I won’t go into how heinous I find that, although I’m tempted. My own views on psychopharmacology are not very positive, as I’ve mentioned at least a few times before. But what interests me is that we have a very different relationship to depression, to all unpleasant emotional states, than our counterparts all over the world.

That is to say, we have a culture of unhappiness, but we don’t revere or honor that unhappiness. A great deal of our social mores, norms, and patterns are designed to make us unhappy. There are hundreds of things we can do or experience that will make us unhappy. It’s practically impossible to live a life virtuous enough to be happy. Instead, every day, we are surrounded by things to make us upset. We’re fucking depressed by the rain. Seriously. What’s with that? We’re not happy with our health, our bodies, our income, our family, our insurance, our government, our celebrities, or our relationships. We feel we’re entitled to live a complete untroubled life, and when that turns out to be impossible we get depressed about it.

It’s very hard to find a person who is truly happy in our culture. And that’s OK. We aren’t supposed to be happy all the time. We’re supposed to experience all sorts of emotions, because that’s how our psyche is built. Unpleasant emotions help teach us how to thrive, how to be fruitful. From an evolutionary standpoint, rejecting the acceptability of unpleasant emotions and trying to supress them is akin to reinforcing negative traits in our genetic line.

Everything we do is aimed at depression, unahppiness, and dissatisfaction, and yet we’re surprised that we aren’t happy. I’ll be honest and say I don’t have a clue what is going on there. It makes absolutely no sense to me. More importantly, and more frustratingly, most people seem to accept it and think it makes perfect sense.

But we’re in denial about the nature of our culture. We are encouraged to be unhappy, and in fact our social structures enforce (sometimes violently) that unhappiness. But we hate that we are unhappy, and consider it a disease or a failing in the person. Somehow our unhappiness is a sign of defect.

I think this is a fundamental conflict in our culture. In fact, I think it’s the defining trait of our culture. Our culture is defined by the fact that we believe ourselves to be flawed, and that the product of our work is equally flawed. “Nobody’s Perfect” tends to be our catch-all excuse for our failings. We repeat it like a mantra whenever we make a mistake, and accept that we will never be perfect. We ridicule and shun people who are trying to improve themselves, and indeed the desire to better oneself is looked down upon by our culture. We are intransient, and we do our best to prevent each other from changing or growing.

How many times have you heard someone say “This isn’t like you.” or “What have they done to you.” or “You’re not the person I thought you were.” Our expectations of each other are rigid and demanding, and any deviation from those expectations is often met with emotional violence. I could easily blame this on our Puritanical ancestors, but I don’t think that’s fair, or even accurate. The truth is, we make our culture every day. We buy in to the idea that we’re broken and need to be fixed. We support it every time we devalue unhappiness, or pain. Every attempt to manipulate eachother for our own comfort, to bring another person down or rail against their harmless decisions.

It’s not something that’s easy to fix, but I want to fix it. I want to fix it very badly, and I don’t really know how. Except by creating a counter to it. A cultural shift that is based on principles, acceptance, and respect. By living as an example against that culture, a different face, a different voice, striking clearly through the din. But it will take many voices, many strengths, many truths. I choose to be one of them. Maybe you do as well.

Share the gift

The interesting thing is that we deduce the next moment, the next frame of our existence by understanding the directional forces (intertia) at work in the Now. We observe the past by deducing the directional forces that must have been in place to prepare our state to manifest the Now.

This is all speculation of course. The fact is, Time does exist. Now, State, is constantly changing. I suspect that Time is inherently a function of life, that all motion is an expression of life. Death, perhaps, is simply the absence of motion. Certainly that is how we attempt to define it today. We are dead when the heart stills, when the neurons cease to fire, when the energy of our form has dissipated. Of course we live on. Our physical form is broken down and carried back to the natural world. Our bodies do not stay still. And physics tells us that the energy of our life has to go somewhere. That animating force dissipates, but the force itself can not be destroyed. The only real death is the absolute binding of our energy. The absence of time, of movement, of force.

(On a related note, this ties in interestingly with some of my previous thoughts about the Arthurian legends. Arthur as the Warrior against Time, attempting to bring it to a halt, may in truth attempting to bring absolute death to the world.)

So thinking about time, about stillness, about death, I wonder that we spend so much of our now thinking about yesterday and tomorrow. I’m not convinced that this is wrong or bad, but I find it curious. The primary function of thoughts of the past or future is reconciliation and reparation. We want to understand, to reconcile our previous states. We want to repair the future, by which I mean we desire a specific outcome. Note that I say want. We desire reconciliation and reparation. We look to the future and the past out of a desire or a need.

What is that desire? Where does it come from? How does it manifest in the now?

By default I operate on the assumption that Will, (which fuels desire) transcends time. But ignoring the possibility of transcendence, how can we operate with our emotions, our desires, inside of the Now? Can desire be summarized by State in the Now, as a set of rational forces in potential? Is my desire, that state, simply a neurological pattern of forces?

What about our memories of emotions? Are they the reflection, the remains of previous states? Lasting impressions or lingering patterns of a prior state?

The simple answer is yes. Emotions are as illusory as time. They are a function of forces inside our state. However, is emotion the prime mover of that state? What started all the motion? Was it an inevitable consequence of super-dense matter, or was it begun by some primal emotion?

I ask, because if you think about it, our emotions are what connect us throughout time. In the Now, we have a single state, a rational composed set of forces that can be understood. We can perceive the outcome of those forces, but without engaging desire, we have no influence upon those forces. Without desire, without will, those forces will simply cascade through successive states without any further change. The forces that drive will though, those introduce the true element of chaos into the equation, because those forces influence independent action. A directed application of force instead of the consequential.

And that’s what it comes down to. It is easy to believe that free will is an illusion, that we are all the product of cause and effect. That our state ultimately determines our proceeding states. And perhaps that is true. But we aren’t functioning in a closed system, or a singular system. We are functioning in an infinite universe with multiple systems of force interacting. This is the fundamental truth of chaos. the forces of the physical realm are easily understood (relatively). This is why our physical science is so advanced. However, the metaphysical forces, the psychological forces, the spiritual forces, are not so easily defined, let alone understood.

I’ve got a lot running through my head right now. A bit part of that is my quest for weight loss. Today is February 8th. As of this morning I’m down 2.8 pounds total, which is a good start. The first few weeks are always the easiest, so I’m going to take advantage of that as best I can. This week is going to be challenging on the exercise front, because getting out of bed and going to the gym first thing in the morning will not be easy with how busy I’m going to be. Still, after I wash my workout clothes tonight I’m going to try.

There is a lot moving in the world. My visions tell me that there is a great deal of potentia in the murk this year, and that there is opportunity if we keep our eyes and hearts open and aligned. I’ve got lots of ideas and thoughts about projects that seem to be ready to get moving, but making them move will require a lot of energy and time. As George prepares for Massage School and a complete loss of his free-time I find myself preparing for much the same. Not massage school, but I can see that I’ll be providing myself lots of opportunities to be busy and involved. Finding a way to live that schedule healthily will be the primary challenge of the year.

I’m thinking about the pagan internet a lot the last few days. It’s as fractured and poorly communicated as our communities in general. Here in Chicago I’m not even sure what operating groups other than the Brotherhood are functional or reliable. I was trying to suggest a group to a friend of mine recently and found that I kept saying “I haven’t heard a lot out of them lately…” Further research led me to discover that most of the groups I know about have self-destructed or transformed greatly. The pagan internet, much like our larger pagan culture is a frustrating place. There are lots of individual sites and sources of information. Many of them are about as reliable as the common knowledge and assumptions that guide so much of our culture. That is to say, much of it is lacking substance, depth, and understanding, and much of it is just plain incorrect.

There’s a need for that to be addressed, and I’m working on something that I think will help, but I’ve still got a lot to do in my head to make it function. My first instinct was that some sort of Wiki would be a good idea. The trouble is that a wiki relies upon experts to edit and maintain it’s articles. Unfortunately, we have two problems there in the pagan and magical community. 1) We don’t have a lot of experts, and 2) There are lots of people who claim to be experts, but aren’t. With a volume of people who believe they are experts a wiki is a breeding ground for bad, even harmful information. I have a hard time thinking that giving this type of voice more weight is a good thing.

But shouldn’t the voices of the wannabe-experts be heard too? Well yes, and no. Look at Witchvox. I, like many people, have been reading or reviewing WitchVox since the late 90’s. It is a valuable resource and one that I honor. However, it’s seen better days. As near as I can tell, WitchVox will now publish just about anything anyone sends them, regardless of the veracity or quality of writing. In the last 6 months I’ve seen articles published that are offensive (and I’m hard to offend), and worse advocate or advise actions that could be very damaging to people. That is the minority however. The majority of the articles are self-aggrandizing tripe, the equivalent of human interest stories. Lengthy articles where the writer rambles on about their experiences and then ends with a trite moralizing message meant to encourage or enforce an, often questionable, social more.

These people have lots of places for their voices to be heard. And their voices are given equal weight. That said, I don’t think it’s responsible to give them authority by promoting their words. Their thoughts are a different matter. I think that one of the biggest problems we have today is that a vast majority of the writing we find about our religion and craft claims to be factual. The truth is, we have interpretations and thoughts. We have research and experiences. We’re dealing with the metaphysical, the subnoumenal. Not the physical. When dealing with the subnoumenal we have to realize that there is no single truth or fact, and it behooves us to address and present a wide spectrum of those possible truths. From that spectrum the cream will rise. The most powerful, most meaningful beliefs will surface. The most effective magical technology will arise. And in so doing we will maintain both the most accepted of that spectrum, but keep access to that which has been left behind. The preservation of those ideas is vital, and we should have access to it. It also allows us to offer the most important aspect of our religious and magical tradition to the world. The ability to chose what practices and beliefs suit yourself, and with that choice create your own tradition, your own understanding, and your own practice.

So what I’m envisioning is a resource where all ideas are permitted and allowed, but none are given preferential treatment. The care with which this must be maintained is evident. It is easy for individual authors to promote their own views while deprecating the views of others. And It’s important that this is both allowed and discouraged. Individuals should promote their own views and opinions, much like the editorial page of a newspaper, but it’s important to keep those views out of the reporting or encyclopedic information. Many people don’t like non-opinion writing because it’s viewed as impersonal and doesn’t help us come to conclusions about things. The truth is though, that this is partially intentional. Good explanatory writing is often not meant to convince you of something, or to draw a conclusion for you. It is meant to give you the information on which to draw your own conclusion.

There is something to be said however, for explanatory or informative writing that has personality. Not putting forth a great deal of opinion or casting judgment upon a subject does not mean that the writing has to be dry or boring.

So I’m trying something new. I’m just throwing my physical body and personal discipline at the problem. I’m watching the way my body reacts to exercise, and to eating less, and to eating more carefully. I’m going to use the observations I garner to become an expert on my body and the way it interacts with the world. Along the way I’m also going to lose a lot of weight, tone my muscles, and cultivate a sense of thriving vitality and resilience to the world.

I will not become enslaved to a too rigid diet or artificially imposed habit of exercise or eating. I’ve observed, in other people, that rigidity may cultivate thriving health, but it does not cultivate resilience, and I demand both for myself. Think of it as a garden. the gardener who carefully tends each seed and bulb he lovingly planted, weeding, and feeding, and caring for them in a greenhouse environment produces beautiful thriving specimens of all sorts of plants. But take those plants out of their greenhouse and plant them in natural soil, submit them to the conditions of weather and toxins, and submit them to competition with other plants, and they will often wither and die.

In order to truly thrive, not in a predictable and controlled environment, but in the hairy chaotic reality of my life, I need to cultivate a resilience to the various factors of the world by preparing my body for all manner of upset, including bad schedules, bad food, emotional turbulence, political upset, and personal challenges.

And that’s where I’m at.

On top of that I’ve got all my personal work that I want to do, including some training with Amatheon, a more comprehensive study of TCM (long term, not immediate), and the fact that I’m trying to learn how to be a better friend to the people in my life. Oh, and I want to lose weight too.

I might as well plan on buying a pony while I’m at it, right?

But I’m not really discouraged. Having a full plate keeps me focused. George often comments that I’m too hard on myself about getting things done, about making good use of my time. I don’t think so. I’m actually very gentle with myself. I take the time I need. If I need to let something fall I do. I don’t typically hurt or overwork myself.

I do sometimes have a tendency to get overwrought about things that are stressing me, in particular conflict type stuff. Sometimes I don’t sleep so well, but only occasionally is that because I’ve got too much on my plate. I am also stern with myself, because if I’m not, many things would never get done. Things that I want done. I don’t flog myself over letting things slide, but eventually I do have to get up off my ass and get it done, and it helps to say to myself, “theo, stop fucking off and focus. Just do this one thing right now.” It’s more effective than you’d think.

I need to clean my room tonight though. It’s not dirty, just a little laundry needs to be straightened. I’ve managed to keep it quite neat for 10 days now. This is possibly a record. If George and I can keep the whole house relatively clean for a while we might even manage to make a habit of it.

Ah, almost home, time to get things done now.

I lost it a little last week when commenting back and forth on a blog that I read. DetentionSlip.org.

There is an article about a school in Bangor Maine, that is threatening to suspend all high school dances if the students don’t clean up their dance moves. Read: stop grinding on the dance floor.

I think that’s pretty stupid on several levels. First, and coming from base principles, I don’t see a valid reason for prohibiting pseudo-sexual contact. For me this is a non-issue. I recognize that the community and school administrators are not as sexually accepting as I am however, so I can understand their desire to keep what they perceive to be inappropriate behavior off the dance floor.

Still, threatening to ban all school dances? Absurd. It is a terrible enforcement policy that punishes an entire school populous for the disciplinary actions of a specific group of students. (If every one of the students at a dance is grinding together I think we probably have a different issue at hand.) Otherwise, the appropriate response is to discipline the students in violation of the schools policy fairly and immediately, and make the policy clear to everyone attending the dance.

I said as much in my comments, although not as clearly or precisely, not at first anyway. What got me angry is not the schools ridiculous enforcement policy, but the comments of another reader who only entered “Guest” as a name. My reading of the comments suggests someone of the female gender, so I will use that pronoun through the rest of this rant. Guest states that she is a teacher, and feels that grinding is inappropriate and that the school is in the right. Fine. No problem. The problem is the immediate and continual display of gender bias, criminalizing young men, “boys” as she says, and infantilizing the young women, or “girls.”

Among her offensive comments were phrases like “Almost all boys are perverts,” “Most boys are violent,” and “boys are always thinking about sex.” Her words paint young women as naive, innocent victims of the perverted advances of boys on the dance floor. When called on her bias she claims that it’s not bias because it is based upon her actual real life observations of behavior.

Here is the article and comments. Bangor: High School Bans Dances

The comments back and forth ranged among a variety of topics, including gender bias, sexual obsession in culture, sports as a healthy outlet for violence, and supression of sex as the appropriate response. Throughout she continually demeans young men by reducing them to out of control hormonal children who must be “trained” in “appropriate” behavior.

The number of issues I have with this are innumerable, and I’m so incredibly full of anger that I’m having trouble breaking them out into their component pieces. It is no wonder that public education is in such disarray if even a fraction of teachers display these attitudes and biases.

May all the gods forbid that we treat our students as actual, real live people, with rights, and feelings, and complexities that can never be reduced to out of control hormones. I’ve read many times in the last few years that young men are consistently producing less and less acceptable test scores across the country, while young women are continuing to perform at expected or superior levels. To hear teachers express their obvious bias against male students, and the clear expectation that they will not learn or perform in class, for me answers a lot of the questions raised about this phenomenon.

I can’t help but remember that 50 or 60 years ago young women were in the same boat. They were not expected to do as well as the young men. They were ridiculed for their educational aspirations, and nobody really worried about pushing them to excel. Our culture assumed that they simply weren’t able to be smart, because they were too obsessed with girlish things, like hair-styles and learning to cook and sew. I find an eerie parallel between that pattern and the current crop of “boys are too hormonal to really focus” teaching styles.

I am not an endocrinologist, but I have serious doubts that the hormonal stages of adolesence have changed drastically for young men in the last 60 years, so this idea that they aren’t capable of thinking straight cause they’re too horny and sex obsessed on account of their wacked out hormones doesn’t hold any water at all. But that’s the party line right now.

This is part of why I’m struggling to find where I fit into the educational system. I can’t sit by and watch this. It is a tremendous disservice and abuse of our children (both the young men and women). I just don’t understand how people can sit by and accept these things, how anybody can think it’s okay.

I’m trying to put together a comprehensive list of the things I need to do over the next few weeks, and some of them are just getting away from me. Work is very busy right now, I’m juggling several projects and trying to make myself useful in a variety of ways. I often have the feeling that I’m not getting enough done, or being effective enough. It is frustrating, because it’s not really my fault. I’m bound by the processes and dictums of the rest of the company, and not just my own efforts.

The train is in the middle of the tracks now, stopped dead. Apparently we’re experiencing an equipment problem. The conductor is off the train trying to fix it. That seems dangerous when we’re not actually in a station. I am getting the scary image of another train coming by and smushing the conductor.

I’ve been thinking a lot about religion lately, particularly my religion. The Brotherhood of the Phoenix is its own religion, underneath the NeoPagan and earth-based umbrella. Theoretically we have our own set of beliefs, practices, and traditions, but in practice we’re a syncretic tradition. We’re a tradition of NeoPaganism, and to my mind the religion itself is NeoPaganism, and our Brotherhood is a sect or order of that religion.

This lends some interesting potential to how we view and work with our tradition. Most importantly, it heightens the fraternal element of the Brotherhood, and in some lights equates us to Catholic orders of Monks or Nuns. This is important, and resonant for me, because we operate less like a congregational church, and more like an order. Our services are segregated. They are open to a subset of the larger community, and we have rites and services that are closed to anyone who is not a member of our order. We operate independently of a governing religious body but are involved and attentive to the needs and growth of the larger religious community of which we are a part.

Becoming a member of our temple is not a simple matter of attending service and tithing, but a larger, significantly more complex process that is not undertaken lightly by us or those seeking to become members. The expectation is that when you join our order you will be a member for life, wherever it is that life takes you. We have an internal degree system, that is similar but not identical to the expected heirarchal structure of the NeoPagan religious community and a dedicated body of deeply committed priests and mentors who guide and shepherd members of our order, and the larger body of our religious community, and in many respects have duties external to even the religion. As with most traditions, vows of service tend to transcend the limiting elements of congregational bodies.

All that said, we are definitely a religion in our own right. We revere our own gods and mythologies, have our own mysteries of creation and existence, our own ethical tenets, and our own set of rites that give meaning and structure to the cycle of life.

What interests me most in all of this, is how I as a member, mentor, and one day priest, can build a culture of our religion. Our order tends to dislike the dogma of commandments, as does much of the NeoPagan community. As a result we’ve, for years now, avoided the codification of a single unified mythology or a unified way of looking at our mysteries, Gods, rites, and paths. Underneath that avoidance an unofficial dogma has risen, that I am not sure we have control over, and I feel we should. I do not think avoiding the path of dogma was a bad decision, but I think we have become a bit rabid in our avoidance of it.

The purpose of avoiding dogma is to allow individual experience to define a persons relationship with Spirit. Culture, Understanding, and Community grow in connection to each other, and with them comes a natural development of principles. We have struggled so hard to prevent dogma from creeping into those principles that I am coming to believe we have crippled ourselves to an extent. I think that a cultural understanding that has risen out of our experience is very different than a commandment or declaration from on high. If our tradition is learning about itself, finding truths and realities amidst our experience, I think we can healthily allow those principles to manifest themselves.

The key to doing this in a healthy way is not limiting ourselves to those principles. As they arise and we embrace them (which we are already doing, but are avoiding naming) we have to remember that they are not immutable laws of the universe, but communications of our experience meant to guide us and aid us as we grow, as we transform. Further, as these tenets are adopted, as they become part of our process, we must understand that they are not a law unto themselves. They are a representation of culture, of mores that have arisen out of need and experience.

So I’m spending a lot of time thinking about what dogma we have already, what more we need (or rather, have and aren’t naming), and how we can express and embrace that dogma without losing the freedom of individual experience. The policy thus far has been one of unofficial dogma, and I am beginning to think that it’s not working. Unofficial dogma smells too much like hidden dogma, or concealed tenets. What we need is a way of establishing healthy, true dogma that has manifested itself in our tradition, without shoving it down the throats of our members or community, and without presenting it as immutable.

I suspect that’s enough work for anyones lifetime.

I’ve been in the mood to write, but haven’t had a lot of things to say the last couple of weeks. A lot of that is simply that I feel kind of out of touch with the world at large. I’m not sure why that is, but I don’t feel as though I’m really connected the last few weeks to a month. I think this is a larger feeling connected with some of what the Brotherhood is going through at the moment. I feel as though I’ve been insular, and lost contact with the world around me.

That isn’t really true, but that’s how I feel. I think I need to spend more time with other people and be more social. Not in the demanding way, that would be a disaster, but just doing more out of the house. That’s a goal for the year, but I’m not going to get very far while the weather is this cold. The cold doesn’t generally bother me too much, but I don’t like getting to and fro in it.

I’m also thinking a lot about my talents and the things that are important to me. I have been really feeling drawn to working with kids the last month or so, and I’m trying to understand how that fits into it all. I don’t have any desire to be a therapist or teacher of children, but their rights are really important to me. There is a part of me that is constantly aware of how unjustly we treat our youth. Perhaps it has ever been this way, but I think we do them and the world a great disservice by treating them as lesser adults. I’ve never been comfortable with our, to my mind, arbitrary division of life stages and the expectations we place upon people in different phases of their lives. There is such panic consistently in our cultural consciousness about protecting our children, about taking care of them properly, about so many things. I can’t help but feel that this level of cultural obsession is not only overkill, but ultimately poisonous to our children and our civilization.

For instance, the obsession with letting kids be kids and not burdening them with the weighty thoughts of adulthood. I am not so old that I don’t remember being a kid. From a very early age I was aware that my family often had trouble with money. So much so that with a few exceptions I always tried not to nag my parents for expensive things. I suspect you have your own memories of things you were aware of and that affected your decision making and behavior. This does not mean our parents didn’t properly sheild us from these things. The idyllic childhood where we are carefree beings doesn’t exist. I don’t think it ever did. It’s a myth we continue to perpetuate, and it places unrealistic expectations upon parents and children.

A lot of the things that bother me come down to something that bothers me in the grand scheme of things. We, as a race, seem to be unwilling to think about the principal meanings behind our behaviors. We seem to avoid even thinking about why we do things, and what those things mean about our ideals. The second part is perhaps worse than the first. It’s bad that we don’t think about things. But that we don’t extrapolate meaning from our actions is terrible in my mind.

Take a common circumstance. The germaphobe who won’t shake hands. I’m not picking on a person who has this practice, but it’s generally understood that if you refuse to shake someones hands because of germs you’re pretty much saying they have dirty germ-ridden hands. This isn’t a hard concept to grasp. We see it in social situations all the time, and the same thought process extends to all sorts of backhanded compliments and quirks of behavior. Most of these things we write off. We know the germaphobe is not trying to insult us by refusing to shake hands, so we let it go. But the truth is, the behavior speaks clearly to a belief the germaphobe has: “All people are dirty and will make me sick.” This may or may not be true. There are plenty of people with weak immune systems who may very well pick up illnesses left and right from such casual contact. The truth of the belief isn’t important. The belief is.

I carry a messenger-bag style laptop case most days. The flap of this case has a zipper compartment on the outside. I tend to throw items like books in there where I can get at them easily. I typically don’t zip it up unless it’s raining. Often I clip my blackberry to the inside of it so I can get to it without much work. It loads from the top so I’m not worried about things falling out of it.

Often, the bag rides in my lower back, so it’s behind me, out of sight. Still, I’ve yet to have something fall out of it, or someone steal my random book or my blackberry. Two years, no attempted robberies or accidental losses. In that time however, I’ve had at least a dozen people pull my book out and give it back to me to demonstrate that leaving it open is dangerous. An equal number have come up and zipped it closed for me while telling me “Your bags open,” operating on the assumption that I must have just forgotten to close it. I couldn’t possibly want my stuff so accessible.

This says a great deal about the mindset of our culture. Whether we express it or not, we live our lives in an almost perpetual state of fear. Fear that we’re going to be robbed, or that we’re going to suffer loss. The fear is bad, but just as bad is the fact that we never challenge that fear or stop to think about it rationally. Is someone really going to steal a paperback novel out of my bag? Or an ancient blackberry worth maybe $5? Or a hairbrush?

This “close your bag” behavior is rampant. It’s interesting because of what it says about people. One one hand it indicates the obsessive and constant fear they experience, not just on their own behalf but nobly, on behalf of others. But it also says something about what they think of me. The “I could have stolen your book.” approach tells me that they think I’m being careless with my property, that I’m not obeying the fear-compulsion properly.

It indicates to them naivete on my part, or disregard. That’s not entirely inaccurate. I am not terribly worried about someone stealing my book. If someone feels compelled to steal a badly written novel they must have more need of it than I do. I am certainly naive about this in some lights, or perhaps I just have a strong conviction that is counter to their own. I certainly avoid obeying the fear-compulsion. (When I had a car, I did lock the doors, however I don’t lock the door of my apartment.)

The thing that bugs me the most here, is what that fear-compulsion says about us. It says that we should mistrust each other, that we should fear each other, and that most people are not just not looking out for us, but are actively out to destroy us. I don’t believe that. I think a lot of people don’t believe that. If they don’t much of their behavior makes no sense and they should change it. But the connection from principle to practice is too weak to convince most people to change their behavior.

Sad truth is, most people don’t believe that their day to day behaviors, the standard ones like zipping up their bag and crossing the street to avoid the four teenagers on the corner, have an impact in a larger sense. I believe, deeply, that it is those smallest behaviors that define our lives. They govern the largest part of our experience, and are in some ways more defining because of it. Someone who abuses their child verbally on a daily basis is not absolved because he donates a large sum to a childrens advocacy group. It’s the things we do every day that determine who we are, and so those little things deserve as much attention as the big ones. Perhaps more.

It is perhaps the greatest and most common of sins a teacher can commit, to inhibit the students growth by assembling around him a system of reinforcement that restricts growth to the manner the teacher desires. Not just in the Art is this true, but in all things. An environment of learning must be a sandbox where the rules of nature and life may be tested and explored. Too much structure and the student does not learn to perceive the natural laws on his own. Too little structure and the student does not learn to communicate those laws.

Nature gives us the opportunity for this learning if we will allow it. Students are generally inferior to their teachers in many ways. A child is less strong, less fast, but more difficult to damage. This has not only an evolutionary benefit, but allows children the lattitude to explore their world with less risk of harm to themselves or those around them. So it is with the student of the Art. A new practitioner is less able to harness powers that will do upset to his life or the lives of others. He is protected by his inexperience and is less easily damaged because he is less easily influenced by the forces he seeks to control. (This is in some circumstances not the case.)

Knowing that our children, our students, are less likely than our teachers to do damage to themselves or others, and less likely to be damaged in general, it is absurd to impose a set of rules upon them that is structured to our own discipline. Better for them to play in the sandbox, to discern the natural shapes their hands make of the world, to understand the way the sand behaves when wet and dry, to make simple mounds and towering spires.

And from this play one can determine the character of the student, and evaluate his nature and suitability. Does the student discern those natural laws? Does he experiment with different consistencies of sand? Does he recognize results and is he able to replicate them? Does he, instead of learning, simply reuse the same buckets and molds to make the same tired sandcastle day after day? How does he behave in a sandbox with other students. Does he lift them up or tear them down? Does he sabotage their efforts? Does he keep what he has learned to himself or share it?

As teachers, it is only by observing this behavior in an unrestricted environment that we can determine the character of our students and whether or not they are suitable for deeper teaching. I do not say now that students should be accepted and then abandoned after some flaw is found. Our duty as teachers is not to find the best and improve them, but to aid in the growth of all who come to us. Unless there is strong cause a student should never be dismissed. He should be nurtured and helped along his path with care and attention. If his character makes him unsuitable for what he wishes to learn, you must offer him the opportunity to alter himself, to grow into the person he wishes to be.

If a student wishes to be a teacher, but guards his own discoveries jealously, assign him to teach the fundamentals he was taught. Show him how to release the posessiveness he has for his knowledge. Encourage him to write about his understandings and knowledge, and share those words with others. If a student wishes to be a priest, but lacks compassion, assign him a course of denial in some way, make of him an ascetic first, and then a healer. Let him minister to the dying, to the hungry, to the cold.

There is no time frame upon these studies. The student will learn the lesson and his character will be what is required for his desire, or his desire will change. In this, you too must be changeable. Your perceptions are your own, and you must determine their vailidity constantly. Too, a teacher must not let the past cloud the present. The goal of the Art is always change. Holding on to the past too firmly, refusing to forgive or release, does not serve this goal. Nor does it serve the student, or the teacher. We know that we are not the same as we once were. Allow the student that same change. Remember who he once was, but see also who he now is.

——-

The necessity of motion:

Our Art is one of change. To change, one must be in motion. Power forced to stillness corrodes the vessel that carries it. In our spirit we must be calm and still, but in our power we must always be in motion. Our Power must always move, even when we are waiting for fullness. Stopping that flow impedes us and the nature of our Art.

We must be motion, as fluid and graceful as the mighty benu bird, settling upon a golden capstone. We must be motion, as fierce and undeniable as a tidal wave. We must be motion, vital and alive. absorbing and expelling the light at all times.

When one is in motion without stillness of spirit, he acts recklessly and without foresight. His plans come to ruin for their repurcussions.

When one is in motion with stillness of spirit, he acts with knowledge and awareness. His Art is given grace.

When one is still and is without stillness of spirit, he does not act but slowly dies. His Art will turn upon him and and chase the soul away if it can.

When one is still and has stillness of spirit, he is consumed by fear and doubt. His Art will die in his hands, and his heart will wither. He is as a mundane, but will always long for his Art.

In the stillness of spirit we understand. We know. In the motion of power there is change and light. By letting the power free of its shackles and maintaining stillness of spirit, the Power simply moves, it gives us the balance to Will, to Create, and to Change. Trust the Power. Trust that it will be there, that it will flow through you and mate with the nature of what is. Power is not a quantity that can be captured and reserved. It is not a commodity or a resource, but a fact of being. And we must be with it.

Maybe it’s the dark moon, but I can’t help feeling a bit overful of ideas/power/energy that wants to just flow out of me and into the world around me. That’s a good thing, but it also means there are a lot of things that could get swept away or poorly tended in the rush.

Last night we had a meeting of the Brotherhood Choir, and we talked about a lot of good things, both choir related and not. Wulfelm and I seem to be on the same page about some of the changes to process/method that I would be happy to see happen. He and I are going to talk about more of it soon I think. He’s got some time off for a few weeks so we may have dinner.

I keep thinking a lot about Kamion lately. He keeps coming to mind at the oddest times. I need to call him and talk to him about some stuff that’s happening that seems to resonate with some experiences he once described having to me. Also, I miss his presence and energy. There’s something about Kamion that almost always makes me feel more safe, more confident, more myself, more at ease. Maybe we’ll be able to hang out or go to dinner next time he’s in town.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be a Priest, or a Mentor, or a Teacher, or a Leader. More and more my definitions are opening up to a very wide array of possible expressions. I’m finding that I believe what makes a person a priest isn’t how they purport themselves, or even the training or ordination they’ve had, but the motivation and purpose behind their actions. A priest is someone in service to a higher authority with a basis in Spirit or Divinity. Not all priests are meant to heal, or counsel, or lead. Sometimes a priests service may be in politics, or medecine, or hell, even in Law. The world has a wide variety of priestly people in many roles, and I think sometimes we do a disservice to ourselves as priests when we put ourselves in a box of expected behavior.

Last night I was talking to George, and we were discussing our purposes/missions/work. For him, healing individuals is of the utmost importance. He feels called to treat injuries and illnesses. To heal. I realized that I am also called to heal, but for me healing is about culture. I feel the need to heal our culture, our society, perhaps our race. I work on that in a number of ways, one of which is healing individual people and empowering them with tools to change themselves and our culture. I do that through counseling and education, through ministry and ritual, and by attempting to live up to my own expectations of our culture.

There is a romantic part of me that believes there is a true and potent nobility in the human race, that deep in the core of who we are we are meant to be generous, to be full of love, to be bursting with the strength of compassion and the desire to nourish and nurture each other. I am constantly at war with my inner cynic about that, and about how to act in a way that promotes that. I try and ask myself every day what I’m doing to encourage that nature, to uphold it, to exemplify it. Some days, some months, I don’t like the answer. Some days I do.

Some days, often actually, I feel very alone in that belief. It seems the whole world is even more cynical than I am about it. Worse, it seems most of the world is unwilling to believe that we are better than our behavior. This is one of the reasons that a lot of hard-core athiests scare me. Not because they don’t believe in a divinity that might or might not exist, I don’t care one way or the other. But because when I explain that my faith, my belief, my relationship with the divine gives me the strength and the will to try and uphold that principle of human nobility, they scoff at me. I’ve been told that my attempt to uphold a fallacious notion of nobility or grand purpose is foolish, and has no basis in rationality. They might be right, but that angle of rabid disbelief strikes me as the less helpful perspective. The idea that enlightened self-interest is the best we as humans can do seems to set the bar awful low, particularly when I think ordinary self-interest is all many people actually believe in, with the enlightened part being a myth.

I am here, listening.

Halloween, in only the light of the full moon.

At midnight, awake and aware.

LISTEN

Nothing is as still as you are. everything around you is in motion, and you have found stillness, but to us you are the motion. As still as you are, you are still full of the movement of life.

This is good, but you do not choose that movement. This is bad.

Real stillness, as you seek, is only the result of quietude and time together. You are still too busy, with not enough time of quietude to truly be still. Perhaps you are simply too young.

But too nervous as well.

Your hearing and sight is what it is meant to be, ease away from your doubts and insecurities in this matter.

Train yourself, yes, but not in earnest, out of a belief that you lack proficiency, but in the desire to improve the skill you posess so you may better serve your purposes.

You have read/heard/learned much, and the Glyph of the sidhe [referencing the glyph given to the public by John Matthews in his book 'The Sidhe'] [I am given a name for it that will not be shared here] is a tool you should embrace, but do not listen only to it, for your learning has much more than the lessons meant [to be received from it.]

Do not turn away from the practice at knowledge of self you have gained.

Do not be lax with your word

Be sincere with your heart and fall deeply in love as often as you can, that gift is perhaps your greatest, though we know it causes you great suffering.

To the light of the Phoenix and those sheltered by it,

Draw Gnosis from the depths of your community, understand the power of Love, and embrace similarity to bind you together beyond the shadows of difference

Of the earth,

Give thanks.
Embrace the reality of connections.
Trust her/his cycles and chances, for they are the keys to your own.

Of the ancestors,

Listen quietly to their blood in your body, and allow the light of the underworld to shine.

there are many more messages, words, and powers with the light tonight, but now is not the only time you can hear them.

Return.

I’ve had to omit some of the messages, but that which is fit and safe for consumption is above. I had forgotten much of this, if not all of it.

Sometimes we find things we’ve lost just when we need them the most.

I sat down in bed last night, and I was going to write, but all the stuff that would have come out just sort of settled in, and nothing happened. My dreams have been more active of late too, some of them very telling and others just random. One thing that I realized this past week is that I am missing alone time. Time for just me. I have never lived alone for more than a few months at a time. I’m not sure that I want to live alone, but I sometimes find myself wishing for more alone time.

It’s not privacy, just that there is a difference of quality between being alone in my room, or at my computer, and being alone at home. I have been aching for that particular quality, and I’m not sure why. I think part of it is that I feel like getting away from other people more will help me get a better handle on who I am. I am too often defined by the people around me, by what I do.

There’s a scene in Across the Universe:

“Why is it always ‘what are you going to do?’ Do, do, do. Why can’t it be about who I am?”

An older relative replies “Because what you do, defines who you are.”

The young man responds “No! Who you are determines what you do.”

I agree with the young man, not because he’s right, but because he should be right. What we do should be a product of who we are. Our job, our impact on the world, our purpose is, or should be, a function or expression of our being. Too often this is not the case, but it should be. I feel a little trapped lately, like I am letting myself be defined by the roles I fulfill instead of filling the roles with myself.

Sometimes I wonder how much of what other people see in me has more to do with the role I’m fulfilling for them than who I am. I know this is not a new observation, or even a particularly startling one. But right now it’s bothering me a little bit. Do our parents ever see us as anyone other than their son or daughter? Do our students see us as anyone other than a teacher? Do our teachers see us as anyone other than students?

Can you tell someone who you are without indicating a role? Can you explain yourself to them? There is a maxim:

If you can’t explain it in three sentences you don’t really understand it.

Who am I other than son, student, teacher, friend, priest… ? The world of Branding is all about roles. I read every day how to have a brand you have to have a brand statement, and it should be about what you do. This kind of bothers me, because what we do is so little of our brand. It doesn’t explain our personality, our passions, our motivations. Believe it or not, these are the things that make us who we are. I’m not talking about cause and effect either, just a realization of who we are.

And how does that realization take form? What are things we do, and what are things we are? Do I program for a living, or am I a programmer? I think everyone needs to define that for themselves. For me it’s about passion, personality, and purpose. I am passionate about love, about connection, about people, and about discernment. My personality is petulant, earnest, acerbic, and sometimes sweet. My purpose is torch-bearer, someone who holds the light for others to see by, to illuminate and reveal who, what, and where we are.