Reblogging because the 3rd man quoted totally gets it, and I mean GETS IT! Go Gwion Raven, you rock! All the others except the first one quoted get it, too. But read this for the 3rd man’s quote who is of course part of Reclaiming.
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On being surprised when people act as they actually are (tardy Monday blogging)
Well, 2 days late, damnit. Where does the time go? So, Wednesday blogging.
When people are honest about who they are, how they behave, and their actions show consistently this truth, why am I surprised? I should not be. They have been truthful with me. I have seen them in action. I have acknowledged certain truths about them and love them anyway. (Duh. Humans, flawed.) And yet. And yet and yet and yet when their truth has a less than positive impact on me I am all 
for a bit – surprise!
This is a flaw in me. Do I think I am oh so special I will get better different treatment than the rest of the world? Do I think because this is a person who loves me I’ll escape the less pleasant parts of their personality? Apparently I do think that. Why? Time proves me wrong. I get my feelings hurt. When I examine my hurt, when I sink deeply and Listen I hear the same thing over and again: “This is Who They Are. Why are you surprised?”
Like I said to ye daughter a few weeks ago about a friend’s behaviour, “Stop being surprised.”
It seems I needed to hear it as well as say it.
Community Warning: Facebook Predator
I’ve spent the last 48 hours stewing and stunned over a situation that has come back from 2012… Pagans and Polytheists on Facebook, please be on the look-out for a man wishing to assume a female identity or woman in our community messaging you and wishing to talk about headcovering, clothing, or conversion. The situation may not be quite as innocent as it seems.
In August and early September of 2012, members of the all-female headcovering group Occulta Femina on Facebook were getting messaged by a member of the group who claimed to be a pre-transition trans-woman (Note: I am not attacking trans people. I am not saying this is because said person is trans, though I have my questions if that fact is true or not. What this person is doing has nothing to do with that, but uses it as an opening to start pulling you into this…
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Hypocrisy – Thy Name is Boehner
Because every now then we need a reminder that supporting human rights *is* a spiritual pursuit so this lands here on my religious blog.
Opinion: Goddess in Times of Horror (reblog)
Monday blogging – Why Elliot Rodger is a product of patriarchy
“when she was 7, a boy pushed her on the playground
she fell headfirst into the dirt and came up with a mouthful of gravel and lines of blood chasing each other down her legs
when she told her teacher what happened, she laughed and said ‘boys will be boys honey don’t let it bother you
he probably just thinks you’re cute’
but the thing is,
when you tell a little girl who has rocks in her teeth and scabs on her knees that hurt and attention are the same
you teach her that boys show their affection through aggression
and she grows into a young woman who constantly mistakes the two
because no one ever taught her the difference
‘boys will be boys’
turns into
‘that’s how he shows his love’
and bruises start to feel like the imprint of lips
she goes to school with a busted mouth in high school and says she was hit with a basketball instead of his fist
the one adult she tells scolds her
‘you know he loses his temper easily
why the hell did you have to provoke him?’
so she shrinks
folds into herself, flinches every time a man raises his voice
by the time she’s 16 she’s learned her job well
be quiet, be soft, be easy
don’t give him a reason
but for all her efforts, he still finds one
‘boys will be boys’ rings in her head
‘boys will be boys
he doesn’t mean it
he can’t help it’
she’s 7 years old on the playground again
with a mouth full of rocks and blood that tastes like copper love
Fortesa Latifi – Boys Will Be Boys(And Why That Is The Stupidest Thing You Could Ever Say To A Little Girl)
Flashback 2005 – Monday blogging
(I missed a week. Oops!)
Back in 2005 an online friend had a witchcraft course running in a forum. The tradition she co-created was Wiccan based. That trad was not for me, but one of the pieces of course work I found very intriguing. It was to rewrite the Charge of the Goddess by Doreen Valiente in our own words with what the deities mean to us after meditating on the charge. Here is my rewrite:
The Charge of the Goddess
by PJVJ (Modified from Doreen Valiente’s Charge of the Goddess)
Listen to the words of the Great Mother; she who of old
was also called among men Artemis, Astarte, Athene, Dione,
Melusine, Aphrodite, Cerridwen, Dana, Arianrhod, Isis,
Brid, and by many other names.
I am the cut in the leaf and the tiny insect underneath. I am the wild goose and soaring wind. I am your joyous burst of laughter and your most bitter tear. I flit at the edges of your imagination and tease in your dreams. I am the base of all that you are and that you will become. I am the love – in nature, in art, in music, in laughter, in sex, in you. I am the despair – in light, in darkness, in words, in crowds, in loneliness, in you. I am always with you. I am the Honor. I am the Humility. I am the Reverence. I am the Peace. I am the Joy of All things.
Meet with kindred spirits, once a month when the moon is full, and invoke my presence, my joy, my desire; and fulfill your need. Call me and I shall join you in your rite. Know that all acts, all manners, of love and pleasure come through me. Rejoice in my presence and raise voice, hands and feet to me. Sing! Dance! Laugh! Seek my wisdom – all of my wisdom.
Hear ye the words of the Star Goddess; she in the dust
of whose feet are the hosts of heaven, and whose body
encircles the universe.
Look up! Look down! I am everywhere. I am here in your house. I am out in the fields. I am above you in the sky. I am below you in the middle earth. I surround the universe with my ample self and I reach inside you and light the flame – of existence, of knowledge, of love, of eternity. Seek everywhere at once for me, but know this to be true – if what you seek you do not see first within you, you shall never find it outside of you.
I am the beginning and end, the above and below, the seen and unseen. I was there to smell your first breath and I will be there blowing your last breath away. And when you rise again I will be there with you. I am All that Is and all that Is is Me.
Copyright © 2005 (Boneweaver) Pamela V Jones
Authority and submission – not always the dirty little words you think they are
The quotes below remind me of initiation and the joyful giving up of authority in order to be transformed. It reminds me of why we submit, sometimes, for our own greater good. It reminds me of why I did such on this anniversary of my two initiations, each one done at Beltane. It reminds me of how the action of submission to authority allowed the passing of the currents. It reminds me how in so doing I could become comfortable with my own authority. These energies so vital to my Joy, these energies that run through me weaving threads of connection and connectedness inward and outward, that bind in Love. These would not have been possible without a new understanding of submission and authority. I am so very grateful.
From a Diana’s Grove person:
“A safe group, a healthy group, has a leader. Here’s why: if it doesn’t, then no one is responsible for the group’s safety. Here is the other reason: there are no leaderless groups. Groups have overt leaders, acknowledged leaders, or they have covert, unacknowledged leaders.
Responsibility = Authority = Power = Impact = Responsibility.
If you are Responsible you need the Authority to fulfill that responsibility. If you have Authority, you are Powerful. And if you are Powerful, you make an Impact on others. If you Impact others, you are Responsible for that impact. When you act responsibly in your use of power, and when you take responsibility for the impact you have on others, you gain more authority. That is the spiral of leadership.”
~Cynthea Jones
In discussion about authority, initiation, and submission Amoret spoke of a nugget she gleaned from a work by G. I. Gurdjieff (not his quote because this is a summation of what Amoret took from the text):
Submitting to the will of a trusted teacher is important. You learn to submit to another, and in that process you learn to submit to yourself. Later, when your Godself tells you something is necessary, you act according to your Will.
Happy anniversaries to me!
Why this blog is not full of woo – Monday blogging
It is full of woo if I read back, but it is everyday embodied woo more than pithy words, Dali Lama inserts, and quotes from “how to be more yourself only better/happier/faster/more awe inspiring” authors who seem to have cornered the market on 5 word sound bytes that sound so important. My blog is not full of pointed “think on this today” questions. And it won’t be.
Those types of religious blogs are fine for others to write. I read some of those blogs myself. For many of them their public persona is very strictly controlled with professional image restriction in content stamped all over it. Everyone gets to be exactly who they are so I leave them to it. They are far better at spiritual declarations about the constant chase of their inner blockages in less than 100 words. Me, I’m gonna sit here and talk to you like we know each other intimately and with a lot more words. I can do the quips. I can do the eyebrow-raised core soul querying (I call these “deep thinky thoughts”) and sometimes I will do that, but mostly what you’ll get is a thorough and thoroughly flawed picture of me.
A couple of years ago during an intense religious ordeal I found myself making an oath alone in a large museum room with a stuffed buffalo. (For those curious a ceremony was done asking her permission to sacrifice her to educate others in the museum. She agreed and so it was done.) As I pet her I teared up and leaned my upper body against her shoulder, head on her neck, forearms and hands on either side of my head. Words pounded into my head and I knew I was expected to say them out loud as an oath. I didn’t want to. I didn’t understand what the oath meant so I balked. But as the incessant pounding into my head continued it became clear the way to stop it was to speak it. And so I did.
I kept rolling it around in my head. I couldn’t make sense of it in a way to be or live or serve. It was a command for how to serve. I was focusing on the wrong part of the sentence. I was trying to suss out the wrong part. It was the beginning of the sentence that I should have noted. There is a thing about buffalo and the tie between them and the indigenous people of this country. Their is a bond and an agreement. The buffalo gives itself to the people and the people honour the buffalo by using all of its parts.
I serve by using all of my parts. The glorious centered and grounded part, the broken parts, the flaws and foibles, the less than stellar parts, the high woo parts, the devoted parts, the Joy and Love parts. I show all of them here, not only some of them. You’ll get widely varied posts about: predators, naps, slips back into coping mechanisms, woo, and sitting in shit. This is who I am, religious blog or not, and the difference between this blog and the other one on Dreamwidth is I am focused on my practices and leaving out the other mundane stuff that ends up there.
I write as if I am talking to you with incomplete sentences, extra punctuation, rise and fall in pitch, and all the rest of the weirdness that is my writing. In ritual and out of ritual I am pretty much the same. Offline and online I am pretty much the same. I’ve met a good number of folks in “real life” that I had only previously known online and I have yet to hear one of them say, “Oh! You’re so different than online!” That makes me happy.
I’m far from perfect and pretty proud of the fact that I can comfortably know this while still doing my best. Comfortably knowing it doesn’t stop stage fright in some situations. Prior to stepping into ritual or facilitating a workshop or leading a ceremony I have long moments of jello-insides. I see the equivalent of me walking the red carpet in a gorgeous gown, stepping on the front hem and doing a faceplant. Not a trip and delicate fall, a faceplant with two broken teeth and a bloody nose. Sometimes that stage fright is less intense, sometimes more intense, but it is always there. “What if I am an ass??” the wicked voice in the back of my mind taunts. I know the answer is, “What if you are an ass? Then what?” I’ve learned that the world does not come to a crashing halt, I don’t lose friends or loved ones, and I don’t die of humiliation on the spot. (These were surprises!)
Here I want to show all of myself, even when I am an ass. Because being an ass sometimes is okay. Not being an ass is even better, yes, and I thoroughly enjoy those times (which are far more common than that wicked voice would let on; yet another surprise). When I do a fabulous non-ass job I tend to say it out loud as if hearing it in my own voice makes it true. “We really rocked that!” has been known to come out of my mouth. If when you hear me say that you see a little kid jumping up and down clapping her hands then you’ve got the right picture because that is how inside me feels when I say that. I am really happy to have the mental image of me sprawled on the red carpet picking up tooth chips and wiping a bloody nose on my gown’s sleeve fade away, forgotten until the next time.
So I present here my whole self as I do in my offline life. Sometimes I curl into myself feeling overwhelmed. Sometimes I sit sobbing across the table from you keenly feeling the pain of rejection that I did not take personally yet hurts just the same. Sometimes I bark out a high cackling laugh or a low tight evil-sounding chuckle. Sometimes I soften my voice and speak words of love to you. I try to convey all of that here. No, not your usual religious blog. Doing it this way is scary as hell, but it is one way I have been called to serve. It is the way I know how to be me and to live the oath I choked out, alone, crying against Buffalo two years ago.
LEAN IN TO JOY with BONEWEAVER 