Category Archives: Words Words Words

God As A Fellow Artist

Surrealmuse takes a look at art in several different ways. Her subtitle was what really caught my attention: When the muse is alive in anyone, they become an inventive, searching, self-expressing creature.

I found this paragraph in Art & Spirituality:

I envision God as another fellow artist, the master artist with a touch of scientific knowledge, but an artist all the same. Who else but an artist would create such beautiful scenic beaches and mountains? With the same token, the dark side of God’s artistic vision is illustrated in the creation of angry, fiery volcanoes. But God also has a sense of humor, who else could create a platypus?

I thought that might get your attention. Enjoy the site, and think about how your own creativity conveys your spirituality.

Division Of Labour

I just got a call from my publisher. My bid to rewrite the current book for which I’m consultant has been accepted — sort of. They’re splitting the book up: the regular copyeditor answers all the obvious (and justifiably snarky) queries she put in for the author to clean up, and I get The Ultimate Chapter From Hell to change, alter, rewrite, and otherwise make professional and appropriate.

It’s not the answer I was hoping for, but I’ll take it. This abnormally long chapter constitutes a third of the book, after all. Dividing the rewrite gets things done twice as fast, and this book is already late; it ought to have been in production by now.

Grr

Any time Philip Heselton’s Wiccan Roots wants to stop quoting and re-hashing Jack Bracelin’s 1960 bio of Gerald Gardner, it can go right ahead. I’d rather read something original than a secondary text. Heselton acknowledges in his foreword that Bracelin’s book is a key text and that he quotes frequently, but really, the first two chapters do nothing to advance the scholarship of the field. So far the analysis is weak and pointless, and it’s just a string of quotes from other books.

This book is supposed to be ground-breaking. I keep waiting for the ground-breaking part. I may only have finished two chapters, but readers are gained are lost through a first chapter alone.

Hail Spring!

In another one of those synchronous miracles that really isn’t because I believe that we create our own coincidences, I taught a class yesterday that compared and contrasted group work with solitary worship, and the students asked very perceptive questions about the group mind and how it forms. Then I came home to a ritual with my new still-gelling group which celebrated the group mind and the wonders of being an individual, while simultaneously being a part of something greater.

It was a fabulous ritual which took the concepts of balance (Vernal Equinox, equal day and night, God/Goddess), co-operation, frolic, and reverence, blended them together, and created a terrific experience through which everyone learned something about themselves and each other. And all this came from an individual who had never written/led a group Sabbat before. (I might be wrong, but I am fairly certain I’m not. If so, then the individual had certainly never written/led a Wicca-based rit for a group.)

Heck, yeah. The invocations raised chills, the raising of energy focused on control instead of quantity, and the whole thing took less than half an hour. That, dear readers, is a sign of a well-managed ritual. Focused, moving, thought-provoking, engages emotional-mental-physical levels, and doesn’t drag on.

And every single one of us walked away with a new understanding of the words “spring” and “balance”.

The group mind. It’s the greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts entity/identity that arises independently from the regular interaction of a group of people. Your clique in high school had a group mind. Your family has a group mind. Your softball team has a group mind. A group mind takes a while to form while everyone gets to know each other socially and within the context of the group’s performance, but when it’s there, whoa baby, it’s a powerful thing. Yesterday’s exercise in circle did a lot to demonstrate that a group mind can not only be formed sooner with intention, but refined through attention and careful management.

I’ve also discovered one of the uses of a coven Book of Shadows. It’s a HPS’ brag book and scrapbook. Years from now we’ll go back over it and say, “Do you remember the day so-and-so led such-and-such ritual?”

So yes: spring. The celebration of new beginnings. One of the affirmations used in yesterday’s ritual was, “I’m glad you’re here.” I’d like to take this opportunity to say to my coven dedicants who have chosen to study with HRH and me: I’m glad you’re here.

And, dear readers, I’m glad you’re here too. After all, what’s a regular literary exploration of words and ideas without an audience?

One Word Makes All the Difference

I found this phrase on someone’s website:

Wicca centers around reverence for nature as seen in the Goddess and the God.

Except I misread the fourth word as “revenge”. And you know, I had two simultaneous responses: the first, acceptance (well, yeah; I just so happen to work with two severely justice-oriented deities), and the second, a major double-take (people usually define Wicca as love and light and tolerance, blah blah blah, and forget that Nature encompasses both light and dark).

Revenge for Nature would make an interesting title for an environmental-oriented book on Goddess spirituality, though.

Serial Stories Taken to a New Level


NOVELS DELIVERED TO YOUR PHONE: E-mail Opens New Possibilities for Old Medium.

Nowadays the sight of people passing time on the train by sending e-mail with their mobile phones is an everyday occurrence in Japan. This technology has now led to the emergence of a new and unexpected phenomenon: people reading entire novels on their mobile phones.

How… novel.