennanti

Stories, Ritual, and Sacrifice

It's been a while from my last post. New job, started classes, blah-blah work-life balance fail. Anyway.

Taun-taun has, twice now, brought a podcast to my attention that I should have immediately started following (second fail!), but is now firmly in my catcher-feed. I've only listened to two, plus a co-host/interview on Inciting a Riot, but I love it - New World Witchery, and it's made of hearts and magic. :)

An interesting question was posited by a listener in the most recent one, of whether or not story-telling and writing (as opposed to straight-up ritual and prayer writing) have a place in ritual and spellwork. I found it interesting in part because my answer was the precise opposite of the lovely host. He talked about publishing and readers as a way to spread the ripples, etc.

I have used writing, stories and poems, as well as art in pictures and scenes, in spell-work before, but not like that. For me, they have served the purpose of sacrifice. In this day and age (and place, for me), it is not always or generally possible to observe the traditional ways of sacrifice - chickens or cows, slicing yourself across the palm, etc; at worst, you get arrested and create a public incident that has the rest of us moaning, "Seriously, WHY?! This press SUCKS!", at best you're still covering for an injury that's not easily explained. (Moon-blood is the only blood I'd term as "freely given", and it has it's place in ritual as well. But that's a different post.)

Creative outlet, though, if you're already prone to it - the pain of burning a story you're proud of, a picture, a poem, is a sacrifice in and of itself. A story written for the ritual, with no copies, never read by another soul, and then consigned to the flames or the water with no recourse - this is a sacrifice for the gods and for no mortal eye.

It hurts. Really. Writing something, pouring your soul into something, and then destroying it to send it into the Beyond, feels the same or worse as getting dumped (Depends on the dumper. This is not the "I dodged a bullet" feeling. It's the "Oh gods, I can't fix this" feeling.) This is what I use as sacrifice, when I'm doing a ritual that is important, when I really want to get Someone's attention. And, it works. I don't do it often, and it's based in no research or historical record, but there it is.

What I'd love to hear is stories of the other way - the published, the passed around, the stories that were told and retold to gain their effect. I love writing, but I'd never think I could write something good enough, entertaining enough, that it could create the ripple effect of passing on and passing down. Now that it's been mentioned though, the idea is fascinating!

Blessed Be,
Pennanti

Sometimes wishing makes it so...

In the past three days:

- a pie pan (that I may or may not have been eating straight out of) flipped over for no apparent reason. It was lying flat on my hand, and I was sitting down.

- the fork I eat lunch with disappeared. We moved everything on the table. I borrowed a coworker's fork. When I cleaned up, it reappeared underneath the cheese bag.

- No one knows where my keys are.

I'm going to take this as a good sign, methinks?
Blessed be!
Pennanti

All those people with horoscope tattoos are going to feel really...wait, they won't care. http://huf

Apparently, some astronomer took it upon himself to "correct" the zodiac. (Um, what??)

I am not going to dispute anything here. I am not an expert on the horoscope - I think it's kinda fun to look at, and definitely a great topic of conversation, what with 5,000 years of historical and cultural depths to explore. I deeply identify with my sign. An expert though, definitely not.

However, one of the reasons I've never tried to be an expert is because there are quite a few out there, and could some of them please weigh in? Because this is looking really stupid from over here in the plebian zone.

Blessed be!
Pennanti

I need a brownie-attracting spell, stat!

I'll just come right out of the closet with this one, and let the puns fall where they may. I believe in fairies. There's reasons for that, among them being that I'm 1st generation Irish American, and I spent whole summers in the country with my Dublin-native grandparents, and also that a few used to live with us. As Catholic as Gramma was and is, she couldn't help herself with the stories and myths of the Fay. The Sidhe. The sprites and pookas and leprechauns. She also "can't help herself" when it comes to the other kind of fairy, to use the vernacular, but that's a source of considerable less glee on my part.

Doesn't everyone have at least one chore, that despite all best intentions, continously and ruinously kicks their butt? In our house, it's the Laundry Demon. The Laundry Demon has been slain, oh, mayhap 3 times in the span of the last 5 years, and rises again, hydra-like, worse than ever every time.

It doesn't make sense. Taun-taun throws loads in several times a week. I fold and put them away. We work on it constantly. We're only two people, but somehow the laundry multiplies as though we were two parents and 8 kids.

This is, seriously, not exactly a problem. Definitely not a problem that you pray/cast circle/summon gods' assistance upon. (Bridgid would laugh at me, and she would be right to.) I don't like calling for anything other than worship or sheer desperation, when you get right down to it. Feels wrong.

And it was these thoughts that made me suddenly remember - I can't remember the last time I sent out a more mundane plea, to fairies or otherwise. High school, I did it all the time. Energy constructs, fairies, small spirits and karmic waftings, whatever. It was a gleeful time, of trying whatever came into my damnfool head, with deeply mixed results. Along the way, as belief grew into devotion, the need for smaller spells sort of dissipated, and the memory of doing them also evaporated. Couplets and cantrips and sprigs of herbs tucked in odd places - you know, the fun stuff! The fluffy stuff.

Anyway, once upon a time, I didn't have this laundry problem. I was actually worse at doing laundry than I am now, but somehow, it wasn't an issue. And reflecting upon that, I remembered the brownie! More of a shy and grumpy gnome, actually. He lived in our basement for years, even followed us from house to house for a little while. In the apartment complex, he lived in the boiler room. Squirt and I had a rule, to always whistle while we were in the basement. That way he'd know when we left and wouldn't have to be scared.

I left for college, and he stayed. I'm sure he's long gone by now, given that neither of my parents are much for leaving out bits of candy and small bowls of Coca-cola when they leave for vacation (I was twelve, you work with what you have. Spilled cola, Dad will forgive or not notice. Spilled milk? Different story.)

How does one go about attracting a brownie? I've quite forgotten, but we'd offer him a lovely home, with an excellent basement and regular 'forgotten' bits of candy or bread. And we would never, ever thank him. Promise!

Blessed Be,
Pennanti

Magic and you. And you, and you, and you, and you...(guest post)

Hello, hypothetical audience. I guess on the intertubes, I'm Taun-Taun. Which really has yet to stop being strange when I see it written referring to me on here.

So why am I interrupting the normal posting habits of my better half? As I told her earlier today, I had something I kind of wanted to talk about and I didn't really have an outlet, so here I am, shouting into the void instead. I was listening to Pagan Parents On The Edge earlier at work, which is an awesome show, so listen to it if you don't already. They were talking about the role of Santa in the holiday season, and, as expected, talked briefly about how children generally stop believing in him as they get older, along with a general waning of belief in the fantastic or magical. Which I agree with, to an extent.

As a society, we obviously are fairly down on magical thinking. You didn't cure your headache with that spell, it was just a placebo effect because you thought about it a lot. Smudging your house with sage doesn't purify it, you just made the place smell funny. So on and so forth. I'm sure we've all heard some version of this at some point or another. But then, I got to thinking, which is always a bad idea. For as much as anything supernatural is generally looked down on, you know who the biggest coven in the world actually is? Sports fans.

Stay with me for a second here. Maybe you're reading this from somewhere in Boston, and you have a Red Sox hat on a shelf somewhere. Or Chicago, and your winter coat is a Cubs jacket. Or maybe you're familiar with any of the ENTIRE FREAKING ARTICLE- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports-related_curses

I used to be pretty big into baseball until a few years ago, and I saw people, including my own family, doing the craziest crap because they thought somehow it would help their team win. Or that there was some kind of "bad luck" that kept their team from going anywhere in the playoffs. Hell, I watched my mother adjust the position of a roll of posterboard she'd left on the couch by accident one day because we thought if we moved it a little bit, the Yankees might start playing better. Other friends had certain shirts of certain players they would wear so that they would break out of their slumps. Me and my brother wore a small Yankees symbol on a chain like it was a cross. Another person I knew wore a particular hat when his team was playing at home, no matter how gross it got. It couldn't be washed, you see, that would take the luck out of it. We were all just joking, of course. Right?

Looking back on it, I don't really think that was the case. There's a certain level of vehemence that rose to the surface when these goofy little rituals of ours were challenged. I distinctly remember getting yelled at if the Yankees were playing well and I would accidentally knock that roll of posterboard out of place. It's possible that this makes her sound like a nutcase, but the fact is, this is the kind of passion and faith you see people put in superstitions all over the world of sports fandom.

So what's my point here? Is it that sports fans are batshit crazy? That one doesn't need me writing about it. But let's look at the bigger picture, the one that this post only touches on one aspect of. As a culture, we perform rituals. We wear totems. We make sacrifices. Why do we do this? "Well, you know, it's just this stupid little thing I have, but it helps me calm down/focus/keep moving while I'm doing housework/get through visiting my in-laws without killing them/etc." Frequently said with a bit of shame, as though this is something you shouldn't be doing, or is kid's stuff, and how silly it is that you as a grown, mature adult still hold onto a bit of it. The only thing that's silly about this is that we try to hide it and ignore it. "It just isn't the Way The World Works", we adamantly repeat to ourselves. To that, I say- pfft. The Horned One has helped me finish more than one workout when all I've wanted to do is topple to the floor and pass out in a nice warm puddle of my own sweat.

Unlike disco, magic ain't dead. It just updated its wardrobe. Also unlike disco.